Step it up 2007 looks set to be a great event, 1333 actions across the US when I last checked!

I post this video as it references the global climate campaign as part of the inspiration for them getting going as a national umbrella organisation, dispersed actions on one day.

I find this amazing, and I hope that everyone reading this from around the world will take part in this years global day of action and benefit from that solidarity an inspiration again! On the sidebar I have created some images that can be used to promote the global climate campaign website, there is also a promotional pdf. More photos and information is available on the Global Climate Campaign website.

Just a bit of self promotion. If you like the blog then you might be interested in subscribing, digging, or otherwise promoting.

Web 1.0
Climate Change Action is linked to from 167 Blogs (including Trehugger) according to Technorati.

Web 2.0
Climate Change Action has 50 Bloglines Subscribers. (Compared to 30 for the Pew Centre)
Climate Change Action has been tagged with Del.Ico.Us 42 Times. (Compared US EPA 54)
Climate Change Action has 102 subscribers who receive regular email updates. (sub via sidebar)
Climate Change Action has an unknown number of RSS feed subscribers.
The Climate Change Action feed is displayed in the sidebar of 3 climate change blogs including
this one, this one, and one i cant remember. (Thanks!)

An idea of what I am doing and where this blog is going…

The main things that I am trying to maintain are:
1.) A balance of geographical coverage, there is far more information about US and European climate action but i`m making a conscious effort to go beyond this.
2.) Trying to keep a broad outlook on climate action, from grass roots activism to politics, business and special interest groups.
3.) Sharing video and audio as well as reports; i think most people would rather watch an interesting talk rather than read the corresponding report.
4.) I am also always interested in new angles (e.g health, security, urban quality of life) and discussing how these relate to building a climate movement.

Recently i have become more interested in:
5.) How we project a positive vision of a low carbon future. ‘Marketing’ climate mitigation and changing behaviours (not just attitudes) is something that I will be increasingly looking at.

I can’t quite believe this report…

Another great example of coal power, corporate power and serious erosion of basic human rights in the UK.

NPower, you are a disgrace.

More importantly, to NPower customers, if you would like to change then please consider ecotricity. I have just change, I had an NPower ‘Juice’ account, there green energy scheme but after this I really had to change. Basically you just have to enter your address, add give them your power bill number and fill in a direct debit form…that simple. Takes a minute and makes a point, perticularly if you send a quick email to explain why you have cancelled your account.

I personally used the following email address as it is probably better than customer services for getting attention csr.feedback@rwenpower.com (CSR is corporate social responsibility).

Finally, if you wan’t to send a copy of your letter to someone else with influence then you might try RWE NPower CEO Andy Duff, by email: andy.duff@rwenpower.com and by mail:

Any Duff
RWE Npower
Trigonos Building
Windmill Hill Business Park
Whitehill Way
Swindon
Wilts SN5 6PB

The Intergovornmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) draws together cutting edge science from around the world in order to provide governments with an authoritative and broad base of information on which to base there policy decisions. The IPCC is policy relavent, not policy prescriptive. (Who set up the IPCC, how are govornments involved, what are it’s aims?)

The IPCC report is a synthesis of current science, not a new piece of primary research. The work of the IPCC is split three ways: Working Group 1 (WG1) looks at the basic science, Working Group 2 (WG2) look at Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Working Group 3 (WG3) looks at ways to mitigate (reduce) climate change. (Who are the scientists in WG2?)

Today WG2 release the 23 page Summary for Policy Makers (SPM), the report in full of there work will be released later in the year. (Webcast of Event+ Q&A)

In fact, although the main launch of the report occurred today (April 6th 2007) in Brussels there where launches in 16 regions around the world; representing the global nature of the issues and the international diversity of the scientists involved (from over 100 nations) more details on theses other launches here.

The UN Environment Program (UNEP) have just released a report outlining the potential for climate change mitigation through efficient (or ‘green’) building design.

The report “Building and Climate Change: Status, Challenges and Opportunities” is the latest in a long line of interesting reports on this subject.

