Tiempo Climate Newswatch

Climate change is already causing 300,000 deaths a year, according to a new report, The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis, from the Global Humanitarian Forum. By the year 2030, the economic cost of global warming could reach US$600 billion a year. "The world is at a crossroads. We can no longer afford to ignore the human impact of climate change. This is a call to the negotiators to come to the most ambitious agreement ever negotiated or to continue to accept mass starvation, mass sickness and mass migration on an ever growing scale," said Kofi Annan, the Forum's president, as he launched the report.

Meanwhile, in London, participants in the St James's Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium have called on world leaders to ensure that global greenhouse gas emissions peak by the year 2015. Hans Schellnhuber, who heads the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said that the conference memorandum represented the work of "probably the biggest concentration of brains on the planet." The memorandum urges industrialized nations to cut emissions by 25 to 40 per cent by 2020 with a global reduction of 50 per cent by 2050, all from 1990 levels.

A new tool to assist "managed relocation" of biological species has been developed by a multi-disciplinary working group. Managed relocation involves human intervention to shift species into areas where they are not currently found as old habitats are lost, for example, due to climate change. It has been a controversial technique, with concerns that current occupants may be overwhelmed by new arrivals, but is now being given serious consideration.

"We have previously been able to say, 'let nature run its course,'" said study co-leader Jessica Hellmann of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, United States. "But because humans have already changed the world, there is no letting nature run its course anymore. Now, action, like inaction, has potential negative consequences." The new tool will help define managed relocation's risks, trade-offs and costs. Users can assign a score to a proposed relocation based on criteria such as the probability of the relocation's success, potential for harming receiving ecosystems and the social and cultural importance of impacted species, legal implications and costs. "The tool takes advantage of the fact that, although science can't tell us exactly what will happen in the future, it can tell us how likely a favorable result is - useful information for decision makers," commented Nancy Huntly of the United States National Science Foundation, which partly supported the research.

Concrete may absorb more carbon dioxide from the air during its lifetime than previously thought, reducing its hefty carbon footprint. Carbon-based chemical compounds may form in concrete alongside the mineral calcite. "Even though these chemical species may equate to only five per cent of the carbon dioxide by-product from cement production, when summed globally they become significant," said Liv Haselbach of Washington State University in the United States. "Concrete is the most-used building material in the world."

New research has thrown light on the Great Ocean Conveyor, generating a more complex portrait of this critical aspect of the world's heat and carbon balance. Based on field data and computer modelling, it has been shown that much of the southward flow of cold water from the Labrador Sea in the Atlantic section moves not along the deep western boundary current, but along a previously unknown path in the interior of the North Atlantic. "This new path is not constrained by the continental shelf. It’s more diffuse," said Amy Bower from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Massachusetts, United States. "It’s a swath in the wide-open, turbulent interior of the North Atlantic and much more difficult to access and study."