by Fred Pearce

The tropical forest conservation plan, known as REDD, has the potential to significantly reduce deforestation and carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. But unless projects are carefully designed and monitored, the program could be undercut by shady dealings at all levels, from the forests to global carbon markets.

It could be the cheapest way to save the planet from climate change. Western governments and corporations want to shut down a major source of carbon dioxide emissions by paying the people who destroy forests to desist. But the dream could turn into a nightmare, in which Western polluters use their carbon credits to evade cutting emissions at home, while the promised benefit to the atmosphere is lost in a mire of conflict and corruption.

The plan is called REDD, for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. It has backing from big oil and forest tribes, the World Bank, and blue-chip environment groups like the Nature Conservancy. Right now, REDD looks to be the only positive outcome likely to emerge from this December’s Cancun climate conference, the successor to last year’s failure in Copenhagen. If it happens, a new global business of carbon conservation in forests could soon be worth tens of billions of dollars a year.

The stakes are high. The destruction of tropical rainforests is responsible for an estimated 17 percent of global CO2 emissions — six times the amount of emissions from aircraft. REDD’s backers say REDD could snuff out those emissions, sharply reducing deforestation by 2030. Already a range of pilot projects are up and running. But the warning signs about what could go wrong are flashing.

Take the Nature Conservancy’s Noel Kempff Climate Action Project in Bolivia. This is a 14-year-old forest conservation project rebranded as a model for REDD. But Greenpeace last year called it a “carbon scam.”

The $10 million project doubled the size of an existing national park to more than 800,000 hectares. It expelled loggers and installed forest rangers with funding from corporate sponsors, including the oil giant BP and America’s largest coal burner, American Electric Power. The plan is to reward this corporate philanthropy with carbon credits equivalent to half the amount of carbon fixed in the forest. The rest go to the Bolivian government.

To date, carbon auditors say the project has prevented emissions of more than a million tons of CO2. One day, the partners may offset the carbon credits against their own emissions back home, or sell them in the carbon market likely to emerge under REDD.

The Noel Kempff project is highly regulated. Nobody doubts extra carbon is being kept in the forest. But there is a problem about its benefit to the atmosphere that can be summed up in one word: leakage. Some of the loggers expelled from the park simply put their chainsaws in the back of the pickup, drove down the road, and resumed cutting in the next forest. Since the project started, UN data show that rates of deforestation in Bolivia overall have gone up, not down, with a 4.4 percent rise between 2000 and 2005.

Timber pirates are everywhere, says Karl Bahler, a principal at Bahler Consulting and the former portfolio manager at Sustainable Forest Systems, which runs a green-minded logging project near the Noel Kempff forest. “The idea that governments in places like Bolivia can effectively police property rights just doesn’t match up to the reality on the ground,” says Bahler. So the bigger picture suggests that, however virtuous the Nature Conservancy’s activities within the park, they may not be keeping carbon out of the air. Those carbon credits may represent hot air.

To prevent such leakage, many people say governments should have to ensure that national deforestation rates are curbed before anyone can claim any carbon credits for local projects. “National accounting is essential,” says Kevin Conrad, the son of an American missionary in Papua New Guinea who has promoted REDD in his adopted country as the special envoy for climate change. Yet groups like the Nature Conservancy and Conservation International oppose the idea that credits should be awarded at the national level. They have lobbied hard at the UN that local projects should qualify, whatever goes on over the back fence.

Perhaps this is not surprising for organizations whose main activity is “on-the-ground” conservation. The Nature Conservancy accepts that “national-scale accounting is the ultimate goal.” But it argues that “a transition period should be allowed in which subnational or project-scale activities can generate credits for sale,” which will ensure “learning by doing.” In UN negotiations, the Obama administration has argued the same position. But, even if leakage does not become endemic, the danger is that a few well-publicized cases could fatally undermine the whole REDD project.

REDD faces many other challenges if it is to become part of the solution to climate change, rather than part of the problem. They range from the scientific to the economic, legal, and political.

Satellites have transformed the ability of independent scientists to track deforestation, and ended reliance on questionable form-filling by national governments. But if scientists are to verify REDD, what exactly should they be measuring? A study last year by the Nairobi-based World Agroforestry Centre showed that in many places, farm woodlots and woody scrub are as important in capturing carbon as forests, but they are not part of the REDD definition.

There are other critical questions for the carbon counters. If countries are to be given carbon credits in return for cutting rates of deforestation, how do you measure the baseline rate? It can make a massive difference. In Brazil, for instance, deforestation rates doubled between 1990 and 2004, then fell by two-thirds in the next four years. So measuring changes in deforestation against the earlier, higher rate, would yield far greater compensation than if a more recent date were chosen.

On economics, there is a real danger that so many carbon credits will be awarded that they will end up flooding the existing carbon market and causing prices to crash. A Greenpeace study last year concluded that REDD could cut prices of carbon credits by 75 per cent. That would undermine the economics of a huge range of initiatives to reduce CO2 emissions, such as the development of renewable fuels.

Meanwhile, carbon accounting is likely to prove difficult and open to abuse. A carbon credit is more like an abstruse financial commodity than, say, a ton of wheat or coffee. In the jungles of the financial markets, the potential for carbon fraud is huge. Last August, several London City traders were arrested on suspicion of operating swindles involving carbon credits. They may be the first of many.

Is REDD fair? A looming problem is that REDD sets out to reward the bad boys of the forests if they mend their ways. The worse they are now, the more they stand to gain in the future. The bad guys are wise to this. On the Indonesian island of Sumatra, major companies responsible for pulping ancient rainforests now want to be rewarded with carbon credits for setting aside a small fraction of their huge landholdings for conservation.

Meanwhile the good guys — those who have conserved their forests all along — may get nothing. Nothing for Costa Rica, the only country in the tropics to have curbed rampant deforestation and increased its forest cover. Nothing for Guyana, which has kept its forests. And nothing for indigenous tribes who have looked after their forests for centuries.

Some say the rules should be changed to recognize long-time conservers. One carbon finance fund in London, Canopy Capital, has bought up the carbon-credit rights to the 370,000-hectare Iwokrama forest in Guyana in the hope of a payout one day. Such rewards may be fair. But if someone can gain carbon credits for protecting forests they never intended to destroy, that makes a mockery of the intention of REDD to compensate people who give up forest destruction. Paying people who have never destroyed their forests to ensure they carry on the good work may be valuable, but would not demonstrably reduce rates of deforestation or benefit the atmosphere. To pay them in carbon credits that could be sold to offset actual emissions would be potentially counterproductive in the fight against climate change.

REDD also raises afresh the issue of who owns the forests and is entitled to claim carbon credits. Some forest communities, such as the Surui tribe in the Rondonia region of the Brazilian Amazon, believe they can benefit from running their own carbon-sink forests. There are precedents. In part of the Juma rainforest in Brazil, the state government has given every household a credit card account into which it deposits $50 each month as a payment for keeping the forest intact.

