Biochar Breakthrough

Sometimes the world does the right thing for the wrong reason. Having this conference support biochar as a way to save the climate is quickly turning out to be a silly rational. But no matter, if that is what it takes to get it done.

Biochar will sequester all the CO2 we have put into the atmosphere if every farmer on earth gets involved and uses biochar to rebuild his soils. It will take generations but in the end we will have healthy fertile soils everywhere and vast tracts of new land will have entered cultivation.

We need a global conference focused on implementing biochar in every soil. This will be a good start.

Eighteen months ago, when I first discovered the antiquity of biochar, I understood immediately what it meant and posted extensively. Few understood the underlying mechanism. That knowledge is slowly percolating into our tool kit and everyone has accepted now easy it is to make work. A few still tout the biofuel aspect but that is an unnecessary complication and a likely misstep. Other excellent methods have emerged and we still have access to primitive methods.

During the last eighteen months, biochar has gone from total obscurity to now been on the verge of been a household name. The recent National Geographic and the apparent fallout from this conference is now getting the story out with the full weight of the media.

This press release is a bit of an overstatement still but I heartily support the sentiments. Every farmer needs to know about biochar and needs to know how to use it.

http://globalclimatesolutions.org/

Breakthrough from the Black: Biochar to be Considered for Kyoto Status

11 12 2008
From the INTERNATIONAL BIOCHAR INITIATIVE

[From the Editor: Biochar may be one of the most promising tools humanity now has to mitigate and adapt to global climate change. And now it's being considered for inclusion as a Clean Development Project (CDM) by the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNCCC). The CDM is the central component of the Kyoto Protocol that allows for developed countries (so-called "Annex II" countries) to offset their emissions in developing countries through specific projects that must meet be approved by the UNCCC.

The efficacy of the Kyoto protocol to combat climate change has come under increasing scrutiny as decreases in emissions have proven dismally inadequate in light of recent suggestions that we may already be above dangerous levels of anthropogenic emissions. A clear-eyed and critical analysis of the Kyoto Protocol's strengths and weaknesses are needed in order to move forward with a truly effective international agreement that will set the Earth on course to drive down atmospheric CO2 levels to 350 ppm by 2050 (as the best science now indicates is necessary to avoid dangerous climate destabilization.)

Clearly, the consideration of biochar by the UNCCC is a monumentous achievement and should help drive us toward a much more serious and sensible investigation of what will be necessary for a post-Kyoto agreement. The cause has been taken up by United Nations Conference to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and is a decisive step toward widespread development and implementation of carbon-negative biochar production.

Below is the press release, in full, by the International Biochar Initiative. (Feel free to send them email expressing support or express it with a donation to the IBI. Congratulations to all who were involved in spearheading this most important achievement! -RDH.]

IBI Announces Success in Having Biochar Considered as a Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation Tool

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: December 10, 2008

POZNAN, Poland, December 10, 2008 - The International Biochar Initiative (IBI) announces that the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) has submitted a proposal to include biochar as a mitigation and adaptation technology to be considered in the post-2012-Copenhagen agenda of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). A copy of the proposal is posted on the IBI website at

The International Biochar Initiative (IBI) .

Biochar is a fine-grained, highly porous charcoal that helps soils retain nutrients and water. The carbon in biochar resists degradation and can sequester carbon in soils for hundreds to thousands of years.
IBI Executive Director Debbie Reed said, “The UNCCD submission is a great success, and is paralleled by a lot of very positive discussions and interest in biochar amongst country delegates as well as observers of the process.”

The UNCCD, a sister convention to the UNFCCC, has identified biochar as a unique opportunity to address soils as a carbon sink. According to the submission document: “The world’s soils hold more organic carbon than that held by the atmosphere as CO2 and vegetation, yet the role of the soil in capturing and storing carbon dioxide is often one missing information layer in taking into consideration the importance of the land in mitigating climate change.”

UNCCD proposes that biochar must be considered as a vital tool for rehabilitation of dryland soils: “The fact that many of the drylands soils have been degraded means that they are currently far from saturated with carbon and their potential to sequester carbon may be very high … making the consideration of Biochar, as a strategy for enhancing soils carbon sequestration, imperative.”

UNC CD also cites the ability of biochar to address multiple climate and development concerns while avoiding the disadvantages of other bioenergy technologies that deplete soil organic matter (SOM). IBI Executive Director Debbie Reed said, “Pyrolysis systems that produce biochar can provide many advantages. Biochar restores soil organic carbon and soil fertility, reduces emissions from agriculture, and can provide clean, renewable energy. Conventional biomass energy competes with soil building needs for crop residue feedstocks, but biochar accommodates both uses.”

Reduced deforestation is another biochar advantage cited by the UNCCD in their submitted proposal for including biochar in carbon trading mechanisms: “The carbon trade could provide an incentive to cease further deforestation; instead reforestation and recuperation of degraded land for fuel and food crops would gain magnitude.”

