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Climate Change Statistics

If you are doing homework, a project or are a statistic anorak for no obvious reason, please find some statistics below. They have been extracted from various media sources. This was originally written in February 2007. Some of it may be old news already but it provides a snapshot of the world on the eve of the IPCC 4th Assessment Report . The statistics have been grouped as follows;


Good News

  • There is plenty in the Stern report that could have been used to say we stand at the gates of a second industrial revolution “There are also significant new opportunities across a wide range of industries and services. Markets for low-carbon energy products are likely to be worth at least $50 billion per year by 2050 and perhaps much more. Individual companies and countries should position themselves to take advantage of these opportunities [extract from report]”

  • “I have children and I hope to have grandchildren and this is all going to play out after I’m gone”. Coming from Rex Tillerson, the chairman and chief executive of the world’s leading oil company Exxon, this quote captures a blend of frankness and maturity that is hard to find in most arenas of global discussion. [at World Economic Forum in Davos]

  • Sweden, without a whimper, has set course to become oil-free by 2020.

  • Germany, without a whimper, is changing its power supply to wind-generation.

Changes for Ireland

  • Experts predict that parts of Cork, Dublin, Galway and Limerick could be under water in 40 years time with extreme storms causing frequent and severe flooding in our main cities. Parts of Mayo, Wexford, Cork Harbour, the Shannon Estuary, Tralee Bay and Castlemaine Harbour will disappear completely as record temperatures cause a rise in sea levels and increased coastal erosion.

  • Last year was the warmest year on record according to the latest data from Met Éireann for a number of the country’s recording stations.

  • For the country as a whole, 2006 now ranks as the second-warmest year in the last 100 years, being beaten only slightly by 1945.

  • The warming here has accelerated in recent years, with 10 of the 15 warmest years in the last century all occurring since 1990.

  • In Ireland we are among the highest per capita in terms of greenhouse gas emissions in the world. Although we are a small country, on a per capita basis we are way above the UK and Germany in terms of our contribution to the problem”

  • “Even if emissions were stabilised at present levels” says Mr Walsh, “because of the way the earth’s systems work we would still have a 0.1ºC increase per decade coming from the latent heat stored in the oceans. But emission levels are’nt going to stabilise”.

  • A new scientific report has predicted that southeastern parts of Ireland will suffer from drought within 15 years as a result of climate change. The report, to be published by the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), later this month predicts significant impacts on the country from 2020.

  • In Ireland this will mean:

    • Increased rainfall, rising sea levels and more storm surges, leading to the overflowing of rivers and the flooding of cities on which they are built.

    • Drought or water shortages in the East and South East where rainfall will reduce by 30-40% by the middle of the century

    • Receding coastlines

  • With reduced rainfall and increasing population there will be a shortfall of water by the mid-century. This will lead to competition for resources between agriculture, industry and domestic use.

  • EPA deputy director general, Dr Padraic Larkin, said the report would show that “increased storm intensity, more intense rainfall during the winter months and prolonged dry periods during the summer” are among the likely outcomes.

  • All 15 of the Irish state’s fleet of cars are significantly higher in terms of emissions than the target that will be set in the coming months by the EU for manufacturers. The EU target will be 120-130g per kilometre. This is below the normal emissions of a standard family petrol car, which is in the region of 150g-160g.

  • His comments centred on the Irish Goverments plans to buy 3.6 million tonnes of carbon per annum between now and 2016 at a cost of €270 million. “This is a gross underestimate of the total potential cost. For a start, the 3.6m tonnes does not take any account of the additional 1.5m tonnes which may now have to be bought following the European Commission’s decision to reduce the Emission Trading Scheme Allowances by that amount” said an opposition TD.

  • For more predicted changes in Ireland, see Icarus

Rest of World

  • Last month temperatures across China were an average 1.4ºC warmer than usual, while the temperature on the plateau was 2.7 ºC higher than normal years, Xinhua news agency reported. Chinese scientists have warned that rising temperatures on th e Qinghai-Tibet plateau will melt glaciers, dry up major Chinese rivers and trigger droughts, sandstorms and desertification, according to state media reports.

  • Hugo Chavez on a one day visit to the Cuban capital yesterday said Dr Castro has taken to studying climate change and he sent him a book on the topic; “He is doing a master’s degree on climate change. I think he knows more than all the scientists.”

