Economist Debate as of week Oct 12-18

greenmay26UID: 2677632

About this debate                            Theworld's dependence on traditional fossil fuels—particularly coal andoil—must change. But many proposed solutions would simply use fossilfuels in a cleaner or more efficient way. "Carbon capture and storage"holds out the promise—as yet only a promise—of turning coal-firedelectricity clean. Canada's oil sands and "coal-to-liquids" offer a wayof getting energy from friendlier climes than the likes of Iran,Venezuela and Russia. And the world may have more natural gas thanpreviously thought. But spending scarce research and developmentdollars on these and other fossil-fuel technologies means not spendingthem on renewables, and risks technological dead-ends that will lock inpossibly dangerous levels of carbon-dioxide emissions for decades tocome. Should the world try to make fossil fuels greener, or leave thembehind as quickly as possible?

                                                
Background reading
1.Developing countries and global warming: A bad climate for development

IN LATE April Mostafa Rokonuzzaman, a farmer in south-westernBangladesh, gave an impassioned speech at a public meeting in hisvillage, complaining that climate change, freakish hot spells andfailed rains were ruining his vegetables. He didn’t know the half ofit. A month later Mr Rokonuzzaman was chest-deep in a flood that hadswept away his house, farm and even the village where the meeting tookplace. Cyclone Aila (its effects pictured above) which caused the stormsurge that breached the village’s flood barriers, was itself aplausible example of how climate change is wreaking devastation in poorcountries.
Most people in the West know that the poor world contributes toclimate change, though the scale of its contribution still comes as asurprise. Poor and middle-income countries already account for justover half of total carbon emissions (see chart 1); Brazil produces moreCO2 per head than Germany. The lifetime emissions from these countries’planned power stations would match the world’s entire industrialpollution since 1850.

Less often realised, though, is that global warming does far moredamage to poor countries than they do to the climate. In a report in2006 Nicholas (now Lord) Stern calculated that a 2°C rise in globaltemperature cost about 1% of world GDP. But the World Bank, in its newWorld Development Report*,now says the cost to Africa will be more like 4% of GDP and to India,5%. Even if environmental costs were distributed equally to everyperson on earth, developing countries would still bear 80% of theburden (because they account for 80% of world population). As it is,they bear an even greater share, though their citizens’ carbonfootprints are much smaller (see chart 2).
As December’s Copenhagen summit on climate change draws near, poorcountries are expressing alarm at the slow pace of negotiations toreplace the Kyoto protocol. Agreed (partially) in 1997, this bound richcountries to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions by 5.2% from 1990levels by 2012.

Counting the cost of global warming is hard because no one reallyknows how much to attribute to climate change and how much to otherfactors. But one indication of its rising costs is the number of peoplearound the world affected by natural disasters. In 1981-85, fewer than500m people required international disaster-assistance; in 2001-05, thenumber reached 1.5 billion. This includes 4% of the population of thepoorest countries and over 7% in lower-middle-income countries (seechart 3).
In all, reckons the World Health Organisation, climate changecaused a loss of 5.5m disability-adjusted life years (a measure of harmto human health) in 2000, most of it in Africa and Asia. Estimates bythe Global Humanitarian Forum, a Swiss think-tank, and in a study in Comparative Quantification of Health Risks,a scientific journal, put the number of additional deaths attributableto climate change every year at 150,000. The indirect harm, through itsimpact on water supplies, crop yields and disease is hugely greater.

