03/10/2016

Good News For Asian Elephants As India Ratifies Climate Deal

SBS - Lisa Upton

Scientists who work with wild Asian elephants have welcomed India’s move to ratify the global agreement on climate change.
Wild Asian elephants in Karnataka, southern India. (Nishant Srinivasaiah)
Nishant Srinivasaiah is a certain breed of person, one with a deep reservoir of patience. He spends hours, that stretch into days, waiting and hoping to observe Asian elephants in the wild. “I don’t always have patience with people, but I do with elephants,” he laughs.
Backpack on, binoculars in hand, the PhD student has offered to let SBS join him for the day as he searches for three elephants he’s been observing for many years in the southern Indian state of Karnataka.                 
The leader of the group he calls Tin Tin because his tusks move up in the same direction as Tin Tin’s hair. The others are PT Junior (Perfect Tusks) and Sam (sub-adult male).
Tin Tin, PT Junior and Sam have moved out of a national park to land near a local village, looking for food; there’s nothing more nutritious than an irrigated crop. It’s a risky strategy for both elephants and humans.
“People around here say they’re very scared to come out of their houses,” says Mr Srinivasaiah.
“Similarly for elephants, they’re extremely scared when they’re moving around at night. Increasingly, their behaviour might get more aggressive.”
Mr Srinivasaiah’s study area covers 6000 square kilometres across the states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. In the past month, elephants have killed seven people in this area.


Scientists say climate change will bring more extreme weather events, like droughts, which will force hungry elephants to go in search of food. Invariably, this will lead to conflict.
These elephant scientists have welcomed India’s move to ratify the global agreement on climate change agreed in Paris last year.
More than 60 countries have now ratified the agreement representing almost 52 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Once that figure reaches 55 per cent the deal comes into effect.
India’s Minister of External Affairs, Sushma Swaraj, said October 2 was a significant day for India to ratify the agreement.
“This has been well thought out,” she told the United Nations recently.
“It is the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi who epitomised a lifestyle with the smallest carbon footprint.”
Professor Raman Sukumar, of the Indian Institute of Science and one of the world’s leading Asian elephant experts, says the move is significant.
“I think India has taken a very bold step and joined the global community in its commitment to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases and dangerous global warming,” he said.
In 1983, Professor Sukumar witnessed the behaviour of a clan of elephants forced from its natural habitat as a result of one of India’s worst droughts.
“Approximately 50 elephants left the states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka and marched off into the northern regions of Andhra Pradesh where wild elephants had not been seen in the last 300 to 400 years, and there was this sharp escalation in conflict between elephants and people,” he says.
The elephants trampled agriculture crops and dozens of people were killed.
“My fears are that with climate change, with heat waves or the failure of the monsoon, the elephants’ habitat would be highly stressed, that these populations will now start coming out of their natural habitat and starting wandering in human dominated landscapes,” says Professor Sukumar.
“I really don’t think we’re fully prepared to deal with this conflict because of the scale and the magnitude.
“Dealing with this conflict would mean developing the management skills to handle large numbers of elephants. The animals may not just have to be driven back, they may have to be captured and transported back to the forest. Some of the elephants may have to be captured and kept in captivity.”
The Asian elephant is found in 13 countries. India has more than half the global population with an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 in the wild.
But even the most ambitious climate agreement isn't going to stop extreme weather events and their impact on the Asian elephant.
Indian experts say the focus must be on managing the conflict that's coming.
Professor Sukumar says in future local people will need to be educated about how to behave if they encounter wild elephants.
Mr Srinivasaiah often sees villagers getting too close to elephants, assuming they’re docile creatures.
That didn’t happen on the day SBS joined Mr Srinivasaiah.
Tin Tin, PT Junior and Sam spent the day in a dry lake, camouflaged by ipomea weed and undisturbed by humans.
But as the sun set the mighty animals moved on in search of water.
The erratic weather may make some pessimistic about their future, but India’s elephant experts believe the animal is as tough as its hide; that it will survive and adapt to a warming planet.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:

Medical Staff In Dark About Policies To Mitigate Health Risks Of Climate Change, Study Says

