welcome

A man wades through a flooded street in the Philippines after heavy rains from tropical storm Ketsana devesated the Pacific island.Photo: rembcc via Flickr

A man wades through a flooded street in the Philippines after heavy rains from tropical storm Ketsana devesated the Pacific island.Photo: rembcc via FlickrBANGKOK - The Philippines strongly urged developed countries Wednesday to cut greenhouse-gas emissions to stem the impact of climate change in the wake of its worst flooding in decades.

Tropical storm Ketsana dumped the heaviest rain in more than 40 years on Manila and its neighboring areas over the weekend, killing 246 people and affecting more than 2 million. It continued to leave a trail of destruction across Southeast Asia Wednesday, killing at least 49 people in Vietnam and Cambodia and smashing into Laos.

At talks in Bangkok over a global climate treaty, the Philippines’ chief negotiator Secretary Heherson Alvarez said he hoped “the sense of urgency, the sense of need for safe protection” was conveyed to rich countries.

“Tropical storm Ketsana is clearly a manifestation of the consequences of global inaction in addressing the immediate impacts of creeping climate change,” he said.  Rich countries must act “to moderate these storms and spare the whole world from the impoverishing and devastating impacts of climate change, especially to low-lying archipelagic island-nations like the Philippines,” he continued.

The Philippines is calling for developed countries to make “deep and early cuts of emissions” of more than 30 percent from 2013 to 2017 and more than 50 percent from 2018 to 2022, pegged to 1990 levels. Alvarez said the current targets of industrialised nations, accounting for 15 to 22 percent, were “not very encouraging.”

Alvarez also said the Philippines was pushing developed countries to ensure support and financing for an adaptation package for poorer countries, to combat the effects of global warming.

If the storm spurred on the negotiations then “the ruin and the pain may not have been in vain,” he told reporters.

“Bangkok would be a take-off point in the consciousness-raising so that we may be able with clearer vision to address this grave danger to the future of humanity,” he added.

The divide between rich and poor nations has continued to dominate crucial negotiations here in Bangkok, the penultimate session to develop a draft climate treaty before world leaders meet in Copenhagen in December.

A wake-up call? 

More rain fell on Manila and surrounding regions in nine hours on Saturday than the amount Hurricane Katrina dumped on New Orleans in 2005.  The ferocity of the storm shocked even seasoned experts in this Southeast Asian country where an average 20 typhoons hit every year, but they said it continued a recent pattern of unusually bad weather.

Civil defence chief Anthony Golez and the country’s chief weather forecaster, Prisco Nilo, said they were puzzled by “strange” changes in the behavior of the typhoons that struck the country over the past two years.

In April, which is supposed to be a summer month for the Philippines, three typhoons hit the country, with one of the storms triggering a landslide that killed 250 people south of the capital, Golez said.

The typhoons also deviated from their traditional paths during the month of June, traversing the northern and central parts of the main Luzon island for the first time.

“When you try to scientifically observe the data ... we will find this year and last year as very strange years, and we can only presuppose that this is due to climate change,” Golez said.

“We can’t just blame this on the rain,” Greenpeace campaigner Mark Dia said on local television. “We know this is the worst deluge in 40 years. We know there is climate change happening, there is no debate about that. This is just a glimpse of what will happen. This is not even a super typhoon. We need to be prepared. This is just a taste of things to come. We need to have more preparations and we need to factor in climate change.”

U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer said in Bangkok on Monday that Philippine floods highlighted the need for the world to agree on a global warming pact by a December deadline during talks in Copenhagen. A global accord would ensure that “the frequency and severity of those kinds of extreme weather events decreases as a result of ambitious climate change policy,” de Boer said.

Jose Bersales, humanitarian and emergency affairs director at World Vision, warned that the Philippine storm was likely a taste of more doom for the world’s poorest, who often are the least prepared for storms. “This has to be a wake-up call for the world as it prepares for the climate change talks in Copenhagen later this year,” Bersales said.

World Vision quoted recent forecasts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that tropical cyclones would become more intense, have stronger peak wind speeds and heavier precipitation.

Research by British charity Oxfam showed that the number of people affected by climate crises worldwide was projected to rise 54 percent to 375 million over the next six years.

• Study says 4C rise in temperature could happen by 2060
• Increase could threaten water supply of half world population

Droughts and heatwaves are predicted to spread if average temperatures rise by 2C. The Met Office's study warns global warming could result in a rise of 4C by 2060. Photograph: Vinay Dithajohn/EPA

Unchecked global warming could bring a severe temperature rise of 4C within many people's lifetimes, according to a new report for the British government that significantly raises the stakes over climate change.

The study, prepared for the Department of Energy and Climate Change by scientists at the Met Office, challenges the assumption that severe warming will be a threat only for future generations, and warns that a catastrophic 4C rise in temperature could happen by 2060 without strong action on emissions.

Officials from 190 countries gather today in Bangkok to continue negotiations on a new deal to tackle global warming, which they aim to secure at United Nations talks in December in Copenhagen.

"We've always talked about these very severe impacts only affecting future generations, but people alive today could live to see a 4C rise," said Richard Betts, the head of climate impacts at the Met Office Hadley Centre, who will announce the findings today at a conference at Oxford University. "People will say it's an extreme scenario, and it is an extreme scenario, but it's also a plausible scenario."

According to scientists, a 4C rise over pre-industrial levels could threaten the water supply of half the world's population, wipe out up to half of animal and plant species, and swamp low coasts.

A 4C average would mask more severe local impacts: the Arctic and western and southern Africa could experience warming up to 10C, the Met Office report warns.

The study updates the findings of the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which said the world would probably warm by 4C by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. The IPCC also listed a more severe scenario, with emissions and temperatures rising further because of more intensive fossil fuel burning, but this was not considered realistic. "That scenario was downplayed because we were more conservative a few years ago. But the way we are going, the most severe scenario is looking more plausible," Betts said.

A report last week from the UN Environment Programme said emissions since 2000 have risen faster than even this IPCC worst-case scenario. "In the 1990s, these scenarios all assumed political will or other phenomena would have brought about the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by this point. In fact, CO₂ emissions from fossil-fuel burning and industrial processes have been accelerating."

The Met Office scientists used new versions of the computer models used to set the IPCC predictions, updated to include so-called carbon feedbacks or tipping points, which occur when warmer temperatures release more carbon, such as from soils.

When they ran the models for the most extreme IPCC scenario, they found that a 4C rise could come by 2060 or 2070, depending on the feedbacks. Betts said: "It's important to stress it's not a doomsday scenario, we do have time to stop it happening if we cut greenhouse gas emissions soon." Soaring emissions must peak and start to fall sharply within the next decade to head off a 2C rise, he said. To avoid the 4C scenario, that peak must come by the 2030s.

A poll of 200 climate experts for the Guardian earlier this year found that most of them expected a temperature rise of 3C-4C by the end of the century.

The implications of a 4C rise on agriculture, water supplies and wildlife will be discussed at the Oxford conference, which organisers have billed as the first to properly consider such a dramatic scenario.

Mark New, a climate expert at Oxford who has organised the conference, said: "If we get a weak agreement at Copenhagen then there is not just a slight chance of a 4C rise, there is a really big chance. It's only in the last five years that scientists have started to realise that 4C is becoming increasingly likely and something we need to look at seriously." Limiting global warming to 2C could only be achieved with new technology to suck greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. "I think the policy makers know that. I think there is an implicit understanding that they are negotiating not about 2C but 3C or 5C."

The plateau in temperatures has been seized upon by skeptics as evidence that the threat of global warming is overblown. And some climate experts worry that it could hamper treaty negotiations and slow the progress of legislation to curb carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.

Scientists say the pattern of the last decade — after a precipitous rise in average global temperatures in the 1990s — is a result of cyclical variations in ocean conditions and has no bearing on the long-term warming effects of greenhouse gases building up in the atmosphere.

But trying to communicate such scientific nuances to the public — and to policy makers — can be frustrating, they say.

