Bonn UN Climate Talks Seek To Turn Words Into Action

Deutsche Welle - Reuters | AFP

Climate experts are meeting in Bonn to draw up a rule book from the 2015 Paris Agreeent. Their deliberations come after seven months of record temperatures around the world.
Delegates to the latest round of talks following the Paris Agreement began their work on Monday to work out a detailed plan on how governments are to report and monitor their national plans to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
Their 10-day meeting comes as US space agency NASA reported that last month was the warmest April in statistics dating back to the 19th century. April was the seventh month in a row to break temperature records.

Spiralling global temperatures from 1850-2016.

Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres, the retiring executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

Retiring UN climate director Christiana Figueres told the conference on Monday that the record temperatures were partly caused by the natural warming effect of the El Nino weather activity in the Pacific Ocean but that it was magnified by the build-up of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
Addressing delegates at the start of the 10-day meeting, Figueres said: "The whole world is united in its commitment to the global goals embodied in the Paris Agreement," telling the 196-nation UN meeting: "Now we must design the details of the path to the safe, prosperous and climate-neutral future to which we all aspire."
The meeting in Germany is the first since the UN members reached a deal in Paris to limit climate change by moving away from the use of fossil fuels to renewable energy by 2100. Last month, the agreement was signed by 175 governments at a ceremony in New York, including top greenhouse-gas emitters China and the United States.The agreement still needs to be ratified by national governments. It will come into force when 55 nations, representing 55 percent of world emissions, have signed up to the plan. French Environment Minister Segolene Royal said she would submit a bill on Tuesday to the French National Assembly, seeking ratification.
Speaking to the Bonn conference on Monday, Royal said: "The Paris Agreement represents the foundations ... Now we have to raise the walls, the roof of a common home."

Warmest April
US scientists have reported that last month was the warmest April recorded, the seventh consecutive month to exceed previous highs. The record means that 2016 will become the warmest calendar year in NASA's database.

NASA records the warmest April on record.

During each of the past seven months, global average surface temperatures have exceeded the 20th century average by more than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

Water pipelines from the Tansa dam, near Mumbai, India

On Monday, the Japan Meteorological Agency backed up NASA in finding that April was the warmest such month since their records began in 1891. The warm weather was most pronounced across the Arctic, from Siberia to Greenland and Alaska. There were deadly heat waves in Thailand and India.
The UN climate talks in Bonn continue until May 26, and will also set the agenda for the next high-level gathering in Marrakesh, Morocco in November.

Links

• UN climate talks in Bonn seek to turn Paris agreement into action 13.05.2016
• Will Paris make a difference?
• Deadly heat waves in Thailand and India
• E-mobility to drive Europe toward decarbonization 29.04.2016 
• Is Germany green enough? 11.05.2016

Climate Change Puts 1.3bn People And $158tn At Risk, Says World Bank

The Guardian - Larry Elliott

Organisation urges better city planning and defensive measures to defend against rapid rise in climate change-linked disasters 

Flooding and drought will affect more people but few countries are planning for it, warns the World Bank. Photograph: Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty Images

The global community is badly prepared for a rapid increase in climate change-related natural disasters that by 2050 will put 1.3 billion people at risk, according to the World Bank.
Urging better planning of cities before it was too late, a report published on Monday from a Bank-run body that focuses on disaster mitigation, said assets worth $158tn – double the total annual output of the global economy – would be in jeopardy by 2050 without preventative action.
The Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery said total damages from disasters had ballooned in recent decades but warned that worse could be in store as a result of a combination of global warming, an expanding population and the vulnerability of people crammed into slums in low-lying, fast-growing cities that are already overcrowded.
"With climate change and rising numbers of people in urban areas rapidly driving up future risks, there's a real danger the world is woefully unprepared for what lies ahead," said John Roome, the World Bank Group's senior director for climate change.
"Unless we change our approach to future planning for cities and coastal areas that takes into account potential disasters, we run the real risk of locking in decisions that will lead to drastic increases in future losses."
The facility's report cited case studies showing that densely populated coastal cities are sinking at a time when sea levels are rising. It added that the annual cost of natural disasters in 136 coastal cities could increase from $6bn in 2010 to $1tn in 2070.
The report said that the number of deaths and the monetary losses from natural disasters varied from year to year, but the upward trend was pronounced.
Total annual damage – averaged over a 10-year period – had risen tenfold from 1976–1985 to 2005–2014, from $14bn to more than $140bn. The average number of people affected each year had risen over the same period from around 60 million people to more than 170 million.
Although developed countries have been responsible for the bulk of historic global emissions, poorer countries are more vulnerable to the impact of climate change and they demanded financial help from the west as part of last December's breakthrough global deal to reduce emissions.
Oxfam this week called on rich countries to make good on the pledges made at the Paris conference to provide the funding to help developing countries adapt to the effects of global warming.
"Climate change is a brutal reality confronting millions of the world's most vulnerable people. Their need for financial support to adapt to climate extremes is urgent and rising," Oxfam said in its Unfinished Business report.
"International support for adaptation falls well short of what is needed. Latest estimates indicate that only 16% of international climate finance is currently dedicated to adaptation – a mere $4bn–$6bn per year of which is public finance."
According to the the facility, disaster risk is affected by three factors. It said these were: hazard – the frequency of potentially dangerous naturally occurring events, such as earthquakes or tropical cyclones; exposure – the size of the population and the economic assets located in hazard-prone areas; and vulnerability – the susceptibility of the exposed elements to the natural hazard.
It added that hazard was increasing due to climate change; exposure was going up because more people were living in hazardous areas and that vulnerability was on the rise because of badly designed and poorly planned housing.
The World Bank-run body said the population was expected to rise by at least 40% in 14 of the 20 most populated cities in the world between 2015 and 2030, with some cities growing by 10 million people in that period. "Many of the largest cities are located in deltas and are highly prone to floods and other hazards, and as these cities grow, an ever greater number of people and more assets are at risk of disaster."
Francis Ghesquiere, head of the secretariat at the The Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, said: "By promoting policies that reduce risk and avoiding actions to drive up risk, we can positively influence the risk environment of the future. The drivers of future risk are within the control of decision makers today. They must seize the moment."

