Uni Eropa Sangat Kawatir Pada Negosiasi Iklim

PITTSBURGH, KOMPAS.com - Uni Eropa pada menyuarakan keprihatinan mendalam tentang negosiasi perubahan iklim, memperingatkan mereka sedang menuju ke arah yang salah dengan minggu-minggu sebelum membuat atau putusnya konferensi Kopenhagen .

Perdana Menteri Swedia Fredrik Reinfeldt, kepala Uni Eropa saat ini, datang ke kota AS Pittsburgh untuk KTT ekonomi kelompok 20-negara setelah pembicaraan tingkat atas di Perserikatan Bangsa-Bangsa tentang perubahan iklim.

"Kami berdua sangat khawatir tentang situasi," kata Reinfeldt dalam jumpa pers bersama dengan Kepala Komisi Eropa Jose Manuel Barroso.

"Ketika datang ke perundingan, mereka sebenarnya memperlambat; mereka tidak akan ke arah yang benar," kata Reinfeldt. "Kami sangat khawatir bahwa kita perlu untuk mempercepat negosiasi."

Sedikit lebih dari dua bulan tersisa hingga konferensi di Kopenhagen, yang dimaksudkan untuk menyetujui kerangka pengganti Protokol Kyoto, perjanjian yang mengharuskan pengurangan emisi disalahkan atas pemanasan global.

Uni Eropa dan Jepang telah menjadi juara terkemuka Protokol Kyoto, yang tidak membuat persyaratan pada negara-negara berkembang untuk mengurangi emisi karbon.

Namun, negara-negara kaya termasuk Amerika Serikat bersatu dalam bersikeras bahwa perjanjian berikutnya juga memerlukan tindakan oleh negara-negara berkembang.

Presiden China Hu Jintao mengatakan hari Selasa bahwa negara berkembang terbesar di dunia itu siap untuk memperlambat pertumbuhan emisi karbon sepertidi negara maju, tapi ia tidak menetapkan angka.

Es Kutub Utara Kondisinya Sangat Mengkawatirkan

JAKARTA, KOMPAS.com - Rebecca Woodgate tidak mempunyai waktu untuk ngobrol sementara tim oceanografi bergerak cepat di dek kapal penelitian mereka di Bering strait, wilayah penting bagi studi dampak pemanasan global.

Woodgate, dari Polar Science Center di University of Washington, menghadapi banyak pekerjaan dalam waktu singkat, untuk secara tepat menunjukkan lokasi bawah laut delapan alat pengumpul data di wilayah AS dan Rusia di selat tersebut.

Ia secara elektronik mengangkat alat itu ke permukaan dan menenggelamkan alat baru yang akan ditambatkan di sana selama satu tahun.

Itu adalah pekerjaan yang harus dilakukan secara cepat guna membaca data yang bermanfaat buat dia dan rekannya di dalam ekspedisi gabungan Rusia-AS untuk menaksir dampak perubahan iklim di perairan utara-jauh antara bekas musuh era Perang Dingin tersebut.

Ketika seseorang yang melihatkan kegiatan itu dan berada terlalu dekat selama penggelaran di perairan yang berombak kecil di lepas pantai Siberia, ilmuwan kelahiran Inggris tersebut secara tergesa-gesa menyerahkan satu paket sepotong gigi besi dan berkata, "Ini, kerjakan sesuatu dengan ini."

Alat penambat tersebut, yang mirip benang bola pantai, menyediakan pengukuran tepat mengenai arus, temperatur dan kandungan garam. Sebagian bahkan mencatat suara ikan paus bagi misi itu, yang disebut RUSALCA, atau Russian-American Long-term Census of the Arctic.

RUSALCA, yang dalam bahasa daerah di Rusia adalah nama dewi laut, telah mengungkap bukti yang meningkat mengenai pemanasan dan dampaknya di tempat samudera Pasifik dan Arcktik bertemu.

