The ice could become frozen in place over winter or escape into the waters between Greenland and Canada. If the iceberg moves south, it could interfere with shipping, Prof Muenchow said. Cracks in the Petermann Glacier had been observed last year and it was expected that an iceberg would calve from it soon.

The glacier is 1,000 km (620 miles) south of the North Pole. A researcher at the Canadian Ice Service detected the calving from Nasa satellite images taken early on Thursday, the professor said. The images showed that Petermann Glacier lost about one-quarter of its 70km-long (43-mile) floating ice shelf. There was enough fresh water locked up in the ice island to “keep all US public tap water flowing for 120 days,” said Prof Muenchow. He said it was not clear if the event was due to global warming.

Patrick Lockerby, a UK engineer with a background in material science, had predicted the calve on 22 July, posting images on the science2.0 website. “I was watching the floating ice tongue wedged between two walls of a fjord for three quarters if its length with the last part at the outlet end wedged by sea ice. I thought once the sea ice was gone, the pressure would be too great and the tongue would calve.” He said there could be a beneficial outcome if the calving drifts to block the Nares Strait and effectively prevents the loss of more ice from the Lincoln Sea.

The first six months of 2010 have been the hottest on record globally.

When asked what discourages environmentally friendly consumer behavior, 44 percent of respondents answered “companies make false claims about the environmental impact of their products.” The second-highest obstacle was that “individual efforts are not worth it if governments and industries don’t take action.”

GlobeScan’s analysis of the data notes that these two perceptions suppress more sustainable consumption. Cost, lack of options and information barriers ranked last, a result that, according to GlobeScan, shows that “consumers are sending a message that they want ‘less talk and more action’ from business and government, or at least action before talk.”
The survey also found that environmentally friendly behavior among consumers in 10 out of 17 countries has increased over the past year. However, the U.S. ranked dead last on the survey. Consumers in Brazil, India and China scored highest. The reasoning? According to the survey, wealth is synonymous with higher ecological impact. Consumers in emerging economies round out the top tier of the Greendex ranking, while the six lowest scores were all earned by consumers in industrialized countries.

Still, Americans’ average Greendex score has increased by 1.3 points year over year. While the increase is subtle, the survey notes that it is no doubt a sign of a positive trend of consumer attitude. Respondents who had lowered their energy consumption cited cost as one of their top two reasons for the decline. But a significant percentage, ranging from approximately 20 percent to 50 percent, also attributed the change to “environmental concerns.”

This is the third year National Geographic has partnered with GlobeScan to develop an international research to measure consumer behavior towards energy use and conservation, transportation choices, food sources, the relative use of green products versus traditional products, attitudes towards the environment and sustainability and knowledge of environmental issues. You can measure your own consumption and determine your individual Greendex score by using National Geographic’s Greendex Calculator. CLICK HERE FOR YOUR GREENDEX SCORE

by Amanda Will, Earth 911

GOT A SOLUTION?
•    Would-be solvers can call +1 281 366 5511.
•    Also, send us your ideas using the link at the bottom
•    Int MMS: +44 7725 100100]
•    MMS from UK: 61124

The public are also doing their part. By 2 June, BP had received 31,600 suggestions from members of the public on how to plug the well, or deal with the oil slicks already in the sea. The company’s helpline, which has 80 telephone operators, deals with interested citizens. Of the 31,600 ideas, 8,000 have been submitted on paper. BP then puts the plans through a four-stage process. The first is a primary evaluation to weed out ideas that have already been considered or are just not possible. The second stage is classification into categories such as “dispersants” or “mechanical”.

The third stage is a more detailed technical review and the fourth stage is field testing. There are 235 ideas currently in stage three and four, says BP. Of those, just 10% are about how to plug the well. Some might ridicule the idea that interested amateurs might be able to solve a problem that is foxing a giant company with immense resources at its fingertips. But the notion has a long pedigree. One of the most famous examples of attempting to tap the public brain came in the Longitude Prize, established in the UK by Parliament in 1714. For a seafaring nation, the ability to accurately measure longitude was a massive challenge.

The act of Parliament offered £20,000 to the person who could do it, and the clockmaker John Harrison established the principles for the marine chronometers that revolutionized navigation. Another prize was offered in late 18th Century France for the creation of soda crystals from sea salt. Harrison was met with skepticism and never received the full prize, while the French winner Nicholas Leblanc was denied his cash because of the revolution.