But in Indonesia, the government owns the forests — and hence any carbon credits that they attract. Campaigners there complain that REDD pilot projects being set up by the Indonesian and Australian governments in Borneo — with support from the world’s largest mining company, and would-be carbon offsetter, BHP-Billiton — are more likely to end up evicting forest dwellers to guarantee the protection of the forests than to enrich them.

This may already have happened in the Harapan forest in southern Sumatra, where locals say they have been thrown off their land as part of a carbon-sink project endorsed by the Prince Charles Rainforest Project and the conservation group Birdlife International. Birdlife says only illegal loggers have been expelled, but the locals say that isn’t so. The only certainty is that the project seems to have created a lot of local antagonism.

We should not be too skeptical. It may be that a mixture of government concern and consumer pressure will soon outlaw pirate loggers, and that financiers can create carbon markets that will reward good behavior by landowners and governments alike. But, even in the days of satellite observations, it will remain hard to know exactly what is going on deep in the forest.

Image credit: contact@renteasier.com

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

by David Rosenfeld

Environmentalists achieved a major victory in March when the United Nations International Maritime Organization agreed to set strict new standards for air emissions from ships off the U.S. and Canadian coasts.

The agreement requires ocean vessels within 200 miles of the shoreline to switch to a cleaner yet costlier blend of fuel that emits less sulfur and other harmful pollutants linked to asthma and cancer. Environmental Protection Agency scientists believe the new rules will save 8,300 lives per year, mostly in communities near ports.

Some in the shipping industry supported the tougher measures, but one key industry component continues to vigorously oppose them: the cruise line industry.

Cruise industry sticks out

A previous report at DCBureau.org shows how the cruise line industry has protected its right to dump minimally treated sewage and other harmful pollutants into near-shore oceans. Now, a recent look at the industry’s record of lobbying against air pollution controls and its limited use of shore-side power hookups underscores an equally disturbing disregard for the environment.

No industry has been as opposed to the new sulfur standards than cruise lines. Cruise ships comprise just 12 percent of the world’s 46,000 commercial shipping vessels, yet they accounted for some of the most vocal opposition to the new regulations announced earlier this year. The Cruise Line International Association did not return multiple requests for comment.

At an industry trade conference in Miami, shortly after the IMO agreement, cruise company executives denounced the new rules. Stein Kruse, chief executive of Holland America Line, called the 200-mile boundary arbitrary. "The reality is that the problem exists in a few very, very large cities,” Kruse was quoted as saying in a Reuters article.

Carnival Cruise Line Chief Executive Gerald Cahill in the same article lamented continued regulatory pressure. “Some days you get up and you feel that new regulatory efforts are coming from almost every direction, from every government from every part of the world,” Cahill said, “and that does propose a lot of issues for the industry.”

You don’t have to look far to find a different perspective in the maritime world. The globe’s leading organization representing worldwide shipping companies, the World Shipping Council, supported the new fuel requirements, said Bryan Wood-Thomas, its lobbyist in Washington DC.

“There’s no question these cleaner fuels impose a significant expense on our operations, but we have argued strongly that we want uniform standards (across the globe),” said Wood-Thomas, who speculated the new rules will impact cruise lines more because they spend greater time closer to shore.

At the IMO’s next meeting later this year, it’s expected to begin taking up greenhouse gas emissions. And once again, the World Shipping Council is out in front with their own proposal.

The cruise line industry for its part points to millions of dollars in environmental upgrades and regulation compliance as signs that it acts as good environmental stewards. Executives say the industry is building more energy efficient ships. They’re designing itineraries to reduce idle times. And they’re experimenting with gas scrubbers on exhaust pipes similar to electric utilities as a way to reduce carbon emissions.

An IMO study last year said that all ships could get 75 percent reductions in carbon emissions through operational and technical measures, such as motoring slower and shifting itineraries. “The first 25 percent comes at no cost,” said Jackie Savitz, Oceana campaign manager who attends IMO meetings in London. “That’s almost unheard of for any pollution control.”

Antarctic fuel ban scales back cruising

A similar ban on heavy oil bunker fuel – not just to burn it, but to carry it -- in the Antarctic protective zones was also adopted by the IMO this year. As a result, cruise vessels that use the fuel will be forced to burn the more expensive marine fuel, already used by most smaller vessels, for the entire voyage back to their ports in Australia and New Zealand. In response, several cruise companies announced they would end Antarctic cruises, while others are scaling back, said Steve Wellmeier, executive director of IAATO International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators (IAATO).

The vast majority of cruises Down Under are taken on smaller vessels that won’t be affected by the ban. But for the larger cruise-only crowd on ships with more than 500-passengers (led for now by Holland America, Princess Cruises and Celebrity) traveler numbers will likely drop from 15,000 in the season that just ended to 6,500 cruise passengers in the 2011-2012 season when the ban takes effect.

“A number of them have said they will comply but some have said it’s not worth their while to do so,” Wellmeier said. “The difficulty for them is it’s logistically quite difficult to use up all the fuels until you get down to the Antarctic area.”

At the IMO meeting earlier this year, cruise line industry lobbyists wanted a delay. “Despite the item having been debated for years, CLIA wanted the ban to go into effect in July 2013 instead of 2011,” said John Kaltenstein, marine program manager for Friends of Earth, who serves on the international seat at the IMO in London.

He said the way the cruise line industry lobbies at this international body is to influence member nations they have close relations with such as the Bahamas. “These smaller countries have a vested interest in the cruise industry,” Kaltenstein said. “It’s a larger share of their economy. In some cases quite significant. The health of the cruise industry and where they choose to take their ships is very influential.”

Supporting delay were Malta, Bahamas, Marshall Islands and Liberia. Against delay were New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Germany, UK, France, Ireland, Argentina and Chile.

Shore-side power

Along with the fight for tougher sulfur emission standards, Friends of the Earth is also pushing for greater use of shore-side power stations while ships are at port to reduce air emissions. Based on a report card on cruise ships posted on the group’s website, less than half of ships with available power hookups possess the ability to use them. Rather, ships continue running onboard diesel engines, in most cases fueled by heavy diesel “bunker” fuel. (See DCBureau’s Three Part Series on bunker fuel)

The cruise line industry defended its environmental record in a written response soon after the report card came out last September. “While some ships in the CLIA fleet are fitted to plug in to shore power,” the statement read. “This technology is only available at five berths in North America. Therefore to fail a ship for not using port-side technology that is not even available is emblematic of FOE’s tactics and further discredits this so-called report card.”

The authors of the report card say they did consider whether shore power was available and the grades reflect a percentage based on whether it was available. Princes Cruises, mostly in Alaskan waters with more stringent regulation, received an ‘A’ for its ability to utilize shore-side power while Royal Caribbean and Carnival Cruise Lines each got an ‘F.’

