Tiempo Climate Newswatch

As the Tianjin Climate Change Talks ended, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, was pleased that participants had come closer to defining what could be achieved at the forthcoming Cancún climate summit. "This week has got us closer to a structured set of decisions that can be agreed in Cancún. Governments addressed what is do-able in Cancún, and what may have to be left to later," she said. Action that could be agreed at the summit was about turning "small climate keys that unlock very big doors," generating a new level of climate action among rich and poor, business and consumers, governments and citizens. "If climate financing and technology transfer make it possible to give thousands of villages efficient solar cookers and lights, not only do a nation's entire carbon emissions drop, but children grow healthier, women work easier and families can talk, read and write into the evening," she said. This is about real people being given the opportunity to take control of their future stability, security and sustainability, she added.

With little progress made in Tianjin towards resolving the impasse with regard to the next stage of the climate treaty's development, there is increasing concern that the Kyoto Protocol could unravel. "We have to acknowledge that the world is in a valley of frustration," Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Environment Programme, told the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit. He remains confident, though, that global agreement will eventually be achieved. "Climate change has not gone away," he said. "Our problem has not become smaller as a result of Copenhagen. The problem has continued to grow bigger. That will sooner or later re-focus government attention on why there is more to be gained by acting together." The Tianjin talks also failed to resolve the allocation of the US$30 billion "fast start fund" for developing countries, a Copenhagen Accord pledge. At a subsequent meeting, the BASIC group of developing nations "expressed concern with the lack of transparency and the relevant information on fast start finance and reiterated that these resources must be new and additional to the existing ODA [Official Development Assistance] and bilateral funds," according to a statement released after the meeting.

Eighteen per cent more water entered the oceans in 2006 than in 1994, with an average increase of 1.5 per cent per year, according to an analysis of satellite records of sea-level rise, precipitation and evaporation. Global precipitation is also increasing. "In general, more water is good," commented author Jay Famiglietti at the University of California at Irvine in the United States. "But here's the problem: Not everybody is getting more rainfall, and those who are may not need it."

"What we're seeing is exactly what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted - that precipitation is increasing in the tropics and the Arctic Circle with heavier, more punishing storms. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of people live in semiarid regions, and those are drying up," reported Famiglietti. The researchers caution that the analysis period is short. "I want to be clear that this is an emerging trend... there are many ups and downs in the data, [but] if these trends persist, then they will be very much an indication that the water cycle is intensifying," Famiglietti said.

New research indicates that the biological impact of global warming could be greatest in the tropics, even though the temperature increase has been smaller there than in colder regions. "The expectation was that physiological changes would... be greatest in the north temperate-Arctic region, but when we ran the numbers that expectation was flipped on its head," said Michael Dillon of the University of Wyoming in the United States.

The study focused on the effect of recent temperature rises on metabolic rates in cold-blooded organisms, whose body temperature approximates the temperature of their surroundings. Small temperature changes can push tropical organisms beyond their optimal body temperatures, causing substantial stress, whereas organisms in temperate and polar regions, adapted to large seasonal temperature shifts, can tolerate much larger increases. Dillon argues for more studies of climate impacts in the tropics in view of the past neglect of this area.