  • Two Norwegian parliamentarians have nominated former US president Al Gore for the Nobel Peace Prize for raising awareness of climate change.

  • A feud within the European Commission over its car emissions strategy intensified yesterday with environment commissioner Stavros Dimas considering swapping his gas-guzzling Mercedes for a Japanese hybrid. However, the choice of a Japanese car would break a long-standing tradition in Brussels, where all 27 commissioners use European cars, typically German made BMWs or Audis.

  • At least 30 people have been killed in Mozambique after torrential rains across southern Africa caused the Zambesi river to burst its banks. Although the government learned the lessons of the 2001 floods, in which about 700 people died and swiftly launched missions by boat and helicopter to evacuate about 90,000 people from affected areas, it is now rapidly running short of food for those collected in 33 temporary camps and lacks tents and other essentials for many of them.

  • Melting snow on Mount Ruapehu (a crater lake, used as a backdrop in Lord of the Rings) in New Zealand has filled the lake on the 2797 metre volcano to within 1.5 metres of its lip. The lake is on the verge of collapsing and sending a torrent of muddy water down the mountain.

Financial Statistics

  • To head off and hopefully halt the worst ravages of climate change (stabilising CO2 at 550ppm),says Stern, will cost $1 trillion annually from world GDP, which equates to 1%.

  • Stern gives a corresponding GDP cost, culminating in a 5ºC rise in temperature costing in the region of 1—20% of annual world GDP.

  • Stern is a man who knows about major capital investments around the world from his time at the World Bank. For instance, he will instantly know that the bank currently has $US25 billion tied up in carbon-emitting projects. This is the same bank that in 1992 signed the Climate Convention calling for the backing of such projects to be phased out.

  • Stern, like an insurer, is measuring risk. Business as usual will cost 20% of annual world GDP and more, as in terms of climate change this takes us into the unknown. The 450ppm CO2 stabilisation target will cost 3%, 550ppm, 1%. Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report to be published today. Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an Exxon Mobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasised the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

  • ExxonMobil and Shell, two of the biggest carbon emitters in the world, reported combined annual profits yesterday of nearly UK£90 million a day, earned largely from oil production, refining and petrol stations. Shell insisted it would be “pointless” to say how much of Shell’s US$23 billion of capital expenditure was going into renewable energy schemes. Friends of the Earth took out full-page newspaper adverts yesterday that demanded of Shell “Use your profits to clean up your mess”. It pointed to gas flaring in Nigeria, leaking pipes in South Africa and endangered whales at Sakhalin as examples of environmental damage.”

  • On the day the IPCC report was released, a group of 284 institutional investors representing $41 trillion demanded that the 2,400 largest quoted companies in the world disclose the risks and opportunities faced by those companies due to climate change. It is the fifth request by the Carbon Disclosure Project which claims to have the world’s largest pool of corporate greenhouse gas information.

  • Climate change disclosure is an increasingly important component in ethical investment funds, according to Mercer Investment Consulting, which released data on the 2006 performance of ethical funds. The best-performing such fund was the Hibernian High Yield Equity fund.

  • The Green Mountain State [Vermont] has been slow to take serious heed. But this year’s damage to the $550 million snowmobile industry is hard to ignore.

  • Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today. Letters sent by an Exxon-Mobil funded think thank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered. “It’s a desperate attept by an organisation which wants to distort science for their own political aims” said David Viner of the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia”

Global Climate History

  • Looking back on earth’s 4.6 billion year history, it has fluctuated between a “snowball earth” and steamy hothouse, with many stages in between.

  • For the past 8000 years our planet has been enjoying a remarkably stable climate. This has allowed agriculture to commence, cities to swell, cultures to flourish and hence human civilisation to blossom. Prior to this period of climatic stability, man existed, for the previous 140,000 years, as a hunter-gatherer, unable to settle anywhere for long in a fluctuating and harsh climate.

  • The past century has seen a massive shift upwards in average global temperature, to levels not experienced in the previous 650,000 years of Earth’s history

  • Global temperatures have risen by 0.7ºC in the last century and they are still rising (with a commitment to 1.6ºC already due to a time lag in the effects of GHGs)

  • Our climate has already warmed by 0.7ºC above pre-industrial levels

  • 0.2m sea level rise in recent decades.

