Impact on communities - Climate change

Whilst not necessarily a post around strategic ways to be ready for climate change, I wanted  to share some ways that NCVO - the organisation - and NCVO - the individuals - are doing their bit to reduce their carbon footprint(s).

As the rain pours down outside, I read the cheery news that:

“The UK could see more flooding like that witnessed recently” because of global warming.

Three UK groups studying climate change have issued a strong statement about the dangers of failing to cut emissions of greenhouse gases across the world. The Royal Society, Met Office, and Natural Environment Research Council (Nerc) say the UK floods, 2003 heat wave in Europe and recent droughts were consistent with emerging patterns of climate change activity.

 But their lead experts:

Professor Julia Slingo, chief scientist of the Met Office, Professor Alan Thorpe, Nerc's chief executive,  and Lord Rees, president of the Royal Society all say:

“Cutting carbon emissions could substantially limit the severity of climate change”

So what is NCVO doing to help reduce its carbon footprint?

On a macro level:
achieved silver level on Mayor’s green procurement code which ensures we prioritise the environmental impact of our systems;
Signed up to 10:10 – which commits us to cutting 10% of our emissions by 2010 (next year!);
We support the Every Action Counts campaign  which encourages and helps other VCOs to green up.

On a micro level, a few things are:
- We have a green electricity provider
- All our PCs shut down over night
- Staff are encouraged to recycle like mad recycling-addicts.

So what can you do?

A few examples, from the sublime:
- Buying organic veggies and making amazing meals from them
- Look out for opportunities organised by others to raise awareness of environmental campaigns eg join the Wave; sing up to 10:10; become an EAC champion…
- …or organise them yourself! Fancy a clothes swop?
- Have meat-free lunches for a week…

...to the ridiculous...

Have been known to collect random furniture abandoned on the street, and give it a new home (anon)
What do you do to reduce your carbon footprint? Let us know, I'd love to hear!

Utter nonsense! No scientific link has been made between natural disasters, such as floods and hurricanes, and 'global warming:'

"LORD STERN’S report on climate change, which underpins government policy, has come under fire from a disaster analyst who says the research he contributed was misused."

"Robert Muir-Wood, head of research at Risk Management Solutions, a US-based consultancy, said the Stern report misquoted his work to suggest a firm link between global warming and the frequency and severity of disasters such as floods and hurricanes."

Muir-Wood said his research showed no such thing and accused Stern of “going far beyond what was an acceptable extrapolation of the evidence”.

The same report was also used by the IPCC to erroneoulsly link global warming and disasters.

AND:

Information was quietly removed from an influential government report on the cost of climate change after its initial publication because supporting scientific evidence could not be found.

The Stern Review on the economics of climate change, which was commissioned by the Treasury, was greeted with headlines worldwide when it was published in October 2006

It contained dire predictions about the impact of climate change in different parts of the world.

But it can be revealed that when the report was printed by Cambridge University Press in January 2007, some of these predictions had been watered down because the scientific evidence on which they were based could not be verified.

Among the claims that were removed in the later version of the report, which is now also available in its altered form online, were claims that North West Australia has been hit by stronger tropical typhoons in the past 30 years.

Another claim that southern regions in Australia have lost rainfall due to rising ocean temperatures and air currents pushing rain further south was also removed.

Claims that eucalyptus and savannah habitats in Australia would also become more common were also deleted.

The claims were highlighted in several Australian newspapers when the report was initially published, but the changes were never publicly announced.

A figure on the cost of US Hurricanes was also changed after a typographical error was spotted in the original report. The original stated in a table the cost of hurricanes in the US would rise from 0.6% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to 1.3%.

The later report corrected the error so the increase was from 0.06% to 0.13%. A statement about the correction appeared in a postscript of the report and on the Treasury website.

The Stern Review has been instrumental in helping the UK government draw up its climate change policies while it has also been cited by leading organisations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its assessment reports on climate change.

Details of the changes, which have not been publicly detailed before, have emerged as the IPCC is under fire for errors on the melting of Himalayan glaciers that appeared in their most recent assessment report because of a failure to check the sources of the information.

A spokesman for Lord Stern, who headed the review and is now chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said that the changes to the statements about Australia were made following a quality control check before the report was printed by Cambridge University Press.

He said: "Statements were identified in the section on Australia for which the relevant scientific references could not be located.

