Brazil Plans a Price on Oil to Accelerate Climate Efforts

Brazil expects to see its lowest rates of illegal deforestation since 1988 by the end of this year.

Minister of Environment Izabella Teixeira said the government will reduce the annual chopping and burning of the Amazon rainforest to between 4,000 and 5,000 square kilometers. The figures will be announced in the run-up to this year's U.N. climate change conference in Cancun, Mexico, this December.

The Amazon clearing is a far cry from the 24,000 square kilometers the so-called "lungs of the Earth" lost in the beginning of this decade. But, Teixeira said, it's also not enough.

"OK, you did this, yes, we are so great," the minister said in a self-mocking flourish at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars' Brazil Institute. But, she added with seriousness, "this challenge is not the only one."

Last year, at climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, Brazil promised to reduce its carbon dioxide output 36 percent over the coming decade. Meeting that goal would bring Brazil -- now the world's seventh-largest emitter -- back to its 1994 levels. This week, Teixeira said, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will sign Brazil's sectoral strategy and investment plan to show how the country will meet that target. Also this week, Brazil will launch a long-planned climate change fund, bankrolled by a levy on oil production and exploration.

Together, these moves and others are part of a larger Brazilian strategy of assuming a new role in the U.N. climate talks: that of an emerging economic superpower intent on protecting smaller, developing countries while also proving to the United States and others that it will do its part to fight rising global emissions.

But what impact that will have at the 16th U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP16, talks, where nearly all attention will be focused on getting the United States and China to come to terms over mitigating emissions, is unclear.

An emerging player throws chips on the table

In an interview with ClimateWire after speaking to the Brazil Institute about the current Convention on Biological Diversity conference in Nagoya, Japan, Teixeira was at once dismissive and upbeat about the Cancun meeting.

"COP 16? Forget it," said Teixeira when told the interview topic. Then she recovered. Cancun, she said, is key to bringing leaders together. "It's important that you have a pragmatic approach, and that you can show the global society that we are doing something. It's important to show the world that we can establish a pragmatic basis for actions."

Teixeira maintained the need for an international treaty -- though she didn't specify when that might become a reality -- and stressed the importance of developed countries like the United States making good on commitments to give poor countries $30 billion by 2020 to cope with climate change consequences.

"Let's be current with our declaration," she said. "If we're not able to do this, why are we able to spend lots of money with wars?"

The gregarious minister, who in the course of her public talk teased a questioner about her marital status ("I hope that you can have a lot of marriages. High biodiversity.") and handed her personal e-mail to a graduate student who had written recently on Brazil, offered few other specifics on COP16. Instead, she peppered much of her talk with platitudes.

On whether the Cancun meeting is a referendum on the troubled U.N. climate process: "It's important to understand that climate change is an issue with high complexity."

On whether countries, including Brazil, trust the United States when it says it will keep its Copenhagen promise to cut carbon about 17 percent below 2005 levels, despite the absence of legislation: "It's very important that you have political leadership from President Obama."

As to whether Lula will attend COP16, the minister said she wasn't sure. But, she added, "to have political leadership, you don't necessarily need to go to the COP."

Brazil's plan to grow jobs in a 'low-carbon economy'

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Climate forum: Water, wind and fire bombard Earth

Stronger but maybe fewer hurricanes. Larger storm surges from ever-rising seas. More fires from intense lightning bolts.

Scientists and economists plan to explore those and other predicted consequences of global warming during Tuesday's forum at Florida Tech.

The changes could happen faster than many think because global warming is not linear, said Mark Bush, a Florida Tech biologist and speaker. He has found geological evidence of drastic species extinction in the Amazon rainforest and other hotspots of biological diversity as a result of past abrupt climate shifts.

"Amazonia is going to become very flammable," Bush said at another recent climate change forum at Florida Tech. Long term, "Brazil will basically lose its Amazon forest, and that will be a huge extinction event. We hit tipping points. We're very close to them."

Global warming could fuel more lightning, resulting in more forest fires, especially in the tropics, researchers have found.

Lightning bolts, like tailpipes and smokestacks, form nitrogen dioxides, a chemical compound that contributes to lung damage and acid rain. Scientists want to know how climate change might affect lightning intensity and contribute to nitrogen dioxides in the atmosphere.

Joseph Dwyer, a world authority on lightning, will talk about his research into thunderstorm physics and X-rays and gamma-ray flashes from lightning.

Recent studies show wave heights have increased over the past few decades because of more hurricanes and more powerful storms.

Randy Parkinson, a Melbourne consultant with the Brevard County Climate Change Group, plans to present evidence of the accelerating rise in sea level.

http://www.floridatoday.com/article/20090302/NEWS01/903020314/1006

Lawmakers gather in Brazil to discuss climate change

Lawmakers from the world's major industrial nations and five emerging economies gather in Brazil from Wednesday to discuss a global climate change treaty currently under consideration.

This will be the first gathering of legislators from wealthy and developing countries to help shape the post Kyoto Protocol agreement, World Bank Vice President for Latin America, Pamela Cox, told Reuters.