  • The end-Permian extinction, 251 million years ago, involved a 6ºC global temperature rise, thought to have been precipitated by climatic feedbacks following an initial volcanic eruption or meteorite impact.

Evidence

  • The International Red Cross produces an annual Disaster Report. A Recent one tells us that in the 1970s, the number of people whose lives were affected by natural disasters was about 275,000. In the 1990s, the figure jumped to 18 million – a 65 fold increase. The organisation reports that there are 5,000 new so-called environmental refugees created each day.

  • The vast Greenland ice sheet is shrinking by 11 cubic miles each year.

  • “The data published by the world Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), confirm the trend in accelerated ice loss during the past 25 years and bring the average thickness loss since 1980 to about 9.6 metres”

  • The World Glacial Authority has told us that 79 of the 88 glaciers it has studied are retreating.

  • In Iran, 124 villages have been abandoned as a result of soil erosion in recent years.

  • In China, the Gobi desert is growing by 10,000 square km each year.

  • The UN calculates that worldwide, a quarter of a billion acres of good land are lost each year, affecting the food security of more than a billion people.

  • Research shows that the ocean has been absorbing more than 80% of the extra heat, causing water to expand and sea levels to rise. Between 1961 and 2003, the IPCC says that the global average sea level rose by an average of 1.8mm a year. Between 1993 and 2003 it was rising at a rate of 3.1mm a year.

  • Average Arctic temperatures have increased at almost twice the global average rate over the past 100 years and the ice has shrunk by 2.7% each decade.

  • The last time the polar regions were significantly warmer than now was around 125,000 years ago and the meltdown which that caused led to a 4m to 6m rise in sea levels.

Predictions

  • According to Stern, in order to meet the target of stabilising GHG emissions at 450ppm CO2e, global emissions would need to peak in the next 10 years and then fall at more than 5% per year, reaching 70% below current levels by 2050.

  • Weak action in the next 10-20 years would put stabilisation even at 550ppm CO2e (equivalent) beyond reach.

  • Klaus Toepfer, Director of UNEP has predicted that by 2010, the number of people on the move to escape the effects of “creeping environmental destruction” will reach 50 million.

  • The researchers warn that the European summer heatwave of 2003, which killed 26,000 people, will be a normal summer in some parts of Europe by 2050.

  • Last month, a report compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) warned that climate change posed serious risks to the “snow reliability” of Alpine ski areas and consequently to their economies. The Alps had the warmest November on record, delaying the arrival of snow by several weeks. Germany was the country most at risk, facing a possible 60% reduction in snow with an increase in temperature of just 1ºC.

  • One study estimates that with only 2ºC of warming, around 15-40% of species face extinction.

  • Scientists have predicted that a rise of more than 2ºC is the point at which some of the most dangerous runaway processes could become irreversible.

  • Vector borne diseases, such as malaria and dengue fever, could become more widespread as temperatures rise in the temperate zones.

  • The UK Met Office has warned that by 2030, the total carrying capacity of the biosphere will have reduced from the current 4 billion tonnes a year to 2.7 billion.

  • Data from 11 separate studies indicate that, stabilising at 450ppm CO2e, the probability of exceeding a 2ºC rise, relative to pre-industrial levels is 26 to 78%. This probability sharply increases from this point to 63 to 99% with stabilisations at 550ppm CO2 equivalent.

  • Any rise above 2ºC threatens agriculture across the globe and will lead to food shortages

  • Amazon rainforest starts to die off if temperature rises reach 3ºC.

  • The IPCC report states that global average temperatures will rise by another 1.5º to 5.8ºC, this century, depending on emissions. It projects that Arctic ice will shrink and perhaps disappear in summers by 2100.

  • Average global temperatures will rise by between 1.8º and 4.5ºC, though they can’t entirely rule out much larger increases

  • Hurricanes and typhoons will become more intense

  • Sea levels will rise on average by about half a metre

  • The Arctic will be ice free in some summer months by the end of the century.

  • Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Europe, including Spain, southern France and parts of Italy, will face severe water shortages.