The poor are more vulnerable than the rich for several reasons.Flimsy housing, poor health and inadequate health care mean thatnatural disasters of all kinds hurt them more. When Hurricane Mitchswept through Honduras in 1998, for example, poor households lost15-20% of their assets but the rich lost only 3%.
Global warming aggravates that. It also increases the chances ofcatching the life-threatening diseases that are more prevalent inpoorer countries. In many places cities have been built just above aso-called “malaria line”, above which malaria-bearing mosquitoes cannotsurvive (Nairobi is one example). Warmer weather allows the bugs tomove into previously unaffected altitudes, spreading a disease that isalready the biggest killer in Africa. By 2030 climate change may expose90m more people to malaria in Africa alone. Similarly,
meningitis
outbreaks in Africa are strongly correlated with drought. Both arelikely to increase. Diarrhoea is forecast to rise 5% by 2020 in poorcountries because of climate change. Dengue fever has been expandingits range: its incidence doubled in parts of the Americas between1995-97 and 2005-07. On one estimate, 60% of the world’s populationwill be exposed to the disease by 2070.
Next, as Mr Rokonuzzaman’s story showed, poor countries areparticularly prone to flooding. Ten of the developing world’s 15largest cities are in low-lying coastal areas vulnerable to rising sealevels or coastal surges. They include Shanghai, Mumbai and Cairo. InSouth and East Asia the floodplains of great rivers have always beenhome to vast numbers of people and much economic activity. Climatechange is overwhelming the social and other arrangements that in thepast allowed countries and people to cope with floods. National budgetscan ill afford the cost of improving defences. The Netherlands is alsoaffected and is spending $100 per person a year on flood defences. InBangladesh that sum is a quarter of the average person’s annual income.
         
   
   The biggest vulnerability is that the weather gravely affectsdeveloping countries’ main economic activities—such as farming andtourism. Global warming dries out farmland. Since two-thirds of Africais desert or arid, the continent is heavily exposed. One study predictsthat by 2080 as much as a fifth of Africa’s farmland will be severelystressed. And that is only one part of the problem.
Global warming also seems to be speeding up the earth’s hydrologiccycle, causing both floods and droughts (more rains fall in shorterperiods, with longer gaps between). In addition, by melting glaciers,global warming reduces nature’s storage capacity. Two-thirds of theworld’s fresh water is stored in glaciers. Their melting leaves poorcountries with less of a buffer to protect farmers against changingweather and rainfall patterns.
This kind of increasing unpredictability would be dire news at thebest of times: hit by drought and flood, the land becomes lessproductive. It is compounded by another problem. The higher-yielding,pest-resistant seed varieties invented in the 1960s were designed tothrive in stable climes. Old-fashioned seeds are actually better atdealing with variable weather—but are now less widely used.Reinstituting their use will mean less food.
In India the gains from the Green Revolution are already shrinkingbecause of local pollution, global warming and waning resistance topests and disease. A study for the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology forecast that yields of the main Indian crops would declineby a further 4.5-9% over the next 30 years because of climate change. Arecent assessment based on a large number of studies of what mighthappen in the long run if carbon continues to be pumped into theatmosphere found that world farm production could fall by 16% by the2080s, and possibly by as much as 21% in developing countries. Althoughthe timescale makes such figures no more than educated guesses, thereis not much doubt that climate change is undermining the gains fromintensive farming in developing countries—at the very time whenpopulation growth and greater wealth mean the world will need to doublefood production over the next three or four decades. By 2050 the worldwill have to feed 2 billion to 3 billion more people and cope with thechanging (water-hungry) diets of a richer population. Even withoutclimate change, farm productivity would have to rise by 1% a year,which is a lot. With climate change, the rise will have to be 1.8%,says the bank.
If these myriad problems have a silver lining, it is that they givedeveloping countries as big an interest in mitigating the impact ofclimate change as rich ones. As the World Bank says, climate-changepolicy is no longer a simple choice between growth and ecologicalwell-being.
Sideways to CopenhagenIn principle that shift should make a climate-change deal inCopenhagen more likely, by increasing the number of countries that wantan agreement. But two big problems remain. First, the poor countrieswant large amounts of money. To keep global warming down to an increaseof 2°C, the World Bank calculates, would cost $140 billion to $675billion a year in developing countries—dwarfing the $8 billion a yearnow flowing to them for climate-change mitigation. The $75 billion costof adapting to global warming (as opposed to trying to stop it)similarly overwhelms the $1 billion a year available to them.
Second, poor countries see a climate-change deal in fundamentallydifferent terms. For rich countries the problem is environmental:greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere and must be cut,preferably using the sort of binding targets recommended by theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. For developing countries theproblem is one of fairness and history: rich countries are responsiblefor two-thirds of the carbon put into the atmosphere since 1850; to cutemissions in absolute terms now would perpetuate an unjust pattern.Poor countries therefore think emissions per head, not absoluteemissions, should be the standard.
Moreover, targets set at national level have little effect in poorcountries where public administration works badly. So rich and pooralso disagree about the conditions attached to any money for mitigatingor adapting to climate change. The rich see this as a sort of aid,designed for specific projects with measurable targets, requiringstrict conditions. Poorer countries see the cash as no-stringscompensation for a problem that is not of their making.
The cost of climate change gives developing countries a big interestin a deal at Copenhagen. But what sort of deal they want—and how hardthey push for it—is another matter altogether.

