17 & 18 Nov: Leonids meteor showers
from wild shores of singapore
Observation Notes on the variability of the female Jacintha Eggfly
from Butterflies of Singapore
Cobra at Ubin!
from wild shores of singapore
Purple Heron in comfort mode
from Bird Ecology Study Group
Climbing Bukit Timah
from The Lazy Lizard's Tales
Monday Morgue: 16th November 2009
from The Lazy Lizard's Tales
Straits Times 16 Nov 09;
I REFER to last Monday's letter by Mr Harry Mason, 'Public need to know the facts'. I am appalled to read such misinformation about climate change.
The crucial Copenhagen summit is less than a month away and a fair and ambitious global deal must emerge from it to tackle the increasingly urgent issue of climate change. At this moment, we should not go into denial or promote misconceptions.
The general consensus on climate change is clear and unequivocal. Over the past 150 years, human civilisation has allowed carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere to reach around 390 parts per million, the highest level in more than 800,000 years. A correlated and consistent increased trend in temperature has also been observed.
The earth's climate has changed many times in its history, but the current observable changes are occurring at a much faster rate, resulting in numerous negative impacts which are already seen today and will only worsen in the future.
The number of scientific institutions which agree that climate change is human-induced are plenty. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an independent body consisting of over 2,000 scientists, concluded this in its 2007 peer-reviewed report. Volcanic and solar flare activity have already been discounted as possible factors.
Furthermore, many prominent national and international science academies have concluded that the world must take serious action to avoid the wide-ranging deleterious impacts of climate change.
There has been no vested interests or media green hype over climate change, as Mr Mason suggests. If this was the case, measures taken to tackle the problem now would not be so woefully inadequate.
A strong signal from Copenhagen to limit greenhouse gas emissions will allow the world to become truly sustainable, weaning us away from dirty fossil fuels, transforming the entire economic structure of the world, and creating numerous opportunities for us to emerge from the current economic crisis.
Solving the climate crisis will also have many other co-benefits by improving energy security and access, increasing food security and sustainable agriculture as well as more concerted biodiversity protection. There is not only an environmental imperative to take action, but also a social, economic and moral one to make the world more equitable and prosperous for all humanity.
Lee Zhe Yu
Get all the facts about climate change first before taking a stand
Straits Times Forum 18 Nov 09;
THE rebuttal from Mr Lee Zhe Yu on Monday ("Why it is crucial to act quickly on climate change") to Mr Harry Mason's letter ("Public need to know the facts", Nov 9) is insufficient to disprove Mr Mason's observations as "misinformation about climate change".
Mr Mason was advocating for more public debate on the global warming issue so that Singaporeans can then make informed choices on the true state of affairs. Mr Lee's argument that "the general consensus on climate change is clear and unequivocal" hardly qualifies as valid evidence to support the scientific truth. It could, instead, prove Mr Mason's point that "the global warming saga is a sorry affair of apparently deliberate media and scientific misinformation".
Just because an opinion is shared by the majority does not make it any sounder.
Mr Lee's subsequent argument that "the number of scientific institutions which agree that climate change is human-induced are plenty", followed by the quoting of an independent scientific body comprising more than 2,000 scientists and "many prominent national and international science academies", is, at best, an attempt to "quote the authority". This in itself offers no substantial counter-argument to Mr Mason's assertion that climate change might not be human-induced.
To Mr Mason's opinion that there has been vested interest in the environmental discourse, Mr Lee argued that there has been "no vested interests or media green hype over climate change" simply because "if this was the case, measures taken to tackle the problem now would not be so woefully inadequate". This is once again inadequate and unconvincing.
During my university days, I came across academic papers that argued that the environmental crisis is an attempt by the developed world to "subjugate" the developing world by curbing their productions. Not politically correct, I am sure. Others predict the near end of the world given the way we use up resources. Which theory is closest to the truth? There is no clear indication.
I am not in either camp, but I second Mr Mason's point that it is vital for all to acquire as many facts as possible in any debate before stating the unequivocal. No one has the right to claim that one's opinion is the final word and should not state that the other party's opinions are "misinformation", unless they can be proven beyond reasonable doubt, which is unlikely in the case of science anyway.
Lee Khum Thong
Agreement sought with palm-oil industry to create ape-saving forest corridors
Lewis Smith, The Independent 16 Nov 09;
Wildlife campaigners have made "a deal with the devil" in a bid to save the orang-utan from being driven into extinction. They have teamed up with the palm-oil industry, widely condemned by conservationists for causing devastation to orang-utans.
But palm-oil companies and the Sabah state government in Borneo have agreed to a project to create wildlife corridors that will link forest areas and create a network of safe havens. They signed up to the pilot scheme last month in Kota Kinabalu, Borneo, and will meet again this month in London to try to agree final details. There are hopes the project can be expanded.
Dr Marc Ancrenaz, director of the Kinabatangan Orang-utan Conservation Project, agreed the alliance between conservationists and the palm oil industry was like a pact with the devil but said the green lobby had to be pragmatic in its hopes of saving the red ape.
"The oil-palm industry is going to stay," he said. "There's no point in fighting development. We need to look for a solution together to save the orang-utan. By recreating 100m-wide corridors of forest along major rivers we will provide contiguous corridors of natural habitat to link isolated orang-utan populations. The oil-palm industry has to be part of our conservation efforts if we want to succeed, since the major orang-utan populations in Sabah are fragmented by oil-palm estates."
The meeting in London has been organised by the World Land Trust (WLT), which is anxious to keep all sides talking. Mary Tibbet, of the WLT, said: "It's important to get everyone to the table. The palm-oil industry has been vilified but there could be a mechanism in which they are engaged in the conservation of orang-utans.."
Orang-utans live only in Borneo and Sumatra but have been pushed back into ever-smaller areas of their rainforest habitat largely because of intensive logging and agriculture. In the past century, orang-utan numbers in Borneo and Sumatra have slumped by more than 75 per cent, and in Sabah they have crashed up to 90 per cent in 200 years. But Sabah remains a stronghold for the animal, with more than 11,000 orang-utans living there, a fifth of the total estimated wild population.
The palm-oil industry has expanded rapidly over 20 years, encroaching heavily on the forests where orang-utans live, in response to increasing demand from western countries for palm-oil in cooking and in biofuels. Malaysia is the world's biggest producer of palm oil, the country's third-biggest export, worth £11.5bn last year.
Without the corridors, the animals, which dislike travelling either on the ground or through crop plantations, are trapped in small areas of forest. These fragments support only a handful of the apes and in the long term they would die out because the gene pool is too small to be biologically viable.
The World Bank has stopped lending money to the palm-oil industry amid concerns about the impacts of plantation expansion on local people and the effects of deforestation on orang-utans and other wildlife. Companies such as Lush cosmetics and Cadbury New Zealand have stopped using palm-oil because of environmental concerns.
Andi Abdussalam, Antara 15 Nov 09;
Jakarta (ANTARA News) - Greenpeace activists --who set up a camp last month and sealed the heavy-duty equipment of PT Riau Andalan Pulp and Paper (RAPP) in Kampar Peninsula, Riau, two days ago -- left the location on Saturday after police gave them until 6 pm to leave the place.
"Fifteen of the volunteers --who came there in protest against deforestation and peatland drainage-- have already left the camp while the other 35 are still packing their belongings," Southeast Asia Greenpeace forest campaigner Bustar Maitar said on Saturday evening.
He said Greenpeace would not stop its fight to protect forests in Riau and would continue to call for protection of Kampar Peninsula forest and exert pressure on the company that had cleared the natural forest.
However, according to latest negotiations the local police in Pelalawan had given them a security guarantee and until Sunday morning to leave.
Earlier, chief of the Pelalawan police resort Adj. Chief Coms. Ari Rachman called on them to leave the site and vacate the `Climate Protection Camp` as soon as possible around the peatland area.
The call was directly made by the Pelalawan police resort chief when he had a dialog with the locals who held a rally against the presence of the Greenpeace activists.
Rachaman said police would not take risk in maintaining the presence of the environmental activists in the area. He said he received orders from the Riau police chief to evacuate them in order to prevent physical clashes between the volunteers and local people.
Since the activists` presence, tension between groups of local people who were for and against the activity had also increased although it was believed it was the company who had incited local sentiment against the environmental activists.
Greenpeace`s action took place on the Kampar Peninsula on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, on Thursday, where Greenpeace has set up a `Climate Defenders` Camp`.
The activists locked themselves to three excavators, owned by Asia Pacific Resources International Limited (APRIL), one of Indonesia`s biggest pulp and paper producers, to prevent it destroying the rainforest to make way for tree plantations, grown to make pulp and paper for international customers, including UPM Kymmene.
UPM-Kymmene is one of the world`s leading forest industry groups and the leading producer of printing papers. It is a modern, efficient and focused forest industry company. It has production facilities in 15 countries and its main market areas are Europe and North America. UPM`s shares are listed on the stock exchange in Helsinki. UPM creates value from renewable and recyclable.
The activists decided to leave the area in an effort to prevent increasing tension among groups of local people.
"Greenpeace is in a position where it has to make a hard decision for the sake of the interest of the local people," Greenpeace forest campaigner Bustar Maitar said.
He added: "We are at a loss about what to do," he said. As an organization that shuns violence, he said, the organization did not want to see a communal conflict to happen after they had left.
Maitar believed that the company was behind all this and therefore his side had asked the police to follow it up.
"The license of PT Riau Andalan Pulp and Paper (RAPP) is not complete and therefore the company`s action in clearing the forest is against the law. If the government acts as if it does not know it it means they are ignoring existing public norms," he said.
