United Nations Climate Change Conference - COP15
COP15
Archive for the ‘Climate Change College’ Category
Climate Action Factories
Incubators of Youth Energy for our Climate
This December, representatives from 192 countries will meet in Copenhagen, to determine the new global agreement for climate change. But currently, progress is stalling towards a new global deal that will drive our future towards a clean economy and stable climate. We urgently need a massive injection of energy to kick-start bold leadership from politicians around the world, and where better a source to draw energy than from passionate youth climate activists?
That’s why this summer Avaaz is setting up two ‘Climate Action Factories’ in Washington DC and in Berlin, Germany. In an intensive high-energy environment, these two teams of 25 young, dedicated activists will work to implement creative, politically-biting actions and campaigns which target the lack of ambition by those countries most responsible for the problem. Their important, strategic work will maximise the possibility of achieving a strong, binding global climate treaty at Copenhagen this December. But they’ll need lots of support to make it happen. If you would to help the make this project possible, or you would be interested in being one of the youth activists in the warehouse, please fill out the form at this link - read more
Wij Zijn Koel
If you read Dutch you’ll enjoy this article about my good friend and climate entrepreneur Aart Van Veller, if you don’t you can still enjoy the nice photo of me and Aart in the Artic last summer :).
http://www.volkskrant.nl/economie/article1180985.ece/Jong_en_groen_zakendoen
Travel Less - Communicate More
Status report of Climate Change College project: Travel Less – Communicate More
The team is currently working on a strategy for the final part of the project. This includes a campaign site featuring a road-map and information that highlights the benefits of modern ICT (Information and Communications Technology) and how the technology can replace physical travels with digital ones. Visitors will find a calculator that calculates the amount of CO2 emissions they emit for every trip they make, and what the effect of those emissions are. The calculator will also include the amount of time and money that can be saved by using ICT-technology. Other features of the campaign site are presentations of best-case companies and a downloadable and easy to read and follow strategy–or guide–for companies where they’ll learn how to reduce physical travels by implementing digital communication tools in their businesses and travel policies.
Melting Glaciers
The last part of our expedition offered some of the most breathtaking scenery as we kayaked our way up to massive glacier walls, past floating icebergs and curious otters. Glaciers all over the world have been retreating ever since the last ice age ended some 10,000 years ago, but due to global warming this retreat is accelerating at alarming pace, and some glaciers are losing mind boggling amounts of ice. The Greenland ice-sheet, for example, has during the last few years lost 380-490 billion tons of ice each year, around 150 billion tons more than has been accumulated again during the winter.
Kayaking in Prince William Sound
Kayaking in Prince William Sound
One day we kayaked for a few hours to visit and look at three glaciers. Up until a few years ago those three had actually been one, but has since divided as a result of massive melting of ice. A new island that no one knew about has actually shown up as well, you never know what’s hidden underneath the ice and snow!
Boggs visitor center was opened in 1986 and besides exhibitions about the area’s geology also features a huge panorama facing the Porter glacier, or at least did. Since the center was built the glacier has been retreating so fast that it’s now hidden behind a ridge, and can no longer be seen from the visitor center. The only thing curious tourists can see now is water, bare land and some floating icebergs. In a way the visitor center has changed from being a place to witness the wildness of nature into a place to witness the wild effects and results of human activities on this planet. Perhaps this is a good thing, perhaps people need to see with their own eyes what it happening to this planet in order to accept and accelerate real change towards sustainability.
Behind us used to be the Porter glacier
Up in the sky
The expedition continues and the next step on our journey is to visit and examine the glaciers in the Prince William Sounds area, the place of the 1989 Exxon Valdez catastrophe where a massive oil spill led to the death of more than a quarter million seabirds. This is the last part of our Arctic expedition and we are going to camp out in the wilderness and use canoes to travel the last few miles up towards the glaciers. The area is rough and after having spent a whole day in a bio-diesel bus, I entered a helicopter to get to the harbor where a boat was waiting to take us out in the sound.
The helicopter ride was amazing and we where all stunned by the beauty of nature, nothing man-made can come close to the complex elegance of nature. Our planet is an amazing place that we are borrowing from future generations - truly a place worth every possible effort to protect!
