Global warming lull down to China's coal growth

Solar power is coming to China - but
coal-burning
grew amazingly quickly a few years back

The lull in global warming from 1998 to 2008 was mainly caused by a sharp rise in China's coal use, a study suggests.

The absence of a temperature rise over that decade is often used by "climate sceptics" as grounds for denying the existence of man-made global warming.

But the new study, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concludes that smog from the extra coal acted to mask greenhouse warming.

China's coal use doubled 2002-2007, according to US government figures.

Although burning the coal produced more warming carbon dioxide, it also put more tiny sulphate aerosol particles into the atmosphere which cool the planet by reflecting solar energy back into space.

The researchers conclude that declining solar activity over the period and an overall change from El Nino to La Nina conditions in the Pacific Ocean also contributed to the temperature plateau.

Lead researcher Robert Kaufmann from Boston University, whose research interests span climate change and world oil markets, said the study was inspired by "sceptical" questioning.

"Two years ago, I gave a talk to a general audience in New Jersey about climate change," he told BBC News.

"And an older gentleman asked me 'why should I believe in this climate change - I was watching Fox News and they said the Earth's temperature hasn't changed in 10 years and has actually gone down'.

"At that stage I wasn't paying much attention to climate change - I'd returned to working on oil markets - so I went back and checked the data and found that was just about right."

Mainstream answers

Mainstream climate scientists have traditionally answered the "no warming since 1998" claim in two ways.

One is by pointing out that 1998 saw the strongest El Nino conditions on record, which transfer heat from the oceans to the atmosphere, warming the planet.

So while you may not see a temperature rise if you start the series in 1998, you do see one if you begin with 1997 or 1999.

The second answer is to point out that temperatures will naturally vary from year to year, and to point to the consistent upward trend seen when long-term average temperatures are used rather than annual figures.

But the new study, which uses statistical models that are very different from the models traditionally used to simulate the Earth's climate, offers an alternative way of explaining the apparent halt.

According to figures from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), the rate at which coal use was increasing around the world showed a sharp acceleration around 2003, with China in the vanguard.

China's consumption had doubled over two decades from 1980. But from 2002, it doubled again in the five years to 2007.

As the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emerged in 2007, it was not able to include this data.

Piers Forster from the UK's Leeds University, who led the IPCC chapter analysing factors affecting global temperatures, said the new study was "interesting and worthwhile".

"The masking of CO2-induced global warming by short term sulphur emissions is well known - it's believed that the flattening off of global mean temperatures in the 1950s was due to European and US coal burning, and just such a mechanism could be operating today from Chinese coal," he told BBC News.

"Other natural fluctuations in the Sun's output, volcanoes and water vapour have also been proposed for causing the non-warming 'noughties', and may have contributed to a degree.

"It needs to be emphasised that any masking is short-lived, and the increased CO2 from the same coal will remain in the atmosphere for many decades and dominate the long-term warming over the next decades."

Since the end of the study period, in 2007, China's coal consumption has risen again by about 30%.

Changes in the Sun's output were also a
factor in the cooling, the modelling indicates

Out of the shadow

The European and US coal boom after World War 2 caused such an environmental impact in terms of urban smog and acid rain that many governments introduced legislation curtailing the output of aerosols.

As the air cleared, global temperatures began to rise again; and Professor Kaufmann believes the same thing is likely to happen now, as China and other developing countries get to grips with their burgeoning environmental issues.

The last two years' data suggest temperatures are once more beginning to rise; but how fast this happens depends on a number of factors.

One is how quickly the rapidly industrialising countries mandate the fitting of equipment that removes sulphate particles.

Another is solar activity. Recently, it showed signs of picking up as the Sun enters a new cycle of activity, although recent researchraises the possibility of a new lull.

Other research groups, meanwhile, have produced evidence showing that natural cycles of ocean temperature, such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, may restrain temperatures for another decade or so.

Uncertainties over aspects of the Earth's immensely complex climate system, such as melting ice and the behaviour of clouds, could also skew the overall picture.

But Robert Kaufmann is in no doubt that temperatures will pick up if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

"People can choose not to believe in [man-made] climate change - but the correct term here is 'belief' - believing is an act of faith, whereas science is a testing of hypotheses and seeing whether they hold up against real world data.