Craig Sams, founder of Green & Black’s Organic Chocolate, is in Poznan to help educate delegates about biochar. Sams believes that the climate and ancillary benefits of biochar are so great that biochar systems should be eligible for double credits. Sams said, “Adding the rewards for abandoning carbon emitting practices such as slash and burn cultivation, deforestation and wood fire cooking, to the rewards for adopting biochar practices in agriculture, forestry and cooking, ought to qualify for double credits.”

UNCCD proposes to include biochar in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), and to revise the rules to account for biochar as a permanent means of carbon capture. UNCCD also proposes adjusting the carbon offset rules to allow greater financial flows to help developing countries increase soil organic matter with biochar.

Biochar has one important additional advantage over other land use carbon sequestration projects - carbon sequestration through biochar is easy to quantify. It is also relatively permanent. The UNCCD says: “Potential drawbacks such as difficulty in estimating greenhouse gas removals and emissions resulting from land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF), or destruction of sinks through forest fire or disease do not apply to biochar soil amendments.”

Overall, the potential magnitude of biochar as a climate mitigation tool is great. IBI Board Chair Dr. Johannes Lehmann said, “We are pleased that the UNCCD has recognized the potential of biochar. Results from IBI’s preliminary model to estimate the potential of biochar carbon sequestration show that biochar production from agriculture and forestry residues can potentially sequester one gigaton of carbon in the world’s soils annually by 2040. Using the biochar energy co-product to displace fossil fuel energy can approximately double the carbon impact of biochar alone.”

IBI’s objective for the remainder of the UN meeting at Poznan is to interest more countries in proposing biochar for consideration as a mitigation and adaptation technology in the post-2012 Copenhagen process of the UNFCCC.

About IBI

The International Biochar Initiative (IBI) is a registered non-profit organization that serves as an international platform for the exchange of information and activities in support of biochar research, development, demonstration and commercialization. IBI participants comprise a consortium of researchers, commercial entities, policy makers, development agents, farmers and gardeners and others committed to supporting sustainable biochar production and utilization systems that remove carbon from the atmosphere and enhance the earth’s soils.

The International Biochar Initiative (IBI)

UN Conference Chills Out

It is enough to say that the much ballyhooed international conference that is now taking place in Poland was greeted by a UN generated report essentially saying what has been unavoidable for eighteen months. That the world has decided to cool off by 0.7 degrees without any fanfare or the slightest bit of notice.

Even the UN is learning that the climate will persistently warm up over years and decades and then abruptly cool. It actually explains and illuminates a lot about past historical climate shifts and even may partly explain the mythology of the Boreal Wind.

That may well be a folk memory of strong unusual Arctic summer winds been followed by bitterly cold winters.

There is nothing like living through a transition time to get a handle on the mechanisms at work.

I am looking forward to the communiqués that will come out of this conference. I wonder if they can grab the nettle or are we to be treated like idiots.

The moment the temperature dropped in the winter of 2008 after the spectacularly warm summer of 2007, the current cycle of warming was patently over. The big question now is whether a fresh warming cycle will begin, or if the decline will continue for some time.

Remember that the Romans faced a frozen Rhine and tens of thousands of so called Germanic barbarians on the other side with slim warning from the preceding years if any. A one degree drop in the next year or so would likely give us analogous conditions.


World Climate Report

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2008/12/02/will-the-un-chill-out-on-climate-change/

The Web’s Longest-Running Climate Change Blog
December 2, 2008

Will the U.N. Chill Out on Climate Change?

Filed under: Climate Politics, Surface, Temperature History —

10,000 people from 86 countries have descended upon Poznan, Poland for yet-another United Nations meeting on climate change. This time, it’s the annual confab of the nations that signed the original U.N. climate treaty in Rio in 1992. That instrument gave rise to the infamous 1996 Kyoto Protocol on global warming, easily the greatest failure in the history of environmental diplomacy.

Kyoto was supposed to reduce global emissions of carbon dioxide below 1990 levels during the period 2008-2012. But since it was signed, the atmospheric concentration of this putative pollutant continued to rise, pretty much at the same rate it did before Kyoto. (Even if the world had lived up to the letter of the Kyoto law, it would have exerted an influence on global temperature that would have been too small to measure.)

The purpose of the Poznan meeting is to work out some type of framework that goes “Beyond Kyoto.” After completely failing in its first attempt to internationally limit carbon dioxide emissions, the U.N. will propose reductions far greater than those called for by Kyoto. Kyoto failed because it was too expensive, so anything “beyond” will cost much more.

The fact is that the world cannot afford any expensive climate policies now. Economic conditions are so bad that carbon dioxide emissions—the byproduct of our commerce—are likely going down because of the financial cold spell, not the climatic one. Indeed, a permanent economic ice-age would likely result from any mandated large cuts in emissions. If you’re liking your 401(k) today, you’ll love “Beyond Kyoto.”