International Maritime Organization Slow to Act

To be sure, the IMO’s new air standards were a milestone. But for activists working to control greenhouse gas emissions from ships, which contribute as much carbon to the atmosphere as the sixth largest country, the IMO represents a place where best intentions languish.

“It’s a very slow, torturous process,” said Oceana campaign manager Savitz. “What’s ironic is that a lot of countries talk about regulating greenhouse gasses from ships. We’ve petitioned the EPA who said they wouldn’t do it because they think the IMO is going to handle it. Well, anyone who goes to an IMO meeting knows that’s not happening anytime soon.”

Even the sulfur restrictions, though applauded in the end by environmentalists, took longer than necessary. “The IMO can’t just agree to it even though they are in agreement,” Savitz said. “They had to think about it for nine months and now they’ve agreed to it.”

The IMO has around 300 international staff that governs everything on the high seas within international waters from piracy to pollution. There are 169 member states and three associate members that meet every nine months, so it’s no wonder pollution controls that even the shipping industry agrees to can’t be implemented sooner. Yet for members of Congress, the IMO remains the regulators of last resort on shipping pollution. The latest climate bill spearheaded by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) does not address the matter. And in a lot of ways, this suits the industry just fine.

Reprinted with permission from DC Bureau

The world community should abandon efforts to sign a climate change treaty and instead focus on combating global warming by imposing carbon taxes to fund renewable energy breakthroughs and to deliver clean electricity to the world’s poor, according to a report by 14 academics and scientists. The group recommends pursuing a “politically attractive and relentlessly pragmatic” climate and energy strategy that combines a huge research effort into renewable energy with pragmatic, near-term solutions, such as reducing heat-absorbing “black carbon” produced by wood fires and industries. Their conclusions, released in the so-called Hartwell Paper, call for an end to efforts to forge a global climate treaty or slash Western consumption and a focus instead on supplying green electricity to the world’s 1.5 billion people who currently lack it. “The raising of human dignity is the central driver, replacing the preoccupation with human sinfulness that has failed and will continue to fail to deliver progress,” said lead author Gwyn Prins of the London School of Economics. Other scientists have attacked the paper, saying that the Kyoto climate treaty has reduced emissions growth and that signing a more far-reaching pact remains an important goal.

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

Rampant illegal logging in Indonesia is undermining the sustainability and strength of the forest products industry in Indonesia and the United States and thwarting efforts to preserve forests to slow global warming, according to a new report. The report by the BlueGreen Alliance and several U.S. environmental and labor organizations said that 40 to 55 percent of Indonesia's timber is harvested illegally, often from protected areas. Widespread illegal logging in Indonesia and elsewhere has depressed timber prices worldwide, costing the logging, wood, paper and cabinetry industries more than $1 billion in the U.S. alone, the report said. Illegal logging also is undercutting the production of sustainably produced timber. “Under current conditions, there is no level playing field,” the report says. The authors also cite an Indonesian report estimating that logging accounts for 80 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, making Indonesia the world’s third-largest emitter of CO2. The report says stricter enforcement of logging regulations and increased transparency are critical to stemming illegal logging in Indonesia.

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

Earlier this year, climatologist Ellen Mosley-Thompson led an expedition to drill into glacial ice on the Antarctic Peninsula, one of the world’s fastest-warming regions. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Mosley-Thompson explains what the Antarctic ice cores may reveal and describes what it’s like working in the world’s swiftly melting ice zones.

Ellen Mosley-Thompson and her husband, Lonnie Thompson, are two of the world’s most respected climatologists and glaciologists, traveling around the globe to bore holes in shrinking glaciers and ice sheets. Mosley-Thompson works mainly at the poles, in Greenland and Antarctica, while her husband has done more ice corings of low-latitude glaciers — in the Andes, Africa, and the Himalayas — than any other person alive. Their work, taken together, paints a sobering portrait of the rapid retreat of most of the world’s glaciers and ice caps in the face of the buildup of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

Several months ago, during the Antarctic summer, Mosley-Thompson — the director of the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University — returned to Antarctica for the ninth time to head a six-person expedition to the Bruce Plateau on the Antarctic Peninsula. The peninsula has warmed faster than almost any other place on Earth, with winter temperatures increasing by 11 degrees F over the past 60 years and year-round temperatures rising by 5 degrees F. As a result, sea ice now covers the western Antarctic Peninsula three months less a year than three decades ago, 90 percent of glaciers along the western Antarctic Peninsula are in retreat, and large floating ice shelves are crumbling.

The most famous of those ice shelves is the Larsen B, a slab of ice — once the size of Connecticut — that disintegrated spectacularly in 2002 in the Weddell Sea. Mosley-Thompson’s expedition was part of a larger study to research the collapse of the Larsen A & B ice shelves and to place this major event in the context of previous eras of climate change.

Working for 42 days in frigid temperatures at 6,500 feet, Mosley-Thompson and her team encountered numerous hardships and difficulties, including the loss of ice drills. Thanks to the ingenuity and engineering skills of her team members, the group finally succeeded in drilling 1,462 feet to the bedrock atop the Bruce Plateau. When the ice cores return to Ohio State in June, Mosley-Thompson and her colleagues hope to analyze the ice to track the history of climate change for thousands of years, perhaps to the last glacial period and beyond.

But even before she analyzes her latest drilling samples, Mosley-Thompson tells Yale Environment 360 senior editor Fen Montaigne, one thing is clear: the retreat of the world’s glaciers, coupled with evidence from other Antarctic ice cores showing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at their highest levels in more than 800,000 years, “tells us very clearly that we have a serious problem.”

Yale Environment 360: I wondered if you could describe for our readers the purpose of this ice coring expedition.

Helen Mosley-Thompson: We were part of a much larger International Polar Year project sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The name of the big project is LARISSA. This was a very large, multidisciplinary international effort to get a better understanding of the interaction of the various systems operating in the Larsen B embayment — for example, the oceanographic system, the ice system, the ecological system, the atmosphere.

e360: And [the Bruce Plateau] is basically a big ice cap or glacier in the midst of these beautiful mountains that run the length of the Antarctic Peninsula?

Mosley-Thompson: Yes, that’s correct. Actually, the Bruce Plateau itself is relatively narrow at the spot where we were drilling. So on our six clear days — we were there 42 days — we had excellent horizon. We could see mountains and we could look out into the distance where we knew the remaining part of the Larsen B Ice Shelf and the Larsen C Ice Shelf were out to the east.

e360: Was [this project] basically an attempt to understand the warming behind the break up of the Larsen B [Ice Shelf] and how it fits into a climate history record?

Mosley-Thompson: Yes. Of course the break up of the ice essentially makes an area available that has not been available for five to ten thousand years. So the idea is that the ecologists could actually look at an ecosystem on the ocean bottom in an area that, eight or nine years ago, was covered by ice – and [had been] for thousands of years — [compared] to one that is now open water. And of course the ecosystems in that area will be adjusting to the new normal. So the idea for the ecologists was that they would be able to look at the potentially rapid changes in a disturbed ecosystem.