Insoluble problems generate unusual solutions. The term “crowd-sourcing”, coined by journalist Jeff Howe, author of Crowd-sourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business, is now often used to describe this phenomenon. Howe says that it is sometimes the case that problems that have proved insoluble to hand-picked experts can be solved when placed before a wider, but less expert, audience. I’m looking at it from the point of view of doing home maintenance -if this happened in someone’s house how would I fix it?

Barry Redd Would-be solver says “Crowd-sourcing is an acknowledgment that 99 times out of a 100 the best person to solve a problem is an expert. If it’s a chemistry problem, you want a chemist. “But one time out of a hundred the problem seems intractable. Crowd-sourcing has revealed - in those intractable cases - you need someone who is not trained. All the steps the experts have thought to do haven’t worked. You need the unexpected.” That might be why BP is using some of its resources to test these suggestions from the public. They won’t reveal any of the detail of the submissions they have had, but look at some public forums on the web - not run by BP - and you can get a flavour of the sort of ideas that might be arriving.

Barry Redd, from Louisburg, North Carolina, submitted an idea to BP, also posting it on BP Oil News, an independent blog critical of the company. His idea - heavily paraphrased - involves the use of a pipe smaller in diameter than the casing of the oil well. This would have valve at one end and inflatable tubes in the other.

PAST ATTEMPTS
•    Oil booms - partly successful
•    Controlled burning - causes serious air pollution
•    Dispersant used - scientists warn it may kill marine life
•    Huge dome placed over leak - became blocked by ice crystals
•    Top hat - smaller dome not yet used
•    Mile-long tube - fails to suck up large amount of oil
•    “Top-kill” method to pump heavy mud - abandoned and with the valve open, the smaller pipe could be inserted, the tubes quickly inflated to form a seal, cemented in place and then the valve closed.

Looking on the web you can see solutions involving pre-cast concrete plugs, giant screws, explosives, sealant pumps, giant magnets, liquid nitrogen, inflatable bladders and all manner of other devices. Mr Redd, who runs a pressure washing and home maintenance business, says he was motivated to try and solve the leak after watching news coverage. “I was expecting all those engineers to have an idea, that they would have had contingency plans. Eventually it was clear they didn’t. “I’m looking at it from the point of view of doing home maintenance. If this happened in someone’s house how would I fix it?” Prof Steven Sears, chairman of the petroleum engineering department at Louisiana State University, has himself received suggestions in two categories. “The first are things like using hay to put down on the seashore to absorb the oil. “The second category is more directed towards stopping the oil flow.

Those have been similar to what is being attempted. “There hasn’t been in what I’ve seen a really novel approach.” But despite the public enthusiasm, there’s a feeling among some experts - not brought in by BP - that they aren’t able to contribute their own ideas because of a lack of detail from the oil firm. “The problem is there is not a whole lot of detailed information released,” says Prof Sears. “Exactly what are the pressures, temperatures, flow rates and pipe sizes? “The more information is released the more analysis can be done by people that are not directly involved.”

It will probably be somebody with some sort of engineering or science background who could come up with an answer, says Howe. It is unlikely that “a random guy with an English degree” will crack it, he notes. “Someone who has some tangential experience - it isn’t some experience that BP think to tap.” Harrison was a self-educated genius, who already made clocks, and Leblanc had a scientific background. The prize approach made sense in a time when the pool of formal academics was tiny compared with today. And if an ordinary citizen comes up with the solution, they have to hope that the powers-that-be treat them a bit better than they did Harrison and Leblanc.

Do you have an idea for solving the spill? As well as contacting BP, you can CLICK HERE TO HELP

Let me pick out a statistoid from the UN’s third and latest Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3) report, launched at the Zoological Society of London on Monday. The abundance of vertebrates - mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds and fish - decreased by about one-third between 1970 and 2006. Let’s put it another way. If you’d added up the numbers of mammals, fish, birds etc in the world in 1970, and done so again in 2006, one-third of them would have disappeared in between times. Is it just me, or is that a truly staggering figure? A couple of other things caught my eye from GBO-3.
One is that over the same time period - 1970-2006 - the Earth’s human population almost doubled. The second concerns the 21 “subsidiary targets” that governments set in 2002, alongside their headline target of significantly curbing the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010.

The main 2010 target has been spectacularly missed, but some of the 21 subsidiary ones have partially been met, in some regions of the world at least. They’re indicated in GBO-3 by a bit of green in an otherwise red circle.