Links

• Global warming will hit poorer countries hardest, research finds
• World Bank fudges the fossil fuel facts
• World Bank must do more on fossil fuels
• Scrap fossil fuel subsidies now and bring in carbon tax, says World Bank chief
• Davos 2015: World Bank chief makes climate action plea
• Tackling climate change would grow global economy, World Bank says
• World Bank says growth alone can't end poverty
• Climate change will 'lead to battles for food', says head of World Bank

Confirmed: Southern Hemisphere CO2 Level Rises Above Symbolic 400ppm Milestone

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

A significant marker of rising global greenhouse gas emissions has been passed, with a key monitoring site on Tasmania's north-west tip recording atmospheric carbon-dioxide exceeding 400 parts per million for the first time.
As foreshadowed by Fairfax Media last week, a baseline reading at the Cape Grim station that exceeded the 400-ppm mark of the primary gas driving global warming was imminent.

Cape Grim, one of the world's most important monitoring stations for gauging changes in the atmosphere. Photo: Auscape

As it turned out, "the unfortunate milestone" was reached on Tuesday May 10 at 8am, local time, said Paul Krummel, who heads the CSIRO team analysing data from the most important site in the southern hemisphere. (See chart below.)

"It's a bit sooner than we expected," Mr Krummel told Fairfax Media. "It just rocketed up there."

Australian emissions are on the increase, particularly in the electricity sector. Photo: Michele Mossop 

Atmospheric readings from Cape Grim, along with two stations in Hawaii and Alaska, are closely watched as they date back decades and closely track a range of pollutants from ozone-depleting chemicals to the various greenhouse gases resulting from burning fossil fuels and clearing forests.
Mr Krummel said that while mostly symbolic, the 400-ppm reading "highlights the problem of rising emissions, which are increasing more rapidly than they used to be".
A report out earlier this year from the World Meteorological Organization noted atmospheric readings of CO2 at the Mauna Loa site in Hawaii rose 3.05 ppm in 2015 alone – the biggest increase in the 56 years of research.

Melting moments: A polar bear off the coast of Svalbard, Norway. Photo: Steven Kazlowski

Sun-Herald editorial illustration from May 15. Photo: David Rowe

The recent surge in CO2 levels was not unexpected because of the giant El Nino event now breaking up in the Pacific. In El Nino years, global temperatures get a kick higher and droughts tend to be worse. As a result, vegetation take out less CO2 from the atmosphere.
CSIRO's Mr Krummel said the El Nino influence was evident in Cape Grim's reading with barely a dip in the past year as might otherwise be expected in spring.
"This year, it's just plateaued and now it's taken off again," he said, adding the site was "probably one of the last places on earth" to remain below 400 ppm.
Sites in the northern hemisphere exceeded 400 ppm from 2012 onwards. But as the region has greater seasonal variation – mostly because there is more terrestrial vegetation – CO2 concentrations dropped back below that mark each spring.
Once Cape Grim gets past a short period with CO2 levels gyrating around 400 ppm, it will need a huge global effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions to push the level back down.
"It's not going to go back below 400 ppm for a very long time unless we get very good at mitigation," Mr Krummel said.Global CO2 levels were running at roughly 280 ppm up until about 1850 when they started to take off. (See chart below).
Climate scientists, such as David Karoly at Melbourne University, note that when other greenhouse gases, such as methane, are included, the situation is even bleaker.
The so-called carbon dioxide-equivalent level that takes in the full global warming impact is now about 485 ppm.
Both 2014 and 2015 were record hot years globally in data going back about 130 years. With the effect of a strong El Nino overlaying long-term trends, this year is likely to be even hotter after a scorching start.
Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the UK's University of Reading, has constructed the following animation showing how the world has warmed in the past 166 years.

Many regions of the world are experiencing unusual warmth for May, with parts of Alaska expected to be 15 degrees warmer than average.
Even Sydney is running about 5 degrees above average so far for May and Australia on the whole is headed for close to its warmest autumn on record.
The Cape Grim site, meanwhile, celebrated its 40th anniversary in March with a cloud over its future because of the CSIRO job cuts.
While management has promised to maintain the facility that it runs in cooperation with the Bureau of Meteorology, the number of CSIRO staff analysing the gases collected at the site is expected to be cut by about one-third from the current tally of about 30 researchers.

Links

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• April joins parade of record global temperatures