Mojib Latif, a prize-winning climate and ocean scientist from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Kiel, in Germany, wrote a paper last year positing that cyclical shifts in the oceans were aligning in a way that could keep temperatures over the next decade or so relatively stable, even as the heat-trapping gases linked to global warming continued to increase.

But Dr. Latif, who gives about 200 talks to the public, business leaders and officials each year, said he had been met with confusion and even anger when he tried to describe this normal variation in climate while at the same time conveying the long-term threat of global warming.

“People understand what I’m saying, but then basically wind up saying, ‘We don’t believe anything,’ ” he said in a telephone interview.

Other climate researchers dispute Dr. Latif’s forecast, saying that climate cannot be reliably predicted on such a short time scale, though even they agree that sooner or later, cool stretches are inevitable.

Underscoring just how little clarity there is on short-term temperature fluctuations, researchers from Britain’s climate change office, in a paper published in August, projected “an end to this period of relative stability,” with half the years between now and 2015 exceeding the record-setting global temperatures of 1998.

Whatever the next decade may hold, critics of global warming have lost no time in using the current temperature plateau to build their case.

“I think it supports the arguments of those who’ve said, ‘What’s the rush for policy on this issue?’ ” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist affiliated with George Mason University and the Cato Institute, a group opposing most regulatory solutions to environmental problems.

The recent stability of global temperatures makes regular appearances in blog postings disputing the reality of global warming and is frequently invoked by pundits who oppose the climate bill that passed the House this year and is pending in the Senate.

Advocates of such regulatory measures are equally vehement. In a post last week on his blog, Climate Progress, Joseph Romm, a physicist and energy expert affiliated with the liberal Center for American Progress, wrote that statements by climate skeptics about planetary cooling were “nonsense.”

“We need all the unmuffled warnings we can get given that humans are not like slowly boiling frogs, we are like slowly boiling brainless frogs,” he wrote.

The recent spate of years with stable temperatures is particularly noticeable because it followed a seesawing from unusually cool temperatures to unusually hot ones in the 1990s, said Vicky Pope of Britain’s climate agency, called the Met Office.

The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines had a cooling influence, as the volcano threw off veil-like emissions. Then, in 1998, an El Niño episode in the Pacific Ocean set off a record-setting hot spell.

The global average temperature is now only 0.13 degree Fahrenheit higher than it was in 1999, according to the British meteorology office.

A series of unremarkable storm seasons followed the string of destructive storms in 2004 and 2005 that included Hurricane Katrina. And in the Arctic, an extraordinary summer retreat of sea ice in 2007 has been followed by less substantial losses and projections by some researchers of a possible, if temporary, recovery.

Most climate scientists stand firm in their projections of centuries of rising seas and other disruptive effects of a warming planet if humans take no steps to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases.

In an address to world leaders at the climate summit meeting on Tuesday, Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has advised the world’s nations on climate issues for 20 years, described the mounting risk and said, “Science leaves us no space for inaction now.”

A clearer view of whether the recent temperature plateau undermines arguments for dangerous climate change in the long run should come in a few years, as the predictions made by the British climate researchers are tested. Their paper appeared in a supplement to an August issue of The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

While the authors concluded that there was a 1 in 8 chance of having a decade-long pause in warming like the current plateau, even with rising concentrations of greenhouse gases, the odds of a 15-year pause, they wrote, are only 5 in 100. As a result, the next few years of observations could tip the balance toward further concern or greater optimism.

Meanwhile, social scientists who study the way people understand and respond to environmental problems say it is not surprising that the current temperature stability has created confusion and apathy.

Getting people to care about a climate threat that is decades away is hard enough, they say, without adding in the vagaries of natural climate cycles.

At best, said Robert J. Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University, global warming remains an abstraction for many people.

“It does not have the direct visual or emotive impact of seeing seabirds covered in oil from the Exxon Valdez oil spill,” he said.

Johan Rockström^1,2, Will Steffen^1,3, Kevin Noone^1,4, Åsa Persson^1,2, F. Stuart Chapin, III⁵, Eric F. Lambin⁶, Timothy M. Lenton⁷, Marten Scheffer⁸, Carl Folke^1,9, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber^10,11, Björn Nykvist^1,2, Cynthia A. de Wit⁴, Terry Hughes¹², Sander van der Leeuw¹³, Henning Rodhe¹⁴, Sverker Sörlin^1,15, Peter K. Snyder¹⁶, Robert Costanza^1,17, Uno Svedin¹, Malin Falkenmark^1,18, Louise Karlberg^1,2, Robert W. Corell¹⁹, Victoria J. Fabry²⁰, James Hansen²¹, Brian Walker^1,22, Diana Liverman^23,24, Katherine Richardson²⁵, Paul Crutzen²⁶ & Jonathan A. Foley²⁷

We all know what has to happen. But are we too primitive and irrational to do it?

We are – at the same time – thrillingly close and sickeningly far from solving our planetary fever. The world's leaders huddled in New York City yesterday to discuss man-made global warming, in a United Nations building that will soon be underwater if they fail. They all know what has to happen: their scientists have told them, plainly and urgently.

As man-made warming rises by up to 2.4C, all sorts of awful things happen – whole island-states in the South Pacific will drown, for example – but we can stop it. If we turn off the warming gases, the temperature will stabilise. But if we go beyond 2.4C, global warming will run away from us, and we will have lost the "Stop" button. The Amazon rainforest will dry out and burn down, releasing all the carbon stored in the trees; the vast amounts of warming gases stored in the Arctic will be belched into the atmosphere; and so 3C will turn ineluctably to 4C, which will turn to 5C, and the planet will rapidly become a place we do not recognise.

To stay the right side of this climatic Point of No Return, global emissions need to start falling by 2015 – just six years from now – and drop by 85 per cent by 2050. Our leaders need to agree this at the climate talks in Copenhagen in December. The scientific debate is over. The answer is in sight. Indeed, each one of the leaders could feel the solution on their skin and in their hair yesterday: it lies in the awesome power of the sun.

Each day, the sun bombards our planet with 9,000 times more power than we need to run every car, warm every home, and power every electrical appliance on earth. If we can capture just a sliver of one per cent of it, we can kick fossil fuels into the melting dustbin of history. The technology exists. It is there, waiting for us. Professor Anthony Patt has shown that all the energy Europe needs could be provided by lining 0.3 per cent of the Sahara desert – an area the size of Belgium – with concentrating solar power technology. A consortium of Germany's leading corporations is raring to go. They just need the money. It costs a lot up front – $50bn – but this is nothing like as much we would spend chasing the last dribbles of oil into warzones, and defending ourselves as the planet goes into meltdown.

Every continent has the same option. The entire energy needs of the US could be met by covering 200 square kilometres of its empty deserts with solar plants: it would cost about 10 years' worth of oil purchases, with none of the wars, tyrannies, or blowback Islamism. China and India have similar options. It is achievable, with the kind of great effort we made to defeat the Nazis. We too could be a great generation – one that came close to the brink, but then came together in a great collective effort to change course. We would leave a lean, green civilisation that will run for millennia.

But instead, our leaders are fiddling with the old dirty technologies, too addicted and too addled to move us on and up. In Britain, we are actually turning back to coal, mining 15 per cent more this year than last. Professor Jim Hansen, the head of Nasa and the world's leading climatologist, calls coal power stations "death factories" that condemn millions to drown, or starve, or burn. Across Europe, solar power is being allowed to wither: Germany's biggest solar company, Q-Cells, has seen its stock fall from €100 to €10 in a year. The other market-leader, Spain, has seen a similarly disastrous fallback.

The World Bank, which receives £400m of your taxes every year, is promoting this soot-streaked vision across the planet. They have just spent $5bn helping poor countries to build power plants that will destroy them. Indeed, it just bankrolled the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in earth – a coal plant in Gujarat, Western India.

How can this possibly be defended? US and European governments are engaged in the collective fantasy that coal can be rendered "clean" by "scrubbing" its carbon emissions from the chimney-stacks, and storing them somewhere forever. In the real world, one of the largest "clean coal" pilot plants in operation, Hazelwood power station in the Latrobe Valley, catches just 0.05 per cent of its carbon emissions. Professor Howard Herzog, the renowned expert on this technology, was recently asked what the chances of the technology achieving the cuts we need is. He replied: "Zero."

