U.N. Warns of Long-Term Climate Change Impacts on Food Production. By Gargi Parsai, The Hindu, 4/1/11. “‘Potentially catastrophic’ impacts on food production from slow-onset climate changes are expected to increasingly hit the developing world in the future, and action is required now to prepare for those impacts, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warned on March 31st in a report to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Food production systems and the ecosystems they depended on were highly sensitive to climate variability and change. Changes in temperature, precipitation and related outbreaks of pest and diseases could reduce production. Poor people in countries that depended on food imports were particularly vulnerable to such effects, the FAO said… A crucial measure highlighted in the FAO submission is need to develop staple food varieties better adapted to expected future climatic conditions. Plant genetic material stored in gene banks should be screened with future requirements in mind and additional plant genetic resources -- including those from wild relatives of food crops -- must be collected and studied because of the risk that they may disappear.”

Carbon-Rich Mangroves Ripe for Conservation. By Janelle Weaver, Nature, 4/3/11. “Mangrove forests in tropical regions of the Indian and Pacific Oceans store more carbon than previously recognized, according to a study published today in Nature Geoscience. The findings indicate that much of the carbon in such forests is found in the surrounding soil, which is rich in organic material. Cutting down mangrove forests, which occupy less than 1% of tropical forest area, could therefore contribute up to 10% of global carbon emissions from deforestation. Although carbon reserves in other types of tropical wetland forest have been assessed, the amount of carbon in mangroves has been largely ignored, even though they are present in more than 100 countries.”

Climate Meddling Dates Back 8,000 Years. By Alexandra Witze, Science News, 3/29/11. “People started influencing their home planet’s climate millennia before the industrial revolution’s fossil fuel–burning machines began spewing carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, a new study suggests. Clearing land -- first to hunt and gather, and then to farm -- removed trees that otherwise would have soaked up carbon dioxide. The new work suggests that humans working the land put nearly 350 billion metric tons of carbon -- many times other estimates -- into the atmosphere by the year 1850. (For comparison, between 1850 and 2000 people added 440 billion tons of carbon, mostly from burning fossil fuels — surpassing in a century and a half what had taken humanity eight millennia.)…

“[Team leader Jed Kaplan of the Federal Polytechnic School in Lausanne, Switzerland] reported the work on March 25 at an American Geophysical Union conference on past civilizations and climate. He and Lausanne colleague Kristen Krumhardt also describe the findings in an upcoming issue of Holocene… Climate scientists often select 1850 as the putative start of the industrial revolution. But the world in 1850 was not a pristine globe untouched by human hands... Rather, people cut down forests and cleared land early on... Previous research often assumed that as the world’s population grew, the proportion of cleared land grew as well. But the more people crowded onto a landscape, the more efficient they became at extracting dinner from it… Irrigation, fertilizer, multicropping and new tools allowed farmers to increase crop yields, and per-capita land use began to drop...

“Kaplan and Krumhardt looked at how growing population and changing land-use trends affected carbon emissions. The scientists gathered data on how many people lived in each population center for the past 8,000 years, then cataloged how land use changed over time. The result: a dramatic video showing a green-forested world giving way to a brown spread of deforestation, up until the modern era.”

Aircraft Contrails Stoke Warming, Cloud Formation. By Alister Doyle, Reuters, 3/29/11. “Aircraft condensation trails criss-crossing the sky may be warming the planet on a normal day more than the carbon dioxide emitted by all planes since the Wright Brothers' first flight in 1903, a study said on Tuesday. It indicated that contrails -- white lines of Vapor left by jet engines -- also have big knock-on effects by adding to the formation of high-altitude, heat-trapping cirrus clouds as the lines break up. The findings may help governments fix penalties on planes' greenhouse gas emissions in a U.N.-led assault on climate change. Or new engines might be designed to limit Vapor and instead spit out water drops or ice that fall from the sky…

“But a key difference is that CO2 lingers for decades while warming from contrails quickly ends if flights are grounded, such as after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, or in Europe after last year's Icelandic volcano eruption. ‘You can get rid of contrails very quickly. You can't get rid of CO2 quickly,’ lead author Ulrike Burkhardt at DLR told Reuters... Olivier Boucher, of the Met Office Hadley Center in England…said the findings might bring changes in air traffic control, for instance diverting planes from regions or altitudes where air moisture was high and favored cirrus formation. But a problem was that any benefits of fewer contrails might be canceled out by higher fuel use on longer routes.”

Energy Efficiency: The Jevons Paradox. By Charles Komanoff, Grist, 12/15/10. “One of the most penetrating critiques of energy-efficiency dogma you'll ever read is in this week's New Yorker [the 12/20/10 issue]. The Efficiency Dilemma, by David Owen, has this provocative subtitle: ‘If our machines use less energy, will we just use them more?’ Owen's answer is a resounding, iconoclastic, and probably correct Yes. Owen's thesis is that as a society becomes more energy-efficient, it becomes downright inefficient not to use more. The pursuit of efficiency is smart for individuals and businesses but a dead end for energy and climate policy. This idea isn't wholly original. It's known as the Jevons paradox, and it has a 150-year history of provoking bursts of discussion before being repressed from social consciousness.

“What Owen adds to the thread is considerable, however: a fine narrative arc; the conceptual feat of elevating the paradox from the micro level, where it is rebuttable, to the macro, where it is more robust; a compelling case study; and the courage to take on energy efficiency guru Amory Lovins…Best of all, Owen offers a way out: raising fuel prices via energy taxes… We can thank Owen not only for raising a critical, central question about energy efficiency, with potential ramifications for energy and climate policy, but for giving us a brief -- an eloquent and powerful one -- for a carbon tax.”

'Perverse' CO2 Payments Send Flood of Money to China. By Mark Shapiro, YaleEnviro360, 12/13/10. “European legislators in Brussels have discovered that the strategy they devised to combat climate change is helping subsidize the economy of their, and America’s, major global competitor -- China. European companies have been overpaying Chinese companies more than 70 times the cost to eliminate a potent greenhouse gas -- triflouromethane, or hfc 23, a byproduct of manufacturing a refrigerant that has been banned in developed countries and is being phased out in developing ones.

“In order to offset their own greenhouse gases, companies and utilities in Europe that are subject to the emission limits of the Kyoto Protocol have been paying vastly inflated prices to Chinese companies to destroy hfc 23, and in the process have been providing the Chinese government with hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue to compete against Europe’s own ‘green’ industries. European concern about this practice was a major source of contention during last week’s climate negotiations in Cancun, as the UN attempted to defend the integrity of the multi-billion dollar global carbon offset market.”

Pelosi’s ‘Green the Capitol’ Initiative Headed to the Trash Heap of History. By Sarah Abruzzese, Greenwire, 12/10/10. “Republicans are likely to make significant changes to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's ‘Green the Capitol’ initiative in the coming months. The initiative, which was launched when Pelosi (D-Calif.) became speaker in 2007, has attempted to change the way members and their staffs think about energy and the environment in their daily work lives, emphasizing recycling and energy efficiency. According to the House chief administrative officer, the program has diverted more than 75,000 pounds of waste from landfills, cut more than 400,000 pounds of carbon emissions and saved more than 175,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity. Several members of the House Republican transition team said they are fairly certain that the operations budget for the Capitol will be cut with the GOP set to take over, meaning that some of Pelosi's high-profile and costly environmentally friendly programs may end up in the trash heap of history.”