Tiempo Climate Newswatch

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has warned that emissions control commitments made since the Copenhagen climate summit will not be sufficient to limit the rise in global temperatures to two degrees Celsius or less. "No one should assume that the pledges will be enough," Achim Steiner, UNEP director, said at the organization's annual meeting. "Countries will have to be far more ambitious in cutting greenhouse gas emissions if the world is to curb a rise in global temperature."

It has been decided that the next negotiating session regarding the future of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will take place in April in Bonn, Germany. At this time, two further sessions are planned for 2010, in May in Bonn and then in December at the annual summit in Cancun, Mexico. "Following the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, this constitutes a quick return to the negotiations," said UNFCCC executive secretary Yvo de Boer. "The decision to intensify the negotiating schedule underlines the commitment by governments to move the negotiations forward towards success in Cancun," he continued.

Global warming could have a substantial effect on food prices, poverty and hunger over the next two decades, according to a new modelling study led by the Food Security and the Environment programme at Stanford University in the United States. The outcome, though, depends on the scale of the change in climate. A rise in global temperature of one degree Celsius by the year 2030 would have relatively little effect on crop yields, food prices and poverty rates. A further half a degree warming by that year, however, would result in a 10 to 20 per cent drop in agricultural productivity, a 10 to 60 per cent rise in the price of rice, wheat and maize and an overall rise in the poverty rate of three per cent in the 15 countries studied.

While many poor people will be adversely affected, some may benefit, the researchers report. "Poverty impacts depend not only on food prices but also on the earnings of the poor," said David Lobell from the FSE programme. "Most projections assume that if prices go up, the amount of poverty in the world also will go up, because poor people spend a lot of their money on food. But poor people are pretty diverse. There are those who farm their own land and would actually benefit from higher crop prices, and there are rural wage labourers and people that live in cities who definitely will be hurt," he continued.

The mass media have been a key vehicle by which climate change contrarianism has travelled, according to Maxwell Boykoff of the University of Colorado at Boulder in the United States. "A variety of influences and perspectives typically have been collapsed by mass media into one general category of scepticism. This has been detrimental both in terms of dismissing legitimate critiques of climate science or policy, as well as amplifying extreme and tenuous claims," he reported at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego.

Over-dramatization of new stories has also created problems. "Reducing climate science and policy considerations to a tit-for-tat between duelling personalities comes at the expense of appraising fundamental challenges regarding the necessary de-carbonization of industry and society," he said. Boykoff's conclusions were based on surveying newspaper reports on the climate issue in 20 countries and assessing how people understand and relate to climate science and policy in the United States, the United Kingdom and India.