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James Cook Logs Shed Light On Global ClimateAugust 04, 2008 - METICULOUSLY kept logbooks of Captain James Cook's Endeavour are to be analysed by researchers studying modern climate change.
Thousands of Royal Navy records that have survived from the 17th century, ranging from Nelson's Victory and the Endeavour down to the humblest frigate, have emerged as one of the world's best sources for long-term weather data.
The discovery has been made by a group of British academics and Meteorological Office scientists who were seeking new ways to plot historic changes in the climate.
"This is a treasure trove," said Sam Willis, a maritime historian and author who is affiliated with Exeter University's Centre for Maritime Historical Studies.
"Ships' officers recorded air pressure, wind strength, air and sea temperature, and other weather conditions," Dr Willis said. "From those records scientists can build a detailed picture of past weather and climate."
A preliminary study of 6000 logbooks has produced results that raise questions about climate change theories.
One paper, published by Dennis Wheeler, a Sunderland University geographer, in the journal The Holocene, details a surge in the frequency of summer storms over Britain in the 1680s and 1690s.
Many scientists believe storms are a consequence of global warming, but these were the coldest decades of the Little Ice Age that hit Europe from about 1600 to 1850.
Dr Wheeler and his colleagues have since won European Union funding to extend the research to 1750. This shows that during the 1730s, Europe underwent a period of rapid warming similar to that recorded recently - and which must have had natural origins.
Hints of such changes are known from British records, but Dr Wheeler has found they affected much of the north Atlantic too, and he has traced some of the underlying weather systems that caused them. His research will be published in the journal Climatic Change.
The potential of Royal Navy ships' logs to offer new insights into historic climate change was spotted by Dr Wheeler after hebegan researching the weather conditions during famous naval battles.
Most of the documents contain verbal descriptions of weather rather than empirical data, because ships lacked the instruments to take numerical readings. However, Dr Wheeler and his colleagues found early Royal Navy officers recorded weather in consistent language.
"It means we can deduce numerical values for wind strength and direction, temperature and rainfall," he said.
THE AUSTRALIAN
The Sunday Times
Vicious cycles
By Fiona HarveyMay 30 2008 - Within 18 months, the world is set to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol that will determine how governments, individuals and businesses respond to the threat of climate change for decades to come.
Governments will meet in Poland later this year ahead of a crunch meeting in Copenhagen in 2009, at which they have pledged to hammer out a replacement to the current treaty, the main provisions of which expire in 2012.
Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary-general, told ministers at the climate change summit in Bali last year: “Already, there is an emerging consensus on the building blocks of a climate agreement, including adaptation [to the effects of climate change], mitigation [of greenhouse gases], [low-carbon] technology and financing.”
A new agreement – if it does take shape – is likely to involve a commitment from rich countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, and an effort from rapidly developing countries to curb theirs. The negotiations will be informed by an upsurge in the scientific understanding of climate change over the past few years.
Scientists now know more about climate change than seemed possible a decade ago, when the Kyoto Protocol was drawn up, although the gaps in knowledge remain broad.
Last year, the United Nations-convened Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change completed its fourth and largest report to date – a landmark publication reviewing more than four years of climate research.
The IPCC concluded that there was a 90 per cent certainty that global warming was occurring and that it was in large part caused by human actions such as deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels.
It found that the globe was likely to see a rise in temperature by about 3°C over the next century, and that such warming would have some unpleasant and sometimes catastrophic consequences.
But climate change is not simply a matter of warmer temperatures. Scientists predict global warming will be accompanied by a wide range of other effects: rising sea levels, stronger storms and hurricanes, shifting rainfall patterns, increasing incidence of flooding and droughts, food shortages, and the mass migration of people from the worst affected areas in developing countries.
Mr Ban has urged world leaders to take up “the defining challenge of our age”, while offering hope that the IPCC’s more dire predictions could be avoided.
“Concerted and sustained action now can still avoid some of the most catastrophic scenarios,” he says. “We can pursue new and improved ways to produce, consume and discard. We can promote environmentally friendly industries that spur development and job creation even as they reduce emissions. We can usher in a new era of global partnership, one that helps lift all boats on the rising tide of climate-friendly development.”
The IPCC – which has attracted controversy from several quarters, including those who argue it has become politicised and others who say its warnings do not go far enough – was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year, along with former US vice-president Al Gore, for its achievements.
For its part, the UK government has named climate change as one of the factors behind the conflict in Darfur and initiated a debate on climate change at the UN Security Council last year. This has led to a push for the issue to be seen not just as an environmental problem but as an issue of national security.
But climate change is likely to have sharply contrasting effects in different parts of the world, exacerbating existing inequalities between rich and poor nations.
For instance, northern Europe and parts of North America may actually experience some benefits from climate change. Agriculture will be made easier, as a wider range of crops will flourish in the warming temperatures and longer growing seasons.
But for many already poor regions of the world, the warming climate could make agricultural land impossible to farm. Disappearing glaciers will mean the communities that rely on them for water may experience droughts, and the south Asian monsoon could start to fail.
However, the consequences of climate change will not be confined to rural areas. Even small sea level rises could contribute to flooding in coastal cities, especially as storms are forecast to become more intense.
Already, the flood barrier across the river Thames in London has been put to far greater use than anticipated when construction started there more than three decades ago. Fiercer storms could also disrupt transport and could overwhelm sewage and drainage systems, even in the developed world.