But a small number of people make a lot of money on coal and oil and gas. A shift to reaping power from the sun and the wind and the waves would render the rocks and barrels they have spent a fortune mining worthless – so they are prepared to pay politicians to keep the system working in their favour, and lavish billions on misinformation campaigns to keep us confused.

You can see this process working most clearly in the United States. Barack Obama is a highly intelligent man who has appointed some of the best scientists in the world to explain to him what needs to happen now. But he is trapped in a political system soaked in petrol. The lackey-filled House of Representatives has passed a woefully inadequate "Cap and Trade" bill, which – if it worked perfectly – would cut emissions by six per cent below 1990 levels. Even that won't happen: many of the permits oil companies are supposed to pay for will now be given away for nothing, producing no reductions at all. And even this feeble, sickly bill may not make it through Congress.

Meanwhile, China has hinted it would agree to more substantial restraint at Copenhagen if the rich world – responsible for 90 per cent of all the warming gases belched into the atmosphere so far – agrees to give one per cent of its GDP annually to poor countries to adjust to clean fuels. There's a lot to criticise the Chinese dictatorship for, but this isn't one of them. It's a reasonable request for simple justice. Poor countries have done very little to cause this crisis, but they will feel the worst, first. They deserve our reparations. Yet both the EU and US have damned this sane proposal as "totally unrealistic".

So are we, as a species, condemned to fall into the historical crack between a world powered by fossil fuels, and one powered by the sun? Will the fossil record discovered millions of years from now show we were just too irrational and too primitive to make that leap?

If we despair and wait glumly for the meltdown, we will make it so. Then we will have little choice but to try to survive as best we can in a radically altered landscape. But there is still a slim window in which sanity can prevail – and I believe, perhaps madly, that it can. It will require a global mass movement of extraordinary tenacity, pressuring governments everywhere, and overpowering the fossil fools. We can still change the tale of the 21st century from one of collapse to one of a species finding a way to live with its ecosystem, rather than against it.

It can be done. It must be done. Copenhagen is in three months. There, and in the years after when the deal must be implemented, we will learn something profound about ourselves. Are we a great generation – or the worst of all?

j.hari@independent.co.uk

WHEN Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word Anthropocene around 10 years ago, he gave birth to a powerful idea: that human activity is now affecting the Earth so profoundly that we are entering a new geological epoch.

The Anthropocene has yet to be accepted as a geological time period, but if it is, it may turn out to be the shortest - and the last. It is not hard to imagine the epoch ending just a few hundred years after it started, in an orgy of global warming and overconsumption.

Let's suppose that happens. Humanity's ever-expanding footprint on the natural world leads, in two or three hundred years, to ecological collapse and a mass extinction. Without fossil fuels to support agriculture, humanity would be in trouble. "A lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people," says Tony Barnosky, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In this most pessimistic of scenarios, society would collapse, leaving just a few hundred thousand eking out a meagre existence in a new Stone Age.

Whether our species would survive is hard to predict, but what of the fate of the Earth itself? It is often said that when we talk about "saving the planet" we are really talking about saving ourselves: the planet will be just fine without us. But would it? Or would an end-Anthropocene cataclysm damage it so badly that it becomes a sterile wasteland?

The only way to know is to look back into our planet's past. Neither abrupt global warming nor mass extinction are unique to the present day. The Earth has been here before. So what can we expect this time?

Take greenhouse warming. Climatologists' biggest worry is the possibility that global warming could push the Earth past two tipping points that would make things dramatically worse. The first would be the thawing of carbon-rich peat locked in permafrost. As the Arctic warms, the peat could decompose and release trillions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere - perhaps exceeding the 3 trillion tonnes that humans could conceivably emit from fossil fuels. The second is the release of methane stored as hydrate in cold, deep ocean sediments. As the oceans warm and the methane - itself a potent greenhouse gas - enters the atmosphere, it contributes to still more warming and thus accelerates the breakdown of hydrates in a vicious circle.

"If we were to blow all the fossil fuels into the atmosphere, temperatures would go up to the point where both of these reservoirs of carbon would be released," says oceanographer David Archer of the University of Chicago. No one knows how catastrophic the resulting warming might be.

That's why climatologists are looking with increasing interest at a time 55 million years ago called the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum, when temperatures rose by up to 9 °C in a few thousand years - roughly equivalent to the direst forecasts for present-day warming. "It's the most recent time when there was a really rapid warming," says Peter Wilf, a palaeobotanist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. "And because it was fairly recent, there are a lot of rocks still around that record the event."

By measuring ocean sediments deposited during the thermal maximum, geochemist James Zachos of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has found that the warming coincided with a huge spike in atmospheric CO₂. Between 5 and 9 trillion tonnes of carbon entered the atmosphere in no more than 20,000 years (Nature, vol 432, p 495). Where could such a huge amount have come from?

Volcanic activity cannot account for the carbon spike, Zachos says. Instead, he blames peat decomposition, which would have happened not from melting permafrost - it was too warm for permafrost - but through climatic drying. The fossil record of plants from this time testifies to just such a drying episode.

Carbon spike

If Zachos and colleagues are right, then 55 million years ago Earth passed through a carbon crisis very much like the one feared today: a sudden spike in CO₂, followed by a runaway release of yet more greenhouse gases. What happened next may give us a glimpse of what to expect if our current crisis hits full force.

Geochemists have long known that when a pulse of CO₂ enters the air, much of it quickly dissolves in the upper layer of the ocean before gradually dispersing through deeper waters. Within a few centuries, an equilibrium is reached, with about 85 per cent of the CO₂ dissolved in the oceans and 15 per cent in the atmosphere. This CO₂ persists for tens or hundreds of thousands of years - what Archer believes will be the "long tail" of the Anthropocene. Until recently, though, climate modellers were a bit fuzzy on what this tail would look like.

"Until we had some case studies from the past, there was always some degree of uncertainty in the models," says Zachos. His studies are beginning to clear up these doubts. Carbonate rocks laid down on the sea floor during the carbon spike, for example, reveal that the oceans quickly became very acidic (Science, vol 308, p 1611). But this extreme acidification lasted just 10,000 or 20,000 years, barely a blink of an eye by geological standards, after which the oceans returned to near-normal conditions for the next 150,000 years. Even the stores of peat and methane hydrates must have regenerated within 2 million years, Zachos says, because at that time the planet underwent another, smaller carbon crisis, which must also have involved peat or methane hydrates. That suggests that the long tail of the Anthropocene is unlikely to last longer than 2 million years - still not long at all by geological standards.

However, today's carbon spike differs from that of the late Palaeocene in one important way: our planet is much cooler than it was back then, so warming is likely to have a more profound effect. During the late Palaeocene, the world was warm and largely ice-free. Now we have bright, shiny ice caps which reflect sunlight back into space. These will melt, giving way to dark, energy-absorbing rock and soil. And with all that meltwater, sea levels will rise and permafrost will thaw more rapidly, boosting warming still further.

This extra nudge could conceivably tip the Earth out of its present cycle of glacials and interglacials and return it to an older, warmer state. "The Earth was ice-free for many millions of years. The current ice ages started only about 35 million years ago, so we might kick ourselves out of that," says Pieter Tans, an atmospheric scientist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado. Even so, the newly ice-free world would merely be reverting to a familiar state. On this reading of the evidence, even the most drastic climate catastrophe would have little chance of pushing the Earth's physical systems into uncharted territory.

Not so, says James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He argues that past episodes are a poor guide to what will happen in the future, for the simple reason that the sun is brighter now than it was then. Add that to the mix and the release of methane hydrates could lead to catastrophic, unstoppable global warming - a so-called "Venus syndrome" (PDF) that causes the oceans to boil away and dooms the Earth to the fate of its broiling neighbour.

So much for the Earth itself - what of life? If Hansen is right, Earth is heading for sterility. But if the lesser scenario plays out instead, it's a very different story.