He said Greenpeace would also hand over the camp set up last month on the side of Kampar River to the local community.
It was reported on Friday that police have named 21 of the activists after they sealed the heavy-duty equipment of RAPP.
The 21 were among 33 Greenpeace activists detained at the Pelalawan police resort after they sealed the heavy-duty equipment in a peatland forest area in the peninsula on Thursday, their lawyer Susilaningtias said.
Twelve of the 33 Greenpeace activists are foreign nationals. They come from Brazil, Germany, Thailand, Spain and the Philippines.
Their lawyer said the 21 activists are charged with committing an unpleasant act under article 335 of the Criminal Code and violating a ban on entry into a company`s working area without a permit under article 551 of the code.
"They may be penalized under articles 335 and 551 of the Criminal Code. It was a RAPP employee who reported them to the police," Susilaningtias said.
However, police denied having arrested them. All the 21 suspects are from Indonesia.
Chief of the Pelalawan police resort Adj. Chief Coms. Ari Rachman denied that the police had detained tens of Greenpeace activists after they sealed the heavy-duty equipment.
"The police did not arrest but protected them after the local people had written to the Riau governor, the Riau provincial police and the Pelalawan police resort rejecting the presence of the Greenpeace activists," he said.(*)
Into the wild, once again
A rehabilitator plans to start releasing rescued orangutans back into Borneo's forests. But there are concerns whether the tamed apes will survive out there.
Andrew Higgins, The Washington Post 14 Nov 09;
PALANGKA RAYA, INDONESIA -- Over the past decade, Lone Droescher-Nielsen, a former Scandinavian Airlines Systems flight attendant, has saved nearly 600 orphaned orangutans in Borneo from almost certain death. Funded by donations from abroad, she has given the apes food, shelter and better health care than many humans in these parts ever get.
Now, the 46-year-old Dane is preparing for a more difficult -- and controversial -- task: returning tame orangutans to the wild. "They were born wild, and they deserve to go back in the wild again," said Droescher-Nielsen, founder and director of the Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Rehabilitation and Rescue Project. "That is our ultimate objective."
Early next year, if all goes according to plan, she'll release a first batch of about 75 rehabilitated orangutans into a remote forest in Central Kalimantan, an Indonesian province on the Southeast Asian island of Borneo. Tiny radio transmitters placed under their skin will monitor their movements -- and help answer a big question: Can the animals survive?
Some experts wonder whether orangutans raised by humans will be able to hack life in the forest and whether diseases they might have caught in captivity will harm kin that never left the jungle.
Droescher-Nielsen, whose 10-year-old project has grown into the world's largest primate rescue effort, expects most to make it. "The ones we set free are not going to be wild, but they can manage," she said.
It will take a couple of generations for bad habits picked up in captivity to be completely purged. Disease, she added, shouldn't be a problem because the area selected for the trial release doesn't have a viable orangutan community of its own.
The orangutan -- which means "man of the forest" in a local language -- is one of mankind's closest cousins in the animal kingdom, sharing about 97 percent of its DNA with humans. But it has suffered catastrophically from contact with man.
A century ago, Borneo had more than 300,000 wild orangutans. Today, the number has fallen to about 50,000, most of which live in Central Kalimantan. They could vanish if forests keep getting chopped down at the current rate of what Indonesian environmentalists say equals the size of six football fields every minute. Palm oil plantations, which have expanded rapidly in recent years as demand for the cheap oil surged, have led to an even bigger influx of baby apes at the rescue center.
Droescher-Nielsen initially hoped to start returning orangutans to the wild years ago, but, as forests kept retreating, it became increasingly difficult to find a safe place to put them. The task was further complicated by the fact that rehabilitated apes don't fear humans -- a big problem when many humans see them as a menace and want them dead.
Keeping orangutans fed and sheltered is expensive. The Nyaru Menteng project has a staff of about 200 people. Salaries, food, medicines and other expenses mean that it costs about $2,000 a year for each of the nearly 600 apes in residence. That is more than twice the average annual income in the area. An additional 400 or so of the primates are being cared for in other rehabilitation centers in Borneo.
"I'd like to be an orangutan," joked Nordin, a local environmental activist, who like many Indonesians uses one name. "They get given meals, and when they get sick they get sent to hospital."
Droescher-Nielsen's center has a well-equipped clinic. Adult orangutans spend much of the day in a nearby peat-land forest that is off-limits to loggers and oil palm growers. Each afternoon, dozens come out of the trees for a "social hour" in the main compound. They munch fruit, climb on a jungle gym and play on swings. At night, they are escorted to a cluster of cages; the younger primates are piled into wheelbarrows and taken to a separate sleeping area.
To survive in the wild, the orangutans will have to forget their pampered past lifestyle. Droescher-Nielsen's staff members have devised a number of techniques to try to help prepare the animals for life on their own in the forest. About 125 apes, for example, have been moved onto islands in a nearby river, where they have little contact with humans. Most of their food is still provided, but they have to work much harder to get it: It has been placed in trees, not simply left on the ground.
Some of her center's orangutans, Droescher-Nielsen said, have scant chance of surviving in the wild, so they will have to stay put until they die. This could mean decades, as the animal's average life expectancy is 40 to 45 years. Those likely to stay include the blind, the maimed and apes "just too plain stupid to make it."
Some question whether protecting apes in captivity will contribute to the long-term survival of the species. Rescuing baby orangutans is a "welfare issue, but it is not good for conservation," said John Burton, head of World Land Trust, a British conservation group. He's against returning orangutans that might be carrying human diseases to the forest and thinks that keeping them in expensive rehabilitation centers is "not cost-effective" as it only adds to a "world surfeit of captive orangutans." The main focus, he said, should be on protecting forests and the wild apes that live in them.
Droescher-Nielsen agrees that the fundamental problem is the destruction of trees. But she also says humans must take responsibility for the havoc they've already caused.
"I don't look at this with my brain. I look at it with my heart. I cannot leave these victims," she said. "We're the cause of their becoming orphans. What should we do, just euthanize them? Should we just kill them and say, 'I don't really care?' "
Staff photographer Linda Davidson contributed to this report.
Yahoo News 14 Nov 09;
BEIJING (AFP) – China has started construction on a research centre to help captive pandas adapt to the wild with a view to releasing them into nature, state media reported.
The centre is being built in a mountainous area of the southwestern province of Sichuan, the official Xinhua news agency said, where an 8.0-magnitude earthquake left more than 87,000 people dead and missing in May 2008.
It is expected to be completed within three to five years, at a cost 60 million yuan (8.8 million dollars), the report said.
"Currently, there are about 300 captive giant pandas and it's time for us to think about putting them back in the wild," Zhang Zhihe, director of the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Research Base, was quoted as saying.
A large experimental area will accommodate 10 pandas that will be trained into adapting to the wild, according to the report.
Those animals that perform well will then be transferred to a "half-wild area" within five to 10 years, where they will live in caves and feed by themselves.
Finally, another five to 10 years will see some pandas let out into real nature.
There are about 1,590 pandas living in the wild around China, mostly in Sichuan, northern Shaanxi and northwestern Gansu provinces.
A total of 180 have been bred in captivity, according to earlier reports, but their notoriously low libidos have frustrated efforts to boost their numbers.
Jonathan Leake, Times Online 15 Nov 09;
Reindeer imported to Britain for Santa’s grottoes and festive parades are dying prematurely after exposure to diseases from British farm animals, a senior government vet has warned.
An official investigation has revealed a sharp increase in deaths in young reindeer, also linked to bad diet, poor welfare and the stress of being uprooted from their natural habitat.
Dr Aiden Foster, who carried out the research at the Veterinary Laboratories Agency (VLA), said the deer, which normally live to 12 years, were badly suited to life in Britain. He said: “Reindeer are highly specialised Arctic deer. The recent fashion of keeping them in captive situations many degrees south of their normal range is fraught with health and welfare issues.”
The warning comes amid greater commercial exploitation of the animals, which are now a common festive feature. Today, reindeer parades are planned in Birmingham and Middlesbrough, and others in cities across Britain.
About 500 of the animals have been imported in the past five years, taking advantage of a relaxation of quarantine rules. Some cases are detailed in quarterly bulletins published by the VLA’s network of regional laboratories. In the past year these have included:
• A two-year-old female kept on a farm near Shrewsbury, which died of malignant catarrhal fever — a sheep disease that causes mucus to pour from their muzzles. Reindeer are highly vulnerable to this.
• A herd of seven reindeer, from the same area, which contracted liver and gut flukes, probably from contact with farm animals.
• A reindeer kept near Winchester that died from lung infections.
• A 15-month-old animal killed by parasites and copper deficiency.
Reindeer owners are not obliged to notify the VLA of unusual deaths, so Foster is uncertain exactly how many reindeer there are in Britain, or how many have died, but he said the trend was worrying: “We have noticed a significant increase in the number of submissions of reindeer carcases and samples, and when we looked at the causes of death it was clear there were common factors.”
Earlier this year, Foster outlined his concerns in a paper given to the Veterinary Deer Society, and a lay version of his research is about to be published in Smallholder magazine. Foster hopes it will make farmers aware of the risks of buying reindeer, most of which are purchased for hiring out for festive parades and Santa’s grottoes in shopping centres around Britain.
Foster points out that reindeer suffer when removed from their natural life of roaming the tundra, eating fresh lichen and other plants and mingling with fellow reindeer. He said: “They are not like other livestock. It is very difficult to keep these animals here. They are semi-wild and vulnerable to the diseases and parasites carried by British farm animals.”
