One of the most hidden and potentially dangerous impacts of global warming is the impact on the oceans.  Life in the oceans can go on without terrestrial life, but without the oceans, life on land would be impossible.  Phytoplankton in the ocean are responsible for half of the planet’s oxygen. To survive, they depend on the pH of the ocean being the one they’ve adapted to.  Ocean pH has been about the same for more than 20 million years.

And we’re changing it — faster than the organisms in the ocean can adapt.

This is a key issue we talk about on our Coasts and Islands course, but is a hard topic to explain and teach about.  Here is a great  film out from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC.org) on ocean acidification and its impact on climate and life in the oceans.

ACID TEST, a film produced by NRDC, was made to raise awareness about the largely unknown problem of ocean acidification, which poses a fundamental challenge to life in the seas and the health of the entire planet. Like global warming, ocean acidification stems from the increase of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Highly recommended!  You can jump to their webpage for more information and background, including in-depth discussions of the science.

This coming week the Copenhagen summit will be going on, from December 7-18.  The goal of this summit is to follow up on the work done during the Kyoto agreements, and to try and limit global warming.

The stakes are incredibly high.  Pressure, slander and huge amounts of money and disinformation are being thrown in the way of any binding agreements, as oil companies and their allies try again to introduce doubt into the debate (hacking into scientists’ private email and distorting what they said is just part of it).

The science is clear, settled, and overwhelming. If drastic cuts are not made in global emissions of CO2 and other gasses that contribute to global warming, we are headed towards a global catastrophe. We are already seeing massive changes due to anthropogenic climate change, and it is only going to get worse.  Feedback loops in climate are making even the worst case scenarios of only a couple of years look like underestimates of how bad it can get.  And it will get very very bad.

If we can get back to 350 ppm CO2 (we’re around 384 now), there is hope.  It will be a benefit to our economies to move away from oil, and the opportunity for business for clean and renewable energy and technologies are huge.

But the challenge is significant.

I’ve included here a tracker showing real time what the negotiations are working towards. Below that are some good links to learn more.

Let’s hope history is made in the next few days, or future generations will point to this time as an opportunity lost.

Homepage for the conference: http://en.cop15.dk/

One of our students coming in the spring, Taylor Cantril, is at Copenhagen.  He mentioned in the comments several blogs worth noting, especially deppcopenhagen.wordpress.com and thecopenhagenquestions.wordpress.com

Good summary and detailed current report on the state of the science and current situation: Copenhagen Diagnosis

The best online discussion of the science is at Real Climate.  This includes links to basic science information (see these lectures which are particularly good).

The best discussion of the politics around climate change from the perspective of an engaged and passionate scientist is at Climate Progress.

Great new book out from Lester Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.  The book is both a call to action and a hopeful message showing what is already being done. Wind power, for example, is coming online faster than expected, and huge gains are being made in de-carbonizing our civilization. However,

The question we face is not what we need to do, because that seems rather clear to those who are analyzing the global situation. The challenge is how to do it in the time available. Unfortunately we don’t know how much time remains. Nature is the timekeeper but we cannot see the clock.

Brown clearly lays out that the multiple issues facing us (climate change, energy, etc.) eventually lead to the problem of food.  How do we balance food demand and supplies? From the start of the book:

From time to time I go back and read about earlier civilizations that declined and collapsed, trying to understand the reasons for their demise. More often than not shrinking food supplies were responsible. For the Sumerians, rising salt levels in the soil—the result of a flaw in their irrigation system—brought down wheat and barley yields and eventually the civilization itself.

For the Mayans, soil erosion exacerbated by a series of intense droughts apparently undermined their food supply and their civilization. For other early civilizations that collapsed, it was often soil erosion and the resulting shrinkage in harvests that led to their decline.

Does our civilization face a similar fate? Until recently it did not seem possible. I resisted the idea that food shortages could also bring down our early twenty-first century global civilization. But our continuing failure to reverse the environmental trends that are undermining the world food economy forces me to conclude that if we continue with business as usual such a collapse is not only possible but likely.

This is an important point usually lost in the Global North, where over feeding (obesity) rather then food shortages are currently of concern.