Conservation biologists say we may already be in the midst of an extinction event that could potentially turn into one of the greatest mass extinctions ever - one that would alter the trajectory of evolution.

Oddly enough, the climatic turmoil of the thermal maximum led to very little loss of biodiversity. "Nobody has ever picked the Palaeocene-Eocene boundary as a major extinction interval. It's not even in the second tier," says Scott Wing, a palaeobotanist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. Instead, the fossil record shows that species simply migrated, following their preferred climate across the globe.

Today, of course, that is often not possible because roads, cities and fields have fragmented so many natural habitats. Polar and alpine species may find their habitat vanishes entirely, and this is not to mention all the other ways people imperil species.

"We're a perfect storm as far as biodiversity is concerned," says David Jablonski, a palaeontologist at the University of Chicago. "We're not just overhunting and overfishing. We're not just changing the chemistry of the atmosphere and acidifying the oceans. We're not just taking the large-bodied animals. We're doing all this stuff simultaneously." Even so, Jablonski thinks humans are unlikely to be capable of causing an extinction comparable to the one at the end of the Permian, 251 million years ago, when an estimated 96 per cent of all marine species and 70 per cent of terrestrial ones bit the dust.

Whether the Anthropocene mass extinction eventually ranks with the Permian or with lesser ones, it would still reshuffle the evolutionary deck. Once again, the past gives us some idea of what we could expect.

The fossil record tells us that every mass extinction plays out differently, because each has its own unique causes. However, there is one common factor: the species at greatest risk are those with the narrowest geographic ranges. Jablonski's studies of fossil marine snails show that species with planktonic larvae - which disperse widely - fare better than species with a more restricted distribution (Science, vol 279, p 1327).

Cockroach world

Add to that massive habitat disturbances, says Jablonski, and a picture emerges of life after the Anthropocene extinction. Small body sizes, fast reproductive rates and an ability to exploit disturbed habitats will all prove advantageous. "It's a rats, weeds and cockroaches kind of world," says Jablonski.

The wave of extinctions is likely to sweep through species in a fairly predictable way. "First we would probably lose the species that are already endangered, then it would work its way down," says Barnosky. "Eventually it would hit some of the species that we don't consider at risk today - for example, many of the African herbivores that today seem to have healthy populations."

However, predictions about the fate of any particular species are almost impossible, as luck will also play a role. The survivors will probably be a more-or-less random selection of weedy plants and opportunistic animals, notes Doug Erwin, a palaeobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution.

If the Anthropocene does end with a mass extinction, the fossil record tells us a lot about what the recovery might look like. Whether the news is good or bad depends on your perspective. "Recoveries from mass extinctions are geologically rapid, but from a human point of view grindingly long. We're talking millions of years," says Jablonski.

Immediately after a mass extinction, the fossil evidence suggests that ecosystems go into a state of shock for several million years. For many millions of years after the Permian extinction, for example, marine environments the world over were dominated by the same 25 or 30 species. "It's pretty boring," says Erwin.

Something similar happened on land after the Cretaceous extinction. Pre-extinction plant fossils from western North America testify to flourishing ecosystems, with a variety of insects feeding on a wide assortment of plants. After the extinction, though, both plant and insect diversity drops dramatically, with some insect feeding methods vanishing almost completely.

After that, confusion reigns for 10 million years. There are fossil assemblages with only a few insects and plants, ones with many insects but few plants, others with many plants but few insects - just about everything except what ecologists would call "normal" (Science, vol 313, p 1112). "At no time did we have what I would call a healthy ecosystem, with diverse insects feeding on diverse plants," says Wilf. All the while biodiversity remains low, with few new species evolving. "You're just trying to hang on," says Erwin.

A study of marine fossil diversity bears this out. Nearly a decade ago, James Kirchner of the University of California, Berkeley, and Anne Weil of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, took a database of all known marine fossils and used it to work out how closely peaks of speciation follow peaks of extinction (Nature, vol 404, p 177). "We went into this thinking, like everybody else, that when you have an extinction, you begin repopulating almost immediately," says Kirchner, now at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research in Birmensdorf. Instead, they found that speciation peaks lagged about 10 million years behind extinction peaks. "We pretty much fell out of our chairs," he says.

In fact, for the first few million years after an extinction the speciation rate actually falls. "That suggests to us a sort of wounded biosphere. Extinction events don't just remove organisms from an ecosystem, leaving lots of opportunity for new species to diversify. Instead, what we think happens is that the niches themselves collapse, so you won't have new organisms emerging to occupy them. The niches themselves don't exist any more," says Kirchner.

Eventually, though, evolution wins the day, and after a few tens of millions of years biodiversity rebounds. Sometimes, as after the Ordovician mass extinction 440 million years ago, the new regime looks a lot like the old one. But more often a new world emerges. "You're not re-establishing the old chessboard, you're designing a whole new game," says Erwin.

In the Permian, the oceans were dominated by filter-feeding animals such as brachiopods and sea lilies, which lived their whole lives attached to the bottom. Predators were rare. All that changed after the extinction, leaving a more dynamic and richer ecosystem. "From my point of view, the end-Permian mass extinction was the best thing that ever happened to life," says Erwin.

In a perverse way, then, the bottom line is an encouraging one. Even if we manage to overpopulate and overconsume ourselves back to the Stone Age, the Earth will probably survive. Life will go on. By the time the long tail of the Anthropocene is over, what little was left of humanity will probably be gone. A new geological age will dawn. Shame there won't be anybody around to give it a name.

This week's summit on climate change offered cause for confidence. But all nations now need to redouble their efforts

This week's summit on climate change at the United Nations in New York has given a strong boost to the negotiations over a major international treaty, but there remain a number of major obstacles that must be overcome before the crucial meeting in Copenhagen in December.

China, India and Japan, along with the private sector, all made positive and significant contributions at the summit.

Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, made specific commitments on curbing the growth in greenhouse gas emissions as China continues its extraordinary economic growth. While the president promised a reduction by a "notable margin" rather than a specific figure, there is no doubt that the cut will be significant. And the environment ministers of both China and India made important and constructive proposals for how their countries will reverse deforestation.

This was the kind of leadership I had hoped to see at the summit – organised by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general – with developing and emerging countries showing that they can tackle climate change while continuing their efforts to reduce poverty. But we still have a long way to go before we can be sure that a strong agreement is in place for Copenhagen.

In the next couple of years, annual emissions of greenhouse gases are likely to reach a level of 50 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. If we are to have a reasonable chance of avoiding a rise in global average temperature by more than 2C, annual emissions have to be cut to no more than 20 gigatonnes by 2050.

That means that the 9 billion people who will be living on the planet in 2050 must be producing, on average, no more than about two tonnes of greenhouse gases per year each.

At the moment, the rich industrialised countries of the European Union average about 10-12 tonnes per head of population, while the figure for the United States is almost 24 tonnes. China, by contrast, emits about 6 tonnes per head at present. Thus rich industrialised countries in particular must substantially reduce their emissions.

The developed countries must now demonstrate that they have the political will to reach a strong agreement in Copenhagen. In New York, Japan's new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, outlined how his country will reduce its emissions by 25% by 2020, compared with 1990. This was a positive example that few others matched.

President Obama has already committed to a cut of 80% in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, compared with 1990. But the American Clean Energy and Security Act passed by the House of Representatives sets an interim target for 2020 that is not considered ambitious enough by many other countries. And it is not clear when, or even if, the Senate will pass a comparable act to reduce emissions.

It is these interim targets that should now be addressed by all countries during the coming weeks. If we are to reach the goal of reducing emissions to 20 gigatonnes by 2050, we must be at about 35 gigatonnes by the halfway point of 2030.

That means global emissions have to peak within the next five years and be steadily falling by 2020. And while the commitments by the largest emitters already on the table for 2020 offer significant cuts relative to today's emissions, they collectively fall 4 or 5 gigatonnes short of what is necessary if we are to be on a realistic trajectory to reach the 2030 and 2050 targets.

Developing countries should also sharply reduce their emissions – but they must be supported, financially and through technology sharing with the rich industrialised countries. Without commitments to such support, the negotiations ahead will prove very difficult.