RUSALCA melakukan itu sementara menyeimbangkan sasaran dua negara dengan kepentingan yang berkembang dalam menjamin wilayah Kutub Utara mereka, yang kaya akan sumber daya, saat perairan terbuka membuat wilayah itu lebih mudah dimasuki.

Kegiatan tersebut diselenggarakan oleh U.S. National Administration dan Rusian Academy of Sciences. "Daerah itu adalah bagian penting dari teka-teki perubahan iklim," demikian laporan kantor resmi Inggris, Reuters.

"Saya melihat Bering Strait berpotensi menjadi pemicu bagi pencairan es," kata Woodgate, sewaktu menaikkan (uploading) data dari alat penambat di kapal penelitian rusia, Professor Khromov.

Perlunya keterangan lengkap, dari pantai Alaska sampai ujung timur Rusia, membuat kerja sama bilateral jadi pentin. Tanpa itu, "Anda berada dalam masalah," katanya.

Woodgate termasuk di antara sebanyak 50 ilmuwan dari Amerika Serikat, Rusia dan negara lain di kapal Professor Khromov selama enam pekan pada Agustus dan September, untuk mempelajari kehidupan laut dan air di Laut Bering dan Chukchi dan di perairan Kutub Utara jauh di sebelh utara Wrangel Island di lepas pantai timur-laut Rusia.

Sulit untuk membayangkan ketika angin dingin dan sangat kuat serta laut ganas mengombang-ambingkan kapal itu pada akhir musim panas, Air yang lebih segar dan lebih hangat yang mengalir melalui selat tersebut menuju Kutub Utara barangkali mendorong ujung es laut ke belakang.

Pada 2007, es itu mencapai rekor yang belum pernah terjadi sebelumnya sehingga mengejutkan para ilmuwan. Musim panas tahun ini, es trsebut berkurang jadi daerah paling kecil ketiganya dalam caratan sejarah, demikian laporan U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Sekjen PBB: Atasi Segera Kenaikan Temperatur Global

NEW YORK, KOMPAS.com — PBB mengakhiri pertemuan tingkat tinggi satu hari mengenai perubahan iklim dan Sekretaris Jenderal PBB Ban Ki-moon mendesak para pemimpin dunia agar bertindak cepat guna menjamin keberhasilan dalam konferensi mendatang PBB mengenai iklim di Copenhagen, Desember.

"Saya berbesar hati mendengar bahwa makin banyak pemimpin siap bertindak di luar perspektif nasional guna mengikuti kepemimpinan global," kata Sekjen PBB Ban Ki-moon kepada para pemimpin dunia saat penutupan sidang tersebut.

"Anda telah melakukan tindakan untuk tetap terlibat sampai satu persetujuan ditandatangani di Copenhagen. Dan Anda telah sepakat memberi panduan kepada para perunding Anda untuk bekerja ke arah kesepakatan yang ambisius, efektif, dan adil di Copenhagen," kata Ban.

Hampir 100 kepala negara dan pemerintahan ikut dalam pertemuan tingkat tinggi itu, pertemuan terbesar para pemimpin dunia guna membahas perubahan iklim.

Dengan membicarakan masalah tersebut, Sekjen berharap dapat menggerakkan keinginan politik serta momentum yang diperlukan guna mencapai satu kesepakatan ambisius dalam konferensi Copenhagen.

Perubahan iklim adalah masalah ekonomi dan geopolitik abad ke-21. Namun Ban, yang mengunjungi wilayah Kutub Utara awal bulan ini dan menyaksikan sendiri dampak cepat perubahan iklim, menyampaikan penyesalan mengenai perundingan dan mendesak para pemimpin untuk melakukan pandangan jauh guna memenuhi kebutuhan rakyat mereka.

Sekjen PBB tersebut membantah pendapat bahwa penanganan pemanasan global itu dilakukan dengan tebusan sangat tinggi. "Mereka keliru. Yang benar adalah sebaliknya. Kita tidak akan mampu membayar jika kita tak bertindak sekarang," kata Ban.