"Legislators are more than just another voice," Cox said. "In many countries they are the ones that actually sponsor and enact the laws that may govern any future climate change agenda," she added.

Cox, who will attend the conference in Brasilia, said reducing the carbon emissions that cause climate change requires a global solution.

"It is such an important global issue that it can't be a bilateral discussion, you need to engage society across the board," she said. "I don't think there has been any other sort of initiative or event like this."

The meeting of 100 lawmakers includes the Group of Eight industrial countries -- Britain, the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Canada and Japan -- and fast-developing nations China, Brazil, India, South Africa and Mexico.

The Kyoto Protocol was aimed at traditionally industrial powers and their emissions and did not target emerging and developing economies such as China and India. The post Kyoto treaty being negotiated will include all nations to ensure cuts in all forms of greenhouse gas emissions.

Brazil's concerned its involvement in a multilateral treaty will undermine its sovereignty over its Amazon rainforest region. Yet it is the world's fourth largest producer of greenhouse gases, virtually all of it as a result of deforestation.

PROTECTING FORESTS

The World Bank is leading efforts to develop private-sector and other solutions to curb greenhouse gas emissions, including those that emanate from deforestation.

In October, the Bank said it was developing a Forest Carbon Partnership Facility that would provide financial incentives to countries for protecting and replanting tropical forests, which store huge amounts of carbon that causes climate change.

Deforestation contributes 20 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, more than all the world's cars, trucks, trains and airplanes combined. By creating economic value for tropical forests, the facility can help developing nations like Brazil generate new revenue for poverty alleviation.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is expected to address the conference. He has argued that rich countries are responsible for 60 percent of the gas emissions and therefore need to shoulder the responsibility.

Brazil, like other developing nations, is also worried that solutions to climate change could hamper economic development.

"Both sides need more understanding of each other's point of view because it's a global issue and we are all in this together," Cox said. "These countries need to be seen as full partners. It isn't just who pays but who plays, and we're expecting the G8 will pay and these middle-income countries will play and we need to figure out how that will work out," she added.

Cox said it was important to balance development and environmental needs.

"We would like to help on the debate but also to put the development focus into the debate. It isn't an either/or," she said. "While money is helpful, it is also important that they have a voice in the process, that they feel heard, that their interests are respected. If you don't do that you won't have a long-run sustainable solution," she added.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/feedarticle?id=7321922

The new climate science: Governments gamble with our survival

Almost universally, governments are refusing to recognise the scope and urgency of the changes demanded by global warming. The menace, however, is real, and the time available for concerted action to combat it is frighteningly brief.

There is something counter-intuitive here, when most of us are still experiencing climate change only as near-imperceptible shifts in average temperatures. But nature is gradualist only up to a point. The smooth curves that describe “linear” processes can suddenly turn jagged.

Startling new phenomena emerge, often with bewildering abruptness. At certain points, even small quantitative changes can become huge changes of quality. If ocean water heats up beyond 27.7̊C, the weather systems that form over it can include not just local storms, but hurricanes hundreds of kilometres across.

This is non-linear change, in which gradual processes push elements of the material world past natural “tipping points” or “trigger mechanisms”, after which new and unfamiliar processes take over.

The Earth’s climate, especially if viewed over long periods, is full of non-linear processes. Renowned climate scientist James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Space Research Institute, speaks of the Earth being “whipsawed between climate states” as the amount of energy entering and leaving the atmosphere undergoes seemingly minor shifts — in the language of climate science, “forcings”.

The Earth’s climate, Hansen observes, is “remarkably sensitive to global forcings”. This, he explains, is because of a predominance of “positive feedbacks”. Gradual warming or cooling brings natural systems to the point where new processes cut in and multiply an earlier trend. Climate change then becomes self-accelerating.

The human-induced rise in global temperatures due to the burning of fossil fuels is an exceptionally large forcing, much stronger than the changes that set off and ended the ice ages of the past million years or so. Over a few decades, the burning of fossil fuels promises to thrust the Earth’s biosphere past a series of tipping points, into a climate state hotter than any since modern human beings evolved.

Albedo flip

The term “albedo” refers to the propensity of the Earth’s surface to reflect radiation from the sun back out into space. Ice and snow reflect about 80% of the sun’s heat, while for open ocean the figure can be as little as 10%.

Even minor shifts in global temperatures can produce marked changes in the extent of snow-covered ground and sea ice. These changes then multiply or reduce the amount of the sun’s radiation that remains to heat the Earth. Repeatedly in the past, dramatic changes in albedo — referred to as albedo flip — have been crucial for helping to transform slight changes in the Earth’s orbit and angle of rotation into ice ages and interglacial warm periods.

During 2007, the world’s climate scientists came to realise that albedo flip was underway again. The area of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean during the northern summer was nearly 23% smaller than the previous record. Moreover, this ice was unusually thin; NASA satellite data indicated that the volume of the ice at the end of the summer was just half what it had been four years earlier. Surface temperatures in the Arctic Ocean were the highest on record, in some places 4.5̊C above normal.

