Tiempo Climate Newswatch

Tropical Cyclone Sidr made landfall on the Bangladeshi coast on Thursday November 15th, By the following weekend, the death toll may have reached 1,100, with thousands injured. The availability of shelters, as well as an evacuation programme, may spare the country the mass casualties of previous events. "We are expecting less casualties this time because the government took early measures. We alerted people to be evacuated early," said Samarendra Karmakar, head of the Bangladesh Meteorological Department. Over half a million people were evacuated.

Mass evacuation, albeit on a much smaller scale, took place in the east of England the previous week, as gale-force winds combined with a high tide to generate a storm surge that threatened to rival the 1953 North Sea disaster. In the event, the coast escaped serious flooding, but the UK Met Office warned that the flood risk could rise by a factor of ten this century as global warming develops. "Floods that occur once in 100 years on the East Coast today may happen once every ten years by the end of the century," said Jason Lowe of the Hadley Centre.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) met in Valencia, Spain, mid-November to finalize a summary of its Fourth Assessment of climate change science. "What is produced here in Valencia is the guide that every one of the thousands of delegates attending the crucial Climate Convention meeting in Bali will be packing in their suitcases and slipping in their back pockets," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme. After extensive debate, national representatives issued the sternest warning yet from the IPCC, agreeing that climate change could have "abrupt" and "irreversible" consequences.

Use of the word "irreversible" had been challenged by the United States as inappropriate in a scientific summary. India argued strongly that adaptation should be given greater emphasis, along with the need for financial assistance from the developed nations. The IPCC also discussed the next stage of its work. Before the meeting, World Meteorological Organization head Michel Jarraud stressed the need for more precise forecasts of areas at risk. "We need to give indications which are at the scale countries can use to make decisions," he said. "We need to come to a scale which is smaller than countries like Spain or France or the UK. You really need to come to smaller scales - 100, 200 kilometres. We are not yet there."

"OPEC [the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] can deliver a big part of the solution to climate change," concluded Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at a high-level OPEC seminar in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. "International action on climate change is a war against emissions, not a war against oil. Oil will continue to play a pivotal role in the global energy mix for many decades to come, not least due to growing global energy demand. But oil will have to be decarbonized with adequate technologies," he continued.

The UNFCCC Secretariat has reported that the International Transaction Log (ITL) is now operational. The ITL is a computerized system that ensures that emissions trading among countries is consistent with the climate treaty rules. "This step is a key milestone and a real achievement in the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol," said de Boer. Japan was the first country to log credits under the new system. It plans to buy 100 million tonnes of carbon offsets through the scheme over the five years from April 2008 to meet its Kyoto commitments.