  • Oceans will become more acidic than they have been for 25 million years

  • The warming is likely to cause the Greenland ice sheet to melt, though this may take a thousand years, but it holds enough ice to raise sea levels by 7m.

  • The forecast is expected to forecast a temperature rise of 2 to 4.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2100.

  • According to Stern, 200 million people will be permanently displaced from their homes by rising sea levels if temperatures rise by 2ºC.

The Stern Review

  • In July 2005, economist Sir Nicholas Stern was asked by chancellor Gordon Brown to review the economic impact of climate change. Stern delivered his 70-page review on October 30, 2006.

  • Sir Nicholas Stern is one of the world’s leading economists – a former chief economist with the World Bank and now chief economist adviser at the UK Treasury.

  • In July 2005, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, commissioned Stern to provide an economic assessment of the impacts of climate change, to be used as a basis for policy making. Stern presented his findings on October 30, 2006.

  • In the review he studies three scenarios:

    • Business as usual

    • Stabilising CO2 at 450 ppm.

    • Stabilising CO2 between 500 - 550 ppm.

The economic outcome of business as usual was “catastrophic”, estimating to cost the equivalent of two World Wars and the 1930s stock market crash, all at the same time.

Stabilising CO2 at 450ppm gives a 50/50 chance of stopping climate temperatures rising by more than 2ºC

Stabilising between 500-550ppm is essentially the realpolitik option that Stern has chosen in his report. Realpolitik because politically, it is probably attractive to many global political leaders but this conclusion has shown the perversity of using economic principles to make such significant decisions. It essentially means that we are likely to lose Africa, Bangladesh, the Amazon, the Maldives and most of the Netherlands. It will mean agricultural collapse, water shortages and floods. It will mean two hundred million migrants. “The greatest and widest ranging market failure ever seen” is how Stern describes it.

  • The current level of GHG in the atmosphere is 430ppm and rising at 2.3 ppm annually. To stabilise at 450 ppm, Stern says, would then require global emissions to peak in the next 10 years and then fall at more than 5% per year, reaching 70% below current levels by 2050.

  • Correct economic reasoning or not, this is a conclusion devoid of humanity, without conscience.

  • “The greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen” is how Stern describes it.

  • In September, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research reported that a 90% cut in greenhouse gas emissions and no less, was needed by 2050, rather than the 60% advocated by the Stern Report.

IPCC

  • What is the IPCC? In 1988, the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organisation set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which produces reports based on the best available evidence every few years. Each successive report has gone one step closer to blaming human activities for observed warming

  • IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report due on Friday 2nd February. The report draws on research from more than 2500 scientists from more than 130 countries and has taken six years to compile

  • Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment includes reports written by 600 academics from 40 countries, plus many more reviewers. The panel made up around 2,000 climate experts, including three from Ireland, has based its findings on thousands of peer reviewed scientific papers published since the last assessment in 2001.

  • The draft report says that there is at least a 90% probability that human activities are to blame for most of the warming in the past 50 years. The previous report in 2001, rated the probability at 66%.

  • They have used ice cores to gather data from hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Greenhouse Gases

  • The presence of GHGs (Green house gases) in the atmosphere is essential to life on Earth, allowing it to maintain an average temperature between the boiling and freezing point of water. If they did not exist, the Earth’s surface would be 30ºC cooler and similar to the moon.

  • Methane emmisions currently account for around 15% of all GHG emissions but are predicted to increase to 50% by 2100.

  • Atmospheric levels of CO2 have been constant, at around 280 parts per million (ppm) for the last 1000 years.

  • Since the industrial revolution, they [carbon dioxide emissions] have risen by a third to 380ppm today. However all GHG gases equate to a total of 430 (ppm) CO2e (i.e. CO2 equivalent).

  • At current projections, the IPCC predict atmospheric GHG concentrations to rise to 550-700ppm CO2 equivalent by 2050 and 650-1200ppm by 2100 which will mean a global climatic warming of 2.5ºC or more by 2050.

  • Even more disturbing and so poorly understood that it has been omitted from most climatic models, is the danger of so-called “positive feedbacks”. These feedbacks relate to an increasing risk that natural processes could be set in motion that could drive atmospheric GHG concentrations far higher than human activity alone ever would, either by reducing natural absorption of CO2 or releasing stores of CO2 and methane.

 

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