Lights go off around world to observe Earth Hour

Hong Kong before (top) and during Earth Hour last March

BEIJING, March 27 (Xinhua) -- As night fell on Saturday, the world saw a wave of darkness spreading from time zone to time zone, with countries and regions switching off lights to observe the Earth Hour event.

During the one-hour-relay campaign, landmarks in hundreds of countries and regions went dark at 8:30 p.m.(0930 GMT) in a unified show of support for action towards a sustainable future.

In Los Angeles, the second biggest city in the United States, the 100-foot-tall pylons, which mark the entrance to the Los Angeles International Airport, glowed solid green an hour before the event and then went dark.

Lights also went off on the Queen Mary, a historic hotel featuring Art Deco staterooms and legendary sites, which turned off many of its exterior lights, including the smokestack.

In Kenya, people counted down in the square of the Kenyatta International Conference Center, the highest building in the capital Nairobi, to mark the commencement of Earth Hour 2011.

Olympic Champion Asbel Kiprop, Kenya's image ambassador for the event, graced the occasion and called for a sustainable growth model based on a green low-carbon economy.

"All sportspeople are training in the outside weather but climate change is polluting the environment and thus affecting their performance on the track," Kiprot told Xinhua.

South Korea also joined the world in marking Earth Hour on Saturday, with cities, homes, major landmarks and buildings switching off the lights for one hour starting 8:30 p.m..

Despite the cold wind, a group of people gathered on the top of Mt. Nam in central Seoul, watching candles being lit up. Among the participants, parents brought along their children to increase their awareness about environmental issues.

Other landmarks and major buildings in Seoul such as the Gyeongbokgung Palace, Sejong Center for the Performing Arts, the Central Government Complex and Gwanghwamun Square supported Earth Hour by extinguishing their lights for one hour.

In Singapore, some landmark buildings in the central business district Marina Bay and shopping district Orhcard Road turned off decorative lightings to support the event.

One of the buildings in Marina Bay had a countdown to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) initiative that has enjoyed ever wider participation since its launch in 2007 in Sydney.

In Hong Kong, China, more than 3,200 companies and buildings joined the global campaign, featuring record numbers of participants.

Hong Kong's Victoria Harbor, known for its night scenes, also went dim at 8:30 p.m. when neon signs and lights of buildings started to black out.

In Finland's 67 cities and towns, including Helsinki, Turku, Tampere and Rovaniemi, over 350 enterprises and more than 150 communities and organizations joined the Earth Hour event on Saturday evening.

In the Finnish capital of Helsinki, some landmark buildings, such as Helsinki Cathedral Church turned off the lights between 20:30 and 21:30 local time as part of an effort to draw attention to the danger of climate change. Helsinki-based power plants also turned off their electric logos and ornamental lightings during Earth Hour.

Other international landmarks joining the one-hour blackout include Times Square and the Empire State Building in New York, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the tallest building in the world, Dubai's Burg Khalifa

The Earth Hour event, initiated by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), will traverse the globe over 24 hours, from the first lights being dimmed across Fiji and New Zealand to lights being turned on again in Samoa.

According to Earth Hour spokesman Winston Su, some 133 countries and regions have signed up for the event this year, with 13 of them taking part for the first time.

Speaking at a global launch media conference earlier this month, Andy Ridley, co-founder and executive director of Earth Hour, said this year, the event is challenging people to go beyond the hour and think of other ways to make a difference after the lights go on.

"Earth Hour has grown amazingly from one city to over 4,000 in 128 countries (and regions). For us, it is the time for us to go to the next stage, and for us to go beyond the hour," he said.

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http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2011-03/27/c_13800614.htm

Mummified Forest Provides Climate Change Clues

This undated image provided by Ohio State University shows Ellesmere Island National Park in Canada. Ohio State University researchers and their colleagues have discovered the remains of a mummified forest that lived on the island 2 to 8 million years ago, when the Arctic was cooling. This mummified forest is giving researchers a peek into how plants reacted to ancient climate change. That knowledge will be key as scientists begin to tease out the impacts of global warming in the Arctic.