Keberhasilan di Copenhagen, Denmark, akan memerlukan semua negara bekerja secara beriringan guna membatasi kenaikan temperatur global, serta mendorong kemampuan dunia untuk menangani perubahan yang terjadi melalui perubahan iklim.

Stop Global Warming, G20 Sepakat Hapus Subsidi BBM Bertahap

Pittsburgh - Negara-negara yang terhimpun dalam G20 sepakat untuk menghapus subsidi bahan bakar fosil dan penghasil karbon dioksida lainnya secara bertahap. Ini sebagai upaya untuk memerangi pemanasan global (global warming).

Draf kesepakatan G20 menunjukkan negara-negara seperti Rusia, India, dan China akan kembali mengurangi serta menghapus anggaran yang membuat harga minyak rendah sekalipun tanpa kepastian mengenai waktu.

G20 juga akan menjaga upaya mereka itu hingga terjadinya kesepakatan tingkat PBB mengenai perubahan iklim setelah tahun ini. Demikian salah satu hasil pertemuan G20 yang berlangsung dua hari di Pittsburgh, Amerika Serikat (AS) seperti dikutip dari reuters, Sabtu (26/9/2009).

Untuk kepentingan penghapusan subsidi bahan bakar, para pemimpin negara G20 akan berbicara dengan menteri keuangan negara mereka masing-masing.

Negara-negara di luar G20 juga akan diimbau untuk mengikuti langkah tersebut. Beberapa kalkulasi menunjukkan jumlah subsidi minyak di seluruh dunia mencapai US$ 300 triliun.

Penghapusan subsidi bahan bakar diperkirakan akan mampu mengurangi afek rumah kaca 10 persen pada 2050. Hal itu berdasarkan data dari International Energy Agency and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Pernyataan G20, yang terdiri dari negara kaya dan berkembang itu, juga menyebutkan, para menteri energi dan keuangan negara anggota akan segera menyusun strategi. Hasilnya akan dilaporkan pada pertemuan G20 berikutnya.

Inside Sheryl Crow's 'Stop Global Warming' Tour

"There's no sleeping in the nude on the tour bus!" Crow, 45, joked to PEOPLE on the first day of her "Stop Global Warming College Tour," which kicked off Monday at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Crow and An Inconvenient Truth producer Laurie David are touring 11 campuses to inform college students about the climate crisis and how they can help stop it. (They also have a documentary team with them filming the tour.)

"Laurie and I just met in November, and now we're sleeping together," Crow said with a laugh. "On a bus in separate bunks!"

On a more serious note, Crow told PEOPLE: "When I learned how serious global warming is, I wanted to do something to help. So when [Laurie] and I were talking about what we could do, well, my answer to everything is to get on the bus and take it to the people, in true troubadour fashion."

And what is Crow doing to be eco-friendly? "I try to wash my clothes in cold water as much as I can," she said. "I turn off lights in rooms that I'm not using. I drive a hybrid. I'm getting solar panels for my house." Joking with her guitarist, Tim Smith, she added, "To save water, I'm only going to shower once a week, like I did when I was a kid – on Saturdays."

Also, Crow's tour bus is running on eco-friendly biodiesel fuel. "We're in a bus powered by vegetable oil, so we're craving French fries the whole tour," she said.

She began the tour by rocking SMU's packed McFarlin Auditorium, where she also urged students to join the virtual march at Stopglobalwarming.org. "At the end of our journey, we hope to be taking a million marchers with us to Congress to let them know that we demand a change," she told audience members, who were each given an energy-efficient Philips compact fluorescent light bulb.

At a Q&A session after the concert, students asked what they could do to help. Among the tips from Crow and David: Reuse plastic bags, inflate your tires and don't idle your car.

But one hunky student had more pressing matters on his mind: "Are you going to be in Dallas long?" he asked. Laughing, Crow told her longtime guitarist, Tim Smith: "Can you get his number? I don't have any homework to do!"