For the glaciologists, one of the critical things that they wanted to examine closely was — and still is — since the 2002 break up, how much more rapidly are the land-based glaciers discharging ice out into the ocean. Some measurements back in 2004 based upon satellite imagery suggested some of those glaciers increased their flow speed by four to eight times. Because if the ice shelf is gone, then you’ve lost that buttressing effect. And so the question really is how much additional ice is being dumped through those major glaciers?

e360: And, the glaciers whose motion to the sea is being accelerated because the ice shelf isn’t holding them back, that leads to direct sea level rises?

Mosley-Thompson: That’s correct. Any ice that’s on land that you put in the water will raise sea level. And so then the marine group had people who were looking at changes in marine geochemistry. They have chemical measurements of the ocean, they have drilled cores in the ocean bottom along the outer margins of the Larsen B, when it was in place. And the idea is that they could now come into the area that was ice covered very recently and collect new cores. So then [we] integrate those records, [and] where appropriate, where the time scales overlap, compare with the records that we’ll be getting from the cores that we drilled.

You know one of the things we don’t really know for that region is how extensive the ice cover on the peninsula was during the last glacial stage, when North America, from Canada and the northern part of the U.S., and the Finnish/Scandinavian area, was covered by these large ice sheets during the last glaciation. The perception is that you would have had more extensive ice cover in the Antarctic Peninsula, but there’s no evidence to either support or refute that. Those records [are] not in hand yet. And so one of the big questions for the ice core that we drilled was, does the basal or bottom ice contain ice that was deposited during the last glacial stage, or has all of the ice that exists on the spine of the peninsula been deposited since the beginning of Holocene.

e360: Which is what, ten, twelve thousand years ago?

Mosley-Thompson: Exactly. And so we don’t have those answers yet. The ice cores that we drilled won’t even arrive in Columbus, Ohio [until] June 18th. So they’re still in transit.

e360: What are you hoping to find out about the climate records of the recent thousands of years?

Mosley-Thompson: Well we want as many details as we possibly can. So we’ll be looking at the oxygen and hydrogen isotopic ratios that tell us something about the temperatures in the area. We’ll be measuring particulates. We’ll be looking at the sulfate — that, we already know, gives us an excellent record of the volcanic activity. We’re going to look at something called methane sulfonic acid, MSA. If you have more MSA, the thinking is that you probably then have more open water because the primary source for that would be from phytoplankton. So we’re going to be looking at this to see if it might be consistent with other evidence that would tell us whether the sea ice was more extensive, less extensive, or absent.

e360: MSA, from the photosynthetic process that involves phytoplankton’s growth, would put compounds into the atmosphere that you could actually find in the [glacial] ice?

Mosley-Thompson: Right. They convert to dimethyl sulfide, DMS. DMS is actually what is put in the atmosphere and then that converts to this MSA. That’s what we can measure in the ice. We also have a facility here that we’ve just implemented or installed in the last few months that can do what’s called trace element analysis. So if there are specific areas of the core that are of interest — I mean once we have constructed a robust time scale for the core, there will be periods in the past that are of specific interest to the climatological community. We can then go into those parts of the core and measure very, very tiny concentrations.

e360: What do you think is the minimum age that you’ll be able to go back to?

Mosley-Thompson: We picked up 100 percent of the ice [down to the bedrock], contained in 445 meters of core. So what that means is that as we get lower and lower in the core, time is going to become very compressed. We do not know at what point we will lose our ability to pick up annual variation. Our intent is to analyze the core in the highest possible time resolution, so that we don’t lose any valuable information. But there will be a point beyond which we will not be able to look at the seasonally varying parameters and count those years.

e360: And that’s because the weight of the snow and ice just compresses those years so tightly that you can’t distinguish them.

Mosley-Thompson: That’s right... But we should know pretty quickly whether or not that bottom ice was deposited during a warm period, like the Holocene, or during a somewhat [colder] or much colder period, like the end of the last glacial stage. And we’ll know that from the oxygen and hydrogen isotopic ratios. There’s a very clear signature in the depletion of oxygen 18 [indicating cooling] in the glacial stage ice... We anticipate that this ice probably did build up in the latter part of the last glaciation. Knowing that answer will provide some really interesting constraints on what the climate must have been like at the end of the last glacial and in the early Holocene period.

Another thing that our team here at Ohio State is intently studying is a fairly large abrupt climate event around 5,200 years ago that seems to be very widespread, and no driving mechanism has yet been identified for that. We do not know whether there’s any signature of it in Antarctica. But since this event was most strongly expressed in mid- to low- latitudes, if it is in Antarctica you would expect it’s going to be in the peninsula for sure, because of the [Antarctic Peninsula’s] tighter connection to the mid-latitudes of the southern hemisphere.

e360: Is this the same signal that your husband, Lonnie Thompson, picked up in some Andean glaciers?

Mosley-Thompson: Exactly. The Quelccaya ice cap in the southern Andes of Peru is rapidly retreating, and as it has retreated the plant deposits are exposed and they’re very fresh, which means that they’ve never been exposed before. They literally dry out in the course of a year and so these are fresh plant deposits, but they’re all 5,200 years old. Which means that that ice cap advanced over those plants and that ice cap has never been smaller for 5,200 years. But there is evidence for this abrupt shift all the way from logs that are now coming out of glaciers in Alaska as they retreat, [to] very rapid changes in bogs in Patagonia. All throughout the tropical regions there are different types of evidence suggesting a very rapid change. And the change wasn’t consistent. In some areas the change was to cold and dry and in other areas it was to cold and wet. So is it evident in the [Antarctic] Peninsula? That’s one of the key things we want to answer.

e360: Out of your core atop the Bruce Plateau, do you expect that for quite a few hundred or more than a thousand years back you will have a good CO2 and temperature record?

Mosley-Thompson: There is no reason to expect that we will not.

e360: As some of our readers may know, there have been some extremely deep ice cores taken in Antarctica at Dome C that go back 800,000 or 900,000 years.

Mosley-Thompson: Right.

e360: I understand that the Dome C record shows very clearly that we’ve got more CO2 in our atmosphere now than at any time in 800,000 years.

Mosley-Thompson: Oh yeah. Very clearly. If you look back over the eight glacial/interglacial cycles, you essentially see that CO2 never rises above 300 parts per million and we’re at about 389 now. Methane never rises above about 800 parts per billion, and I think we’re at about 1,700 parts per billion. So we’re clearly outside the range of natural variability. I personally think that graph simply showing the natural fluctuations in those two important greenhouse gases, over almost a million years of Earth history — and then you see the two dots [today] that are so much higher than anything that we see in that near-million history — tells us very clearly that we have a serious problem.

e360: I know you have done a lot of ice coring in Greenland and Antarctica and I know your husband has done groundbreaking work in low-latitude glaciated areas like the Andes and the Himalaya. What does this cumulative ice coring work show about what we’re experiencing in the last century or so in terms of the warming of the planet?