On a remote island in the Canadian Arctic where no trees now grow, a newly unearthed mummified forest is giving researchers a peek into how plants reacted to ancient climate change.

That knowledge will be key as scientists begin to tease out the impacts of global warming in the Arctic.

The ancient forest found on Ellesmere Island, which lies north of the Arctic Circle in Canada, contained dried out birch, larch, spruce and pine trees. Research scientist Joel Barker of Ohio State University discovered it by chance while camping in 2009.

"At one point I crested a small ridge and the cliff face below me was just riddled with wood," he recalled.

Armed with a research grant, Barker returned this past summer to explore the site, which was buried by an avalanche 2 million to 8 million years ago. Melting snow recently exposed the preserved remains of tree trunks, leaves and needles.

About a dozen such frozen forests exist in the Canadian Arctic, but the newest site is farthest north.

The forest existed during a time when the Arctic climate shifted from being warmer than it is today to its current frigid state. Judging by the lack of diverse wood species and the trees' small leaves, the team suspected that plants at the site struggled to survive the rapid change from deciduous forest to evergreen.

"This community was just hanging on," said Barker, who presented his findings Thursday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

The next step is to examine tree rings to better understand how past climate conditions stressed plant life and how the Arctic tundra ecosystem will respond to global warming.

Since 1970, temperatures have climbed more than 4.5 degrees in much of the Arctic, much faster than the global average.

Barker also plans to conduct DNA tests on the remains.

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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=132107821

Hope For Polar Bears

Polar bears may be threatened, but they aren't yet doomed.

While Arctic sea ice will continue to retreat under the glare of rising global temperatures, the ice is unlikely to collapse in spectacular fashion, causing hope that, with aggressive greenhouse gas emissions cuts and wildlife management, polar bears may retain viable habitat into the next century, a team of scientists reports in a paper to be published tomorrow in Nature.

Several years ago, government scientists projected that two-thirds of the world's polar bears would go extinct by midcentury under current emissions scenarios, a finding that ultimately prompted the George W. Bush administration to list the bear as threatened. Those estimates, though uncertain in their specifics, remain unchanged by the current work, said Steven Amstrup, senior scientist at Polar Bears International and former biologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, who co-authored both studies.

However, what seems increasingly unlikely is that the retreat of summer sea ice -- the base for bears' pursuit of seals, their highway system and their mating grounds -- could cascade out of control. Rather, its decline is entirely contingent on controlling human emissions of greenhouse gases, Amstrup said.

"Conserving polar bears largely seems to be a matter of containing temperature rise," he said.

The notion that no "tipping point" exists for Arctic ice decline has spread in climate science for several years, supported by deeper examination of the North's physics. Initially, the media exaggerated fears that the loss of ice, which naturally reflects light, would expose more heat-absorbing water to the sun, causing runaway decline. However, scientists now widely believe this feedback is balanced by a host of other phenomena, like increased flows of hot air from the tropics, improved ice formation efficiency under thinning conditions and the region's general cloudiness.

The sea ice episode should be a cautionary tale, wrote Dirk Notz, a climatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, last year. Melting thresholds likely exist for land-bound glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, he said, and scientists should not risk their credibility by conflating those claims with Arctic sea ice. Most prominently, NASA climatologist James Hansen has included Arctic ice in his list of possible tipping points, along with melting permafrost, glacier melt and ecosystem collapse.

Despite the growing scientific awareness that ice loss has an inch-by-inch relationship to rising temperatures, though, the public has largely been left with the message that prospects were grim for polar bears, no matter what steps were taken to limit global warming, Amstrup said. That message was hardly a call to action and, more importantly from a scientific view, lacked validity.

"If people and leaders feel there's nothing they can do, they will do nothing," he said.

'Messy literature'

The projections published by Amstrup should be taken with a grain of salt, independent scientists said. Most models incorporating sea ice fall short of predicting the actual loss seen in the Arctic over the past several decades, and systems like cloud cover are not well understood. Indeed, over the past few years a sometimes acrimonious debate has arisen as to whether existing ice models were unintentionally introducing errors to compensate for errors.