greenmay26UID: 2677632

Africa and climate change
A green ransom

Sep 3rd 2009 | NAIROBI
From The Economist print edition
Make the rich world feel guilty about global warming

RICH countries should compensate Africa for all their belching chimneys and exhausts. In a rare fit of African unity, it was decided at a recent flurry of leaders’ meetings that the United States, the European Union, Japan and others should pay the continent the tidy sum of $67 billion a year, though it was unclear for how long. Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, is likely to lead a delegation of 53 countries (all of Africa minus Morocco) to the climate-change summit in Denmark’s capital, Copenhagen, in December, where he will presumably lodge this demand.

Would the money come, if it came at all, with strings attached or as reparations for damage to Africa’s atmosphere? Mr Meles has made it clear he is seeking blood money—or rather carbon money—that would be quite separate from other aid to the continent. If the cash were not forthcoming, the African Union (AU) might take a case to a court of arbitration and ask it to judge overall culpability for climate change.

The AU says it would not administer the carbon cash directly. National governments would get it. But it is unclear how it would be allocated. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says Africa will be the continent worst hit by higher temperatures. But some bits of Africa may deteriorate more, whereas others may benefit from greater rainfall.

Africa’s demand is high, but there is widespread agreement that the continent should get help to adapt to climate change. Some think cash reparations are the right way to go. Others reckon it would be more practical (and less costly) to help to build sea defences for the Niger and Nile deltas and to protect Congo’s rainforest.

greenmay26UID: 2677632

Nothing New under the sun

IMAGINE a small group of farmers tending a rice paddy some 5,000 years ago in eastern Asia or sowing seeds in a freshly cleared forest in Europe a couple of thousand years before that. It is here, a small group of scientists would have you believe, that humanity launched climate change. Long before the Industrial Revolution—indeed, long before a worldwide revolution in intensive farming, the results of which kept humanity alive—people caused unnatural exhalations of greenhouse gases that had an impact on the world’s climate.

Much of what is known about recent ice ages comes from drilling into the ice at the planet’s poles. This holds a chemical chronology of the Earth laid out by depth. There is evidence in this ice-core record of seven periods when the ice caps expanded, and each of them shows a steady decline in the level of greenhouse gases after the ice receded again. All, that is, but for the one which saw the rise of modern agrarian societies.

In Europe, slash-and-burn techniques for clearing forested land allowed the farming of crops that had spread from the Fertile Crescent. This practice loosed the forests’ stored carbon into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide. In eastern Asia a couple of millennia later there was a tenfold increase in the growth of rice as the region’s principal foodstuff. That meant the destruction of vast grasslands, which released equally vast amounts of methane—a gas far more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide is.
The Economist

The ice-core record shows that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere made an anomalous upturn about 7,000 years ago, and that methane levels, which were also falling, began to increase about 5,000 years ago (see chart). These numbers correspond well with the rise of farming in Europe and Asia. This is not a new idea, but one of its proponents, Bill Ruddiman, a palaeoclimatologist at the University of Virginia, has recently refuted one of the main objections to it: that there were not enough people farming the land to have made a significant difference.

