Tiempo Climate Newswatch

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the third report in its latest assessment of climate science and policy on May 4th in Bangkok, Thailand. The Working Group III review covers means of limiting the rise in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. It concludes that emissions must start declining by the year 2015 to prevent global temperature rising more than two degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline. "The time to act is now," Chartree Chueyprasit of Thailand's Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment told government officials and scientists as they met to finalize the text.

The IPCC report notes that a wide range of technological options, already available and under development, can be deployed to limit global warming. "The most important thing is to improve energy efficiency," commented Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a member of the Belgian delegation. "There is a lot of energy wasted everywhere in the world," he continued. Other options include converting from coal to natural gas, greater use of renewable energy and the safe deployment of nuclear power. The report also advocates making buildings more energy-efficient and motor vehicles more fuel-efficient, reducing deforestation and tree planting to absorb carbon. Hans Verolme of WWF said that "the IPCC has delivered a road map for keeping the planet safe. Now it's the turn of politicians to do more than pay just lip service."

Participants at an international symposium held in Oxford, England, have concluded that communication between indigenous peoples and scientists and policy makers is critical if the worst consequences of global warming for this vulnerable group are to be averted. "There is a risk that the international climate change forum has lost sight of the immense collective danger [indigenous peoples] face," warned Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute (ECI), organizer of the Oxford Indigenous People’s Symposium.

New findings on the impacts of climate change on the indigenous peoples of the Pacific, Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, North America, South America, Africa and Europe were presented at the meeting. According to Pablo Eyzaguirre from Bioversity International, "indigenous and traditional communities should be supported in their unique adaptation to marginal areas and ecosystem boundaries. We need to respect ecosystem buffers that also provide livelihoods, sacred spaces, and pathways for traditional peoples." "Both ethnoecological researchers and indigenous people themselves need to network and initiate comparable climate change research and action," concluded Jan Salick, visiting fellow at ECI. "Indigenous peoples must be integrated into discussions of climate change and policy formation."

"The collapse of the Larsen shelves may tell us about impacts of climate-induced changes on marine biodiversity and the functioning of the ecosystem," according to Julian Gutt of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany. He was speaking after a ten-week expedition to explore the sea bed exposed by the collapse of the Larsen A and B ice shelves. "The break-up of these ice shelves opened up huge, near pristine portions of the ocean floor, sealed off from above for at least 5,000 years, and possibly up to 12,000 years in the case of Larsen B," he continued.

The temperature rise over the Antarctic Peninsula has been marked over the past 50 years. Declining sea ice may reduce the planktonic algae that grow underneath and the myriad species that depend on them. Gauthier Chapelle at the International Polar Foundation in Brussels, Belgium, warns that "this is virgin geography. If we don’t find out what this area is like now following the collapse of the ice shelf, and what species are there, we won't have any basis to know in 20 years' time what has changed, and how global warming has altered the marine ecosystem." There is increasing concern that the fresh water released as Antarctic ice melts may affect the global ocean circulation as bottom water formation becomes limited.