However, despite these gross differences, there's one thing nearly every model agrees on: that there is a gradual relationship between rising temperatures and ice loss, said Michael Winton, an Arctic modeler at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab at Princeton University.

Arctic sea ice is a "messy literature," Winton said. Substantial natural variability is needed to match even the most sensitive models, like the one used in the Nature study, to observed changes, he said. "The outstanding question is, 'Are the models sufficiently sensitive? Are we missing something?'"

Given these uncertainties, it has been perplexing to scientists that the public seized on "tipping point" scenarios for sea ice, the one area where there is large agreement. Those fears, which peaked in 2007, were likely exacerbated by the stark retreat in sea ice that year. The Arctic lost more than 1.6 million square kilometers of ice, an area larger than Alaska; by September, sea ice covered half the area it had during the early 1950s.

However, since that shocking decline, the ice has modestly expanded during the summer, perhaps the best evidence that Arctic ice won't drop off a cliff, said Eric DeWeaver, a co-author on the Nature paper and physical climatologist at the National Science Foundation.

The 2007 loss was "spectacular," he said, but "one would not expect to see it very often."

Scientists do expect that ice fluctuations will become increasingly steep and difficult to predict, largely thanks to the floes' declining girth. Simply put, the thinner ice is more susceptible to the weather.

Sweltering summers will cause large retreats in sea ice, while chilly years will cause equally large increases. (The mid-1990s saw a one-year ice advance almost as large as the 2007 loss.) The era of Arctic ice impassively gliding through these variations is over.

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http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/12/15/15greenwire-no-tipping-point-for-sea-ice-in-polar-bears-fu-29018.html

Climate draft text signals breakthroughs

Negotiators made breakthroughs in key areas of contention at the Cancun climate talks late Friday, producing a draft text that commits all countries to step up their efforts to limit the rise in global temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius and leaves open the possibility of new commitments under the Kyoto Protocol.

In a surprise move, as delegates were preparing for a gruelling overnight session, Mexican chairwoman Patricia Espinosa released draft texts of agreements approved by 50 countries that were charged with finding compromises to what many believed were becoming intractable positions. But the agreements fell well short of an overarching accord that could form the basis of a new treaty, and it remained unclear whether it would pass the full convention.

In an informal session aimed at giving countries the opportunity to object and spark further talks, Ms. Espinosa received a 75-second standing ovation and no objections. She then adjourned to begin a final debate that was expected to last well into the night.

“If this gets approved, we are much further than we thought we would be before coming to Cancun,” said Wendy Trio, climate policy director for Greenpeace. “We now await the response from countries and urge them to adopt it.”

Negotiators from 193 countries have had to marry vastly different approaches that were contained in the 1997 Kyoto agreement and the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, which resulted in non-binding emission pledges from countries such as the United States, China, India and Brazil that were not covered by Kyoto commitments.

The draft text refers to the commitment to extend Kyoto with a new round of emission-reduction targets for the post-2012 period. Japan and Russia had explicitly rejected such an approach, and Russia’s objection was footnoted in the text. Canada had refused to provide a commitment to new Kyoto targets but never ruled it out. Environment Minister John Baird said earlier Friday that the government had not “closed any doors” as negotiators sought to find compromises to keep the talks alive.

A spokesman for Mr. Baird said Friday night that Canadian officials were studying the texts and could not comment on their content.

Zoe Caron, a climate-change researcher with WWF Canada, said the tough decisions on Kyoto have been put off until next year, as Canadian negotiator Guy St. Jacques had earlier suggested they would be. She said the Harper government may simply decide to transform its current 2020 target, made at last year’s Copenhagen Accord, into any new Kyoto deal, though Canada would also face a penalty for missing its 2012 goal.

“Their position is that the Kyoto Protocol is not enough on its own, and I expect they also understand that is it the core element of a larger legal deal [to be negotiated] moving forward,” Ms. Caron said.

The proposed agreements would endorse the view that “climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time” and requires “long-term co-operative action” in order to prevent catastrophic impacts across the planet. And they pledged that countries would consider strengthening the long-term goal to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees, something demanded by small island states who fear the 2-degree target would leave their countries literally under water as a result of rising sea levels.

