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December 12, 2011, 5:09 pm

A Post-Pollution Path to Global Climate and Energy Progress

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Some hard realities are being acknowledged as diplomats, scientists, scholars and others ponder next steps following the indeterminate Durban climate negotiations — the latest failed attempt to limit climate risk using pollution-style restrictions on carbon dioxide under a global treaty.

The real-time demand for energy and economic vigor continues to trump long-term climate concerns, as has been clear in the climate talks for years.* So a focus on finding ways to boost energy access in places that lack it, while working to cut energy waste and the costs of non-polluting energy choices, is spreading. You can see this in the grudging Tweets from green-energy proponents acknowledging some of the merits of Bjorn Lomborg’s reaction to the climate talks, as with Tom Rand here and Lisa Vickers here.

You can also see a shift toward energy action in the latest thinking from William R. Moomaw, a scholar and professor at Tufts University who for decades has assessed international environmental diplomacy. Moomaw and Mihaela Papa, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Law School, sent me a short piece proposing ways to invigorate the faltering climate treaty process by shifting the focus from confrontations over emissions to collaborative work encouraging access to modern energy choices while limiting environmental harms.

Here’s an excerpt and link to the Moomaw-Papa essay, which I encourage you to read in full: Read more…

December 10, 2011, 1:08 pm

Young Voices Reverberate at Indeterminate Climate Talks

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

“You’ve been negotiating all my life.”

That was a core line in a remarkable speech delivered on behalf of youth in the final stretch of two weeks of contentious, largely indeterminate climate treaty talks in Durban, South Africa. The talks went into overtime Saturday night (Durban time), with the leadership desperate to salvage at least a “Durban outcome,” akin to the “road map” produced in Bali in 2007.

The best way to track the finale and afterthoughts is by following the #COP17 or #UNFCCC tags on Twitter.

[11:00 p.m. | Insert | Bloomberg Business Week and Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones have filed useful initial summaries of the complicated final "Durban Platform." 3:06 p.m. | Insert |John Broder of The Times has written a very useful news analysis stepping back to survey where the process is likely to head in coming years. See the bottom of this post for an excerpt and link.]

The youth statement was delivered by Anjali Appadurai, a member of the class of 2013 at the tiny College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Me. Representing Earth in Brackets, a group from the college (with a great name, given the bracketed nature of debated documents), Appadurai was chosen from hundreds of youth delegates at the talks to give voice to their views. Here’s the rest: Read more…

November 16, 2011, 5:06 pm

An Island Adviser Sees Promise in Durban Climate Talks

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

It feels like a bit of a stretch. But Mark Lynas, the author of “The God Species” and an adviser to the leadership of the low-lying Indian Ocean nation of Maldives, swears there could be meaningful outcomes when the annual climate-treaty talks, after a bland performance in Cancún, Mexico, open in Durban, South Africa, at the end of the month.

To get a sense of the man, here’s a talk he gave at the Slow Life Symposium in Maldives not long ago, followed by Lynas’s “Your Dot” take for Dot Earth on the role of small developing countries in addressing the greenhouse challenge: Read more…

November 14, 2011, 1:01 pm

Can Extreme Climate Confusion be Avoided?

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

This post is a tale of two climate conferences, and a forecast for a substantial risk of climate confusion later this week.

A meeting of the world’s “climate vulnerable” nations, aiming to nail down longstanding, but largely unfulfilled pledges of aid from the world’s industrial powers, is wrapping up in Dhaka, Bangladesh (here’s the latest draft of the planned statement). As this meeting ends, another is getting into high gear in Kampala, Uganda. There, climate scientists and government officials from around the world are tweaking the summary of a forthcoming report, “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation.”

It would’ve been better if the timing had been reversed, given the signs that many of the science findings of the extremes report, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are largely not reflected in the statements from the leaders in Dhaka.

Richard Black, the indispensable climate and environment reporter for the BBC (I urge you to follow him on Twitter @BBCrblack), has nicely summarized the disconnect in a piece describing the draft summary of the report on extreme meteorological events and relating it to claims of greenhouse-driven damages in poor places.

