Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has condemned today’s suicide bombing at an African Union compound in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, which has left at least nine peacekeepers dead.

Good piece in the Wall Street Journal today, about how Ireland has nothing to fear from a ‘no’ vote.

Well worth a read.

China’s emissions unlikely to fall low enough because 2C target ‘does not provide room for developing countries’
Jonathan Watts, Asia environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 16 September 2009 15.13 BST
Don’t expect China to keep global warming below 2C, a senior government adviser warned in Beijing today at the launch of an influential report on the nation’s prospects for low-carbon growth.
Even in a best-case scenario with massive investment in solar energy and carbon capture technology, Dai Yande, deputy chief of the Energy Research Institute, said China’s emissions were unlikely to fall low enough to remain below the temperature goal recommended by the G8 and European Union.
His prediction will alarm those governments and scientists who warn that a rise more than 2C risks disastrous consequences in terms of food security, migration, sea-level rises and extreme weather events.
“You should not target China to fulfill the two degree target. That is just a vision. Reality has deviated from that vision,” said Dai. “We do not think that target provides room for developing countries.” China argues that its priority must be economic growth to relieve poverty among its vast population.
Dai – whose think tank works under the government’s powerful National Development and Reform Commission – blamed rich nations for excessive consumption and for failing to reach the targets set at Kyoto.
“Twenty percent of the world’s population takes 80% of wealth and emits 70% of greenhouse gases,” he said. “I think two
degrees is a vision that is difficult to fulfill because few countries have reached Kyoto protocol targets, except the UK and some others in the EU.”
Dai stressed that his comments are not official government policy, but they are consistent with a hardening of positions ahead of the Copenhagen climate change summit in December.
Dai was speaking at the launch of the most influential study ever carried out in China on the possibility of the country moving toward a low carbon path of development.
The detailed study, which was conducted by 10 institutions including universities and the World Wildlife Fund, was built on a preparatory study published last month.
Under its most ambitious scenario, China’s overall emissions would peak between 2030 and 2035, assuming generous financial assistance from rich nations, technological transfer, changed consumer habits, enormous investment in renewable energies and large-scale economic restructuring.
Dai said he thought it was unlikely that the two most optimistic scenarios could be achieved because of the huge cost of expanding solar and wind power and capturing carbon. Even under the least ambitious scenario China would have to invest 89.9 trillion yuan by 2050.
Professor He Jiankun, a co-author and the former executive vice president of Tsinghua University, said China faced huge obstacles in moving to a low carbon path because it was still in the midst of development. “There are a huge number of cities to be built. They will consume a large amount of steel and cement. This means that emissions will not be reduced for some time.”
He said the report was not national policy, but it was a blue-print for change.
The WWF signed the recommendations and Yang Fuqiang, director of global climate solutions at the China office of WWF, said developing nations were making a “heroic” effort to reduce carbon. He added that governments in richer countries used the excuse of democracy to claim it was “politically impossible” to make bigger cuts.
He said China would suffer more than any other country as a result of climate change, but it was unlikely to shift direction on emissions any time soon.
“China emits most carbon in the world. We don’t want this hat, but we may have to wear it for many more years,” he said.
The Chinese state council is currently debating a major new plan for renewable energy and there is speculation that it will also announce a carbon intensity target in its economic plan for the first time, but they have yet to show their hand ahead of Copenhagen.
President Hu Jintao is expected to outline some measures at a major United Nations summit on climate change next week.
Until now, Beijing has focused its efforts on technological development. Dai said this was a hope, though it was a wild card.
“Technological innovation is hard to measure,” he said. “Nobody could imagine in the 1960s that everyone would have a cellphone and internet access.”

