Tiempo Climate Newswatch

The first negotiating texts for the critical climate change treaty negotiations to be held in Copenhagen in December have been published. The documents bring together proposals put forward by Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). "With only 200 days before Copenhagen, time gets tighter but the world is not standing still on climate change," said Yvo de Boer, who leads the UNFCCC Secretariat.

"We have an almost complete list of industrialized nations' pledges to cut emissions after 2012, so governments can see now, more clearly, where they are in comparison to each other, and can build a higher ambition on that basis," de Boer observed. Proposals for a long-term emissions goal include stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at specific levels, a 50 per cent cut by 2050, limiting temperature rises to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, or aiming for a global annual per capita emissions of two metric tons of carbon. "There is a great gulf between the various numbers presented by parties," said John Ashe, Antigua and Barbuda's ambassador to the United Nations, who compiled these proposals. "It won't be possible to please everyone. Everyone will be unhappy with the outcome in Copenhagen, but my hope is that what comes out will be good for the planet."

Some coral reefs are adapting to higher temperatures, rendering the global coral ecosystem less vulnerable to climate change, according to a new study. "Corals are certainly threatened by environmental change, but this research has really sparked the notion that corals may be tougher than we thought," commented Stephen Palumbi, director of the Hopkins Marine Station at Stanford University in the United States.

"The most exciting thing was discovering live, healthy corals on reefs already as hot as the ocean is likely to get 100 years from now," said Palumbi. "How do they do that?" The answer appears to lie in the adoption of heat-resistant algae, which, in a symbiotic relationship, can continue to provide the corals with nourishment as temperatures rise, avoiding the reef death and coral bleaching that occurs when heat-sensitive algae die. "These findings show that, given enough time, many corals can match hotter environments by hosting heat-resistant symbionts," explained Tom Oliver, a researcher at Stanford University. "While hopeful, the work also suggests that modern environments are changing so rapidly that corals may not be able to keep up. It comes down to a calculation of the rates of environmental change versus the rates of adaptation."

An economic and climate modelling study led by the Center for Global Change Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States has concluded that the climate problem could be twice as serious as previously estimated. The analysis made use of the MIT Integrated Global Systems Model, which combines both economic and physical processes, and, taking account of the various uncertainties, assigned a probability to specific outcomes.

The researchers predict a 90 per cent probability that global temperature will be 3.5 to 7.4 degrees Celsius higher by the end of the present century, based on the assumption that there will be no concerted action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This estimate is higher than previously forecast by the MIT model and greater than the latest projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A combination of economic factors, such as less chance of a low-emissions future, and physical factors, for example, reduced heat transfer to the deep ocean, worsened the climate impact. "Overall, the [various factors] stacked up so they caused more projected global warming," said MIT's Ronald Prinn.