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Copenhagen, December 2009

This is a date you should focus on very hard. Why? because it's the next global summit on climate change, following on from Bali and Kyoto. You may not like it, or believe it yet, but it's probably the last chance the world will have to really stop the effect of global warming and climate change. The policies decided at this conference will be implemented in 2012 and if they aren't extreme enough, like an 80% reduction in CO2 (27 gigatonnes worldwide in 2005), the IPCC higher prediction of a rise of 5 degree C in global temperatures in the next hundred years could become reality and Jeremy Clarkson's holiday home on the Isle of Man will be under water. Although he and I will be dead by then so we won't live to see it but our grand children will. But we can make a difference - acid rain in northern Europe was stopped in the eighties and our forests recovered. Lead levels in the atmosphere plunged after we stopped putting lead in petrol. It can be done, it must be done and the world's nations have a duty to our children to act decisively next year through to implementation in 2012.

We need a catalytic converter type solution to CO2 buildup now and I have no doubt the IPCC conclusion that to survive long-term we need to stop ALL CO2 emissions escaping into the atmosphere now is accurate. We need time to wean ourselves off oil and develop renewable, CO2-free sources of energy but we need to focus on how to buy ourselves time with realistic, effective solutions. It can, and will, happen. And you can be part of it.

If you want to read about it from the horse's mouth follow this link to NASA's James Hansen's open letter to Barak and Michelle Obama.

and read 

James Hansen's mini Powerpoint presentation

(Despite the doom and gloom on this page I'm naturally an optimistic, cheery soul believe it or not.)

GLOBAL WARMING  - WHAT I'VE LEARNT 

ABOUT WHERE WE LIVE

For many people, this has become a dead boring subject, but just wait until water is lapping around your kitchen table and the headlines are screaming from the tabloids: "WHY WEREN'T WE WARNED?".  But we were, weren't we?  A group of physicists called The Janus told President Reagan 30 years ago and their predictions were bang in the middle of what is happening now and what is projected for the future...but they were silenced.

30 years when we could have found an alternative energy source and reversed global warming. We wouldn't have needed the 3,350 oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico we have now but then all those petro-dollars would have gone to waste. It shouldn't escape our attention that there is some sort of irony in the fact that global warming caused by profligate use of fossil fuels is stoking the hurricanes which are hitting the Gulf, and the oil wells,  every year with increased ferocity.

The good news is that America has a new President as of  January 20th 2009 who could make a real difference and scientists are now looking ever harder at ways to save the planet. I've been involved recently with the development of one such idea developed by Professor David Keith at the University of Calgary, Canada - an air capture device which could help mitigate CO2 emissions by sucking the CO2 right out of the air and turning it back into a carbonate (where it came from) or pure CO2 which can be stored deep underground. This is already happening off Norway with natural gas which contains about 10% CO2 - the CO2 is extracted at source and reinjected back into what's known as a saline aquifer below the gas field which permanently traps and stores the CO2 as a liquid.

Chief Engineer on the scrubber fabrication was the world's nicest guy, Craig Irish. Craig tragically died in a car crash three days after we finished filming the build and I would like to remember him here for the top bloke he was.

The bad news with the global warming debate is the effects are still manifesting themselves in places  people don't really care about like Northern India and the Arctic - despite anecdotal examples of odd weather patterns and everything else. Figures published by www.eia.doe.gov make interesting reading: we produce 28 gigatonnes of CO2 every year. One power station can belch out 24,000 tons of CO2 a day. One cement plant will produce a million tonnes of CO2 for every million tonnes of cement. We are now producing CO2 100 times faster than at any time in the planet's history. That's not a record to be proud of.

Now scientists have found "chimneys" of methane gas bubbling up from the seabed under the arctic ice. This is a very worrying development. It means deposits of methane hydrate in the rock which have been frozen and locked in by the permafrost below the seabed are now escaping. The fact bubbles are reaching the surface means the methane is escaping in such volume it is not being absorbed as a dissolved gas in the water before it surfaces. Methane is twenty times as bad as CO2 in terms of trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Oh, and while this new very worrying development is occurring they are seriously researching methane energy. Unfortunately,  as it is twenty times as bad as CO2 as a greenhouse gas as I've just mentioned, its presence in the atmosphere is not desirable. Luckily it doesn't hang around nearly as long. Reserves of methane hydrate dwarf oil and gas deposits. But if we are going to survive, methane being used to produce methanol as a fuel is not the answer - it would be like shooting the planet in the head. Fuel, like the CFC scare with the ozone layer,  has to be greenhouse gas free in the future. Nuclear? Bring it on!