As has been the case for years, climate science points to measurably rising impacts from human-driven global warming later this century. And those impacts will be divided unevenly between the world’s poor, vulnerable countries and rich ones that are shielded from big impacts by wealth and are most responsible for building the global greenhouse blanket so far. (That “climate divide” was explored in two pieces in The Times in 2007.)

But the same research concludes that it’s difficult to link human-driven warming to losses in recent mega-disasters. Deeply confounding factors get in the way — particularly the huge growth in exposure to climate threats through population growth and settlement patterns in vulnerable places and the substantial natural variability in the frequency and intensity of rare extreme events.

Black starts by describing the three categories of climate and coastal impacts projected to intensify as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere: Read more…

September 16, 2011, 6:27 pm

Obama Presses Iceland Over Fin Whale Hunt

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

On Thursday, President Obama ordered government agencies to ramp up pressure on Iceland to end its slaughter of endangered fin whales, the second largest whale species. But the president stopped short of imposing trade sanctions. He issued a Message to Congress with the details, including this passage:

Of particular concern to the United States, Iceland harvested 125 endangered fin whales in 2009 and 148 in 2010, a significant increase from the total of 7 fin whales it commercially harvested between 1987 and 2007.

This is what that harvest looks like (video from Greenpeace):

There are thought to be around 30,000 of these giants, the second largest whale species, in the North Atlantic.

I was lucky enough to see a few in 2004, while writing about humanity’s evolving relationship with whales from the vantage point of Tadoussac, Quebec. — a spot where whales centuries ago were slaughtered on the beach but where crowds now gather on the rocks to watch spouting blue, sperm, minke and other whale species feeding. Here’s one photo from that visit: Read more…

May 17, 2011, 5:00 pm

Exploring Roots of Climate Stasis, and Next Steps

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

David Roberts, the Grist blogger, has written a double-barreled book review for the American Prospect that’s well worth reading. It explores “The Climate War,” Eric Pooley’s deconstruction of the long, and ultimately failed, effort to pass a comprehensive climate bill in the United States. But Roberts focuses most on David Victor‘s new book “Global Warming Gridlock,” which I’m way overdue to read. Victor, from the University of California, San Diego, has been a frequent and welcome voice on Dot Earth.

The books mostly describe the array of forces that together make the climate and energy challenge a “super wicked problem.” (At the bottom of this post is a link to a new effort by the Climate CoLab project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to find new ways forward.)

The most interesting section in Roberts’ piece examines  Victor’s list of three myths that have for too long propped up the global climate treaty talks: Read more…

February 25, 2011, 3:47 pm

What if: Standing in Line for Climate Aid

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Pakistan flood victimsTyler Hicks/The New York Times Flood victims in Pakistan reach for milk distributed from a truck.

Lisa Friedman of Climatewire has an excellent story on The Times Web site digging in on an issue I’ve touched on periodically here — the prospect of intensifying fights over whatever money might flow someday to poor countries exposed to risks thought to be amplified by human-driven global warming.

The challenges ahead in part derive from the extremely constrained definition of “climate change” used in the foundation climate treaty, the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change. In theory, the treaty and addenda like the Kyoto Protocol, only apply to climate changes attributable to human alterations of the global atmosphere. Below I’ve added excerpts from previous posts explaining why that’s a problem. But there is the prospect of tussles between countries exposed to coastal retreats or megadroughts.

Here’s Friedman’s lede: Read more…

February 16, 2011, 12:15 pm

The A, B, C’s of Limiting Climate Risk

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

There appears to be a breath of fresh air wafting through the environmental community, reflected in Degrees of Risk: Defining a Risk Management Framework for Climate Security, a new report from the Britain-based nonprofit group Third Generation Environmentalism, or E3G. The report is enthusiastically endorsed by Bill Becker, the head of the Presidential Climate Action Plan, in a guest post at Climateprogress.

What’s refreshing is that the building human influence on the climate system is not being portrayed definitively as an unfolding catastrophe, with present-day events cast as the reason for action. That approach, from Katrina forward, was bound to fail, given the variability of conditions year to year and persistent (and non-manufactured) uncertainty surrounding some of the most consequential impacts (for instance, the pace and extent of warming and sea-level rise in this century).