Before proposing an even harsher treaty the U.N. ought to pay attention to its own climate science. It regularly publishes temperature histories from its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was formed in the late 1980s with the express charge of finding a scientific basis for a global climate treaty.

Since Kyoto, a very funny thing has happened to global temperatures: IPCC data clearly show that warming has stopped—even though its computer models said such a thing could not happen.

According to the IPCC, the world reached its high-temperature mark in 1998, thanks to a big “El Niño,” which is a temporary warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean that occurs once or twice a decade. El Niño years are usually followed by one or two relatively cold years, as occurred in 1999 and 2000. The cooling is, not surprisingly, called La Niña. No one knows what really causes these cycles but they have been going on sporadically for millennia.

Wait a minute. Starting an argument about global warming in 1998 is a bit unfair. After all, that’s starting off with a very hot temperature, followed by two relatively cool years.

Fine. Take those years out of the record and there’s still no statistically significant warming since 1997. When a scientist tells you that some trend is not “significant,” he or she is saying that it cannot mathematically be distinguished from no trend whatsoever.

More important, as shown in our Figure 1, there’s not going to be any significant trend for some time.

Assume, magically, that temperatures begin to warm in 2009 at the rate they were warming before the mid-90s, and that they continue to warm at that rate.

We show two alternatives. One includes the El Niño/La Niña cycle of 1998-2000. Assuming that the old rate of warming reappears in 2009 and continues, the warming since 1998 does not become statistically significant until 2021.

Our other alternative simply removes the El Niño/La Niña cycle and starts in 1997. Under that assumption, warming doesn’t become significant until 2020.
Whatever the assumption, even if the earth resumes warming at the pre-1998 rate, we will have nearly a quarter-century without a significant warming trend.

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/wp-images/poznan_fig1.JPG

Figure 1. Top: Observed temperature, 1998-2008 (blue circles), plus a constant rate of warming beginning in 2009 at the rate established from 1977 through 1997 (0.17°C/decade) (red circles). Warming since 1998 does not become statistically significant until 2021.

Bottom: Same as above, but the observed temperatures beginning in 1997 through 2008 (filled blue circles), and ignoring the El Niño/La Niña swing in 1998-2000 (open blue circles). The constant rate of warming is assumed to begin in 2009 (filled red circles). In this case, warming does not become significant until 2020.

Perhaps the delegates at Poznan ought to look at the IPCC’s latest (2007) compendium on climate. It used 21 different climate models to forecast the future, and subjected each to different “storylines” (in the U.N.’s parlance) for global emissions of carbon dioxide. They are there for the world to see, on page 763 of the volume on climate science (reproduced as our Figure 2). Not one of them predicts a quarter-century without warming—even under a scenario in which emissions increase faster than they already are.

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/wp-images/poznan_fig2.JPG

Figure 2. Temperature projections from 2000 to 2100 from the suite of climate models used by the IPCC for three different “storylines”—SRES A2 (top); SRES A1B (middle); SRES B1 (bottom) (source: IPCC AR4, page 763).

The bottom line is that the U.N.’s own climate models have failed, barely a year after they were made public. They have demonstrated a remarkable inability to even “predict” the present! Can 10,000 people in Poznan somehow ignore this?

They shouldn’t. Instead they should be thankful. The lack of recent and future warming almost certainly means that the ultimate warming of this century is going to be quite modest. Instead, they should keep in mind that expensive policies to fight a modest climate change will only worsen the unprecedented cold snap affecting the global economy.

Ben Bova on Global Warming

I hate to say it, but I suspect that Ben has come to the Global Warming party rather late in the day with the horse disappearing over the hill. Global temperatures are reported to have dropped swiftly and significantly and there is no sign of a quick rebound.

And we are having a real winter.

Global warming was very real until the peak in 1998. It stayed warm until the excess heat escaped into the Arctic in 2007. Then it dropped. Unless something sharply changes in the next few months using as yet unidentified mechanisms, this recent cycle of global warming is over.

It was pleasant while it lasted, but my concern today is the likelihood that recently elected governments are so committed to this silliness that they enact a slew of well meaning policies that are not only wrong but will turn out to be historically bone headed. Since 1998, the data was telling us to wait and see. Now it is telling us to back off.

He even hauls out poor old Patrick Henry who merely asks us to open our eyes. Please look at the data Ben.

Ben Bova: Facts show global warming is real

By BEN BOVA

7:01 p.m., Saturday, November 29, 2008

I have a number of friends who don’t believe that global warming is real. They suspect it’s all a plot by Third World collectivist nations to cripple our economy.

Global warming has lots of doubters.

For example, in a commencement address a couple of years ago, the late author Michael Crichton remarked that if weather forecasts can’t be depended on for accurate predictions a few days ahead, why should we take seriously alarms about a global warming that won’t fully manifest itself until decades or even centuries from now?