Foster says much of Britain’s farmland is unsuitable for reindeer and many owners simply lack the expertise to keep them. He warns that reindeer also carry microbes dangerous to humans, such as salmonella, campylobacter, E coli and yersinia.
Inexperienced owners are also at risk. In September this year, Kay Davies was gored by Mr Frosty, her 18-stone reindeer, after entering its pen while the creature was in rut, a period of high aggression.
Davies owns the firm Wedding Horses, based in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, and planned to rent Mr Frosty out for Christmas displays.
Davies, who has since had the reindeer destroyed, said: “I fed him the day before without a problem.”
Tilly Smith, owner of the Cairngorm reindeer herd and widely regarded as Britain’s authority on the animals, believes there is nothing inherently wrong in using the animals for such events.
She supplied a team of reindeer for the Christmas parade at Harrods earlier this month, with no ill effects. The creatures were part of her 150-strong herd, which since 1952 has roamed over hundreds of acres of Scottish mountains — a landscape chosen for its similarity to their native habitat.
She said: “When animals are imported, they have been taken from huge, semi-wild herds and then they are expected to live alone or in small groups in enclosed areas, often near other livestock. It’s no wonder they get sick.”
Foster said: “Like puppies, reindeer should be kept for life, not just for Christmas.”
Yahoo News 16 Nov 09;
SAO PAULO, Brazil (AFP) – Environmentalists on Sunday warned bluefin tuna was on its way to extinction after a international meeting of fishery ministry officials trimmed catch quotas but upheld continued hauls of the fish, prized in sushi dishes.
"After meeting for 10 days, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) refused to end fishing for Atlantic bluefin tuna," the Pew Environment Group, a US organization that sat on in the meeting in Recife, Brazil, said in a statement.
"Instead, ICCAT set the catch limit for bluefin, considered the most valuable fish in the sea, at 13,500 tons," it said.
That is down from the 19,950-ton quota originally decided for 2010 in an EU accord with ICCAT in Brussels in April this year.
Ecological outfits warned that bluefin tuna faced disappearance because of overfishing in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, mainly for lucrative markets in Asia, especially Japan.
Yearly quotas set up by ICCAT are systematically exceeded by industrial fleets. That and illegal fishing have caused the population to decline by more than 85 percent in the eastern Atlantic and by more than 90 percent in the western Atlantic.
ICCAT "has failed once again to act beyond the interests of a few tuna fishing and farming industries," Greenpeace said in a statement. "Again it has approved recommendations which fail to ensure the recovery of Atlantic bluefin tuna."
It said that a catch limit of 8,000 tons would have given bluefin tuna "a 50 percent chance of stocks recovering by 2023," Greenpeace said.
Susan Lieberman, the head of international policy for the Pew Environmental Group, told AFP in a telephone interview that while a quota cut was a positive step, it was "too little too late" and was "not enough for even 50 percent chance of recovering the species."
"We were calling for a suspension" of all bluefin tuna catches for at least a year, or, failing that, the quota of "8,000 tons or less," she said.
"What they are doing is responding to economic pressures from the fishing industry. But in the long term there won't be a fishing industry," she said.
Other groups, including Greenpeace, were equally disappointed by Sunday's decision.
Environmental groups are now backing a call from Monaco for the issue of bluefin tuna to be taken before a March meeting of CITES, an international body that sets rules against illegal wildlife trade, with the aim of declaring the fish endangered and putting a ban on catching it.
Francois Provost, Greenpeace International oceans campaigner, said: "A ban on international trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna is now the only remaining chance to save the iconic fish from commercial extinction."
ICCAT was set up in the late 1960s to conserve "tuna and tuna-like species in the Atlantic Ocean and adjacent seas," according to its website.
Forty-eight countries in every region of the world -- ranging from Algeria, Barbados, China and France, to Ivory Coast, Japan, the United States and Venezuela -- are contracting parties to ICCAT.
Reuters 15 Nov 09;
HONG KONG (Reuters) - Man-made ponds and rice fields irrigated using groundwater may be responsible for arsenic contamination of groundwater in Bangladesh, a study has found.
Arsenic is a naturally occurring chemical poisonous to humans and is known to cause skin lesions and cancers of the bladder, kidney, lung and skin.
While it is known that organic carbon triggers the release of arsenic from sediments into groundwater, the source of this carbon has been unclear.
In a paper published in Nature Geoscience, researchers said they used chemical tests and models to examine the flow of groundwater in a typical agricultural area in Bangladesh and found that man-made ponds were a key source of organic carbon.
"The chemical signature of high-arsenic groundwater points toward ponds as the source of the contaminated water," wrote the scientists, led by Charles Harvey from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.
They warned against the building of artificial ponds above existing tube wells.
"The development of artificial ponds above wells should be avoided if it is possible, and drinking-water wells should not be placed downstream of recharge from existing ponds, wetlands, rivers or other permanently saturated water bodies potentially elevated in organic carbon," they wrote.
Hundreds of thousands of people in Bangladesh suffer from skin lesions and experts have warned for years that Bangladesh can expect more cases of cancer if its people continue drinking arsenic-contaminated water from millions of small tube wells spread across the countryside.
Ironically, the tube wells were installed from the 1970s with the help of international agencies like the United Nations Children's Fund to provide "clean water" and as an answer to dirty surface water and widespread gastrointestinal diseases.
Arsenic contamination of ground water has been found in other countries, including Argentina, Chile, China, India, Mexico, Taiwan, Thailand and the United States, and is a global problem.
But Bangladesh's plight is unprecedented and some experts have described it as the largest mass poisoning of a population in history.
According to the World Health Organization, arsenic contaminated water directly affects the health of 35 million people in Bangladesh, which has a total population of 130 million.
Arsenic is widely distributed throughout the earth's crust and is introduced into water through the dissolution of minerals and ores. There should not be more than 0.01 milligrams/liter of the chemical in drinking water, according to the WHO.
(Reporting by Tan Ee Lyn; Editing by Charles Dick)
Bangladesh mass poisoning mystery solved
Fred Pearce, New Scientist 16 Nov 09;
One of the world's great poisoning mysteries may have been solved – the source of the arsenic that turns up in lethal quantities in hundreds of thousands of wells across Bangladesh. The answer is ponds.
Bangladesh occupies the flood-prone delta of the river Ganges. In the past half-century, villagers have had to dig pits for soil to raise their homes above the floods. Water-filled pits cover roughly a tenth of the delta, and appear to be poisoning the wells Bangladeshis sink for drinking water.
Organic carbon in silt and sewage settles on the bottom of the stagnant ponds and seeps underground, where it is eaten by microbes. This microbial oxidation releases arsenic already in the delta silt – it washed down into the delta from the Himalayas over thousands of years. The arsenic dissolves in underground water and is tapped by village wells.
Rebecca Neumann of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and colleagues, cracked the problem after seven years spent plotting the chemistry and underground flows of water beneath villages near Dhaka. She found that oxidation only occurs beneath the stagnant ponds. In contrast, oxygen-rich rice paddies trap the arsenic in soils at the surface.
Future poisoning?
As long as Bangladeshis drank surface water they were safe. In the late 1970s the country switched to ground water and since then Neumann estimates arsenic has poisoned 2 million Bangladeshis. Luckily for rice eaters, arsenic in the paddy fields is usually flushed away during the monsoon season.
Neumann's analysis reveals that most of the arsenic in well water today seeped underground from ponds dug about 50 years ago, though pits are still being dug today, which could exacerbate poisoning in future.
However, John McArthur of University College London published a study last year showing no link between ponds and arsenic across the border in West Bengal. "Ponds may have an effect locally, but in the big picture, they may not be so important," he says. But Neumann recommends Bangladeshis play safe by sinking wells away from ponds.
Journal reference: Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/NGEO685
David Rand and Martin Nowak, New Scientist 15 Nov 09;
HAVE you ever noticed a friend or neighbour driving a new hybrid car and felt pressure to trade in your gas guzzler? Or worried about what people might think when you drive up to the office in an SUV? If so, then you have experienced the power of reputation for encouraging good public behaviour. In fact, reputation is such an effective motivator that it could help us solve the most pressing issue we face - protecting our planet.
Environmental problems are difficult to solve because Earth is a "public good". Even though we would all be better off if everyone reduced their environmental impact, it is not in anyone's individual interest to do so. This leads to the famous "tragedy of the commons", in which public resources are overexploited and everyone suffers.
Public goods situations crop up all over the place, including decisions on maintaining roads, funding the police and whether or not to shirk at work. This leads us to an important question: is it possible to make people care enough about such problems to do their bit? To help answer this, researchers have developed a representation of such situations called the public goods game. The results give cause to believe that the tragedy of the commons can be overcome.
In the public goods game, each player is given a sum of money, say $10. They then choose how much to keep and how much to anonymously contribute to a common pool. Contributions are multiplied by some factor (less than the number of players) and then split equally among all players. If everyone contributes, the payout is higher. But making a contribution is costly, and causes you to end up worse off than if you did not contribute.
Imagine, for example, four people playing a game in which contributions are doubled. If everyone contributes their $10, they all end up with $20. But a player who refuses to contribute while the others put in the full amount ends up with $25 while the rest get $15 each. If only one player contributes their $10, they end up with just $5 and everybody else $15. The self-interested thing to do, therefore, is never to contribute.
When the public goods game is played in the lab, most people usually begin by contributing a large amount, trying to do their part towards maximising the group's earnings. Some people, however, decide to take a slice of the profits without contributing. Over time this free-riding undermines the others' willingness to pay and the average contribution decreases. This results in significantly lower earnings all round, recreating the tragedy of the commons.
