Tiempo Climate Newswatch

Government and business leaders from Australia and New Zealand have met with climate experts from the United States to discuss a plan for combating global warming outside the Kyoto Protocol framework. The plan has been developed by the Pew Centre and involves, amongst other things, voluntary, rather than binding, emissions targets. Alcoa Australia executive Meg McDonald commented that "one of the things that will be important is flexibility to develop a framework that incorporates actions to engage more countries and more players and therefore achieve more reductions than a simple target-based approach... Countries like India and China will need that flexibility."

Speaking before the meeting, Ian Campbell, Australia's environment minister, said that "this dialogue is one of the most optimistic forums we have got on the planet." He told the meeting that he hoped Australia could broker a pact that would include both the United States and China. "There is a view abroad, which I subscribe to, that the Kyoto Protocol by itself won't be enough, because there are too few countries involved with targets, and it won't be enough because the targets are too light," commented Pete Hodgson, New Zealand minister. "[But] it is an astonishingly important first step," he continued, "because we are discovering the price of carbon and we are therefore able to turn an environmental issue progressively more and more into an economic one."

More information

• Terra Daily
• Stuff

• Australian state action, Newswatch
• Australian federal government strategy, Newswatch
• Pew Centre initiative, Newswatch

There would be severe effects on the oceanic food chain if the Atlantic Conveyer current shuts down, according to Andreas Schmittner of the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University. In the worst case projection, global productivity of phytoplankton drops 20 per cent and, in the North Atlantic, the loss reaches 50 per cent. "Phytoplankton are the basis of the entire marine food web," Schmittner said. "They ultimately affect everything from zooplankton to the larger fish that people consume."

According to Schmittner, "when the Atlantic Conveyer current works, the dead plankton sink to the bottom and are replaced at the surface with nutrient-rich water that encourages further production. When the current is disrupted, and the mixing slows, that production also is disrupted." There is concern that global warming, by increasing temperatures and precipitation and decreasing salinity, might weaken the Atlantic Conveyer.

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Background

• Science Daily

• Great Ocean Conveyer Belt, Environmental Literacy Council

A new report details ways in which the global warming contribution of ozone-depleters, the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), and their replacements could be cut by half by the year 2015. The report has been produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Technology and Economic Assessment Panel, set up under the 1987 Montreal Protocol.

"Although climate change and ozone destruction are essentially different issues, our use of certain chemicals links them together", said Michel Jarraud, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization. Not only the CFCs, but also certain replacement chemicals, such as the hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), are powerful greenhouse gases. "We must continuously monitor, undertake research and improve how we manage this group of extremely useful substances, which is implicated in not one, but two of the major environmental problems we have ever known," concludes Jarraud.

More information

• ENN
• YubaNet

• Summary for policymakers, IPCC