The cultural challenge to climate science writing - PLoS Blogs (blog)

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My previous posts on the inevitable politics of climate science, I was flattered to see, figured into a terrific article this week by David Roberts of Grist about the futility of “just the facts” approaches to explaining that science to the public. Read his whole post for the thoughtfully developed argument, but these paragraphs offer the gist of it:

… [A] democratic public does not want bare facts. It wants meaning. It wants to know why climate science matters and what can be done about it. More fundamentally, it’s not just that people want meaning, it’s that they only absorb facts through meaning. Our identities are how we make sense of information. This is the whole point of cultural cognition research: We seek out information that reinforces our identities.

Scientists, at their best, avoid this kind of blinkered, identity-reinforcing cognition, at least when they’re engaged in scientific work. They struggle to unearth their own assumptions and subject them to testing, to render them falsifiable. It’s a kind of mental self-discipline that requires considerable training. Scientists should not imagine that members of the general public do or could or should share that same self-discipline. If they want the information they convey to be understood and absorbed, they will have to speak as humans speak, from within a cultural identity and a set of values, not hovering above such mortal concerns.

Roberts notes my “morose conclusion” that scientists should advocate for whatever they want because nobody seems to care what they think, then makes the case that by building bridges to cultural groups with whom they can find real affinities, scientists can become more persuasive. (He cites climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe as a success at this.)

He and I are actually not far apart in our optimism. My remark was perhaps a little too flip: I was only trying to say that I think the potential harm from scientists discussing policy intelligently can get overstated. The kind of engagement that Hayhoe has managed seems like a wonderful example for at least some others to follow, and it should be an inspiration to anyone who wants to help build the democratic consensus that real progress on climate policy will need.

Cultural cognition—people’s universal tendency to screen their perception and acceptance of facts through cultural attitudes—gets a lot of attention from science writers these days, as it should. Walk into a meeting of science writers and talk about the need to better educate climate deniers and a fluttery squawk of scolding about “information deficit models” will erupt from every corner. I mostly agree with this, but will also confess to being frustrated for two reasons at how unproductive the recognition of cultural cognition typically becomes.

My first, lesser reason is that on the face of it, cultural cognition often seems to explain too much. It seems like such a potent force in shaping attitudes that I’m left wondering how anyone ever gets persuaded of ideas at odds with their social groups’ values, even though this clearly must happen all the time. Plenty of Americans haven’t been culturally comfortable with fighting wars, accepting tax hikes, abiding by environmental regulations, or accepting legalized abortions and gay marriages, and yet somehow those things happened through a political process anyway. No doubt the lesson is that in those cases, ways of making those propositions culturally tolerable were found, which makes sense—but it also suggests that instances of cultural cognition only get defined by failure in retrospect, which makes me suspicious.

My other, bigger reason is that in practice, people often treat cultural cognition as a showstopper, and a justification for haughtily criticizing certain communication efforts without offering meaningful alternatives. It’s easy to chide science writers for pointlessly throwing more scary climate facts at a public that doesn’t want to hear them, or for tut-tutting that some climate news will sound like the same old doom-saying hysterics unless it’s been watered down to pabulum. But what exactly are the bridges to those people’s realities we should be using instead? And what do we do if the value frameworks within which they define the world don’t allow meaningful policy responses and their intransigence carries consequences for everyone else?

(Here I should also acknowledge a third reason, which is more of a bias: I’m all for reaching out to others’ cultures with understanding and respect, but if somebody’s culture shows a deep, committed refusal to at least acknowledge empirical physical reality, then it’s hard for me personally to maintain that respect.)

Yet I could be very wrong on these points, which is why I’m glad that some people in science communications are trying to engage with the significance of cultural cognition more meaningfully. It’s why I’ve always been impressed by something that Dan Kahan, cultural cognition’s most prominent investigator, posted this past February, which I’ve called the most edifying and useful thing I’ve read about cultural cognition because it carries a clear message for communicators. Rather than deploring how some unscientific ideas come to be bound up within certain cultural sets, Kahan writes, science journalists need to be more attentive to how these mistaken notions become rallying cries in the first place.

The entanglement of facts that admit of scientific investigation—e.g., “carbon emissions are heating the planet”; “deep geologic isolation of nuclear wastes is safe”—with antagonistic meanings occurs by a mixture of influences, including strategic behavior, poor institutional design, and sheer misadventure. In no such case was the problem inevitable; indeed, in most, such entanglement could easily have been avoided.

These antagonistic meanings, then, are a kind of pollution in the science communication environment.  They disable the normal and normally reliable faculties of rational discernment by which ordinary individuals recognize what is collectively known.

One of the central missions of the science of science communication in a liberal democratic state is to protect the science communication environment from such contamination, and to develop means for detoxifying that environment when preventive or protective measures fail.

Granted, that advice doesn’t do much to help unpollute the existing atmosphere for climate discussions, but it points to ways of preventing the situation from getting still worse. And that may be a second step toward improvement, falling right after the sympathetic outreach efforts of scientists like Hayhoe.

