Millennium Island, Kiribati (Photo:AP)
China's official reaction (China.org.cn, Sept. 27) is unequivocal: "Human influence on the climate system is clear. This is evident in most regions of the globe, a new assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes." The US-based Natural Resources Defense Council adds: "China's own 710-page Second National Assessment Report on Climate Change, released to the public last year, warns that China itself faces extremely grim ecological and environmental consequences from global warming. These impacts, including increasing droughts and floods, threaten China's already vulnerable food and water supplies, and rising sea levels will affect millions of people in Shanghai and other highly populated coastal cities." China and the United States as the world's largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions know they must act and pledge to do so in their Joint Statement on Climate Change. Besides the joint efforts with the United States, China is "is closing heavily polluting factories, prohibiting new coal-fired power plants in major industrial regions, and investing more in renewable energy than any other country in the world." [NRDC]
The Times of India and the Hindustan Times both drew sobering conclusions from the IPCC report. The Times of India in an October 2 web article notes that the entire Indian subcontinent can expect longer rainy seasons: "...the report clearly points at 'enhanced summer monsoon precipitation and increased rainfall extremes of landfall cyclones on the coasts of the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea'. Temperature rise and rainfall variations are expected to have an impact on the region's agriculture. The IPCC report on "impact, adaptation and vulnerability" will be finalized and released next year. On October 1, The Hindustan Times reported the preliminary conclusion of the effect on agriculture: "Higher rainfall will not mean more rainy days. It would amount to higher incidence of extreme rainfall events like what happened in June in Uttarakhand this June. With loss of green cover, the annual runoff will be more than 40% of the total rainfall. Another paradox emerging from the report is that despite more rainfall there would be more water stress areas in the region, especially north and central India. The report also says that agriculture production would fall by about 9 to 25% in South Asia."
Russia is urging the IPCC to include geo-engineering solutions to the crisis in its reports. Climate Central.org posted a piece by Guardian writer Martin Lukacs on September 24: "Geoengineering aims to cool the Earth by methods including spraying sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight, or fertilizing the oceans with iron to create carbon-capturing algal blooms. Such ideas are increasingly being discussed by western scientists and governments as a plan B for addressing climate change, with the new astronomer royal, Professor Sir Martin Rees, calling last week for such methods to buy time to develop sources of clean energy. But the techniques have been criticized as a way for powerful, industrialized nations to dodge their commitments to reduce carbon emissions." Anatoly Miranovsky writing for Pravda on September 10 notes that although a Stanford University study concluded that using "only one fifth of the wind energy available in the world, mankind can increase the amount of the consumed electricity seven-fold, ... Russia is [at] 64th place in the world in terms of generating electricity from wind (16.8 MW)." China, the US, and the countries of the European Union are all developing wind projects. The situation differs though in Russia. "Wind power in Russia is not developed because there is virtually no support from the government" according to the co-chairman of the Russian environmental group Ekozaschita" Vladimir Spivyak.
Japan's commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions was thrown into chaos by the tsunami that wrecked the Fukishima nuclear plant in 2011. A July 2013 article in the East Asia Forum notes: "At the 2010 UN climate change conference Japan committed to reducing its emissions by 25 per cent (relative to 1990 levels) by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050. While these reductions were, in part, to be achieved through an emphasis on clean energy, the lynchpin of the program was to be its reliance on nuclear energy and the introduction of a price on carbon at the national level." These plans were scuttled when Japan shutdown its nuclear industry after the Fukishima incident and Japan announced that it could not meet its commitments. An even greater surprise was their withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, which "grew from both a frustration with the inadequacies of the program, especially the lack of global commitment, and a realisation that Japan could no longer continue to meet its emissions reduction commitments." Japan's current approach is called "the Bilateral Offset Crediting Mechanism (BOCM). Under this regime the Japanese government is to recognise credits for investments in emissions reduction projects in developing countries." The Japan Times reported on September 29 that this fifth IPCC report, which is to be concluded next year, may be the last of its kind. As useful as these reports have been in gaining public attention and putting pressure on politicians to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, "some critics say these mega-reviews spanning thousands of pages belong to the past. The process is agonizingly slow at a time when both climate change and the science used to evaluate it are leaping ahead, they say. And the need for consensus makes these comprehensive judgments worryingly conservative." An October 3 article in The Japan Times (from the AP) reports on the ongoing court battles of a Kiribati man seeking asylum in New Zealand as a climate refugee. "Kiribati, an impoverished string of 33 coral atolls about halfway between Hawaii and Australia, has 103,000 people and has been identified by scientists as among the nations most vulnerable to climate change. In a transcript of the immigration case, the Kiribati man, whose name was withheld, describes extreme high tides known as king tides that he says have started to regularly breach Kiribati’s defenses — killing crops, flooding homes and sickening residents."
"If people continue to emit greenhouse gases at current rates, the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere could mean that within as little as two to three decades the world will face nearly inevitable warming of more than 2C, resulting in rising sea levels, heatwaves, droughts and more extreme weather."
Calved icebergs, Qaqortoq, Greenland (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