"Even before this paper there wasn't much scientific evidence for denying climate change, and now I don't see any credible scientific contradiction - if people don't believe it, it'll be because they choose not to believe it."

Source: BBC Science and Environment

Global Warming — Fact or Myth?

Global Warming — Fact or Myth?
6 common misunderstandings about global warming. Or is that climate change?

Myth or fact? There are a lot of misconceptions about global warming that have cropped up in recent months. Here's a look at some of them:

Fact or Myth? "Snowmageddon" and all those other weird U.S. snowstorms this winter prove that global warming isn't real.

Myth
The reaction to "Snowmageddon" is an example of a common misunderstanding about climate change. Weather events are not climate; climate is the accumulation of weather events over an extended period of time. So a cold summer day doesn't prove global warming is false any more than a heat wave in winter proves it's true. That said, the effects scientists predict from global warming are sometimes counterintuitive. While snow is associated with winter, warmer winter temperatures can result in more snow, since warmer air can hold more moisture. One of the most well-documented predictions about global warming is that it will result in more intense storms, in any season, but may leave longer droughts between those storms.

Fact or Myth? The U.N. scientific report on global warming was full of errors and should not be trusted.

Myth
There have been errors discovered in the U.N.'s landmark report on climate science. The errors concern facets of climate change, like how fast Himalayan glaciers have melted, or how fast sea levels will rise in the Netherlands. The errors are a black eye for an organization that won a Nobel Peace Prize for the authoritative work it has done on the subject. However, these errors amount to t's left uncrossed and i's left undotted. The sentences still read loud and clear about the overall consensus about fundamental issues: That the Earth is warming, that our pollution is a primary cause, and that continued warming would have consequences worldwide, many of them costly to human life and property, and to wildlife.

Fact or Myth? There has been no global warming in the past 10 or 15 years.

Myth
The hottest year ever recorded was in 1998, according to measurements by the British University of East Anglia, or 2005 (with 1998 ranking very close) according to measurements by NASA. Both agree that the first decade of the 21st century was the hottest ever recorded, which means the hottest since the 1880s. Comparing the temperature to other data hidden in the natural world, like tree rings or layers of Arctic ice, scientists can determine that we're likely experiencing temperatures higher than any time in thousands of years.

"Climate change" is a more accurate description for what's happening than "global warming."

Fact
While it is true that the world as a whole is warming, "climate change" is more accurate, particularly when it comes to how individuals in different regions will experience these changes. Global warming is the driving force, but climate change is what we will experience. What will climate change look like? It could mean more intense storms or more prolonged droughts. It could mean more risk of wildfires in one area, and more flooded basements in another. It could make one farmer's field more productive, while killing that of another. Some even have called the effects of climate change "global weirding." In general, scientists expect climate change will affect different regions very differently.

Fact or Myth? Carbon dioxide is natural. Breathing is not pollution.

Myth
There's nothing wrong with breathing, of course, and nothing unnatural about carbon dioxide. Breathing is not causing the world any harm. So if carbon dioxide exhaled in our breath is harmless, how can carbon dioxide "exhaled" by power plants, tailpipes and factories be a problem? A clue lies in the name we have for what we burn: fossil fuels. By burning coal, oil and gas, we take carbon that had been buried deep underground for millions of years, and we transfer it to the atmosphere. There, it acts as a chemical greenhouse, trapping more of the sun's heat close to the Earth's surface. There's about 40% more carbon in the atmosphere today than there was in pre-industrial times. In fact, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher today than at any point in the last 650,000 years, before humans walked the Earth -- before even Neanderthals walked the Earth. Natural processes also have an effect on the concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (those early human-like species weren't driving SUVs), and other factors affect the climate beyond the makeup of chemicals in the atmosphere, but scientists studying the causes of global warming agree that human pollution is a driving force for the climate change we've documented in recent decades.

Fact or Myth? Even if we stopped driving cars completely today, the climate would not be affected.

Fact
Carbon dioxide, which is released from burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, survives for years or decades. When you hear news reports stating that other gasses are "more potent" than carbon dioxide, it's often because they last even longer in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, trapping heat all the while. The fact is, the pollution we've emitted in the past will stay with us for some time. So why act now? We understand today that future generations will have to deal with planetary changes we're setting in motion. Past generations didn't have the knowledge we do.