It’s also great that science communicators as a profession may be starting to take a more scientific approach to overcoming these cultural blocks to understanding, as John Timmer of Ars Technica reviewed splendidly back at the beginning of August. And although I’m not attending the ScienceOnline Climate conference now in progress, the feed of tweets emerging from it testifies to the value of the discussion. The program is also giving lots of attention to exactly these kinds of communications issues, such as the plenaries on “Testing Climate Communications Hypotheses” and “Credibility, Trust, Goodwill, and Persuasion,” as well as sessions on “Lamenting Eden-Climate Change Discussions Across Ideologies,” on “Problem solving, democracy, and handling climate change,” and on “Engagement Strategies—The CCTI & Beyond.” Follow along on #scioClimate and let’s see what we can all learn.

The The cultural challenge to climate science writing by Retort, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

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Australia's One Nation under climate science denial - The Guardian

Link to video: Stephanie Banister: 'I don't oppose Islam as a country'

Oh, how the world laughed at Stephanie Banister – the extreme right wing Australian election candidate who told a TV interviewer that Islam was a country.

Wasn't it just side-splitting to hear the 27-year-old One Nation hopeful get her Qu-ran's mixed up with her harams?

What fun to hear her re-write the Jewish faithful as a congregation of Jesus-followers?  You could have knocked me down with a kippah.

The Queenslander claimed she was a victim of selective editing from the television network Channel Seven, which aired the interview. She's since pulled out of the election race.

But virtually every major news outlet in the developed world covered Banister's gaffs.

After twisting its satirical knife every which way, US television political comedy The Daily Show suggested Banister had set "a new low watermark for electoral ignorance".

But after reading her party's stance on climate change, I beg to differ.

One Nation appears to have gone shopping to the Climate Science Denial Mart and come back with the whole deli counter of debunked talking points.

"What's really behind all the global warming hoopla," One Nation's website asks.

"Power.  It's the same old Marxist/Communist/Fascist collectivist shtick, dressed up in new clothes. Global warming is all about a power grab by a wealthy elite and their collectivist sycophants — using the (United Nations) as a cover and tool."

Elsewhere, One Nation accuses the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO of engaging in the corruption of science.

Much of the material is near identical to that offered by the climate science denial organisation the Galileo Movement, whose patron – Sydney shock-jock Alan Jones – says human-caused climate change is a hoax and the science is "witchcraft".

One Nation New South Wales Senate candidate Pauline Hanson even cites the Galileo Movement's project leader Malcolm Roberts, asking readers to check out a document which Sydney Morning Herald environment editor Ben Cubby has described as a "pile of horse shit".

Now, while you probably wouldn't expect the Christian Democrats to jumble its religious lexicon, the party is as equally clueless as One Nation about the current state of climate science.

According to the Christian Democrats, there are "equally reputable scientists" who say that climate change "is not, and never was driven by CO2 levels".

This ignores a recent study, co-authored by fellow The Guardian environment blogger Dana Nuccitelli, about 97 per cent of scientific studies on climate change in the last 20 years all agree that global warming is caused by humans. It also ignores all the major science academies in the developed world.

The CDP says it is "agnostic" about human caused climate change, which is a bit like saying you're an agnostic about the laws of physics.

Definitely not an agnostic, but rather an all-out worshipper of anti-science, is the Christian fundamentalist Rise Up Australia Party, led by a Melbourne Pastor who thinks humans have only been on earth for 6,000 years. Rise Up Australia also drafted in UK Independence Party figure Lord Christopher Monckton earlier for a pre-election push.

Key minor parties in Queensland – Katter's Australia Party and Palmer United Party – have also chosen to put debunked fringe ideas above sound science.

Katter's Australia Party says: "The scientific case is not made out and nor is there empirical evidence connecting carbon emissions to global warming - the argument is simply not sustainable."

The Palmer United Party doesn't say anything about climate change aside from saying it wants a national commission to investigate the "carbon issue" but its leader, billionaire miner Clive Palmer, is a climate science sceptic.

Palmer tried to play-down the role of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by telling an ABC television audience that "97 per cent of carbon dioxide is from natural sources" – as if this was somehow relevant.

One Nation also does this sweet little climate denial two-step that tries to suggest that carbon dioxide is both inconsequential but also powerful enough to be the life force of the planet.

Pauline Hanson writes: "Carbon dioxide is Nature's invisible, tasteless, odourless trace gas essential to all life on Earth."

Perhaps she's been reading the same talking points as Opposition leader Tony Abbott, who earlier this year dog whistled to the climate denial crowd when he described emissions trading as "a so-called market, in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no one."

Abbott has said in the past that he thinks climate science is "crap" but has also said he thinks it does contribute to climate change.

But Abbott's Liberal Party is riddled with representatives scornful of the risks of burning billions of tonnes of fossil fuels annually to load the atmosphere with that all-powerful (but also trace gas) carbon dioxide.

In Queensland, the state party's rank and file members voted last year in favour of a motion to ban the teaching of climate science in schools.

The motion was proposed by a party member who claims to have debunked the greenhouse theory using just two fish boxes and a roll of cling film in an experiment he cooked up in his kitchen.

Maybe it's time to quote some wise words from that former One Nation candidate and religious philosopher Stephanie Banister.

"Everyone in the world has a lot to learn about day to day stuff. Everything in life is just about learning."

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Will Climate Change Get Cold Shoulder in Obama's 2nd Term?

As President Barack Obama prepares to take the oath of office for the second time, he has promised that climate change will be a priority in his second term. The chances that significant climate action will actually happen, however, remain slim, policy experts say.

"I always have hope, but it is sometimes hard to see how real progress, substantial progress, is going to be made with the fact that the Congress is so polarized," said Travis Franck, a policy analyst for nongovernmental organization Climate Interactive.

After his re-election, Obama told Time magazine that his daughters inspired him to think long term, particularly about issues of climate change. And in his first news conference after the election, the president told reporters that he planned to shape a climate change agenda, but gave no details on what that agenda might look like — though he did say that a tax on carbon emissions was likely a non-starter.

These statements took place before the massacre at Newtown, Conn., which pushed gun control to the forefront. And climate change will surely have to vie for attention with other divisive issues, such as an upcoming congressional battle over the nation's debt ceiling. While Obama may be able to take some executive action to tighten environmental regulations in certain sectors, such as fuel-efficient vehicles or clean energy, experts say, a gridlocked Congress is unlikely to cooperate with the administration's global warming agenda. 

"From my point of view, being an observer from Europe, I think it's more likely this sector-by-sector approach is implemented than a national climate policy," said Niklas Höhne, the director of energy and climate policy at Ecofys, a renewable energy and climate policy consulting firm. [8 Ways Global Warming Is Already Changing the World]

An urgent call for action

Obama's second term comes at a time when climate scientists are making increasingly urgent calls for action to mitigate the effects of a warming world. In November, University of Bern, Switzerland, climate researcher Thomas Stocker warned in the journal Science that every year of delay makes it harder to keep warming below levels that would severely disrupt the planet.

A cap of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) of warming, the most conservative goal discussed by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, is already out of reach, Stocker wrote. After 2027, the world can no longer hope to keep warming below 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C), which is the number currently at the center of international climate negotiations.

The World Bank also issued a report in November, calling for global action on climate change. And in January, a study published in the journal Nature found that the biggest determiner of whether the world would successfully tackle climate change is not tech savvy or hoped-for green development, but the timing of political action.

Public opinion appears receptive to climate change as well. About 73 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of independents and 33 percent of Republicans say they are somewhat or very worried about climate change, according to a September 2012 survey of Americans by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.

Support for action was higher. Three-quarters of independents, 93 percent of Democrats and 52 percent of Republicans said global warming should be at least a medium priority for the president and Congress. Severe weather such as the summer's wildfires out west may have shifted these opinions, as the same numbers in March 2012 (before the fires) were 9 points lower for Democrats and 7 points lower for independents. Republicans held steady between March and September.

Challenges in Congress

The party schisms seen in the polling data are more pronounced in Congress, where representatives routinely deny the scientific consensus that climate is changing and that greenhouse gas emissions by humans are the main driver.

"I'm not going to bet the U.S. economy or the Texas economy on a theory that is not proven," Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) told the Dallas Morning News this month. "Climate has always been changing." [Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted]

Attitudes like Barton's are why climate policy specialists expect little in the way of climate legislation in the upcoming four years.

The administration can make some progress on its own, said Elizabeth Sawin, co-director of Climate Interactive. In Obama's first term, for example, the administration ordered new fuel standards for lightweight vehicles and coal-fired power plants, and there was money included in the economic stimulus for public transportation and clean energy. Similar efforts in the second term could move the country toward lower carbon emissions, Sawin told LiveScience.

"Anything is better than nothing," she said.

But a piecemeal approach is less likely than an overarching plan to succeed in slowing warming significantly, Franck, the policy analyst for Climate Interactive, said. Moreover, a failure to act nationally puts the administration in an awkward spot in international negotiations. The 2011 climate talks in Durbin, South Africa, set a plan for a new international climate treaty to be prepared by 2015.

"We've lost a lot of credibility in climate change negotiations, because we've been kind of paralyzed," Franck told LiveScience. "If [international negotiators] bring home a treaty or agree to something, when does it get ratified by the Senate? Will we have domestic legislation already? Will the Senate pass it and then we'll have to pass domestic legislation?"

If the Obama administration is stuck with instituting piecemeal regulations, it will be a "major challenge" to communicate this progress to the international community, Höhne told LiveScience.

"The international climate negotiations really depend on the U.S. bringing something forward," he said. "If the U.S. doesn't bring something forward that is considered by most players as something new and something ambitious, then the new international agreement in 2015 will not be ambitious."

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas or LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Annual bird counts give scientists climate clues

MAD ISLAND, Texas (AP) — Armed with flashlights, recordings of bird calls, a small notebook and a stash of candy bars, scientist Rich Kostecke embarked on an annual 24-hour Christmastime count of birds along the Texas Gulf Coast. Yellow rail. Barn owl. Bittern. Crested Cara-Cara. Kostecke rattled off the names and scribbled them in his notebook.

His data, along with that from more than 50 other volunteers spread out into six groups across the 7,000-acre Mad Island preserve, will be analyzed regionally and then added to a database with the results of more than 2,200 other bird counts going on from mid-December to Jan. 5 across the Western Hemisphere.

The count began in 1900 as a National Audubon Society protest of holiday hunts that left piles of bird and animal carcasses littered across the country. It now helps scientists understand how birds react to short-term weather events and may provide clues as to how they will adapt as temperatures rise and climate changes.

"Learning the changes of habit in drought could help us know what will happen as it gets warmer and drier," said Kostecke, a bird expert and associate director of conservation, research and planning at the Nature Conservancy in Texas.

Scientists saw birds change their habits during last year's historic drought that parched most of Texas. Some birds that normally winter on the coast — such as endangered whooping cranes — arrived and immediately turned back when they couldn't find enough food. Other birds didn't even bother flying to the coast. Snowy owls, who sometimes migrate from the Arctic to Montana, suddenly showed up as far south as Texas.

There has been some rain this year, but Texas still hasn't fully recovered from the drought and many areas remain unusually dry. Wetlands, a crucial bird habitat, have been damaged. Trees and brush are dead or brown. There are fewer flooded rice fields, prime foraging grounds for birds. And sandhill cranes, for the second winter in a row, are staying in Nebraska.

An initial report on the 24-hour count that began midnight Monday and ended midnight Tuesday included 233 different species — a drop of 11 from last year when 244 were counted on Mad Island. While the area likely still has one of the United States' most diverse bird populations, the species that were missing raise questions.

Where are the wild turkeys? Why were no black rails found? What about fox sparrows and the 13 other species that are commonly counted on the preserve? Where have they gone?

"There are several possibilities," Kostecke surmised. "Conditions may be better in the east, like Louisiana. Some may still be north, because it's been mild, and they tend to follow the freeze line."

With weather in the north still relatively warm, some birds might choose to stay put and conserve energy for the nesting season, Kostecke added.

Similar changes in bird behavior could be seen this year in the Midwest and parts of the South, areas that have been gripped by a massive drought that covered two-thirds of the nation at its height. The drought's severity is unusual, but scientists warn that such weather could become more common with global warming. Birds — as well as other animals — will have to adapt, and the data collected in the Christmas count gives crucial insight on how they might do that.

The dataset is notable for its size and the decades that it covers. Along with showing how birds adapt to climate change, it reveals the impact of environmental changes, such as habitat loss, which has contributed to a 40 percent decline in bird numbers during the past 40 years, said Gary Langham, vice president and chief scientist for the National Audubon Society.

"We've converted the landscape dramatically, and then you add climate change to the mix ... and the results are more alarming," Langham said.

Scientists have used the data to predict bird populations and behavior in 2020, 2050 and 2080. They also could use it to advance conservation work or calls for emergency action, he said.

Birds, though, are only one part of an ecosystem. As they move from place to place, they encounter new predators and species that may be competing for the same food. Vegetation also is changing as the Earth warms and some areas become more drought-prone. What happens as all these changes take place?

"It's the million dollar question. When you have that kind of ecological disruption, no one knows what happens," Langham said. "There are going to be winners and losers. There will be some that become more common, and some that will go extinct."

The survivors are the big unknown.

___

Plushnick-Masti can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RamitMastiAP

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West's wildfires a preview of changed climate: scientists

(Reuters) - Scorching heat, high winds and bone-dry conditions are fueling catastrophic wildfires in the U.S. West that offer a preview of the kind of disasters that human-caused climate change could bring, a trio of scientists said on Thursday.

"What we're seeing is a window into what global warming really looks like," Princeton University's Michael Oppenheimer said during a telephone press briefing. "It looks like heat, it looks like fires, it looks like this kind of environmental disaster ... This provides vivid images of what we can expect to see more of in the future."

In Colorado, wildfires that have raged for weeks have killed four people, displaced thousands and destroyed hundreds of homes. Because winter snowpack was lighter than usual and melted sooner, fire season started earlier in the U.S. West, with wildfires out of control in Colorado, Montana and Utah.

The high temperatures that are helping drive these fires are consistent with projections by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said this kind of extreme heat, with little cooling overnight, is one kind of damaging impact of global warming.

Others include more severe storms, floods and droughts, Oppenheimer said.

The stage was set for these fires when winter snowpack was lighter than usual, said Steven Running, a forest ecologist at the University of Montana.

Mountain snows melted an average of two weeks earlier than normal this year, Running said. "That just sets us up for a longer, dryer summer. Then all you need is an ignition source and wind."

Warmer-than-usual winters also allow tree-killing mountain pine beetles to survive the winter and attack Western forests, leaving behind dry wood to fuel wildfires earlier in the season, Running said.

"Now we have a lot of dead trees to burn ... it's not even July yet," he said. Trying to stop such blazes driven by high winds is a bit like to trying to stop a hurricane, Running said: "There is nothing to stop that kind of holocaust."

Fires cost about $1 billion or more a year, and exact a toll on human health, ranging from increased risk of heart, lung and kidney ailments to post-traumatic stress disorder, said Howard Frumkin, a public health expert at the University of Washington.

"Wildfire smoke is like intense air pollution," Frumkin said. "Pollution levels can reach many times higher than a bad day in Mexico City or Beijing."

The elderly, the very young and the ill are most vulnerable to the heat that adds to wildfire risk, he said. The strain of fleeing homes and living in communities in the path of a wildfire can trigger ailments like post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety.

The briefing was convened by the science organization Climate Communications, with logistical support by Climate Nexus, an advocacy and communications group. An accompanying report on heat waves and climate change was released simultaneously at http://climatecommunication.org/new/articles/heat-waves-and-climate-change/overview/.

(This story corrects the name of group convening the briefing in last paragraph)

(Reporting By Deborah Zabarenko; Editing by Stacey Joyce)

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Is China poor? Key question at climate talks

BONN, Germany (AP) — Another round of U.N. climate talks closed without resolving how to share the burden of curbing man-made global warming, mainly because countries don't agree on who is rich and who is poor.

China wants to maintain a decades-old division between developed and developing countries, bearing in mind that, historically, the West has released most of the heat-trapping gases that scientists say could cause catastrophic changes in climate.

But the U.S. and Europe insisted during the two-week talks that ended Friday in Bonn that the system doesn't reflect current economic realities and must change as work begins on a new global climate pact set to be completed in 2015.

"The notion that a simple binary system is going to be applicable going forward is no longer one that has much relevance to the way the world currently works," U.S. chief negotiator Jonathan Pershing said.

Countries like Qatar and Singapore are wealthier than the U.S. per capita but are still defined as developing countries under the classification used in the U.N. talks. So is China, the world's second largest economy.

Finding a new system that better reflects the world today, while also acknowledging the historical blame for greenhouse gas emissions, is the biggest challenge facing the U.N. process as it seeks a global response to climate change.

"That is a fundamental issue," said Henrik Harboe, Norway's chief climate negotiator. "Some want to keep the old division while we want to look at it in a more dynamic way."

The U.N. climate talks are based on the premise that industrialized countries must take the lead on climate change by committing to reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. They are also expected to provide money to help poor countries grow in a sustainable way and to protect the most vulnerable nations from rising sea levels, droughts and other consequences of a warming world

Disputes on how to categorize countries going forward was behind much of the procedural wrangling that slowed down the talks in Bonn. Delegates failed to agree on an agenda until the last day, leaving most of the work for a bigger summit in Qatar in November.

A separate dispute between developing countries delayed the appointment of officials to steer the talks. That stalemate was also unlocked on the last day.

The slow pace frustrated climate activists who fear that there won't be enough political will to rein in emissions to avoid dangerous levels of warming in coming decades.

"The talk here doesn't match the action that science says is required," said Mohamed Adow, senior climate change adviser at Christian Aid.

China's lead negotiator Su Wei told The Associated Press that the proposed new deal, which would have binding commitments for all countries after 2020, must be based on the principle of "common but differentiated responsibility" enshrined in previous climate agreements.

"That means we still would continue the current division between developed and developing countries," Su said.

He said China is still a developing country because if you look at wealth per capita, it barely makes the world's top 100. More than 100 million Chinese live below the poverty line, which Beijing has defined as about $1 a day.

Still, Western officials say China's fast-growing energy needs and rising emissions mean it can no longer be off the hook in climate negotiations.

"We need to move into a system which is reflecting modern economic realities," EU negotiator Christian Pilgaard Zinglersen said.

In the early 1950s, China accounted for just 2 percent of global emissions while the U.S. accounted for more than 40 percent, according to Climate Analytics, a climate research group based in Potsdam, Germany.

Today China's share of global emissions exceeds 25 percent, while the U.S. share has fallen toward 20 percent.

China and its supporters reject blame for stalling the climate talks, saying it is the U.S. and other developed nations that are unwilling to live up to their obligations to cut carbon emissions.

The U.S. refused to join the only binding accord to limit emissions — the 1997 Kyoto Protocol — partly because it didn't include China.

Seyni Nafo, spokesman for a group of African countries in the climate talks, noted that the U.S. also said that joining Kyoto would harm the U.S. economy. Years later, the U.N. climate effort still has little support in the U.S. Congress, which includes outspoken climate skeptics.

"We are hoping that they will get on board this time, which is not a given," Nafo said.

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Climate scientists say warming could exceed 3.5 C

Climate researchers said Thursday the planet could warm by more than 3.5 degrees Celsius (6.3 degrees Fahrenheit), boosting the risk of drought, flood and rising seas.

The UN's target is a 2 C (3.6 degree Fahrenheit) limit on warming from pre-industrial levels for manageable climate change.

In a report issued on the penultimate day of new UN talks in Bonn, scientists said Earth's average global temperature rise could exceed the dangerous 3.5 C (6.3 F) warming they had flagged only six months ago.

Marion Vieweg, a policy researcher with German firm Climate Analytics, told AFP the 3.5 C (6.3 F) estimate had been based on the assumption that all countries will meet their pledges, in themselves inadequate, to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

New research has found this is not "a realistic assumption," she said, adding that right now "we can't quantify yet how much above" 3.5 C (6.3 F) Earth will warm.

The monitoring tool is called Climate Action Tracker (CAT), a joint project of Climate Analytics, Ecofys and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

Her colleague, Bill Hare, said the gap between countries' promised interventions and the reality was "getting bigger."

Projections are for greenhouse-gas overshoot of between nine and 11 billion tonnes per year beyond the annual 44-billion-tonne ceiling needed by 2020 to achieve the 2 C (3.6 F) target.

At the moment, the world emits about 48 billion tonnes of these gases, including CO2 and methane.

The United States accounts for six billion tonnes, China seven and the European Union (EU) five, the CAT said.

The 195 parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are meeting in the former German capital of Bonn for the first time since they agreed in Durban, South Africa, last December to forge a new global pact.

The accord would be completed by 2015 and take effect in 2020.

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Climate scientists shine new light on methane mystery

Farmers work in a padi field at Khokana village, located south of Nepal's capital Kathmandu July 27, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/Navesh Chitrakar

By David Fogarty

SINGAPORE | Thu Aug 11, 2011 7:25am EDT

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Atmospheric levels of methane, 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide (CO2) at trapping heat, stayed steady for two decades to 2006 on wider fertilizer use to grow rice or a surge in natural gas demand, according to two separate studies in the journal Nature.

Climate researcher Fuu Ming Kai from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Singapore research center said in one study that methane output from rice fields in the Northern Hemisphere dropped during the period as fertilizers replaced manure and because of reduced water use.

In the second study, Murat Aydin at the University of California, Irvine, concluded that a drop in methane emissions from more efficient burning of fossil fuels and a surge in natural gas demand.

The studies aim to solve a puzzle that has confounded climate scientists for years: why did methane levels in the atmosphere, after rising steadily for many years, taper off in the mid-1980s in a dip lasting two decades?

Solving the puzzle is crucial because methane levels have risen more than 150 percent since the start of the industrial revolution, compared with CO2's 40 percent increase, and are on the rise again.

While the studies reach different conclusions, both studies point to human activities as the reason for the slowdown.

"In general most of the methane sources come from the Northern Hemisphere," Fuu told Reuters.

The main methane sources come from burning fossil fuels, rice paddies, coal mines, livestock and clearing and burning of tropical forests.

"We looked at the isotope data to see how it's changed over the past 20 to 30 years. And what we saw is a trend in the isotope signature and especially in the Northern Hemisphere."

Fuu said long-term data and comparing methane levels between the both hemispheres helped researchers conclude that about half the decrease in Northern Hemisphere methane emissions could be explained by reduced emissions from rice agriculture in Asia over the past three decades.

"It is important to know what the mechanism is behind the slow down. If you know this, you can adopt a suitable policy to reduce methane emissions," Fuu said.

Aydin concluded the drop coincided with rapid natural gas production as the fuel became increasingly price competitive with oil and other fossil fuel, instead of flaring it off. The gains came even though overall fossil fuel use increased as cleaner burning technologies helped keep methane emissions in check, he said.

"We speculate that the rising economic value of natural gas during the late 20th Century and the deployment of cleaner technologies led to sharp reductions in the release of light hydrocarbons into the atmosphere," the study says.

(Editing by Ed Lane)

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Butterflies losing habitats due to climate

A study of beleaguered butterflies in California provides some of the best clues yet as to how other animals may react to climate change, scientists say.The unprecedented, 35-year analysis of butterfly populations in the Sierra Nevada details how several species are fleeing to higher elevations to escape warming temperatures.

Those butterflies that already live on mountaintops and can't adjust to the heat have "nowhere else to go but heaven," says Arthur Shapiro, a biologist at University of California-Davis who collected the data.

Butterflies have long been regarded as an early warning indicator for climate change. Their short life cycles and high sensitivity to temperature make them especially vulnerable, says Matthew Forister, a biologist at the University of Nevada-Reno and the study's lead author.

"Like polar bears, these high-elevation butterflies were already living in extreme environments, and now they don't have any options" for escape, Forister says. He says butterfly populations have always shifted over time, but the destruction of their habitat has occurred at an accelerated pace in recent years because of urbanization and warming temperatures.

"Their environment is changing so quickly that they just can't cope," Forister says.

The study, published last month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, tracked 159 species of butterflies at 10 locations. It's one of the best compilations of data on how any species has reacted to environmental changes in recent decades, says Gary Langham, lead scientist in California for the National Audubon Society, a conservation group.

A separate study published in September in Biology Letters said climate change was one possible explanation for a sharp decline in female monarch butterflies in the eastern United States and Mexico. British researchers have tracked a decline in several species of butterflies since the 1960s.

"What's happening to butterflies is an indication of what's happening, and what could happen, to many different kinds of plants and animals," Langham says. "It underscores the importance of protecting habitats."

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Special report: Scientists race to avoid climate change harvest

Combines harvest soybeans at a farm in Tangara da Serra, Mato Grosso state in western Brazil, March 5, 2009.

Credit: Reuters/Paulo Whitaker

By David Fogarty

CANBERRA | Fri Jun 10, 2011 12:47pm EDT

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Charlie Bragg gazes across his lush fields where fat lambs are grazing, his reservoirs filled with water, and issues a sigh of relief. Things are normal this year and that's a bit unusual of late.

His 7,000-acre farm near the Australian town of Cootamundra is testament to the plight facing farmers around the globe: increasingly wilder weather is making food production more unpredictable. It's the new normal they must prepare for.

Bragg's farm in New South Wales state has been in the family for generations and has weather records for the area stretching back 110 years. After seven years of costly drought, the weather switched last year to unseasonably wet with flooding rains.

"It's screaming to me that things are getting hotter and drier at different times of the year," said the 40-year-old Bragg during a recent visit to his property, about two hours drive to the west of Canberra, the Australian capital.

"Our summers are getting wetter and if this trend continues, then we will have to find different means of farming," he said.

Across the globe, rising temperatures and more intense droughts, floods and storms are forcing a rethink in how to grow food, from breeding hardier crop varieties and changing planting times to complete genetic overhauls of plants.

Growing populations, changing diets and insatiable demand for grains, meat and vegetables is putting pressure on global food production and prices like never before.

Soaring food prices, civil unrest and worries about weather have spurred a global race to create more productive crops that can thrive in a warmer -- and more prosperous -- world.

The World Bank estimates 925 million people are hungry in the world today. The figure has been rising since 1995-97 due to rising food prices, a succession of economic crises, and a neglect of agricultural innovation, especially relevant to the poor.

It is going to get much worse for the hungry because global food prices will more than double within 20 years, aid agency Oxfam International said in a June 1 report. Flat-lining yields, a scramble for fertile land and water, and environmental crises are reversing decades of progress against hunger, it said.

The challenge is to speed up the creation of new crops more adaptable to climate change and capable of much greater yields. A laboratory in the leafy heart of Canberra could hold some of the answers.

Inside, hundreds of seedlings on a conveyor belt file through a high-tech chamber, each plant bar-coded and scanned for signs of genetic superiority. A selection process that took months in the past, now takes a fraction of the time.

"I call this digital agriculture," said plant scientist Bob Furbank of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO). The 3-meter high PlantScan chamber uses 3D laser radar and other devices to measure size, growth and water use.

"It's like the plant Olympics. We have to rapidly pick the best of the best," Furbank, scientific director of CSIRO's Plant Phenomics center in Canberra, said on a recent visit to the laboratory brimming with high-tech equipment after a multi-million dollar refit.

The center is part of renewed global efforts to create a new generation of crops that will dramatically boost yields, particularly for wheat and rice.

Investment into creating a new generation of staple crops, especially wheat and rice, has lagged since the Green Revolution of the 1960s, which led to years of bumper harvests, easing worries about lack of food.

The new green revolutionaries must find ways of doubling yields as the global population, set to hit 7 billion later this year, heads for 9 billion by 2050, with greater affluence changing diets and triggering ever greater demand.

THE HEAT IS ON

To feed 2 billion more mouths by 2050, food production will have to increase by 70 percent, the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says.

Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to meeting the target as rising temperatures and droughts dry out farmlands or more intense floods and storms inundate them.

"What we expect in the future is there will be much more unexpected events, much more extreme climate change," said Concepcion Calpe, a senior economist with the FAO in Rome.

Boosting yields has become almost an obsession with governments, seed companies such as Syngenta and Monsanto, and scientific bodies such as Australia's CSIRO.

Global yield growth of wheat and rice has stagnated at 0.6 percent to 0.7 percent annually over the past 10 years -- about half the production growth rate of 1.2 to 1.4 percent annually needed from now to 2050, the FAO says.

Scientists say they are running out of time to boost yields.

With greenhouse gas emissions rising quickly, the world is already on track to exceed a 2 degrees Celsius threshold that scientists say risks triggering dangerous climate change. The planet has already warmed about 0.8 degrees Celsius on average since 1900.

Unless emissions growth is slammed into hard reverse, the world could be 2 to 3 degrees warmer on average by 2050, and much more by 2100.

Computer climate models show large areas of Australia, Africa, the United States, eastern Brazil and southern Europe drying out in the coming decades. But Russia, Canada and Indochina would become wetter, potentially benefiting crop production or allowing new crops to be grown in previously cooler climes.

Overall, for many major cereal crop-growing regions, the future will hinge on drought and heat-tolerant varieties, better weather forecasts and a likely shift in cropping to new areas.

A U.S. study published last month in the journal Science found climate change was already exerting a considerable drag on the yield growth of crops.

The authors used crop yield models with and without changes in temperature and rainfall to show global falls in wheat output of 5.5 percent and 3.8 percent for corn as a result of climate change from 1980-2008.

That was equivalent to the entire annual corn crop of Mexico, or the wheat crop of France, the European Union's biggest producer, it said.

SEEDS OF CHANGE

The global forecast is for increasingly bad weather, amid spiraling demand from an expanding global middle class.

"2.5 billion people entering the world's middle class is a lot more important than climate change," said Jeffrey Currie, global head of commodities for Goldman Sachs in London.

The World Bank's food price index, which measures global prices, jumped 36 percent in April from a year ago to near its 2008 peak, before dropping again.

"While it might not be the primary cause, it definitely is an underlying cause for some of the instability you're seeing in North Africa and the Middle East right now," said Rick Leach, chief executive of the World Food Program USA. "The very poor can spend up to 80 percent of their income on food," he said, adding: "We're now moving into a period of extreme worry in terms of the implications of food price increases."

More than 680 million people in Asia and the Pacific region live on less than US$1.25 a day, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, a U.N. agency, says. More than 70 per cent of these are in South Asia -- Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan -- making the region among the most vulnerable to food price inflation and climate change.

The World Bank in February said rising food prices had pushed an estimated 44 million more people into extreme poverty over the course of eight months, triggering unrest.

That is putting ever mounting pressure on governments, agronomists and the farm industry to come up with ways of growing more food on less land and under harsher conditions.

"Everything we do in terms of developing our technology, bringing that to growers worldwide, is really about addressing the need to grow more from less," said Davor Pisk, chief operating officer for Syngenta, the world's largest agrochemicals firm.

The Swiss firm's seeds business has flourished, growing to $2.8 billion in 2010, out of total sales of $11.6 billion, in large part for demand for Genetically Modified (GM) seeds to meet soaring demand in the United States for corn ethanol and for soyoil and soymeal in China.

Corn and soy, major elements of animal feed and biofuels, have attracted significant investment for new GM food varieties that have substantially boosted yields. Corn and soybean are also much simpler genetically than wheat and rice.

Syngenta has developed corn and soy varieties that repel pests, fungi and are tolerant to a range of chemicals that kill weeds -- all threats expected to get worse during climate change. It has also just released a hybrid called Agrisure Artesian that has resistance to drought.

"What we're confident of being able to demonstrate is that we can achieve a 15 percent decline in percentage of losses due to drought. So if you like, we get 15 percent yield preservation," Pisk said. The next generation of varieties would aim for 25 percent.

GM is just one part of a suite of technologies growers need to meet demand and fight the impact of climate change, he said.

The problem is knowing just what sort of future lies ahead for farmers and exactly what varieties were needed for different growing areas.

Computer climate models have become quite good at showing how temperatures will change across the globe, but are less precise on how rainfall and storm patterns will change, particularly at local levels.

SEARCH FOR BETTER YIELDS

If you can't predict the weather then you can try to beat it -- with new genetic strains of grain plants that will boost yields.

But crop yields would have to rise a lot faster than they have been. Scientists say yields will have to increase by around 1.5 percent a year to match the growth in the world's population of around 1 percent a year. That may sound small, but the current pace of yield growth is well below that.

Overall, rice yields have more than doubled over the past half-century from 1.85 metric tones per hectare in 1960 to 4.29 metric tones in 2011/12, USDA data shows.

But the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines says rice yields will have to rise another 11 percent to about 4.8 metric tones per ha by 2018/19 just to keep rice prices steady.

By comparison, corn yields have risen from 1.95 metric tones per ha in 1960 to 5.22 metric tones in 2011/12, propelled by soaring demand for animal feed and ethanol. Wheat yields have gained more modestly to 3 metric tones in 2011/12 from 1.15 metric tones in 1960.

The production of rice, the staple for more than half the world's population, has kept pace so far with consumption, thanks to advances made in the Green Revolution. But yields will have to keep rising and stocks kept at healthy levels to avoid the kind of panic purchases by governments and export restrictions that helped drive the food price crisis of 2008.

The danger is that climate change could cause yields to drop, in some cases dramatically so, according to a study by the International Food Policy Research Institute.

Its modeling of the impact of climate change on cereal crops showed yields in 2050 are likely to be lower than they were in 2000, with the most vulnerable being wheat.

But developing a new variety of higher-yielding wheat takes a minimum of seven to 10 years, mostly because it has highly complex genetics. It's one reason why wheat, and to a similar extent rice, have fallen behind in yield growth and investment.

"In breeding new varieties for use in 20 years' time, we need to have the necessary genes now. And I think that's going to be tricky," said Greg Rebetzke, a wheat breeder for CSIRO in Canberra. One trick is to boost the early growth of wheat plants. The dwarfing genes that triggered the Green Revolution cut the height of wheat plants and allowed the plant to focus on filling the grain head. But the shoot that emerges from the seed is too short, limiting planting depth and access to water deeper in the soil. Rebetzke said CSIRO has found "alternative dwarfing genes" with no negative effects on early growth, which are "a major thrust in our breeding effort."

FUTURE RICE PLANT

To the north of London, the world's oldest agricultural research station is working on ways to boost British wheat potential yields to 20 or even 25 tonnes in the long-term, far above the 8 tonnes produced there now.

The 1.6 ha Broadbalk field on Rothamsted farm dates back to 1843 when its founder, John Bennet Lawes, decided to test the power of artificial fertilisers. He had built the world's first fertilizer factory a year earlier.

Walking in the same field where those trials started, project team leader Martin Parry explained how his team at Rothamsted and in the United States were looking at ways to super-charge photosynthesis in wheat by doubling the amount of CO2 inside the plant.

Parry, like many agronomists, believes a new global effort akin to what happened in the 1970s is needed to feed the world, beyond the promise of technology.

"We're going to have to do it much more effectively. We're going to have use our resources like fertilizer much more efficiently and we'll have to do it with less land," he said.

Developing countries will be a big focus in those efforts.

According to the USDA, yields for major crops, including corn, wheat, soybean and rice, are more than 40 percent lower in developing nations than rich nations, highlighting the paradox that production is lowest where demand is greatest.

The biggest breakthrough on the yields front could come in creating a new type of rice plant, the staple for many countries in the developing world.

"We expect the weather conditions and temperature to be more severe in the coming years," said IRRI Director-General Robert Zeigler during a recent open day at the institute, near Manila.

"That's why we need to develop more rice varieties that can tolerate flooding, drought, higher temperature, and can also tolerate salt water," he said as farmers chatted with scientists at the institute to learn about new varieties.

IRRI has already released commercial varieties that are drought and flood tolerant, limiting losses during bad weather.

Salt-water tolerance will also be crucial as seas rise and more powerful storms push seawater further into fertile river deltas, such as the Mekong Delta in Vietnam and large areas of coastal Bangladesh. Faster growing varieties can also help farmers get in a crop before the typhoon season starts.

IRRI, the CSIRO, as well as researchers in Britain and elsewhere are working on creating supercharged rice to try to double yields, by boosting the rate of photosynthesis.

The project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, could take 20 years, said CSIRO's Furbank, but will also lead to new ways to ramp up wheat yields as well.

Crucial as well to bridging the yield gap is better agronomy, or farm management practices. Syngenta has developed a way to boost rice yields in India by an average of 30 percent as well as cutting labor. Its Tegra system uses seeds coated with an insecticide, mechanical planting of seedlings and training for farmers. That can make a huge difference in a country of 1.2 billion people where two-thirds of the population are employed by the farm sector and where a failed monsoon can send shockwaves through international markets. "It should be an agronomy revolution," Calpe, the FAO economist said. "This has been missing tremendously in a lot of countries."

(Additional reporting by Gerard Wynn in London, Erik Dela Cruz in Manila, and Naveen Thukral in Singapore; Editing by Bill Tarrant)

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