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Anthony Watts, sceptic and scourge of climate change science, has used copyright laws to censor an opponent.
One of the allegations made repeatedly by climate change deniers is that they are being censored. There’s just one problem with this claim: they have yet to produce a single valid example. On the other hand, there are hundreds of examples of direct attempts to censor climate scientists.
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Some scientists fear climate change will adversely affect the monsoon season.
It is almost halfway through the rainy season, and the monsoon in many parts of South Asia continues to remain unreliable.
In some places it has been crippling weak, while in others it has been devastatingly intense.
There are places reeling from drought, yet at the same time there are areas that have been hit by torrential rains, triggering floods and landslides in a very short span of time.
This has made the lives of millions of people difficult and has left them increasingly worried for the future.
Very little of the arable land is irrigated, and local populations depend on monsoon rainfall for agriculture.
Crops in the region are dependent upon the annual monsoon rains.
The monsoon clouds have weakened in several parts of the region and the variable and erratic rains have left weather forecasters scratching their heads.
This failure of the monsoons to behave as expected has led to the question of whether climate change is to blame.
Experts differ on whether these changes are directly linked to climate.
“This year’s monsoon behaviour cannot yet be attributed to climate change as it is still within the observed natural variability of the monsoon,” said Krishna Kumar Kanikicharla, a scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology.
“Our assessment of climate model simulations for the current and the next century indicate no significant deviation until the middle of the 21st Century. Thereafter, the monsoon rainfall will continue to increase by 8-10% from current levels.”
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India has resisted the external imposition of climate change law – and with good reason. But its about-turn is to be applauded.
Here’s the best news I’ve seen all year: India is finally lumbering into action on climate change.
Though this country is likely to be hit harder than almost anywhere else by the climate crash, not least because its food production is largely dependent on meltwater from Himalayan glaciers, which are rapidly retreating, it has almost been a point of pride in India not to respond to the requests of richer nations to limit its emissions.
I think there are several reasons for this, not all of them discreditable. The first is that Indian people and governments have rightly perceived that when it comes to acting on climate change, most developed countries are all leaf and no plums. They make grand statements (remember the G8 meeting) about the need to cut emissions, but in most cases they haven’t been translating them into domestic policy (the UK is now an exception). With some justice, India has suspected that it is being urged to implement global policies that the rich nations have no intention of honouring.
Indians are also painfully aware that the rich nations in the past deliberately prevented their nation from developing. England, for example, banned the import of calico (cotton cloth) from India, in order to protect its own textile industries. It went on to smash Indian looms and cut off the thumbs of Indian weavers in order prevent them from making their superior products. As Ha Joon Chang shows in his book Kicking Away the Ladder, England’s industrial revolution was made possible by preventing India’s. Many people there suspect that attempts to limit India’s future greenhouse gas emissions have the same purpose.
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German carbon capture plan appears to be a victim of ‘numbyism’ – not under my backyard.
It was meant to be the world’s first demonstration of a technology that could help save the planet from global warming – a project intended to capture emissions from a coal-fired power station and bury them safely underground.
But the German carbon capture plan has ended with CO2 being pumped directly into the atmosphere, following local opposition at it being stored underground.
The scheme appears a victim of “numbyism” – not under my backyard.
Opposition to the carbon capture plan has contributed to a growing public backlash against renewable energy projects, raising fears that Europe will struggle to meet its low-carbon commitments. Last week, the Danish firm Vestas blamed British “nimbies” opposing wind farms for its decision to close its turbine factory on the Isle of Wight.
Many countries continue to use coal for generating power as it is the cheapest and most readily available fuel in the world. It will probably power the development of China and India. But coal is also seen as the dirtiest fuel. So, Vattenfall’s Schwarze Pumpe project in Spremberg, northern Germany, launched in a blaze of publicity last September, was a beacon of hope, the first scheme to link the three key stages of trapping, transporting and burying the greenhouse gases.
The Swedish company, however, surprised a recent conference when it admitted that the €70m (£60.3m) project was venting the CO2 straight into the atmosphere. “It was supposed to begin injecting by March or April of this year but we don’t have a permit. This is a result of the local public having questions about the safety of the project,” said Staffan Gortz, head of carbon capture and storage communication at Vattenfall. He said he did not expect to get a permit before next spring: “People are very, very sceptical.”
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From Shetland to the Isle of Wight, feelings run high as plans to transform the UK into a low-carbon economy hit further trouble.
Shetland, where plans for Europe’s biggest onshore windfarm have been blown off course by formal objections. Photograph: Patrick Dieudonne/Getty Images.
Europe’s largest onshore windfarm project has been thrown in severe doubt after the RSPB and official government agencies lodged formal objections to the 150-turbine plan, it emerged today.