Climate change, of course, is the biggest contextual threat to food supplies. As glaciers retreat the buffer they supply by slowly releasing water in the dry season will disappear. Drying (as we’ve seen in Australia already) is leading to permanent drought, dust storms, and desertification. Sea levels increasing even a small amount lead to salt intrusion.  More severe storms, like Cyclone Nargis, devastate standing crops, and their storm surge leads to even more salt being dumped into soils. Shifting rainfall patterns destroy the predictability of rain-fed agriculture. The “shift to the poles” of growing zones challenge farmers with crop yields and new weeds and pests. Demand for bio-fuels pull  land out of food production into feeding cars.

Brown lays out the issues of shifting to renewable (non-carbon) based energy, sustainable cities, poverty and overpopulation, restoration ecology and related issues. This last chapter, “Can We Mobilize Fast Enough?” he lays out our options and chances of making it.

There is much that we do not know about the future. But one thing we do know is that business as usual will not continue for much longer. Massive change is inevitable. “The death of our civilization is no longer a theory or an academic possibility; it is the road we’re on,” says Peter Goldmark, former Rockefeller Foundation president and current director of the climate program at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). Can we find another road before time runs out?

The notion that our civilization is approaching its demise is not an easy concept to grasp or accept. It is difficult to imagine something we have not previously experienced. We hardly have the vocabulary, much less the experience, to discuss this prospect. We know which economic indicators to watch for signs of an economic recession, such as declining industrial output, rising unemployment, or falling consumer confidence, but we do not follow a similar set of indicators that signal civilizational collapse.

He ends with a challenge:

The choice is ours—yours and mine. We can stay with business as usual and preside over an economy that continues to destroy its natural support systems until it destroys itself, or we can adopt Plan B and be the generation that changes direction, moving the world onto a path of sustained progress. The choice will be made by our generation, but it will affect life on earth for all generations to come.

Get the book (online or hardcopy), read it, and pass it on.

(Download or purchase Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. The data the book is based on is going online, as well as other supporting information and resources.)

Scientists need a listening public

A sobering post up by Joseph Romm on the failure of scientists to communicate the realities facing us due to global warming, Publicize or perish: The scientific community is failing miserably in communicating the potential catastrophe of climate change. His post is a reprint from a special issue of Physics World on Energy, Sustainability and Climate Change. (emphasis mine)

The fate of the next 50 generations may well be determined in the next few months and years…

The International Scientific Congress on climate change held in Copenhagen in March, which was attended by 2000 scientists, concluded that “Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realized.” That would mean that by 2100 there would be atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide of more than 1000 ppm, total planetary warming of 5 °C and sea-level rises probably on the high end of recent projections of 1–2 m followed by a rise of as much as 2 cm per year or more for centuries. We would also see one-third of inhabited land reaching dust bowl levels of aridity, half or more of all species becoming extinct, and the oceans increasingly becoming hot, acidic, dead zones. And if we do not change course quickly, the latest science predicts that these impacts may be irreversible for 1000 years.

That’s not good.  The problem is:

In short, the fate of perhaps the next 100 billion people to walk the Earth rests with scientists (and those who understand the science) trying to communicate the dire nature of the climate problem (and the myriad solutions available now) as well as the ability of the media, the public, opinion-makers and political leaders to understand and deal with that science.

Given the money being poured into denying climate science to protect the profits of carbon intensive industries (coal, oil, etc.), and their exploitation the false idea of “there are always two sides to every issue” we’ve got a serious problem. The same dynamic existed with the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer (money poured into creating doubt, insisting on “balance” when the science was clear there as a link, etc.).  The big difference here, however, is that the changes taking place are occurring over generations, rather than an individual’s lifespan.

People who smoke die of lung cancer at higher rates, and it is easy to see and observe first hand, even by people who don’t understand the science. You can see an uncle who you remember being young and healthy coughing, getting ill, and finally dying from lung cancer in only a few years.  The end point — death — was something that anyone could see, and see multiple times from multiple cases.

We have, however, only one earth, and it is dying. Part of dealing with a terminal illness is getting over the denial that it is really happening, because denying in some ways makes you feel superior. “The doctor’s wrong!” “I’m as strong as an ox!” “The tests aren’t reliable!”

Another stage in dealing with a terminal illness is bargaining: “It won’t be that bad!” “There will be a cure soon.” “We can deal with it once technology gets better…”

The problem isn’t just that scientists are poor communicators.  The problem is that we don’t want to listen.