The report takes the approach used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its “reasons for concern” section and the diagram known as “burning embers” — both of which essentially illustrate how rising temperatures equate with rising risk in a variety of areas that matter to society.

The report also casts the underlying challenge of moving beyond deep dependence on conventionally burned fossil fuels for what it is:

Reducing global greenhouse gas emissions to safe levels is a marathon, not a sprint. Countries must establish resilient and flexible regimes at national and international levels to avoid failures in the future.

Becker’s summary of the report contains one potentially confusing line. Where he writes that “nations must also work now on ‘crash mitigation programs’ to reduce the danger and impact of catastrophic climate disruption,’ the report actually calls this “contingency crash mitigation planning” (my italics): Read more…

December 11, 2010, 1:05 am

Consensus Emerges On Common Climate Path

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Dec. 11, 9:59 a.m. | Updated
What a difference a year makes. Climate talks ended in Copenhagen one year ago in raucous, then deflated, division, with the resulting accord noted, but not formally embraced, by the nearly 200 countries aiming to make good on an 18-year-old pledge under the first climate treaty to limit dangerous human-driven warming.

In Cancún, perhaps because the pressure was off to “seal the deal,” nearly all of the world’s nations rallied late Friday night around Mexico’s foreign secretary, Patricia Espinosa, and the text she offered as a rough template for an eventual global climate agreement. You can read the full text of the Mexican draft below.

[DEc. 11, 9:11 a.m. | Update Here's John Broder's news story on the resulting draft agreement, with many vital details left for future sessions. Here's my analysis of next steps, inside and out of the treaty process.]
[Dec. 11, 1:57 a.m. | Update Bolivia protested late into the night, making me muse on Twitter why no one this year has done for Bolivia what Kevin Conrad did for the United States in 2007, when he said, "Please get out of the way."]

Here’s a video snippet of a pivotal moment, when applause for Espinosa erupted earlier Friday evening, shot by one of the Adopt a Negotiator youths roaming the halls:

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This is still early days, with more to wrap up in the morning and a very long road ahead through Durban, South Africa in 2011 and the 20th anniversary of the original Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2012.

The best place to track analysis of the document is through the #cop16 tag on Twitter.

Here are some “moments” captured on Twitter, followed by a link to the text: Read more…

December 10, 2010, 11:58 am

Climate and Energy Beyond Cancún

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Dec. 10, 4:59 p.m. | Updated*
Two weeks of talks in Cancún, Mexico, aimed at building the foundation for a new international climate agreement are scheduled to end within hours. I’ll be posting updates periodically, but from home. I left the climate negotiations in Cancun on Wednesday to get back to work at Pace University and to limit time away from my family.

[Dec. 11, 9:23 a.m. | Updated Early Saturday morning, agreement was reached, over objections from Bolivia and a few other countries, on a template for a new (although still non-binding) climate accord.]

I put the Mexico meeting in broader context in a conversation with Leonard Lopate on WNYC radio Thursday afternoon. I encourage you to listen (click here; it’s short and to the point).

My departure does not mean I think the talks are a waste of time. (Mind you, I do think they waste a lot of resources and money; much of the first week of jockeying and events could have been done virtually, for instance, and the extravagance of some of the parties was beyond parody considering the poverty outside the hotel zone.)*

What’s important is to keep in mind the limits of what such efforts can accomplish. It was always wishful thinking to expect that 194 parties as varied as oil kingdoms, impoverished and dysfunctional African states, low island nations, superpowers and rising powers would someday magically adhere to a grand and legally binding instrument curtailing emissions of gases that, for a long time to come, will be a nearly direct proxy for economic activity.

I don’t imagine you’ll ever hear the phrase “seal the deal” again, unless perhaps the worst worst-case scenarios unfold and the climate system comes utterly unglued.

Instead, you’ll see something in between the world sought by “climate hawks,” the term proposed by David Roberts of Grist as the label for aggressive campaigners pursuing policies that live up to the picture delineated by science, and the contrasting world of free marketeers and industrialists who speak breezily of climate uncertainty as a reason to relax and let spreading wealth give people the leisure to start to care for the environment and the money and technology to do something to clean it up. Read more…