Iowa to host national symposium on climate change

AP

DES MOINES, Iowa – Iowa will play host to a national symposium on climate change next week at the Honey Creek Resort State Park near Centerville.

Leaders from Iowa, Maryland, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Washington, West Virginia, Wyoming, Minnesota, Missouri and the American Samoa are expected to attend the meeting from Nov. 16-18.

Iowa Department of Natural Resources Director Rich Leopold says symposium will be an outstanding opportunity to continue a discussion about conservation and sustainability.

He says a goal of the symposium will be to form an organization of state natural resource agency leaders to advocate for national policies and programs that will promote sustainability.

Scientists upset over end of global warming tests

 

By Jeff Barnard | Associated Press

DURHAM For more than a decade, the federal government has spent millions of dollars pumping elevated levels of carbon dioxide into small groups of trees to test how forests will respond to global warming in the next 50 years.

Some scientists believe they are on the cusp of receiving key results from the time-consuming experiments.

The U.S. Department of Energy, however, which is funding the project, has told the scientists to chop down the trees, collect the data and move on to new research. That plan has upset some researchers who have spent years trying to understand how forests may help stave off global warming, and who want to keep the project going for at least a couple of more years.

“There has been an investment in these experiments and it’s a shame we are going to walk away from that investment,” said William Chameides, an atmospheric scientist at Duke University, where one of the experimental forests is located. “There is no question that ultimately we want to cut the trees down and analyze the soil. The question is whether now is the time to do it.”

Ronald Neilson, a U.S. Forest Service bioclimatologist in Corvallis, Ore., said the experiments should continue because they still have potential to answer key questions about how rainfall and fertility affect how much carbon a forest will store long-term – essential to understanding how forests may soften the blow of climate change.

But the Energy Department, following the advice of a specially convened panel of experts, believes that chopping down the trees and digging up the soil will allow the first real measurements of how much carbon the leaves, branches, trunks and roots have been storing, said Michael Kuperberg, a program manager with the agency.

Ending the experiments will also allow the funding to be devoted to new research that will look at the effects of higher temperatures, changes in rainfall and variations in soil fertility, Kuperberg said.

“What we are trying to do here is balance the time to get optimal results out of the existing experiment with our desire for a new generation of experiments that we feel is more likely to realistically represent future climate scenarios,” Kuperberg said.

Some scientists, though, believe ending the long-term research may be a mistake.

Read on here.

Ruling could spell trouble for coal plants

By KARL PUCKETT | Great Falls Tribune  

Environmentalists said a decision Thursday could carry implications for proposed coal-fired facilities nationwide — including at the Highwood Generating Station planned east of Great Falls.  An appeals panel ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency failed to consider carbon dioxide emissions controls at a proposed coal-fired power plant in Utah.

“I think it will force greenhouse-gas emitters to bear down and consider ways to reduce their emissions and address global warming,” said Abigail Dillen, an attorney for Earthjustice, of the decision.

Earthjustice is representing the Helena-based Montana Environmental Information Center and Great Falls-based Citizens for Clean Energy, which are suing the state Department of Environmental Quality, demanding carbon dioxide controls at the Highwood plant, which is under construction eight miles east of Great Falls.

“They’re not saying the Clean Air Act means you have to regulate CO2,” said Ken Reich, attorney for Southern Montana Generation & Transmission Cooperative, the Highwood power plant’s developer. He added the ruling doesn’t go as far as MEIC and CCE claim.

EPA Region 8, headquartered in Denver, issued a permit to Deseret Power Electric Co-op in 2007 to construct a coal-fired unit at Deseret’s existing Bonanza Power Plant near Bonanza, Utah.

The Sierra Club appealed to the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board, saying the permit violated the federal Clean Air Act by not requiring the “best available control technology” to limit carbon dioxide emissions. CO2 is a suspected contributor to climate change.

In its decision, the appeals board remanded the permit back to the EPA, saying the regional office must look into whether the Clean Air Act requires CO2 emissions limits. The judges also said the issue was bigger than the Utah plant.

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Europe, Japan Face $46 Billion Global-Warming Penalty

By Alex Morales and Jeremy van Loon | Bloomberg

Nov. 14 (Bloomberg) — Twenty nations including Japan, Italy and Australia may be releasing more greenhouse-gas pollution than they agreed to under the Kyoto treaty to curb global warming.

They’re failing to rein in carbon-dioxide output enough to meet their pledges signed in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, according to reports by individual countries. As a penalty for missing their goals under the treaty, the nations are required to buy permits for every excess ton of the heat-trapping gas released through 2012. That will total 2.3 billion permits for 20 nations, New Carbon Finance, a research firm in London, has estimated.

The potential penalty, 36 billion euros ($46 billion) for the group based on current permit prices, and the fact that only a minority of 37 Kyoto signatory nations may meet their pledges bodes poorly for international efforts to limit global warming.

“This shows there’s a lot more interest in promising stuff than actually keeping those promises,” Bjorn Lomborg, author of the book “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” said in a telephone interview from Copenhagen. “What you should be doing is investing in research and development to make much more dramatic emissions cuts much cheaper in the future.”

In three days the UN will publish a report on emissions data for 2006, compiling figures from national reports already released. Analysts have been using that data to estimate emissions for Kyoto’s 2008-2012 measurement period because a nation’s CO2 output from factories, power plants and vehicles varies little year to year. It takes about 10 years, for example, to build a low-emissions nuclear plant to replace several dirtier coal-fired power stations.

Cost-Sharing

Kyoto’s binding targets are a cornerstone in the international effort to limit global warming. The U.S. is the only developed nation not to ratify the pact.

Under the treaty, countries that are unable to meet targets must buy permits from nations that have a surplus. The government must pay the bill, and some such as Italy and Spain are requiring industry to share in the costs.

Alternatively nations may buy credits representing greenhouse-gas reductions made abroad through investments in clean-energy and forestry projects. That comes at a cost. UN- Certified Emission Reduction credits, or CERs, which double as a Kyoto permit, today traded at 15.80 euros for a 2008 contract.

The U.K., Sweden and several eastern European nations are headed to meet their Kyoto obligations, according to carbon analysts. Others are set to miss by a wide margin, with Canada, Japan, Italy and Spain the worst transgressors.

Canada, facing the biggest emissions overshoot, has already said it won’t meet its Kyoto target, even by buying permits. It wasn’t included in New Carbon Finance’s forecast.

Read on here.

Oklahoma: Climate’s effect on southwest lake will be noted

 

BY JULIE BISBEE | News OK

A reservoir in southwest Oklahoma will be part of a federal study on how climate change can affect the state’s water supply.  Scientists from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation plan to study the demand for water at Lake Altus-Lugert and how climate change relates to water levels in the lake.

Data from the $100,000 study will be used in the planning for Oklahoma’s Comprehensive Water Plan, which will be finished in 2011. The Oklahoma Water Resources Board will pick up $20,000 of the study’s cost.

The Altus-Lugert reservoir is the primary source of irrigation for more than half of the state’s cotton crop produced over 45,000 acres of land in southwest Oklahoma. In a typical year, more than 100,000 bales of cotton worth $35 million dollars are produced, generating an estimated economic impact of $220 million to Jackson County alone.

Kyle Arthur, director of water planning for the board, said hydrologists will look at water levels at the lake and compare them to climate patterns.

“We’ve got to understand what sort of trends are emerging because of climate change,” Arthur said. “We’ve got to think about what the impact will be on water resources as we plan ahead 50 years.”