Global-warming opponents are quick to jump on any shred of evidence that the current warming trend isn’t global, or is not actually happening. They have long pointed out that as recently as the 1970s climate experts believed that the Earth was cooling, not warming.

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, one of the main sources for global-warming data, was embarrassed recently when it had to admit that its declaration that last month was the warmest October on record was wrong, based on a faulty reading of the temperatures in Siberia.

One of my closest friends sent me through the Internet a newspaper account of the Goddard fiasco, together with 136 pages of comments by various bloggers, many of them gloating over the error.

In the face of such doubts and mistakes, though, I remembered a piece of wisdom uttered by the great science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Heinlein once told a graduating class at Annapolis:

“What are the facts? Again and again and again — what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget ‘what the stars foretell,’ avoid opinion, care not for what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable ‘verdict of history’ — what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!”

The facts are based on actual temperature measurements around the world. Despite the Goddard Institute’s recent gaffe, those measurements consistently show that global temperatures are rising. The rise is most noticeable at high latitudes, where Canadian and Siberian villages that have for centuries rested on solid ground are now sinking into mud, because the permafrost beneath them is thawing.

Migrating animals head north earlier because spring temperatures are arriving weeks earlier in the year.

Plants blossom earlier too. And both plant and animal species are expanding their habitats northward because of the generally warmer temperatures. Arctic sea ice is thinning drastically. Glaciers are melting away.

These are observable, measurable facts.

In California’s Yosemite National Park, a group of researchers recently completed a survey of small mammals in an area that had been surveyed about a century earlier by other scientists. The new survey found that, compared to a century ago, species that lived at low altitudes have moved their habitats to higher areas, while the original high-altitude species have declined in numbers. This is a clear response to a warming climate: as the climate heats up, the low-altitude species are seeking cooler habitats and making inroads on the living space of the original high-altitude species.

Field mice and pine trees don’t have politics. They are responding to the climate changes that they face. Those changes are real.

What’s not real is the claim that until the 1970s climate scientists were worried about Earth’s climate cooling into a new ice age. That’s a canard. A team from the National Climatic Data Center in North Carolina surveyed climate research papers published between 1965 and 1979; their study showed that only seven papers predicted that global temperatures would grow cooler, while 44 papers predicted warmer temperatures and another 20 were either neutral or offered no long-term predictions.

The climate-change doubters are especially hostile to the idea that human actions are causing global warming. They fear that attempts to control climate-altering greenhouse-gas emissions are thinly-disguised attacks on the economies of the Western nations, especially the economy of the United States.

While I agree that the Kyoto Treaty’s approach to lowering greenhouse-gas emissions is a half-baked piece of international politics, and the U.S. is right to refuse to sign it, it seems equally clear to me that human actions are indeed causing at least part of the planet’s rising fever.

Our Earth goes through climate shifts over the course of time, but the greenhouse gases we humans are pouring into the atmosphere are accelerating a natural warming trend. If we can move away from fossil fuels without doing fatal harm to our economy and our way of life, it will alleviate the warming.

In his famous “Liberty or Death” speech, Patrick Henry said, “… it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. … Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and to provide for it.”

Despite the naysayers, global warming is real. It may be hardly noticeable to most of us, but the world’s temperature is rising. How far and how fast it will rise, no one can yet predict. But studies of past climate changes show that the planet can switch from ice age to tropical in a few decades.

If we want to avert wrenching changes that would come with an accelerated global warming, we should do all we could to move from fossil fuels to cleaner, less-damaging energy sources. Such a change would be good not only for our global climate, but it would be good for our economy and the world’s political situation, as well.

Look at the facts. Make up your mind. Then act.

China sends Global Warming Ransom Note

This is a timely article on the likelihood of international agreements similar to the Kyoto accord. I never thought that accord was ever worth the paper it was written on. Particularly since India and China begged off because of poverty and the USA refused to have anything to do with it. Of course the Europeans found a marvelous way to game it all while looking serious. And Canada said yes and our then liberal government promptly forgot about it all, leaving it to their successors to take the heat for telling the truth.

The joke was on everyone who believed any of it.

Of course with the global chilling possibly about to set in with a vengeance, it is wise to drag our feet for another couple of years. Someone needs to tell Obama that this is a great time to promote the excuse that he needs to concentrate on saving the global economy first for the next two years.

There is a real need to create global initiatives that contribute to the successful terraforming of the planet. Suspending development in order to prevent a third of the population from rising out of total poverty is not a good idea. Expanding their participation in the globe’s economic life is a good idea and can be a powerful global initiative.

That can be in the form of guarantees supporting micro credit everywhere. The infrastructure and expertise is growing naturally and making it a global undertaking would be a wonderful confirmation.

Adding the remaining third of the global population to the world of consumption will supercharge global growth for the next two generations.

