Rich countries 'must slash living standards' to fight climate change

Living standards in Britain and other rich countries must fall sharply over the next decade if the world is to avoid catastrophic global warming, according to a leading climate research centre.
Consumption of energy-intensive goods and services should be cut and remain capped until low-carbon alternatives are available, said the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
The study says that Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions need to fall twice as fast as planned by the Government. It concludes that global greenhouse gas emissions are rising much faster than previously thought.
It says that Britain should commit to making all energy, including for electricity, heating and cars, zero-carbon by 2025, at least 25 years earlier than planned.







The centre, a partnership of seven universities including Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester, says that the economies of developed nations will have to shrink and consumption of almost all types of goods will have to fall “in the short to medium term”.
Speaking to The Times, Professor Kevin Anderson, the centre’s director, said: “The wealthier parts of the world, including Britain, will have to seriously consider reducing their levels of consumption over the next 10-15 years while we put in place low-carbon technologies.
“That may mean having only one car per household, a smaller fridge, buying fewer clothes and electronic goods and curtailing the number of weekend breaks that we have.
“It’s a very uncomfortable message but we need a planned economic recession. Economic growth is currently incompatible with reductions in absolute emissions.”
The study says that global emissions are rising much faster than has been assumed by Britain and other countries in setting their carbon targets. It says that these targets are “dangerously misleading” because they focus on distant dates, such as 2050, and avoid mentioning the immediate cuts that are needed.
Professor Anderson calculates that emissions in all developed countries must peak by 2012 and fall by 20 per cent a year from 2018 to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2C above the pre-industrial average.
Britain and most major economies agreed in July to limit the increase to 2C to avoid an unprecedented humanitarian disaster in the developing world. The global average has already risen by almost 1C.
Most climate scientists agree that an increase above 2C is likely to trigger mass migration from countries made uninhabitable by drought and rising sea levels.

Poor Nations' Climate Adaptation Could Cost $100 Billion a Year

Helping developing countries adapt to climate change will cost the world between US$75 and $100 billion per year for the period 2010 to 2050, the World Bank said today. The figures are detailed in the most in-depth analysis of the economics of climate change adaptation published to date.
The draft consultation document was released at ongoing United Nations climate negotiations in Bangkok that are shaping a post-Kyoto Protocol greenhouse gas agreement to take effect at the end of 2012.
"The costs of adapting to a 2 degree Celsius warmer world are of the same order of magnitude as current Overseas Development Assistance," said Katherine Sierra, World Bank vice president for sustainable development.

Food aid is distributed during a drought in Zimbabwe by Aktion Deutschland Hilft, 2007 (Photo courtesy World Vision)

"Faced with the prospect of huge additional infrastructure costs, as well as drought, disease and dramatic reductions in agricultural productivity, developing countries need to be prepared for the potential consequences of unchecked climate change," Sierra said. "In this respect, access to necessary financing will be critical."
The study, "Economics of Adaptation to Climate Change," funded by the governments of the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, is
President Barack Obama and the leaders of the other large industrialized countries have pledged to help the least developed countries adapt to climate change.
At the UN Climate Summit in New York in September, Obama pledged to help provide the financial and technical assistance needed to help the poorest and most vulnerable of developing nations "leap-frog dirty energy technologies and reduce dangerous emissions."
"What we are seeking, after all, is not simply an agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions," said Obama. "We seek an agreement that will allow all nations to grow and raise living standards without endangering the planet."
This is the first report to develop a workable definition of adaptation costs that can set the stage for common understanding of what adaptation actually entails, what role development plays, and what policy changes are needed to facilitate adaptation.
Suggesting that countries become less vulnerable to climate change as their economies grow, the study finds that adaptation costs decline as a percentage of GDP over time.
"Economic growth is the most powerful form of adaptation," said Warren Evans, director of the World Bank’s Environment Department. "However, it cannot be business as usual. Adaptation minimizes the impacts of climate change, but it does not address its causes. There is no substitute for mitigation to reduce catastrophic risks."
In the study, adaptation costs for all developing countries are estimated for the major economic sectors using country-level data sets that have global coverage, including partial assessment of costs of adaptation for ecosystem services.
Cost implications of changes in the frequency of extreme weather events are also considered.
The study uses a new methodology for assessing these adaptation costs, comparing a future world without climate change and a future world with climate change.
The difference between these two worlds entails a series of actions to adapt to the new world conditions. The costs of these additional actions are the costs of adapting to climate change.

