We still have choice

With the COP15 Copenhagen climate talks starting in a few days, there may not yet be much of a feeling of optimism in the crisp autumn air, and there is widespread recognition that the liklihood of a binding, realistic and strong set of emissions targets is small. We do however, have many choices still in front of us.

• Regardless of the COP15 outputs, we'd still be smart, at some stage soon, to make some choices about:
• When to start creating a robust plan for food resilience
• When to implement planning restrictions on low level coastal land
• When to integrate potential responses to peak oil and energy security into our strategies.

George Monbiot put it neatly in the Guardian the other day:

In its new World Energy Outlook, the International Energy Agency (IEA) maintains that, to meet new demand and replace old equipment and exhausted reserves, the world will have to invest $25.6tn in energy supply infrastructure between now and 2030. The industrialised nations would also need to pay a fortune to the Opec countries to maintain their oil and gas supplies: the IEA predicts that the oil producers' income will rise fivefold in this period, to $30tn. These costs will be much higher if oil supplies peak.If moving to a low-carbon economy looks implausible, so does maintaining the high-carbon economy. Whichever route is taken, staggering amounts of money need to be spent. As resources become harder to extract and concentrated in fewer countries, it shouldn't be too difficult to persuade world leaders that the money might as well be spent on exploiting ambient energy, which will neither run out nor allow us to be held to ransom.

Do Lectures documentary 2009

Do Documentary 09 from PopUp!Media on Vimeo.

Simon Edwards from Pop Up Media has produced an excellent 20 minute documentary of the 2009 Do Lectures that captures the essence of the event from speakers and attendees. Great stories about the stories that the talks were about.

Social biomimicry: Insect Societies & Human Design

There's an interesting event coming up in Arizona in February 2010:

A pioneering collaboration among biologists, designers, engineers, and businesspeople, Social Biomimicry: Insect Societies and Human Design is a conference organized by graduate students and supported by the Frontiers in Life Sciences program at Arizona State University.  This conference will explore how the collective behavior and nest architecture of social insects can inspire more efficient and sustainable solutions to human challenges in areas such as manufacturing, communications, transportation, and green building. It will facilitate interdisciplinary exchange of concepts, perspectives, and tools that may enrich biology and advance biomimetic design. Finally, it will address fundamental issues in social biomimicry, including its ethical and psychological implications. We invite you to join us for this exciting event February 18 – 20, 2010 at the Memorial Union, Arizona State University, Tempe Campus.

Further details here

UK Climate Impacts Programme

Notes from UK CIP webinar - very well run and useful introduction to UKCP09

Background - the UK is locked into a certain amount of climate change - the lowest level of change is around 2 degrees.

CP09 are the most advanced climate scenarios in the world. CP09 allows UKCIP to give a level of probability on different outcomes - building in understanding levels of uncertainty allows organisations to make a more robust decision.

Using CP09, it's very important to think about what your appetite is for risk - if you're building a nuclear power station, you might want to look at the extremes of the risk. If you're presenting to the climate change partnership, position yourself in the middle.

The widest range gives 10% probability from the lowest emissions scenario, 50% probability from the medium and 90% from the highest

Vague questions can produce very different results which make it very important to relate the emissions scenario (mean / medium / probability) with the map of the data that's being shown.

Climate scenarious have been available since 1981 - on 200km grids.  As computer power and knowledge improved, predictions evolved up untio UKCIP02.Future projections will be developed for between 5-10 years out - using the same underlying data. UKCP09 - 25km grid squares - can't average the results for two squares next to each other. Geographic regions, river basins and DEFRA marine areas have all been defined by 25km squares. The 'Weather Generator' takes the monthly data and applies change factors on daily or even hourly intervals. Hourly data requests will give you 700mb of data - and are designed for experts.

Threshold Detectors allow the system to be interrogated with questions such as "how likely is to get 10 days of >100mm rain?

Anything less than 30 years is considered as 'weather' - 30 years+ is a climatological period

A1FI - high energy high fossil fuel - through to B1 - lots of energy efficiency and a lot more renewables in the power generation sector;  up unitl the middle of this century, the different lines don't create massibely different emissions pathways, but then diverge after that

UKCP09 produces statements such as: for the the North West, under medium emissions scenarios, the central estimate of temperature increase is 3.7 degrees

EXAMPLE - Oxforshire County Council had roads melting - was this more or less likely to occur. What's the threshold? 35 degrees for more than two days. Looked at the observed trends report and saw that temperatures were increasing - likely to be a more regular occurence. They pulled together the maps and graphs, showed it to councillors who gave funding for extra research. With this, they went into the user interface and extracted the relevant data. The monthly data was not all that useful, so they went into the Weather Generator and got an insight into likely daily information. They discovered that over the next 20 years, it would happen but would not be a regular occurence. When roads cam up for renewal, they could replace them with roads of greater heat tolerance.