Dr Ruddiman argues, in Quaternary Science Reviews, that with vast tranches of land at their disposal and only unrefined agricultural techniques, early farmers had no incentive to maximise the potential of the land they farmed. Previous attempts to take into account the effects of early agriculture on the climate have assumed that people farming then used about the same amount of land to grow food, per person, that they did into the modern era. Dr Ruddiman argues that such an assumption is tantamount to suggesting that farmers have learned nothing in the past 5,000 years.

He and his colleagues have turned to archaeological and anthropological data to show that early farmers used ten times as much land per person as modern farmers. Burning off large areas of forest or grassland, they would farm the enriched soil until its yield began to drop, and then move off to do the same elsewhere—as practitioners of slash-and-burn agriculture do to this day.

Such profligacy would make the contributions of early farmers large enough to have an effect on worldwide levels of greenhouse gases. So although the size of the effect has increased markedly since the industrial revolution, it looks as if humanity has been interfering with the climate since the dawn of civilisation.

greenmay26UID: 2677632

Thaw Point

THE Arctic tundra is one of the world’s most extensive ecosystems, and the frozen soil known as permafrost, which underlies it, can be hundreds of metres deep. But as the world warms up in response to the millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases being poured into the atmosphere each year, so does the permafrost. As the permafrost thaws, bacteria start chewing up the organic matter it contains. This releases yet more carbon dioxide, as well as methane, another greenhouse gas, which has 25 times the warming potential of CO2. Edward Schuur of the University of Florida in Gainesville, a doyen of the field, estimates that the world’s permafrost contains twice as much carbon as its atmosphere. If even a fraction of that were released as CO2 and methane, it would be bad news.

Nor is that all. Thawing permafrost also leaks nitrates and phosphates into the tundra, allowing novel plant species to get a foothold in what was, to start with, a fairly spartan habitat. It distorts the Earth’s surface, too, creating a landscape of domes and pits known as thermokarst because of its resemblance to the karstic terrain of limestone-rich parts of the world. This changes the tundra’s ecology. It also plays havoc with human structures, such as buildings, roads and pipelines, that sit on top of it. For all of these reasons, then, more research is needed into this icy realm. And that is the object of a project with the unsnappy name of Spatial and Temporal Influences of Thermokarst Failures on Surface Processes in Arctic Landscapes, which was kicked off by a group of scientists who gathered in late June at the Toolik Field Station in northern Alaska.
Karsting the first stone

The project, which is led by Breck Bowden of the University of Vermont in Burlington, involves 17 research groups from America and Canada. To start with, they will use a combination of aerial photography, field measurements, and ground- and satellite-based sensors to compile a map of all the thermokarstic areas of Alaska. This will provide a reference point from which changes can be measured.

The team will then try to work out how the development of features such as “retrogressive thaw slumps” and “active-layer detachments” (different ways in which thawing permafrost can cause a hillside to slip) are associated with the local climate, geology and vegetation. They will look, too, at the amount of ice in the ground, and the temperature and the moisture of the soil. All these data will be fed into computer models which, the researchers hope, will allow them to develop an automated way of predicting where and when new features will form, and to monitor them when they appear.

Dr Bowden and his colleagues also hope to understand the impact of thermokarst activity on the structure of the soil, and its nutrient content. They will concentrate on a few sites that can be studied intensively and which are affected by different types of activity. They will measure the amount of carbon, phosphate and nitrate in the soil, together with the rate of plant growth and microbial decomposition. That will let them work out just how “leaky” thawing permafrost is and thus how big its contribution of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere might be, should the worst come to the worst.

It will also help them forecast changes in the tundra’s vegetation. The softening of the soil and the consequent release of nutrients is likely to encourage the growth of shrubs on land that is now dominated by grass, moss and lichens. The researchers will monitor the growth of this vegetation around newly formed thermokarst features and use experimental field plots to test how conditions mimicking such features affect which species will thrive.