China Sends Global Warming Ransom Note

November 2, 2008

by Dennis T. Avery

China has now destroyed Western hopes for a new global warming agreement, just weeks before global talks in Poland aimed at writing a successor for the Kyoto Protocol- which expires in 2012. China has attached a ransom note to its Polish meeting RSVP: They might go along with a new warming pact if the rich countries agree to hand over 1 percent of their GDP-about $300 billion per year-to finance the required non-fossil, higher-cost energy systems the West wants the developing countries to use.

Bad timing: The U.S. and Europe are trying to bail their financial systems out of Barney Frank's Fanny Mae/Freddy Mac sub-prime mortgage adventure. "Climate change policies need a lot of money to be invested. However, developed countries have not made any substantive promises about how much they are going to spend on this," said Gua Guangsheng, head of China's Climate Change Office on Oct. 28. "And they did not fulfill some of the promises they made in the past very well either."

China, India, Brazil, and Mexico had already demanded-in July- that the developed countries cut their own emissions

by 80-95 percent by 2050. Very unlikely. The EU has loudly boasted of trying to set an 80-percent cut in its emissions, but that now looks impossible. Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Greece are part of a "blocking force" saying says they can't afford to give up coal and oil during a financial crisis. Especially when the only alternative is imported Russian gas; Russia recently "invaded" Georgia, many think to stop Georgian efforts to build a gas pipeline that would have competed with Russia's.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who helped create the Kyoto Protocol, now says that drastic cuts in CO2 emissions are "ill-advised climate policy." She's building 26 brown-coal power plants instead, and re-thinking the German promise to scuttle its nuclear power plants.

Don't spend much of your "worry time" on a new climate treaty however. Global temperatures are doing their best to tell us that CO2 isn't very important after all.

Global thermometers stubbornly refused to rise after 1998, and have plummeted in the past two years by more than 0.5 degree C. The world is now colder than in 1940, when the Post-WWOII Industrial Revolution started spewing lots of man-made CO2 in the first place. On October 29, the U.S. beat or tied 115 low-temperature records for the date.


Alaska, which was unusually warm last year, recorded 25 degrees below zero Fahrenheit that night-beating the previous low by 4 degrees F.

London had snow in October for the first time in more than 70 years.

The 2007-08 temperature drop wasn't predicted by the global climate models, but it had been predicted by the sunspots since 2000. Both the absent sunspots and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation now predict a 25-30-year global cooling. After that, the remaining enthusiasm for global warming agreements will presumably have vanished-without any big payoff to the Chinese government.

Meanwhile, India is about to rescue our Appalachian coal industry. India is already importing 50 million tons of coal per year, and sees our high-sulfur eastern coal as an under-priced energy resource. While New York and Philadelphia import low-sulfur coal from Wyoming's Powder River Basin, India wants to buy not just Appalachia's coal but the mines that produce it. They note, "It's a buyer's market."

Carbon Dioxide Pollution Increases Sharply

Efforts to reduce CO2 emissions have been pathetic to date, although that should not come as a surprise. We have to replace all our energy protocols while our global economy is growing. That is impossible without suffering an expansion of CO2 for some time yet.

The global economy will double in size over the next twenty years. Read my lips. That means that we will need twice as much fuel as we are using today whatever it looks like. That means that if we wish to take a 600 MW coal powered power plant off line, we have to replace it with two 600 MW power plants.

You would not be too far wrong to suggest that a lot of the ideas out there are simply pissing in the wind. We have major fossil fuel supplies coming on stream, but they are only going to cushion the shock of change. There are after all only two trillion barrel reservoirs of heavy oil in the world. Canada has one and Hugo has the other.

If we produce the tarsands at the rate of 100 million barrels per day, they will last the world a couple of centuries or so.

To replace them we need solar energy to produce electrical power to support a fast shift over to electric transportation.

Even better we produce biological fuels such as ethanol using cattails and algae.

These all call for the mobilization of a large portion of humanity into the business of producing feed stocks for fuel manufacture.

Starting all this now would be a great idea.

Global Warming Pollution On The Increase

WASHINGTON (AP) - The world pumped up its pollution of the chief man-made global warming gas last year, setting a course that could push beyond leading scientists’ projected worst-case scenario, international researchers said.

The new numbers, called “scary” by some, were a surprise because scientists thought an economic downturn would slow energy use. Instead, carbon dioxide output jumped 3 percent from 2006 to 2007.

That’s an amount that exceeds the most dire outlook for emissions from burning coal and oil and related activities as projected by a Nobel Prize-winning group of international scientists in 2007.

Meanwhile, forests and oceans, which suck up carbon dioxide, are doing so at lower rates than in the 20th century, scientists said. If those trends continue, it puts the world on track for the highest predicted rises in temperature and sea level.

The pollution leader was China, followed by the United States, which past data show is the leader in emissions per person in carbon dioxide output. And while several developed countries slightly cut their CO2 output in 2007, the United States churned out more.