They were therefore, as a precaution, omitted from the version published by Cambridge University Press and they were deleted from the electronic version on the HM Treasure website.

"These changes to the text had no implications for any other parts of the report.

"It is perhaps not surprising that in a report of more than 700 pages a few typographic errors and minor but necessary clarifications to the text were identified in November and December 2006 after its launch.

"However, none of these corrections and changes affected the analysis or conclusions in the Stern Review, which is rightly regarded as an important contribution on the economics of climate change."

Professor Roger Pielke, from the centre of Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado who has been a long term critic of the Stern Review, described the changes to the report as "remarkable".

He said: "In any academic publication changes to published text to correct errors or to clarify require the subsequent publication of a formal erratum or corrigendum.

"This is to ensure the integrity of the literature and a paper trail, otherwise confusion would result if past work could be quietly rewritten.

"Such a practice is very much a whitewash of the historical record.

"One would assume – and expect – that studies designed to inform government (and international) policy would be held to at least these same standards if not higher standards."

Here's a 2009 peer reviewed report on European floods:

J. I. Barredo of the European Commission published an interesting paper earlier this year titled, “Normalized Flood Losses in Europe: 1970-2006″ (PDF) in the open access journal Natural hazards and Earth System Sciences of the EGU. The study looks at a relatively short period, 37 years, but its findings are interesting nonetheless. Here are a few excerpts (emphasis added):
Following the conceptual approach of previous studies, we normalised flood losses by considering the effects of changes in population, wealth, and inflation at the country level. Furthermore, we removed inter-country price differences by adjusting the losses for purchasing power parities (PPP). We assessed normalised flood losses in 31 European countries. These include the member states of the European Union, Norway, Switzerland, Croatia, and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

Results show no detectable sign of human-induced climate change in normalised flood losses in Europe. The observed increase in the original flood losses is mostly driven by societal factors.

And also:

Despite the existing evidence (see Table 1) of changes in temperature and precipitation in Europe (Alcamo et al., 2007; Rosenzweig et al., 2007; Trenberth et al., 2007) there is no conclusive evidence for a climate-related trend for hydrologic floods either on a continental or a regional scale in Europe (Glaser and Stangl, 2003; Mudelsee et al., 2003; Lindstr¨om and Bergstr¨om, 2004; Kundzewicz et al., 2005, 2007; Macklin and Rumsby, 2007). This supports the hypothesis that a positive trend in the increase of flood losses should be attributed to societal shifts in the exposed areas.

The paper concludes:

These results indicate that changes in population, inflation and per capita real wealth are the main factors contributing to the increase of the original raw losses. After filtering their influence there remains no evident signal suggesting any influence of anthropogenic climate change on the trend of flood losses in Europe during the assessed period.

Studies of disasters around the world are unambiguous and uncontested: Increasing damage over recent decades can be explained entirely by societal factors and there is no evidence to support the hypothesis that greenhouse-gas driven climate change has led to increasing disasters. The standard disclaimer applies — this does not mean that action to address accumulating greenhouse gases does not make sense; as I’ve stated on many occasions, it does. What it does mean is that efforts to point to contemporary disasters as a basis for action on energy policies are misleading at best.

The much hyped 2003 heat wave:

Chase, T.N., K. Wolter, R.A. Pielke Sr., and Ichtiaque Rasool, 2006: Was the 2003 European summer heat wave unusual in a global context? Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L23709, doi:10.1029/2006GL027470.

In Chase et al. (2006) we documented the June, July, and August averaged thickness temperature anomalies in terms of standard deviations exceeded and concluded that, while the European heatwave was unusual, natural variability in terms of ENSO and volcanic eruptions exceeded the extremes of the European heatwave. In subsequent commentary on this paper, Connelly (2006) found that the European heat wave was indeed quite unusual if surface temperature data was used prompting Chase et al. (2008) to conclude, along with others, that the unusual heat wave was confined near the surface was the result of surface processes and not a general warming of the troposphere as would be expected in a global warming scenario. We also concluded that with the updated time series that an upward trend in extreme variability was starting to appear. 