A quick look at the Global and US emissions by end use sector explains this. Just over a quarter of US emissions (27%) are attributable to building energy demand. Globally the proportion of emissions consumed by buildings is 15%, this exclude energy used in the construction process.

Further Reading:

1. The UK government has a target for 60% reduction of GHG’s by 2050, a project by the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) called The 40% House describes how this can be done.
2. The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP) has taken a look at Urban environments in it’s latest report. This report deals with climate change as a central theme but also deals with a plethora of urban challenges. My idea that ‘It’s also low carbon’ could be a useful philosophy for a campaign is reinforced by the many synergies identified between climate mitigation and smart urban policy.
3. In 2005 the Sustinable Development Comission took a look at what we are going to do with all our old building in the UK. Can they be upgraded cost effectively or will they have to go?

The 3rd International Polar Year runs from March 1st 2007 . A webcast of the launch is available here.

The webcast is hosted by the Arctic Portal. Coverage of the IPY is primarily through there own website that has a range of blogs, news and announcements. Another interesting and educational website is IGLO.

This morning I recieved an email about a conference soon to be held in London on the security implications of climate change. Usually I`m pleased to hear of a new sector of society taking climate change seriously, but in this case no comfort is brought to me by the fact that the military are starting to see an emerging global threat. This is perticularly the case since that threat is drawn from the expectation of hundereds of millions of newly dispossesed and poverty stricken environmental refugees.

As the military establishment studies this impending tidal wave of desperate humanity, we stand so near yet so far from a global agreement that holds a chance of mitigating the worst of these possible scenarios. So near in that global awareness has never been higher, we have the technologies we know the policies required; so far, in that even suggesting the measures a the low end of what is required will have you labelled an extremist.

I decided to have a look and see how seriously this was being taken, the links bellow constitute the most interesting results from a short perod of web searching, there seems to be plenty of activity!

Websites:
Global Environmental Change and Human Security
Institute for Environmental Strategy
Woodrow Wilson Environmental Change and Security Program

Upcoming Conferences:
Royal United Services Institute, April 24th 2007 “Climate Security in Asia“
Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College, March 30-31 2007 “National Security Implications of Global Climate Change“

Newsletter:
Global Environmental Change and Human Security

Reports:
US Department of Defence, Abrupt Climate Change
Tyndall Centre, Security and Climate Change
Nigerian Institute for Social And Economic Research, Climate Change, Population Drift and Violent Conflict Over Land Resources in North Eastern Nigeria
University of Kent, Stones in a greenhouse?–Global and regional conflicts over climate change
Department of Sociology and Political Science Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Climate Conflict: Common Sense or Nonsense?
Institute for Environmental Security Adelphi Research, Forum & Exhibition on Environment, Conflict and Cooperation

Video
Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, Climate-Security Connections: An Empirical Approach to Risk Assessment

On A Lighter Note!

All of this reminded me of a superb website where “The Yes Men” masquerading as Haliburton representatives invited a wide range of high profile guests to a very posh hotel to see there new invention for a conflict ridden future.

“The SurvivaBall is designed to protect the corporate manager no matter what Mother Nature throws his or her way,”

said Fred Wolf, a Halliburton representative who spoke today at the Catastrophic Loss conference held at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Amelia Island, Florida.

“This technology is the only rational response to abrupt climate change,”

he said to an attentive and appreciative audience.

The New York Academy of Sciences hosted the launch of a UN Foundation sponsored report entitled “Confronting Climate Change: Avoiding the Unmanageable, Managing the Unavoidable“.

The panel presentation is here, Q&A here and report here.

The key finding are:

	Climate change is reality and some of its results are now inevitable, but a new report offers a road map for mitigating and adapting to its effects.
	Allowing the global average surface temperature to rise more than 2°C to 2.5°C over the next 100 years would sharply increase the risk of catastrophic events. Greenhouse gases now in the atmosphere have already committed the planet to a rise of about 1.5°C.
	Climate change will lead to major crop failures, more extreme weather events, and make environmental refugees of tens of millions.
	Responding to climate change requires intelligent policy making and sustained investment in appropriate technology, both of which could help avert disasters resulting from climate change while simultaneously boosting living standards worldwide.