Mosley-Thompson: Well, from the tropical work, the cores in the Andes and the Himalaya, the oxygen isotopic ratio in those cores, when you stack those cores together, show very clearly that the last 50 or 60 years have been the warmest in the last 2,000 years. There’s a lot of regional variability. So for example, we’ll often hear that the Medieval Warm Period, roughly 1,000 years ago, was as warm as today. And it’s interesting if we look at the three ice cores from the Andes, we do see a Medieval Warm Period signature and a very, very distinct Little Ice Age cool signature. That’s not surprising because both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age are expressed most strongly around the Atlantic Basin. And the moisture that builds the glaciers in the Andes of Peru actually comes from the southern part of the North Atlantic and the equatorial Atlantic, and not from the Pacific, as people might think. So these Andean cores showed a very distinct Atlantic signature.

But the four cores from the Tibetan Himalaya show virtually no signature of medieval warming or Little Ice Age cooling. They’re sampling a totally different region, and so when we put these records together, the medieval warming is very modest and the Little Ice Age signature is strongly muted as well. And what really stands out when you put these all together and into the composite, is the last 60 years. The oxygen isotopic enrichment in the tops of the cores [indicating warming] is very striking.

The other thing that we are now seeing, particularly with the tropical ice fields — and it’s not something that we really were looking for when we started going to the high mountains — is that these glaciers are retreating very rapidly. And, in fact, several of the ice fields, particularly one that we recently published the results [for] in the southwestern Himalaya, it has not gained mass or has no ice that was deposited after 1950. It’s like these glaciers are just literally being decapitated. And it’s very frightening.

e360: When you see global warming skeptics seize on a bit of sloppy work in the IPCC report that predicted the end of Himalayan glaciers in 2035, the skeptics then say, “Well, see, the glaciers aren’t melting.” It must be extremely frustrating to you that this kind of misinformation gets out to the public when in fact you and your husband see that the world’s glaciers are disappearing at a very rapid rate.

Mosley-Thompson: Of course it is frustrating, but you know any time that a system, a human system, shows change and people may have to make changes and there are clearly economic consequences, you get into these debates. The unfortunate thing is that scientists generally operate by one set of rules, and the way that we debate and the words that we use and the standards to which we try to hold ourselves are quite different for political debate. In political debate you can use quite different language, things don’t have to be precise, you can virtually lie if you want to and then apologize later. But a scientist, if you speak untruthfully, then what’s on the line for you as a scientist is your credibility and your reputation. But frankly, I’d like to turn that around and say that when you look at the breadth of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, and how much information is in there, the fact that this must be the most egregious error, otherwise they would be making more of something else — I think it’s astounding that the IPCC got as much right as they did because there was just tremendous potential for error.

e360: You and your husband work in the world’s ice zones, and so you’re getting a first-hand and almost shocking look at the rate of melt. Do you sometimes wish that if the general public could somehow accompany you on your work they would have a much greater sense of urgency about doing something about global warming?

Mosley-Thompson: Well, you know, a picture is worth a thousand words. Generally when we go and give talks and we show that the loss of ice is occurring in virtually every environment that has ice, people walk out and say, “Wow, I just didn’t realize the scope of this.”

e360: And if we don’t begin to rein in CO2 emissions, where do you think the cryosphere, the Earth’s ice zone, is heading?

Mosley-Thompson: To the oceans. Ultimately that’s where all water goes, to the lowest level.

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

by Paul Schwartz

In France it is known as la Maree Noir, the “Black Tide.” The waves of oil that are rushing to choke the shorelines of Louisiana are well-known to the residents of the Galician coast of Spain and the shores of southwestern France where I used to live.

It was there in 2002 that the giant oil tanker Prestige broke apart in rough seas, a nightmare that would bring death to more than 20,000 birds and other wildlife, a nightmare that would spell destruction to the fishing and tourism industries for years afterward.

Living near Bordeaux at the time, I witnessed the results of the disaster first hand. For those concerned about the effects of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, past tanker calamities such as the Prestige and the 1989 wreck of the Exxon Valdez are instructive; they help us understand the magnitude of the damage such accidents can have on a region’s habitat, and the dangerous consequences of insufficient government regulation and political wrangling.

When the Prestige began leaking, some 250 km off the northwestern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, it was carrying 77,000 tons of oil. The ship foundered as 125 tons of bilious grease poured daily through cracks in the hull while the governments of Spain, Portugal and France argued whether to allow the wreck to be towed into port for repair.

Within a week the ship broke in two. The first signs of the catastrophe quickly appeared across more than 1000 km of coastline from the north of Portugal and the Galician coast to southwest France. A flotilla of Spanish and French fishing vessels was called into action in an attempt to swab the coastal waters. Nets that had once caught tuna and shrimp now trawled for floating masses of toxic, emulsified fuel oil and dead marine life.

For months afterward, crews of salvage workers, military personnel and volunteers from areas touched by the spill landed on beaches to sift the globs of slimy debris – referred to as galettes (pancakes) by the French – and to clean blackened shore birds. The accident occurred during November, which is the height of the migration season for birds that nest in France, Scotland and the United Kingdom. The area closest to the site of the wreck, Galicia and the Cantabric coasts, were winter homes to large colonies of razorbills, gannets, puffins and other species that would come to partake of the hospitable environment and abundant supply of food.

It would take three months before authorities declared that salvage crews had succeeded in patching the key escapes from the sunken oiler, which rested on the sea bed 4000 meters down; using a combination of remotely operated submersible vehicles and specially designed aluminum containers it would take another two years of painstaking work to pump out as much of the remaining oil as possible.

Authorities say the underwater rig now spilling 5,000 barrels of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico could foul thousands of miles of coastline and decimate 20 national wildlife refuges. The region is on the flight path of more than 70 percent of the country’s waterfowl, including the brown pelican, now in its nesting season on Breton Island, Louisiana. Wildlife experts say sea turtles, manatees, Gulf sturgeon and other species could all be in the cross hairs.

As the reports of the BP rig explosion in the Gulf came in last week, I was reminded of how I walked the beaches of the Gironde region near Bordeaux in 2002 assisting in the cleanup, feeling the oil beneath my feet. I knew it would forever change the way in which I thought about fossil fuels.

Indications are that the Obama administration is moving quickly to address the Gulf disaster. Reacting to a growing chorus of critics that have already begun to label the oil spill “Obama’s Katrina,” the White House is traveling to the region on Sunday with a small team, promising a small presidential “footprint.” Administration officials have said that the president may re-examine his recent proposals for expanded offshore drilling on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf and other areas.

