And very true: a drilling boom isn’t going to supply locals with any significant amount of valuable employment. Never has…never will.
nd PA? To steal the line from the doctor at the end of "The Bridge over the River Kwai": "Insanity! Insanity!" LOL. And that's just severance tax not including corporate taxes.
Climate change has already left its mark "on all continents and across the oceans", damaging food crops, spreading disease, and melting glaciers, according to the leaked text of a blockbuster UN climate science report due out on Monday.
Government officials and scientists are gathered in Yokohama this week to wrangle over every line of a summary of the report before the final wording is released on Monday – the first update in seven years.
Nearly 500 people must sign off on the exact wording of the summary, including the 66 expert authors, 271 officials from 115 countries, and 57 observers.
But governments have already signed off on the critical finding that climate change is already having an effect, and that even a small amount of warming in the future could lead to "abrupt and irreversible changes", according to documents seen by the Guardian.
"In recent decades, changes in climate have caused impacts on natural and human systems on all continents and across the oceans," the final report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will say.
A United Nations panel of scientists is joining the list craze with what they call eight "key risks" that are part of broader "reasons for concern" about climate change.
It's part of a massive report on how global warming is affecting humans and the planet and how the future will be worse unless something is done about it. The report is being finalized at a meeting this weekend by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
They assembled the list to "make it understandable and to illustrate the issues that have the greatest potential to cause real harm," the report's chief author, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution of Science in California, said in an interview.
But a draft of the list—called by the acronym RFCs—includes science-heavy language, caveats and uses lowercase Roman numerals, for example using iv instead of 4.
A boiled-down version of what the scientists say the warmed-up future holds for Earth if climate change continues:
1. Coastal flooding will kill people and cause destruction.
2. Some people will go hungry because of warming, drought and severe downpours.
3. Big cites will be damaged by inland flooding.
4. Water shortages will make the poor even poorer in rural areas.
5. Crazy weather, like storms, can make life miserable, damaging some of the things we take for granted, like electricity, running water and emergency services.
6. Some fish and other marine animals could be in trouble, which will probably hurt fishing communities.
7. Some land animals won't do much better and that's not good for people who depend on them.
8. Heat waves, especially in cities, will kill the elderly and very young.
The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued its second of four planned reports examining the state of climate science. This one summarizes what the scientific literature says about “Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability” (big PDF here). As with every recent IPCC report, it is super-cautious to a fault and yet still incredibly alarming.
It warns that we are doing a bad job of dealing with the climate change we’ve experienced to date: “Impacts from recent climate-related extremes, such as heat waves, droughts, floods, cyclones, and wildfires, reveal significant vulnerability and exposure of some ecosystems and many human systems to current climate variability.”
It warns of the dreaded RFCs (“reasons for concern” — I’m not making this acronym up), such as “breakdown of food systems linked to warming, drought, flooding, and precipitation variability and extremes.” You might call them RFAs (“reasons for alarm” or “reasons for action”). Indeed, in recent years, “several periods of rapid food and cereal price increases following climate extremes in key producing regions indicate a sensitivity of current markets to climate extremes among other factors.” So warming-driven drought and extreme weather have already begun to reduce food security. Now imagine adding another 2 billion people to feed while we are experiencing five times as much warming this century as we did last century!
No surprise, then, that climate change will “prolong existing, and create new, poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hotspots of hunger.” And it will “increase risks of violent conflicts in the form of civil war and inter-group violence” — though for some reason that doesn’t make the list of RFCs.
One of the authors of a U.N. draft report on climate change pulled out of the writing team, saying his colleagues were issuing unfounded “alarmist” claims at the expense of real solutions.
“The drafts became too alarmist,” said Richard Tol, a Dutch professor of economics at Sussex University in England, to Reuters.
Mr. Tol was part of a team of 70 authors working on revisions to a U.N. report on climate change, to be issued in Japan on March 31. The final draft, which is the copy that Mr. Tol found objectionable, included findings that a warming global temperature will lead to disruption in food supplies and stagnating economies — and that coral reefs and lands in the Arctic may already have suffered irreversible damages, Reuters said.