The public goods game gives us an opportunity to explore interventions that encourage cooperation. Experiments have shown, for example, that making each player's contribution public can sustain contributions at a high level. It appears that the benefit of earning a good name outweighs the costs of doing your part for the greater good, and even selfish people can be motivated to care. It is worth contributing in order to protect your standing in the community.
Out in the real world, these experiments suggest a way to help make people reduce their impact on the environment. If information about each of our environmental footprints was made public, concern for maintaining a good reputation could impact behaviour. Would you want your neighbours, friends, or colleagues to think of you as a free rider, harming the environment while benefiting from the restraint of others?
The power of reputation is already being harnessed to protect the environment. Hybrid cars such as the Toyota Prius have recognisable designs, advertising their driver's commitment to cleaner energy for all to see. Some energy companies give green flags to customers who choose to pay extra for energy from a more environmentally friendly source, allowing people to openly display their green credentials. Similarly, individuals who volunteer in environmental clean-up days receive T-shirts advertising their participation.
Tokens such as these serve a dual purpose. First, they allow those who contribute to reap benefits through reputation, helping to compensate them for the costs they incur. Secondly, when people display their commitment to conservation, it reinforces the norm of participation and increases the pressure on free riders. If you know that all of your neighbours are paying extra for green energy or volunteering on a conservation project, that makes you all the more inclined to do so yourself.
Even better than voluntary displays would be laws enforcing disclosure. For example, governments could require energy companies to publish the amount of electricity used by each home and business in a searchable database. Likewise, gasoline use could be calculated if, at yearly inspections, mechanics were required to report the number of kilometres driven. Cars could be forced to display large stickers indicating average distance travelled, with inefficient cars labelled similarly to cigarettes: "Environmentalist's warning: this car is highly inefficient. Its emissions contribute to climate change and cause lung cancer and other diseases." Judging from our laboratory research, such policies would motivate people to reduce their carbon footprint.
Although laws of this kind raise possible privacy issues, the potential gains could be great. In a world where each of us was accountable to everybody else for the environmental damage we cause, there would be strong incentives to reduce the energy we use, the carbon dioxide we emit and the pollution we create. In such a world, we might be able to avert a global tragedy of the commons.
David Rand is a postdoctoral fellow in mathematical biology at Harvard University.
Martin Nowak is professor of biology and mathematics at Harvard University.
Xinhua 14 Nov 09;
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 14 (Xinhua) -- The future of the Maldives, the Indian Ocean islands facing the real prospect of disappearing into the sea, rests squarely in the hands of its younger generations.
As sea levels rise and threaten the very existence of the Maldives, children and adolescents increasingly face the prospect of moving to higher ground, either within their national boundaries or beyond.
Maldivian Vice-President Waheed Hassan told Xinhua that raising awareness about the effects of climate change was a top priority for his government and, while older generations still might cling to antiquated ideas, it was the country's youth that appeared more flexible.
"A lot of young people are educated and they are exposed to the debate on climate change," he said at his home in the capital of Male. "Of course, there are also traditional people, who think, for example, when there is a natural disaster it's the wheel of God and we do not have anything to do with it."
On the international stage, the Maldivian government has taken the lead in sounding the alarm over climate change. Most of the country's 200 inhabited islands are less than a meter above sea level, making them extremely vulnerable to rising sea levels.
President Mohamed Nasheed has announced the establishment of a sovereignty fund to relocate his people beyond Maldivian borders, should his country disappear under the aqua blue waters of the Indian Ocean.
But there is also another, less drastic plan. The island of Hulhumale, an ambitious land reclamation project, is an artificial island built three meters above sea level. It was originally conceived under the previous administration to relocate people living in Male, the most congested city in the world.
But with rising sea levels, Hulhumale will also provide an option for people whose homes are destroyed in extreme storms, tsunamis, or the slower but equally dangerous effects of climate change.
Hassan said the right incentives will lure Maldivians to leave their homes and move to bigger islands, including Hulhumale.
"In the future, I believe that most of the Maldivian people will live on similar bigger islands," he said. "We don't have to force people to migrate from their islands. I think we just have to create the necessary conditions for people to move, and they will."
Older generations who have grown up and learned to live off the land and sea of small islands might be harder to convince, Hassan admitted.
But not for young people.
On Guraidhoo island, a half-hour boat ride from the capital, Xinhua spoke to several adolescents and young adults who did not seemed phased by the prospect of leaving their tiny home should the ocean eventually wash it away.
Aslam Ahmed, 15, shrugged with a smile and said he did not worry about climate change or having to move one day. This is coming from a boy who kept watching a movie when the 2004 tsunami hit on the other side of the island.
Similarly, a group of boys, ages 14 to 18, said they did not concern themselves with "what if" scenarios. They could even laugh about it.
Perhaps the very idea of climate change is too daunting for many local youths. They all expressed a "que sera, sera" attitude.
Yet, even considering how to tackle tangible environment and development challenges seemed just as troublesome for those on Guraidhoo.
The beaches are littered with rubbish, something Shafiu Ahmed, 18, acknowledged made his home look ugly but would do little to change.
In the Maldives, waste is a major environmental headache. With little land to spare, trash is something to be thrown on the beach.
Abdul Hadhee Hussein is the island chief of Guraidhoo. He said his office has been urging locals to stop throwing away their rubbish along the shorelines.
"I have been advising and giving announcements to the people of the island not to do that," he said in Devehi through a translator.
However, so far his office has not doled out any penalties.
Michael Casey, Associated Press Yahoo News 15 Nov 09;
KOKONOGI, Japan – A blood-orange blob the size of a small refrigerator emerged from the dark waters, its venomous tentacles trapped in a fishing net. Within minutes, hundreds more were being hauled up, a pulsating mass crowding out the catch of mackerel and sea bass.
The fishermen leaned into the nets, grunting and grumbling as they tossed the translucent jellyfish back into the bay, giants weighing up to 200 kilograms (450 pounds), marine invaders that are putting the men's livelihoods at risk.
The venom of the Nomura, the world's largest jellyfish, a creature up to 2 meters (6 feet) in diameter, can ruin a whole day's catch by tainting or killing fish stung when ensnared with them in the maze of nets here in northwest Japan's Wakasa Bay.
"Some fishermen have just stopped fishing," said Taiichiro Hamano, 67. "When you pull in the nets and see jellyfish, you get depressed."
This year's jellyfish swarm is one of the worst he has seen, Hamano said. Once considered a rarity occurring every 40 years, they are now an almost annual occurrence along several thousand kilometers (miles) of Japanese coast, and far beyond Japan.
Scientists believe climate change — the warming of oceans — has allowed some of the almost 2,000 jellyfish species to expand their ranges, appear earlier in the year and increase overall numbers, much as warming has helped ticks, bark beetles and other pests to spread to new latitudes.
The gelatinous seaborne creatures are blamed for decimating fishing industries in the Bering and Black seas, forcing the shutdown of seaside power and desalination plants in Japan, the Middle East and Africa, and terrorizing beachgoers worldwide, the U.S. National Science Foundation says.
A 2008 foundation study cited research estimating that people are stung 500,000 times every year — sometimes multiple times — in Chesapeake Bay on the U.S. East Coast, and 20 to 40 die each year in the Philippines from jellyfish stings.
In 2007, a salmon farm in Northern Ireland lost its more than 100,000 fish to an attack by the mauve stinger, a jellyfish normally known for stinging bathers in warm Mediterranean waters. Scientists cite its migration to colder Irish seas as evidence of global warming.
Increasingly polluted waters — off China, for example — boost growth of the microscopic plankton that "jellies" feed upon, while overfishing has eliminated many of the jellyfish's predators and cut down on competitors for plankton feed.
"These increases in jellyfish should be a warning sign that our oceans are stressed and unhealthy," said Lucas Brotz, a University of British Columbia researcher.
Here on the rocky Echizen coast, amid floodlights and the roar of generators, fishermen at Kokonogi's bustling port made quick work of the day's catch — packaging glistening fish and squid in Styrofoam boxes for shipment to market.
In rain jackets and hip waders, they crowded around a visitor to tell how the jellyfish have upended a way of life in which men worked fishing trawlers on the high seas in their younger days and later eased toward retirement by joining one of the cooperatives operating nets set in the bay.
It was a good living, they said, until the jellyfish began inundating the bay in 2002, sometimes numbering 500 million, reducing fish catches by 30 percent and slashing prices by half over concerns about quality.
Two nets in Echizen burst last month during a typhoon because of the sheer weight of the jellyfish, and off the east coast jelly-filled nets capsized a 10-ton trawler as its crew tried to pull them up. The three fishermen were rescued.
"We have been getting rid of jellyfish. But no matter how hard we try, the jellyfish keep coming and coming," said Fumio Oma, whose crew is out of work after their net broke under the weight of thousands of jellyfish. "We need the government's help to get rid of the jellyfish."
The invasions cost the industry up to 30 billion yen ($332 million) a year, and tens of thousands of fishermen have sought government compensation, said scientist Shin-ichi Uye, Japan's leading expert on the problem.
Hearing fishermen's pleas, Uye, who had been studying zooplankton, became obsessed with the little-studied Nomura's jellyfish, scientifically known as Nemopilema nomurai, which at its biggest looks like a giant mushroom trailing dozens of noodle-like tentacles.
"No one knew their life cycle, where they came from, where they reproduced," said Uye, 59. "This jellyfish was like an alien."
He artificially bred Nomura's jellyfish in his Hiroshima University lab, learning about their life cycle, growth rates and feeding habits. He traveled by ferry between China to Japan this year to confirm they were riding currents to Japanese waters.
