Too late to avoid warming

Too late to avoid warming

Sydney could face an annual temperature rise of up to 4.3 degrees by 2070, and a tripling of the number of days a year when the thermometer soars above 35 degrees, if global greenhouse gas emissions are not cut steeply, a new report has found.

It is too late for the city to avoid a warming of about 1 degree by 2030 as well as a 3 per cent reduction in annual rainfall because of polluting gases already in the atmosphere.

More droughts, fires, and severe weather events, and less rain and snow across the country are also on the horizon, according to the report, Climate Change in Australia, which contains the most detailed and up-to-date climate projections produced by the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology.

Its findings, released at the Greenhouse 2007 conference in Sydney this morning, include projections of up to 20 per cent more drought months over most of Australia by 2030.

By 2070 this could rise to 40 per cent more drought months in eastern Australia and 80 per cent more in south western Australia.

The report also spells out the impact that human activity has already had on Australia's climate.

A warming of 0.9 degrees since 1950 and an increase in hot nights have been mostly due to greenhouse gas emissions, it concludes.

These higher temperatures have "exacerbated" the effects of drought and led to a decline in snow cover, including a 40 per cent reduction in snow depth in Spring in the Snowy Mountains in the past 45 years.

Weather patterns and ocean currents have changed, reducing rainfall to south-west Australia and leading to a warming of waters off the east coast of Tasmania that is occurring at triple the global rate of ocean warming.

"The message is that global warming is real, humans are very likely to be causing it and that it is very likely that there will be changes in the global climate system in the centuries to come larger than those seen in the recent past," the report says.

It is based on conclusions of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released earlier this year, and climate research conducted on the Australian region since the last CSIRO projections were released in 2001.

Co-ordinator of the CSIRO's climate change science program, Paul Holper, said improvements in computer modelling of climate meant the new projections were more accurate than the last ones, which warned national temperatures could rise as much as 6 degrees by 2070.

"Over the past five or six years we have learnt so much more about the atmosphere and the oceans, and our ability to use super computers to simulate climate has improved immensely," he told ABC Radio.

Nationally, temperatures will rise by about 1 degree by 2030, and rainfall will decline by up to 5 per cent, according to the report.

The impact of human activity beyond that will depend on how quickly greenhouse gas emissions are reduced, with worst-case scenarios including a 5-degree warming and a 30 per cent reduction in annual rainfall by 2070.

If carbon dioxide levels can be stabilised at 550 parts per million by 2100, however, the temperature rise in Australia could be kept to about 1.8 degrees by 2070, and rainfall decline to about 7.5 per cent.

Climate will alter travel patterns in decades

Climate will alter travel patterns in decades

DAVOS, Switzerland, Oct 2 (Reuters) - Global warming will produce stay-at-home tourists over the next few decades, radically altering travel patterns and threatening jobs and businesses in tourism-dependent countries, according to a stark assessment by U.N experts.

The U.N. Environment Programme, the World Meteorological Organisation and the World Tourism Organisation said concerns about weather extremes and calls to reduce emissions-heavy air travel would make long-haul flights less attractive.

Holiday-makers from Europe, Canada, the United States and Japan were likely to spend more vacations in or near their home countries to take advantage of longer summers, they said.

In a report prepared for a U.N. conference on climate change and tourism, they projected that global warming would reduce demand for travel between northern Europe and the Mediterranean, between North America and the Caribbean, and between northeast Asia and southeast Asia.

"The geographic and seasonal redistribution of tourist demand may be very large for individual destinations and countries by mid- to late-century," the agencies said.

"This shift in travel patterns may have important implications, including proportionally more tourism spending in temperate nations and proportionally less spending in warmer nations now frequented by tourists from temperate regions."

However, overall travel demand was expected to grow by between 4 and 5 percent a year, with international arrivals doubling to 1.6 billion by 2020.

In some developing and island states, tourism accounts for as much as 40 percent of national economic output.

Officials from tourism-dependent countries such as the Maldives, Fiji, the Seychelles and Egypt told the conference that shifts in travel choices, and ecological damage from global warming, posed serious threats to their businesses and jobs.

"Tourism is a catalyst to the economy. If you are hitting the tourism sector, automatically this rocks the whole economic machinery," Michael Nalletamby of the Seychelles Tourism Board told the Davos conference.