The really dismal science.
Peter Raven on the connection between climate change and sustainability.

Climate change may be the most media-unfriendly topic scientists have ever studied. It focuses on phenomena that are so gradual and insidious that they are virtually impossible to film; its conclusions reveal the terribly disturbing truth that the comfortable standard of living to which most of the world aspires is, in fact, destroying the planet; and its celebrity spokesman is Al Gore.

How, then, does one explain the current moment?

“Who would have thought that a singer singing a song about global climate change in a movie called An Inconvenient Truth would win an Academy Award for the best song in any movie in the United States in the past year? This gives you an idea of the situation that we’ve gotten to,” says Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden…

…The meeting at the Academy was the first opportunity for the scientific community to learn about and respond to the report, and followed a meeting between the report’s lead authors and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon earlier that day…

Keeping our cool.
John Holdren on necessary steps for mitigating the effects of climate change.

The new report, written by an international panel of 18 scientists at the behest of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development, complements the series of reports now being published by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “It differs from the IPCC report in that we have selected between possible reactions to climate change and provided a road map,” says Raven, the Sigma Xi report’s lead author.

Besides being more prescriptive, the Sigma Xi report is also more blunt than most politically vetted climate change assessments. The authors used similarly direct language in their presentations at the Academy. “Global climate change is real, it is primarily caused by human activities … [and] it is accelerating,” says John Holdren, director of the Woods Hole Research Institute.

Indeed, the evidence for human-driven climate change has become overwhelming in recent years. “The incidence of extreme weather events … has been going up, sea level rise has been accelerating, sea ice is melting, glaciers are retreating, permafrost is thawing, boundaries of ecosystems are moving,” says Holdren.

Researchers have linked the accelerating changes with the gigatons of carbon dioxide, methane, and other “greenhouse” gases emitted by human activities every year. By causing the atmosphere to retain more of the sun’s heat, these emissions are driving the global average surface temperature inexorably upward.

Worse, the accumulating evidence suggests that climate change may not remain gradual. Several major “tipping points,” such as the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, major melting of the Greenland ice cap, desertification of the Amazon rainforest, and changes in the frequency of strong El Niño oscillations could cause sudden and catastrophic changes over the course of a few years rather than a few centuries. Climate change may be hard to sell, but it’s become even harder to ignore.

The Sigma Xi panel concluded that allowing the global average surface temperature to rise more than 2°C to 2.5°C over the next 100 years would sharply increase the risk of these catastrophic impacts. Greenhouse gases now in the atmosphere have already committed the planet to a rise of about 1.5°C.

To stay within the recommended range, the researchers assert that human greenhouse gas emissions must stabilize not much above current levels no later than 2015, then decline to no more than one third of current emissions by 2100. Compounding the problem, these reductions must occur right when the world’s poorest countries are making the transition to modernity—in other words, at the very moment when global energy demand is about to skyrocket.

Conceding that cutting emissions while raising living standards will be an immense job, Holdren is nonetheless optimistic: “It is a challenge to which we believe society can rise,” he says. In order to meet it, the panel outlined a series of recommendations, highlighting the “win-win” solutions that cut energy demand while boosting economic growth.

Unfortunately, win-win solutions, such as increasing vehicle fuel economy and providing incentives for cleaning up power plants, will not be enough. The report admits that achieving long-term emissions reductions will also require “win-lose” solutions, such as a carbon tax or a “cap-and-trade” system of emissions permits.

Besides choosing the right solutions, policymakers will need to implement them properly. Picking one topical example, Holdren explains that “in the transport sector, we should be increasing the use of biofuels to replace oil, [but] we cannot do that witlessly, because expanding biofuels witlessly will pose serious problems of competition with food production … environmental destruction, [and] loss of biodiversity.”