We're aware that communicating this message can be difficult; whilst the key findings are high level,they can still be too complex for some.  It always makes a message more powerful if there's a sense of what people can do about the threat in front of them. Four of the examples worked through during the webinar exercise were:

Group 1
Without changes to emssions levels, farmers in the West Midlands are likely to have to cope with a 4C increase in temperature by the 2050's.  This will mean planning for changes to the way crops and animals are raised in the area. At worst, temperatures could be as much as 7C higher, with much greater consequences to our food production and animal welfare. Farmers and food businesses are invited to attend the Agri Futures event in Worcester on January 12th to plan what threats and opportunities this brings to them.


Group 2
For tyre manufacturers in the West Midlands, if things carry on as they are (high emissions) the hottest day in the summer by the 2050s could be as much as 8oC higher than current temperatures. This has major implications for how we design tyres for the future

Group 3

In the West Midlands, if things go on as they are, maxmum temperatures are likely to be 4.1C higher than today.  There is uncertainty but temperatures are very unlikely to rise less than 1.6C or more than 7.2C. This can have serious implications for health in homes, schools, hospitals, offices and other buildings.  Both current and new buildings will need to adapt to higher temperatures, using low carbon measures such as insulation, natural ventilation and shading rather than air conditioning. Wider area planning, particulaly in urban areas, should consider the use of deciduous trees to shade buildings and pedestrians during the summer months, whilst allowing sunlight through in the winter months.

Group 4

For planning purposes, in the West Midlands we should be aware the likely uincrease in temperature is about 4 degrees Ceilsus. It may be as low as one degree we should be prepared for temperatures to be up to 7 degrees higher than at present.

Summary

• You need to understand what change means to your system
• Understand your appetite for risk and what the climate can do
• The probabilistic nature of UKCP09 information allows better decisions to be made

Researchers must stay on the moral high ground

This important article was published in New Scientist last week. It's a very important message that clarifies the nonsense that's been talked about in many of the UK newspapers and media in the last couple of weeks.

• 25 November 2009
• Magazine issue 2736. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
• For similar stories, visit the Editorials and Climate Change Topic Guides

The disclosure of personal emails can be embarrassing. And so it proved this week when hundreds of them, accumulated over more than a decade in the files of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, UK, tumbled into the public domain as a result of an illegal hack.

Climate change deniers claim that the emails expose a conspiracy at work to make human-induced global warming a fact. A columnist for the Guardian newspaper in London said that the emails could scarcely be more damaging. One blog for the Daily Telegraph, also in London, called it "Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of anthropogenic global warming", adding "this scandal could well be the greatest in modern science". The sceptical climate scientist Patrick Michaels told the New York Times: "This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud."

But the charge that the emails are proof of a climate change swindle is ludicrous. As we report (see "Hacked archive provides fodder for climate sceptics"), there is no evidence in the hundreds of emails that data is being systematically falsified or dishonestly manipulated in refereed journals.

The overwhelming impression from this peek into the world of climate scientists is their anger about voluble outsiders who won't play the game by the accepted rules of science. They mean those naysayers who generally publish by blog or in non-peer-reviewed journals; who demand access to raw data and personal computer codes; who take preconceived positions to which almost any data will be moulded - and who then accuse the other side of playing dirty.

This anger is understandable. Over the past two decades, the CRU has compiled the most authoritative record of recent temperatures on the planet. It is how we know the world is warming. Yet its researchers have been inundated over the past few years with what feel like unreasonable and malicious demands for their raw data. They fear the hacking of their emails is the culmination of a concerted attack by data terrorists.

Climate researchers have been inundated with what feel like malicious demands for their data

They deserve to be protected. The trouble is that there should also be a place in the scientific dialogue for critics to make their views known, for the heretics who are not part of the scientific consensus.

Researchers being paid from the public purse should not treat their detractors as enemies but make reasonable attempts to engage with them honestly, no matter how unpalatable their views. Nor should they ask each other to delete emails - in response, apparently, to a freedom of information request. Scientists in general need to address how such destructive antagonism can be prevented, before the flow of research data dwindles. If that were to happen, science itself becomes the victim.