Christopher Rodrigues, chairman of the British government agency VisitBritain, said the sector needed to find ways to reduce the effects of ever-increasing travel demand on the environment, which in turn affects the industry's health.

"The biggest risk is that the success of the tourist industry becomes its own undoing," he told the conference.

Expert studied sea fossils

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World-renowned University of Hawaii researcher Johanna Martha Resig, called a role model for women in science, died Sept. 19 at Hospice Hawaii. She was 75.

"She was a very humble person," said Janice C. Marsters, principal at Masa Fujioka & Associates, who took many cruises with Resig. "She was extremely well known worldwide and loved by everyone she met. It's a huge loss to us."

Born in Los Angeles, Resig was an expert in a specialized field of micropaleontology, studying microfossils in ocean bottom sediments, said Brian Taylor, dean of the UH School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology.

"For those interested in tectonics, if submarine land was subsiding or rising, Johanna, from bugs in the sediments, could tell you what was going on."

Resig earned a master's degree in science in 1956 at the University of Southern California under a leading micropaleontologist. She then worked for the Allen Hancock Foundation, studying living foraminifera (microfossils) of the Southern California coast.

Her research papers are cited among pioneering applications of the field now known as environmental micropaleontology, said Marsters, who met Resig on a marine geology research cruise off Peru in 1986.

Marsters said she moved to Hawaii about 1 1/2 years later to work on a doctoral degree at UH and Resig was on her dissertation committee. The two became close friends, she said.

Resig went to Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany, on a Fulbright grant for research in 1962. Her fellowship was extended, enabling her to earn a doctorate in natural science there in 1965, when she was recruited by the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics.

She was the first woman on the HIG faculty and the only one for many years, starting as an assistant micropaleontologist, Marsters said. She became an associate micropaleontologist in 1970 and had a joint appointment in 1990 as an HIG researcher and professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics.

She studied microfossils around Hawaii and the Pacific Basin, participating in scientific cruises of the Deep Sea Drilling Project.

Chuck Helsley, Sea Grant emeritus researcher and former HIG director, said Resig "will be sorely missed. ... She was one of the old-style micropaleontologists that looked at bugs themselves. ... She was a tremendous walking encyclopedia... of the morphology of foraminifera."

Her expertise was in knowing how to extract microfossils from layers of the sea floor and "how to identify them through a narrow piece of time," he said.

"This is very essential expertise for making use of data coming from a research drill ship where we sample cores and want to know how old they are and what they tell is about chemistry in the past."

Such information was "one of the key steppingstones to making sense of the history of the ocean basins," he said.

Resig discovered and described five new species of foraminifera, including a group that "in the mammalian world would be akin to the discovery of a group such as primates," Marsters said.

Resig also was a dedicated teacher and mentor and an author of more than 50 articles in scientific books, journals and academic papers. She supported the arts and volunteered as a tutor reading to elementary school children.

She was a former editor of the Journal of Foraminiferal Research Group, member of the board of directors of the Cushman Foundation for Foraminiferal Research and member of the Society for Sedimentary Geology for more than 50 years.

She retired in 2001 as an emeritus professor, continuing her research in a small office in SOEST until early this year.

Marsters said they traveled to Scotland and Ireland in October. Her health began to fail upon her return and she learned in April she had inoperable cancer.

Survivors include sisters Mary Alley of Folsom, Calif., and Peggy Van Sickle of Austin, Texas, and many nieces and nephews.

Colleagues plan a private memorial service.

Sea Shepherd - Campaign Begins in Tokyo for the Dolphins and Children of Japan

Campaign Begins in Tokyo for the Dolphins and Children of Japan

In an effort to protect both dolphins and children, three Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) activists began a campaign today in the heart of Tokyo to bring attention to a Japanese national crime and scandal. The activists travelled to Japan to mark Dolphin Day by launching a personal protest against the killing of tens of thousands of defenseless dolphins that are in turn being fed to innocent Japanese school children despite the dangerously high levels of mercury in the dolphin meat.

"Dolphins are dying to provide cheap toxic lunches for children," said Allison Lance, SSCS field agent and campaign leader. "This is a crime that must be exposed and shut down." 

