Tiempo Climate Newswatch

Climate change legislation could be introduced in the United States within weeks or months, according to a leading environmental lawmaker. "We are not sitting back and waiting for some magic moment," Barbara Boxer, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said. "We're ready to go." According to Boxer, climate legislation should set "certain and enforceable" short and long-term emissions targets, ensure state and local entities keep working to address global warming, establish a market-based system that cuts carbon emissions and uses revenues to help consumers make the transition to clean energy and invest in new technology and efficiency measures, and ensure a level global playing field with incentives for polluting countries to give their share to the international effort to curb climate change.

Chinese premier Wen Jiabao has underlined his nation's reluctance to accept a national cap on carbon emissions. "It's difficult for China to take quantified emission reduction quotas at the Copenhagen conference, because this country is still at an early stage of development," he said. "Europe started its industrialization several hundred years ago, but for China, it has only been dozens of years," he continued. Wen did emphasize that China is committed to the Copenhagen process and to the development of a global green economy. "The Chinese government gives top priority to meeting the challenge of climate change. We have established a national leadership group on tackling climate change and I'm the head of the group."

The Arctic could be affected by more severe storms as global warming develops, threatening ventures made possible by ice retreat. Large increases in the potential for extreme weather events could occur along the entire southern rim of the Arctic Ocean, including the Barents, Bering and Beaufort Seas, according to a new study by scientists in Norway and the United Kingdom.

"The bad news is that as the sea ice retreats you open up a lot of new areas to this kind of extreme weather," said Erik Kolstad of the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Change in, Bergen, Norway. There might be less ice and more storms, for example, in the eastern Barents Sea where Gazprom aims to develop the Shtokman gas field. Companies needed to take account of the risks associated with worsening weather, especially at times of year with least sea ice, advises Kolstad. To the south, conditions may improve as storm tracks shift polewards.

The climate problem could be limited by sinking bales of crop residue into the deep ocean, argues Stuart Strand of the University of Washington in the United States. Bales of stalks and other waste would be transported to ports where they would be barged to where the ocean is 1,500 meters deep, weighted with rock and sunk.

"The ocean waters below 1,500 meters do not mix significantly with the upper waters," says Strand. "In the deep ocean it is cold, oxygen is limited and there are few marine organisms that can break down crop residue. That means what is put there will stay there for thousands of years." Dropping the bales off river mouths could reduce the risk of adverse effects on local ocean ecology as the bales would be swiftly buried in silt.