“The report is a product of the scientific community and not of any individual author,” the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, said in a statement. “The report does not comprehensively represent the views of any individual.”
The U.N. agency also said Mr. Tol advised months ago of his reluctance to participate in the summary writing of the report. He had still been invited to Japan to help with its drafting, however, Reuters reported.
Mr. Tol said many of the other authors “strongly disagree with me,” but that he found the IPCC’s emphasis on climate change alarmism — and focus on risk — came at the expense of providing solutions for the world’s governments to adapt and overcome.
Today's report is the second of three instalments of the IPCC's fifth assessment of climate change. The first instalment, released last year, covered the physical science of climate change. The new report focuses on the impacts of climate change and how to adapt to them. The third instalment, on how to cut greenhouse gas emissions, comes out in April.
The latest report backs off from some of the predictions made in the previous IPCC report, in 2007. During the final editing process, the authors also retreated from many of the more confident projections from the final draft, leaked last year. The IPCC now says it often cannot predict which specific impacts of climate change – such as droughts, storms or floods – will hit particular places.
Instead, the IPCC focuses on how people can adapt in the face of uncertainty, arguing that we must become resilient against diverse changes in the climate.
Here New Scientist breaks down what is new in the report, and what it means for humanity's efforts to cope with a changing climate. A companion article, "How climate change will affect where you live", highlights some of the key impacts that different regions are facing.
An IPCC Author Steals the Headlines
Sensational reports about the World Climate Council in the media: Richard Tol, environmental economist and Contributing Lead Author of the current IPCC-Report, sharply criticized the panel for allegedly "apocalyptic' statements. Yet, for half a year he has not participated in writing the text that he no longer wants anything to do with. At the end of the day Tol says that he regrets the dust up.
From Berlin Toralf Staud
The IPCC Working Group II final plenary session has been meeting since Tuesday morning in Yokohama, editing line by line the text of the Summary for Policymakers on climate impacts and adaptation. At least on the main stage. Richard Tol had dominated the behind the scenes action. He told the BBC, that the report verged on being too "apocalyptic", that he could not put up with that and that they should please remove his name from the SPM front page. A small explosion.
Tol is not just anyone. The 45 year old, born in the Netherlands, has quite a reputation. At the moment his is a professor at the University of Sussex. He has often created controversy in his field. Tol one of the economists who say that the effects of climate change will be limited - unlike most of the others, most prominently Nicholas Stern or Ottmar Edenhofer. Tol is also controversial because of his behavior. His colleague, the economist Frank Ackerman, demonstrates on his website the nasty course of a controversy between the two. Tol was one who criticized the fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC. As a sign that critical voices were welcome, Tol was chosen as one of the "Coordinating Lead Authors" - together with the American Douglas Arent he was responsible for Chapter 10 in Volume 2, with the title "Key Economic Secotrs and Services"
Tol's words were noticed by a large number of media - in the UK, Australia and the Netherlands, and finally in Germany. The first draft of the report, Tol's core accusations, had kept the balance between the risks of climate change and the possibilities of limiting the risks through clever adaptation measures. This is completely different in the current version of the Summary for Policy Makers. "It is only about the consequences of climate change and the four horsemen of the apocolypse." Tol refers to a -in his words- "very stupid" IPCC statement: People in war zones are especially vulnerable to climate risks. Tol contrasts this with a reference to the currently most gruesome war on the planet: "I believe that people in Syria fear chemical weapons more than global warming." Which is of course true, but no climatologist would disagree.
"The IPCC report underestimates the economic risks of climate change" according to one Tol critic
In discussions with other IPCC scientists (who will not agree to be quoted because of the ongoing negotiations) they appear stunned. While they sweat in grueling meetings in Yokohama, Tol steals attention with around with cheap polemics. As far as the accusations, there is nothing to them. On the contrary, the latest progress report stresses much more strongly than earlier ones, how to adopt to those already unavoidable climate change.