Aside from the much criticized anemic response during the early days of Hurricane Katrina, one of the mistakes President Bush made in that crisis was his choice to fly over New Orleans rather than engage the problem on the ground. I would recommend that, in reassessing his stand on drilling, President Obama might want to consider standing on the beach; he and Secretary of the Interior Salazar should ignore concerns about the size of the presidential footprint, remove their shoes and walk slowly along the sulfurous sands of Louisiana.

Reprinted with permission from Cleantechies

by John R. Luoma

With a single, concerted initiative, says Lakshman Guruswami, the world could save millions of people in poor nations from respiratory ailments and early death, while dealing a big blow to global warming — and all at a surprisingly small cost.

“If we could supply cheap, clean-burning cook stoves to the large portion of the world that burns biomass,” says Guruswami, a Sri Lankan-born professor of international law at the University of Colorado, “we could address a significant international public health problem, and at the same stroke cut a major source of warming.”

Sooty, indoor air pollution from open wood or other biomass fires has long been linked to health problems and deaths. More recently, scientists have been surprised to learn that black carbon — not only from biomass fires but from dirty diesel engines and other sources — is a far larger contributor to global warming than previously suspected: The dark particles absorb and retain heat close to the Earth’s surface that might otherwise be reflected.

Some two billion people around the world, Guruswami notes, do most or all of their cooking and heating with fires from simple biomass — dried dung, wood, brush, or crop residues. In India alone, the ratio is much higher — about three-fourths.

“Think about that,” says Guruswami, who directs his university’s Center for Energy and Environmental Security. “Two billion people, one-third of the people on Earth, are caught in a time warp, with no access to modern energy. They got energy from Prometheus a long time ago, and that was it.”

Public health scientists have been pointing out for years that open fires and primitive stoves for cooking and heating used in much of the developing world pose profound health risks, particularly among women and children. Women typically spend hours cooking multiple meals beside smoky fires and stoves, with infants and small children in close proximity.

The public health implications alone are profound: 1.5 million lives are lost to respiratory, heart and other soot-related harm every year, according to World Health Organization estimates.

As for the climate aspects, atmospheric scientists have more recently reported that ordinary soot — or black carbon — plays a surprisingly large role in global and regional warming. Some scientists now estimate that small, solid particles of black carbon are responsible for about one-fifth of warming globally and, as such, are the second-largest contributor to climate change, after carbon dioxide gas.

In addition to soaking up heat in the atmosphere, the tiny, dark particles — or aerosols — are blown poleward or up mountains, where they settle on snow and ice and absorb warmth. Although dirty diesel engines, power plants and other more advanced technologies produce black carbon, cooking fires appear to be the largest source of soot in developing nations.

More alarming, extra warming driven by black carbon appears to be especially amplified in the high country of Asia’s Tibetan Plateau, home to the world’s highest mountains. There, in a region sometimes called the “Third Pole,” summer melt-water from thousands of glaciers forms the headwaters of major rivers that provide water to more than a billion people in teeming cities and small farms below, in India, China, and smaller nations like Burma and Vietnam. In fact, the plateau has been called “Asia’s water tower,” feeding the Ganges, the Indus, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yangtze, and the Yellow rivers.

Already, glaciers on the plateau have declined by about 20 percent since the 1960s. Scientists have predicted that with rising Asian populations and more open fires, diesel engines, and burning of forests, the glacial melt will accelerate, eventually diminishing the rivers below.

Beginning in 2007, scientists at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography helped establish just how profound warming boosted by black carbon might be in the Tibetan Plateau. While previous hints had come from computer models, Scripps scientists working in India measured soot levels and dispersion by flying three unmanned aircraft equipped with sensors across the region. Using this data, the Scripps team, headed by climatologist Veerabhadran Ramanathan, concluded that black carbon was probably contributing at least as much to the Tibetan Plateau’s glacial melt as were greenhouse gases. A separate study last month estimated that black carbon was responsible for at least 30 percent of glacial melt in the Himalayas.

Late last year, NASA reported that black carbon rises into the atmosphere, attaches to dust, and moves with warm-season air patterns to the Himalayan foothills. Heat from the sun warms this “brown cloud,” accelerating its typical monsoon season rise up the slope, essentially pumping heat up the mountains, according to William Lau, who heads research in atmospheric sciences at NASA’S Goddard Space Flight Center.

“Over areas of the Himalayas, the rate of warming is more than five times faster than warming globally,“ Lau said at a press briefing in December, noting that the heating problem is most dramatic in the western part of the Tibetan Plateau. “Based on the differences, it’s not difficult to conclude that greenhouse gases are not the sole agents of change in [this] region,” he added. “There’s a localized phenomenon at play.”

Enter the cook stove. A November 2009 study published in The Lancet, the British medical journal, estimated that a decade-long, all-out effort to equip about 90 percent of Indian households that burn biomass with clean-burning cook stoves by 2020 would reduce premature deaths by 17 percent annually, essentially saving 55.5 million years of human life.

But there’s a key reason the world’s poor have long cooked with biomass over sooty fires, often nothing more than a “three-stone fire” with dried dung or brush smoldering under a pot sitting on a triangle of stones: They couldn’t afford anything better.

The University of Colorado’s Guruswami says that to be workable for billions of people who might live on as little as one dollar a day, a better cook stove has to have three main attributes: It has to reduce soot, it has to be long-lived, and it has to be cheap — ideally $10 or less. The good news is that inventors and engineers have come up with various versions of efficient cook stoves, some of them both simple to use and inexpensive.

In the early 1980s, Oregon-based engineer Larry Winiarski developed what he called the Rocket Stove, designed for cleaner combustion and more heat using a fire that burns the tips of a long bunch of small wood sticks: To feed the fire as the tips burn away, a cook need only push the bundle in further. The Rocket stove is designed to take advantage of natural convection to burn its biomass more efficiently, and in fact uses about half as much wood as a primitive three-stone fire or simpler stove.

The Aprovecho Research Center, a nonprofit where Winiarski serves as technical director, estimates that more than 40 stove projects in many nations have since built Rocket stoves, and estimates that more than a quarter-million Rocket stoves are now being used worldwide.

Fort Collins, Colo., home to a major university-based combustion laboratory, is a hotbed of cook-stove advocacy and dissemination.

Envirofit, a nonprofit started by two engineering graduates of Colorado State University and two professors, has developed a modified, patent-pending Rocket stove that it claims is exceptionally durable. A problem with past designs is that metal combustion chambers tend to quickly fail due to high heat and caustic fumes. But Envirofit worked with Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists to develop a combustion chamber made of metal alloys that give it an exceptionally long life — long enough, it says, that it can issue warranties on the chamber for five years.

The group works closely with Colorado State’s world-class Engines and Energy Conversion Lab to develop other combustion-chamber and stove efficiency features. The engineering focus, says Envirofit Vice President of Engineering Nathan Lorenz, has been to “control the geometry of the combustion chambers and heat transfer.” The more heat you transfer, the faster a pot heats up, the less fuel you burn.