Rural families in Bangladesh are vulnerable to increased flooding and sea level rise, especially during the monsoon season. (Photo by Natasha Scripture courtesy World Food Programme)

A key part of the overall analysis involved estimating adaptation costs for major economic sectors under two alternative future climate scenarios, a wet scenario and a dry one.
Under the dryer scenario, the adaptation cost is estimated at US$75 billion per year, while under the scenario that assumes a wetter future climate it is US$100 billion. The drier scenario requires lower adaptation costs in all regions except South Asia.
The highest costs of adaptation will be borne by the East Asia and Pacific Region, the World Bank reports, followed by Latin America and the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
"The World Bank study makes plain that taking action in favor of adaptation now can result in future savings and reduce unacceptable risks," said Dutch Minister for Development Cooperation Bert Koenders.
"At this point," Koenders said, "the costs this will entail can still be borne by the international community, to judge by the GDPs of rich countries, but for poor countries they are unacceptably high."
"More than ever, mitigation, adaptation and development cooperation are needed to make the poor less vulnerable to climate change," he said. "International public financial support for adaptation in the poorest developing countries should be new and additional, so as not to jeopardize the Millennium Development Goals."
The eight Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by 2015 were adopted by all nations during the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000. They are: eradication of extreme hunger and poverty, universal primary education, gender equality, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat disease, ensure environmental sustainability, and create a global partnership for development.
The impacts of climate change in developing countries will make many of these goals more difficult to achieve as droughts and extreme weather events, floods and sea level rise take their toll.
"The Economics of Adaptation to Climate Change study provides a range of estimates for a world in which decision makers have perfect foresight," says Sergio Margulis, lead environmental economist with the World Bank. "In the real world where decision makers hedge against a range of outcomes, the actual expenditures are potentially higher than this."
The report stresses that development strategies must maximize flexibility and incorporate knowledge about climate change as it is gained and emphasizes that many questions remain, and that further work is essential.

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2009/2009-10-01-02.asp?5f868080

Smoking Bans Reduce Risk of Heart Attacks by Lowering Exposure to Secondhand Smoke

People who live in communities that ban smoking in public places--such as bars, restaurants, and government buildings--have fewer heart attacks, according to two new research studies recently reported by the National Institutes of Health.
In the communities researchers studied, the rate of heart attacks fell dramatically within one year after the smoking ban was put in place (17 percent in one study and 25 percent in the other), and dropped about 36 percent after three years, leading one researcher to estimate that a nationwide ban on smoking in public places in the United States would result in more than 154,000 fewer heart attacks annually.