Despite the evidence of dangerously high levels of mercury, the mayor of Taiji, Japan, is presently constructing a dolphin slaughterhouse with plans to increase the numbers of dolphins killed. Japanese politicians are refusing to address the scandal and the Japanese media has ignored the issue. The average Japanese citizen is completely unaware of the massive dolphin slaughter and the fact that the mercury tainted meat is being distributed to school lunch programs. Mercury poisoning is a deadly affliction which can lead to Minamata disease named after the Japanese city of Minamata where thousands of Japanese citizens have died or continue to suffer from degenerative brain cell damage and genetic birth defects.

"I cannot sit at home and do nothing," said Lance. "I believe that if the people of Japan become aware of the horror that takes place on Japanese beaches and in Japanese schoolrooms they will demand that the government take action to end the slaughter and the deliberate poisoning of their children."

Lance is being supported by two other activists, Michelle Sass and Danielle Thompson. Sea Shepherd Director, actress Persia White, who appears on the hit television program Girlfriends, will be going to Tokyo in early October to lend support to the efforts.

"Perhaps as a woman who loves both dolphins and children, I may be able to appeal to the women of Japan to call for the government to put an end to the poisoning of their children with mercury. I cannot believe that anyone can condone such evil once they become aware of this horror," said Lance.

Some 22,000 dolphins are killed each year in Japan by dolphin drives that see the animals driven onto beaches and into shallow bays where they are brutally speared, clubbed, and knifed. A few dolphins are selected for sale to dolphinariums around the world, but the majority are slaughtered for meat to feed livestock and children. Pigs fed with dolphin meat produce mercury tainted pork.

SSCS first brought the images of the dolphin slaughter to international attention in October 2003. In November 2003, Lance was arrested in Taiji along with Alex Cornelissen, from the Netherlands, when they dove into the bay to release 15 dolphins before they could be slaughtered. They were held in jail for three weeks and ordered to pay a fine of US $8,300.

"Three weeks incarceration was a small price to pay for freeing those dolphins," said Lance. "I am undertaking this campaign because the alternative is to accept the cruel slaughter of dolphins and the continued poisoning of children, and that is something I cannot and will not do."

Historic Agreement Safeguards Both Climate and Ozone Layer

Historic Agreement Safeguards Both Climate and Ozone Layer

Historic Agreement Safeguards Both Climate and Ozone Layer

MONTREAL, Quebec, Canada, September 22, 2007 (ENS) - In an unprecedented agreement, industrialized and developing countries have decided to accelerate the phaseout of coolant chemicals that are harmful to the ozone layer and also are a cause of global climate warming.

Representatives of 191 countries that are Parties to the Montreal Proctol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer agreed unanimously Friday to accelerate phaseouts of hydrochlorofluorocarbons, HCFCs, from 2009.

HCFCs originally were approved as substitutes for chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs, that were known to deplete the ozone layer back in 1987 when the Montreal Protocol came into force.

Preparatory segment Co-Chairs Marcia Levaggi, Argentina, and Mikkel Sorensen, Denmark smile as agreement is reached. (All photos courtesy Earth Negotiations Bulletin)

This year, during five intense days of negotiations at the 20th anniversary Montreal Protocol conference, the historic deal was reached to accelerate the phaseout of HCFCs.

The details of the agreement - who phases out what and how much, who pays, and under what timetables - are to be made public later today by Canadian Minister of Environment John Baird and UN Environment Programme Executive Director Achim Steiner.

The agreement is unique in that it focuses on ozone recovery and also aims to reverse climate change, a benefit that was not foreseen in earlier understandings of how the stratospheric ozone layer relates to the planet's temperature and climate.

The accelerated phaseout willl potentially achieve five times the expected climate change benefits under the Kyoto Protocol under the most optimistic but unlikely scenarios. Considering the difficulties the Kyoto Protocol has had in achieving its objectives, the new Montreal agreement is even more important.

Brian Mulroney, who was Prime Minister of Canada in 1987 when the Montreal Protocol took effect, said, "It doesn't really matter whether the process is called Kyoto or something else, as long as we are addressing the urgency of global warming."

UNEP Head Achim Steiner

Steiner said there is great synergy between the two treaties.

"The Montreal Protocol is successfully assisting in the repair and recovery of the ozone layer. The Kyoto Protocol is tackling perhaps the greatest challenge of our generation - climate change. However, what is also emerging in 2007, and emerging with ever greater clarity, is that both treaties are mutually supportive across several key fronts," he said.