The setback adds to the problems facing the government’s ambition to install 10,000 new turbines across the UK by 2020 as part of its plan to cut the carbon emissions causing climate change.
The proposed 550MW windfarm, sprawling across the centre of Shetland’s main island, would add almost 20% to existing onshore wind capacity. But the objectors say the plans could seriously damage breeding sites for endangered birds, including a rare wader, the whimbrel, which was unexpectedly discovered by the windfarm developer’s own environmental survey teams. Other species at risk include the red throated diver, golden plover and merlin.
The RSPB heavily criticised the proposal from Viking Energy after initially indicating it could support the scheme. The RSPB also claims now that installation of the turbines could release significant carbon dioxide from the peat bogs affected, undermining the turbines’ potential to combat global warming.
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The current UK government carries the scars of repeated blows from the environmental lobby over its failure to “walk the walk” on climate change.
So with some interest as to whether the umbrella of the UK Low Carbon Transition Plan would shelter it from further blows, I decided to ride the ride by bicycle from the BBC’s Bush House to a news conference telling us about the plan at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills – a journey of about a mile under the rain-pregnant London skies.
It was not a promising start. Within seconds I was tucked up underneath the high-emitting end of a diesel-powered double-decker bus, stopped in my tracks by congestion, the particulate wind chugging through the holes in my cycle helmet.
Half of the journey was a frustrating scoot past serried ranks of stationary buses, vans and cabs – moving faster than them, swallowing their exhaust, forced onto the cobbled Strand central reservation by their blockage of the road surface.
So it was with some irony that I subsequently listened to Business Secretary Lord Mandelson comment that one impact of the low carbon plan would be that he could ride his bicycle more.
London Mayor Boris Johnson is also a cyclist – I have overtaken him several times down the years, though I doubt he recognised it – but still, the reality of cycling in London, as in most other British cities, is all too often a frustrating, particulate-drenched crawl along gutters of urban canyons blocked solid with angry metal.
Transports of delight
Transport finds a place in the low carbon vision – that in itself is worth a remark, given the Department of Transport’s traditional reluctance to espouse anything with a hint of greenery.
Twenty percent of the carbon cuts to 2020 is supposed to come from transport; the bulk of that is from road traffic.
The government is pushing major increases in vehicle fuel efficiency.
Statistics suggest that for cars at least, something is happening, with emissions on a plateau for the last decade despite the continued rise in kilometres travelled; even so, a hike of 40% in the fuel efficiency of new cars in just 11 years is nothing if not ambitious.
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The worst-case scenarios on climate change envisaged by the UN two years ago are already being realised, say scientists at an international meeting.
In a statement in Copenhagen on their six key messages to political leaders, they say there is a increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climate shifts.
Even modest temperature rises will affect millions of people, particularly in the developing world, they warn.
But, they say, most tools needed to cut carbon dioxide emissions already exist.
More than 2,500 researchers and economists attended this meeting designed to update the world on the state of climate research ahead of key political negotiations set for December this year.
New data was presented in Copenhagen on sea level rise, which indicated that the best estimates of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made two years ago were woefully out of date.
Scientists heard that waters could rise by over a metre across the world with huge impacts for hundreds of millions of people.
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Some regions of the UK are likely to see more floods, especially in winter.
The UK needs to plan now for a future that will be hotter and bring greater extremes of flood and drought, says Environment Secretary Hilary Benn.
Launching the UK Climate Projections 2009 report (UKCP09), Mr Benn told MPs that the UK climate will change even with a global deal on emissions.
By 2080, London will be between 2C and 6C hotter than it is now, he said.
Every part of the UK is likely to be wetter in winter and drier in summer, according to the projections.
Summer rainfall could decrease by about 20% in the south of England and in Yorkshire and Humberside by the middle of the century.
Scotland and the north-west of England could see winter rainfall increase by a similar amount.
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Climate change could be the “last straw” for rare woodlands in the far north of Scotland already damaged by overgrazing animals, it is claimed.
The warning from the North Highland Forest Trust (NHFT) came as it received £250,000 from charities to help in its work to protect trees.
The biodiversity project team wants to preserve woodlands
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The researchers fear that the diversity found in woodlands could be lost forever.
British woodlands are less biologically distinctive than they were 70 years ago, says a team of UK researchers.
The use of fertilisers in farming had increased soil fertility, while tree canopies had grown thicker and cut light levels, they explained.
As a result, the woodlands were becoming home to the same species, resulting in the unique characteristics of individual sites being lost.
The findings appear online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The research was carried out by scientists from Bournemouth University, Natural England and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH).
“This study shows that increased pollution and poor countryside management have led to increasing homogenisation of biodiversity in British woodlands,” said co-author Professor James Bullock, an ecologist from CEH.
“These two issues must be addressed in future if we wish to restore the diverse woodland communities of the past.”
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