More than 180 of world’s biggest investors aim to overcome opposition in US and elsewhere to climate change legislation
Suzanne Goldenberg
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 16 September 2009 21.16 BST
More than 180 of the world’s largest investors, with collective assets of $13tn, put their combined weight behind a passionate call for strong US and international action on global warming in New York today.
“We cannot drag our feet on the issue of global climate change,” said Thomas DiNapoli, who heads the $116.5bn New York state pension fund. “I am deeply concerned about the investor risks climate change presents, and the human cost of inaction is unthinkable.”
The summit drew together managers of the world’s leading investment funds, including those from HSBC, Henderson, Schroders, Société Générale and Scottish Widows, and pensions funds from California public employees to the BBC and Church of England. It was aimed at overcoming entrenched opposition within the US and elsewhere to climate change legislation, by showcasing the scale of investor support for climate change action and the potential for mobilisation of private capital.
“For anybody who suggests that regulating carbon or acting on climate change is impractical, here is appropriate contradiction,” said Mindy Lubber, the president of Ceres, the green investor network that helped organise the conference. However, she warned: “Investors are ready to put money into green tech, but they are not going to act until the government acts and makes clear that the right incentives are in the right place.”
The investors’ endorsement for action on climate change comes amid signs of a loss of momentum in the final stretch of negotiations towards a deal to tackle global warming in Copenhagen in December. The group warned that failure to act effectively would have disastrous consequences in human and economic terms.
In contrast to inaction, Lord Nicholas Stern, author of the 2006 Stern report on the economics of climate change, said: “Building a low carbon economy creates opportunities for investment in new technologies that promise to transform our society in the same way as … electricity or railways did in the past.” He added: “Unmitigated climate change poses a threat to the global economy.”
In their joint statement the investors supported the tougher targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions put forward for negotiation at Copenhagen, including cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by developed countries of 25-40% by 2020.The conference was held amid rising frustration that the US Congress and the international negotiations are faltering in the final days before Copenhagen. Stern, in his remarks, said it was time to move away from the “quarrelsome stupid politics” surrounding climate change.

Research suggesting that global temperatures may fall is being used by deniers and sceptics to dismiss the entire canon of climate science

Professor Latif’s model suggested that the long-term warming trend could be masked - perhaps for as long as 10 or 20 years - by a temporary cooling.
Could it be true that global temperatures will fall before they rise? That’s the thrust of a presentation at last week’s World Climate conference. Mojib Latif of Kiel University in Germany suggested that cooling caused by natural factors could suppress global temperatures for several years, after which they will start to rise again.
His presentation, first reported by the eagle-eyed Fred Pearce in the New Scientist, has been seized upon by sceptics and deniers all over the blogosphere. It was picked up this morning by the BBC’s Today programme, which invited my old friend Philip Stott (who spends his time championing such dubious productions as The Great Global Warming Swindle and Michael Crichton’s State of Fear) to raise questions about the global warming thesis.
Professor Latif suggested that the long-term warming trend could be masked - perhaps for as long as 10 or 20 years - by a temporary cooling caused by natural fluctuations in currents and temperatures called the North Atlantic oscillation. “Thereafter,” he told the Today programme, “temperatures will pick up again and continue to warm.”
Could Latif be right? Who knows? As far as I can tell, his paper has not yet been published, so other scientists haven’t had the opportunity to see how strong it is. Vicky Pope of the Met Office suggested this morning that his model might not be as accurate as hers, as it measures only sea-surface temperatures, while the Met Office also takes temperatures below the surface into account.
We know that the world’s climate system is a noisy one, in which natural variations of all kinds jostle constantly with the man-made warming signal. No one ever proposed that the global warming trend would be a smooth one, in which temperatures move up a notch every year. What we have seen so far are minor fluctuations weaving around a solid long-term trend. Nor does anyone claim that climate models are perfect. They need to be constantly refined and updated as new information comes to light. But in seeking to predict the future, you have only two options: wild guesswork, supported by a feeling in your bones, or models incorporating all the data scientists can lay their hands on. Those who reject modelling altogether must propose a better means of prediction. Seaweed, entrails and crystal balls don’t qualify.
But Latif’s presentation is being used by the deniers to dismiss the entire canon of climate science. They choose to overlook the inconvenient fact that he is also a climate scientist, who believes that the warming trend caused by human actions will bounce back as the oscillation moves into another phase.
People demand certainty, but the future resists it. All we can do is to make use of the best available information. And this tells us that we must act.
monbiot.com