Tol has been openly attacked by Robert Ward of the London School of Economics. Ward was one of the external referees of the current IPCC reports. For one thing, he says that Tol is playing dirty. For another that the Report (with Tol's participation) excessively downplays the economic consequences of climate change.
Already in January Ward had written to the IPCC, because he had discovered errors in passages that Tol had worked on. Tol had, according to Ward, very late in the editing process (and thus after the reviewing had been completed) added a passage to the report "that was based on his own research. In that passage it was claimed that the published literature shows that a warming of a few degrees Celcius is conducive to the global economy - this passage has a number of errors and is based on estimates which leave out the greatest potential risks of climate change (e.g. melting of the Greenland ice sheet)."
Tol admits that there were indeed minor errors, that were fixed. Above all he denies Ward's accusations of miscalculations and not following IPCC refereeing procedures. Some weeks ago Tol attacked Ward on his blog. The IPCC Secretariat would not issue a statement on this because of the ongoing final plenary meeting.
Does an economist have the competence to evaluate the IPCC Chapter on Agriculture or Health?
But back to Tol's fundamental criticism of the IPCC. In a follow up question about exactly which IPCC statements he thought alarmist, Tol named three areas. The passages relating to agriculture "downplayed" adaptation possibilities and technical progress. Secondly, in discussions of fatality from diseases, there was too little discussion of the effects of cold and too much emphasis on malnutrition. Thirdly, in relation to war the IPCC relied too much on "a handful of questionable studies that are of the view that climate change will lead to more conflict." As of the publication deadline Tol had not answered a follow up question of how an economist could judge if the selected experts author had properly evaluated the wide research literature on agriculture, medicine and military subjects. (See PS at the end of the article).
There has been no response of the IPCC Secretariat. (UPDATE: 27.03 The IPCC has now released a statement in which it stresses that the IPCC Reports are always team products and naturally do not reflect the views of a single author. The complete text can be found here). In response to KlimaRetter, spokesman Jonathan Lynn merely pointed out that Richard Tol is one of a total of 309 responsible lead authors responsible in Working Group II.
And about his statement that he would not longer sign the policy summary (SPM), Lynn commented slightly sarcastically that he (ER-Tol) had not taken part in writing the current version, but had separated from the writing group in the previous year. He had refused "repeated requests of the Working Group leader, Chris Field, to cooperate further." Therefore his name no longer is included on the title page.
rabett.blogspot.de/2014/03/the-ferret-cornored.html
Instead of speculations based on partial drafts and attempts to spin the coverage ahead of time, you can now download the final report of the IPCC WG2: “Climate Change 2014:Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability” directly. The Summary for Policy Makers is here, while the whole report is also downloadable by chapter. - See more at: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... m7vPG.dpuf
Notably there are FAQ for the whole report and for each chapter that give a relatively easy way in to the details. Note too that these are the un-copyedited final versions, and minor edits, corrections and coherent figures will be forthcoming in the final published versions. (For reference, the WG1 report was released in Sept 2013, but only in final published form in Jan 2014). Feel free to link to interesting takes on the report in the comments. - See more at: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... m7vPG.dpuf
As with every recent IPCC report, it is super-cautious to a fault and yet still incredibly alarming.
It warns that we are doing a bad job of dealing with the climate change we’ve experienced to date: “Impacts from recent climate-related extremes, such as heat waves, droughts, floods, cyclones, and wildfires, reveal significant vulnerability and exposure of some ecosystems and many human systems to current climate variability.”
It warns of the dreaded RFCs (“reasons for concern” — I’m not making this acronym up), such as “breakdown of food systems linked to warming, drought, flooding, and precipitation variability and extremes.” You might call them RFAs (“reasons for alarm” or “reasons for action”). Indeed, in recent years, “several periods of rapid food and cereal price increases following climate extremes in key producing regions indicate a sensitivity of current markets to climate extremes among other factors.” So warming-driven drought and extreme weather have already begun to reduce food security. Now imagine adding another 2 billion people to feed while we are experiencing five times as much warming this century as we did last century!