However, it remains unclear how those ambitious targets will be achieved. In a report released at the beginning of the conference, the United Nations Environment Program said the commitments made under Copenhagen fell far short of what is needed to meet the 2-degree goal. If all countries met the upper end of their promises and delivered all the funding to help poorer countries slow emissions growth, the world would emit 49 gigatonnes of greenhouse gases by 2020, five gigatonnes higher than required to meet the target, the agency said.

Under the proposed deal, countries would set up a "Green Climate Fund" that would manage most of the $100-billion (U.S.) per year promised to poor countries by the developed world; set up technology-transfer programs to help them adopt renewable energy technologies, and fund projects to reduce deforestation and encourage tree planting.

Following the lead of the United States, Canada has pledged to reduce its emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020. Mr. Baird told the summit the Canadian government is working to meet that commitment, though it has yet to produce a plan to get there. Ottawa has introduced new emission standards for automobiles and is moving on ships, airplanes and heavy trucks; it has also promised to pass regulations that will force the power sector to end its reliance on high-emitting coal over the next two decades. But it has not regulated the fastest growing source of emissions: Alberta’s booming oil sands.

In a briefing Friday afternoon, Canadian officials appeared cautiously optimistic that negotiators were closing the gaps in key areas, though Canada was not involved in many of the key sessions.

The United States had insisted the Cancun summit must recognize the political agreement reached in Copenhagen last year, including the emissions pledges. Backed by Canada, the Americans were also insistent that China, India, Brazil and other major developing countries agree to have their plans to reduce the rate of emissions growth monitored and verified by the international community. The developing countries have agreed to a review process, though one that is not as rigorous as the regime for developed countries.

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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/climate-draft-text-signals-breakthroughs/article1832783/

As climate-change talks continue, lack of consensus spurs smaller-scale actions

CANCUN, MEXICO - In response to growing frustration that the U.N. climate negotiations are not producing real-world results, individual nations, states and business are cobbling together patchwork solutions to preserve forests, produce clean energy and scrub pollution from the air.

Under this new approach, businesses in California will offset their greenhouse gas emissions by funding tropical forest preservation in Mexico and Brazil; Japan will help pay for nuclear power plants in developing nations; and South Korea will invest in promoting renewable energy at home.

But the central question remains: Will a bottom-up network of ad hoc arrangements and bilateral deals be enough to avert dangerous climate change?

For years, international policymakers operated on the assumption that they would develop a successor to the landmark 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the only legally binding international accord to reduce greenhouse gases. They expected to agree on a common path for cutting the world's carbon output, dole out key nations' specific obligations and create a common market for trading greenhouse emissions. That vision has evaporated, replaced by a much looser web of climate-related efforts across the globe.

"The web of them together is an international architecture," said Robert Stavins, who directs Harvard University's environmental economics program. "You'll see a bottom-up linkage of climate policies that are very different between countries, regions, and even on the sub-national level."

The advantage of the U.N.-led talks taking place here - increasingly frenzied as they go into the final day Friday - is that they offer every country big and small the ability to argue its case. But the failure of political leadership and lack of a consensus among rich, poor and rapidly developing nations is forcing a departure from the way the world has approached climate-change policy for the past two decades.

Brazil's climate-change ambassador, Sergio Serra, described the U.N. climate negotiations as "on life support" and the goals for this conference so modest that "we are just trying to keep things honorably alive."

In an interview Thursday, Mexican President Felipe Calderon predicted the talks would produce meaningful results by week's end, but he expressed frustration with the cumbersome U.N. process. If negotiations fail, he added, Mexico would push for "a change in the rules."

"I am not allowing another 10 years to go by before we pass an agreement," he said.

Meanwhile, countries and regions are pressing ahead with their own mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions that will involve carbon trading systems - allowing companies to compensate for their emissions by buying credits that are used to invest in pollution-reducing projects in other parts of the world.

"That could open the door for ties between industrialized nations such as Australia, Japan and those in the European Union and developing countries," Serra said. That is good, he said, "though it remains unclear how this will work, since each trading system may involve a different set of rules."