People already go hungry, take children out of school or sell livestock because of climate-related problems, says agency
Press Association
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 16 September 2009 11.28 BST
At least 4.5 million children could die and tens of millions more could miss out on schooling if rich countries “raid” existing aid funding to pay for measures to help poor nations cope with climate change, Oxfam warned today.
The aid agency believes $50bn a year (£30bn) is needed to help developing countries cope with the impacts of global warming including droughts, floods, storms and rising sea levels.
And it says the money must be provided in addition to the 0.7% of GDP developed nations have pledged as aid to improve the lives of people in some of the world’s poorest countries – or efforts to tackle poverty will stall.
A report by Oxfam warns that diverting $50bn from existing aid pledges to fund climate measures would lead to the death of 4.5 million children, while 75 million fewer youngsters would be likely to go to school and 8.6 million fewer people would have access to HIV/Aids treatment.
It could prove a major setback to efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals which aim to end hunger and poverty and boost education, health, gender equality and environmental sustainability by 2015, the report warns.
Oxfam said it was already seeing people going without food, pulling their children out of school or selling livestock to pay for debts caused by failing crops and other climate-related problems.
According to the aid agency, just three countries including the UK are in favour of additional funding for climate measures – and the issue could prove to be a deal breaker in the upcoming crunch talks aimed at agreeing global emissions cuts in Copenhagen in December.
A failure by developed countries to address the problems surrounding adaptation funding has led to distrust between the two sides and could undermine efforts to secure a deal to cut emissions.
Oxfam is also concerned that a Conservative government in the UK would divert existing aid provisions to pay for measures such as flood prevention and the introduction of drought-resistant crops.
Barbara Stocking, chief executive of Oxfam Great Britain, said: “Forcing poor countries to choose between life-saving drugs for the sick, schooling for their children or the means to protect themselves against climate change is an unfair burden that will only exacerbate poverty.
“Stealing money from tomorrow’s schools and hospitals to help poor people adapt to climate change is neither a moral or effective way of rich countries paying their climate debt.
“Funds must be increased, not diverted,” she said.
Oxfam wants to see a carbon market in which rich countries have to buy allowances to cover national emissions under a new global deal to slash greenhouse gases, with the money going towards paying for adaptation measures.
The scheme, similar to one which has been proposed by the Norwegian government in advance of Copenhagen, would avoid the “familiar problem” of developed countries failing to meet aid promises, the Oxfam report’s co-author Robert Bailey suggested.
A spokeswoman for the Department for International Development (DfID) said: “Climate finance will be one of the most important and most challenging issues to be addressed over the coming years and that is why the UK are leading the way by offering new investment in addition to our existing aid commitments.
“In June the UK became the first country to publicly address the issue with the proposal for an annual $100bn global fund, to help developing countries both prepare for the impacts of climate change and build for a low-carbon future.”
The shadow international development secretary, Andrew Mitchell, said: “We must tackle both the causes and the consequences of global climate change.
“As well as setting the framework for carbon markets, international agreements will be key to establishing additional support for adaptation.
“We believe that Britain must work towards an ambitious global deal at Copenhagen that will limit emissions and see substantial financial resources made available for adaptation.”

