Tiempo Climate Newswatch

The report Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change concludes that global warming may have more serious consequences than previous assessments have suggested. Particular concerns are raised about the west Antarctic ice sheet. Chris Rapley, head of the British Antarctic Survey, warns that the massive ice sheet may be starting to disintegrate. "The last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report characterized Antarctica as a slumbering giant in terms of climate change. I would say it is now an awakened giant," he warns. Based on the proceedings of a 2005 conference, the report has been published by the United Kingdom government.

Writing in the foreword, British Prime Minister Tony Blair concludes that "it is now plain that the emission of greenhouse gases... is causing global warming at a rate that is unsustainable." The conference participants considered the prospects to be slim that greenhouse gas levels can be kept below "dangerous" levels. A two degrees Celsius rise in global temperature is a commonly-accepted threshold beyond which it is believed unacceptable impacts are inevitable. To hold the temperature rise to this level would require a 450ppm limit on atmospheric concentrations. In considering means of limiting greenhouse gas emissions, the report identifies vested interests, cultural barriers to change and lack of awareness as hampering the deployment of proven renewable energy and "clean coal" technologies.

More information

• BBC
• Times Online
• CNN

• Full text of report, DEFRA

In his State of the Union address, United States President George W Bush called for a break in his country's addiction to oil. The main rationale was stated to be national security, reducing dependence on imports, though environmental improvement was also cited. Clean energy research is to be stepped up by 22 per cent. The move was welcomed by climate analysts, though with some caution and scepticism. "The first step in curing an addiction is recognizing that you have a problem. He's stood up and taken the first step in the 'oil-aholics' programme," commented Steve Sawyer from Greenpeace. But "this is not a conversion" to Kyoto-style thinking, warned Pål Prestrud of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, Norway.

Leading American climate researcher James Hansen of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NASA) claims that the Bush administration is trying to stop him speaking out on global warming. He says that public affairs staff at NASA have been told to vet his public appearances and pronouncements: "they feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public." NASA denies that there has been any effort to gag Hansen.

More information

• Reuters
• Guardian
• Text of State of the Union speech

• New York Times
• New Scientist
• New York Times

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has advanced a proposal to unlock US$7.24 trillion of untapped wealth to attack problems such as global warming, pandemics, poverty and conflict. According to Inge Kaul, UNDP special adviser, "the way we run our economies today is vastly expensive and inefficient - we don't manage risk well and don't prevent crises. Money is wasted because we dribble aid, and the costs of not solving the problems are much higher than what we would pay for getting the financial markets to lend the money." Nations should account for the cost of failed policies and use cash saved "upfront" to avert crises.

The UNDP plan is based on six financial schemes: pollution permit trading; cutting poor countries' borrowing costs; reducing debt costs; accelerating access to vaccines; making use of remittances from migrants; and underwriting loans to market investors to lower interest rates. The proposal has been published in the book The New Public Finance. Trevor Manuel, South Africa's finance minister, reckons that the proposal addresses one of the most profound challenges of modern public finance, "how to construct better partnerships between governments and private sector players and how to strengthen cooperation between nations in pursuit of common interests.”

More information

• New Zealand Herald

• Press release, UNDP
• Book, UNDP