About 100,000 Envirofit stoves have already been sold in India, at prices as low as 700 rupees, or about $15. The stoves quickly pay for themselves in fuel savings alone, allowing households to save $50 to $75 annually that would have been spent on wood or other biomass, even while using 60 percent less biomass and eliminating about 80 percent of soot.

Another Fort Collins-based nonprofit, called Trees, Water, and People, focuses on Central America, Mexico, and Haiti, where it promotes local construction of Rocket-type stoves. Working with local partners, the group says it has built more than 35,000 stoves.

In India, Scripp’s V. Ramanathan has helped pioneer a newer program that adds a layer of science. Dubbed Project Surya, this nascent effort is conducted in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme. Its first community-wide experiment, launched last March in a village in Uttar Pradesh state, will provide cook stoves, along with solar lanterns (to replace sooty kerosene lamps), to every household that wants them.

The unique feature: The project is designed to collect a wealth of data. A small sensor on the roof of the home of the village leader will provide the first accurate measurements of how much carbon is actually reduced in the local setting. Regional sensors and satellites will eventually help scientists learn more about more widespread pollution effects.

The Energy and Resources Institute in India also has launched a “Lighting a Billion Lives” campaign designed to replace soot-producing kerosene lamps and dung or wood fires with solar-powered lanterns. Begun in 2008, the campaign has so far supplied more than 6,000 solar lanterns to people in roughly 200 Indian villages.

Elsewhere, two of Europe’s largest industrial corporations, Phillips and Bosch, also have high-efficiency cook stoves in development. At Yale University, mechanical engineer Allesandro Gomez, director of the school’s Center for Combustion Studies, has begun to work on other designs.

But a conundrum remains. Researchers have found that it can be difficult to convince people to switch from traditional cooking methods to more advanced stoves, for a variety of reasons that range from uneasiness with unfamiliar or finicky technology, to upfront costs. Working with Yale development economist Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak and a local NGO, a team of researchers at Stanford University has found that many households in Bangladesh simply do not regard the high-efficiency cook stoves as great improvements. The group found that even when offered completely free stoves, more than 30 percent of households refused the offer.

Envirofit’s Lorenz says some of those stoves are simply too cheaply made. That’s why his nonprofit focuses on charging at least minimally for its more durable products, and even paying attention to product aesthetics. “People would rather be treated like customers than victims,” he says.

In India, the promise of improved cook stoves and reduced black carbon have triggered high-level government action recently. In December, New and Renewable Energy Minister Farooq Abdullah announced a new “National Biomass Cook-stoves Initiative.” Given that the world’s wealthiest nations are overwhelmingly responsible for planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, it seems reasonable to suggest that these countries could launch micro-lending programs to underwrite the widespread adoption of clean stoves.

India and the world have at least one good reason to move quickly to reduce black carbon: Compared to greenhouse gas reductions, slashing black carbon offers a much quicker and cheaper fix. While climate-altering carbon dioxide can remain in the atmosphere for many decades, solid soot generally falls from the sky in days or weeks.

“It’s a faster fix, and when you think about the humongous cost of fixing even one power plant to reduce carbon dioxide, it’s really cheap,” says Guruswami. “This is what economists like to call low-lying fruit. Let’s find a way pick it.”

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

by Stephen Lacey, Staff Writer

Last summer, clean energy advocates were confident that the U.S. Congress would pass a comprehensive energy and climate bill by the time the Copenhagen conference rolled around. Now, as energy issues slip further down the policy priority list in the wake of that failed meeting, advocates are left wondering if the U.S. will see any significant piece of clean energy legislation in 2010.

With health care, the economy and the upcoming mid-term elections dominating the political agenda in Washington, most onlookers now believe that an energy bill will be broken up into smaller pieces in order to make progress on key issues this year.

“It looks less and less likely that Congress will pass a broad climate bill. Lawmakers are now talking about individual bills focused just on one issue,” says Chris Stimpson, Executive Campaigner for Solar Nation, a grassroots lobbying organization run by the American Solar Energy Society.

Much has changed since the beginning of 2009, when the clean energy community was banking on President Obama's election promises to swiftly pass a climate bill that would put a price on carbon and create strong national targets for renewable energy.

The prospects for such a program looked good last July when the Waxman-Markey bill passed the House of Representatives. That piece of legislation created a cap and trade program, a 20 percent renewable energy target by 2020, a program to upgrade the electric grid and stronger energy efficiency standards. Although the cap and trade portion was criticized by some as being too lenient on polluters, the bill was a major step for renewables: It would have finally provided the national target that the industry has been seeking for years.

But then the climate bill quickly stalled in the Senate, where lawmakers have been sidetracked by the contentious health care debate. A number of politicians, including Democratic Senators John Kerry and Barbara Boxer, have introduced their own pieces of legislation; however, it is unlikely that the Senate will vote on either bill until March of this year. House lawmakers are now urging Senators to act soon, as the bills will expire at the end of this year when the Congressional session ends.

Because this is a Congressional election year, the make-up of the House and Senate may be different when the new session begins. That could mean that Democrats — who have been much more supportive of climate and clean energy legislation — will have less power to pass a strong bill next year. And if members of Congress are worrying about getting re-elected, they may not give as much attention to climate and energy issues this year.

“[Congress] may not have the energy, ironically enough, to work on an energy bill,” says Stimpson. “If it doesn't happen by Memorial day, this being an election year, it's generally understood here [in Washington] that you can forget it — nothing else will happen until after the election.”

The chance that individual, renewable-energy specific programs will get passed is much more realistic, says Stimpson. Some analysts believe that Congress will individually support more manufacturing tax credits for renewable energy companies, a renewable energy standard and increased funding for an overhaul of the electric grid, rather than an overarching climate bill.

Many advocates who see renewables as only one part of a broader carbon-reduction strategy are disappointed by this approach. Assuming the political landscape in Washington will be different in the next session of Congress, they see 2010 as a “make-or-break” year for climate change legislation.

“To say that we'll pass some parts this year and save other parts for other years, I think risks dealing with the bargaining in Congress that needs to take place,” says Jim Rubens with the advocacy group Clean Energy Works. “If we can't get them in this year, they're just going to be tougher to get later.”

To make matters more complicated, there is increasing backlash in Washington against an economy-wide cap and trade program. Many Senators have proposed more straightforward carbon taxes or “cap and dividend” programs, which would tax carbon at the source and then send the money back to taxpayers in different ways.

Most observers believe that cap and trade will be the policy of choice, but they agree that the debate could be delayed further as concerns over a complex trading program are worked out.

“I do believe [cap and trade] is on the train right now. But I do think there's going to be lots of compromise and lots of horse trading. And you never know what's going to end up in the sausage until the votes are taken,” says Analyst Scott Sklar, president of the Washington, DC-based consulting firm Stella Group Ltd.