The Guardian - 

While some states have begun developing climate and health policies, 65% said they were not aware of any such policies
A heatwave in Melbourne. Australian health professionals overwhelmingly say they don’t know of any policies that deal with the health implications of climate change. Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/AAP
Australian health professionals overwhelmingly say they don’t know of any policies that deal with the health implications of climate change, despite the World Health Organisation saying “climate change is the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century”.
The results come from the first national snapshot of the knowledge and views of doctors, nurses, health academics and other health professionals on the topic of climate and health.
They were collected by the Climate and Health Alliance, as the group prepares to present its national strategy on climate, health and wellbeing discussion paper to politicians in Canberra this month.
Liz Hanna, the president of the Climate and Health Alliance, said the strategy was supported by groups representing most of the health industry and represented the most important move in the climate and health space in Australia to date.
When the analysis of the survey results was performed, 134 health professionals or representatives of health organisations had completed the survey.
The group was highly aware of climate and health-related issues, with every respondent able to identify at least five of eight major health risks that climate change will bring, including food insecurity, increases in infectious diseases and mental health issues.
Despite that, 45% of respondents said they were not aware of the only national climate change adaptation strategy that deals with health – the National Resilience and Adaptation Strategy. Just 7% said they were “fully aware” of the strategy.
While some states have begun developing climate and health policies, 65% of respondents said they were not aware of any such policies.
“Overwhelmingly, the seemingly well-informed group could not identify many policies at national or state levels specifically targeting the health effects of climate change,” the report said.
Hanna said the lack of awareness was a result of the policies being very minimal. She said the health policies in the National Climate Resilience and Adaptation Strategy were mostly useless. “They’re motherhood statements, rather than anything that has any capacity to make a difference,” Hanna said.
Ninety-eight per cent of the respondents said they supported the development of a National Strategy for Climate, Health and Wellbeing.
Comments in the survey would be used by the Climate and Health Alliance to inform later iterations of the strategy, Hanna said.
Hanna said that, among wealthy countries, Australia was particularly vulnerable to the health impacts of climate change since it had such variable rainfall and was already very hot.
As temperatures rise, the health implications are going to force change in almost every sector, she said.
“In cold countries, landlords and people who manage public housing are required by law to have adequate heating,” Hanna said. “We’re going to get to that point but with cooling.
“It will have to permeate all the way through to cricket clubs, who have members playing out in the sun during the day.”
When the group goes to Canberra this month to present the strategy, it will be joined by representatives from medical colleges, hospital networks and alliances and associations of other health professionals.
“What we’re doing as a health sector is letting the politicians know that there are lots of things that need to be done and we’re here to help,” Hanna said.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:

Betting The Farm: Farmers Confront Climate Change

ABC Background Briefing - Jo Chandler

Climate change is here, and Australian agriculture is acutely feeling the effects. Three farmers explain how it's impacting their lives and livelihoods.
George Mills at Panshanger, near Longford in Tasmania. (ABC Rural: Rosemary Grant)
Climate change makes farming more of a gamble than it ever was. It should be a complete concern to everyone who eats on this planet, because the whole world is going to be gambling on food production.
Real-world observations of temperature spikes, pasture growth and grape harvests across southern Australia reveal that the landscape is heating up at rates experts did not expect to see until 2030.
In some instances the rates of warming are tracking at 2050 scenarios.
Scientists concerned that climate change is biting harder and faster than models anticipated are campaigning for more research investment to protect Australia's $58 billion agriculture industry from extreme weather.
Background Briefing has learned that their concerns about the capability of Australian research to address climate change will be validated in an independent review by the prestigious Australian Academy of Science.
The review, due for release in the next few weeks, has identified a substantial shortfall in the nation's climate research firepower.
It's understood that the review will recommend that the number of scientists working for CSIRO and its partners on climate science needs to increase by about 90. That is almost double the current number of full time positions.
Meanwhile, the reality is already confronting farmers on the front line, many of them battered by this last year of wild conditions.
Mark McDougall on his potato farm in Tasmania. (ABC RN: Jo Chandler)
Climate change is here, there is no doubt about it ... The hip pocket is when it makes you decide it is here or not, and it hurt our hip pockets, so we know. We're going to be still digging spuds at the end of September. We've never done that before, ever — it's a bugger. It's normally the end of May, middle of June, so we're miles behind. We pre-watered before we even planted the crop. Then as soon as we planted, we were watering straight away, then we went from that through until January. We got a rain event at the end of January which wiped out about 1,500 tonnes. Then at the end of April we got another rain event, and lost about another 1,500 tonnes. It costs about $1,000,000 of turnover. It's people we employ who don't get to work. It affects the community, it affects everyone. If that's not climate change, I don't know what is. I've been farming this area all of my life. I've only ever seen one dry period like that before, but never seen the rain events like that.
Brett McClen, chief viticulturist at Brown Brothers. (Supplied: Brown Brothers)
We are seeing grapes ripening faster and ripening within a much shorter timeframe than they once did.
Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:

02/10/2016

Climate Change And The Astrobiology Of The Anthropocene

National Public Radio - *

The Geologic History of Earth. Note the timescales. We are currently in the Holocene, which has been warm and moist and a great time to grow human civilization. But the activity of civilization is now pushing the planet into a new epoch which scientists call the Anthropocene. Ray Troll/Troll Art
You can't solve a problem until you understand it. When it comes to climate change, on a fundamental level we don't really understand the problem.
For some time now, I've been writing about the need to broaden our thinking about climate. That includes our role in changing it — and the profound challenges those changes pose to our rightly cherished "project" of civilization.
Today, I want to sharpen the point.
But first, as always, let's be clear: We have not gotten the science wrong. The Earth's climate is changing because of human activity. That part has been well-established for awhile now, in spite of the never ending — and always depressing — faux "climate debate" we get in politics.
But the part of climate change we've failed to culturally metabolize is the meaning of what's happening to us and the planet.
In other words, what we don't get is the true planetary context of the planetary transformation human civilization is driving. Getting this context right is, I think, essential — and I'm dedicating most of the year to writing a book on the subject. The book's focus is what I believe should be a new scientific (and philosophical) enterprise: the astrobiology of the Anthropocene.
I meet a lot of folks who've heard of both astrobiology and the Anthropocene before. In general, however, lots of people look at me a bit sideways when I use either word, much less lump them together as the future of humanity.
Given that experience, let's start with a couple of definitions.
A trip to NASA's astrobiology homepage will tell you the field is all about understanding life in its planetary context. It might seem strange to have an entire scientific domain dedicated to a subject for which we have just one example (i.e. life on Earth). But take that perspective and you'd miss the spectacular transformation astrobiology has brought to our understanding of life and its possibilities in the universe.
All those planets we've discovered orbiting other stars are part of astrobiological studies. The robot rovers rolling around Mars proving that the planet was once warm and wet — they are astrobiology, too. The same is true for work on Earth's deep history. These studies show us that Earth has been many planets in its past: a potential water world before major continents grew; a totally glaciated snowball world; a hothouse jungle planet. In understanding these transformations, we've gotten to see one example of life and a planet co-evolving over billions of years.
If you want an example, consider how cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, completely reworked the planet's atmosphere 2.5 billion years ago giving us the oxygen-rich air we breathe today. Another example is the work showing how after the retreat of Ice Age glaciers, Earth entered a warm, wet and climatically stable period that geologists call the Holocene — about 10,000 years ago.
The Holocene has been a good time for human civilization to emerge and thrive. The seasons have been pretty regular, moving between relatively mild boundaries of hot-ish and cold-ish. That transition was the key change and allowed humans to get stable and productive agriculture started.
But, thanks to civilization, the Holocene is now at an end. That's where the story gets really interesting and where the Anthropocene makes its entrance.
Scientists now recognize that our impact on Earth has become so significant we've pushed it out of the Holocene into the Anthropocene, an entirely new geological epoch dominated by our own activity (see Andy Revkin's reporting on the subject). And it's not just about climate change. Human beings have now "colonized" more than 50 percent of the planet's surface. And we drive flows of key planetary substances, like potassium, far above the "natural" levels.
It may seem impossible to some folks that a bunch of hairless "primates" could change an entire planet. But that view misses the most important part of our story, the part that speaks directly to our moment in planetary evolution.
What I'm interested in, now, is putting these two ideas together: the astrobiology of the Anthropocene. That means looking at what's happening to us today from the broadest possible perspective. A couple of years ago, my colleague Woody Sullivan and I published a paper titled "Sustainability and the Astrobiological Perspective: Framing Human Futures in a Planetary Context." The idea was to show how much of what's been learned in astrobiology could be brought to bear in understanding what's happening to us now (a'la climate change, etc.). Going further, we wanted to know how the astrobiological perspective about life and planets might also help us understand what to do next. (Here is a piece I wrote for The New York Times about it, since the paper is behind a pay wall.)