Source: The Daily Green

Deforestation: The hidden cause of global warming

In the next 24 hours, deforestation will release as much CO2 into the atmosphere as 8 million people flying from London to New York. Stopping the loggers is the fastest and cheapest solution to climate change. So why are global leaders turning a blind eye to this crisis?

The accelerating destruction of the rainforests that form a precious cooling band around the Earth's equator, is now being recognised as one of the main causes of climate change. Carbon emissions from deforestation far outstrip damage caused by planes and automobiles and factories.

The rampant slashing and burning of tropical forests is second only to the energy sector as a source of greenhouses gases according to report published today by the Oxford-based Global Canopy Programme, an alliance of leading rainforest scientists.

Figures from the GCP, summarising the latest findings from the United Nations, and building on estimates contained in the Stern Report, show deforestation accounts for up to 25 per cent of global emissions of heat-trapping gases, while transport and industry account for 14 per cent each; and aviation makes up only 3 per cent of the total.

"Tropical forests are the elephant in the living room of climate change," said Andrew Mitchell, the head of the GCP.

Scientists say one days' deforestation is equivalent to the carbon footprint of eight million people flying to New York. Reducing those catastrophic emissions can be achieved most quickly and most cheaply by halting the destruction in Brazil, Indonesia, the Congo and elsewhere.

No new technology is needed, says the GCP, just the political will and a system of enforcement and incentives that makes the trees worth more to governments and individuals standing than felled. "The focus on technological fixes for the emissions of rich nations while giving no incentive to poorer nations to stop burning the standing forest means we are putting the cart before the horse," said Mr Mitchell.

Most people think of forests only in terms of the CO2 they absorb. The rainforests of the Amazon, the Congo basin and Indonesia are thought of as the lungs of the planet. But the destruction of those forests will in the next four years alone, in the words of Sir Nicholas Stern, pump more CO2 into the atmosphere than every flight in the history of aviation to at least 2025.

Indonesia became the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world last week. Following close behind is Brazil. Neither nation has heavy industry on a comparable scale with the EU, India or Russia and yet they comfortably outstrip all other countries, except the United States and China.

What both countries do have in common is tropical forest that is being cut and burned with staggering swiftness. Smoke stacks visible from space climb into the sky above both countries, while satellite images capture similar destruction from the Congo basin, across the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic and the Republic of Congo.

According to the latest audited figures from 2003, two billion tons of CO2 enters the atmosphere every year from deforestation. That destruction amounts to 50 million acres - or an area the size of England, Wales and Scotland felled annually.

The remaining standing forest is calculated to contain 1,000 billion tons of carbon, or double what is already in the atmosphere.

As the GCP's report concludes: "If we lose forests, we lose the fight against climate change."

Standing forest was not included in the original Kyoto protocols and stands outside the carbon markets that the report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) pointed to this month as the best hope for halting catastrophic warming.

The landmark Stern Report last year, and the influential McKinsey Report in January agreed that forests offer the "single largest opportunity for cost-effective and immediate reductions of carbon emissions".

International demand has driven intensive agriculture, logging and ranching that has proved an inexorable force for deforestation; conservation has been no match for commerce. The leading rainforest scientists are now calling for the immediate inclusion of standing forests in internationally regulated carbon markets that could provide cash incentives to halt this disastrous process.

Forestry experts and policy makers have been meeting in Bonn, Germany, this week to try to put deforestation on top of the agenda for the UN climate summit in Bali, Indonesia, this year. Papua New Guinea, among the world's poorest nations, last year declared it would have no choice but to continue deforestation unless it was given financial incentives to do otherwise.

Richer nations already recognise the value of uncultivated land. The EU offers €200 (£135) per hectare subsidies for "environmental services" to its farmers to leave their land unused.

And yet there is no agreement on placing a value on the vastly more valuable land in developing countries. More than 50 per cent of the life on Earth is in tropical forests, which cover less than 7 per cent of the planet's surface.

They generate the bulk of rainfall worldwide and act as a thermostat for the Earth. Forests are also home to 1.6 billion of the world's poorest people who rely on them for subsistence. However, forest experts say governments continue to pursue science fiction solutions to the coming climate catastrophe, preferring bio-fuel subsidies, carbon capture schemes and next-generation power stations.

Putting a price on the carbon these vital forests contain is the only way to slow their destruction. Hylton Philipson, a trustee of Rainforest Concern, explained: "In a world where we are witnessing a mounting clash between food security, energy security and environmental security - while there's money to be made from food and energy and no income to be derived from the standing forest, it's obvious that the forest will take the hit."

