Ecobella Blog

By Bjorn Lomborg

COPENHAGEN – This December, global leaders will meet in Copenhagen to negotiate a new climate change pact to reduce carbon emissions. Yet, the way that it has been set up, it will inevitably fail. The best hope is that we use this lesson finally to deal with this issue in a smarter fashion.

The United States has made it clear that developing countries must sign up to substantial reductions in carbon emissions in Copenhagen. Developing nations – especially China and India – will be the main greenhouse gas emitters of the twenty-first century – but were exempted from the Kyoto Protocol because they emitted so little during the West’s industrialization period. Europe, too, has grudgingly accepted that without developing nations’ participation, rich nations’ cuts will have little impact.

Some would have us believe that getting China and India on board will be easy. According to former US Vice President Al Gore, “developing countries that were once reluctant to join in the first phases of a global response to the climate crisis have themselves now become leaders in demanding action and in taking bold steps on their own initiatives.”

But Gore’s fellow Nobel laureate, Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is not so sure. He recently told an Indian audience, “of course, the developing countries will be exempted from any such restrictions, but the developed countries will certainly have to cut down on emissions.”

It is likely that Pachauri is right and Gore is wrong: neither China nor India will commit to significant cuts without a massive payoff.

Their reasons are entirely understandable. The biggest factor is the massive cost and the tiny reward. Reducing emissions is the only response to climate change that environmental campaigners talk about, despite the fact that repeated attempts to do so – in Rio in 1992 and in Kyoto in 1997 – failed to make a dent in emission levels.

Some believe that past agreements did not go far enough, but Kyoto actually turned out to be overly ambitious. Ninety-five percent of its envisioned cuts never happened. Yet, even if Kyoto were fully implemented throughout this century, it would reduce temperatures by an insignificant 0.3°F (0.2oC), at an annual cost of $180 billion.

China and India are enjoying swift growth that is helping millions of people lift themselves out of poverty. India’s External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee recently said, “India is very concerned about climate change, but we have to see the issue in the perspective of our imperative to remove poverty so that all Indians can live a life of dignity.”

And Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao recently said, “it’s difficult for China to take quantified emission reduction quotas at the Copenhagen conference, because this country is still at an early stage of development. Europe started its industrialization several hundred years ago, but for China, it has only been dozens of years.”

Some environmental campaigners argue that, given the effects of global warming, every nation must act. But if one takes a closer look at China, this argument disintegrates.

Climate models show that for at least the rest of this century, China will actually benefit from global warming. Warmer temperatures will boost agricultural production and improve health. The number of lives lost in heat waves will increase, but the number of deaths saved in winter will grow much more rapidly: warming will have a more dramatic effect on minimum temperatures in winter than on maximum temperatures in summer.

There are few arguments for China and India to commit to carbon caps – and compelling reasons for them to resist pressure to do so.

Kyoto’s successor will not be successful unless China and India are somehow included. To achieve that, the European Union has made the inevitable, almost ridiculous proposal of bribing developing nations to take part – at a cost of €175 billion annually by 2020.

In the midst of a financial crisis, it seems unbelievable that European citizens will bear the financial burden of paying off China and India. The sadder thing, though, is that this money would be spent on methane collection from waste dumps in developing nations, instead of on helping those countries’ citizens deal with more pressing concerns like health and education.

There is an alternative to spending so much to achieve so little. Cutting carbon still costs a lot more than the good that it produces. We need to make emission cuts much cheaper so that countries like China and India can afford to help the environment. This means that we need to invest much more in research and development aimed at developing low-carbon energy.

If every country committed to spending 0.05% of its GDP exploring non-carbon-emitting energy technologies, this would translate into $25 billion per year, or ten times more than what the world spends now. Yet, the total also would be seven times cheaper than the Kyoto Protocol, and many times cheaper than the Copenhagen Protocol is likely to be. It would ensure that richer nations pay more, taking much of the political heat from the debate.