He concluded China's coastal waters offered a perfect breeding ground: Agricultural and sewage runoff are spurring plankton growth, and fish catches are declining. The waters of the Yellow Sea, meanwhile, have warmed as much as 1.7 degrees C (3 degrees F) over the past quarter-century.
"The jellyfish are becoming more and more dominant," said Uye, as he sliced off samples of dead jellyfish on the deck of an Echizen fishing boat. "Their growth rates are quite amazing."
The slight, bespectacled scientist is unafraid of controversy, having lobbied his government tirelessly to help the fishermen, and angered Chinese colleagues by arguing their government must help solve the problem, comparing it to the effects of acid rain that reaches Japan from China.
"The Chinese people say they will think about this after they get rich, but it might be too late by then," he said.
A U.S. marine scientist, Jennifer Purcell of Western Washington University, has found a correlation between warming and jellyfish on a much larger scale, in at least 11 locations, including the Mediterranean and North seas, and Chesapeake and Narragansett bays.
"It's hard to deny that there is an effect from warming," Purcell said. "There keeps coming up again and again examples of jellyfish populations being high when it's warmer." Some tropical species, on the other hand, appear to decline when water temperatures rise too high.
Even if populations explode, their numbers may be limited in the long term by other factors, including food and currents. In a paper last year, researchers concluded jellyfish numbers in the Bering Sea — which by 2000 were 40 times higher than in 1982 — declined even as temperatures have hit record highs.
"They were still well ahead of their historic averages for that region," said co-author Lorenzo Ciannelli of Oregon State University. "But clearly jellyfish populations are not merely a function of water temperature."
Addressing the surge in jellyfish blooms in most places will require long-term fixes, such as introducing fishing quotas and pollution controls, as well as capping greenhouse gas emissions to control global warming, experts said.
In the short term, governments are left with few options other than warning bathers or bailing out cash-strapped fishermen. In Japan, the government is helping finance the purchase of newly designed nets, a layered system that snares jellyfish with one kind of net, allowing fish through to be caught in another.
Some entrepreneurs, meanwhile, are trying to cash in. One Japanese company is selling giant jellyfish ice cream, and another plans a pickled plum dip with chunks of giant jellyfish. But, though a popular delicacy, jellyfish isn't likely to replace sushi or other fish dishes on Asian menus anytime soon, in view of its time-consuming processing, heavy sodium overload and unappealing image.
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On the Net:
Jellyfish Report from National Science Foundation: http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/jellyfish/index.jsp
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Associated Press writer Shino Yuasa contributed to this report from Tokyo.
Jonathan Leake, Times Online 15 Nov 09;
Scientists will this week warn that Italy may be forced to import the basic ingredients for pasta, its national food, because climate change will make it impossible to grow durum wheat.
In a report to be released by the Met Office tomorrow, scientists predict that Italy’s durum yields will start to decline from 2020 and the crop will almost disappear from the country later this century.
The report will say: “Projected climate changes in this region, in particular rising temperature and decreasing rainfall, may seriously compromise wheat yields.”
The warning is the latest example of the impact climate change could have on lifestyles and diets across Europe. It has emerged from the five-year Ensembles project, an EU-sponsored study straddling 66 research centres in 20 countries across Europe.
The project has been led by the Met Office which will host a conference to unveil its findings this week.
The aim was to combine the power of various super-computers used to predict climate by different research groups across Europe. This would enable the researchers to generate climate projections for particular countries and regions.
One element involved predicting how rising temperatures and changing rainfall might affect food production. Italy was chosen as a case study because it is a leading food producer and its southerly position means it is especially vulnerable to temperature rises.
The same report will deliver similar warnings about potato and wheat growing in Poland, which supplies other parts of the European Union. The study contradicts earlier research which suggested rising levels of CO2 might boost crop yields.
Plants use CO2 as a raw material for building the proteins and carbohydrates needed to survive and grow. The Ensembles project found that this effect would be outweighed by the damaging impact of climate change.
Paul van der Linden, director of Ensembles, who is based at the Met Office, said: “We have looked at a small number of crops but many others could experience similar declines as Europe gets hotter and drier summers.”
It reinforces earlier research suggesting climate change may leave France unable to produce many of its leading wines, including champagne.
Similarly, Spain may also be unable to retain its position as a leading producer of fruit and vegetables because rising temperatures are predicted to turn much of the country into desert.
Jonathan Leake, Times Online 15 Nov 09;
Six months is all it took to flip Europe’s climate from warm and sunny into the last ice age, researchers have found.
They have discovered that the northern hemisphere was plunged into a big freeze 12,800 years ago by a sudden slowdown of the Gulf Stream that allowed ice to spread hundreds of miles southwards from the Arctic.
Previous research had suggested the change might have taken place over a longer period — perhaps about 10 years.
The new description, reminiscent of the Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, emerged from one of the most painstaking studies of past climate changes yet attempted.
“It would have been very sudden for those alive at the time,” said William Patterson, a geological sciences professor at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, who carried out the research. “It would be the equivalent of taking Britain and moving it to the Arctic over the space of a few months.”
His findings, published at a recent conference, reinforce a series of studies suggesting that the earth’s climate is highly unstable and can flip between warm and cold very rapidly with the right trigger.
Most such research is based on analysing cores drilled from ice or from the sediment found at the bottom of oceans or lakes. In such cores the ice or sediment is found in layers whose composition shows what the climate was like at the time they were laid down.
Ice cores drilled from the Greenland ice cap have already shown that the big freeze of 12,800 years ago — known as the Younger Dryas mini-ice age — happened fast but lacked the detail to pin it down precisely.
Patterson, however, obtained mud deposits from Lough Monreagh, a lake in western Ireland, a region he says has “the best mud in the world in scientific terms”.
Patterson used a precision robotic scalpel to scrape off layers of mud just 0.5mm thick.Each layer represented three months of sediment deposition, so variations between them could be used to measure changes in temperature over very short periods.
Patterson found that temperatures had plummeted, with the lake’s plants and animals rapidly dying over just a few months. The subsequent mini-ice age lasted for 1,300 years.
What caused such a dramatic event? The most likely trigger is the sudden emptying of Lake Agassiz, an inland sea that once covered a swathe of northern Canada.
It is thought to have burst its banks, pouring freezing freshwater into the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans, disrupting the Gulf Stream, whose flows depend on variations in temperature and salinity.
A single year’s disruption in the Gulf Stream could have been enough, said Patterson, to let ice grow far to the south of where it usually formed. Once it had taken over, the Gulf Stream was unable to regain its normal route and the cold took hold for about 1,300 years.
Some scientists have suggested that if the Greenland ice cap melts it could have a similarly dramatic effect by disrupting the world’s ocean currents.
Other research has shown that rapid climate flips are normal. In its 4.5-billion-year history, the earth has experienced at least four main ice ages, of which the last, the Quaternary, is still continuing.
Within each ice age, however, there are periods when ice advances or retreats, and in the past 60,000 years alone the earth is thought to have warmed or cooled by up to 7C at least 20 times. The current interglacial period has lasted about 10,000 years.
“Human civilisation has grown up in a period of remarkable climatic stability,” said Tim Lenton, professor of earth system sciences at the University of East Anglia.
“In the period from 65,000 to 10,000 years ago there were periods of abrupt warming and cooling roughly every 1,500 years, when the temperature in Greenland might fall or rise by 10C in a decade.”
Patterson’s findings are supported by the research of Chris Stringer, professor of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London.
He believes the extinction of Neanderthals roughly 30,000 years ago was linked to a series of rapid climate fluctuations that began more than 40,000 years ago. He said: “Climate is basically unstable, so one of the mysteries is why it has stayed warm for the last 10,000 years.
“Some researchers have suggested this may be linked to the activities of early humans, who started growing crops and clearing forests 8,000 years ago.
“That may have put enough greenhouse gases into the air to stave off another ice age, but the problem now is that we have gone too far the other way.
“The amount of greenhouse gases in the air is greater than at any time in the last million years, so ironically, the threat now is from global warming.”
Patterson is still focusing his efforts on the past. He has built a new robot capable of shaving tiny slivers from the shells of fossilised clams, showing temperature almost day by day from millions of years ago.
Allison Jackson (AFP) Google News 15 Nov 09;
BEIJING — As resource-hungry China scours the world for crude oil and natural gas supplies, it has managed to corner the global market for a group of obscure metals used to make iPods, wind farms and electric cars.
China supplies at least 95 percent of the world's rare earths -- 17 chemical elements with hard-to-pronounce names such as praseodymium and yttrium -- essential for a wide range of high-tech devices and green technologies.
The nation has long recognised the value of these metals, with the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping noting the Middle East had oil but China had rare earths.
And, as the Organization for the Petroleum Exporting Countries does with oil, China is tightly controlling the supply of these vital natural resources.
"China's goal is to create jobs in China and create goods in China," Jack Lifton, a US-based independent rare earths analyst, told AFP.
"We need to start producing these metals here (United States) as we did in the past. If we don't do that, China will be the only country manufacturing devices using rare earths by the year 2015."
A single mine in China's northern Inner Mongolia region produces half of the world's rare earths, with the rest coming from smaller mines in southern China as well as Russia, India and Brazil.
China keeps most of the minerals within its borders by restricting foreign shipments.
Authorities have been increasingly restricting exports in recent years as China seeks to prop up prices, ensure supply for its own needs and create jobs for millions of migrant workers by luring foreign companies to its shores.
"The government hopes that the restrictions could prompt the transfer of advanced rare earth processing technologies into China," said Ren Xianfang, a Beijing-based economist with IHS Global Insight.
"Whether this resource-in-exchange-for-technology strategy will work in favour of China remains to be seen."