Here we update the original time series through 2009 as shown in Figures 1a,b,c which show the percentage of the Northern Hemisphere extratropics affected by 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 SD anomalies, respectively. There is now a clear and significant upward trend in the most extreme variability (Table 1) with the summer of 2008 being the most extreme yet. This is due to very large warm anomalies in northeastern Canada, around Greenland, and also in Siberia (Figure 2). Interestingly, these extremes in SD exceeded are largest in the near-surface layers of the atmosphere than in the mid-troposphere despite the temperature variability at high latitudes being much larger near the surface than in the mid troposphere (e.g., Peixoto and Oort, 1992; Figure 7.8) again suggesting that surface processes are more responsible than generalized climate warming.  

Paul Biggs

Climate Change started out as an issue raised by scientists who merely observe the world around them. Observation and interpretation for the sake of better understanding the world about us is the aim of science - not to preach to us about how to live our lives, lobby government for their favoured policies or to make money. Scientific understanding and discoveries are then taken by society to be used to cure illnesses, improve agriculture, manage our environment and even get us to the moon.

At Global Action Plan we want to help everyone understand what the science is telling us, before that science is intercepted by those in politics, business, NGOs or any other group and twisted to suit their interests. We'll leave it up to you to decide what you think climate change and the imperative of living within our environmental means.

If you want to read what the IPCC - the work of thousands of scientists pulled together in the biggest scientific investigation of all time - has to say on the matter, the enormous volume of work is freely available here: http://www.ipcc.ch/

It is a really complicated subject and so some of the mainstream scientific journals have produced more readable guides to the science on offer. One very good source of information is the New Scientist, which has produced a guide to the biggest debates around climate science called "a guide for the perplexed". http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11462

Read what the scientists have to say and make your mind up from there, rather than listening to any pressure group or NGO, whether pro-environmental or anti-environmental. The science is all publicly available and you won't need to illegally hack any university's computer account to access it!

Hi Keith,

I can understand where you're coming from given the recent climate gate turn of events, and the scientific communities lack of response to these criticisms, as well as some criticism from some of the scientists involved. You're clearly a very frustrated man so here's my top tips on how to really prove your case against the climate change agenda.

1. You cite perhaps 10 papers in your favour above, and perhaps 10 the IPCC might have got wrong. In the context of thousands of papers in favour of the idea of climate change as anthroprogenic from across the scientific community though that's not going to cut it. Your going to need to establish a body of research robust, credible and large enough to at least match the IPCC's to win any reasonable argument. It's incredibly easy to pick holes in a huge piece of work involving lots of people as there will always be mistakes. It's less easy however to mount a credible alternative argument that has as much support. If you really care about this, that is what you must do.

2. You correctly criticise the IPCC for making unsubstantiated claims, yet you do the same yourself above. Again if you are going to win this argument, you must substantiate, with robust, credible and peer reviewed papers every major point that you make if you are to argue from a level playing field, otherwise again, you're not providing a credible alternative. You can't criticise the IPCC and then do the exact same thing yourself.

3. I would urge common sense. If you have a problem with your car, and 10 non qualified people who know a bit a bout cars generally say it's problem x, while thousands of qualified mechanics, each the World leaders specialising in one tiny bit of your car tell you it's problem Y, who would you listen to, today. Think about that, I'm sure you'll know the answer. It's not so different, Science never proves anything, it only informs our best guesses...and that's what the IPCC are doing, sure they're making mistakes, but they're still by a country mile the best guess we have. SO, again, if you want to  genuinely change this, you're going to have give a credible alternative.

4. Last one, and I genuinely hope this is all helpful in you mounting a serious challenge rather than shouting from the sidelines (which doesn't really help anyone), you make the mistake of assuming these lifestyle changes will be bad. Actually there's an incredible amount of evidence (I have personally researched this but see Kasser, 2002; and Jackson, 2009 for excellent reviews which will provide you with over 100 pieces of peer reviewed scientific articles) that says that we can make changes which both avoid the worst affects of climate change and give us a BETTER standard of living, an IMPROVED quality of live. This is the biggest mistake the green movement have made, portraying changes to be about sacrifice but that's about to change. You will see in the nesxt few years an increase in messaging about a better life. Before you scoff at it honestly, I urge you to go and read about it, I've been following it for years.

OK, I hope that this either a) arms you to go and make a difference in the thing you care about instead of just being frustrated, or b) makes you realise that whether climate change is anthroprogenic or not, we all have the opportunity to make ours and our childrens lives better in the future whilst doing things which also happen to be good in relation to climate change.

Good luck!