But cloaked in complete red, indicating complete failure, are the two that are most fundamental when it comes to preserving the extent to which human lives depend on what nature supplies : Reducing unsustainable consumption of biological resources, or that impacts upon biodiversity and maintaining the capacity of ecosystems to deliver biological resources that support sustainable livelihoods, local food security and health care. There are, of course, significant problems in trying to track trends precisely across a world in which the capacity to observe rigorously is not uniformly distributed, and where reliable documentation gets swiftly less global and less plentiful as you go back in time. Nevertheless, there are few signs even in the most expertly documented countries that ecosystems are returning to full health.

The big white hope of the biodiversity world is, as those of you who follow this stuff regularly will know, the idea of quantifying the economic benefits that nature brings, and then persuading people and governments and businesses that these economic benefits make preservation of said ecosystems a wise policy option. We’ll have a lot more detail on this coming later in the year, but in the meantime I wanted to offer you a couple of snapshots that were offered to me at the GBO-3 launch. First, a feathered tale from Japan. In the 1970s, Oriental storks left the country; modern rice farming methods, including pesticide use, concrete irrigation canals and keeping paddy fields under water for shorter length of time had reduced their chances of finding prey so much that they couldn’t survive.

The global population of this spectacular but endangered species, by the way, is less than 3,000. In 2003, authorities in Toyooka City, in the south of the main island of Honshu, established incentives for farmers to adopt more traditional farming methods with a strong organic component. The results: yields are down, but the rice sells for a higher price. The storks are back, and visitors are flocking to see them. These two factors combined have increased municipal income by more than 1%. This win-win outcome is in microcosm what the UN Environment Program (Unep) hopes to achieve across the world by stimulating awareness of biodiversity’s economic value. But are governments interested - those same governments that have so signally failed to meet the 2010 target?

According to Nick Nuttall, the Unep spokesman at the GBO-3 launch in London, 30 developing country governments have recently approached Unep asking for advice on how to “green” their economies and live within nature’s boundaries. That sounds like a new twist on the old story to me. Whether it’s enough to prevent a further 30% drop in the abundance of mammals, birds, reptiles, fish and amphibians, with the human population set to increase as much between now and 2050 as it did between 1970 and 2006, is another matter.

Richard Black, environment correspondent for the BBC News website.

Climate skeptics claimed that the e-mails provided evidence that scientists at the university’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were hiding data and falsifying scientific evidence on global warming. The committee said much of the data that critics claimed Prof Jones had hidden, was in fact already publicly available. But they said Prof Jones had aroused understandable suspicion by blocking requests for data. The MPs’ report acknowledged that Prof Jones “must have found it frustrating to handle requests for data that he knew - or perceived - were motivated by a desire to seek to undermine his work”. The committee also said that the responsibility for data requests made under the Freedom of Information Act lay with UEA authorities, rather than with Prof Jones or the CRU.

It said that university authorities should have supplied the data to those who requested it, referred them to where it could be found, or where appropriate, argued that the multiple requests were deliberately aggravating. Instead, the MPs concluded, the UEA appeared to support a culture of “resisting disclosure of information to climate change skeptics”. The committee chairman, Phil Willis, described this as “reprehensible”. Climate science must be transparent and irreproachable, the committee said. “When the prices to pay are so large, the knowledge on which these kinds of decisions are taken had better be right,” the report stated.

The MPs have urged the Information Commissioner’s Office to make a formal ruling as to whether the university’s failure to disclose information was a breach of the law. Former Chancellor Lord Lawson of Blaby, a critic of the way climate science is conducted, said it was important that further inquires into the matter were held in public. He also said he had no sympathy for Prof Jones and the avalanche of FOI requests to which he was subjected. “Any good scientist always is prepared to reveal his data and his methods, and he does not need to have it extracted by FOI requests. It was only the concealment by the scientist that led to the FOI Act requests,” said the chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). The committee was satisfied that, with regard to the sharing of data and methodologies, “Professor Jones’s actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community”. “It is not standard practice in climate science to publish the raw data and the computer code in academic papers,” its report said.

But the committee added that this practice could be “problematic”. “We consider that climate scientists should take steps to make available all the data that support their work, including raw data… and full methodological workings, including the computer codes.” Mr Willis said he hoped that science would emerge stronger from the controversy. He said that if the data from government-funded research were made automatically available, unless there were a good reason to keep it confidential, “the winners would be scientists themselves”. The committee expressed regret that its inquiry had been cut short because of the end of the Parliamentary term. But it said that according to the evidence it had received, Prof Jones’s e-mails did not reveal scientific malpractice. It pointed to controversial phrases used in the published e-mail correspondence, including the terms “trick” and “hide the decline”. The report stated: “We are content that the phrases were colloquial terms used in private e-mails and the balance of evidence is that they were not part of a systematic attempt to mislead.