Alarm bells started ringing this year amid reports that China's State Council, or cabinet, was considering further tightening restrictions and even banning the export of certain elements as well as closing mines.
Foreign companies and governments fear the new rules, if implemented, will deny them access to the metals used to make everything from hybrid vehicles to missiles, and force manufacturers to shift their plants to China.
"It's crunch time," Dudley Kingsnorth, an Australian-based independent rare earths consultant, told AFP.
"In the next few years we are going to be in a situation where (export and production) quotas are reduced and unless we have sources outside China, more companies are going to have to relocate to China to secure access."
On top of the minimal rare earth production in Russia, India and Brazil, deposits being developed in Australia and the United States will be able to produce about 50,000 tonnes of rare earths by 2014.
But with total demand expected to double to around 180,000 tonnes within five years and China shutting the door on foreign buyers, analysts fear this may not be enough to meet global needs.
"Supply and demand are going to start to be fairly tight from 2012 to 2014," said Kingsnorth.
"If there's a delay in those projects (in the United States and Australia), we are going to have real issues. There won't be enough rare earths."
Alok Jha, guardian.co.uk 15 Nov 09;
Millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide could be prevented from entering the atmosphere following the discovery of a way to turn coal, grass or municipal waste more efficiently into clean fuels.
Scientists have adapted a process called "gasification" which is already used to clean up dirty materials before they are used to generate electricity or to make renewable fuels. The technique involves heating organic matter to produce a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, called syngas.
However gasification is very energy-intensive, requiring high-temperature air, steam or oxygen to react with the organic material. Heating this up leads to the release of large amounts of carbon dioxide. In addition, gasification is often inefficient, leaving behind significant amounts of solid waste.
To find out how to make the process more efficient, researchers led by Marco Castaldi, at Columbia University, tried varying the atmosphere in the gasifier. They found that, by adding CO2 to the steam atmosphere of a gasifier, significantly more of the biomass or coal was turned into useful syngas.
The technique has a double benefit for the environment: it provides a use for CO2 that would otherwise escape into the atmosphere and, after the hydrogen is siphoned off from the syngas, the remaining carbon monoxide can be buried safely underground.
Castaldi's results will be published this week in the Journal of Environmental Science & Technology. His team calculated that using CO2 during gasification of a biomass fuel such as beechgrass, in order to make enough biofuel for a fifth of the world's transport demands, would use 437m tonnes of the greenhouse gas. Preventing that entering the atmosphere would equate to taking 308m vehicles off the road.
Replacing 30% of the steam atmosphere of a gasifier with CO2 ensured that all the solid fuel was turned into syngas. Castaldi's process reduces the amount of water that needs to be heated, thereby saving energy, and is 10 to 30% more efficient than standard gasification.
"If I operate at 1,000C and don't use CO2 I'll have some residual carbon left over, which could be a fuel – that's an efficiency penalty," said Castaldi. "Using about 30% CO2, for that same 1,000C you get the complete gasification of the carbon into the syngas."
Applied to a modern IGCC (integrated gasification combined cycle) power station, which gasifies coal, this can lead to an efficiency gain of up to 4%. "While that may not sound like much, for a power plant producing 500 megawatts of energy, it is significant," said Castaldi.
Pollution needs to be brought under control within ten years to stop runaway climate change, according to the latest Met Office predictions.
Louise Gray, The Telegraph 15 Nov 09;
In the first study of its kind, climate scientists looked at how much pollution the world could afford to produce between now and the end of the century in order to keep temperature rises within a "safe limit".
A number of different scenarios were run and the most likely outcome was that carbon dioxide from factories and cars peaked somewhere between 2010 and 2020 and then fell rapidly to zero by 2100.
In the worse-case scenario, modelled by the Met Office Hadley Centre, emissions had to turn negative by 2050 to stand any chance of keeping the temperature rise below 2C (3.6F). This would mean using "geo-engineering" such as artificial trees that are designed to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
The five-year Ensembles Project is funded by the European Commission and led by the Met Office. It brings together scientists from 66 institutions around the world.
The new research developed five climate models that predicted how much greenhouse gas could be produced by mankind, as well as naturally from plants, the oceans and soil, before concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused temperatures to rise more than 2C.
The models assumed that the maximum concentration of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) in the atmosphere could not go beyond 450 parts per million (ppm), even though it is already close to 400 ppm now.
Paul van der Linden, director of the project, said it would be tough for the world to keep temperature rises within a safe limit.
"To limit global mean temperature [increases] to below 2C, implied emissions of CO2 to the atmosphere at the end of the century fall close to zero in most cases," he said.
Mr van der Linden said the study highlighted how important it was for the world to agree an international deal in Copenhagen this December that forced both rich and poor countries to cut emissions.
"It is a question that affects every human being but it is up to the politicians now to make the pragmatic decisions on the lifestyle changes and technology needed to solve this problem," he added.
The Ensembles Project has also predicted the effect of an average 2C temperature rise in Europe over the next century on agriculture, health, energy, water resources and insurance. Regional variations would imply under such an average rise that temperatures could be up by 4C in areas of north-west Europe including the UK. Winter wind storms, forest fires, heatwaves, water shortages and flooding were predicted. Wheat yields would go up in some areas but there would be drought elsewhere. Animal diseases and pests were expected to spread.
The models highlighted concerns that certain countries would lose their national dishes. For example a low durum wheat yield in Italy could make pasta more expensive while in Poland potato crops were under threat.
Dan Norris, the Environment Minister, said the work by the Met Office was helping scientists around the world to prepare for climate change.
"Not only do we need to tackle the causes of climate change but we must deal with the consequences," he said.
The finals results of the project will be presented at a symposium at the Met Office on Monday.
Michael Richardson, Straits Times 16 Nov 09;
NEGOTIATIONS on a new treaty to curb climate change are proving difficult. After two years of talks, the best outcome from the high-level meeting to be convened by the United Nations in Copenhagen next month is now expected to be... more talks, stretching through next year.
Does history tell us that the nations of the world should hasten to conclude a deal?
When British explorer James Cook ventured far south of Australia in his sailing ship in 1773 to search for a fabled southern continent, he was driven back by icebergs and storms.
He wrote that if others went farther, they would find 'a land doomed by nature... to lie for ever buried under everlasting ice and snow'.
On the opposite side of the globe from Antarctica (eventually discovered in 1820), vast sheets of ice up to 80m thick covered the Arctic Sea. For centuries, they blocked the path of ships seeking a short cut between Asia and Europe.
Global warming in the modern era has had a major impact on the ice caps in both the antipodes. Earlier this year, two German freighters successfully navigated their way through the Arctic, from South Korea to their home port in Europe, without the aid of icebreakers.
An increasing number of experts say that the North Pole will be completely ice free in summer by 2030, for the first time in a million years.
This may be good for shipping, trade and the exploitation of oil, natural gas and minerals in the region. But what about the health of the planet and the people who crowd its land?
The Arctic is warming several times faster than most other places on earth, for as the ice melts ever larger expanses of darker sea water are exposed. While ice reflects the sun's rays, the water absorbs them, thus warming more quickly and melting more ice.
The latest scientific research indicates that warming at both poles is intensifying, although the North polar region is less stable than the South polar zone.
While both are far from Asia, the melting of ice sheets on land - in Antarctica, Greenland - would raise sea levels around the world. A report last week by the World Wide Fund for Nature warned that Asia, with hundreds of millions of people living in low-lying areas close to the sea, was among the regions most vulnerable to climate change.
Since Arctic Ocean ice floats on water, its melting does not directly add to sea level rise. However, the radiator effect, from above and below the shrinking Arctic ice, has spread to the ice sheet on nearby Greenland, which contains enough water to lift the global sea level by 7m.
Satellite sensors can measure changes in the mass of ice over large areas in both Greenland and Antarctica. A team of scientists from Britain, the Netherlands and the United States reported last week that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet accelerated rapidly from 2000 to last year, as about 1,500 billion metric tonnes of water flowed into the sea.
The scientific panel advising the UN on climate change estimated in 2007 that world sea levels had risen 17cm in the past century and could rise by as much as another 59cm by 2100, mainly as a result of water expanding as it warmed. It said more research was needed to assess the possible contribution of ice sheet melting.
The British, Dutch and US team concluded that melting Greenland ice was currently raising the sea level by about 0.75mm a year. This would amount to 7.5cm if continued for 100 years.
The stability of the Antarctic ice sheet is of even greater concern than Greenland because the former contains enough water to raise sea levels by 58m, with the most fragile section in West Antarctica contributing up to 6m.
Much of the Antarctic ice sheet and the rock on which it rests are below sea level. The ice is therefore affected by rising temperatures in both the surrounding air and water.
New Zealand scientists reported last week that massive ice shelves were protecting the frozen southern continent from warming waters. The shelves are extensions of ice sheets that float on the ocean. They ring about half of the Antarctic coastline.
However, the New Zealand group cautioned that this buffer might not last. About 10 ice shelves have collapsed on the Antarctic Peninsula, the most rapidly warming part of the continent, in the past 50 years, and some scientists say the disintegration rate is increasing.
Among the most pessimistic scientists is Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, of Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He expects sea levels to rise by about 1m this century. 'The crux of the sea level issue is that it starts very slowly, but once it gets going, it is practically unstoppable,' he added.
For officials negotiating an accord on stopping global climate change, this is a devil of a problem. Their scientific advisers cannot accurately predict the rate of sea level rise. It may be gathering pace but the rise seems as yet small - unless you are living on an atoll in the Pacific or Indian oceans.
Will the present generation of taxpayers happily pay for potential future damage that is so difficult to assess?