Sulfur Scrubbing Gets A Boost As China Cracks Down On Pollution

Last year's Olympics in Beijing brought China to the verge of global embarrassment over its pollution problem. Only shutting down some of its factories temporarily stopped the city from choking the tourists and athletes.
But beyond such quick fixes, there are signs that China is getting more serious about its long-term environmental problems. In June 2008, the government tightened its gas emission standards.
One of its rules related to sintering, a process that makes solid alloys out of metal powder using high heat. The process emits sulfur dioxide when powered by coal, so the new rules mandate desulfurization equipment on all coal-fired sinters.
Builds Better Mousetrap
Enter Rino International (NasdaqGM:RINO - News) of Dalian, China. More than three-quarters of its sales come from flue gas desulfurization systems, or FGD, designed for that very niche. It costs about a third of what the competition costs without sacrificing quality, says Chief Financial Officer Jenny Liu.
"Our technology can remove 92% to 93% of sulfur," she said. "The current technology can only remove 88%."
So far, the company has installed 29 systems in the sintering facilities of China's major steel producers, more than half of all such installations in China. Its most recent deployment, which started Sept. 8, is a $14 million deal with Hunan Lianyuan Iron and Steel Co. The technology is a new ammonia-based FGD system called DXT, which resolves an earlier issue over what to do with the waste products the process creates, Liu says. DXT's waste comes in the form of ammonia sulfate, which can be used as fertilizer.
There should be more business in the pipeline, according to analyst Amit Dayal of Rodman & Renshaw. Only about 10% of the 500 or so sinters in China have had FGD gear installed. And unlike some sectors of the Chinese market, the steel industry seems to be expected to comply.
"In many cases where polluters have not adhered to the new laws, arrests have been made," Dayal wrote in his Sept. 3 initiation report. "In regards to Rino's position in this context, a majority of its customers are state-owned steel entities that cannot avoid meeting these mandates."
The FGD business has driven explosive growth. In 2005, Rino pulled just $3.6 million in sales, but last year it reached $139 million. In the second quarter of this year, profit jumped 86% from last year to 39 cents a share. Sales rose 18% to $40.7 million.
Though FGD sales climbed a brisk 20% in the quarter, it wasn't the fastest-growing segment. That honor went to wastewater treatment, whose sales vaulted 53.4% to $6 million. Strange as it sounds, the customer base for this is the same as for FGD gear. Iron-making blast furnaces and steel-making converters both consume and expel large amounts of water, contributing to industrial pollution.
Rino's Lamella wastewater treatment system cost $4 million to install and draws a 40% gross margin for the company. But it is a somewhat more mature market than FGD. Dayal says 68% of blast furnaces and 54% of converters already have treatment systems, some of them installed by the steel producers without recourse to third-party vendors.
Wastewater treatment is Rino's original product line, launched when its first facility started production in 2003. Since then, the firm has been developing new equipment jointly with the research departments of several Chinese universities.
Apart from the FGD line, this system has produced an anti-oxidation technology to combat pollution from production of hot-rolled steel. That drew $1.1 million in sales in the second quarter. Last year, the R&D department also created dust-catching and sludge-treatment technology, but this has yet to produce revenue.
Meanwhile, demand for the existing products has been so brisk that Rino is outsourcing some of its work. This has put pressure on margins, since the firm generally benefits from controlling the supply chain. Liu says the company is "in the closing stage" of a deal to buy another piece of land in Dalian where it will build a factory.
Becoming Visible
The growth has helped raise Rino's U.S. profile. It first started trading on the Nasdaq in 2007 after a complicated reverse merger, but it was trading only around 3,000 shares a day and rarely topped $10 in price. In July, however, it was upgraded to the Nasdaq Global Market, and hired U.S.-educated Liu as CFO. The price and volume both shot up, and it now trades about 600,000 shares a day at over 20.
So far Dayal is the only analyst to launch coverage, but his outlook is promising. The main thing to keep an eye on, in his view, is the restructuring of China's steel industry. It got hit by the global recession like everybody else, causing an ongoing consolidation of production into a few companies. This could potentially limit demand for Rino's products.
But that still leaves room for growth. Dayal expects earnings to jump 122% this year to $1.91 a share, climbing 11% next year to $2.09.

After a Devastating Fire, an Intense Study of Its Effects

The Station fire, which in over a month has burned away nearly a quarter of this vast, mountainous backdrop to the Los Angeles skyline, is finally just about out, sending all but a handful of firefighters home. Now, the scientists swoop in