“Likewise the evidence that we have seen does not suggest that Prof Jones was trying to subvert the peer review process. “Academics should not be criticized for making informal comments on academic papers. “Within our limited inquiry and the evidence we took, the reputation of Professor Jones and the CRU remains intact. “We have found no reason in this unfortunate episode to challenge the scientific consensus that global warming is happening and is induced by human activity.”

UEA vice-chancellor Edward Acton said he was “delighted” by this conclusion. “We are pleased too that [this report] has dispelled and rejected many of the myths over the matter, while accepting that we have been taken to task on a number of issues which we are determined to address.” The committee stressed that the two other independent reviews that were currently being carried out into the science at CRU must not overlap, in order to avoid undermining the review process.
One dissenting member of the committee, Labour MP Graham Stringer, said he was unhappy that neither of the independent reviews had a climate sceptic member. “There should be a reputable scientist on the panel [who is] skeptical about man-made global warming,” he said. “If we are trying to establish credibility this would be preferable.” But Dr Evan Harris, science spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, disagreed and said that scientific inquiries were, by their nature, skeptical. Setting up oppositional positions within a committee tended to hinder its work, he said. Labour MP Doug Naysmith said he hoped the committee’s report would prove to be a “corrective” to climate sceptic hysteria. “Before becoming an MP, I earned a living as a scientist,” he said. ”

Scientists are human. Most scientists I know when off duty say things that wouldn’t be said when writing a scientific paper. “E-mails are the modern method of chatting to colleagues around the world.” The committee’s report said it hoped future inquiries would be able to investigate further into the controversial issue of why Prof Jones had asked for e-mails to be deleted. Climate sceptics on the sceptic website Bishop Hill ridiculed the MPs’ findings. One asked: “Is it April fools already?” Another commented: “No-one with half [a] brain cell will view this conclusion as anything other than a hasty and not very subtle establishment cover-up.”

By Roger Harrabin, Environmental analyst, BBC News

When was the last time you had a “rainforest picnic”? Or even, perhaps, an “all-day Amazon breakfast”? Next time you are in a supermarket picking up a chicken sandwich for lunch, or fancy tucking in to a hearty breakfast of eggs, sausage and bacon before setting off for work, spare a thought for the Amazon. A new report by Forest Footprint Disclosure reveals for the first time how global business is driving rain forests to destruction in order to provide things for you and me to eat. But it does also reveal what companies are doing to try to lighten their forest footprint. Sadly, however, the answer is: not much, at least not yet. Consumers “eat” rain forests each day - in the form of beef-burgers, bacon and beauty products - but without knowing it. The delivery mechanism is a global supply chain with its feet in the forests and its hands in the till. Because of growing demand for beef, soy and palm oil, which are in much of what we consume, as well as timber and biofuels, rain forests are worth more cut down than standing up. Supermarket sweep Governments, which claim to own 70% of them, create prosperity for their nations through this process, but poor forest communities need their forests for energy and food.

The report shows that the EU is the largest importer of soy in the world, much of it coming from Brazil. It also shows that after China, the EU is the biggest importer of palm oil in the world. Soy provides cheap food to fatten our pigs and chickens, while palm oil is in everything from cakes and cookies, to that fine moisturiser you gently rubbed into your cheeks this morning. I have become a bit of a bore in supermarkets, challenging my kids to hunt for soy lecithin or palm oil (often disguised as vegetable oil) on product labels. You should try it! The stuff is everywhere. The gargantuan farms of Brazil’s Mato Grosso State can boast 50 combines abreast at harvest time, marching across monoculture prairies where once the most diverse ecosystem on Earth stood, albeit in some cases many years ago. Further north, thousands of square miles of rainforest natural capital is going up in smoke each year, often illegally, to provide pastureland for just one cow per hectare to supply beef hungry Brazilians or more prosperous mouths in China and India.