Still, it was large increases in China, India and other developing countries that spurred the growth of carbon dioxide pollution to a record high of 9.34 billion tons of carbon. Figures released by science agencies in the United States, Great Britain and Australia show that China’s added emissions accounted for more than half of the worldwide increase. China passed the United States as the No. 1 carbon dioxide polluter in 2006.

Emissions in the United States rose nearly 2 percent in 2007, after declining the previous year. The U.S. produced 1.75 billion tons of carbon.

“ Things are happening very, very fast,” said Corinne Le Quere, professor of environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey. “It’s scary.

Gregg Marland, a senior staff scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said he was surprised at the results because he thought world emissions would drop because of the economic downturn. That didn’t happen.

“ If we’re going to do something (about reducing emissions), it’s got to be different than what we’re doing,” he said.

The emissions are based on data from oil giant BP PLC, which show that China has become the major driver of world trends. China emitted 2 billion tons of carbon last year, up 7.5 percent from the previous year.

“ We’re shipping jobs offshore from the U.S., but we’re also shipping carbon dioxide emissions with them,” Marland said. “China is making fertilizer and cement and steel and all of those are heavy energy-intensive industries.”

Developing countries not asked to reduce greenhouse gases by the 1997 Kyoto treaty - and China and India are among them - now account for 53 percent of carbon dioxide pollution. That group of nations surpassed industrialized ones in carbon dioxide emissions in 2005, a new analysis of older figures shows.

India is in position to beat Russia for the No. 3 carbon dioxide polluter behind the United States, Marland said. Indonesia levels are increasing rapidly.

Denmark’s emissions dropped 8 percent. The United Kingdom and Germany reduced carbon dioxide pollution by 3 percent, while France and Australia cut it by 2 percent.

Nature can’t keep up with the carbon dioxide from man, Le Quere said. She said from 1955 to 2000, the forests and oceans absorbed about 57 percent of the excess carbon dioxide, but now it’s 54 percent.

What is “kind of scary” is that the worldwide emissions growth is beyond the highest growth in fossil fuel predicted just two years ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said Ben Santer, an atmospheric scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

Under the panel’s scenario then, temperatures would increase by somewhere between 4 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100.

If this trend continues for the century, “you’d have to be luckier than hell for it just to be bad, as opposed to catastrophic,” said Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider.

Benny Peiser heralds end of Kyoto

This article by Benny Peiser was published this morning in the Financial Post. The Kyoto circus continues on to its inevitable demise amid rancor and recrimination. It could only fail from inception since the business model is grossly flawed and completely an invitation to greed and stupidity. What were they thinking?

As I have intimated but not perhaps fully enunciated, the carbon economy can be made to work for everyone provided everyone participates and provided the business model is simple enough to apply universally. I have described such a model.

It is enough that all carbon emitters buy offsetting carbon credits on the open market without exception. It is enough that a licensing system be put in place to permit the origination and sale of these credits worldwide. The brokers will be quite happy to take care of the details and prices will soon sort themselves out.

Every farmer in the world can then become a carbon credit granter by simply manufacturing terra preta soils using corn or maize culture as I have already described. On top of all that, a good way to place foreign aid money is to simply use it to buy carbon credits from third world farmers at market prices. This will slowly sponge up a surplus over actual production rolling back the CO2 surplus.

It is an absolute waste of time and resources to attempt to make this happen from further up the food chain which is the fatal flaw with Kyoto. Making the rich pay has always resulted in the poor dying.

If an international consensus is impossible, then internal national deals can go a long way toward obviating the problem. For example, Canada has a huge CO2 production problem, thanks to the fact that we are on the way to becoming the global oil reserve backstop. If we convert all our land capable of growing corn into terra preta soils, it will take a minimum of twenty years and create the most fertile soils on earth, effectively doubling agricultural production.

This then becomes a classic case of the rich getting richer. I suspect that all developed countries can benefit by taking this approach, even to the extent of successfully offsetting the entire problem. It is just that it would be more satisfying to use this need to lift two billion people out of the subsistence lifestyle globally over the next two generations.

Any other approach is no more than cash grabs by stupid and greedy elites. I get tired of listening to it.

Climate blowback

The CO2 crusade only generates hostility against the West; Benny Peiser

Financial Post Published: Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Imagine, there is a UN climate conference, and hardly anybody seems to note or care. This is what appears to have happened with the latest round of post-Kyoto negotiations that ended in Bangkok last Friday. While delegates from more than 160 nations met at yet another United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change confab in the Thai capital, much of the media seemed indifferent to its deliberations or did not bother to report about it.

What used to be major environmental gatherings that would trigger global media hype and front-page headlines has turned into routine diplomatic meetings that wrap up, these days, on more or less the same note: Let's meet again. Eight more such meetings are planned for the next 18 months to negotiate a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, which runs out in 2012.

Instead of the passionately celebrated "breakthroughs" that used to be the hallmark of international climate conferences, today they often end in deadlock and disappointment.