The Kyoto Protocol's clean development mechanism has led to the destruction of large volumes of the very potent greenhouse gas HFC-23, a by-product of the production of the coolant HCFC-22.

Currently, it is the only reliable mechanism available to prevent emissions of this gas in the short term, according to a new report by the Technology and Economic Assessment Panel of the Montreal Protocol released in Montreal this week.

Didier Coulomb International Institute of Refrigeration

Didier Coulomb of the International Institute of Refrigeration told delegates that environmentally friendly refrigerants have been developed.

Alternative cooling technologies such as thermoelectrics, thermoacoustics, acoustic compression, magnetic cooling, and gas cycles such as the Stirling cycle open up more possibilities, he said. Natural refrigerants, especially carbon dioxide and hydrocarbons, are making inroads in some parts of the world. Three recent projects use solar energy to operate air-conditioning systems.

Coulomb stressed that any decision on refrigerants should differentiate between industrial and non-industrialized countries and that cooperation and funding are vital to transfer technologies.

Developing countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Switzerland and several low-lying Pacific island nations brought new scientific findings to the table nearly nine months ago, when new research showed the added benefits of ozone replenishment to slowing climate change. They urged acceleration of HCFC phaseouts over 10 years instead of 40, the timetable that was in effect until today.

U.S. EPA Head Stephen Johnson

Supporters of the accelerated phaseout plan include the United States, Europe and China, who all helped tip the political balance to secure an agreementl.

Argentina, one of the most aggressive supporters of the phaseouts, was instrumental in informing negotiating ozone delegations and environmental ministries over the last several months of the large climate benefits that could be reached by linking the Montreal and Kyoto Protocols.

Argentina, Brazil, the United States and China, played a key role in helping steer negotiations during the Meeting of Parties in Montreal, when the deal seemed stuck due to negotiating teams' inability to get beyond technical hurdles. Finally, the historic agreement was reached in the final hour.

Scientists say the elimination of HCFCs could potentially quintuple the most optimistic objectives set by the Kyoto Protocol.

Some delegates in Montreal point to the unique linking of the two treaties and distinct sets of global environmental objectives as an indication that we are seeing a maturation of the world's global environmental governance system, and a sign that collaborative global environmental agreements can work.

David Doniger, NRDC

"This week's deal will sharply cut global emissions, especially by reducing large HCFC increases expected in the next decade from China and India," said David Doniger, policy director of the Climate Center at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

"The Bush administration deserves credit for working with other countries to push for faster cuts in HCFCs. The quicker phaseout will help heal the ozone layer and reduce skin cancer. Reducing HCFCs also helps cut global warming pollution," he said.

Looking ahead to the meeting of the world's largest global warming polluters in Washington next week, Doniger added, "We could not have protected the ozone layer with voluntary pledges and non-binding goals. That won't work for global warming either."

"The Montreal ozone treaty is a model for progress on global warming," said Doniger. "It shows that a binding treaty ?with industrial countries taking the lead and with real pollution limits for both developed and developing nations ?can successfully cut global pollution and trigger a clean technology revolution."

Climate change 'devastating Africa'

Extreme rainfall and flooding as a result of climate change has destroyed crops, homes and livelihoods in parts of Africa, Christian Aid has warned.

The aid agency said a number of countries across the continent were experiencing more unpredictable weather conditions, with the worst rainfall in decades.

Unusually heavy rain fell in the Ethiopian and Ugandan highlands in June and in Sudan in July, which was hit by floods as a result.

Flooding in Uganda washed away crops just as the harvest was due - following droughts earlier in the year.

In Kenya the rains were unusually intense, forcing 20,000 people to flee their homes as dykes burst in the Budalangi region, and destroying their harvest, Christian Aid said.

And in Mali, homes, crops and market gardens have been destroyed along with bridges and dams in what locals describe as the worst floods since 1946, leaving them reliant on aid for clean water, blankets and food.

Andrew Pendleton, Christian Aid's senior climate policy analyst warned: "These extremes of weather are exactly what have been predicted.

"Long dry periods followed by short, torrential rainy spells are creating havoc.

" Harvests are being destroyed with the result people are no longer able to feed themselves.

"The situation is only going to get worse unless we take action now."