Many of the hides from these cattle then go into the designer trainers, handbags or luxury car upholstery that wealthy markets have such an appetite for. Few Europeans know that their fine steak au poivre or choice after dinner mints might have an added expense on the other side of the world that unknown to them, is altering life on Earth. None of this would matter but for three things. Firstly, evolution is being changed forever. Most of us, sadly, can live with that. Secondly, burning tropical forests drives global warming faster than the world’s entire transport sector; there will be no solution to climate change without stopping deforestation. Finally, losing forests may undermine food, energy and climate security. Yet saving them could, according to UN special adviser Pavan Sukhdev’s forthcoming review on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), reduce environmental costs by $3-5 trillion per year. Oh yes, let us not forget the 1.4bn people, many of them the world’s poorest, who depend on these forests for their survival and who cannot afford to lose them, even if we can.

Full disclosure? So what can be done? The first thing is to encourage business to mind its “forest footprint”. The impact global business has on deforestation will be a key factor in halting deforestation in the future. No amount of hand-wringing in the UN climate talks will alter action on the ground unless the drivers of global deforestation are also tackled. Whilst poverty is possibly the largest of these drivers, so is the way in which business drives the conversion of cheap forest land to feed their global commodity supply chains - all the way to you and me. This is why we launched the Forest Footprint Disclosure project last year: to invite companies to first recognize their impact on forests and then disclose what they were doing about it. Such a request might be ignored by giant businesses if it were not for the fact that investment managers, with at least $3.5 trillion of assets, also wanted to know and backed our disclosure request with their names.

Why? Because it is their money that may be at risk if the companies do not clean up their act. In 2009, Amigos da Terra’s report Time to Pay the Bill, and Greenpeace’s Slaughtering the Amazon highlighted the cattle industry as a driver of climate change responsible for the bulk of Brazil’s greenhouse gases through deforestation and methane emissions from 180 million cows. This resulted in the withdrawal of a $60m loan from the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation to Bertin, Brazil’s largest exporter of beef.

In June 2009, Brazil’s major supermarkets - Pao de Acucar, Wal-mart, and Carrefour - all announced they would no longer accept beef from ranches involved in deforestation. In July, sportswear manufacturer Nike said it would not accept leather in its products from Brazil if it came from deforested areas. And in October, JBS Friboi, Bertin, Mafrig and Minerva - the largest players in Brazil’s cattle industry - all agreed to similar action. Daniel Azeredo, a Federal Public Prosecutor in Para State, has recently filed legal actions totaling $1bn against 22 ranches and 13 meat-packing plants for non-compliance with federal laws governing deforestation. ‘Extraordinary time’ The effects are rippling all the way up the supply chain - well, to you and me again. Consumers and businesses can play their part by demanding that their suppliers know where their “Forest Risk Commodities” come from.

But will they? Evidence from certification schemes shows that consumers care but not enough to get their wallets out. If business cannot secure a premium for the extra costs of producing the good stuff, why should they bother? I believe, however, that we are at an extraordinary time in human history when all that could be about to change. What all this is evidence of is a quickening step in a remarkable journey that will result in nothing less than the transformation of the 21st Century economy. Curbing emissions from deforestation, which was the outsider in the UN negotiations just two years ago, has moved to become the front-runner. It is now widely recognized that forests offer the quickest, most cost-effective and largest means of curbing global emissions between now and 2030.

So, are we at a tipping point in history where this could actually happen? Conservation will never out-compete commerce with a global population rising toward nine billion. Feeding and fueling our growing world is one of the greatest opportunities of the 21st century, but sending natural capital up in smoke and squandering ecosystems that support wealth creation in the process will, ultimately, be counterproductive. Businesses that understand this will be the rising stars of the future. Our report provides some of the first insights into who the potential winners and losers may be, and which business are setting the pace today.
Investors will want to spot them.

Andrew Mitchell is Chairman of the Forest Footprint Disclosure project and Executive Director of the Global Canopy Program

The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental topics running on the BBC News website

Now, it doesn’t bother me that European firms are earning U.S. tax credits. They are clearly playing by the rules, and their investments are helping to create jobs here in the United States, just as was intended. What really bothers me is the lack of urgency on the part of U.S. policymakers in ensuring that America remains competitive in the renewable energy sector. Unlike the United States, Europe started down the path toward renewable energy in earnest many years ago. Over the past decade, European firms have acquired critical expertise in the renewables business and are now formidable competitors. They got a jump start in their home markets – UK, Spain, Portugal, France and Germany – and have exported this know-how to become THE major players in the U.S. market.