In the meantime, the Environmental Protection Agency is gearing up to start regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. This top-down “command and control” approach, which is much less flexible than a trading program, has many in the energy business worried. The Obama administration is using this option as a way to get Congress moving on a climate bill this year. It doesn't appear to be working, however.

Even though the passage of a comprehensive climate bill is becoming less likely each day, analysts are still positive about the prospects for renewables in 2010. After all, the Obama administration has given more support for clean energy in the last year than had been given in the last decade, says Sklar.

Sklar points to last year's stimulus package, increased government spending on R&D and the billions of private dollars that have poured into the industry as tell-tale signs of how strong the industry is today — even if Congress doesn't pass a bill that advocates were hoping for.

“Sometimes you have to separate the climate issues and the renewables issues...They are both extremely important...but I sometimes have to pinch myself when I see where [the renewable energy industry] has come. It's on a trajectory that I don't think can be stopped.”

Reprinted with permission from Renewable Energy World

Developed nations rounded up additional pledges for adaptation and mitigation funding in Copenhagen on Wednesday, and on Thursday developing nations won a procedural battle that has slowed negotiations over the past week and a half.

Japan stepped up with a large commitment to add about $19.5 billion to short-term funding for developing nations for the years 2010-2012, according to an AFP report. Along with previous commitments of $10.6 billion by the European Union, this is enough to fund the $10 billion a year proposed for this time period.

The U.S. has yet to commit to commit to specific funding amounts.

Thursday morning, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, who is presiding over the remainder of the conference, said he would abandon an attempt to combine various negotiating texts into a single document for review by heads of state in the final hours. (Reuters reporting)

Developing nations have repeatedly protested against the creation of such a text, arguing that it benefits industrialized nations and their desire to create a single unifying agreement to replace Kyoto Protocol.

Delegates agreed to split talks into two tracks--one looking at further commitments by developed nations except the United States to cut emissions until 2020 and another looking at ways to get all nations to slow climate change.

UN Climate Secretary Yvo De Boer on Wednesday asked the U.S. to make a specific proposal on climate financing to developing countries, according to the Xinhua News Agency. He noted that the US is in a difficult position, not having taken steps to slow emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. He also said he believes China's offer to reduce the intensity of its greenhouse gas emissions 40-45% by 2020 is "very encouraging."

US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived on Thursdsay and said the US is willing to participate in a $100-billion-a-year fund through the year 2020, but that China must be willing to allow for verification of its emissions reduction efforts.

Although Clinton did not give a specific US contribution figure, the commitment was considered a breakthrough, leading de Boer to say: "“Hold tight. Mind the doors. The cable car is moving again.”

Clinton said the money would be a mix of public and private funds, including “alternative sources of finance.” Typically in multilateral financial efforts the United States contributes about 20% according to the New York Times.

Reuters on Wednesday quoted an unnamed Western negotiator who said China told participants it saw no possibility of achieving a detailed accord to tackle global warming. But on Thursday, China refuted the story as a rumor meant to lay blame on China, should negotiations fail.

China's climate change ambassador Yu Qingtai said "Copenhagen is too important to fail." He said the Chinese delegation "came to Copenhagen with hope and have not given it up." (Reuters reporting)

China has softened its stance against mandatory verification of its promised emissions reductions, according to a separate Reuters story. The country's head negotiator Su Wei said "national communications" on emissions as outlined by the Kyoto Protocol would be sufficient.

"It will not be difficult for us to find a solution to this problem (verification), as long as we adhere to the principles of the convention, it is not a crucial problem," he said.

Another hopeful sign that developing and developed nations may be moving closer on their demands is that Africa reportedly scaled back its expectations for climate aid on Wednesday, according to a report on MSNBC.com. The report did not state by how much, but African nations had previously asked for $40 billion a year in the mid-term.

The US on Wednesday pledged $1 billion to the reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) program, bringing total funding for the period 2010-2012 to $3.5 billion.

The New York Times report did not give any details as to the current form of the program. Environmentalists earlier in the week said it had been stripped of important targets and safeguards.

Republican Senator and climate change denier James Inhofe (R-Okla.) made an unwelcomed press appearance Thursday morning, after failing to receive an invite to talk within the conference.

“I am here to make sure the 190 countries here don’t go home with the false impression,” he told a somewhat hostile crowd. “The United States is not going to pass cap and trade. It just isn’t going to happen. Its chances are zero.”

Fox News reported that "Inhofe often looked like a lamb on his way to slaughter."

Obama arrives in Copenhagen Friday morning. Obama is unlikely to propose a more aggressive emissions reduction target, according to Reuters.

However, he may have wiggle room to raise his pledge from 17% below 2005 levels to 20%--the level proposed in a current US Senate bill.

Combined with specific, big numbers to support Clinton's $100 billion proposal, Obama could prompt agreement to a specific, but non-binding framework on Friday. However, that would likely require other developed nations to push to higher levels for emissions reductions--a brave step in light of US history on Kyoto and the Obama Administration's inability to guarantee cooperation of the US Congress.

Scientists and non-governmental organizations at the United Nations climate negotiations last week said the commonly accepted figures for greenhouse gas emssions from tropical deforestation are too high.

In light of a new analysis published earlier this week in Nature Geoscience, a group including experts on deforestation emissions, released the following statement:

"The new paper, other papers and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports published in the last few years lead us to conclude that the percentage of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from deforestation and forest degradation is less than the commonly used figure of 'about 20%.' The best current estimate would be about 15% if peat degradation is included."

The change in the estimate is due to several factors, including increases in fossil fuel emissions, as well as revision of the estimates of deforestation emissions, due to new data and scientific analyses.

The change is not due to a decrease in deforestation since the 1990s, and in fact the analyses agree that global deforestation in the early 2000s has been similar to that in the 1990s. So, this new estimate is not a sign of progress.

This figure includes deforestation, forest degradation, and peat emissions from deforestation and degradation (including later decomposition and fires in peat from previously deforested areas).

Even considering the lower figure, these emissions are comparable to the emissions of all of the European Union, and are greater than those of all cars, trucks, planes, ships and trains worldwide.

Reducing tropical forest emissions remains a relatively cost-effective option to reduce emissions, the Union of Concerned Scientists said in a release, highlighting some lines from the new paper:

"…reducing fossil fuel emissions remains the key element for stabilizing atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Nevertheless, efforts to mitigate emissions from tropical forests and peatlands, and maintain existing terrestrial carbon stocks, remain critical…."

Some of the scientists and organizations endorsing the statement include: Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Rainforest Action Network, Sierra Club, The Nature Conservancy, Frédéric Achard (Joint Research Centre of the European Commission), Ruth DeFries (Columbia University) and Douglas Morton (NASA).

Reprinted with permission from SustainableBusiness.com">Sustinable buseinss