(See also The Invention of Lying about Climate Change)

Great news via Grist. Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just endorsed what many scientists have been saying for a long time – to avoid a climate catastrophe we need to aim for 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not 450 as earlier determined in the IPCC report.

From AFP, “Top U.N. climate scientist backs big CO2 cuts, 350-ppm goal“:

“As chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], I cannot take a position because we do not make recommendations,” said Rajendra Pachauri when asked if he supported calls to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations below 350 parts per million (ppm).

“But as a human being I am fully supportive of that goal. What is happening, and what is likely to happen, convinces me that the world must be really ambitious and very determined at moving toward a 350 target,” he told AFP in an interview.

The article goes on to note:

Even at current CO2 levels of 385-to-390 ppm, severe impacts from climate change—rising sea levels, drought, violent storms—have started and are likely to get worse, experts say.

Many scientists also worry that carbon pollution has damaged Earth’s capacity to absorb CO2 and triggered events—the shrinking Arctic ice cap, the decay of the Greenland ice sheet, methane release from permafrost—that will drive global warming on their own.

This is very important, and it further supports the goal of 350 ppm, and while challenging, it is still (hopefully) reachable, at least from a scientific / technical standpoint, if not necessarily from a political standpoint.

Bill McKibbon at Grist notes:

When Jim Hansen and other scientists looked at phenomena like the Arctic ice melt of the last two summers, they produced new data demonstrating that 350 ppm is the bottom line. But it’s been hard to get that news out to the powers that be. So today it comes as enormous and welcome news that Pachauri, from his New Delhi office, said that 350 was the number.

For more on this see 350.org.

In Thailand, as in much of the world, more time is required to catch fewer and fewer fish.

Alanna Mitchell’s book, Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis,  lays out in clear language the multiple challenges that are facing the oceans, from oxygen depleted dead zones, to the acidification of the oceans, to the crashing of the global fish stocks. Part travel writing, part investigative reporting, Sea Sick follows Mitchell around the world talking with scientists and seeing the crisis of the oceans first-hand.

We’ve been looking for a good book that we can use on our Coastal course as well as the Islands course. Mitchell’s book is perfect for what we needed — a book with the big picture, and lots of links into the primary literature.  So, for example, while reading about her visit to Halifax and discussions with scientists studying the crisis of global fisheries, we also read the journal articles that those scientists have written (such as Worm, Boris, et. al., “Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services,” Science, Vol. 314, November 2006).

Here are some excerpts (from the book’s page online).

The ocean is built to withstand change. It has layers of safeguards that the atmosphere and the land systems do not, and yet even these are being breached. It is a larger and more serious problem than atmospheric change.

However, we are not hearing much about it, or about the implications for life on the planet–not just human life and civilisation, but life in general. We hear from time to time about overfishing, or about the cities that would flood if the sea level rose, or about coral bleaching, but rarely everything put together…

About 250 million years ago, during the time known as the Great Dying at the end of the Permian period–the biggest mass extinction the world has yet known–the ocean’s oxygen ran out. There are a couple of theories about why this happened, but a leading candidate is that the surface layer warmed up enough and became salty enough to disturb the currents. Currents feed oxygen from the atmosphere into the ocean and move nutrients around. When the oxygen vanished, most life on land and in the sea–more than 90 per cent of the species then alive–died.

The point of the story, [Flannery] said, is that it is clear that the ocean contains the switch of life. Not land, nor the atmosphere. The ocean. And that switch can be flipped off.

We know it’s happened in the past, he told me. We just don’t know the trigger.

As the book makes clear, we may have pulled the trigger without realizing it.

A few good points from the book:

• The ocean produces half the oxygen we breath.  In other words, every other breath comes from the ocean.
• 99 percent of the living space on the planet is the ocean.
• Most of us have a “terrestrial bias” and really mostly think about only the very surface of the ocean (when we think about it at all).
• If all terrestrial life ceased, the life in the oceans would go on.  If life in the oceans ceased,  terrestrial life would also cease.

The book provided the basis for some great discussions.  One of the main things that kept coming up over and over again was the question of WHY.  Why do students grow up in school studying the destruction of the rainforest, and for most of the students, this was the first time they had read about the crisis facing the oceans? Their own experience proved Mitchell’s point of terrestrial bias.