...it explicitly has very little to say about the catastrophic impacts and vulnerability in the business as usual case where the Earth warms 4°C to 5°C [7°F-9°F] — and it has nothing to say about even higher warming, which the latest science suggests we are headed toward.
The report states:
“Relatively few studies have considered impacts on cropping systems for scenarios where global mean temperatures increase by 4°C [7°F] or more.
“… few quantitative estimates [of global annual economic losses] have been completed for additional warming around 3°C [5.4°F] or above.”
D’oh! You may wonder why hundreds of the world leading climate experts spend years and years doing climate science and climate projections, but don’t bother actually looking at the impacts of merely staying on our current carbon pollution emissions path — let alone looking at the plausible worst-case scenario (which is typically the basis for risk-reducing public policy, such as military spending).
Partly it’s because, until recently, climate scientists had naively expected the world to act with a modicum of sanity and avoid at all costs catastrophic warming of 7°F let alone the unimaginable 10°F (or higher) warming we are headed toward. Partly it’s because, as a recent paper explained, “climate scientists are biased toward overly cautious estimates, erring on the side of less rather than more alarming predictions.”
A UN climate impact report, released today, gives the clearest and most comprehensive evidence yet that the earth we call home is in deep trouble. It reinforces the sobering view that climate change is real, it's happening now and it's affecting the lives and the livelihoods of people as well as the sensitive ecosystems that sustain life.
This is the second in a series of four reports being prepared by the world's leading climate authorities in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It assesses the impacts, adaptation and vulnerability of human and natural systems, the observed impacts and future risks of climate change, and the potential for and limits to adaptation.
Samantha Smith, leader of the WWF Global Climate & Energy Initiative says the report highlights, for the first time, the dramatic difference of impacts between a world where we act now to cut emissions, which now come mostly from using fossil fuels; and a world where we fail to act quickly and at scale.
"This report tells us that we have two clear choices: cut emissions now and invest in adaption - and have a world that has challenging and just barely manageable risks; or do nothing and face a world of devastating and unmanageable risks and impacts."
"The report makes it clear that we still have time to act. We can limit climate instability and adapt to some of the changes we see now. But without immediate and specific action, we are in danger of going far beyond the limits of adaptation. With this risk posed so clearly, we have to hope that the next IPCC report which is being released in Berlin in April, will provide us with strong statements on the solutions that we know exist," she says.
Despite the warnings given by the IPCC in its reports over the past 20 years - reinforced by the release of the report today - the gap between the science and what governments are doing remains huge, says Sandeep Chamling Rai, head of the WWF delegation to the meeting.
""We now have a better understanding of how climate impacts will affect people and nature in different regions. International adaptation efforts need to be intensified to adequately respond to such varied impacts," says Chamling Rai.
1.Read the full IPCC WG2 report here
2.Read the IPCC media statement on the report here
3.Read the IPCC WG I report, The Physical Science Basis, here
4.Read the World Meteorological Office (WMO) Annual Climate Report 2014 here
5.Read the World Bank Turn Down the Heat report here
1. Food threat
Climate change is already taking a sizeable chunk out of global food supply and it is going to get worse... The shortages, and the threat of food price spikes, could lead to unrest.
2. Human security
Climate change poses a threat to human security, and could lead to increased migration. Potential shortages of food and water, because of climate change, could be drivers of future conflicts...those conflicts are going to get in the way of government's efforts to protect people from future climate change.
3. Inequality
Some are more vulnerable than others. Poor people in poor countries – and even the poor in rich countries – are going to bear an unfair burden of climate change..
4. No-one is safe
As temperatures rise beyond 2 degrees to 4 degrees – our current trajectory – there are limits to how far society can adapt to climate change. The only way out is to cut emissions now...
5. Hard but not hopeless.
The report notes that research on the effects of climate change has doubled since the last report in 2007 – and so has understanding about what needs to done to insulate people from more severe consequences.
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