60 years of permafrost
After having studied how microbes that are eating up organic matter at the bottom of lakes are producing the greenhouse gas Methane, and how this process accelerates when the permafrost melt, we moved up land, and met scientists that were studying the same kind of process on dry land.
We met with Jason Vogel and his colleague, Ted Schuur. They were setting up carbon dioxide ”traps” that measures how much carbon dioxide that the melting permafrost emit, and how this is effected by global warming.
Melting permafrost really triggers two processes, one is that plants can start to grow on land that before has been frozen – this will bind carbon dioxide from the air. The other is the freeing up of dead frozen organic matter for microbes to eat on – which is a process that emits carbon dioxide into the air. Researchers have been uncertain as to which effect is stronger, and thus also if melting permafrost is a net emitter or sink for carbon dioxide.
Jason and Teds’ research has shown that, up until a certain level of melting, the carbon dioxide binding effect is bigger, which means that areas that are melting bind, or sink, more carbon dioxide than it emits. When the planet warms up more, however, the melting reaches a tipping point, and the emitting effect takes over – this is now happening in many areas in the northern hemisphere.
Totally there is more than 500 million tons of coal stored up in the permafrost areas of the planet, which is equivalent to about 60 years of annual human carbon emissions at today’s levels. If we continue to warm up the planet, and it would result in melting of the earth’s permafrost, we are in other words looking forward to 60 years of stored up emissions. Time to act?
Methane bubbles and thawing permafrost
Out on the ice of 8-mile Lake (a few kilometers away from the bus in the movie “Into the Wild”) we met with Katey Walter and Laura Brosius, two researchers from University of Alaska Fairbanks that are studying thawing permafrost and methane emissions from Arctic lakes. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is up to 20 times as potent as carbon dioxide – and thus very relevant for studies of climate change.
Many of you readers have probably read or heard about that global warming threatens to thaw the large expansions of permafrost in the northern hemisphere (21 % of total landmass), which then will release massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It is Katey’s research that lies behind this discovery and her results has been given worldwide attention. We spent two days out on the tundra to take part in, and learn more about, the research.
Researchers used to believe that the arctic lakes didn’t account for much emissions – that until Katey together with Russian scientist found out that large amounts of methane are constantly released thru bubbling from lakes in Siberia. They started to investigate this phenomenon and found that “hot-spots” that were releasing methane could be found in waters all over the Arctic region. Methane is second only to carbon dioxide in contributing to the global warming of the latest 100 years, and Kateys research indicates that those emissions might be even larger than we currently believe. The Arctic regions share of global methane emissions might be as much as 64 %, and not the earlier estimated 10 %.
The permafrost of the northern hemisphere contains more organic material than all the worlds rainforests taken together. Before the last ice age big forests were growing here and there was plentiful of animals around. Dead organic matter was trampled down in the ground and stored up over time, when the ice age then arrived all this was frozen down and made the Arctic a large storage of organic matter. When the climate is now warming up, this storage becomes accessible to microbes that can feed of the organic matter – a process that produces methane or carbon dioxide as a side effect. When the feeding take place under water methane is produced and this was exactly what we studied out on 8-mile Lake.
We collected various types of organic material from land – such as leaves and pines – and organic material from water plants. We also put up methane traps to capture the methane bubbles released from hot-spots in the lake and store this gas on bottles. In the laboratory the researchers then studies the gas and the organic material to determine how much of the methane that comes from the permafrost, water plants and land plats respectively. This information is needed to create a model for this part of the methane cycle - that then is going to be implemented in climate models used to for example by the IPCC.
This methane process has historically been taking place over very long periods of time, and the climate has thus had time to adapt. As an effect of human caused climate change, however, the lakes are now expanding fast (14 % in the last few decades). Big areas under water, together with accelerated thawing, leads to more methane emissions – and if this process is not dampened the methane emissions might accelerate global warming considerably.
To take part in Kathey’s and other scientists’ research out on the field, and learn more about how climate change is affecting the planet, is indescribably interesting and exciting. Standing out there on the lake, watching the stunning scenery and understanding how interconnected everything is, I thought about how weird the climate discussion is today. We complain about costs and protect national and industrial self interest – while the worlds researchers are telling us that we are about to press the climate system out of control and that we humans actually might ruin the beautiful and invaluable planet we all inhabit.