Today, the students are down in Trang, Southern Thailand, camping on the beach and sea kayaking through the mangroves.  The next few days will be spent padding and diving, learning about mangroves, sea grasses and reefs. Tomorrow requires a crossing to Koh Muk, and paying attention to wind, tides and currents will be key. In just over a week, they will paddle down the coast to a small Muslim fishing village, and spend the remainder of the course learning from their host families about the crisis of the oceans Mitchell writes about, and what one small Thai community is doing to help conserve the mangrove and sea grasses, and make a difference in the future of the oceans.

This is a great book. Get it, read it, and pass it on to someone else to read.

Rice fields in Mae Hong Son province

Rice is sacred in many parts of Asia, and a core part of Thai culture. Most people eat rice three times a day, and rice is used as offerings to monks, as well to the spirits. Rural villages have traditionally been organized around the production of rice, with communal labor working together to build and repair irrigation channels for the rice fields, and families working cooperatively to plant and harvest rice.  Even now, as labor sharing has given way to paying wage laborers to work the fields, rice is a key part of Thai daily life and cultural identity.  The most common greeting in Thai is  กินข้าวแล้วหรือยัง? (gin khao laew rue yang?) which means “Have you eaten rice yet?”

Today the Asian Development Bank (ADB) released a sobering report on the economic impact of climate change on the economies of Southeast Asia, including the impact on rice:

Rice production will dramatically decline because of climate change, threatening food security. Rising sea levels will force the relocation of millions living in coastal communities and islands, and more people will die from thermal stress, malaria, dengue and other diseases.

While the report stresses global cooperation is key, Southeast Asian countries can do a lot themselves to help mitigate climate change:

Southeast Asia also has the highest technical potential to sequester carbon in the agriculture sector of any region of the world.

Further:

At the same time, many climate challenges could be more effectively countered through closer regional cooperation, particularly in the areas of water basin management, shared marine ecosystems, extreme weather events and the containment of infectious diseases.

While sobering, there is hope:

The basic policy message is that efforts must be made to apply all feasible and economically viable adaptation and mitigation measures as key elements of a sustainable development strategy for Southeast Asia. It also argues that the current global economic crisis offers Southeast Asia an opportunity to start a transition towards a climate-resilient and low-carbon economy by introducing green stimulus programs that can simultaneously shore up economies, create jobs, reduce poverty, lower carbon emissions, and prepare for the worst effects of climate change.

In our work in Thailand we have found that villagers are very aware of climate change, and how it is impacting their lives – from lowland rice farmers to tribal people in the mountains. The rains are shifting, the weather getting hotter and drier, and the historic cycles of the seasons are shifting.

The challenges facing Thailand are formidable, especially in the rice sector. The good news is that moving now to respond to climate change in Thailand will (as elsewhere) be cheaper than doing nothing, and will create more jobs and a more resilient and strong society.

(For more, here is the Google news feed on the ADB report.  More on rice in Thailand is at Wikipedia.)

Offshore wind turbines (via TreeHugger)

While most of the news on catastrophic climate change isn’t good, there are some signs of hope  that the massive changes to move to a post-carbon future are happening.

Via TreeHugger:

The United States Interior Department just issued regulations governing offshore renewable energy projects that use wind, ocean currents and wave power for producing electricity. The offshore leasing rules for electricity production had stalled for two years over of a turf dispute as it were between governmental agencies, but that bottleneck has been broken…

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced the framework for how leases will be issued and revenue shared. Nearby coastal states will receive 27.5 percent of the royalties generated from electricity production.

Salazar anticipates that many of the proposed offshore wind projects will be in the north and central Atlantic and that the first electricity production from some of the offshore projects in two or three years, probably off the Atlantic Coast.

Wind has enourmous potential for power production, and it is ecouraging to see that it is finally getting real support from the US.  There are also economic benefits, as wind power generates a lot of jobs in both maintenance and manufacturing, and have the potential to replace coal fired plants, which have a huge negative impact on the biosphere.

None of this would be possible without the leadership of someone who finally gets it, and isn’t beholden to the fossil fuel lobby and their allies (see this article for more on how they knew the science showing anthropogenic global warming was correct but still chose to deny it). Speaking yesterday at a wind tower production facility in Iowa, President Obama said:

Now, the choice we face is not between saving our environment and saving our economy.  The choice we face is between prosperity and decline. We can remain the world’s leading importer of oil, or we can become the world’s leading exporter of clean energy.  We can allow climate change to wreak unnatural havoc across the landscape, or we can create jobs working to prevent its worst effects. We can hand over the jobs of the 21st century to our competitors, or we can confront what countries in Europe and Asia have already recognized as both a challenge and an opportunity:  The nation that leads the world in creating new energy sources will be the nation that leads the 21st-century global economy. (via Climate Progress.)