As the bus pulled away from the SMU campus and headed to Texas A&M in College Station, the group sat around talking about the day's events and munching on Doritos and pizza. "You would think that being on tour with a rock star that there would be a lot of drinking," David said. "Instead there's a lot of eating."

Drowning states ask world to stop global warming

THE world has fallen well behind in the race to find a formula to deal with global warming in time for December's Copenhagen summit, regional leaders have warned.

After their two-day summit in Cairns, 15 Pacific Islands Forum leaders issued a statement saying the threat was grave and a strong global agreement was vital.

"With 122 days to go, the international community is not on track to achieve the outcome we need unless we see a renewed mandate across all participating nations," the leaders said.

Chaired by the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, the forum urged all nations to redouble their efforts to secure an agreement.

The leaders called for a program that would set the world on a path to limit the increase in global temperatures to 2 degrees or less and to cut global emissions to at least 50 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050.

The forum nations are part of the Alliance of Small Island States, 39 nations in the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean that are likely to be the first - and worst - affected, by global warming.

The alliance was set up in 1990 to provide a voice for small nations, and it says that unless the increase in temperature is kept below 1.5 degrees the result will be disastrous for millions of people on those islands.

Grenada's representative to the United Nations and the alliance leader, Dessima Williams, told the Herald the impact on dozens of low-lying nations would be disastrous.

"We are going to have more devastation of all sorts from sea level rise and hurricanes," Ms Williams said.

"We are going to lose our jobs, our food supply.

"The world is going to see disruption that starts from the small island states. It will be disruption of every sort, more health problems, economic dislocation and more migration."

As well as the climate change plea, the 16 nations are to pool their experiences with energy sources including solar, wind and wave power generation, with Australia putting $25 million into the initiative.

The forum leaders also agreed to pursue common development strategies fostered by growth in the private sector, better state services and governance and investment in infrastructure, and to get aid-donating countries and organisations to co-ordinate their programs with these strategies.

The Pacific Island countries receive the highest amount of foreign aid in the developing world per capita, but Mr Rudd said many were not showing progress towards the Millennium goals of greater welfare by 2015 and some were regressing.

"It is a sobering fact that across our region some 2.7 million people are living in poverty," he said.

Governments in the Pacific were frustrated at the "spaghetti bowl" of aid programs, Mr Rudd said, with half of their officials "offshore running around in various programs being offered by dozens of competing and occasionally conflicting development assistance programs".

He hoped China would also align its aid programs in the Pacific - put at $US208 million ($247 million) in pledges last year.

Get Rich Quick! (And Stop Global Warming in the Process)

Despite all of the rhetoric, a recently published series of studies demonstrates that the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions probably won’t be very harsh, and there might even be a net economic benefit to such cuts. The studies, published in a special issue of The Energy Journal under the umbrella of the Innovation Modeling Comparison Project, analyze various models that explore the economics of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, taking into account the effects of policies that induce technological change. You can access the entire special issue for free via the University of Cambridge.

This week’s issue of Nature features a news story (subscription required) that serves as a basic overview of the project and a good starting point for exploring it further:

Transforming the world's energy industry to stop the flood of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere might actually be quite cheap.

Figures of tens of trillions of dollars are often cited, and used to question whether measures such as the Kyoto Protocol, which attempts to limit carbon emissions, are too expensive. But according to a suite of economic models released late last month, the costs of stabilizing carbon dioxide levels could be tiny — equivalent to setting back the growth of global GDP (gross domestic product) by less than 1% over 100 years; global GDP generally grows 2–3% each year. In some cases, the right policies for limiting carbon emissions could even create a surprising win–win situation, leading to the stabilization of greenhouse gases and an increase in global wealth.