The United States has tremendous solar, geothermal and wind energy resources, we can harvest them through a combination of smart public policy and fierce entrepreneurialism. Yet for all of the political rhetoric in support of renewables, the fact remains that the United States has no price on greenhouse gases, no transmission superhighway to carry renewable energy to population centers, and no national renewable energy standard. With the proper economic signals in the marketplace, we can build a world class renewable energy industry in the United States. Right now, carbon is not priced, making fossil fuel generation look artificially cheaper than renewables. With a gradually escalating price on carbon that reflects the full social costs of burning fossil fuels, low-emissions fuel sources will find a level playing field with their high-carbon counterparts.

Until carbon is priced and renewables can deploy on a level playing field, we need a national renewable energy standard to build a bridge from our high-carbon electricity system to the low-carbon future. A renewable energy standard that requires power providers to get a certain percentage of their electricity from renewable sources will give the renewables industry certainty. In the electric power sector, we make capital decisions with a 30-year time horizon. We can’t spend billions of dollars to build a clean-energy economy without confidence that demand for low-carbon power will remain strong. Finally, we need federal regulators to play a larger role in positioning interstate transmission lines – just as they do with other critical national infrastructure such as railroads, interstate highways and natural gas pipelines – and in fairly allocating the cost. Without transmission, renewable energy cannot get from its remote generation locations to our country’s population centers. And without the right policies, we simply cannot develop the necessary transmission lines. In some parts of the country, there is an effort to make wind farmers pay the entire cost of new transmission lines, even though we would never make wheat farmers singlehandedly pay for the highways that carry food to market.

In its recent forecast for the U.S. energy sector, the Energy Information Administration predicted how the world will look in the year 2035 if we simply continue with the energy policies we have in place today: The amount of electricity generated from coal will remain above 40 percent, the amount generated from renewables will be stuck below 20 percent, and carbon dioxide emissions will rise by 9 percent. In other words, a “do nothing” energy policy virtually assures that we will forfeit renewable energy investment and the potential jobs and fail to make even a dent in our overall greenhouse gas emissions. The United States still has an opportunity to put a policy framework in place that will encourage the development of a vibrant domestic renewable energy industry. We all need to pick up our tools and get to work.

Talbot Clifton - Jan 2010

I led the NRDC delegation to the Copenhagen climate summit. Many people have asked me about my experience there and what the Copenhagen Accord means for global climate change. Here are my answers.

Q. Leaders from 128 countries, and senior officials from 65 more, gathered in Copenhagen to take action against climate change. What did they accomplish?

A. President Obama and other world leaders agreed to take real and unprecedented action to curb climate change. With dissent from just five countries — including Cuba and Sudan — they agreed to work to keep the global average temperature from rising by more than 2 degrees Centigrade, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Q. How?

A. The Copenhagen Accord calls on the United States and other developed countries to set specific 2020 targets for reducing the carbon pollution that is warming the planet and to spell out, by the end of January, the specific action each country will take to make the cuts. Developing nations, in turn, will set targets for mitigating their heat-trapping pollution by paring back the growth of carbon emissions or preserving forests that take carbon from the atmosphere and store it in tree trunks.

Q. Did countries set specific targets for holding down carbon pollution?

A. The countries responsible for the bulk of the world’s carbon emissions announced targets at Copenhagen or earlier. These include the United States, the European Union, China, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, India and South Africa. These countries, and others, agreed to formally list their targets and other emission-curbing policies in the Copenhagen Accord by the end of January.

Q. How do we know countries will do what they say?

A. This was an important point for Obama and his negotiating team. The Copenhagen Accord provides for countries to report on their emissions and the specific actions they’ve taken at least every two years. Results will be analyzed and reviewed, in consultation with other countries, to make clear whether pledges are broken or kept.

Q. What did the United States promise?

A. President Obama said the United States would reduce carbon emissions by about 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. That’s the target in the legislation the House passed in June. Obama is working to get a similar bill passed in the Senate, which is considering its own version of the legislation.

Q. How about China?

A. China has pledged to cut carbon intensity — the amount of carbon released per unit of economic output — to 40-45 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. By cutting carbon intensity, China can hold down emissions growth while its economy develops. To further help mitigate carbon pollution, China has pledged to plant 100 million acres of forest by 2020 and to produce at least 15 percent of its total energy from solar, wind and other renewable sources by that year.