At the heart of the solidifying standoff lies a growing realization that the entire Kyoto process has been an abject failure. Not only did it fail to slow (never mind reduce) carbon-dioxide emissions over the last 15 years or so, climate hysteria is pitting rich and poor nations against each other, dividing the world into opposing camps that embrace incompatible strategies and competing demands.

Developing nations insist that the rich world unilaterally commit to stringent and legally binding CO2 emissions cuts at home. At the same time, they also demand massive wealth transfers from the West in the form of 'clean' technologies and financial funds for adaptation and energy initiatives.

The self-inflicted damage as a result of Western climate policies has been ruinous. Japan alone faces a Kyoto bill of more than US$500-billion -- if the country endeavours to cut CO2 emissions by 11% over the next decade. No wonder, then, that Japan has officially given up on Kyoto and is now calling for a much softer replacement based on select sectoral, rather than national emission targets.

In Europe, too, policy-makers and business leaders now realize that the European Union's unilateral actions are threatening to drive energy-intensive industries abroad. According to recent estimates, European industries are expected to shoulder ¤50-billion to ¤80-billion ($128-billion) per year if the EU's agreed climate targets were to become legally binding. Unsurprisingly, the European Commission has now warned that it will abandon its own goals if the rest of the world won't agree to a new climate treaty.

These staggering costs, however, pale in comparison with what China and the developing nations are demanding for their signature under any new climate treaty. Arguing that Europe, Japan and North America have caused much of the buildup of the world's CO2 emissions in the atmosphere over the last century or so, China has called on Western nations to hand over 0.5% of their GDP per year in form of funds and clean-technology transfer to developing nations to counter global warming. China's demand amounts to a wealth transfer of around US$200-billion a year from the OECD to the rest of the world, of which US$65-billion annually would come from the United States alone.

China's exorbitant request, however, has been eclipsed by demands by African campaigners, who are charging a payback that is twice as high. At the Bangkok meeting, African non-governmental organizations called on rich countries to commit 1% of their GDP each year -- for Africa alone -- for adaptation policies dealing with the effects of climate change, in addition to existing development aid.

In response to mounting pressure and demands, the West is trying to divide the developing world by treating China and India differently to poorer countries. It is attempting to draw China and India, now defined as "major emitters," into an

Stop already! We are not going to reduce CO2 emissions until every human being is rich or the oil actually runs out, whichever comes first. But we can sequester it all in farm soils forever.

international regime of binding emissions cuts. Despite many years of self-righteous denunciation and disagreement, most industrialized countries have begun to band together around Tony Blair's and President George Bush's long-established strategy, which is beginning to enjoy bipartisan support in most Western capitals. Even in Washington there is now a solid bipartisan consensus on this red line. This hardening stance means that any climate treaty that does not include China and India has absolutely no chance of being ratified by the U.S. Senate -- regardless of whom the next U.S. president may be.

Nevertheless, the West's feeble response to international pressure is a defensive strategy. It is looked upon with bitterness in many parts of the world where climate campaigners have created a mood of anti-American anger and resentment. While the Western approach may be able to corner the rising giants of China and India, it will almost certainly fail to compel them to commit to legally binding emissions cuts-- in whatever form.

As a result of promoting environmental alarmism, Western governments find themselves trapped in a perilous, yet largely self-constructed catch. As long as climate change is elevated as the principal liability of industrial countries, as long as Western CO2 emissions are blamed for exacerbating natural disasters, death and destruction around the globe, green pressure groups and officials from the developing world will continue to insist that the West is liable to recompense its exorbitant carbon debt by way of wealth transfer and financial compensation.

Yet this is highly unlikely to happen. Attempts to punish developing countries by introducing carbon tariffs, on the other hand, would only create more fury and resentment. Ultimately, there is now a growing risk that the whole global-warming scare is creating more anti-Western hostility and further loss of influence on the international stage.

Unless the industrial nations are prepared to sacrifice a substantial fraction of their wealth and economic stability, it is extremely unlikely that a new climate treaty will be agreed upon in the foreseeable future. While rich countries will put the blame squarely at the door of their Asian competitors, much of the rest of the world is likely to point the finger at Western greediness and intransigence. In this way, the global warming scare is creating a lose-lose situation for the West which is causing lasting damage to its standing, influence and economic strength.

-Benny Peiser is the editor of CCNet, an international science-policy network.

Carbon Credits

The one aspect of the so called global effort to tackle global warming that I find most disturbing is the stumbling initiative to establish a carbon credit market. The concept is very laudable. We can all grasp that a transfer of money from those dumping CO2 into the atmosphere to those taking it out would go a long way to both measure the size of the problem and to also ameliorate it.

What I have yet to see in the press is a credible explanation of the mechanics. And my own efforts were rewarded with a maybe next year response and that was two years ago. What am I missing? I suspect something is clearly wrong and the most likely reason is that the approach to date is simply wrong headed.

