Tiempo Climate Newswatch

Leaders of all the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized nations, meeting in Italy, have agreed that they must limit the rise in global temperature to not more than two degrees Celsius. They have also committed to strive to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by the year 2050. The baseline year for these reductions was, however, left deliberately vague - 1990 or more recent years, according to the summit declaration. British prime minister Gordon Brown described the agreement as "the foundations for a Copenhagen deal that is ambitious, fair and effective."

The G8 failed to commit to a target for the year 2020, a more contentious issue. "The policies that they have stated so far are not enough, not sufficient enough," commented United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon on the lack of any mid-term commitment. "This is the science. We must work according to the science. This is politically and morally imperative and a historic responsibility for the leaders for the future of humanity, even for the future of planet Earth." In parallel discussions at the Major Economies Forum (MEF), the major developing nations, led by China and India, refused to accept a draft target of a global emissions reduction of 50 per cent by 2050. The absence of a mid-term commitment by the industrialized nations and lack of follow-up on promises of financial and technical support were cited as the main reasons. The MEF Declaration does, however, commit developing countries to "promptly undertake actions whose projected effects on emissions represent a meaningful deviation from business as usual in the mid-term, in the context of sustainable development, supported by financing, technology, and capacity-building."

Targets for greenhouse gas emission reductions should be based on the number of rich people, the biggest individual emitters, in a country rather than the country's total emissions, according to a team of researchers from the United States and Europe. "You're distributing the task of doing something about emissions reduction based on the proportion of the population in the country that's actually doing the most damage," said co-author Shoibal Chakravarty of the Princeton Environmental Institute in the United States. The approach establishes a uniform cap on emissions that individuals should not exceed. "These numbers strengthen our conviction that industrialized countries will have to take the lead in reducing their emissions, but that the fight to prevent dangerous climate change can only be won if all countries act together," said Ottmar Edenhofer of the Technical University of Berlin in Germany.

A new report from a consortium of research institutes argues that the only climate policies that will work are those that focus directly on improvement in energy efficiency and the decarbonization of energy supply rather than on targets for emissions, the outcome of these processes. Coordinating author Gwyn Prins from the London School of Economics considers that "worthwhile policy builds upon what we know works and upon what is feasible rather than trying to deploy never-before implemented policies through complex institutions requiring a hitherto unprecedented and never achieved degree of global political alignment." The report endorses the Japanese "Mamizu" climate strategy, which relies on achievable and direct goals rather than on indirect initiatives such as trading schemes.

The Arctic Ocean's ice cover has thinned by over 40 per cent since 2004, according to the latest data from the United States National Air and Space Administration (NASA). "Even in years when the overall extent of sea ice remains stable or grows slightly, the thickness and volume of the ice cover is continuing to decline, making the ice more vulnerable to continued shrinkage," commented Ron Kwok from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

The analysis, conducted by scientists from NASA and the University of Washington in Seattle, made use of data from the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) to derive the first basin-wide estimate of the thickness and volume of the Arctic Ocean's ice cover. The ice thinned by 0.68 metres over four winters and the total area covered by the thicker, older multi-year ice that has survived one or more summers shrank by 42 per cent. "The near-zero replenishment of the multi-year ice cover, combined with unusual exports of ice out of the Arctic after the summers of 2005 and 2007, have both played significant roles in the loss of Arctic sea ice volume over the ICESat record," Kwok reported.