Tiempo Climate Newswatch

The Russian State Duma, the lower house of parliament, will debate ratification of the Kyoto Protocol Friday October 22nd. Ratification is near certain as the main pro-Kremlin party has a substantial majority. Joke Waller-Hunter, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, commented that Russian ratification would "launch an exciting new phase in the global campaign to reduce the risks of climate change.”

Despite claims to the contrary by some Russian politicians, most analysts agree that ratification of the Kyoto Protocol is not likely to damage the national economy. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, industry was set back and greenhouse gas emissions dropped to 70 percent of the 1990 baseline. Russia, with a Kyoto target of stabilization at 1990 levels by 2012, can sell its excess quota to high polluters. Once Russia ratifies, the Protocol will come into force in 90 days.

More information

• MosNews
• Terra Daily
• UNFCCC

David King, Chief Scientific Adviser to the British government, has cited the accelerated rise in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, over the past two years as a clear sign that the world must take urgent action on the climate problem. "This is taking us up into relatively dangerous levels of carbon dioxide for our planet", he said during the annual Greenpeace Business Lecture.

David King, though, agrees with experts who counsel caution in interpreting the recent data. "I don't think an increase of 2 ppm for two years in a row is highly significant - there are climatic perturbations that can make this occur", said David J Hofmann of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "But", he continued, "the absence of a known climatic event does make these years unusual". Peter Cox, of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in the United Kingdom, told the BBC that the increase was not uniform across the globe - Europe's very hot summer last year and a larger than usual number of forest fires could have killed off vegetation and increased carbon releases from the soil. CSIRO researchers in Australia reported in March that they had detected the same behaviour at Southern Hemisphere sites They reckon that human activity is, in fact, a likely source of the increase as a similar trend had not affected trace gases, such as methane, linked to wildfires.

More information

• BBC
• Guardian Unlimited
• CBS
• CO2 & ClimateCBS

• CSIRO
• The Mauna Loa record, Trends
• David King's lecture

Researchers have found that warming of the Arctic may result in positive feedback as more carbon dioxide is released from the tundra than previously expected. Low temperatures and water saturation currently trap large amounts of carbon in the polar soils. "The rise in temperature would release more of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the air than plants are capable of taking in", said Michelle Mack, an ecologist at the University of Florida at Gainsville in the United States. This conclusion was reached on the basis of a 20-year experiment at the Arctic Long-term Ecological Research site near Toolik Lake, Alaska.

Drew Shindell and Gavin Schmidt of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in New York in the United States have concluded that the Antarctic is set to warm over the next 50 years, despite recent cooling. The scientists' computer model shows that the combined effect of low ozone levels and increasing greenhouse gases has been a shift in the Antarctic circulation (the Southern Annular Mode), isolating cold air in the polar interior. With ozone levels set to recover due to control of ozone-depleting chemicals, "global warming is likely to dominate future trends", says Shindell.

More information

• Arctic, Science Daily

• Antarctic, Science Daily