Scientists studying the icecaps of Greenland and West Antarctica — to the south of South America — were making analogous findings. Melting was found to be accelerating at alarming rates. Instead of lying thousands of years in the future, Hansen warned, the disintegration of these icecaps might be a prospect for the end of the century.

Prehistoric peat

The warming of the Arctic Ocean has affected nearby land masses, with recent annual temperatures in northern and western Siberia as much as 3̊C above average. Snow cover comes later and departs sooner. Capturing large additional amounts of heat from the sun, the albedo flip threatens to act as a trigger for other non-linear warming processes. The materials for a number of such processes are on hand in the form of vast quantities of carbon contained in Arctic and sub-Arctic peat bogs.

According to researcher Chris Freeman of the University of Wales, a third of the carbon stored on land — a quantity approaching the entire amount of carbon in the atmosphere — is locked up in peat — that is, partly decomposed vegetable matter prevented by low temperatures and acidic conditions from decaying fully. Another estimate, quoted by the New Scientist in 2004, calculates that the bogs of Europe, Siberia and North America hold the equivalent of 70 years of global industrial emissions.

Now, warmer temperatures mean that this carbon is starting to return to the atmosphere.

Warmer conditions in the Arctic are bringing about the widespread melting during summer of permafrost — that is, once-permanently frozen soil and swamps, frequently containing large amounts of peat. Countless new thaw lakes have appeared, and from the lake margins ominous quantities of greenhouse gases are now bubbling, as the peat begins to break down.

The decay of peat follows a range of chemical pathways. In oxygen-poor conditions, anaerobic bacteria produce the gas methane (CH4). Studying thaw lakes in northern Siberia, the journal Nature reported in September 2006, researchers from the University of Alaska found that methane flux from thaw lakes was as much as five times higher than previously estimated.

Much of the methane was ancient, formed during previous warm periods and stored as bubbles in permafrost for scores of thousands of years. The exceptionally rapid warming of recent times thus promises to release far more methane than would be created by the year-on-year breakdown of plant matter.

Methane in the atmosphere is relatively short-lived, persisting for only a few decades compared with several hundred years for carbon dioxide. But while methane is present, its greenhouse impact exceeds that of carbon dioxide by at least 20 times. A massive burst of methane in coming decades could sharply accelerate global warming, and act as a trigger for other non-linear processes.

Carbonated rivers

Carbon from peat bogs enters the atmosphere as carbon dioxide as well as methane. If the bogs dry out in warm weather, the peat readily combines with oxygen from the air. On occasion, it even catches fire.

Even if the peat remains saturated, the conditions of the new era of climate change are well able to turn it into carbon dioxide. According to New Scientist in 2004, researchers have found that quantities of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) are rising at as much as 6% per year in rivers that flow through peatlands. Once the DOC is in the rivers, bacteria rapidly convert it into carbon dioxide that bubbles to the surface.

The melting of Arctic permafrost will dramatically increase the area of peatlands where this effect applies. Once the bogs have melted, research by Chris Freeman indicates, the main reason for the growing DOC levels is not so much higher temperatures as the increased amounts of carbon dioxide and nitrogen compounds already in the atmosphere. Accumulating in the soil moisture, these appear to feed bacteria that break down the peat. “The peat bogs are going into solution”, New Scientist remarked.

By the middle of the century, Freeman told New Scientist, DOC emissions from peat bogs and rivers could be as big a source of atmospheric carbon dioxide as the burning of fossil fuels.

Despoiling the forests

Lesser but still perilous amounts of carbon seem destined to enter the atmosphere through the effects of deforestation. Brazil and Indonesia are among the top four greenhouse polluters, primarily because of the logging and burning of their forests. According to the London Independent in January, one-fifth of the Amazon basin has been stripped of its trees in recent years. In December, the World Wildlife Fund published research suggesting the Amazon forests could disappear by 2030.

Even where the chainsaws have not penetrated, forests can suffer drastically if there is widespread logging in nearby regions. Cleared rainforests regenerate slowly at best, and soil degradation often makes their regrowth impossible. The savannas or crop culture that mostly succeed the forests allow far more sunlight to reach the earth, resulting in higher regional air temperatures and lower humidity. Droughts become more frequent, and in the drier conditions forests become susceptible to burning. Rainforest plants are ill-adapted to fire, and are quickly killed. With the foliage gone, temperatures rise, and yet more forest dries out.

What the loggers have begun, global warming seems set to exacerbate. Quite independently of human assaults on the rainforest, modelling of rainfall in the future greenhouse world indicates a trend to drier conditions both in the eastern Amazon, and with more frequent El Nino events, in Indonesia. A paper in 2000 by the Hadley Centre of the British Meteorological Office speaks of the near-total collapse of the Amazon rainforest unless global temperature rises are kept to the now-difficult level of 2̊C. Models describe an Amazon climate in 2100 with almost no rainfall, and average temperatures of 38̊C.