Source: The Independent

What is Global Warming?

Glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising, cloud forests are drying, and wildlife is scrambling to keep pace. It's becoming clear that humans have caused most of the past century's warming by releasing heat-trapping gases as we power our modern lives. Called greenhouse gases, their levels are higher now than in the last 650,000 years.

We call the result global warming, but it is causing a set of changes to the Earth's climate, or long-term weather patterns, that varies from place to place. As the Earth spins each day, the new heat swirls with it, picking up moisture over the oceans, rising here, settling there. It's changing the rhythms of climate that all living things have come to rely upon.

What will we do to slow this warming? How will we cope with the changes we've already set into motion? While we struggle to figure it all out, the face of the Earth as we know it—coasts, forests, farms and snow-capped mountains—hangs in the balance.

Greenhouse effect

The "greenhouse effect" is the warming that happens when certain gases in Earth's atmosphere trap heat. These gases let in light but keep heat from escaping, like the glass walls of a greenhouse.

First, sunlight shines onto the Earth's surface, where it is absorbed and then radiates back into the atmosphere as heat. In the atmosphere, “greenhouse” gases trap some of this heat, and the rest escapes into space. The more greenhouse gases are in the atmosphere, the more heat gets trapped.

Scientists have known about the greenhouse effect since 1824, when Joseph Fourier calculated that the Earth would be much colder if it had no atmosphere. This greenhouse effect is what keeps the Earth's climate livable. Without it, the Earth's surface would be an average of about 60 degrees Fahrenheit cooler. In 1895, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius discovered that humans could enhance the greenhouse effect by making carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. He kicked off 100 years of climate research that has given us a sophisticated understanding of global warming.

Levels of greenhouse gases (GHGs) have gone up and down over the Earth's history, but they have been fairly constant for the past few thousand years. Global average temperatures have stayed fairly constant over that time as well, until recently. Through the burning of fossil fuels and other GHG emissions, humans are enhancing the greenhouse effect and warming Earth.

Scientists often use the term "climate change" instead of global warming. This is because as the Earth's average temperature climbs, winds and ocean currents move heat around the globe in ways that can cool some areas, warm others, and change the amount of rain and snow falling. As a result, the climate changes differently in different areas.

Aren't temperature changes natural?

The average global temperature and concentrations of carbon dioxide (one of the major greenhouse gases) have fluctuated on a cycle of hundreds of thousands of years as the Earth's position relative to the sun has varied. As a result, ice ages have come and gone.

However, for thousands of years now, emissions of GHGs to the atmosphere have been balanced out by GHGs that are naturally absorbed.  As a result, GHG concentrations and temperature have been fairly stable. This stability has allowed human civilization to develop within a consistent climate.

Occasionally, other factors briefly influence global temperatures.  Volcanic eruptions, for example, emit particles that temporarily cool the Earth's surface.  But these have no lasting effect beyond a few years. Other cycles, such as El Niño, also work on fairly short and predictable cycles.

Now, humans have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by more than a third since the industrial revolution. Changes this large have historically taken thousands of years, but are now happening over the course of decades.

Why is this a concern?

The rapid rise in greenhouse gases is a problem because it is changing the climate faster than some living things may be able to adapt. Also, a new and more unpredictable climate poses unique challenges to all life.

Historically, Earth's climate has regularly shifted back and forth between temperatures like those we see today and temperatures cold enough that large sheets of ice covered much of North America and Europe. The difference between average global temperatures today and during those ice ages is only about 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit), and these swings happen slowly, over hundreds of thousands of years.

Now, with concentrations of greenhouse gases rising, Earth's remaining ice sheets (such as Greenland and Antarctica) are starting to melt too. The extra water could potentially raise sea levels significantly.

As the mercury rises, the climate can change in unexpected ways. In addition to sea levels rising, weather can become more extreme. This means more intense major storms, more rain followed by longer and drier droughts (a challenge for growing crops), changes in the ranges in which plants and animals can live, and loss of water supplies that have historically come from glaciers.

Scientists are already seeing some of these changes occurring more quickly than they had expected. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, eleven of the twelve hottest years since thermometer readings became available occurred between 1995 and 2006.

Source: National Geographic