Although the political leaders must devise and implement the right policies to guide national and global emissions trajectories, it is the private sector that will be the main engine in the transition to a low-carbon global economy.

In that respect it was very encouraging that 181 investors, collectively responsible for the management of more than $13 trillion in assets globally, launched a statement in New York last week to support a global agreement on climate change. The Leadership Forum for business leaders, which ran alongside the summit, also highlighted a tremendous variety of innovative ideas from within the private sector for the low-carbon transition.

So there are some reasons to be more optimistic about the prospects for securing a strong agreement in Copenhagen, following the New York summit. But the obstacles that remain are very big and will require an even stronger effort to overcome, starting at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh and continuing during the coming round of treaty negotiations in Bangkok next week.

There must be real vision, leadership and creativity, as well as a mutual understanding of the difficulties of making and implementing domestic policies. But if we can muster the effort, we can, as a world, forge a path towards a more prosperous and sustainable future – for us, our children, and generations to follow.

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Thursday 24 September 2009

In the article below on climate change proposals introduced at the UN general assembly we conflated two Danish politicians in attributing a call for heads of government to participate in the talks to the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The Danish prime minister (who made the remarks) is Larks Loekke Rasmussen. Anders Fogh Rasmussen is the secretary general of Nato.

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The world inched closer to an elusive deal to combat climate change yesterday, when China, the world's biggest polluter, made its most substantial commitment yet to curb its carbon emissions and invest in clean energy.

The proposals, delivered by Hu ­Jintao, the Chinese president, on the first day of the UN general assembly meeting, included the promise of a "notable" decrease in the carbon intensity of China's economy, the amount of emissions for each unit of economic output, by 2020.

"At stake in the fight against climate change are the common interests of the entire world," Hu said. "Out of a sense of responsibility to its own people and people across the world, China fully appreciates the importance and urgency of addressing climate change."

Hu's words about a common cause resonated with leaders of the industrialised world who described a new sense of a "grand bargain" on climate change.

Hu's speech fell short of expectations that he would name the target for China's carbon intensity, and observers suggested China was keeping its cards close to its chest until the climate change summit in Copenhagen in December.

But the speech, coming soon after a change of rhetoric by India's government, raised hopes that a meaningful agreement can still be secured in Copenhagen.

Last night, Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, said the day-long meeting had rescued the Copenhagen negotiations from near certain disaster.

"One thing I am absolutely sure of, without today's summit the world would not have crossed over the finish line in Copenhagen," he said.

"Finally, we are seeing a fall in some of the frozen positions that have prevented governments from moving forward."

John Sauven, the executive director of Greenpeace, said: "This is the first time China has said publicly that it will intensify efforts to reduce emissions, but without firm targets or a detailed action plan today's announcement is too vague to be the major breakthrough we hoped for."

Hu said yesterday that his country would plant forests across an area the size of Norway, and generate 15% of its energy needs from renewables within a decade.

Ed Miliband, the climate change ­secretary, said China deserved praise for announcing any change, despite the lack of specifics. "I think it's still a tough ­battle, but for a Chinese president to come to the UN to announce a change in domestic policy in terms of targeting ­carbon ­intensity is quite a big deal" he said. The official US reaction was more muted. Todd Stern, Barack Obama's ­special envoy for climate change, said that Hu's pledge was welcome, but added: "It depends on what the number is."

Another potentially important step forward yesterday came from Japan's prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, who pledged more financial and ­technical aid for poor countries to adapt to climate change.

Like Hu, the Japanese leader gave no further details on how much cash his country would provide.

Obama also delivered strong rhetoric at the general assembly yesterday: "No nation … can escape the impact of climate change.

"The security and stability of each nation and all peoples – our prosperity, our health, and our safety – are in jeopardy. And the time we have to reverse this tide is running out."

Gordon Brown will echo Obama's words in his speech to the general assembly today. "This is the moment now to limit and reverse climate change we are inflicting on future generations," he will say. "Not later at another conference, in another decade, after we have lost 10 years to delay and inaction."

Brown will also this week try to persuade other leaders to agree to go to the Copenhagen negotiations. The Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said a number of leaders had signalled they would go to Copenhagen.

"It is obvious this issue is so complex it can't be solved by environment ministers alone or ministers of finance," he said. "In order to come to agreement, we must have heads of government."

Environmental groups criticised Obama for failing to make any new concrete proposals in yesterday's speech. "Obama's speech … was a huge missed opportunity which does nothing to break the logjam in international climate negotiations," said Friends of the Earth's Asad Rehman.

Wind power alone could provide electricity for all of China if the country overhauls its rural grids and raises the subsidy for wind energy, a new study finds. 

Photo courtesy of Tian Yake Northern and western China holds large potential for wind energy, especially in Xinjiang (pictured above), Inner Mongolia, Gansu, and Tibet.

China has rapidly become a global leader in wind energy and now ranks fourth in the world in installed capacity. But coal-fired power plants continue to supply most of the country's rising electricity needs - a development path that scientists predict will lead to dangerous levels of climate change.

New models of China's wind resources suggest that coal is not the only cost-effective energy option for the country. The winds blowing in China are powerful enough to generate low-carbon electricity that eliminates "much, if not all" of the power sector's future greenhouse gas emissions, according to researchers from Harvard University and Beijing's Tsinghua University.

"We are trying to cut into the current defined demand for new electricity generation in China, which is roughly a gigawatt (GW) a week - or an enormous 50 GW per year," said Michael McElroy, lead author of the study published in the current issue of Science, in a statement. "China is bringing on several coal-fired power plants a week. By publicizing the opportunity for a different way to go we will hope to have a positive influence."

As China's demand for electricity increases an estimated 10 percent each year, the country is projected to need an additional 800 GW of coal-generated electricity during the next 20 years. With current wind energy payments of 0.4 RMB (US$0.059) per kilowatt-hour, wind energy could displace 23 percent of coal-generated electricity. If so, China would eliminate as much as 0.62 gigatons of annual carbon dioxide emissions, or 9.4 percent of the country's current annual emissions, the study said.

Wind energy could supply all of China's 2030 electricity demands, however, if wind contract prices were increased to 0.516 RMB (US $0.076) per kilowatt-hour, the study said.

"To determine the viability of wind-based energy for China, we established a location-based economic model, incorporating the bidding process, and calculated the energy cost based on geography," said study co-author Xi Lu, a Harvard graduate student.

Rather than increase carbon dioxide emissions by 3.5 gigatons each year through 2030, as current policies would allow, the analysis determined that wind energy could replace 640 GW of coal-fired power. The switch would reduce emissions by 30 percent and require an investment of some 6 trillion RMB (US$900 billion).

"This is a large but not unreasonable investment, given the present size of the Chinese economy and the scale of the investments in both generating capacity and the grid infrastructure that will be required...to accommodate anticipated future growth in power demand," the authors wrote.

Extensive regions of northern and western China hold particularly large potential for wind energy, specifically the provinces of Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Gansu, and Tibet.

But the windiest areas are sparsely populated regions where electricity demands are low. High voltage transmissions lines are needed to connect these areas with electricity consumers in rapidly growing eastern China.

Meanwhile, existing wind farms are struggling to incorporate into the grid. Chinese law gives renewable power priority access to the grid, but a physical lack of grid capacity has limited wind energy's ability to reach customers, according to the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC).

Still, wind farms are expanding rapidly across China. The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China's top economic planner, set a 2010 wind energy target of 5 GW, which the country surpassed in 2007.

Wind energy supplied 12.2 GW of installed capacity last year, about 0.4 percent of China's total electricity supply. China announced in May that more than 100 GW of wind energy capacity will be installed by 2020 and that renewable energy will supply 40 percent of the energy market by 2050.

The recent boost in wind production dates to the passage of a 2005 renewable energy law. The policy granted renewable energy providers with 10-year contracts and guaranteed subsidies. The NDRC clarified the renewable energy law in July by differentiating wind energy tariffs for various regions throughout the country.