According to British writer George Monbiot in his 2006 book Heat, the Amazon basin alone has the potential to release 730 million tonnes of carbon per year, about 10% of today’s human-induced emissions, for the next 75 years.

Greenhouse soils

While the ravaging of the Earth’s tropical forests promises to be the first, most visible catastrophe of the era of global warming, a climate disaster of even greater scope could be developing in the soil beneath our feet.

Scientists have known for many years that with extra carbon dioxide, plants grow more vigorously. In six years of experiments in Florida, a Northern Arizona University team hoped to find that the amounts of carbon fixed in soils would increase as well.

The reverse turned out to be true. Reporting in 2007, the researchers explained that as carbon dioxide levels in the air increased, soil carbon was actually lost back into the atmosphere. The reason, the scientists concluded, was increased activity by soil fungi.

Observations from nature confirmed the experimental findings. In 2005 the British Guardian reported that a 25-year study of soils in England and Wales had discovered carbon losses “consistently, everywhere … and therefore probably everywhere in the temperate world”. The richer the soils, the scientists observed, the higher the rate of loss.

The carbon contained in English and Welsh soils was migrating to the atmosphere, the scientists calculated, at an average rate of 0.6% per year. Across Britain, the extra carbon dioxide was enough to cancel out all the emissions savings Britain was due to make under its Kyoto Protocol obligations.

Worldwide, the soil carbon reservoir is reckoned at more than double the carbon content of the atmosphere. Without prompt, drastic curbs on fossil fuel emissions, the mobilising of soil carbon could overtake all efforts to restrict global warming.

Vanishing sinks

Of more than 7 billion tonnes of carbon that reaches the atmosphere each year as a result of human activity, the Earth’s natural systems absorb about 4 billion tonnes. Obviously, any process that reduces this natural absorption adds to global warming. The clearing of forests represents a major reduction in the Earth’s carbon “sinks”.

Now another such reduction, also massive, has been identified. This involves changes to the chemistry of one of the Earth’s oceans.

Historically, the oceans have absorbed about 2 billion tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere each year. But in May 2007, New Scientist reported that the Southern Ocean — previously one of the biggest sinks —, had in effect stopped soaking up carbon dioxide.

For 24 years, scientists at the University of East Anglia in Britain had been monitoring oceanic carbon around the globe. During this time, they found that the Southern Ocean carbon reservoir remained virtually constant.

“This is surprising”, researcher Corinne Le Quere told New Scientist, “because during the same time CO2 emissions increased by 40 per cent. As the sources of CO2 go up we would expect the reservoir to increase too.”

The explanation appears to relate to the fact that deep ocean water normally contains higher levels of dissolved carbon dioxide than water higher up. Near the surface, vast quantities of tiny organisms use sunlight, along with carbon dioxide absorbed from the air, to carry out photosynthesis. When marine organisms die, their remains sink to lower levels, taking their carbon content with them. In time, this organic matter oxidises and enters solution.

With global warming, the Southern Ocean in recent decades has become noticeably windier. The increased windiness causes additional churning of the waters, bringing water from greater depths to the surface. With it comes the stored carbon, enough to ensure that the net flow of carbon dioxide between the atmosphere and the surface waters is roughly zero.

Gambles we must not allow

Like other non-linear phenomena, changes in the oceanic carbon sink are difficult to quantify and predict. Who yet knows whether, or how fast, the effect seen in the Southern Ocean will develop in other ocean regions? Consequently, the scientists who prepare global climate models have often been reluctant to try to incorporate non-linear effects into their work, at least until more complete data become available.

One result of this reluctance is that “official” climate reports, though often disturbing, have not been nearly as frightening as they ought to be. This is the case with the Fourth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), presented late in 2007. This report had a cut-off date for citations of May 2005, meaning that much new evidence on non-linear phenomena was not taken into account at all.

The IPCC’s report presents generally conservative findings, hedging them with warnings that the actual reality could turn out to be much worse. Predictably, governments and corporations have cited the IPCC’s cautious baseline figures, while essentially ignoring the caveats.

The uncertainties in the science, however, do not permit this irresponsibility. Particular tipping points may turn out to be more remote than expected, and positive feedbacks less potent. But there are many non-linear processes, and we will not be lucky in every case. If governments will not take the lead in preventing disaster, populations must seize the initiative instead, and enforce the transformations required.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2008/740/38310

Climate experts sound grim warning

Scientists have long agreed that climate change could have a profound impact on the planet; from melting ice sheets and withering rainforests, to flash floods and droughts.

Now a team of climate experts has ranked the most fragile and vulnerable regions on the planet, and warned they are in danger of sudden and catastrophic collapse before the end of the century.

In a comprehensive study published on Tuesday, the scientists identify the nine areas that are in gravest danger of passing critical thresholds or “tipping points”, beyond which they will not recover.

Though the scientists cannot be sure precisely when each region will reach the point of no return, their assessment warns it may already be too late to save Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice sheet, which they regard as the most immediately in peril. By some estimates, there will not be any sea ice in the summer months within 25 years.