Here in Chiang Mai there is a store selling solar panels and wind generators.  Inexpensive, efficient, and with a lot of potential.  We see solar panels in a lot of the remote villages we work with. All of it from China. It will be important for the US to lead in the post-carbon future, or there is no reason for other countries (like China) to join the effort.  And if they don’t join, then the future really is doomed.

But there is hope.  Go to Climate Progress to read a longer except of Obama’s speech, and see this post for more about what he has accomplished so far.

Today is Earth Day, a day to focus on the environment and our increasingly damaged biosphere.  Folks will be blogging about it, kids doing projects in schools, big public events, beach clean-ups, etc. That’s all good, but not enough. The news on the earth is not good, and getting worse. Singing fun songs and putting in compact fluorescent light bulbs isn’t going to do it.  We need to move to a post-carbon economy as fast as possible.

Australian bushfires. (REUTERS/Mick Tsikas)

Following climate science for several years can get depressing, as every worst case scenario turns out to not be bad enough.  The catastrophic changes are coming faster and harder than expected, bigger hurricanes, faster glacier melting, collapsing ice sheets, massive bush fires in Australia, etc. It isn’t taking 100 years to see the changes–we’re seeing them now. Meanwhile, the oil companies and their enablers have spent millions confusing the issue and introducing doubt about the anthropogenic causes of climate change, while pumping millions of years worth of carbon sequestered in the earth’s crust into the atmosphere.  They’ve been very successful at introducing false doubt, as today Treehugger reports that only 35% of US voters believe global warming is caused by human activity.

I’ve been struggling to understand why people cannot get their head around the science, or doubt that introducing gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere wouldn’t have an impact on the climate. Even with most Americans’ scientific illiteracy and the successful campaign by the oil and coal companies to confuse the issue, why do so many people not accept anthropogenic climate change?  I’m beginning to think that it may be psychological–along the lines of the stages of grief when someone finds out they have a terminal disease.  The first stage is denial.  One psychiatrist has addressed this, as well as her profession’s responsibility:

Our Moral Obligation to Act

As practitioners we help people to face reality. We chip away at their denial knowing it can be a cover for behaviors that destroy their lives. When they see the world more clearly, we urge them to take charge – warning of the dangers of being passive…

Lethal global overheating – strike the innocuous sounding “global warming” – is not something that may happen in the next century or even mid-century – it is happening now.

Scientists aren’t helping, as pointed out in this from the Guardian:

Far from over-playing their hand to swell their research coffers, scientists have been toning down their message in an attempt to avoid public despair and inaction.

Just 7% of the 261 experts surveyed (200 of whom were researchers in climate science or related fields) said they thought governments would succeed in restricting global warming to 2C. Nearly two-fifths thought this target was impossible and 46% thought a 3 to 4C rise by the end of the century was most likely.

A 3 or 4C rise might not sound much but the climatic shifts accompanying it would be massive. At 3C one to four billion extra people would face water shortages and 150 to 550 million more people would be at risk of hunger. With an extra degree of warming on top of that, seven million to 300 million would be put at risk of coastal flooding due to sea level rise.

As usual, Joe Romm at Climate Progress has a great post up I would encourage you to read, Let’s Dump “Earth Day”:

Affection for our planet is misdirected and unrequited. We need to focus on saving ourselves

With 6.5 billion people going to 9 billion, much of the environment is unsavable. But if we warm significantly more than 2°C from pre-industrial levels — and especially if we warm more than 4°C, as would be all but inevitable if we keep on our current emissions path for much longer — then the environment and climate that made modern human civilization possible will be ruined, probably for hundreds of years (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe).  And that means misery for many if not most of the next 10 to 20 billion people to walk the planet…

We have fiddled like Nero for far too long to save the whole earth or all of its species. Now we need a World War II scale effort just to cut our losses and save what matters most. So let’s call it Triage Day. And if worse comes to worst — yes, if worse comes to worst — at least future generations won’t have to change the name again.