In an effort to stimulate the domestic wind industry, the Chinese government also issued tax rebates last year for state-owned wind turbine manufacturers. Of the 70 Chinese manufacturers that produce wind turbines, more than 20 were formed last year, according to the GWEC.

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

SHANGHAI, China — With the right blend of government policies and incentives, the Chinese greentech market could reach $1 trillion -- or 15 percent of the country’s GDP in 2013, a coalition of business and policy experts said this week.

The China Greentech Initiative, a group of more than 80 private and public stakeholders from the U.S. and China, released a report at the World Economic Forum outlining hundreds of opportunities to grow the mammoth country’s environmental technologies market in a bid to help decision-makers navigate the market's challenges and opportunities.

The report identified more than 300 greentech solutions across seven sectors in a country whose economy has grown into the world's third-largest, but not without significant environmental costs, including pollution and water scarcity issues. The report says the private sector can also play a large part in driving the cleantech sector, but will do so only if the underlying policy framework makes for an attractive business case.

The report’s release comes just three months before the pivotal negotiations at the United Nations Climate Change Conferencee in Copenhagen, where the world’s nations will try to draft a treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. The U.S. refused to ratify Kyoto, citing the exclusion of developing but highly emitting countries, namely China.

Although China has publicly rebuffed calls for mandatory emissions caps, arguing that developed countries should shoulder the bulk of responsibility and cost of reducing emissions, several reports have surfaced in recent months signaling the country’s willingness to join the global effort to address climate change.

In addition to a U.S.-China memorandum of understanding signed in July pledging the countries to work together to reach an international climate agreement, the pair are also expected to sign a bilateral agreement in November during a visit from U.S. President Barack Obama, the Guardian reported.

The roadmap unveiled by the China Greentech Initiative could play a role in this bilateral treaty. “This is a coming-out party for China’s ‘greentech’ initiatives,” said the Clean Air Task Force’s Ming Sung this week, as reported by the Guardian. “China and the U.S. can take over the world on low-carbon technology.”

It wouldn’t be the first time that China and the U.S. have collaborated to advance environmental technologies, although cries of protectionism have overshadowed some developments. The world’s two top emitters formed a research partnership in July to study energy efficiency buildings and communities through joint analyses, exchange of experts and technicians, and demonstration projects.

Around the same time, they launched the U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center to help researchers from both countries pursue technologies to address climate change in the most affordable fashion.

On the Big Island of Hawaii, a wind farm shares the scene with cattle. The state hopes to be a laboratory for the country by cutting its dependence on fossil fuels

NAALEHU, Hawaii — Two miles or so from this tiny town in the southernmost corner of the United States, across ranches where cattle herds graze beneath the distant Mauna Loa volcano, the giant turbines of a new wind farm cut through the air.

Sixty miles to the northeast, near a spot where golden-red lava streams meet the sea in clouds of steam, a small power plant extracts heat from the volcanic rock beneath it to generate electricity.

These projects are just a slice of the energy experiment unfolding across Hawaii’s six main islands. With the most diverse array of alternative energy potential of any state in the nation, Hawaii has set out to become a living laboratory for the rest of the country, hoping it can slash its dependence on fossil fuels while keeping the lights on.

Every island has at least one energy accent: waves in Maui, wind in Lanai and Molokai, solar panels in Oahu and eventually, if all goes well, biomass energy from crops grown on Kauai. Here on the Big Island of Hawaii, seawater is also being converted to electricity.

Still, the state faces enormous challenges in delivering the power to the people who need it. While the urban sprawl around Honolulu consumes the bulk of the energy, most potential renewable sources are far from the city, 150 miles southeast or 100 miles to the northwest.

Each of the state’s six electric grids belongs to its own island and is unconnected to the others. And according to state figures, Hawaii still relies on imported oil to generate 77 percent of its electricity, a level of dependency unique in the United States. Coal-fired power provides 14 percent, and 9 percent comes from renewable sources like the wind or the sun.

Hawaii’s governor, Linda Lingle, a Republican, has resolved to throw off the yoke of oil dependence and harness the state’s potential.

Under an agreement reached last year with the federal government and the dominant local utility, the Hawaiian Electric Company, Hawaii plans to generate 40 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2030. The state’s six grids will be connected by cables, and planners hope that conservation steps like reducing the air-conditioning load at high-rise hotels will cut Hawaii’s energy consumption by nearly a third.

“The goals are very, very aggressive,” said Debra Lew, a senior project leader for the federal National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Three decades ago, Hawaii mapped out a similar vision, if in less detail, that came to nothing. But this time, planners say, failure is not an option. “We don’t have anywhere else to go,” said Ted Peck, the point man for the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative, overseen by the State Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism.

Even if the state were indifferent to the environmental costs of burning oil and gas, including carbon-dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming, it would have to embrace renewable energy sources, said Robert Alm, a vice president of the Hawaiian Electric Company. “Our hedge won’t be buying oil futures, it will be buying wind,” Mr. Alm said.

Heavy reliance on imported oil has proved economically perilous. When oil prices hit $147 a barrel a year ago, electricity rates approached or briefly exceeded 50 cents per kilowatt hour on Maui and Kauai, about five times the national average.

The spike in prices lent urgency to the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative, which Governor Lingle unveiled in January 2008.

The technical and political obstacles have since become clearer.

Hopscotching around this brightly colored archipelago by plane, a visitor gets a vivid sense of Hawaii’s essentially rural nature and the scope of the challenge.

The biggest priority is laying undersea cables between the outer islands and Oahu. Once those connections are made — first with cables stretching from Molokai and Lanai, the islands nearest Oahu — the capital will get power through them.

Then there is the daunting challenge of feeding fluctuating wind and solar power into the small electric grids on the individual islands while devising backup systems to keep the energy output smooth and reliable.

On Maui, for instance, General Electric is working on ways to modulate demand and store energy for later use either in electric batteries or by pump storage — filling an elevated reservoir in low-demand periods to produce hydropower when needed.

“The whole trick is making the system work in the right way, like conducting an orchestra,” said Bob Gilligan, G.E.’s vice president for transmission and distribution.

On the financial side, the state must attract developers with enough financing to help underwrite their own wind, solar, wave or other renewable projects, carry out the required environmental reviews and secure local approval. Addressing local concerns can be especially challenging. As in any state with a rural-urban divide, residents of Hawaii’s less populous outlying areas are wary about being pushed around by planners in Honolulu.

The outer islands have higher concentrations of Native Hawaiians who are well versed in a local history of exploitation, from the American overthrow of their monarch in 1893 to environmental costs of sugar plantations and tourism.

Some have formed groups like the Pele Defense Fund, which sprang up here in the 1980s to protect religious gathering rights in the rain forest on the Big Island. The fund seeks to prevent desecration of Pele, the native goddess of fire and volcanoes, and finds geothermal energy projects sacrilegious.

One avenue for developers, utilities and state officials is to offer outlying communities support or financing for needs that the local population identifies, like fish conservation. “We’re asking the small islands to be significantly burdened on behalf of Oahu, so Oahu needs to do well by them,” said Mr. Alm, the utility’s vice president.

For all the optimism, planners studiously remind themselves of the detritus of past failures, like the dismembered and rusting wind turbines of a defunct wind farm near the southern end of the Big Island.

“This transformation is going to take a generation,” said Ted Liu, director of the state economic development department. “There are no short-term easy solutions.”

Nuclear power is back in favour, at least in government circles. The UK has plans for a fleet of new nuclear reactors, Sweden has reversed its decades-old ban on nuclear power and an increasing number of countries are expanding their nuclear generating capacity.

Environmentalists are divided on the issue of nuclear power. Photograph: George Widman/AP

Four new reactors are under way in Europe at the moment: two Russian-designed reactors in Slovakia, plus Finland's Olkiluoto 3 and France's Flamanville 3, which both rely on the French state-owned Areva's involvement and expertise. The Finnish site has been beset by delays, rising costs and criticisms over safety and still has no definite opening date, while the cost of Flamanville 3 has risen from €3.3bn to €4bn.