The next most vulnerable area is the Amazon rainforest, where reduced rainfall threatens to claim large areas of trees that will not re-establish themselves. The scientists also expressed concerns over the Boreal forests in the north, and have predicted that El Nino, the climate system which has a profound impact on weather from Africa to North America, will become more intense.

The scientists are so concerned they have called for an early warning system to monitor each of these fragile ecosystems.

The international team, whose study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, represents some of the world’s most prestigious organisations, including the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, the University of East Anglia and Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute.

The scientists polled 52 environmental experts and combined their responses with discussions among 36 leading climate researchers at a workshop at the British embassy in Berlin. Each was asked to rank regions at greatest risk of climate change in the next century.

“There’s a perception that global warming is something that will happen smoothly into the future, but some of these ecosystems go into an abrupt decline when warming reaches a certain threshold,” said Tim Lenton, an environmental scientist at the University of East Anglia and lead author of the study.

“If we know when the different tipping points are, we can use them to inform targets to limit global warming. It gives us something to aim for,” he added.

Last year, the U.N.’s expert panel of climate scientists warned average temperatures could increase by as much as 6.4C by the end of the century, with a rise of 4C most likely. Such a rise would bring food and water shortages to vulnerable parts of the world, displace millions of people and wipe out hundreds of species. In the latest study, the scientists calculate Arctic sea ice will go into irreversible decline once temperatures rise between 0.5C to 2C above those at the beginning of the century, a threshold that may already have been crossed. There is already a 50 per cent chance that the Greenland ice sheet will soon begin melting unstoppably, though it could take hundreds of years to melt completely.

The meltwater would raise global sea levels by seven metres.

A temperature rise of 3C could see more intense El Ninos, with profound effects on the weather from Africa to North America.

Warming of 3C to 5C could reduce rainfall in the Amazon by 30 per cent, lengthening the dry season. The Boreal forests could also pass their tipping point, with large swaths dying off over the next 50 years. In Africa, more rainfall may regreen the Sahel region, but the west African monsoon could collapse, leading to twice as many unusually dry years by the end of the century.

The Indian summer monsoon is predicted to become erratic and in the worst case scenario, begin to flip chaotically, unleashing flash floods one year and droughts the next.

Measurements of the western Antarctic ice sheet show the balance of snowfall and melting has shifted and it is now shrinking. According to the study, a local warming of more than 5C could trigger uncontrollable melting, adding five metres to sea levels within 300 years. Under the same warming, Atlantic currents that power the Gulf Stream could be severely disrupted.

“If you can get some warning that you’re nearing one of these thresholds, you can get to work on adapting to it. You could work harder on reducing emissions, or you might use it as impetus to try other options,” said Mr. Lenton.

http://www.hindu.com/2008/02/06/stories/2008020653252000.htm

Amazon Research Raises Tough Questions

Julio Tota stood atop a 195-foot steel tower in the heart of the Amazon rain forest, watching "rivers of air" flowing over an unbroken green canopy that stretched as far as the eye could see.

These billows of fog showed researcher Tota how greenhouse gases emitted by decaying organic material on the forest floor don't rise straight into the atmosphere, as scientists had supposed.

Instead, they hover and drift - confounding scientific efforts to unlock the secrets of the world's largest remaining tropical wilderness.

"What we've learned is the Amazon rain forest is much more fragile and much more complex than we had first imagined," Tota said. "My research is pretty specific. It's aimed at showing why all our measurements are probably off."

Tota is part of the Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment, a decade-old endeavor involving hundreds of scientists, led by Brazilians and with funding from NASA and the European Union. Their open-air "laboratories" are 15 such observation posts spread over an area of rain forest larger than Europe.

The project's goal is to make the best scientific arguments for why this vast rain forest - along with other endangered forests in Africa, southeast Asia and elsewhere - is essential to combating global climate change.

But as the first phase of the $100 million experiment draws to a close, its researchers acknowledge that the data have raised more questions than answers.

Scientists can now say with certainty that the Amazon is neither the lungs of the Earth, nor the planet's air conditioner. Paradoxically, the forest's cooling vapors also trap heat, by reflecting it back toward Earth in much the same way greenhouse gases do.

But a key question remains unanswered: Does the Amazon work as a net carbon "sink," absorbing carbon dioxide, or is it adding more CO2 to the atmosphere than it is subtracting, because of burning and other deforestation that have claimed an average 8,000 square miles - an area the size of Israel or New Jersey - each year of the past decade?

Scientists also can't predict every way in which continued destruction of the Amazon - for timber, for cattle ranching, for soybean farming - might affect global climate. But it will almost certainly lead to drier conditions over a wide area, since ground moisture taken up and evaporated through trees is recycled as rainfall.

Some computer simulations suggest deforestation could cause droughts as far afield as the U.S. grain belt, apparently because chain reactions in the atmosphere would shift the Polar Jet Stream and the precipitation it brings.