Even if the risk that humans are causing a global climate change would be just a few percent (and not over 90 % as the IPCC tells us), it should be enough to make us act boldly and decisively. A low carbon society is urgently needed and it’s time to start constructing it now!
Good weather?
In the United States a total of 400 weather stations are releasing a combined number of no less than 800 weather balloons every day into the sky, 365 days a year. All the weather stations are connected to the World Meteorological Organization, a global cooperation between 188 countries that coordinates over 10 000 weather stations globally. Each and every one of those stations is releasing two balloons daily, at the exact same time in every country. The balloons are measuring things that affect the weather – like temperature, humidity and wind speed. Data from those measurements are then used as the basis for weather forecasts, and by scientists working with related issues - like climate change.
A few days ago we met with John Heidelburg that works at one of those weather stations – a station of special interest for climate research since it’s located in the Arctic region. Together we carried out a launch of a weather balloon, and John also walked us thru the weather station and its different functions. One of the things they do is collecting data on temperature measurements.
In the Arctic part of Alaska the annual mean surface temperature have increased by 2,3 degrees Celsius since 1949, compared to a global average for the period of around 0,6-0,7. There are many reasons behind that the Arctic is heating up more rapidly than the rest of the planet – the most important being the ice-albedo effect. This effect arises because snow and ice reflect a lot more of the sunlight that hits it than do bare land. Basically bare land is absorbing heat instead of reflecting it back, and thus the heating accelerates when the snow and ice-cover melts. Other reasons include the incoming angle of the sunrays and the increased heat that the oceans bring in to the Arctic when the world’s oceans heat up.
The powerful heating in the Arctic region might come to cause major consequences in the rest of the world. Researchers like John are now waiting with great anxiety for this coming summer to witness what will happen in this region. New research from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) shows that the North Pole might be ice free already this year. Those prognoses are based on a worst-case scenario, but most researchers I meet are convinced that this will happen sometime during the coming five years.
There is still a lot of snow and ice in the Arctic - but for how long?
An ice free north pole will probably be followed by an ice free Arctic Ocean in the summer time within a few decades. All this ice is floating on water, and when it melts the sea levels will not rise. If we continue to dump greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, however, we will accelerate the global warming and the ice sheet on Greenland might melt – which is land ice and will result in a global sea level rise of over seven meters.
In other words, it’s time to act seriously on Climate Change- WorldChanging and TED is good places to start and get inspiration in this work.
Everything is connected
The pack ice over the North Pole is retreating with an alarming speed. Last year the record for ice retreat from 2005 was beaten by some 1,19 million square kilometers – the new record is thus smaller by an area the same size as five times the whole United Kingdom. This retreat accelerated the trend of dropping ice sheet cover and in the worst case scenario the ice might be completely gone during summers in as little as six years.
When the ice retreats, it has effects in so many ways that it’s almost impossible to comprehend. The melting affects animals and humans, it has impacts on culture and thru rising sea levels on societies globally, it even has effects on history.
The rising temperatures up here make the permafrost melt and when it does, the land become less stable. The number of ice free days are increasing during summer, which means more days for the water to erode the land and when the ice retreat further away from the shore bigger waves form during storms and this further increases the erosion. At present the erosion in some places in the Arctic region has gone from one meter per year up to six meters in a few decades and the water is now eating up the land in an accelerating pace.
A researcher studying erosion and its effects
A few years ago researchers up here got reports of findings of human remains in one of the spots with the highest rate of erosion – Point Barrow. Archeologist went out to study this and they found out that there was an old Inupiat graveyard that was being washed away into the ocean, some graves over 1 200 years old. What this means is that the history of the Inupiat people is being destroyed due to global warming. A big project has been started to excavate the area and recover historical artifacts as well as rebury the bones at new sites further inland.
We visited the excavation site out on the ice
It is an extremely fascinating and moving experience to witness and understand how interconnected everything is. Think about it for a while – we burn fossil fuels somewhere in the world and it increases global warming, which will impact the life of frogs in Costa Rica, Inupiat history in Alaska and rice fields on islands in the Pacific Ocean. We live in a global world and everything we do will have global consequences, it is now time to acknowledge and act according to this fact. Luckily this global interconnectivity also works for positive things; if we develop new fossil-free solutions we can disperse them globally and achieve global improvements. The world therefore needs more climate entrepreneurship and climate innovation.