Our robotic probes of Venus and Mars provide one good example of this intersection. Both planets have taught us about climate extremes. Venus is a runaway greenhouse world and Mars is freezing desert. Venus taught us a huge amount about the greenhouse effect. Even better, we have ample evidence that Mars was once a warm, wet and potentially habitable world. That means Mars provides us a laboratory for how planetary climate conditions can change.
So why does that matter so much?
Astrobiology is fundamentally a study of planets and their "habitability" for life. But sustainability is really just a concern over the habitability of one planet (Earth) for a certain kind of species (homo sapiens) with a certain kind of organization (modern civilization). That means our urgent questions about sustainability are a subset of questions about habitability. The key point, here, is the planets in our own solar system, like Mars, show us that habitability is not forever. It will likely be a moving target over time. The same idea is likely true for sustainability — and we are going to need a plan for that.
Woody and I are not the only ones thinking about astrobiology and the Anthropocene. David Grinspoon, a highly-respected planetary scientist has also been pursuing his own line of inquiry on the issue. As the Library of Congress's chair of astrobiology, Grinspoon began exploring his questions with experts in fields as diverse as history and ecology. His new book The Earth In Our Hands gives a beautiful and detailed overview of the ways we must change our thinking if we want to truly understand the transformation in our midst.
Thinking about the astrobiology of the Anthropocene in terms of just our species is, I think, a rich line of inquiry. But I think we can go even further. In the last part of my book I'm following a line of research that is also the focus on my sabbatical year.
As a theoretical physicist, I'm used to watching colleagues take the science we understand now and extend it to new possible domains of behavior. This is what happens when particle physicists think about new, but as yet unobserved, kinds of particles. Such theoretical investigations can prove enormously beneficial in widening our vision of the world's behavior.
There is no reason we can't take the same approach with the astrobiology of the Anthropocene. Earlier this year, Woody and I used the amazing exo-planet data (and some very simple reasoning) to set an empirical limit on the probability that we are the only time in cosmic history that an advanced civilization evolved. It turns out the probability is pretty low — one in 10 billion trillion. In other words, one can argue that the odds are very good that we're not the first time this — meaning an energy intensive civilization — has occurred. With that idea in hand, you can take a theoretical jump and ask a simple question: How likely is it that other young civilizations like our own have run into the kind of sustainability crisis we face today?
We know enough about planets and climate to begin investigating that question. In our 2014 paper, Woody and I presented an outline for this kind approach. One can ignore science fiction issues about alien sociology and just ask physics — i.e. thermodynamic — kinds of questions.
If young civilizations use some particular energy modality (combustion, wind, solar, etc.) what will the feedback on their planet look like? (By the way, as we've discussed before, there is always a planetary feedback when using lots of energy for large-scale civilization building. No free lunches folks. Sorry).
Woody and I sketched out the kind of behaviors you might expect from this kind of modeling. Considering just population, energy use and planetary feedback, one can imagine models showing trajectories of history that lead to collapse or to sustainability.
Which path a civilization finds itself on will depend on the parameters for their planet and the energy modalities (sources) they're using (or switching between). Of course, the models I am building are not reality. But they can prove to be a huge help in understanding the interplay of forces that shape the fate of planetary-scale civilizations like ours. In the end, this kind of understanding can help us at least understand what we're up against. Are we doomed, or is there a lot wiggle room in the choices we have to make?
The key point, for me, is that consideration of the astrobiology of the Anthropocene changes the frame of our debate and lets us see something we have been missing. We're not a plague on the planet. Instead, we are simply another thing the Earth has done in its long history. We're an "expression of the planet," as Kim Stanley Robinson puts it. It's also quite possible that we are not the first civilization is cosmic history to go through something like this. From that perspective, climate change and the sustainability crises may best be seen as our "final exam" (as Raymond PierreHumbert calls it). Better yet, it's our coming of age as a true planetary species.
We will either make it across to the other side with the maturity to "think like a planet" or the planet will just move on without us. That, I believe, is the real meaning of what's happening to us now. It's a perspective we can't afford to miss.