These questions take on new urgency as global warming's effects become ever more apparent, and as forests fall at a nonstop pace. In one sign of growing concern, Brazil's national leadership met in emergency session on Jan. 24 to deal with a sudden surge in deforestation after a three-year slowdown.

New studies suggest the Amazon may be approaching a tipping point, at which the drier conditions caused by deforestation will reduce rainfall enough to transform the humid tropical forest into a giant savanna.

If preserving the 80 percent of the Amazon still standing would help offset some greenhouse emissions, destroying it would almost certainly accelerate global warming by releasing perhaps 100 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere - equal to some 10 years' worth of total global emissions.

"If you cut down all the tropical forests in the world, you may increase CO2 concentrations by 25 percent," said Brazilian climatologist Carlos Alberto Nobre. "It's important to keep the forests intact because we are in a global warming crisis and it's important not to reach a tipping point from which we can't come back."

Deforestation - both the burning and rotting of wood in the Amazon - already releases an estimated 400 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, accounting for up to 80 percent of Brazil's greenhouse gases, boosting this country to sixth place or higher among emitter nations.

By contrast, each acre of rain forest that remains intact takes somewhere between 80 and 480 pounds of carbon out of the atmosphere each year through the process of photosynthesis.

The uncertainty in that range hints at the unknowns still puzzling researchers. In the next phase of the grand Amazon experiment, two airplanes will measure emissions higher in the atmosphere, to try to answer definitively whether the rain forest absorbs more carbon than it produces.

Viewed from above, the Amazon appears to be an almost uniform carpet of green, spreading over 2.7 million square miles and nine countries. But in truth, it's home to a wide range of ecological systems and micro-climates.

That's why Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment specialists are helping design development models for each region, from managed logging to fruit farming to the low-intensity harvesting of forest products such as rubber, cocoa, fruits and ingredients for cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.

"We're looking at what all this means for the prospect of sustainability of the Amazon and how we can best inform decision-makers about sustained productivity and land use," Diane Wickland, who manages NASA's Terrestrial Ecology Program, said from Washington.

The experiment has already yielded troubling conclusions, Wickland said. Refined satellite surveillance, for example, finds that selective logging affects about as much area as clear-cutting, adding significantly to carbon dioxide emissions and casting doubt on whether managed forestry can save the Amazon.

Brazilian physicist Paulo Artaxo, a veteran Amazon researcher, said it's essential that Brazil, home to almost 70 percent of the rain forest, sharply slow the destruction of its woodlands. "There is no cheaper way to reduce emissions than by controlling deforestation," he said.

Scientists estimate it would cost about $1 billion a year in lost income for Brazil to end the clearing of forest by loggers, ranchers and farmers, largely giant soybean-growing conglomerates.

At the Bali conference, the world's nations decided to explore possible plans for compensating rain-forest nations for rolling back their rates of deforestation.

That money could come as "carbon credits," in the trading system under the Kyoto Protocol climate pact whereby industrial nations that overshoot their greenhouse emissions quotas can get credit for emissions reductions at power plants or other projects in the developing world. By awarding credits to rain-forest states, richer nations would now also be financing protection of carbon sinks.

The negotiations over such a complex global plan promise to be long and difficult.

http://www.goupstate.com/article/20080203/API/802030631

More than half of Amazon will be lost by 2030, report warns

Climate change could speed up the large-scale destruction of the Amazon rainforest and bring the "point of no return" much closer than previously thought, conservationists warned today.

Almost 60% of the region's forests could be wiped out or severely damaged by 2030, as a result of climate change and deforestation, according to a report published today by WWF.

The damage could release somewhere between 55.5bn-96.9bn tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from the Amazon's forests and speed up global warming, according to the report, Amazon's Vicious Cycles: Drought and Fire.

Trends in agriculture and livestock expansion, fire, drought and logging could severely damage 55% of the Amazon rainforest by 2030, the report says. And, in turn, climate change could speed up the process of destruction by reducing rainfall by as much as 10% by 2030, damaging an extra 4% of the forests during that time.

By the end of the century, global warming is likely to reduce rainfall by 20% in eastern Amazonia, pushing up temperatures by more than 2C and causing forest fires, the report said.

Destroying almost 60% of tropical rainforest by 2030 would do away with one of the key stabilisers of the global climate system, it warned.

Such damage could have a knock-on effect on rainfall in places such as central America and India, and would also destroy livelihoods for indigenous people and some 80% of habitats for animal species in the region.

The "point of no return", in which extensive degradation of the rainforest occurs and conservation prospects are greatly reduced, is just 15-25 years away - much sooner than some models suggest, the report warns.

Releasing the report at the UN conference in Bali, which aims to begin negotiations on a new international climate change deal, the WWF called for a strategy to reduce emissions from forests and stop deforestation.

Beatrix Richards, the head of forests at WWF-UK, said: "The Amazon is on a knife-edge due to the dual threats of deforestation and climate change.