The writer is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
Straits Times 16 Nov 09;
A LINE that reportedly called for carbon emissions to be substantially cut over the next 40 years was noticeably absent from the final statement released by the 21 Apec leaders yesterday.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, asked twice by journalists at last night's press conference, said it had not been dropped, but also that he did not have the details leading up to the final statement.
Earlier reports cited the draft version of the statement as pushing for a commitment to slash emissions by 50 per cent from their 1990 levels by 2050.
In the final version, while calling it 'one of the biggest global challenges', the leaders settled on working 'towards an ambitious outcome in Copenhagen' in a joint statement released on the last day of the Apec meetings. They were referring to the United Nations-sponsored conference on climate change in Denmark next month.
When asked by a reporter whether it was true that the line calling for emissions cuts had been dropped and whether it had been due to pressure from China, Mr Lee said: 'I don't have a blow- by-blow history of how we came to the final resolution but the final resolution is what it says.
'We are leading up to Copenhagen and I am sure the countries would be reserving some of their cards and particularly the bottom cards to be shown at the right moment. So I don't think they have shown their final position yet.'
When a second reporter asked why the emissions target was dropped, Mr Lee said that it was not.
'We didn't drop the emissions. We negotiated a draft, we settled on a text. I do not know the ins and the outs, but this is not an occasion for negotiating climate change, this is Apec, and it is a declaration of intent in good faith and the negotiations and the formal commitments will be done in the UN process which is leading to Copenhagen.'
ROBIN CHAN
Surprise guest raises hot issue
Danish PM moots two-stage process to salvage deal on climate talks next month
Robin Chan, Straits Times 16 Nov 09;
APEC leaders meeting over breakfast yesterday received a surprise guest who addressed them on an issue generating a lot of heat among world economies - hot air.
Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen flew into Singapore unannounced to try and salvage a deal on stalled climate change talks, which are to be held in his country in three weeks' time.
Mr Rasmussen, who will chair the United Nations-sponsored climate conference in Copenhagen, proposed a two-stage process for a deal to 19 of the 21 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) leaders.
Under this, a full and politically binding - although not legally binding - agreement could be reached in Copenhagen.
This would set the stage for the second step: a legally binding agreement, possibly at the next climate change summit in Mexico City in December next year.
The Copenhagen conference is critical as it is supposed to map out a framework to deal with climate change beyond 2012, replacing the Kyoto Protocol.
The deal seeks, among other things, to limit global warming through substantial carbon emission cuts.
Mr Rasmussen was making a calculated move in flying here, as Apec economies include the United States and China, the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases, and the Apec meeting is the last large gathering of world economies before Copenhagen.
Pitching his watered-down deal, Mr Rasmussen said: 'Given the time factor and the situation of individual countries, we must...focus on what is possible and not let ourselves be distracted by what is not possible.'
He added: 'We cannot do half a deal in Copenhagen and postpone the rest till later...We need the commitments. We need the figures. We need the action.
'Even if we may not hammer out the last dots of a legally binding instrument, I do believe a political binding agreement with specific commitment to mitigation and finance provides a strong basis for immediate action in the years to come.'
Climate change talks have stalled amid disputes between developed and developing economies. The developed nations want all countries to agree to binding limits on greenhouse gases.
But developing countries want greater flexibility and more aid from the wealthiest nations to achieve reductions in emissions.
Comments from Apec leaders after Mr Rasmussen's meeting suggest that governments could settle on this proposal.
Mr Michael Froman, US President Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, said: 'There was an assessment by the leaders that it was unrealistic to expect a full internationally legally binding agreement to be negotiated between now and when Copenhagen starts.
'There was widespread support that it was important that Copenhagen be a success, that there be the achievement of real concrete progress with operational impact.'
Chinese President Hu Jintao was quoted by Reuters as saying: 'Developed countries should proceed with taking on deep cuts; developing countries should cut greenhouse gases and fight climate change, in line with their individual circumstances and with the aid of funds and technology transfer from developed countries.'
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told reporters: 'It is going to be tough...but I believe everyone is seeking to put their best foot forward, and that was reflected in what transpired around a small table of world leaders this morning.'
chanckr@sph.com.sg
FOCUS ON WHAT'S POSSIBLE
'Given the time factor and the situation of individual countries, we must...focus on what is possible and not let ourselves be distracted by what is not possible. We cannot do half a deal in Copenhagen and postpone the rest till later...We need the commitments. We need the figures. We need the action.'
Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen
WHAT COUNTRIES CAN DO
'Developed countries should proceed with taking on deep cuts; developing countries should cut greenhouse gases and fight climate change, in line with their individual circumstances and with the aid of funds and technology transfer from developed countries.'
Chinese President Hu Jintao
TARGETING REAL PROGRESS AT COPENHAGEN TALKS
'There was an assessment by the leaders that it was unrealistic to expect a full internationally legally binding agreement to be negotiated between now and when Copenhagen starts. There was widespread support that it was important that Copenhagen be a success, that there be the achievement of real concrete progress with operational impact.'
Mr Michael Froman, US President Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs
Leading up to Copenhagen
Ansley Ng, Today Online 16 Nov 09;
A target to cut greenhouse gases by half was omitted from an Apec leaders' declaration, but will be brought up next month at world climate change talks in Copenhagen.
Speaking to a media conference, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said the goal was not dropped, but a draft was negotiated and the text agreed upon by leaders.
"I think we're leading up to Copenhagen. and I'm sure countries will be reserving some of their cards, particularly their bottom cards, to be shown at the right moment," said Mr Lee.
A previous draft had pledged a 50-per-cent reduction of greenhouse gases from 1990 levels by 2050, but the final communique committed only to working toward "an ambitious outcome" at the Copenhagen talks.
Some leaders such as Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had reportedly tried to push for a more firmer commitment yesterday morning.
Even Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen made a surprise visit to Singapore to revive momentum for a deal to be agreed at the upcoming talks in his country.
When asked in the evening about the Apec climate target, Mr Lee said: "This is not the occasion for negotiating climate change. This is Apec and is a declaration of intent in good faith, and negotiations and formal commitments will be done in the United Nation process." ANSLEY NG
APEC urges new growth model, climate pact progress
Elaine Kurtenbach, Associated Press Google News 16 Nov 09;
SINGAPORE — Open trade and people-centered strategies are key for sustained, stable growth, President Barack Obama and Asia-Pacific leaders said Sunday, pledging to persist with stimulus spending until a global recovery is assured.
The leaders wrapped up the annual meeting of the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum with a joint pledge to resist protectionism. They also endorsed policies to encourage more environmentally friendly growth that is "balanced, inclusive and sustainable, to ensure a durable recovery that will create jobs and benefit our people."
Growth led mainly by American consumption and borrowing and Chinese exports is not sustainable in the long term, Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore's prime minister, told reporters. Neither is relying on debt-backed stimulus spending to spur demand.
"We know that the old formulas are not going to work as well in the future because it's a different world," he said. "You have to find another balance."
But despite calls for faster progress in world trade talks and efforts to craft a worldwide global warming treaty, the leaders offered no specific, new initiatives for either one — typical of the forum's nonbinding nature.
The World Wildlife Fund's Global Climate Initiative expressed disappointment that an earlier push for a 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2050 was omitted from the leaders' final statement.
"Leaders have to take the bull by the horns, and finally tackle the difficult questions, instead of constantly avoiding them," spokeswoman Diane McFadzien said in a statement.
The leaders, who met over breakfast to discuss global warming, committed only to working toward "an ambitious outcome" at climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, next month.
But Lee said he believed some countries were holding their cards for later. "This is not an occasion for negotiating climate change," he said.
The annual meeting of APEC, which was founded 20 years ago to promote closer economic ties in the diverse, wide-flung region, focused mainly on ways to ensure the recovery from the worst economic crisis since the 1930s takes hold and endures.
The overriding concern is to end imbalances in trade, investment and growth that are viewed as the underlying causes of the global financial meltdown.
"The intrinsic problems of the world economic system are yet to be solved at the source, and the effort to fully restore world economic growth is beset by uncertainties and destabilizing factors," Chinese President Hu Jintao said in a speech to fellow leaders Sunday.
"We should use the financial crisis as an opportunity to take a serious look at its root causes," said Hu, whose country expects growth of at least 8 percent this year and was widely credited by other APEC leaders with spearheading the global recovery.
Leaders pledged to pursue reforms that will "gradually unwind global imbalances," and also to put in place regulatory policies that will prevent credit and asset markets from becoming "forces of destabilization."
As it assessed progress on dismantling regional barriers to trade and investment, the group won backing for its long-term goal of creating a free-trade area covering all 21 APEC economies.
Underscoring the American commitment to a region increasingly dominated by China, now the world's third-largest economy and a growing political and military player, Obama announced Washington's interest in joining the Trans-Pacific free-trade partnership.
For now, the gesture is largely symbolic: the grouping now includes only four countries, and Obama's administration has put off work on free-trade pacts with South Korea, Colombia and Panama while it deals with domestic economic troubles and the war in Afghanistan, among other issues.
Washington is embroiled in disputes with China over trade in tires, steel and autos, among other products, and is pushing Beijing to loosen controls that it says keep the Chinese currency, the yuan, undervalued.
The yuan's weakness is unwelcome for many countries in the region that compete with Chinese export manufacturers. But the APEC leaders did not mention currency rates in their final statement, despite an earlier call by finance ministers for maintaining "market-oriented exchange rates."
Later Sunday, Obama headed to China, with a first stop in Shanghai, the mainland's commercial and financial capital.