Jake Schmidt, who directs international climate policy for the Natural Resources Defense Fund, an advocacy group, said, "Countries aren't just sitting and waiting for this international agreement to deliver."

On the state level, California recently announced that starting in 2012 it would allow companies forced to cut their carbon output to offset some of their emissions by supporting certified forest protection projects in the Brazilian state of Acre and the Mexican state of Chiapas. Linda Adams, California's secretary for environmental protection, said at a panel in Cancun that the decision will "pave the way for others to be part of our carbon market."

Even developing countries that are not bound by mandatory limits yet are looking at ways to cut their greenhouse gases. Mexico is examining how to convert its urban solid waste into energy, for example, while some of its farmers are producing shade-grown coffee for Starbucks using practices that sequester carbon.

Steve Cochran, vice president for climate and air at the Environmental Defense Fund advocacy group, said this new period of experimentation could lay the foundation for a more ambitious global effort in the future.

"People need to see, touch and feel that some of this stuff actually works," he said. "And when they do that, they'll be willing to take broader steps."

But even the emerging approaches, such as donations from rich countries to poor ones to conserve their forests, need to work out some kinks. On Wednesday, Guyana's President Bharrat Jagdeo publicly questioned why it's taking so long to get its first installment of funds under a $250 million forest conservation agreement with Norway.

"The international community has a very poor track record of delivering help," he said, blaming World Bank officials for a recent delay. Yvonne Tsikata, World Bank country director for the Caribbean, said in a statement that her institution was just serving as a "financial intermediary" and was awaiting the sign-off from a steering committee comprising officials from Guyana and Norway before transferring the funds.

In the meantime, representatives from nations most vulnerable to climate change said they still needed a global agreement - and soon. The current emissions pledges that industrialized and developing countries have made as part of the U.N. process fall well short of ensuring global temperatures don't exceed 3.6 degrees above pre-industrial levels, which many scientists agree could be a significant tipping point.

"Individual actions by themselves cannot substitute for international governance," said Grenada's permanent U.N. representative, Dessima Williams, who chairs a coalition of 43 small island nations threatened by rising sea levels. "We realize the multilateral process is complex and long-term. We have been in it, and we're in it for the long haul. Our problem is the islands are really suffering."

These annual negotiations, formally known as the Conference of Parties (COP), have taken place for the past 16 years and now even some senior U.N. diplomats and advisers have raised the question of whether it's worth imposing an expiration date.

"Which COP will be the final one for a decision?" asked one top U.N. official here, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak on the subject. "Are we just going to go on and on?"


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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/09/AR2010120906727.html

Climate talks: Cancun may deliver statement at Durban in 2011

In a big step forward, negotiators from 194 nations are looking at a Copenhagen Accord like statement, which may be adopted at the Cancun climate talks, unlike the accord of which the summit had only taken note of. Backroom negotiations continued late in the night to workout a comprehensive statement having information annexers listing the pledges of different countries. Japan, which has got the Kyoto Protocol almost killed, is insisting that its commitments should not be mentioned in the information annexure.

An Indian negotiator said all issues have been sorted out except on mitigation and finance. "We except brief paras in the Cancun statement on these issues once an agreement is reached on broad parameters," he said.

India has, however, failed to convince Japan to agree for a second commitment period for Kyoto Protocol. "They have not agreed," he said.

The Cancun summit appears to be heading to a Copenhagen like finish with the host nation Mexico trying its best to get something out of the summit. "We expect a comprehensive binding statement from the summit," an official said. Exact details of the statement were not known.

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http://www.hindustantimes.com/americas/Climate-talks-Cancun-may-deliver-statement-at-Durban-in-2011/636196/H1-Article1-636218.aspx

What climate deal may be agreed in Cancun?

Countries in talks at Mexico's Cancun beach resort are split over how to toughen existing pledges to cut carbon emissions, made at last year's Copenhagen summit which ended in a brief, non-binding agreement.

Issues that hinge on a deal on emissions include long-term climate aid for developing countries and payments to tropical nations to protect their forests.