"Developed countries have a key role to play in throwing a lifeline to forest around the world. At the international negotiations currently underway in Bali governments must agree a process which results in ambitious global emission reduction targets beyond the current phase of Kyoto which ends in 2012.

"Crucially this must include a strategy to reduce emissions from forests and help break the cycle of deforestation."

The report's author, Dan Nepstead, senior scientist at the Woods Hole research centre in Massachusetts, said: "The importance of the Amazon forest for the globe's climate cannot be underplayed.

"It's not only essential for cooling the world's temperature but such a large source of freshwater that it may be enough to influence some of the great ocean currents, and on top of that it's a massive store of carbon."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/dec/06/conservation.endangeredhabitats

Food, Forests and Fuel

2007 will see more than 10,000 representatives of government and civil society gather in Bali for a meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This is the international treaty under which the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated. The Protocol expires in 2012, and Bali is supposed to begin negotiations on a post-Kyoto framework.

In 2007, no one can deny that man-made climate change is taking place. However, the commitment to mitigate and help the vulnerable to adapt does not match the recognition of the disaster.

Mitigation requires material changes in production and consumption patterns. Globalization has pushed production and consumption worldwide to higher carbon dioxide emissions. WTO rules of trade liberalization are in effect rules that force countries on a high emissions pathway.

Similarly, World Bank lending for super highways and thermal power plants, industrial agriculture and corporate retail coerces countries to emit more greenhouse gases. And giant corporations such as Cargill and Walmart carry major responsibility in destroying local, sustainable economies and pushing society after society into dependence on an ecologically destructive global economy.

Cargill is an important player in spreading soya cultivation in the Amazon, and palm oil plantations in the rainforest of Indonesia thus increasing emissions both by the burning of forests and destruction of the massive carbon sink in rainforests and peat lands. And Walmart’s model of long-distance centralized trade is a recipe for increasing the carbon dioxide burden in the atmosphere.

The first step in mitigation requires a focus on real actions of real actors. Real actions are actions such as a shift away from ecological farming and local food systems. Real actors include global agribusiness, the WTO, the World Bank. Real actions involve destruction of rural economies with low emission to urban sprawl designed and planned by builders and construction companies. Real actions involve destruction of sustainable transport systems based on renewable energy and public transport to private automobiles. Real actors pushing this transition to non-sustainability in mobility are the oil companies and automobile corporations.

Kyoto totally avoided the material challenge of stopping activities that lead to higher emissions and the political challenge of regulation of the polluters and making the polluters pay in accordance with principles adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio. Instead, Kyoto put in place the mechanism of emissions trading which in effect rewarded the polluters by assigning them rights to the atmosphere and trading in these rights to pollute.

Today, the emissions trading market has reached $ 30 billion and is expected to go up to $ 1 trillion. Carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase, while profits from ‘hot air’ also increase. I call it ‘hot air’ both because it is literally hot air leading to global warming and because it is metaphorically hot air, based on the fictitious economy of finance which has overtaken the real economy, both in size and in our perception.

A casino economy has allowed corporations and their owners to multiply their wealth without limit, and without any relationship to the real world. Yet this hungry money then seeks to own the real resources of people – the land and the forests, the farms and the food, and turn them into cash. Unless we return to the real world, we will not find the solutions that will help mitigate climate change.

Another false solution to climate change is the promotion of biofuels based on corn and soya, palmoil and jatropha.

Biofuels, fuels from biomass, continue to be the most important energy source for the poor in the world. The ecological biodiverse farm is not just a source of food; it is a source of energy. Energy for cooking the food comes from the inedible biomass like cow dung cakes, stalks of millets and pulses, agro-forestry species on village wood lots. Managed sustainably, village commons have been a source of decentralized energy for centuries.

Industrial biofuels are not the fuels of the poor; they are the foods of the poor, transformed into heat, electricity, and transport. Liquid biofuels, in particular ethanol and bio-diesel, are one of the fastest growing sectors of production, driven by the search of alternatives to fossil fuels both to avoid the catastrophe of peak oil and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. President Bush is trying to pass legislation to require the use of 35 billion gallons of biofuels by 2017. M. Alexander of the Sustainable Development Department of FAO has stated: ‘The gradual move away from oil has begun. Over the next 15 to 20 years we may see biofuels providing a full 25 per cent of the world’s energy needs’.

Global production of biofuels alone has doubled in the last five years and will likely double again in the next four. Among countries that have enacted a new pro-biofuel policy in recent years are Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Columbia, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Malawi, Malaysia, Mexico, Mozambique, the Philippines, Senegal, South Africa, Thailand and Zambia.

There are two types of industrial biofuels – ethanol and biodiesel. Ethanol can be produced from products rich in saccharose such as sugarcane and molasses, substances rich in starch such as maize, barley and wheat. Ethanol is blended with petrol. Biodiesel is produced from vegetable only such as palm oil, soya oil, and rapeseed oil. Biodiesel is blended with diesel.