US/Mexico border fence

Over the last five years or so I’ve witnessed the hidden effects of global warming and I feel  there is definitely something happening to our environment akin to a wall starting to topple over - hard to see at first but just try stopping it once it starts to go.  And speaking of walls, the Pentagon predicted the US would have to build one right along its border with Mexico due to an uncontrolled influx due to internal conditions in other countries, drought and flooding being major factors...and guess what's happening now? A wall is being built. 

However, we need to understand that we are not the sole cause of climate change. A cyclical process of warming and change is underway but I do firmly believe our contribution is hastening and distorting the effects.  To illustrate this point graphically, I took the pictures above in Alaska and it's easy to find lots and lots of anecdotal evidence of retreating ice.

But governments charging the individual more duty which does not go straight back into dealing with the problem is not the solution. 

A total halt on all CO2 emissions today worldwide might arrest factors like the slide into increasing acidification of the seas due to CO2 absorption which will eventually kill all the fish in the ocean. The ocean can't absorb as much CO2 when it gets warmer and it makes the water less alkaline as it absorbs CO2. More acidic water prevents crustaceans from forming shells and destroys coral feeding grounds. The food chain is being mortally wounded in the process.

In 2009 scientists have found the Sea of Japan has crashed in terms of its ability to absorb CO2. Gainsayers are still claiming the oceans can absorb the 27 billion tons of CO2 we produce a year in 16 days. It's true we do only produce 3% of all CO2, but the earth is a sensitive biosphere and our contribution is a peturbation, not part of its natural synthesis system. The maths involved in this reabsorption calculation was flawed anyway and we must realise the oceans, and the forests, are not the potent carbon "sinks" they once were. If you check the Hadley Centre  Mean Global Surface Temperature averages you will see that year on year there hasn't been a negative swing since 1986. Before the Industrial Revolution CO2 levels remained reasonably constant - and in balance - for 10,000 years back to the Pleistocene Ice Age.

The Larsen B ice field in Northern Antarctica melted in just six weeks in February 2002. It was an Antarctic ice shelf that was 200 metres thick with a surface area of 3,250 square kilometers.  500 billion tonnes of ice the surface area equivalent to Rhode Island just melted.  

As a result, ice flow into the South Atlantic has apparently increased in speed from 300 meters a year to 2.5 kilometres as the glacial “plug” has been removed. Antarctica could therefore unwind like a melting ice cream into the sea. This will increase sea levels, divert warm currents, decrease sea temperature, its salinity and density.  All bad. 

The Larsen B melt was hastened by the formation of "moulins" - under ice rivers of meltwater which dislodge gigantic areas from the bedrock and cause intact ice to slide off the continental shelf and melt in the open sea. New lakes of melted ice can now be seen from space further inland in Antarctica and guess what is going to happen again? - further massive breakup of the ice shelf. Its rate of disintegration is exponential as rock and water absorb heat, whereas white ice reflects it. The more dark areas, the more heat is retained (albedo effect), the more the ice melts and so on in a dangerous, uncontrollable spiral.

And now the Wilkins icefield in western Antarctica has broken up and disappeared in six weeks. An ice field the size of Northern Ireland which was not due to start disintegrating for another 30 years at least has gone. NOAA say the summer ice in Alaska will be down to 4 percent or nothing at all next summer. That has exceeded the prediction by 50 years  - and the adjustment has occurred over 3 years - no time at all.

Forget egotistical and politically-motivated arguing over who predicted what weather and were they right in their predictions this season or that season.  This is a creeping problem which will profoundly and permanently affect the planet.  Although do understand that CO2 levels are not necessarily the sole trigger the media have latched on to with mind-numbing repetition. 

It's thought that year on year, temperature fluctuations are much more allied to solar flare activity versus cosmic rays which increase cloud cover and  create cooling in years with less solar activity. Therefore C02 levels follow temperature change triggered by solar flares, they don't actually cause it initially - so CO2 levels are a result and symptom of warming, not the base cause. But everyone is becoming obsessed with carbon levels as once they rise, they do contribute to retaining heat which would otherwise escape into the troposphere. 