Authoritarian government makes greenhouse emissions worse.
By BRUCE GILLEY
China is the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, and countries around the world from the United States to Japan are pressuring Beijing to lower emissions and to introduce an absolute cap on emissions. But asking China’s central government to impose a carbon cap is the wrong approach. Even if Beijing wanted to do so, such a decision would be almost impossible for the central government to enforce. Greater political freedoms are the key for real environmental improvements in China.
Since economic reforms began in China 30 years ago, local governments have been given wide autonomy in pursuing economic growth. One widely noted result is the inability of Beijing to implement tough planning, tax or environmental policies that might constrain that growth. To some extent, public pressures have forced the hand of local governments on environmental issues that have a direct impact on everyday quality of life air and water quality, waste disposal or food toxins, for instance.
But greenhouse gases, the most common of which is CO2, are different. Like the protection of a threatened animal or plant species, reducing greenhouse gases has little noticeable impact on the communities concerned. Reducing CO2 is rarely a pressing public priority in a country like China, where rapid development is a top goal and other pollution problems are more tangible. Add to that the fact that local governments are autonomous of top-down regulation from Beijing. In essence, the most critical government actors for controlling global carbon emissions are insulated from both top-down and bottom-up political pressures.
There are a few reasons why local governments in China may get more serious about climate change on their own, although these are probably insufficient to control emissions nationwide. One is the lucrative “clean development mechanism” administered by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change under which polluters in one country can buy carbon-emission credits from another country. China is expected to rake in about 59% of the global revenues (likely worth several billion dollars, depending on carbon prices) from this mechanism through the end of 2012, according to the U.N. Local governments and their companies will get most of this revenue. There are also first-mover advantages for cities and provinces that develop the technologies that will likely prove a growth industry in future. The city of Yangzhou, for instance, is pushing ahead with a low-carbon “eco-city” development model that, unusually, includes an immediate reduction in absolute emission levels, something the national government has not embraced.
Beijing itself could take the lead by making greenhouse-gas mitigation efforts one criterion in the evaluation of local cadres, who are currently judged mainly by their economic records and ideological rectitude. In April, the State Council required that all provincial and local governments consider climate change initiatives in their economic and social development policies. But the well-known ability of local governments to evade such top-down mandates is unlikely to be any different in the case of climate-change efforts.
Better yet would be to open up political space at the local level so that citizens and advocacy groups can create a public consensus on the need for action. While Beijing talks about “public participation” in its response to climate change, so far that has meant mainly authoritarian-style efforts to educate the public and encourage greater obedience. In a few places, however, citizens and groups have been brought into the making of policy. The northeastern city of Shenyang, for instance, has been experimenting with participatory approaches to environmental policy since passing a law in 2005 under which citizens must be included in the making of all environmental laws. So far, this has meant mainly public consultations on laws, but the city also tolerates an active community of environmental nongovernmental organizations. One result: its air quality has improved faster than almost any other similar city in China.
Another approach being considered is meetings of representative groups of citizens who deliberate on the best policy approach and then deliver their findings as binding policy mandates to the government concerned known in China as minzhu kentanhui or “sincere democratic forums.” In China, experiments with this system, mainly in the city of Wenling in Zhejiang province, have demonstrated that Chinese citizens place a high priority on environmental protection when asked to rank different government projects. In one forum in Wenling in 2005, citizens selected six environmental protection projects among the top 10 projects they wanted the government to fund.
Deliberation not only expands information but also expands the sense of common responsibility on which the willingness to embrace potentially costly carbon emission programs depends. If Beijing were to start targeting environmental performance in cadre promotions and expand political freedoms that would generate social pressures, more local governments would have an incentive to embrace this bottom-up approach to emissions control.
Despite these signs of progress on locally driven initiatives, many foreigners continue to misunderstand the causes of China’s environmental-policy failures. Most foreign assistance, whether government-to-government or private sector, has replicated the top-down approach by giving money to Beijing. This aid has centered on helping central bureaucrats to develop national policy, transferring technology to energy users, or improving policy monitoring.
That’s a mistake. While some well-known commentators have praised China’s authoritarian approach to climate change, the truth is that Beijing is failing on the environment precisely because of the lack of political freedoms. Rather than leaning even more heavily on Beijing, the critical need is to invest in approaches that will hold local governments accountable to their citizens. Only then can China really tackle CO2.
Mr. Gilley is assistant professor of political science at Portland State University and principal investigator of the Portland State University-Lanzhou University Global Warming Initiative.