Representatives of organizations and social movements from Brazil, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Columbia, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, in a declaration entitled ‘Full Tanks at the Cost of Empty Stomachs’, wrote ‘The current model of production of bio-energy is sustained by the same elements that have always caused the oppression of our people’s appropriation of territory, of natural resources, and the labor force.’

And Fidel Castro, in an article entitled ‘Food as an Imperial Weapon: Biofuels and Global Hunger’ has said that, ‘More than three billion people are being condemned to a premature death from hunger and thirst’.

The biofuel sector worldwide has grown rapidly. The United States and Brazil have established ethanol industries and the European Union is also fast catching up to explore the potential market. Governments all over the world are encouraging biofuel production with favorable policies. The United States are pushing the other Third World nations to go in for biofuel production so that their energy needs get met at the expense of plundering others’ resources.

Inevitably this massive increase in the demand for grains is going to come at the expense of the satisfaction of human needs, with poor people priced out of the food market. On February 28, the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement released a statement noting that ‘the expansion of the production of biofuels aggravates hunger in the world. We cannot maintain our tanks full while stomachs go empty’.

The diversion of food for fuel has already increased the price of corn and soya. There have been riots in Mexico because of the price rise of tortillas. And this is just the beginning. Imagine the land needed for providing 25% of the oil from food.

One ton of corn produces 413 liters of ethanol. 35 million gallons of ethanol requires 320 million tons of corn. The US produced 280.2 million tons of corn in 2005. As a result of NAFTA, the U.S. made Mexico dependent on U.S. corn, and destroyed the small farms of Mexico. This was in fact the basis of the Zapatista uprising. As a result of corn being diverted to biofuels, prices of corn have increased in Mexico.

Industrial biofuels are being promoted as a source of renewable energy and as a means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, there are two ecological reasons why converting crops like soya, corn and palm oil into liquid fuels can actually aggravate climate chaos and the CO2 burden.

Firstly, deforestation caused by expanding soya plantations and palm oil plantations is leading to increased CO2 emissions. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 1.6 billion tons or 25 to 30 per cent of the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere each year comes from deforestation. By 2022, biofuel plantations could destroy 98% of Indonesia’s rainforests.

According to Wetlands International, the destruction of Southeast Asian land for palm oil plantations is contributing to 8% of global CO2 emissions. According to Delft Hydraulics, every ton of palm oil results in 30 tonof carbon dioxide emissions or 10 times as much as petroleum producers. However, this additional burden on the atmosphere is treated as a clean development mechanism in the Kyoto Protocol for reducing emissions. Biofuels are thus contributing to the same global warming that they are supposed to reduce. (World Rainforest Bulletin No.112, Nov 2006, Page 22)

Further, the conversion of biomass to liquid fuel uses more fossil fuels than it substitutes.

One gallon of ethanol production requires 28,000 kcal. This provides 19,400 kcal of energy. Thus the energy efficiency is -- 43%.

The U.S. will use 20% of its corn to produce 5 billion gallons of ethanol which will substitute 1% of oil use. If 100% of corn was used, only 7% of the total oil would be substituted. This is clearly not a solution either to peak oil or climate chaos. (David Pimental at IFG conference on ‘The Triple Crisis’, London, Feb 23-25 2007)

And it is a source of other crisis. 1700 gallons of water are used to produce a gallon of ethanol. Corn uses more nitrogen fertilizer, more insecticides, more herbicides than any other crop.

These false solutions will increase the climate crisis while aggravating and deepening inequality, hunger and poverty. Real solutions exist which can mitigate climate change while reducing hunger and poverty.

According to the Stern Report, agriculture accounts for 14% emissions, land use (referring largely to deforestation) accounts for 18%, and transport accounts for 14%. The increasing transport of fresh food, which could be grown locally, is part of these 14% emissions.

Not all agricultural systems however contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. Industrial chemical agriculture, also called the Green Revolution when introduced in Third World countries, is the major source of three greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and methane.

Carbon dioxide is emitted from using fossil fuels for machines and pumping of ground water, and the production of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Chemical fertilizers also emit nitrogen oxygen, which is 300 times more lethal than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. And grain fed factory farming is a major source of methane.

Studies indicate that a shift from grain fed to predominantly grass fed organic diet could reduce methane emission from livestock by up to 50%.

Ecological, organic agriculture reduces emissions both by reducing dependence on fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers and intensive feed, as well as absorbing more carbon in the soil. Our studies show an increase of carbon sequestration of up to 200% in biodiverse organic systems.

When ‘ecological and organic’ is combined with ‘direct and local’, emissions are further reduced by reducing energy use for ‘food miles’, packaging and refrigeration of food. And local food systems will reduce the pressure to expand agriculture in the rainforests of Brazil and Indonesia.

We could, with a timely transition reduce emissions, increase food security and food quality and improve the resilience of rural communities to deal with the impact of climate change. The transition from the industrial globalized food system being imposed by WTO, the World Bank and Global Agribusinesses to ecological and local food systems is both a mitigation and adaptation strategy. It protects the poor and it protects the planet.

The post-Kyoto framework must include ecological agriculture as a climate solution.

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