Q. What does the accord say about helping poor countries cope with climate change?

A. It calls for the United States and other developed countries to chip in on a global fund to provide $30 billion over the next three years to help the world’s poorest people deal with drought, floods, famine and other disasters made worse by climate change. The fund will ramp up to $100 billion a year in private and public investment by 2020. Some of the money will go to help low income countries invest in clean energy and preserve forests.

Q. How much of that will the United States pay?

A. That hasn’t been determined. The funds will include both public and private money. The United States typically pitches in about one-fifth of the public portion of global aid funds. That reflects our share of global wealth. It’s a smart investment in U.S. security and prosperity. Environmental devastation is a growing factor in forced migration, conflict over scarce water and farmland and other sources of regional instability. A portion of U.S. aid commonly goes to purchase American products. That helps build markets for U.S. goods, materials and expertise, so some of the money flows back to U.S. workers and families.

Q. Is the Copenhagen Accord enough to lick global warming?

A. No. More needs to be done, as Obama and other proponents of the accord have acknowledged. This is, though, an important step forward, something we can build on moving ahead.

Q. What more is needed?

A. We’ll need deeper cuts in carbon emissions, especially after 2020, from both developed and developing countries. We’ll need greater use of renewable fuels and more forest preservation action. The number one need in the United States is for the Senate to pass clean energy and climate legislation this spring that will put Americans back to work improving the efficiency of our homes, cars and workplaces in ways that cut carbon emissions while reducing our reliance on foreign oil.

Q. How does the Copenhagen Accord help to advance U.S. legislation?

A. It addresses, at least partly, three key concerns. With most other countries - including all the world’s big carbon emitters — taking action against climate change, Americans aren’t being asked to act alone. The transparency provisions need to be fleshed out, but they go a long way toward assuring lawmakers that countries can’t say one thing and do another. And the forest protection provisions are meant to prevent U.S. carbon cuts from being cancelled out by deforestation abroad.

Q. What’s the next step?

A. All of us who believe the time has come to take action against climate change need to write our U.S. Senators and urge them to pass clean energy and climate legislation. We should thank President Obama, as well, for the leadership he has shown on this issue.

Q. Why are some groups so disappointed in the outcome at Copenhagen?

A. The accord wasn’t all some had hoped for or all we ultimately need. After two years of delay, though, it’s an important step forward that we can build upon and strengthen. Climate change has been two centuries in the making. We won’t fix it with one meeting, or turn it back with the stroke of a pen. What that’s going to take is a long-term commitment to action. We have to be willing to work to build the national consensus needed to pass good legislation at home and then to take that message abroad to help advance the global momentum for change. Real progress was made at Copenhagen.

Q. Why couldn’t more be done in Copenhagen?

A. This summit brought together, for the first time, the leadership of the planet to take meaningful action on climate change. At the same time, each country brought its own set of priorities, problems and resources. It isn’t easy getting 193 countries to agree to anything. Climate change touches on fundamental issues: economic questions, energy use, the environment and the future of each country. And American leadership was limited because the U.S. Senate has yet to pass clean energy and climate legislation.

We understand why people were disappointed at Copenhagen. It’s important, though, to recognize what actually got done: a global accord that provides a new approach for nations to take action toward curbing climate change.
Rather than dwell on ways the summit came up short, we urge Americans who care about climate change to direct their energies toward helping to pass clean energy and climate legislation in the U.S. Senate. And that will then help to create a virtuous cycle that promotes stronger international action.

Q. What does this mean for NRDC in the months ahead?

A. Passing clean energy and climate legislation is the top priority for NRDC. We will be focused on that objective in the months to come. We will be in Mexico City later this year pushing to strengthen the Copenhagen Accord with even stronger international agreements. Our supporters and staff have worked on this issue for decades. We have worked with scientists, policy makers, activists and members of Congress. We have met with labor leaders, workers and business owners who understand that curbing climate change can create jobs. I have personally discussed this with President Obama and with Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general of the United Nations. I’ve listened to our opponents, I’ve heard from our friends and pretty much everyone in between. And what I can tell you is this.

Climate change is the single greatest environmental challenge on Earth. More than that, it’s an economic challenge. It’s a national security challenge. It’s a humanitarian challenge. And it’s a moral challenge, the great moral challenge of our time. This isn’t going away, neither will our efforts to pass U.S. energy and climate legislation and to carry out the Copenhagen Accord, and we’ll stick with it for as long as it takes.

The Natural Resources Defense Council works to protect wildlife and wild places and to ensure a healthy environment for all life on earth.