Last, the project will try to work out how thawing permafrost will affect the numerous streams, rivers and lakes of the Arctic. Together, these amount to the biggest acreage of water on “dry” land. As water moves through affected areas, it picks up both nutrients and sediment that would otherwise be held in the permafrost’s icy grasp. These, paradoxically, have opposite effects on the growth of algae. The phosphates and nitrates stimulate it whereas the extra sediment suppresses it by trapping nutrients in the beds of such bodies of water.
Muddy waters

It is not only natural habitats and future generations that are threatened by the thawing of the permafrost. People in the here and now are affected, as well. Sediments from a huge thermokarstic area have, for example, dammed the Selawik River in north-western Alaska, interfering with fish and threatening the livelihood of nearby villages. Elsewhere in the state, a combination of melting sea ice and thawing permafrost has exacerbated the erosion of several coastal villages, which will have to be relocated at a considerable cost.

Whether anything short of reversing climate change can be done about all this is a moot question. But at least when the project reports, in five years’ time, the size of the threat will be clearer. The news it brings may not be welcome. But it is surely better than living in ignorance about one of the world’s most important habitats.

greenmay26UID: 2677632

Lines in the sand

Jul 13th 2009
From Economist.com
Climate change could ignite wars in volatile regions

THE Matterhorn, an iconic emblem of the Alps, has two peaks: one on its Swiss side and one on its Italian side. Between them, the boundary separating the two countries traces the mountain ridge until it reaches the glacier at its base. According to a convention agreed long ago between Switzerland and Italy, the ridge of the glacier marks the border between the two countries. But the glacier is now receding, so a draft agreement has been proposed to create a new border that coincides with the ridge of the underlying rock.

The proposed change to this particular international border is unlikely to result in war. As the world warms up, however, more and more countries will need to renegotiate their boundaries. Your correspondent is concerned that a peaceful outcome is by no means assured.
AFP/Times of India An Indian soldier on the Indo-China border

Indeed, two recent reports from the Centre for Naval Analysis, an American military-research institute, suggest that border-related conflicts are a growing threat. In its report on “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change”, published in 2007, it warns that “Climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world.”

Nowhere is this truer than along the disputed sections of India’s border with Pakistan and China. India and Pakistan have been locked in occasionally violent competition for control of Kashmir since their bloody partition in 1947. James Lee of the American University in Washington, DC, reckons “it is a very good bet that the Kashmir glaciers will get caught up in the India/Pakistan dispute.”

India’s border with China is also unresolved. The two countries fought a brief war over it in 1962. In early June, India signalled that it would boost its military presence close to the border. China responded on June 9th, when the Chinese Global Times published an editorial entitled “India’s Unwise Military Moves” denouncing India’s troop deployment.

At the same time, the melting of sea ice around the north pole is causing old rivalries to heat up over conflicting claims to what could be valuable stretches of seabed that are becoming accessible as a result. The same report from the Centre for Naval Analysis warns that “an Arctic with less sea ice could bring more competition for resources, as well as more commercial and military activity.” And at the other end of the world Chile and Argentina, which last had an armed standoff in 1978, have yet to agree formally on a borderline through the southern Patagonian ice fields, which will affect their overlapping seabed claims.

Rising sea levels will also eat away at all coastal communities, especially large, densely populated portions of many South and South-East Asian countries as well as tiny island nations in the South Pacific. In Bangladesh, where about 10% of the country is less than a metre above sea level, tens of millions could be displaced by global warming. India has already constructed a 4,100 kilometre (2,560 mile) fence along the border in an attempt to curb illegal immigration.

As the Centre for Naval Analysis states in its most recent report, “Powering America’s Defence”, which was published in May, “climate change could increasingly drive military missions in this century.” Many of these missions could involve environmental refugees fleeing marginal cropland, the productivity of which is likely to be reduced by global warming. It is worth noting that the report also found the American border to be at risk.

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Indeed, two recent reports from the Centre for Naval Analysis, anAmerican military-research institute, suggest that border-relatedconflicts are a growing threat. In its report on “National Security andthe Threat of Climate Change”, published in 2007, it warns that“Climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in someof the most volatile regions of the world.”


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