Jousting the four horsemen.
Rosina Bierbaum on ways to adapt to inevitable climate change.

Food production and biodiversity were also major topics for Rosina Bierbaum, dean of environmental and natural resource policy and management at the University of Michigan, who spoke after Holdren. Using a pair of world maps, Bierbaum showed the group’s projections of future ecosystem upheavals and crop failures.

Even if governments follow the panel’s recommendations to mitigate climate change, some of these events are probably inevitable. “Adaptation to climate change can’t any longer be seen as sort of a cop-out; it’s not instead of mitigation, but it’s needed in addition to mitigation,” says Bierbaum.

In a generation, Mississippi may be growing coconut palms instead of loblolly pine lumber, and Vermonters’ maple syrup might come from northern Canada. More ominously, major crop failures in the tropics could cause widespread famines in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, rising ocean temperatures and sea levels will likely increase extreme weather events and displace entire communities from coastlines. “There will be tens of millions of environmental refugees that the world will need to deal with,” says Bierbaum.

Michael MacCracken on how climate change is affecting the biosphere.

The most vulnerable countries are those in which agriculture accounts for more than 5% of GDP, and at least one important crop will be jeopardized by climate change. Among these countries are many that are already poor and underdeveloped.

But like the mitigation measures, many of the report’s adaptation recommendations are easier said than done. During the question session after the presentations, for example, an audience member asked about the depressingly instructive case of New Orleans, where a multi-billion-dollar rebuilding effort is now underway on land that is infamously below sea level.

Raven concedes that the outlook is grim. “It’s a lot easier to explain the problem than to forge a solution,” he says, adding that “if we can’t really address the problem of New Orleans in an intelligent and adaptive way, and the signs are relatively few that we will, how do we get together and address the problem of Bangladesh?”

The challenge goes well beyond building codes. “The wetlands that are south of New Orleans have been the shock absorber for hurricanes for a very long time, and they’ve been losing for the last 50 years about 25 square miles per year,” says Michael MacCracken of the Climate Institute. MacCracken adds that “no matter what they do to New Orleans, if they don’t recover the wetlands, they’re going to get inundated [again].” The same is true for many other low-lying regions around the world.

Richard Moss on the international response to sustainable development.

Framing the issue more optimistically, Richard Moss, senior director of climate and energy at the UN Foundation, says that humanity still has the opportunity to choose between two futures. “The path that we’re currently on … involves increasingly serious climate change impacts,” he says. In the alternative future, however, intelligent policy making and sustained investment in appropriate technology could help avert the climate change disaster while simultaneously boosting living standards worldwide. “We must act collectively and urgently to change our course through the leadership at all levels of society. There really is no more time for delay,” says Moss.

The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change

For those of us convinced about the need to act on climate change, and that’s a pretty broad swathe of humanity–including Fox News’ very own John O’riely–this was a very positive day. and a welcome incident of truth finally being explained to Congress: a definite improvement on right wing think tanks voicing oil funded agendas!

Al gore today visited Capitol Hill and…

Testified to the Environmental and Public Works Committee (Testimony + Webcast)

Testified to the Committee on Science and Technology (Testimony + Webcast)

For those of you uncertain about Climate Change due to the fact that Al Gore has been promoting it and he is a politician, bellow are some references on the science.

December 2004 Article in the journal Science.

Naomi Oreskes

Policy-makers and the media, particularly in the United States, frequently assert that climate science is highly uncertain. Some have used this as an argument against adopting strong measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, while discussing a major U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report on the risks of climate change, then-EPA administrator Christine Whitman argued, “As [the report] went through review, there was less consensus on the science and conclusions on climate change” (1). Some corporations whose revenues might be adversely affected by controls on carbon dioxide emissions have also alleged major uncertainties in the science (2). Such statements suggest that there might be substantive disagreement in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This is not the case.

The scientific consensus is clearly expressed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme, IPCC’s purpose is to evaluate the state of climate science as a basis for informed policy action, primarily on the basis of peer-reviewed and published scientific literature (3). In its most recent assessment, IPCC states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth’s climate is being affected by human activities: “Human activities … are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents … that absorb or scatter radiant energy. … [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations” [p. 21 in (4)].

IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members’ expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements. For example, the National Academy of Sciences report, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, begins: “Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise” [p. 1 in (5)]. The report explicitly asks whether the IPCC assessment is a fair summary of professional scientific thinking, and answers yes: “The IPCC’s conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue” [p. 3 in (5)].

Others agree. The American Meteorological Society (6), the American Geophysical Union (7), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling (8).

The drafting of such reports and statements involves many opportunities for comment, criticism, and revision, and it is not likely that they would diverge greatly from the opinions of the societies’ members. Nevertheless, they might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions. That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords “climate change” (9).

The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

Admittedly, authors evaluating impacts, developing methods, or studying paleoclimatic change might believe that current climate change is natural. However, none of these papers argued that point.

This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their professional societies. Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect.

The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it.

Many details about climate interactions are not well understood, and there are ample grounds for continued research to provide a better basis for understanding climate dynamics. The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.

References and Notes

1. A. C. Revkin, K. Q. Seelye, New York Times, 19 June 2003, A1.
2. S. van den Hove, M. Le Menestrel, H.-C. de Bettignies, Climate Policy 2 (1), 3 (2003).
3. See www.ipcc.ch/about/about.htm.
4. J. J. McCarthy et al., Eds., Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2001).
5. National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Science of Climate Change, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions (National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 2001).
6. American Meteorological Society, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 84, 508 (2003).
7. American Geophysical Union, Eos 84 (51), 574 (2003).
8. See www.ourplanet.com/aaas/pages/atmos02.html.
9. The first year for which the database consistently published abstracts was 1993. Some abstracts were deleted from our analysis because, although the authors had put “climate change” in their key words, the paper was not about climate change.
10. This essay is excerpted from the 2004 George Sarton Memorial Lecture, “Consensus in science: How do we know we’re not wrong,” presented at the AAAS meeting on 13 February 2004. I am grateful to AAAS and the History of Science Society for their support of this lectureship; to my research assistants S. Luis and G. Law; and to D. C. Agnew, K. Belitz, J. R. Fleming, M. T. Greene, H. Leifert, and R. C. J. Somerville for helpful discussions.

Further Reading:
What Do Top Climate Scientists think of An Inconvenient Truth? (RealClimate)
How Strong is The Consensus on Human Cause Climate Change? (National Academies of Science)
Views of NASA’s Top Climate Scientist (Columbia University)

Al Gore’s Slideshow:
The presentation on which ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is based. (Climate Change Action)

Nigeria has huge reserves of oil: these reserves are strategically important for the US they are also a curse upon the Nigerian people.

A recent radio show on Nigerian oil can be found on the WBUR website.

“Nigeria is rich with oil, producing more than Iraq and Kuwait combined. The country is the fifth-largest supplier of oil to the United States. And it’s “light sweet crude,” …a dreamy kind of oil that needs little refinement. But, the communities closest to the drills and platforms — the people of the Niger Delta — live in poverty. Without clean drinking water. Without schools. Without jobs. Frustrated by their situation, local men are taking matters into their own hands. They’re forming militias, taking hostages, and disrupting oil flow. Journalist Sebastian Junger went deep into the mangroves and creeks of the Niger Delta. He emerged with a chilling story of violence and despair…”

You might think that this situation is awful but beyond your control. This is untrue, apart from contributing to campaigns that aim to pressure oil companies to abide by Nigerian law and act in line with there CSR policies there are important consumer choices to be made.

Do you have a Royal Bank of Scotland bank account? A recent Report from London Platform exposes the activites of the self described oil and gas bank. Many of these investment are found made within the Niger delta region of Nigeria. Perhaps you should change your bank account to a company with an ethical investment policy such as the cooperative bank.

Do you buy oil from Shell? Can you avoid it, perhaps you should.

Previous articles on nigeria and it’s oil can be found here.