Tiempo Climate Newswatch

Small Island Developing States have stressed their vulnerability to climate change and the need for energy efficiency and fair trade to protect their people against economic and environmental shocks during recent debates in the United Nations General Assembly. "To a Small Island Developing State, there are few things more important than securing the necessary assistance in order to build resilience against the many hazards that afflict the country on a consistent basis, including the violent storms that pass through our region even more frequently as a result of global warming," said Frederick Mitchell, Foreign Minister of the Bahamas. He called for the development of alternative energy sources "to make us less dependent on the current polluting technologies that supply our energy needs but threaten our sustainability." Petrus Compton, Foreign Minister of Saint Lucia, argued that "the international community, and in particular our developed partners, need to take more aggressive action to promote the development and distribution of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies in developed and developing countries alike." He advocated the establishment of a global renewable energy and energy efficiency fund.

Charles Savarin, Foreign Minister of Dominica, welcomed the Central Emergency Response Fund, which, he said, "will significantly enhance the capacity of the United Nations to more effectively respond to the increasing frequency of natural disasters brought about by climate change and global warming." On trade, Eamon Courtenay, the Foreign Minister of Belize, said the World Trade Organization had worsened conditions for his country. "There is something fundamentally unfair in a system which promises a development agenda and delivers suspended negotiations and less market access to vulnerable economies," he said. In an earlier debate, Redley Killion, Vice-President of the Federated States of Micronesia, warned that small island nations "are under greater threat than ever before," despite the fact that they contribute little themselves to the climate problem. Nauruan President Ludwig Scotty lamented the lack of any substantial reduction in greenhouse gas emissions since the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 or in implementing the commitments made at the Mauritius Summit last year.

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• IHT
• Fiji Times

• Press release, UN
• Press release, UN

A decline in methane emissions from human activity during the 1990s, largely associated with less, or more efficient, use of natural gas, was responsible for the slower growth in atmospheric levels during that period, according to a recent study. Using observations and computer simulations, the research team determined that methane levels fell from a growth rate of 12 parts per billion (ppb) a year during the 1980s to 4 ppb a year in the 1990s. Methane emissions have increased since that time, but a reduction in wetland emissions caused by draining and climate change has offset the effect on concentrations in the atmosphere.

Paul Steele from CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Australia, reckons that "had it not been for this reduction in methane emissions from wetlands, atmospheric levels of methane would most likely have continued rising. This suggests that, if the drying trend is reversed and emissions from wetlands return to normal, atmospheric methane levels may increase again, worsening the problem of climate change." The recent rise in emissions from human activity is linked to fossil fuel use in north Asia. Though concerned about future trends, Jos Lelieveld, from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, believes that methane emissions are much easier to control than carbon. "In my opinion the easiest and most time-effective way to control climate change is to start acting on methane," he says.

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• ENS
• EurekAlert!

• Nature

The world is warmer than it has been for 12,000 years, according to scientists from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and universities in the United States. Global temperature has risen by 0.2 degrees Celsius every decade for the past thirty years. The study, based on indirect evidence of past ocean temperatures, concludes that the recent warming has brought global temperature to within about one degree Celsius of the highest temperature of the past million years.

"The evidence implies that we are getting close to dangerous levels of human-made pollution," warned James Hansen, of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. "If further global warming reaches two or three degrees Celsius, we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know," he said. "The last time it was that warm was in the middle Pliocene, about three million years ago, when sea level was estimated to have been about 25 metres higher than today."

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• BBC
• New Scientist

• Aljazeera