It seems too easy for participants to rig a green wash rather than a working solution when there is no particularly clear market mechanism and reporting system.

If we return to the efforts spurred by the Kyoto accord, we immediately discover one primary flaw. It is the lack of equality among the participants. The accord was patched together by a group of folks all trying to protect their short term interests every way they could. It was not an accord so much as an effort to preserve the status quo and assign blame when it fell apart.

The only system that will ever actually work is one that treats everyone equally, with at most a negotiated transition for those facing immediate hurt. The only way that this can be implemented is by assessing a direct transfer credit against every barrel of oil produced and every ton of coal mined globally. It is simple and the producers are then stuck with the very real task of actually spending those credits efficiently.

The present attempt is already a hodge podge of gerrymandering and special interest manipulation which will actually raise the cost of business and create huge imbalances deleterious to the global economy.

The UN can find itself in a management role of enforcing compliance. This will be as simple as cutting off the right to export and transferring the credit obligation to the receiving refinery. The audit process can actually catch it all and the cost of non compliance will actually lose access to a profitable side line for the producers.

In the meantime, it is outrageous that industrial carbon obligations have been outsourced to China and India who have no need to meet these obligations. If the system is not universal, we will be treated to the charade of the worst and dirtiest industries been bounced around the globe every twenty years until they have a final home in Tongo Tongo.

A universal credit system stems the incipient fraud and deceit we are already been exposed to. We already have the word 'greenwash' joining the lexicon.

An universally clear global carbon credit or defacto global carbon currency is a fantastic way to establish a proper global financial system because it is directly tied to the life blood of the global economy and will be forever in some form or the other.

It then makes it easy to monetize the establishment of terra preta soils worldwide since that is the one certain method of sequestering carbon in the long term. The carbon sequestered in the Amazon two thousand years ago is still there and still supporting excellent farming.

Slight changes in tillage, although helpful, actually does little more than perhaps prevent further loss of carbon which is actually not good enough.

Without question, it is necessary to call another global conference and use that conference to impose the carbon credit obligation on the producers and empower the UN to police the system. It will still take time to sort out, but it will sort itself out. Let us do it right this time.

When NAFTA was imposed, the transition was implemented in small steps over ten years. We should do the exact same thing here.

Kyoto protocol denounced

In a recent article in Nature magazine, well regarded economists have declared the Kyoto protocol as a failure at generating tangible results. Of course, this should have been obvious to all. Without direct technology change, the only way to reduce CO2 emissions is by direct economic contraction.

To date we have had neither. And fantasies that forced CO2 reduction is an option are in dreamland. At most we will get transferrance which is most certainly not reduction. So far transferrance has been to China and India who are even less careful about what is dumped into the environment.

The harsh unrelenting reality remains. We are going to burn most of the extractable oil, gas and coal that we can get our mitts on over the next century. We will work hard at doing it more efficiently, but somehow I do not think that the coal mining industry is laying off its workers anytime soon.

As I have pointed out, the only credible replacement for these high quality fuels is algae based bio fuels. This will become well established over the next fifty years and we will get very good at using it. That will not stop us from pumping cheap oil and mining cheap coal until it is no longer cheap. Only when agriculture can bring the cost of such fuels well below that of fossil fuels, will the fossil fuel economy disappear.

Since we are going to burn it all regardless, our only economic strategy that has any validity is to systematize a global carbon credit economy that starts with a direct global tax of CO2 emission. This is as simple as taxing the fuels directly with absolutely no exceptions. This directly underwrites a carbon credit system. A meaningful dollar value could be $20.00 per ton of carbon contained.

In this way, absolutely no new distortions are introduced that will fuel political manipulation. At the same time, been a true global tax, it will inspire a working forum for tackling other global problems.

This tax will accomplish two things. It will swiftly induce a massive investment in more efficient energy regimes for all participants to remain competitive and will thereby strongly shift investment into better technologies. And secondly it creates a financial carbon credit worth $20.00 per ton for newly sequestered carbon.

I showed you yesterday how easy it will be to use this credit to induce the 2,000,000,000 subsistence farmers to sequester carbon while also upgrading their land. They alone can actually solve the whole problem, or come so close that it is the same thing. After all, with this type of support and land improvement and perhaps a little proper social support, these farmers are no longer subsistence farmers. Go look and see what has happened in China, much as I am sure they complain.

And the absolute beauty of the proposed system, it is dead trivial to audit the process. A ten percent allocation at most for the financial institutions and we will even have enthusiasm at all levels. Of course the crooks will try to divert ninety percent into their pockets while turning the farmers into slaves. Since this is a global system, this may actually be global opportunity to lift the bottom third of the global population out of their difficult circumstances. Certainly this is a new option.

Besides, though it is absolutely critical to get the subsistence farmers on board in order to have the maximum social and economic benefit, it goes without saying that the rest of the global economy which has the available capital to deploy will work overtime to earn their fair share without any further intervention by any government.