Earlier, he joined a summit with all 10 leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, including military-ruled Myanmar. In the unusual face-to-face encounter, Obama told Myanmar's Prime Minister Gen. Thein Sein to free pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
A joint statement issued after the summit — the first ever between a U.S. president and ASEAN — devoted an entire paragraph to Myanmar, a major irritant in relations between the two sides.
It urged Myanmar to ensure that 2010 elections are "free, fair, inclusive and transparent," but did not call for the release of political prisoners.
Obama also announced that after next year's APEC forum in Yokohama, Japan, he will host the 2011 gathering in his native Hawaii.
"I look forward to seeing you all decked out in flowered shirts and grass skirts," he told the leaders Sunday.
Associated Press writers Mark S. Smith, Vijay Joshi, Jim Gomez and Alex Kennedy contributed to this report.
World leaders back delay to final climate deal
Caren Bohan Reuters 15 Nov 09;
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders on Sunday supported delaying a legally binding climate pact until 2010 or even later, but European negotiators said the move did not imply weaker action.
Some argued that legal technicalities might otherwise distract the talks in Copenhagen and it was better to focus on the core issue of cutting climate-warming emissions.
"Given the time factor and the situation of individual countries we must, in the coming weeks, focus on what is possible and not let ourselves be distracted by what is not possible," Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told the leaders.
"The Copenhagen Agreement should finally mandate continued legal negotiations and set a deadline for their conclusion," said the Copenhagen talks host, who flew into Singapore to lay out his proposal over breakfast at an Asia-Pacific summit.
Rasmussen said the December 7-18 talks should still agree key elements such as cuts in greenhouse gases for industrialized nations and funds to help developing nations. Copenhagen would also set a deadline for writing them into a legal text.
"We are not aiming to let anyone off the hook," Rasmussen said after the meeting, which was attended by leaders of the United States, China, Japan, Russia, Mexico, Australia and Indonesia.
WAITING FOR UNITED STATES
French Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo said it was clear the main obstacle was the United States' slow progress in defining its own potential emissions cuts.
"The problem is the United States, there's no doubt about that," Borloo, who has coordinated France's Copenhagen negotiating effort, told Reuters in an interview.
"It's the world's number one power, the biggest emitter (of greenhouse gases), the biggest per capita emitter and it's saying 'I'd like to but I can't'. That's the issue," he said.
Danish and Swedish officials said they wanted all developed countries including the United States to promise numbers for cuts in emissions in Copenhagen. The U.S. Senate has not yet agreed carbon-capping legislation.
"There was an assessment by the leaders that it was unrealistic to expect a full, internationally legally binding agreement to be negotiated between now and when Copenhagen starts in 22 days," said U.S. negotiator Michael Froman.
"We believe it is better to have something good than to have nothing at all," said Chilean Foreign Minister Mariano Fernandez. The next major U.N. climate meeting is in Bonn in mid-2010.
"Copenhagen can and must deliver clarity on emission reductions and the finance to kickstart action. I have seen nothing to change my view on that," said Yvo de Boer, the U.N.'s top climate change official. Ministers from 40 nations will meet in Copenhagen on Monday and Tuesday for preparatory talks.
Copenhagen was seen as the last chance for countries to agree on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, aiming to fight a rise in temperatures that many scientists predict will bring rising sea levels and more floods and droughts.
The aim of the summit is to set ambitious targets for cutting greenhouse gases in industrialized nations, but also to raise funds to help poor countries slow their own emissions growth and tackle the worst impacts on crops and water supplies.
But negotiations have been bogged down, with developing nations accusing the rich world of failing to set themselves deep enough 2020 goals for curbing greenhouse gas emissions.
FINANCING FIRST
It was not clear if China, now the world's biggest carbon emitter, had backed the two-stage proposal in Singapore.
Chinese President Hu Jintao instead focused his remarks at the breakfast meeting on the need to establish a funding mechanism for rich nations to provide financial support to developing countries to fight climate change.
Britain's Energy and Climate Secretary Ed Miliband told the BBC the issue was tough but he was "quite optimistic".
"It is about saving the world ... If we can get a very clear set of commitments from the world's leaders in Copenhagen on how they're going to cut their emissions -- not just Europe, not just the United States but India and China and other countries -- then that will be a very major step forward," he said.
Despite the talk in Singapore of urgent action on climate change, a statement issued after the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit dropped an earlier draft's reference to halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Environmental lobby group WWF was disappointed.
"At APEC, there was far too much talk about delay," spokesperson Diane McFadzien said in a statement.
"In Copenhagen, governments need to create a legally binding framework with an amended Kyoto Protocol and a new Copenhagen Protocol. Legally binding is the only thing that will do if we want to see real action to save the planet."
(Additional reporting by David Fogarty, Oleg Shchedrov, Yoo Choonsik and Lucy Hornby, Stefano Ambrogi in London, Emmanuel Jarry and James Mckenzie in Paris, Alister Doyle in Oslo and Pete Harrison in Brussels; Writing by John Chalmers; Editing by Jon Hemming)
APEC nations back face-saving climate plan
David Fogarty, Reuters 15 Nov 09;
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - President Barack Obama backed on Sunday a compromise proposal to ensure U.N. climate talks next month in Copenhagen don't end in failure.
The decision comes as 19 Asia-Pacific leaders meeting in Singapore said on Sunday it was unlikely a tougher, and legally binding, U.N. climate deal would be agreed at the Dec 7-18 Danish talks.
Bickering over emissions reduction targets, climate financing for poorer nations and how to measure, report and prove emissions reduction steps have bogged down U.N. climate talks for months.
The U.N. has set a December deadline to agree a broader climate pact to replace the Kyoto Protocol from 2013, with that goal now pushed into 2010 at least.
The Danish proposal tries to deal with the reality of too many unresolved issues and the need to deliver a politically binding agreement that would capture progress already achieved in the U.N. negotiations, and at the same time provide for immediate action already from next year.
Support for Danish Prime Minister's Lars Lokke Rasmussen's "one agreement -- two purposes" proposal gives the troubled U.N. climate negotiations breathing space by aiming for a politically binding agreement in Copenhagen. Legally binding details would be worked out later.
In particular, it will give Obama's administration more time to try to get a sweeping climate bill through the Senate. Analysts say it needs to pass the Senate in the first few months of 2010 to avoid becoming pushed aside in the run-up to mid-term elections.
But it will not ease the pressure on the United States, the world's number two greenhouse gas emitter, to offer a much tougher mid-term emissions reduction target.
The current Senate draft climate bill outlines a reduction of 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, but this is far below the cuts the U.N. climate panel says are need from rich countries to avert dangerous climate change.
Many developing countries say rich nations' collective cuts are far below the 25-40 percent reductions from 1990 levels by 2020, the U.N. climate panel says.
The U.N. talks process has run out of time, with too much to be agreed to seal a broad, legally binding agreement in little more than a month.
Hence Denmark's "Plan B," which aims to capitalize on the stated desire of world leaders for Copenhagen to deliver a successful outcome.
Denmark also hopes the agreement would mandate continued legal negotiations and set a deadline for their conclusion.
But analysts point to the risk of that deadline slipping if the U.S. political will to agree on emissions targets and carbon cap-and-trade fails, particularly if the U.S. economy falters.
It also risks growing frustration from developing countries which accuse rich nations of not doing enough to fight climate or help poorer states adapt to its impacts.
Developing nations, including big emitters Indonesia and Brazil, have recently laid out tough, voluntary targets to curb emissions by 2020.
South Korea has opted for a tough voluntary 2020 target as well, underscoring the point that developing nations are already moving to curb their emissions, with some of targets they have announced being more ambitious than those of many rich nations.
All this adds pressure on Denmark to ensure the face-saving proposal yields an agreement in Copenhagen that doesn't erode nations' desire to reach a tougher pact as soon as possible.
It will also need to spell out more clearly how the fight against climate change fairly splits the burden and the financial bill between all nations.
(Editing by John Chalmers)
APEC leaders work for 'ambitious outcome' at Copenhagen
Yahoo News 15 Nov 09;
SINGAPORE (AFP) – Asia-Pacific leaders Sunday vowed to work for an "ambitious outcome" at next month's Copenhagen climate talks but gave no target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
"We... reaffirm our commitment to tackle the threat of climate change and work towards an ambitious outcome in Copenhagen," they said in a declaration at the end of a two-day Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.
The 21-member grouping declared climate change "one of the biggest global challenges" but dropped a target to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, a goal outlined in an earlier draft of the joint statement.
Instead, they restated a 2007 "aspirational target" to reduce energy intensity -- greenhouse gas emissions per unit of economic output -- by at least 25 percent by 2030.
The declaration also emphasised developing countries' campaign to pressure rich nations to bear the financial burden of measures to counter global warming.
"Global action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will need to be accompanied by measures, including financial assistance and technology transfer to developing economies for their adaptation to the adverse impact of climate change," it said.
Yi Xianliang, a Chinese foreign ministry official who is part of the country's negotiating team at world climate talks, said Saturday that the 50 percent reduction target had to be omitted from the APEC declaration.
"It is a very controversial issue in the world community... if we put it in this statement, I think it would disrupt the negotiation process," he told reporters on the sidelines of APEC.
Hastily convened climate change talks that took place here earlier Sunday, with leaders including the presidents of the US and China, failed to yield a breakthrough ahead of the December talks in Copenhagen.
"There was an assessment by the leaders that it was unrealistic to expect a full, internationally legally-binding agreement to be negotiated between now and when Copenhagen starts in 22 days," US Deputy National Security Adviser Mike Froman told reporters.
Froman said there was broad consensus for a "one agreement, two steps" arrangement that would see an in-principle agreement in Copenhagen followed later by a legally binding pact.
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