But the report investigates how practical these targets are to reach and concludes that they cannot be met with the current approaches to cutting carbon. They would not, in fact, be reached until the year 2100. According to the analysis, even if the UK managed to cut the demand for energy by 50%, it would still require an extra 16 nuclear power stations and 27,000 wind turbines by 2030 to be sure of hitting the target. Dr Tim Fox is head of environment and climate change at the Institution. He says that the problems of building the infrastructure haven’t been thought through.
“We’ll be competing for the engineering resources to deploy those wind farms in a global market where lots of other nations are trying to de-carbonise at the same time. The most current analysis shows that by 2013 we won’t have enough of the specialist construction vessels to assist in the construction of the offshore wind farms. Not only that, but by 2016 there’s not enough turbine manufacturing capacity in the world to be able to deliver the turbines to all the projects that need them at that time.

“We’ve done an assessment of the level of kit that is needed and it is at a level of building and construction and deployment that is unprecedented in modern times. We need the government to adopt an engineering program management type of approach laying out the best combination of solutions, rather than the current approach which is to almost blindly assume that mitigation can be achieved regardless of whether in practical terms it can be delivered on the ground.”
Back to rationing? According to the Institution, this co-ordinated approach would combine cuts in emissions, adapting to inevitable changes and employing geo engineering to absorb carbon from the air. The Institution suggests that the shortfall in emissions cuts could in fact be made up by deploying 100,000 “artificial trees” by 2050. Artificial trees would capture CO2 from the air, but this is still an untested technology. Real trees do it better. A spokesperson for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said:”The Institute of Mechanical Engineers’ can’t do, won’t do attitude is sending out a defeatist message ahead of the crucial climate change talks in Copenhagen.

“The truth is that if we act now we can not only beat climate change but gain from the green benefits that will flow in terms of jobs and investment from going low carbon. That’s what our transition plan is already doing, so it’s a shame the Institute is not embracing the vast opportunities available for engineers in the shift to a low carbon economy.”
The report calls for a warlike mentality to combat climate change, arguing that it needs much tougher tactics and a new enhanced government department to meet the challenge. According to Dr Fox: It’s time to go to war on climate change, it is attacking us and we must fight back.

Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre on climate change, supports the Institution’s approach.
“In wartime we could look over the gate before and see the enemy at the gate, but this is much more difficult now with climate change. We can see it in the southern hemisphere, but that’s unlikely to bring about significant action from us, so the enemy is at the gate in many parts of the world now but it is not so immediately obvious for us. We are seeing some of the early migratory pressures, the early signs which are not caused by climate change but are exacerbated by it, and that is something we are starting to see. I’m not saying that the migration we see today is caused by climate change, I’m saying that the stresses these people are under are being exacerbated so that will see an increased rate, and we are seeing that now.”

Professor Anderson also suggests that we may need to see some form of carbon rationing like food rationing in wartime.
“When you have something essential like energy that you can’t ration just on price - you have to ration it in a more equitable way. So I would suggest for the high reduction rates that we now need, we need something based on equity and whether it’s personal carbon trading or whatever, we have to make sure the poorer parts of our communities have access to energy regardless of price. So that means for the rest of us, who consume lots of energy we are going to have to make significant reductions to our levels of emissions - there is no way round this.”

By Matt McGrath
BBC Science reporter

Meanwhile, former US Vice President Al Gore says he believes President Obama will attend the talks in Copenhagen. He said the president would want to emphasis his administration’s commitment to safeguarding the environment. But Mr Obama’s allies in Congress are struggling to push through legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and it is unlikely that any bill will be passed before the December talks.

Mr Obama said climate change had been discussed “extensively” with EU leaders. “All of us agreed that it was imperative for us to redouble our efforts in the weeks between now and the Copenhagen meetings to ensure that we create a framework for progress in dealing with what is a potential ecologic disaster,” he said. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said the talks with Mr Obama had made him more confident about progress. “With the strong leadership of the United States we can indeed make an agreement,” he said.

The Kyoto Protocol required 37 industrial nations to cut carbon emissions by an average 5% from 1990 levels by 2012, when it expires. However, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said world leaders are unlikely to agree on a comprehensive treaty in Copenhagen. He said it was more likely there would only be agreement on principles. UN officials have also recently declared there is no chance of agreeing all elements of a new legally-binding UN treaty before the end of the year. But Mr Gore, said it wouldn’t be a disaster if the conference produced only a framework agreement, and not a binding deal.

Less talk and more do, say we.