Following are areas of possible agreement at the November 29-December 10 talks:

* Extending the Kyoto Protocol

- Decide whether to continue the protocol, as favored by developing countries. Its first round of targets ends in 2012

- Decide on the length of commitment period of the next round of targets, for example whether to 2017 or 2020

- Decide whether to cancel surplus, tradable emissions credits owned by countries that are well below their 2008-2012 Kyoto targets. Credits are called assigned amount units (AAUs) * Emissions targets

- Decide new national targets either under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol or the 1992 U.N. climate convention, or both

- Some industrialized countries do not like Kyoto, as so far it has only controlled the emissions of developed countries. A way out may be to note new targets in an appendix to Kyoto and the convention

- Refer to a long-term goal, for example to limit warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees F)

- Mention the widely held scientific view that emissions targets pledged so far are too weak

- Review in 2013-2015 whether targets need strengthening * Measurement

- Also called measurement, reporting and verification (MRV)

- Agree to measure developed country emissions, for example annually, and also their contribution to climate aid funds

- Agree to measure developing countries greenhouse gases and their actions to slow emissions growth, perhaps every two to four years

- Agree common accounting standards, for example on measuring carbon emissions from forests * Protecting rainforests

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http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6B60GH20101207

Spotlight will return on climate change, says Pachauri

Rajendra Pachauri agrees that climate change has nearly fallen off the political map

CANCUN, Mexico — 2010 has been an annus horribilis for climate change and his Nobel-winning scientists, but Rajendra Pachauri is confident that time will turn the tide.

"There are always ups and downs, and one just has to learn from them and live with them," the chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said on the sidelines of global climate talks. "I think this is only a kind of temporary blip."

Pachauri agreed that climate change had nearly fallen off the political map after the near-bustup at last year's Copenhagen summit -- and, he admitted, by flaws within his own organization.

The IPCCC found itself under fire for several mistakes that belatedly surfaced in its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, the landmark document that fueled the drive to Copenhagen.

Vetted by outside experts, the report's conclusions -- in essence, that climate change is on the march and the unbridled burning of fossil fuels is to blame -- stand proudly unchanged.

But, less than three years after it co-won the Nobel Peace Prize, the IPCC was also humiliatingly told to overhaul its procedures and better communicate with the public.

Today, as the unambitious goals set in the Cancun talks can illustrate, political will to tackle the threat spelled out by the IPCC seems to have evaporated.

"There are number of factors which are responsible for that, and I think that we ourselves should have done a few things much better. But we've learnt from them," Pachauri insisted.

Scientists recruited for the 5th Assessment Report due in 2014 will be instructed to avoid the risk of "Climategate," in which hacked emails written by a British scientist were held up by skeptics as proof that data was being skewed.

An independent probe found no evidence of any wrongdoing. The emails had been poorly phrased by a scientist irked by relentless demands to see his data under freedom of information laws.

"We are going to have be very thorough in how we are going to carry out our work, because let's accept it, we are under intense public scrutiny," Pachauri said. "We have to make sure we don't in any way default on what we are expected to do as scientists."

Over the course of this year, many climate scientists -- used to working quietly with their peers, away from the public glare -- were shocked at the anger and clout of climate skeptics.

Pachauri indicated he had been bombarded with hatemail.

Last month, Phil Jones, the University of East Anglia professor embroiled in the Climategate scandal, said his family had received threats and that he had even contemplated suicide at the height of the storm.

If the IPCC has been tarnished in 2010, the neutrality and objectiveness of the panel's work will restore luster, Pachauri argued.

As for climate change, interest would also be revived by public awareness, especially among the youth, of the carbon threat.

"I am not terribly dismayed about the current state of affairs," Pachauri said.

"I believe the trend is clearly toward much greater understanding and awareness on climate change than was the case three or four years ago. I personally feel very optimistic about the youth all over the world, including the US, who feel very sensitive about some of these issues.

"There's a lot of disinformation, which is driving current attitudes, and these things don't last," he added.

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http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jzrqQt132Z4pxBSDWHc1wcW4jBbw?docId=CNG.448033a10781a6df393770a7bb57e526.271