*Adam Frank is a co-founder of the 13.7 blog, an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester, a book author and a self-described "evangelist of science." 

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:

The Lights Go Out In SA And Turnbull Flicks The Switch To Peak Stupid

The Guardian - Lenore Taylor

The PM ridiculed state renewable targets after the South Australian blackout, the very targets he has to achieve to meet his own emissions promises
Turnbull has to convince the climate sceptics in his party that change – and some impact on power prices – is inevitable. Backing in their belief that renewables can't keep the lights on is a bad way to start. Photograph: Angela Harper/AAP
One big storm and our climate and energy debate is surging back to peak stupid.
Now Malcolm Turnbull has encouraged the campaign to use the South Australian blackout to slow the shift to clean energy, saying state renewable energy targets are "extremely unrealistic".
Except all the evidence says the state targets are exactly what Australia needs to meet the promises the prime minister made in Paris last year about reducing greenhouse gases.
Of course it would be preferable to have a consistent national policy to reach those goals, but it's not exactly the states' fault that we haven't got one.
That vacuum was Tony Abbott's proud achievement, with the abolition of the carbon price and the winding back of the federal renewable energy target, after a lengthy debate about whether it should be abolished altogether, which of course dried up almost all investment in renewable energy.
And consistent, credible national policy hasn't been any more evident in the year since Turnbull took over either.
His own officials admitted in a Senate inquiry this week they had undertaken no modelling at all about how to meet the target Turnbull pledged in Paris for reducing Australia's emissions out to 2030. That's the target he is about to ratify, the target that will be Australia's legal obligation.
But plenty of others have done modelling and analysis for him, and they all conclude that he won't meet it, not with the Coalition's current policies.
They all say he will have to introduce significant new policies, including to shift electricity generation away from coal and towards renewables more quickly.
In fact they all conclude that the state targets he so ridicules (Victoria's 40% renewables by 2025, South Australia's 50% by 2025, Queensland's 50% by 2030) are more or less what he is going to have to try to achieve.
There was his own Climate Change Authority report, which concluded electricity generation needed to produce zero emissions "well before 2050". If that's the goal and we haven't got to 40% renewables by 2025, we're in big trouble.
There was the Climate Institute modelling, which found he needed to phase out high-carbon generation over the next 15 to 20 years or else face a crunch so severe after 2030 that it would cause severe economic disruption.
And there was the recent Reputex report, which also concluded the Coalition's current policies cannot reach its own targets, even factoring in the state-based renewable energy schemes Turnbull so criticises. It says he desperately needs a credible and consistent national policy, including measures to reduce emissions from power generation much faster. Who knew?
Of course the government has to find ways to shift generation from fossil fuels to renewables while ensuring we keep the lights on, and while trying to minimise the increase in power costs.
It could, for example, start the switch with an intensity-based emissions trading scheme for the electricity sector, which is Labor party policy and would therefore win bipartisan support, is very similar to the policy Turnbull proposed as opposition leader in 2009, and which the energy market regulator – the Australian Energy Market Commission – recommended he adopt last year and said could operate "without a significant effect on absolute price levels faced by consumers". (It is also something the government's "Direct Action" could be converted into, and most in the business community are assuming it will be.)
It could extend the current watered-down federal renewable energy target, which ends in 2020.
And Turnbull and his energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, absolutely should urgently consider how to make sure the electricity grid is better able to cope with increasingly frequent bouts of extreme weather.
But whatever Turnbull does has to involve convincing the climate sceptics in his own party that change – and some impact on power prices – is inevitable.
Backing in their belief that renewable energy can't keep the lights on is a bad way to start. When Malcolm Roberts, the One Nation senator and former project leader of the climate-sceptic Galileo movement, tweets how great it is that Turnbull is "coming around to One Nation's position" that's not a good thing, not if the prime minister meant anything he said on this subject in the past or has any intention of keeping the promises he made in Paris.
And whichever way he does it, he will still have to shift electricity generation to renewables, at least as quickly as the state targets are suggesting.
The longer the delays, mired in the grand delusion that his current policy is fit for purpose, and the more he entertains the view of his conservative wing that renewable energy is just some kind of leftwing plot to take the country back to the dark ages, the bigger the economic shock and disruption when Australia finally gets around to doing what it has to.
In his attack on the states this week, Turnbull said "You've got to take ideology out of it. You've got to work out what you want to achieve and then make sure that your measures will deliver that for you."
Exactly right. But what his government has done so far is the definition of putting ideology before sensible policy planning. That's irresponsible, not the states' attempts to fill a policy vacuum of the Coalition's making.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:

01/10/2016

Climate Change Is Driving Dangerous And Unpredictable Weather

Fairfax - Professor Mary Heath*

Something strange is going on with the weather. It might be spring, but that hasn't stopped snow falling in the ACT. Or, wet weather forcing the territory's major flower festival to close for the second day running. In Victoria, farms that were dying  of thirst only months earlier have had dams fill too quickly – flooding parts of the state.
In South Australia we're dealing with a storm that has been described as "cyclonic", "super" and a one-in-50-year event.
It might be spring, but that hasn't stopped snow falling in the ACT. Photo: Clare Sibthorpe
I live in a sleepy Adelaide suburb, the sort of place where droughts are front of mind, not flooding rains. My house is near a creek that is dry for most of the year. I have lived beside it for almost 20 years with little concern, but a fortnight ago the State Emergency Service issued what would become the first of many warnings.
I arrived home in time to see the creek burst its banks, sending a torrent of muddy water down our street and another a block away. Neighbours at the top end of the street were flooded almost immediately. I spoke to one woman who looked up from the TV to realise a tide of muddy water was coming in under the door and across her carpet.
A large tree toppled over in the inner southern suburb of Springfield in Adelaide. Photo: Twitter/Lauren Rose
I helped move sandbags and direct traffic out of our street, where a lake was rapidly forming. In the end, I was lucky. Having just experienced that "one-in-50-year" event, colour me surprised to discover another on the way a fortnight later.
The bureau warned this would be worse. Given the previous flood, and warnings of gale-force winds, I decided to take precautions this time: lifting precious items onto higher surfaces, packing away anything that could fly away, requesting sandbags, finding candles and getting out the gumboots.
Then the storm that everyone in Australia has been reading about arrived. The power went off, and the rain came.
As I write, rain is still falling and the winds are strong. The flood risk for the state, including my nook, has not yet peaked. Friends and relatives in the north of the state have fallen silent; they may be without power for days rather than hours. My thoughts are with the people whose homes have been damaged or destroyed, who are cold and without information.
The striking thing about all of this, from where I sit, is the fact that two once-in-50-year events have occurred in a fortnight. Meteorologists with long careers say they have never seen such a ferocious storm in our state.
The weather is rewriting history, because climate change is here on an otherwise quiet suburban street. Climate change is driving ever more dangerous and unpredictable weather that means predictions of what will happen once in  50 years, based on past data, will bear no resemblance to what we must deal with in the future.
It's time for the politicians, who claim to have our best interests at heart, to stop pretending that we can have power security based on fossil fuels without paying for it with a future that we are only glimpsing now, following the first tornadoes I remember hearing of in our state tearing across the land and ripping steel pylons out of the ground like playthings.