We’re poorly adapted as a species to responding to slow moving threats with a long time horizon and no immediate impact on us.  We need to move beyond “Earth Day” and kids singing the Earth Day Rap to real changes, real movement, and a full-on effort to avert disaster.  Just ask an Aussie who got burned out in the fires last month.

If you’re interested in the science, the two best blogs are Climate Progress and Real Climate, both written by some of the top scientific experts on climate.  Dig into the links, especially the posts and links to the evidence for climate change and current revisions on how fast things are happening.

Just so this post isn’t all bad news, I’ll end on a light note with a great look at marketing Earth Day to kids:

Larson B Ice Shelf collapse in 2002. (Science Daily, Oct. 16, 2006)

An important conference, Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions just concluded in Copenhagen (March 10-12), focusing on climate change and updating the most current thinking on what is going to happen.  Some other related reports and information just came out as well that are worth highlighting.

The news is not good.

Consistently as I’ve been reading and studying climate change over the last few years, it seems that the worst case scenarios are usually what happens, or in some cases are underestimates of what ends up actually happening—from open water at the North Pole to rates of glacier melt to extinction rates among vulnerable populations.  Maddeningly we’ve already lost 8 years of the United States doing nothing, and actively undermining the science and confusing the issue.  We don’t have much time left to make some radical changes.

Here are some recent headlines and a few quotes of note:

Sea levels to surge at least a metre by 2100, scientists warn at Copenhagen meeting (Grist, March 10)

“A few years ago, those of us who talked about the impact of the ice sheets were seen as extremists. Today it is recognized as the central issue,” said glaciologist Eric Rignot of the University of California at Irvine.

“The world has very little time,” IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri told the meeting after the new findings were presented.

Carbon cuts ‘only give 50/50 chance of saving planet (The Independent, March 9)

The key aim of holding the expected increase to 2C, beyond which damage to the natural world and to human society is likely to be catastrophic, is far from assured, the research suggests, even if all countries engage forthwith in a radical and enormous crash programme to slash greenhouse gas emissions – something which itself is by no means guaranteed.

If action is sluggish or non-existent, the model suggests that climate change is likely to cause almost unthinkable damage to the world; under a “business-as-usual” scenario, with no action taken at all and emissions increasing by more than 100 per cent by 2050, the end-of-the-century rise in global average temperatures is likely to be 5.5C, with a worst-case outcome of 7.1C – which would make much of life on earth impossible. “Even with drastic cuts in emissions in the next 10 years, our results project that there will only be a 50 per cent chance of keeping global temperatures rises below 2C,” said Dr Vicky Pope, the Met Office’s Head of Climate Change Advice.

Global temperatures ‘will rise 6C this century’ (Times Online, March 10)

“There is not a lot, if any, good news,” said Richardson of the emerging science. “What we know now is that we are we facing the worst case scenario.”

The warnings on temperature rise are linked to the surge in greenhouse gas emissions over the last decade. Currently humanity generates the equivalent of about 50 billion tonnes of CO2 a year through burning fossil fuels, agriculture, deforestation and other processes.

In its last report the IPCC made over-cautious assumptions about how these emissions would rise in future – and concluded it would be possible to prevent a total global temperature rise of more than 2C compared with pre-industrial times.

… John Ashton, a senior civil servant at the British Foreign Office, launched a startling attack – for a government official – on the ability of politicians to deal with climate change, or even understand it.

He said he believed politicians had still failed to grasp the seriousness of climate change – or were even prepared to bend scientific findings to purely political ends.

“Policymaking is not adapted to deal with the problem of climate change, ” said Ashton. “Politiicans often see science as just another group and that opinions based on science are just another lobby. There are also plenty of people who due to ignorance or mischief are willing to confuse the issue.”

Why the world’s top scientists underestimated how fast we’re destroying the climate (Climate Progress, March 16)

The overly optimistic predictions in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment, released in 2007, appear to have been driven, in part, by the political dynamics involved in the international effort.

“We’re looking at future climate beyond anything we’ve considered,” Chris Field, director of the global ecology department at the Carnegie Institution for Science, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Chicago last month. “Actual emissions are at or above the total range of possibilities considered in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment.”

“We were too optimistic,” Field said. “There was no decrease in emissions from developed countries and the sharpest increases and overall intensity came from China and India that rely heavily on coal.”