But it's China that is pursuing nuclear power more enthusiastically and on a bigger scale than anyone else. As the data here shows, it has 14 reactors under construction and 115 either planned or proposed to help it cope with rising energy demands. South Africa is also planning a major expansion in nuclear, joining a countries such as France, Japan and the US, which have historically been some of the most pro-nuclear countries.

Environmentalists are still split on nuclear power. Some see a low-carbon energy source that can help slow global warming, while others see unsolved waste problems and a technology that can't be built fast enough to stop dangerous climate change.

• DATA: The world in nuclear reactors

Most of us in the design and construction industry share in a widespread belief that technology can ultimately rescue us from any challenge we face. This belief is born of some very solid historical evidence:

• In the past 150,000 years, human society has gone through three major technological revolutions -- early tool making, agricultural and industrial revolutions.

• Each of these technological revolutions facilitated rapid growth in human population, from 10,000 initially to nearly 6,700,000,000 today.

• Between 1750 and 1965, global industrial output has increased one hundredfold, and since 1965, it has increased 40 times.

• The rapid increase in global output has greatly exceeded population growth, so that the standard of living (GDP/capita) has risen 14 times/capita in industrialized nations from 1820 to 1987 even as world population grew from 1 billion to 6.7 billion.

• Life expectancy doubled from 37 to 76 years from 1820 to 1987 as a result of improved and expanded technologies.

Our faith in technology to improve our lives and rescue us from our problems has been long in the making. However, in 1865 W.S. Jevons discovered that increased technological efficiency supports population growth and higher levels of consumption, instead of reducing them. Improvements in technology, while reducing the material/energy inputs for the same output, have in the aggregate led to greater demands and impacts on the planet, according to Michael H. and Joyce A. Huesemann in their article, "Will progress in science and technology avert or accelerate global collapse?"

By the 1980s, it was discovered that many natural resources (oceanic protein, soil, potable water, biodiversity, etc.) were being depleted faster than they could replenish -- our extractions exceeded the "produce" in and from the natural inventories -- so that we have been reducing the natural capital upon which our very lives depend, as Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers note in their 1993 book, "Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse; Envisioning a Sustainable Future."

Historically, we have benefited tremendously from new technologies and improvements in old ones. And our faith in technology to solve all our problems is quite understandable. Today, however, we must understand that technology alone will not be enough to avert catastrophic changes in the earth. We must also reduce growth in the human population and its consumption. The problem is that the earth is not limitless in its resources or immutable to our extractions and pollutions. Brian Walker and David Salt in their 2006 book, "Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World," vividly demonstrate that we cannot continue to reduce the natural inventories, because natural systems all around us are heading for collapse and/or change into regimes unfriendly to our existence.

Michael and Joyce Huesemann provide compelling examples that may illustrate the relationship between improvements in technology and the growth in population and consumption:

• Between 1973 and 2000, nations tracked by the International Energy Agency experienced a 50 percent increase in energy efficiency. Total energy use should have fallen by over 30 percent. However, a 100 percent increase in economic output completely overshadowed the increase in efficiency, resulting in the need to increase the primary energy supply by 36 percent.

• Between 1974 and 1994, material efficiencies increased by 60 percent. Material requirements would have been reduced by 40 percent, but a 66 percent increase in GDP kept material consumption practically level.

• In the 20th century, global energy intensity has decreased by 1 percent per year due to improvements in technical efficiency and carbon intensity has decreased by .3 percent per year in the same time period due to a change from wood and coal energy to gas, nuclear and renewable energy sources. Instead of seeing a reduction in carbon emissions, GDP grew by 200 percent in this same timeframe, resulting in a 20 percent increase in carbon emissions.

We continue to expand our consumption with marginally greener technologies, believing that this will ultimately create a sustainable basis for our existence. In order to truly move towards sustainability, we must also build and consume less in absolute terms … finding non-material ways to reach fulfillment in our lives, says David Korten in his 2007 book, "The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community." We must develop more efficient technologies while we also procreate and consume less, too.

Several great questions before us are:

• What are the limits of technological efficiency? Is there a limit to material/energy input for a unit of consumptive output?

• What is a sustainable model of total consumption (material/energy outputs) for people?

• How many people can this output model support?

We don't know the answer to these questions yet. They are clearly complex and the critical factors are forever changing. What we do know is that there are many examples throughout history where societies have collapsed -- Anasazi, Mayan, Easter Island, Norse in Greenland, Viking -- and vanished due largely to unsustainable living patterns. The reasons for these population collapses are several, including degradation of natural resources, loss of biodiversity, human and livestock populations exceeding the carrying capacity of the land, and natural variations in weather and climate patterns, as outlined in Jared Diamond's 2005 book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed."

We in the building industry need to continually broaden our understanding of what it is going to take to create a sustainable life on the earth. Technology alone will not ensure we meet this goal, but will always be a contributing factor in reaching it. We need to be sure we have good answers to the following questions before we act:

• Is there a non-building/non-material solution which accomplishes the client's goals, such as a work process change, a strategic alliance, a new technology, or outsourcing of functions?

• Can we reuse/modify the existing built environment to meet the goals, rather than build new?

• If we must build new, how can we use the above two strategies combined with the most advanced green technology to create an environment which meets our client's goals with the least impact to the earth?

While new and improved technologies will continue to be very important in creating a condition of sustainability on the earth, equally if not more important is the imperative to reduce population growth and our total material consumption. Beyond our professional activities, architects, engineers and contractors need to take leadership in exploring, developing and promoting non-material ways of meeting our needs for community and identity, love and relationships, growth and learning, fulfillment and satisfaction. We must develop a post-consumer society with the most efficient, green technologies and solutions we can devise.

Christopher (Kit) Ratcliff is the third-generation leader of Ratcliff, a century-old, award-winning architectural firm in Emeryville, Calif.

What concrete actions are firms taking to tackle climate change in 2009?

This week Paul Dickinson -- CEO of Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) -- will try to answer this question by offering a daily "sneak peek" at the results of this year’s CDP Global 500 and S&P 500 Reports, produced by PricewaterhouseCoopers, in advance of the organization's September 21 launch date in New York.

Backed by 475 institutional investors with assets of more than U.S. $55 trillion, Carbon Disclosure Project’s climate change questionnaire was sent to 3,700 of the world’s largest corporations to discover how businesses are managing their carbon emissions and climate change risks and opportunities.

The leaders and laggards on corporate performance and climate change strategy disclosure will be revealed in full on September 21 with the launch of our reports.

But what we can reveal today is that -- despite challenging economic conditions for companies -- this year's Carbon Disclosure Project reports received the highest response rate to date, the highest disclosed emissions and the greatest detail ever from the world's largest corporations on their climate-change related activities.

So, what are the key trends coming out of this year's S&P 500 Report, and what can we conclude about U.S. firms' corporate policy towards climate change?

Corporate carbon reduction targets are now a "need-to-do" not a "nice to have;" additionally, more firms are setting reduction targets than ever seen before.

The number of companies reporting emissions targets rose sharply in 2009 -- from 32 percent (102) to 52 percent (169), a 66 percent leap. In this sense, this is a real departure from setting targets as a cost-cutting exercise and a step toward setting targets as a clear, thought-out climate change strategy. We have found from recent research that company reduction targets tend to be motivated by market drivers, such as increased efficiencies, risk reduction, competitive advantage and stakeholder pressure -- from investors and customers.

Type of Scope 3 emissions tracked by sector. Click for full-sized.

… and these reduction targets are becoming more aggressive.

The bar for target emissions commitments has been raised from those that were reported to CDP in 2008. It is striking that more and more companies are choosing an annual reduction of between 1-1.5 percent in addition coupled with a significant increase in companies reporting an annualized reduction target of 5 percent or more. Nine percent of S&P 500 companies who reported to CDP now have targets which will deliver more than 5 percent reductions per annum. This means that these companies are delivering reductions in line with scientific requirements to cut emissions by 80 percent in developed economies by 2050. We applaud these improvements and with many targets still behind the science, we encourage other companies to follow their lead.