Decades of talks have failed to make any impact on carbon emissions. Expecting China and India to make massive emission cuts for little benefit puts the Copenhagen meeting on a sure path to being another lost opportunity. Yet, at the same time, the Chinese and Indian challenge could be the impetus we need to change direction, end our obsession with reducing emissions, and focus instead on research and development, which would be smarter and cheaper – and would actually make a difference.

Permalink: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/lomborg37

The Indo-German iron fertilization experiment LOHAFEX will be carried out from the German research vessel “Polarstern” in the southwest Atlantic from 7th January to 17th March 2009. The interdisciplinary team of 48 scientists on board “Polarstern” will closely collaborate in monitoring the algal bloom expected to grow in the fertilized patch of ocean and studying its effects on the chemistry and biology for at least 45 days.

The results of LOHAFEX will be of great interest to both ocean ecologists and geochemists because the minute, unicellular algae suspended in the sunlit surface layer known as phytoplankton not only provide the food sustaining all oceanic life but also play a key role in regulating concentrations of the greenhouse gas CO₂ in the atmosphere.

Background

The Southern Ocean encircling Antarctica is rich in the nutrients nitrate, phosphate and silicon but phytoplankton growth is limited by the supply of iron which is a crucial ingredient of all organisms. Iron is highly insoluble in sea water, so, unlike the other nutrients, is quickly lost in sinking particles. Addition of trace amounts of iron to these waters, whether from natural sources (contact with land masses and via settling dust blown of the continents) or by artificial iron fertilization (from a ship releasing dissolved iron sulfate to the surface layer), results in rapid algal growth leading to development of phytoplankton blooms.

Phytoplankton grow by taking up CO₂ dissolved in sea water and converting the carbon into biomass (organic matter). Because the CO₂ dissolved in the ocean’s surface layer is in equilibrium with the atmosphere, blooms cause a deficit which is compensated by uptake from the atmosphere. The fate of the bloom biomass determines how long this CO₂ is retained in the ocean. If the organic matter is recycled by bacteria and zoo plankton – unicellular protozoa and a variety of small animals that graze on phytoplankton – within the surface layer, and the iron selectively lost, then the CO₂ taken up is returned to the atmosphere within months. However, the organic particles in the form of phytoplankton cells and zoo plankton fecal material that settle out of the surface layer sequester CO₂ for longer time scales depending on how deep they sink. Carbon transported in particles that sink below 3,000 m is sequestered for centuries and the portion buried in the sediments for much longer.

Five iron fertilization experiments in the Southern Ocean have created phytoplankton blooms but only in the previous experiment EIFEX carried out from Polarstern was it possible to actually follow the rain of particles sinking through the underlying deep water column because the experiment was carried out in the closed core of a stationary, rotating eddy. LOHAFEX will also be conducted in a pre-selected eddy but the size of the patch will be twice as large – 300 km² fertilized with 20 tonnes of iron sulfate. EIFEX had to be terminated after 35 days while the bloom was still growing and sinking but LOHAFEX will last 10 days longer and quantify the amount sinking to depth more accurately.

Another goal of LOHAFEX is to study the effects of iron fertilization on the zooplankton, in particular the shrimp-like krill, which is the main food of Antarctic penguins, seals and whales. Stocks of krill have declined by over 80% during the past decades and their response to the iron-fertilized bloom will indicate whether the decline is due to declining productivity of the region for which there is evidence. Thus, large-scale iron fertilization of the krill habitat could well help in boosting their stocks to their former high densities and facilitate long-term recovery of the decimated great whale populations.

To follow up on the latest developments of this experimento follow: http://www.nio.org/projects/narvekar/narvekar_NWAP2.jsp

Terra Preta can store twice as much carbon on soil even after thousands of years.

By burning carbon without oxygen (pyrolysis) and mixing it with soil we can take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere while enhancing soil to do what we want it to do, that is to retain nutrients for plants, to retain CO2 to enhance soil productivity.

Agri Char technology offers the possibility of taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere via fast growing plants, and permanently sequestering that carbon in the soil.