In 2008 we had one of the worst hurricane seasons ever. Sea temperatures peaked around Papua New Guinea at 30 degrees C. Not the air, the sea temperature. And scientists have recently reported that we have just had the hottest decade in the last 1,300 years. Check out the sea temperatures in the map below which updates every hour and look for hurricane activity.

Whatever the interpretation of the cause, the planet is unarguably getting hotter.  Britain has just had its warmest winter in the last 125 years. 

Read Mark Lynas's book "Six Degrees" to understand the predicted result of incremental one degree c increases in temperature. In the book he reflects scientific predictions from the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) that a one degree C increase will cause a one metre rise in sea levels every 20 years from ice melt. The one degree C increase in temperatures in the last 100 years has only made a difference of millimeters gainsayers claim. Well, that was before we hit the albedo tipping point - when the level of exposed rock which used to be covered with snow and ice throws out lots more radiation which is trapped by the CO2 and methane in the atmosphere. We got the bonfire of our own vanity (!) going with a big flame (the industrial revolution) which had little immediate effect but now the bonfire has caught and it's burning. Scientists believe the earth is going into a natural cooling cycle at the moment but global warming is reversing its effect - imagine the accelerated effect of a warming cycle.

By the way, those projected average temperatures in "Six Degrees" and in the IPCC report represent an increase in sea levels of 5 metres in 100 years. 

London, New York, the Hague, Shanghai and Bangladesh will be underwater. And we've undergone a one degree c increase globally in the last ten years and are committed to one degree more before we can even start to think about ways to reverse the effect. I met professor Walter Dudley, a scientist in Hawaii who is responsible for monitoring sea temperatures in tenths of a degree for the Hadley Centre, and he had to recalibrate his instruments in 2004 as sea temperature increases were off his scale.

But as we will need the equivalent of two planets to feed the population by 2050 due to an explosion in numbers since 1945, it’s probably academic. Maybe the effect of global warming will mean Russia, Asia and America will be able to produce enough crops for bio-ethanol fuel in a sustainable way! But so far, all that has happened is a widening of the food crisis in countries which are growing crops for bio fuels at the expense of food. India banned some types of rice being exported this year and Pakistan has for the first time refused to supply Afghanistan - its neighbour and ally. Add drought and flooding to that bio fuels issue and guess why they think the weather has been so ruinous for the crop.

There is a pattern of connected cause and effect which we will see more and more of.  Ethiopia and Somalia are feeling the brunt of the effects of climate change and these poor, long-suffering people are dying in their thousands. There are people trying to live on a cup of water a day and eating their livestock feed while their cattle and camels die around them.

Meanwhile, funding for research in the US on global warming has increased from 175 million dollars to 2 billion dollars per year over the last 20 years, so now a lot of people in the scientific community who otherwise couldn't give a stuff  have an opinion  - and while they write their reports and go to conferences, Africa's population is quietly starving to death. Time - really - is running out now. 

We need a decisive, huge swing in the way we live - today.

If the US and the UK had spent the three trillion dollars we've blown fighting two wars in the Middle East over, let's face it, oil on developing a new energy source instead, greenhouse gases could be a thing of the past and the power balance amongst the world’s energy producers would have a totally different complexion now.  But don't forget the outgoing President was a Texan and Texans love their oil! And if our cars all ran on hydrogen, we'd need a global network of nuclear power stations to produce the massive volumes of power needed to produce the hydrogen. Which uses vast amounts of water which creates a potential problem and it presently boils away after a week in your fuel tank  anyway.

It was a close run thing for oil. Henry Ford almost elected to go for bio-ethanol fuel for his Model T Ford motor, but felt, understandably that the US had far greater, readily-available reserves of oil at the time. Texas was pumping it out of the ground by the billion barrel load and the mid-west had blown away in a massive dust storm thanks to over farming so there were no crops to produce bio-ethanol fuel. It was a decision which had a more significant influence on the oil industry than anything else since.

Imagine a situation where we are at war, there is no clean water, food is running out and people are dying in their thousands. It may not be a reality in Surrey yet but it is in Africa and South America and it's here to stay. And the socio-economic reasons which intertwine civil unrest and greed with factors in our climate will eventually lay their hand on your shoulder too.

READ AL GORE'S CHALLENGE TO REPOWER AMERICA HERE AND JOIN WWW.WECANSOLVEIT.ORG

Simon Ludgate 2009