Companies are also taking strong steps to better understand their indirect impact and exposure caused by scope 3 emissions, such as employee travel. CDP’s supply chain program has encouraged companies to measure and manage their supply chain emissions.

Type of Scope 3 emissions tracked by sector. Click for full-sized.

This year saw a marked increase in efforts to capture indirect emissions across sectors. We are seeing strong scope 3 reporting from the financials, health care and consumer sectors, with IT leading the sector in reporting scope 3 emissions, boasting 57 percent (29) respondents, up from 48 percent (23) last year. Google's scope 3 data included "employee commuting, business travel, data center construction and manufacturing of our servers." Cisco Systems shared targets on employee air travel -- with a goal of reducing business air travel by 25 percent completely by 2012.

So, what are we seeing across the board?

We are seeing a marked shift in the approach of S&P 500 companies to carbon management. Not only are the majority of those companies who report through CDP now setting reduction targets, but the scope and ambition of targets is becoming far more aggressive.

Paul Dickinson is the Chief Executive Officer of the Carbon Disclosure Project. More information about CDP is available at www.cdproject.net and by following the organization on Twitter @CDProject. 

If you're planning to recoup through energy savings the several thousand dollars you have just spent, or are planning to spend insulating your home, then don't. At least, not any time soon.

Retrofitted insulation makes your house warmer, but don't count on that saving.

The Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) claims installing ceiling installation alone will save homeowners in colder regions up to $400 a year. That's 16% of a monthly $200 power bill, and a saving not be sneezed at. Add underfloor insulation and you save even more, enthuses the EECA website.

But studies which have been done on thermal insulation retrofits tell a different story. One such study by the Department of Statistics, admittedly done some years ago now, found energy use in an insulated group of houses was actually higher than in a group of uninsulated houses.

More recent work done for research consortium Beacon Pathways found Papakowhai, Wellington, homes had unchanged energy use during 2006-08 after being fitted with basic ceiling and floor insulation as part of a study.

"If you're thinking payback [in terms of lower energy use and cost], then think long," says general manager Nick Collins. A cost-benefit analysis done by Beacon Pathways of simple payback in terms of energy savings only for the measures attracting government subsidy showed that:

Thick underfloor insulation payback time was 22.8 years, dropping to 19.3 years for a more thermal-resistant insulation material.

Ceiling insulation payback time was 10 years for the minimum grade required by the Building Code (R2.8 in industry parlance), and 12.9 years for higher quality R3.8 insulation.

Hot water system insulation paybacks are 4.1 years for instant gas, 12.9 years for heat pump hot water and 13.1 years for solar hot water systems.

Not available for government subsidy under the recently announced scheme are double-glazing of windows, with a payback time of 48.8 years where the glass and frames are replaced, and 12.1 years if just the glass is replaced. Double-glazing of windows is estimated to cost an average home-owner between $8000 and $10,000.

Wall insulation, again, is a very expensive operation. Payback time, 48.8 years, where interior linings are removed and replaced.

A 10-year study by Building Research Association of New Zealand (Branz) reviewed local experience of before and after insulation refits on 400 homes. There were small temperature increases of 0.6-1.0% after retrofit and small or zero energy savings.

The study found savings in total energy (all fuels) of perhaps 5% were feasible, but most savings would come in non-electric fuels. Electricity savings could be about 1%. The study concluded: "We cannot expect to get large energy savings from insulation retrofit of houses in New Zealand."

What's happening and likely to happen as the rush to insulate gathers momentum is people in cold homes suddenly find they have warm(er) homes and they like it. "So instead of taking savings by using less energy and having lower power bills, they're taking the comfort instead," says Branz scientist Nigel Isaacs.

It's what researchers call "takeback", and it seems likely many Kiwis will register a 100% takeback from the insulation retrofit.

That's comforting news for power companies chafing under the government directive that they not raise power prices while a review of the electricity market is under way. The consumer rush to heat pumps 110,000 were sold last year has certainly been good news for power companies. Heat pumps might be an efficient way of heating homes, but many people have seen power bills blow out not decrease since they installed them.

Every new heat pump installed has been another brick in a new power station, says Isaacs. Like filling a bath tub with hot water, but forgetting to put the plug in. Heat pumps are making our homes warmer and bring many health and other spinoffs. Retrofitted insulation would ensure the benefits of heat pumps were not dissipated.

Beacon Pathways estimates the temperature rise in retrofitted houses means a health saving of $215 a year.

Collins says providing warmer, drier homes for families and children is more important than energy savings. "Turn the argument on its head and you realise that one night spent in hospital is about the cost of installing ceiling and underfloor insulation in a home, and then you've got to ask where we are better spending our time and money."

This is the nature of the "compelling evidence" that has led the government to initiate a $323 million insulation and heating subsidy scheme that has been running red hot. More than 7000 homes were insulated or fitted with clean heat in the first two months.

The aim is to retrofit 27,500 homes in the first year and 180,000 homes over four years. But even that will only scratch the surface. It's estimated about one million of the 1.6m Kiwi homes are not adequately insulated.

Some form of insulation in new houses was made mandatory only in 1978, and since then the building code has been slowly upping the ante.

But even by 2000 things were not that good, says EECA chief executive Mike Underhill. Which is why the $1300 government retrofit subsidy is for houses built before then.

For too long, says Underhill, we have considered our climate temperate, even sub-tropical, and failed to accept while we don't have extremes experienced elsewhere, we still have a cold and usually very damp winter.

"The reason we have a high mortality rate in winter, and why we have the highest incidence of respiratory illnesses among OECD countries, goes back to the kind of houses we have," he says. Danes use about 15kw/h square metre heating their houses, while Kiwis use about 80kw/h per square metre. "Their houses are designed for the cold with triple-glazing on the windows," says Underhill. "We are very slow off the mark."

Research by both Branz and Beacon Pathways provides some useful insights. Understandably, the cost-benefit (interpreting "benefit" in the wider sense) of installing good ceiling and underfloor insulation when none previously existed increases as you travel south to Invercargill. The same is true of topping up ceiling insulation. The cost-benefit of a top-up in Auckland is marginal true of 1920s' villas and of houses built since the late 1970s.

Isaacs's research shows no relationship between how much income comes into a home, and how warm it is. "The rich, it seems, are just as cold and miserable as the poor," he says. So no surprise to him that the well-to-do are taking as much advantage of the government's subsidy offer as the less well off.

While buying some wax for my surfboard, I noticed that various “eco-friendly waxes” were on offer. Is this just a marketing ploy? I thought surfing was a “green” sport anyway.

Unfortunately even laid-back surfers can't get away from petroleum products. Almost all surfboard waxes are made of fossil fuel derivatives, usually paraffin and petroleum jelly plus synthetic “tackifiers” for extra stickiness. The trouble is that most of these waxes do not biodegrade but break up into ever smaller pieces, which are often ingested by marine life.

Small surfing-accessory companies have been producing waxes made of beeswax, coconut oil, soy, pine resin and other natural products for some years. Financially stretched surfing dudes have balked at paying double the price for these products but now the bigger wax companies, such as Dr Zog’s Sex Wax and Sticky Bumps, are catching the environmental wave and costs are falling.

Surfers are a restless bunch: they move from Australia to Hawaii to Patagonia to Cornwall to Ireland for the challenge of the waves. All that flying adds up to a considerable amount of greenhouse gas emissions.

Then there are the boards and wetsuits. With surfing’s growing popularity, up to a million boards are produced each year. Traditionally these have been made from a cocktail of toxic materials including polyurethane foam, fibreglass, polyester and epoxy resin. While these boards can break easily in crashing waves, they take thousands of years to degrade.

Wetsuits — considered a great modern invention, allowing winter surfing even in the freezing North Atlantic — are made of neoprene, a synthetic rubber, and nylon material derived from petroleum.

But surfing is getting more ecologically aware. More boards are being fashioned from materials such as bamboo, vegetable foam, hemp and vegetable-based resins, the ultimate aim being a board that you can eat when its sea days are numbered.

Surf clothing companies – are also producing more organic goods. So enjoy the waves, dude. But spend a bit extra on environmentally kinder products.

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