By Sarah Arnott
Thursday, 17 September 2009
Carbon passed a milestone on the road to acceptance as a tradeable commodity yesterday as the Climate Exchange recorded its first ever profit.
The company – which runs the European Climate Exchange in London and its US counterpart – recorded a near-doubling in volumes in the first half, pushing it to pre-tax profits of £1.5m compared with last year’s £300,000 loss.
The market for “green” products is taking off, boosted by schemes such as Europe’s emissions trading scheme and the multi-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in the US.
Climate Exchange trading volumes came in some 96 per cent higher in the first six months of this year than last. The jump was sharpest in Europe, where the half-year total of 2.7bn tonnes was up by more than 250 per cent year on year. In the US, trading also more than doubled.
But despite the strong growth, there is considerable uncertainty in such a young market. Both the Copenhagen global climate change conference in December and the impact of Barack Obama’s Climate Bill with have a significant impact on the group in the coming months, Richard Sander, the executive chairman, said.
“Both Europe and the US are going very well,” Mr Sander said. “But we face near-term uncertainty from Copenhagen and also from the legislative stance of the cap and trade programme in the US.”

We’re about to destroy the environment in the name of saving it.
By LAMAR ALEXANDER
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar recently announced plans to cover 1,000 square miles of land in Nevada, Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah with solar collectors to generate electricity. He’s also talking about generating 20% of our electricity from wind. This would require building about 186,000 50-story wind turbines that would cover an area the size of West Virginia not to mention 19,000 new miles of high-voltage transmission lines.
Is the federal government showing any concern about this massive intrusion into the natural landscape? Not at all. I fear we are going to destroy the environment in the name of saving the environment.
The House of Representatives has passed climate legislation that started out as an attempt to reduce carbon emissions. It has morphed into an engine for raising revenues by selling carbon dioxide emission allowances and promoting “renewable” energy.
The bill requires electric utilities to get 20% of their power mostly from wind and solar by 2020. These renewable energy sources are receiving huge subsidies all to supposedly create jobs and hurry us down the road to an America running on wind and sunshine described in President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address.
Yet all this assumes renewable energy is a free lunch a benign, “sustainable” way of running the country with minimal impact on the environment. That assumption experienced a rude awakening on Aug. 26, when The Nature Conservancy published a paper titled “Energy Sprawl or Energy Efficiency: Climate Policy Impacts on Natural Habitat for the United States of America.” The report by this venerable environmental organization posed a simple question: How much land is required for the different energy sources that power the country? The answers deserve far greater public attention.
By far nuclear energy is the least land-intensive; it requires only one square mile to produce one million megawatt-hours per year, enough electricity for about 90,000 homes. Geothermal energy, which taps the natural heat of the earth, requires three square miles. The most landscape-consuming are biofuels ethanol and biodiesel which require up to 500 square miles to produce the same amount of energy.
Coal, on the other hand, requires four square miles, mainly for mining and extraction. Solar thermal heating a fluid with large arrays of mirrors and using it to power a turbine takes six. Natural gas needs eight and petroleum needs 18. Wind farms require over 30 square miles.
This “sprawl” has been missing from our energy discussions. In my home state of Tennessee, we just celebrated the 75th Anniversary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Yet there are serious proposals by energy developers to cover mountains all along the Appalachian chain, from Maine to Georgia, with 50-story wind turbines because the wind blows strongest across mountaintops.
Let’s put this into perspective: We could line 300 miles of mountaintops from Chattanooga, Tenn., to Bristol, Va., with wind turbines and still produce only one-quarter the electricity we get from one reactor on one square mile at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Nuclear Plant.
The 1,000 square-mile solar project proposed by Mr. Salazar would generate, on a continuous basis, 35,000 megawatts of electricity. You could get the same output from 30 new nuclear reactors that would fit comfortably onto existing nuclear sites. And this doesn’t count the thousands of miles of transmission lines that will be needed to carry the newly generated solar power to population centers.
There’s one more consideration. Solar collectors must be washed down once a month or they collect too much dirt to be effective. They also need to be cooled by water. Where amid the desert and scrub land will we find all that water? No wonder the Wildlife Conservancy and other environmentalists are already opposing solar projects on Western lands.
Renewable energy is not a free lunch. It is an unprecedented assault on the American landscape. Before we find ourselves engulfed in energy sprawl, it’s imperative we take a closer look at nuclear power.
Mr. Alexander is a Republican senator from Tennessee and a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.