But although scientists can make broad predictions of climate changes, shorter range predictions remain uncertain. A recent study in the journal Nature suggested that the world would cool in the next decade under the influence of ocean currents. The research argued that this could prevent temperatures from climbing again for a decade, at which point the warming trend would become much more pronounced than before.
In this FT magazine, the first of three on the subject this year, we will examine the strides made over the past decade in understanding climate change; the state of our current knowledge of the science; and where this knowledge leads us.
We tackle the thorny issue of climate computer modelling – how do scientists go about attempting to model a system as complex as the earth’s atmosphere, land and oceans? And we will address those sceptics who argue that climate change research shows human actions bear little responsibility for global warming, or that the science is not sufficiently advanced for us to draw such conclusions.
Our distinguished contributors include Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government and co-author of The Hot Topic; and Bjørn Lomborg, long-time critic of the Kyoto Protocol and author of The Sceptical Environmentalist and Cool It.
In the second magazine, our writers will scrutinise the political implications of the scientists’ findings, ask whether a new treaty can be forged by the UN and what it will take to do so. We will examine what national governments can and are doing to tackle global warming.
The third instalment will look at businesses – how they will be affected if the earth warms, and their role in combating climate change. As well as posing a serious threat to companies, a low-carbon economy would also open up enormous opportunities in new forms of energy, transport and other technologies, or in exploiting the potential for greater efficiency in existing operations.
Radical change in the global economy seems unlikely unless a spur is provided by government – which is why the next 18 months of UN negotiations will be closely watched by those in the business as well as the science community. The prospect for a new global agreement on climate change emerging from the ongoing UN negotiations hangs in the balance.
Time is running out. The UN is demanding that a replacement for Kyoto must be agreed by the end of next year if national governments are to have time to ratify it before the current treaty’s provisions expire in 2012.
Despite repeated assertions by the main players that they want a new accord, and impassioned pleas by UN officials, fraught talks held in Bali last year failed to bridge the serious rifts between the US, the European Union and developing countries.
Further meetings are planned ahead of the crunch UN summit in Copenhagen next year. The signs are that they will be just as tense.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Dawn Of An Energy Famine
Just as the need for renewables becomes critical, the oil giants signal an alarming retreat
Jeremy Leggett, The Guardian
May 2 2008 - This week the shape of the global energy crisis came into its sharpest focus yet. The world needs renewable energy fast, but as BP and Shell announced record profits, they also demonstrated that they are in essence retreating from renewables, perhaps with the exception of biofuels. They intend to focus their record billions on expanding production of what remains of traditional oil and gas, plus tar sands and liquid fuels from coal - ruinous in their effect on the climate.
The oil giants are recarbonising, wilfully choosing to forget both global warming imperatives and the need for renewables in national security terms. Shell pulled out of the biggest offshore UK windfarm yesterday and BP is losing interest in solar and investing in the tar sands - having once refused to do so on ethical grounds because of the greenhouse gas emitted in processing.
The European oil giants are behaving in this way in part because ExxonMobil became the most profitable of the big players while turning its back on the climate issue and pouring scorn on renewables investment. BP and Shell can no longer resist the calls of investors who demand short-term Exxon-type performance, whatever the final cost.
Others think differently. In New York, members of the Rockefeller clan - descendants of Exxon's founder - called yesterday for radical reform of the company because they can no longer stomach its irresponsible attitude towards the climate. They want a board that will invest in renewables. Meanwhile, in London, a big asset management house took out newspaper ads spoofing a death announcement for fossil fuels and one for the birth of renewables, in which its alternative energy fund will invest.
This fund, and others like it, are investing in renewables because they enjoy some of the fastest growing markets in the world. This growth is driven in large measure by feed-in tariffs - to encourage the use of renewables. Thirty-three Labour MPs rebelled this week against the government's energy bill because it ignores the feed-in mechanism. The UK government persists with its discredited renewables obligation, a measure that has seen the renewables mix in UK primary energy sit for several years now at just 2%.
Meanwhile, North Sea oil and gas are depleting rapidly. BP and Shell know there are no more rich oilfields to be discovered there. They are being forced to invest much further afield in the search for the huge fields they so badly need.
As domestic oil and gas production collapses, the UK will be forced to look increasingly to imports. Britain imports only 5% of its energy now, but that is likely to rise to 50% in five years, much of it gas. The government appears to think this is fine, pointing to the growth of domestic infrastructure for liquefied natural gas and pipelines from Norway and the Netherlands. But this week we learned that the UK is the last priority for Norwegian exports. As the Grangemouth strikers wonder what to do next, we smell in that drama just how fragile the whole energy edifice is.
Those who hoped Opec would come to the rescue also received a blow this week. The cartel said it wouldn't lift production, even if oil rises to $200 a barrel. Meanwhile, fuelled by $120 oil, the economies of the producers are booming, sucking up ever more of the oil and gas we will need. As for nuclear, it cannot produce a single unit of electricity for at least 10 years - far too late to help with a gas shortfall and largely irrelevant to oil, anyway.
We need renewables today like we needed tanks and planes in 1929. Those who ignore this may soon face accusations of betrayal from a population staring energy famine in the face.
· Jeremy Leggett is chairman of Solarcentury and author of Half Gone – jeremy.leggett@solarcentury.com
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