*Mary Heath is an Associate Professor at Flinders University, and has lived in Adelaide since 1975

 Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:

Landmark Paris Climate Change Treaty To Come Into Force Amid Alarm Over 'Signals From The Natural World'

The Independent - Ian Johnston

Expert says the 'breakneck speed' at which the Paris deal is being ratified could be because of '16 straight months of record-breaking temperatures'
Demonstrators form a human chain on the Champs de Mars during the Paris climate summit. Getty
The Paris climate change deal – hailed as a landmark step in the fight against global warming – is to be ratified by the European Union in a move that will bring the international treaty into force.
EU ministers approved the ratification at an extraordinary meeting of the Environment Council.
The agreement, already ratified by the US and China, the world's biggest polluters, becomes binding after at least 55 countries who are responsible for 55 per cent of total emissions formally sign up.
Ratification by the EU, which is responsible for 12 per cent of global emissions, would take it over the threshold, allowing the treaty to come into force before the end of this year, some four years earlier than planned.
Concern has been growing over the pace of climate change, with a group of leading climatologists warning this week that the planet could hit 2C of warming – the level at which it is thought the effects will become dangerous – by 2050 or even sooner.
They warned that the measures promised at Paris would not be enough and called for the "doubling or tripling" of efforts.
The EU ministers' decision is expected to be backed by the European Parliament next week, after which the EU will formally submit its ratification to the United Nations – before individual countries such as the UK have done so.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said: "I am happy to see that today the member states decided to make history together and bring closer the entry into force of the first-ever universally binding climate change agreement.
"We must and we can hand over to future generations a world that is more stable, a healthier planet, fairer societies and more prosperous economies.
"This is not a dream. This is a reality and it is within our reach. Today we are closer to it."
Miguel Arias Cañete, EU Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy, admitted that some had doubted the 28-nation bloc would be able to agree to act so quickly.
"Today's decision shows what Europe is all about: unity and solidarity as member states take a European approach, just as we did in Paris," he said.
"We are reaching a critical period for decisive climate action. And when the going gets tough, Europe gets going."


'Dangerous' climate change could arrive as early as 2050

 The UK's climate change and industry minister, Nick Hurd, gave the green light to adopting the Paris agreement at the meeting.
"The Paris climate agreement is an ambitious and landmark deal. I welcome today's agreement, pushing forward EU ratification of the Paris climate change agreement," he said.
"Following the Prime Minister's announcement last week at UN General Assembly, the UK will complete its domestic approval process by the end of the year."
Show all 25 images.
Richard Black, director of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), said the speed at which the deal was being approved was "truly remarkable".
"It's striking not only in the context of global climate talks, which for so many years moved at glacial pace – it's very unusual for Governments to bring any major treaty into force in less than a year," he said.
"It's tempting to say that this breakneck speed is the result of signals from the natural world, such as having 16 straight months of record-breaking temperatures and the final refutation of the 'global warming pause' narrative.
"But another equally important factor is in many nations, led by China, a clean energy revolution is taking off driven by economics as well as climate concerns – which makes cutting emissions much easier."
He agreed the pledges made at Paris were not enough to keep global warming well below 2C – the target agreed at the summit.
"But the Paris deal contains measures to 'ratchet up' national commitments, and its astoundingly quick entry into force raises the prospects of tighter emission cuts down the line that could yet steer the world away from dangerous climate change, as the majority of citizens globally want," Mr Black added.
Molly Scott Cato MEP, the Green Party's spokesperson on EU relations, said the EU had been "crucial for the fight against dangerous climate change", setting targets that "prevented our Government from totally crushing the renewable energy sector".
"But as we prepare to leave the EU it is a worrying fact that many of those who campaigned to leave and are now steering our course and are deeply sceptical about climate change and not remotely interested in pushing for a renewable energy transition," she said.
"So it is critical at this time that climate campaigners, those from the renewable energy sector, progressive politicians; indeed, anyone who cares about a safe and secure future, work together. We need to pile pressure on the government to sign the Paris Agreement without further delay."

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:
Subscribe to: Comments ( Atom )

Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative