Will the costs of “loss & damage” be shared by polluting nations?

From an Article by Bob Berwyn and Zoha Tunio, Inside Climate News, Nov. 19, 2022

SHARM El-SHEIKH, Egypt—A new COP27 agreement that establishes a funding mechanism to compensate developing countries for losses and damages caused by global warming may be the biggest breakthrough in global climate policy since the 2015 Paris Agreement. If it sticks?

The deal was reached as two weeks of nail-biting negotiations here went into overtime with little to show for all the talk. Many negotiators arrived at the conference halls Saturday morning with their suitcases packed for the trip home while facing the prospect of being called out for failing to make progress on one of the key promises of the United Nation’s effort to address increasingly severe climate change impacts like floods, droughts and deadly heat waves.

Along with finding ways to stop the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to slow global warming, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was established in 1992 to address the fundamental inequalities of climate change impacts. Developed countries in the Global North are responsible for about 79 percent of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions, but less developed countries in the Global South have taken the biggest hit from climate change and don’t have the financial and technical resources to recover from them.

That disparity is at the heart of global climate justice and the 1992 United Nations climate framework committed all the parties to take “into account their common but differentiated responsibilities,” with developed countries committing to assist developing countries “that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change in meeting costs of adaptation to those adverse effects … by providing new and additional financial resources.”

The 2015 Paris Agreement added more detail by recognizing “the importance of averting, minimizing and addressing loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change, including extreme weather events and slow onset events” like sea level rise.

“The issue of climate justice has been at the heart of the climate negotiations from its inception over three decades ago,” said Lavanya Rajamani, an international law expert who advised African nations at COP27. “Yet it is only now that its crucial importance in addressing climate change is being realized. The U.N. climate regime needs to place as much emphasis on adaptation, loss and damage and support as it has on target-setting for mitigation, in fairness to vulnerable nations, and in light of the increasing incidence of devastating impacts as mitigation efforts fall short.”

On Saturday at COP27, 30 years after those first promises were made, developed countries finally agreed to “establish new funding arrangements for assisting developing countries in responding to loss and damage, including a focus on addressing loss and damage by providing and assisting in mobilizing new and additional resources.”

The 11th hour deal was sealed Saturday afternoon when the United States reversed its earlier opposition and agreed to the creation of a specific loss and damage fund, surprising climate activists who just hours earlier had been excoriating the U.S. for its decades of obstruction.

This response to the long-standing demand by developing countries was overdue, said Harjeet Singh, who leads global political strategy for Climate Action Network International, an umbrella organization representing 190 civil society groups in 130 countries.

Intensifying global warming impacts require a systemic response, not just piecemeal post-disaster relief efforts, he said. “Humanitarian aid is welcome, but was never sufficient to help people recover from these impacts,” he said, “We wanted the U.N. climate change system to come in and actually create a mechanism that can help people at scale.”

Under the framework U.N. climate treaty, “Countries with the greatest historical responsibility for emissions, and the greatest capacity to act, have committed to bear the costs of climate change,” said Brian O’Callaghan, lead researcher with Oxford University’s economic recovery project. “Rich countries should act with speed or otherwise increase their future liability.”

The complex negotiations on loss and damage featured shifting alliances among various groups of countries that, at different times in the process, put competing proposals on the table. Ahead of COP27, United States climate envoy John Kerry was careful not to commit to a specific loss and damage mechanism, promising only that the U.S. was open to talking about the issue in the coming years.

Singh said that before COP27 started, the United States appeared to be opposed to the creation of a specific loss and damage fund, preferring to talk about potentially restructuring existing climate finance mechanisms to address those climate impacts that go beyond countries’ capacities to adapt.

The collective push from developing countries and resistance from a large part of the developed world led some attendees to fear a repeat of COP15 in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2009, where a similar rift between the wealthy nations most responsible for climate change and poorer ones that are enduring its worst impacts led to an impasse.

At the end of the two-week talks in Copenhagen, world leaders dropped many of their goals for the negotiations and significantly lowered their targets. The parties agreed to recognize the scientific evidence for keeping global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius, but made no tangible commitments to reduce emissions in order to achieve that goal.

But this year, civil society groups applied relentless pressure during the talks, and Singh credited activists with keeping negotiators and the public focused on the topic of loss and damage. At the same time, developing countries maintained a unified front in the talks, “which actually made a huge difference in getting this over the line,” he said. Ultimately, it was the United States taking the step and backing the loss and damage funding mechanism that made the difference, he added.

The fact that the agreement came during a climate summit on a continent enduring some of the world’s most severe climate impacts gave it particular relevance. During the two-week conference, 14 flood alerts were issued for Africa, according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

“After 30 years a loss and damage fund is coming home and it’s coming home on African soil,” said Mohamed Adow, director of energy and climate change for Power Shift Africa on Saturday afternoon during a press conference by Climate Action Network International.

As written, the loss and damage agreement includes views from all countries, but discussions about “some of the thorny issues around who will pay and where it (the funding mechanism) is going to be located have been moved to next year,” Singh said. “In fact, that’s exactly what we as civil society … were also demanding, because the most important thing to be done here was to establish the fund. You cannot do everything in two weeks.”

Yet to be determined is how the fund will be administered, who will pay into it, and which countries will receive money. He said there is still a long road ahead before it actually starts helping people hurt by climate impacts, “but the important thing is we now can send a message of hope to people who are suffering right now.”

Q.E.D.

Glaciers naturally flow but thinning is alarming

From an Article by Brett Wilkins, The Guardian UK, 4/28/21

Researchers warn of the need for urgent climate action as a study published Wednesday revealed that the world’s mountain glaciers are melting at an unprecedented pace, with glacial thinning rates outside Antarctica and Greenland doubling this century. “A doubling of the thinning rates in 20 years for glaciers outside Greenland and Antarctica tells us we need to change the way we live,” the study’s lead author said.

For the first time ever, researchers analyzed three-dimensional satellite measurements of the world’s approximately 220,000 glaciers, except for those on the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. The results, published in Nature, show that the planet’s glaciers lost 267 billion tonnes of ice each year from 2000 to 2019, the equivalent of 21% of sea level rise. The study’s authors said that is enough water to flood all of Switzerland under six feet of water every year.

The paper notes that “thinning rates of glaciers outside ice sheet peripheries doubled over the past two decades.” The study’s authors found that, on average, glaciers lost 4% of their volume during the two decades studied. They determined that the fastest-melting glaciers are in Alaska and the Alps. Alaska alone accounted for one-quarter of the world’s glacial melt, with the Columbia Glacier in Prince William Sound retreating by around 115 feet annually.

“A doubling of the thinning rates in 20 years for glaciers outside Greenland and Antarctica tells us we need to change the way we live,” Romain Hugonnet of the University of Toulouse in France, the study’s lead author, told The Guardian.

“It can be difficult to get the public to understand why glaciers are important because they seem so remote,” he added, “but they affect many things in the global water cycle including regional hydrology, and by changing too rapidly, can lead to the alteration or collapse of downstream ecosystems.”

Hugonnet said he was particularly concerned about glacier loss in high Asian mountain ranges, which are the sources of rivers upon which more than 1.5 billion people rely for water. “India and China are depleting underground sources and relying on river water, which substantially originates from glaciers during times of drought,” he told The Guardian.

“This will be fine for a few decades because glaciers will keep melting and provide more river runoff, which acts as a buffer to protect populations from water stress,” said Hugonnet. “But after these decades, the situation could go downhill. If we do not plan ahead, there could be a crisis for water and food, affecting the most vulnerable.”

Mark Serreze, director of the Colorado-based National Snow and Ice Data Center, told the Associated Press that sea level rise—which is exacerbated by glacier melt—”is going to be a bigger and bigger problem as we move through the 21st century.” Serreze did not contribute to the new paper.

The new study’s authors implore policymakers to devise adaptive measures for the estimated billion people threatened with water and food insecurity before 2050. “We need to act now,” stressed Hugonnet.

Samuel Nussbaumer of the World Glacier Monitoring Service, which did not take part in the study, said that “the new paper will have a big impact.”

“This is the most global, complete study. The gain in new information is huge,” Nussbaumer told The Guardian. “The rapid change we see now is really interesting from a scientific point of view. Never before in history has change happened this fast.”

The new study follows research published last week showing shifts in the Earth’s rotational axis—which have accelerated over the past three decades—are caused by melting glaciers.

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“If we do not plan ahead, there could be a crisis for water and food, affecting the most vulnerable.” —Romain Hugonnet, University of Toulouse

“Never before in history has change happened this fast.” —Samuel Nussbaumer, World Glacier Monitoring Service

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See also: Global Ice Loss on Pace to Drive Worst-Case Sea Level Rise, Bob Berwyn, Inside Climate News, January 25, 2021

A new study combines ice melt data from all sources to reaffirm one of the most serious climate change threats.

Living on “iceberg alley” is unbelievable!!!

From Stephanie Osmanski, Green Matters, December 10, 2020

One of the most overt effects of climate change that researchers can point to is the melting of ice in the Arctic. The average temperature of the planet is getting hotter, with 15 of the hottest years on record having occurred since 2000, according to NASA, and as temperatures climb, the climate no longer becomes sustainable for the environment necessary to support the Arctic. In fact, as of winter 2018, the Arctic’s sea ice coverage was the second smallest it’s ever been measured.

So, what happens if the Arctic melts?

“The Arctic is a natural freezer,” Michael Mann, a climatologist and director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, told The Verge. “Just like you’d be concerned if all of the ice in your freezer melted, so should you be concerned about the loss of Arctic sea ice.”

Sea levels will be drastically affected (increased)

The disappearing ice in the Arctic affects more than just the surrounding area. As the Arctic’s ice disappears, the rest of the world experiences global warming. As per Museum of Natural History, one of the most dangerous ways in which we would be affected by the Arctic melting is the rising of sea levels.

Why is this important? Different cities are established at different sea levels. If the sea levels rise 20 feet, populations and cities would be decimated. Coastal communities — Florida, New Jersey, Maryland – could be drastically affected and even now, are experiencing more instances of flooding. Raise the sea level 20 feet, and these areas will likely not survive.

“If all the ice covering Antarctica, Greenland, and in mountain glaciers around the world were to melt, sea level would rise about 70 meters (230 feet). The ocean would cover all the coastal cities. And land area would shrink significantly,” the Museum of Natural History site reads. “The [main] concern is that portions of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps may disappear. We do not know how much or how quickly this could happen, because we do not know exactly how it will happen.

Here’s what happens if the permafrost melts:

Mongabay reports that permafrost – which refers to any ground that remains completely frozen in nature for at least two years straight, usually near the North or South poles – is heading toward a crisis. Permafrost is located in Alaska, Canada, and Siberia.

“Permafrost covers approximately 22.8 million square kilometers (8.8 million square miles) in the Arctic, sub-Arctic and alpine regions — comprising nearly a quarter of the exposed land surface in the northern hemisphere,” according to Mongabay.

“The world’s permafrost serves as a massive carbon reservoir, storing nearly twice the amount of carbon currently found in the atmosphere. An estimated 1,400 gigatons of carbon — made up of decomposed plants and animals which once inhabited the Earth — can be found embedded in permafrost.”

Should the world’s permafrost melt, it could unleash a toxic amount of carbon, while simultaneously damaging wildlife homes.

Damage to the Arctic may also lead to extreme weather

It has been proven that when the Arctic is “unusually warm,” according to The Verge, extreme winter weather is anywhere from two to four times more likely in the Eastern U.S. Clearly, our extreme weather events here, are directly tied to what’s going on in the Arctic. If the Arctic continues to warm – and at alarming rates at that – the U.S. could experience more extreme weather events such as droughts, heat waves, heavy rainfall, and hurricanes and tropical storms.

Some researchers believe the Arctic’s issues are to blame for unusual weather in the U.S. – 2018’s bomb cyclone, record-breaking freezing temps, and a slew of hurricanes in a short period of time, to name a few. It’s not just the U.S. that is affected by the state of the Arctic. A 2017 study linked the Arctic’s disappearing ice predicament to the unhealthy smog layer in China.

How can we stop the Arctic ice from disappearing?

The most important, day-to-day thing we can do to stop the Arctic ice from disappearing is to cut back on greenhouse gas and carbon emissions. The lesser rate emissions happen, the slower the rate of global warming happens. The slower the rate of global warming, the slower ice from the Arctic disappears.

However, researchers are actively searching for ways to slow down the rate of the ice disappearing. Non-profit Ice911 has proposed covering the Arctic in millions of silica and glass beads, to reflect sunlight back into space and while insulating ice that would have otherwise melted. Silica does not pose a threat to nature or animals, and the beads actually stick to the ice and water upon contact.

Ice911’s silica bead tactic is still being field-tested as of 2019, but it could prove an important means to an end in the near future. In the meantime, the most impactful thing the average person can do is be cognizant in trying to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and carbon footprint overall.

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Listen Up! Dr. James Hansen Has A Message For The Citizens Of Earth, Steve Hanley, Clean Technia, September 7, 2020

Dr. Hansen says there are three parameters to the global heating conundrum but only two receive regular attention — the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and average global surface temperatures. The third critical component is the Earth’s energy imbalance and it may be the most important of the three. “Stabilizing climate requires that humanity reduce the energy imbalance to approximately zero,” Hansen writes.

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See also (Video): New projections for sea-level rise due to climate change, CBS News, December 23, 2020,

A newly published scientific paper warns that sea levels are rising more rapidly than previously thought. Oceanographer John Englander is one the authors of that paper, and he joined CBSN’s Tom Hanson to discuss their findings and the importance of the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica.

The Lancet: Fossil Fuels Are Killing Us… Quitting Them Can Save Us

From an Article by Jon Queally, Common Dreams, June 23, 2015

Comparing coal, oil, and gas addiction to the last generation’s effort to kick the tobacco habit, doctors say that quitting would be the best thing humanity can do for its long-term healing.

The bad news is very bad, indeed. But first, the good news: “Responding to climate change could be the biggest global health opportunity of this century.”

That message is the silver lining contained in a comprehensive newly published report by The Lancet, the UK-based medical journal, which explores the complex intersection between global human health and climate change.

“It took on entrenched interests such as the tobacco industry and led the fight against HIV/AIDS. Now is the time for us to lead the way in responding to another great threat to human and environmental health.” — Prof. Peng Gong, Tsinghua University

The wide-ranging and peer-reviewed report—titled Health and climate change: policy responses to protect public health—declares that the negative impacts of human-caused global warming have put at risk some of the world’s most impressive health gains over the last half century. What’s more, it says, continued use of fossil fuels is leading humanity to a future in which infectious disease patterns, air pollution, food insecurity and malnutrition, involuntary migration, displacement, and violent conflict will all be made made worse.

“Climate change,” said commission co-chairman Dr. Anthony Costello, a pediatrician and director of the Global Health Institute at the University College of London, “has the potential to reverse the health gains from economic development that have been made in recent decades – not just through the direct effects on health from a changing and more unstable climate, but through indirect means such as increased migration and reduced social stability. Our analysis clearly shows that by tackling climate change we can also benefit health. Tackling climate change represents one of the greatest opportunities to benefit human health for generations to come.”

The four key findings of the report include:

1. The effects of climate change threaten to undermine the last half-century of gains in development and global health. The impacts are being felt today, and future projections represent an unacceptably high and potentially catastrophic risk to human health.

2. Tackling climate change could be the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century.

3. Achieving a decarbonized global economy and securing the public health benefits it offers is no longer primarily a technological or economic question – it is now a political one.

4. Climate change is fundamentally an issue of human health, and health professionals have a vital role to play in accelerating progress on mitigation and adaptation policies.

“When health professionals shout ‘emergency’ politicians everywhere should listen.” —Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth“Climate Change is a medical emergency,” said Dr. Hugh Montgomery, commission co-chair and director of the UCL Institute for Human Health and Performance. “It thus demands an emergency response.”

With rising global temperatures fueling increasing extreme weather events, crop failures, water scarcity, and other crises, Montgomery says the report is an attempt to make it clear that drastic and immediate actions should be taken. “Under such circumstances,” he said, “no doctor would consider a series of annual case discussions and aspirations adequate, yet this is exactly how the global response to climate change is proceeding.”

In a companion paper published alongside the larger report, commission members Helena Wang and Richard Horton explained why human health impacts are an important part of the larger argument regarding climate change:

When climate change is framed as a health issue, rather than purely as an environmental, economic, or technological challenge, it becomes clear that we are facing a predicament that strikes at the heart of humanity. Health puts a human face on what can sometimes seem to be a distant threat. By making the case for climate change as a health issue, we hope that the civilizational crisis we face will achieve greater public resonance. Public concerns about the health effects of climate change, such as undernutrition and food insecurity, have the potential to accelerate political action in ways that attention to carbon dioxide emissions alone do not.

Responding to the findings and warnings contained in the report, Mike Childs, the head of policy for the Friends of the Earth-UK, said the message from one of the world’s foremost institutions on public health has given powerful new evidence to the argument that “radical action is urgently required” to avoid further climate catastrophe.

“When health professionals shout ‘emergency’,” Childs said, “politicians everywhere should listen.”

Going from diagnosis to prescribing a remedy, the doctors and scientists involved with the report—who equated the human health emergency of climate change with previous physician-led fights against tobacco use and HIV/AIDS—argue the crisis of anthropogenic climate change demands—as a matter of “medical necessity”—the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels (with special emphasis on coal) from the global energy mix. In addition, the authors say their data on global human health support a recommendation for an international carbon price.

“The health community has responded to many grave threats to health in the past,” said another commission co-chair, Professor Peng Gong of Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. “It took on entrenched interests such as the tobacco industry and led the fight against HIV/AIDS. Now is the time for us to lead the way in responding to another great threat to human and environmental health.”

The Commission argues that human health would vastly improve in a less-polluted world free from fossil fuels. “Virtually everything that you want to do to tackle climate change has health benefits,” said Dr. Costello. “We’re going to cut heart attacks, strokes, diabetes.”

A video, produced by the Commission and released alongside the report, also explains:

As Wang and Horton conclude in their remarks, “Climate change is the defining challenge of our generation. Health professionals must mobilize now to address this challenge and protect the health and well-being of future generations.”

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Not ‘If’ But ‘How’: New Study Shows Why All Extreme Weather Is Climate Related

From an Article by Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams, June 23, 2015

New research explains why people debating whether or not specific events are caused by climate change have it all wrong

The debate over climate change has long focused on determining attribution—whether rising greenhouse gases and global warming caused a particular storm, drought, flood, or blizzard. Now, a new study in Nature Climate Change published Monday seeks to shift the underlying question from “if” to “how.”

“The climate is changing,” wrote National Center for Atmospheric Research scientists Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo and University of Reading physicist Theodore Shepherd in their study, Attribution of Climate Extreme Events. “The environment in which all weather events occur is not what it used to be. All storms, without exception, are different. Even if most of them look just like the ones we used to have, they are not the same.”

Antarctic Ice Melting

Major Antarctic Glacier Melting Irreversibly, Reaching Tipping Point

From Yale Environment 360,  January 14, 2014

A major Antarctic ice mass, the Pine Island Glacier, is melting irreversibly and could add as much as a centimeter to global sea level rise over the next 20 years alone, according to new research published in Nature Climate Change.

Ice flow velocities at the surface of Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica. Regions in red are flowing most quickly toward the sea. The irregular black line represents the “grounding line,” where land-based ice meets the floating ice shelf. Image credit: Favier, et al., Nature Climate Change, 2014

Calculations show that the Pine Island Glacier’s “grounding line”—where land-based ice meets a floating ice shelf that is an extension of the glacier—has retreated roughly 10 kilometers in the past decade. Scientists say that the grounding line is in the process of a 40-kilometer retreat that could push it beyond an important tipping point.

Pine Island Glacier is a major contributor to global sea level rise and has been losing massive amounts of ice for decades, accounting for 20 percent of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet’s total ice loss. An international research team says that the Pine Island Glacier has been losing 20 billion tons of ice annually for the past two decades and could lose 100 billion tons annually over the next 20 years.

The glacier ” has started a phase of self-sustained retreat and will irreversibly continue its decline,” says Gael Durand, a glaciologist with France’s Grenoble Alps University.

Visit EcoWatch’s CLIMATE CHANGE page for more related news on this topic.

Source:  James Balog’s “Chasing Ice” Review

Twenty years ago, James Balog didn’t believe in climate change. In fact, the whole concept seemed a little arrogant to him.

Really, humans thinking they were actually powerful enough to affect the health of the entire planet? How cocky. Sure, the earth warmed, the earth cooled, but it did it on its own, and it took eons.

But Balog was also a world-class photographer, specializing in nature shots for outlets like National Geographic. And so he decided to begin documenting what, if anything, was happening to the world’s glaciers.

What he came back with convinced him of the crisis. If we’re lucky, it will convince a lot of other people, too.

“Chasing Ice” documents Balog’s work, and one of his pictures is worth a thousand words from any stubborn doubter. Scene after scene shows glaciers shedding mountains of melting ice the size of football fields, rivers of frigid water flowing out into the oceans.

And while they can’t show the greenhouse gases, they can show other ugly evidence of our pollution – bits of far-flung, sludgy black dust from diesel exhaust or coal-burning factories that spot the virginal snow and, because of their dark color, attract and hold warming sunlight.

Balog knew he needed more than random photographs to convince, though. So he has spent years visiting places from Alaska to Iceland – and, also, setting up high-tech security cameras to watch for him. Their time-lapse photography shows a rapidly shrinking wilderness.

It has come at some cost, too. Balog – who looks a little like a calmer, even-straighter Jeff Daniels – is away from his wife and two daughters for long stretches of time. He has blown out his knees so often from the arduous hikes, he sometimes crosses the ice on crutches.

But he cares too much about documenting this destruction to even think of stopping.

Although “Chasing Ice” is barely feature-length, it could be even shorter. Ironically, that comes from its own effectiveness; once you’ve seen one of Balog’s time-lapse sequences of disappearing glaciers, and a couple of graphs, there’s not much more to see. The pictures have their own terrible beauty, but they begin to feel redundant.

But that doesn’t mean they’re not terribly, chillingly important.

Ratings note: The film contains some strong language.