Adam Backlin and Liz Gallegos, federal biologists, stood thigh-deep in a stream last week, sweeping a large net over and over like frustrated anglers to collect Santa Ana speckled dace fish as part of research on the damaging effects of fire on fragile wildlife.
Earlier, another biologist, Diana Papoulias, hauled out centrifuges, dry ice, syringes and other equipment to perform autopsies on fish, delving deeper into the role that heat, fire retardant and debris in the water may have played in their demise.
And Todd M. Hoefen, a geophysicist, scooped up white and black ash as part of research to analyze “the impact of it, what blows out of these fires and what are people breathing.”
Fire, typically touched off by lightning strikes, has always been part of the life cycle of the wilderness here and elsewhere, to a large degree crucial to regenerating it. Most wildlife and landscape eventually come back.
But with the increasing frequency and size of fires — 7 of the state’s 10 largest wildfires have occurred in the last six years, and most were caused by people — scientists are intensifying study of the environmental aftermath of the changing burn pattern.
“Fire dynamics have changed a lot, and urbanization has fragmented the landscape,” said Robert N. Fisher, a biologist with the United States Geological Survey, which has coordinated a team to take a closer look at this fire and other recent ones. “We have to figure out a way to give animals a way to persist in a way they did before in a landscape that is burning too fast and too much.”
This week, Mr. Fisher coordinated an unusual evacuation of sorts. A multiagency team of state and federal forest and wildlife representatives removed a colony of mountain yellow-legged tadpoles, endangered in Southern California, from a tributary of the San Gabriel River before rock and debris unleashed by fall and winter rains imperil their creekside habitat.
The tadpoles were taken to the Fresno Chaffee Zoo, where they will be raised, with the young spawned there eventually returned to the wild.
But such maneuvers represent the extreme. Much of the scientists’ work is intended to provide a better understanding of the ecological aftermath of fires, particularly those in areas where development meets wilderness and threatened and endangered species are present.
Scott L. Stephens, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and president of the Association for Fire Ecology, said the Station fire work coincided with a burst of fire science research in recent years designed to answer questions not only about what happens during and after fires but also about the effect climate change and drought may be having on forests and scrubland in high-burn areas.
Underlying much of the interest, Dr. Stephens said, are questions like these: “Are there things we can do to mitigate fire? Are there things managers can do to reduce their impact?”
The Station fire, which was named for its start on Aug. 26 near a ranger station, has destroyed several dozen homes and caused the deaths of two Los Angeles County firefighters. It ranks as the largest fire in the modern history of Los Angeles County. It has burned more than 160,000 acres, or 250 square miles, an area nearly the size of Chicago, and has cut off access to one of Los Angeles’s most popular wilderness getaways, about 20 miles north of downtown.
But the fire may be best remembered for the towering, thundercloud-like plume that loomed for days over the city.
Just what happened to all that ash and how thousands of gallons of fire retardant sprayed on the forest is affecting its creatures is now the focus of much investigation.
Much of the work requires painstaking field research in the deepest reaches of craggy forest.
On a recent afternoon, in the moonscape of the “burn scar,” Mr. Backlin and Ms. Gallegos bounced in a truck along trails and hopped out at the edge of a creek for an afternoon of “fishing.”
With a Forest Service fire truck parked nearby and water-dropping helicopters dashing overhead to hit the last smoldering hot spots, the two cast a literal wide net in an effort to collect small, finger-length speckled daces.
“We’re on fire now,” Mr. Backlin exulted, after several previous efforts turned up nothing but trout and water bugs.
“When the winter rains come, we won’t have any idea what these fish were like if they are washed away,” he said, tossing a few more into a collection bucket.
Later, the two biologists sat in the dirt and measured the specimens, euthanized them and placed them in jars to take back to the laboratory for autopsies.
DNA samples were taken, their internal organs analyzed and other tests performed to assess their overall health and the presence of toxins

With Forest Service officials already warning that heavy rains could produce severe mudslides because so much vegetation holding the soil in place has burned away, scientists worry about the consequences, particularly to aquatic creatures

Another group of scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Arizona State University and the California Institute of Technology plan to take detailed, high-resolution aerial photographs of the burn in the coming days as part of research on erosion and the movement of sediment in the mountains.
“Fire changes a lot of dynamics and releases a lot of sediment,” said Todd Farr, a geologist with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whose offices in La Cañada Flintridge abut the forest.
But even without the rain, the fires created a threat.
Already, scientists have found that ash particles in the streams can shred the fish’s gills and drive up the water’s alkalinity, possibly affecting reproduction and setting the stage for die-offs.
A research ecologist, Edward E. Little, said soil and water samples reddened by retardant were being analyzed to determine toxicity to fish and amphibians, among the creatures most susceptible to environmental changes.
Similar work has been done after fires in Colorado and Idaho, Dr. Little said, but “the interesting thing about the Station fire is it is such a different kind of fire than we have visited, in terms of devastation of vegetation in the area.”
Mr. Hoefen, who also helped analyze ash from the World Trade Center collapse, said ash samples had shown elevated levels of minerals that could be the result of what the burned plants had absorbed from the soil or air pollution. They mirror findings from devastating fires in San Diego in 2007, he said, though additional research is needed to pinpoint how harmful the ash could be to human health and the environment.
With rains expected to wash much of the ash into the watershed, Mr. Hoefen said, the quality of rivers, streams and reservoirs could be affected.
“Hopefully, our science will start to show people that it is not just fire, but there could be problems for the frogs, fish and the runoff,” Mr. Hoefen said. “Wind and rain blowing the ash into streams and ponds could have an effect after the fire.”

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