It is a controversial conclusion with which not everyone agrees, but which the modellers say should be food for thought for policy-makers. "If we prepare properly and acknowledge that carbon will be constrained, it will be relatively cheap," says Michael Grubb, a climate-policy expert at Imperial College London. "But only if we do the right things."…

…The results are striking. Nine of the models predict that stabilizing carbon dioxide levels at 450 parts per million, widely seen as the most ambitious target worth discussing, would set back global GDP by less than 0.5% or so by 2100 (the other two produced figures of 2.1% and 6.2%). In each scenario, the regulation of greenhouse-gas emissions persuades the private sector to shift investment into low-carbon technologies, which then become competitive with traditional energy sources.

In some cases, this shift in investment stimulates growth and actually boosts overall wealth. At least, that's the conclusion of two of the models — one developed at the University of Cambridge, UK, and the other at the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, a centre for sustainable-development research in Italy. These models suggest that stabilization policies would give an added boost to global GDP of up to 1.7% over 100 years. They assume such climate policies will bring about side benefits, such as increased investment in new technologies.

Although the results sound convincing, I hope to go through the findings myself to get a better idea of how compelling they really are. The article in Nature already addresses some of the naysayers coming from an economics perspective, but I imagine that the harshest critics will be those from the industries that have fought so consistently against change and regulation (and in effect innovation). Although some models predict economic benefits to come from decreasing carbon dioxide emissions, major shifts in energy usage and production threaten the current system that has benefited the current dinosaurs so well.

In addition to the basic findings in economics, the authors of the introductory paper to the series offer their own policy recommendations based on the project's findings. In short, they stress the necessity of both regulation from government and research-driven technology innovations from industry. An optimal strategy from a governmental perspective, then, would involve both emissions caps and policies that stimulate the desired types of research:

Taken as a whole, the analyses give good grounds for believing that the atmosphere can be stabilized (or brought close to stabilization), at or significantly below a doubling of CO₂-equivalent concentrations (below 500ppm CO₂) at long-term macroeconomic costs that seem relatively modest—unlikely to exceed one year’s foregone economic growth. However, this broad figure over a century hides many distributional impacts, across sectors, across countries and across generations. In particular, stabilization may require big changes in investment patterns in the short run, which would obviously provoke resistance to the implementation of effective climate policies. Whether or not the costs are actually small, will be a function of policy, and in particular, whether or not the policies adopted send the right signals and get the right mix of investment in R&D at one end, diffusion at the other—and of no lesser importance—all that lies between….

…The policy implications are thus far more subtle than choosing between ‘technology led’ versus ‘cap-and-trade’ led approaches. Even with a strong role for ITC, future rounds of the Kyoto Protocol which duplicate the structure of sequential 5-year limits, without any clear and credible signals about the longer term evolution of the system, are unlikely to deliver the depth of innovation and adjustment to infrastructural investments required to minimize long-term costs. On the other hand, a purely supply-driven R&D strategy may generate ideas but not technology-based industries with the capacity to solve the problem, and with no signal at all to redirect ongoing investment and promote prior adjustment of infrastructure appropriate to a carbon constrained world. Thus both R&D, and carbon cap/pricing, appear necessary but in isolation insufficient instruments to deliver stabilization at low costs. What really matters may be combinations of these policies and all that lies between—together with the critical role of framing expectations that really influence the scale and direction of corporate investment in low-carbon knowledge, in learning-by-doing in the nascent technologies and industries, and in the infrastructure appropriate to low-carbon economies.

The idea that curbing greenhouse gas emissions won’t be disastrous for the economy isn’t a new one, and I’ve even written about it before. Still, it is important in these types of discussions not to lose site of the big picture. The most immediate goal needs to be halting global warming, by reducing carbon dioxide emissions, something that will require action that is both decisive and soon. If the economy benefits, that’s an added bonus, but if climate change is allowed to spin out of control, these matters of money will begin to appear increasingly trivial.

21 Solutions to Save the World: 450 Ways to Stop Global Warming

The most important number on Earth is almost certainly 450. And just as certainly, it’s not a number that means much to most policymakers. Not yet, anyway.

Everyone without a severe ideological kink knows by now that global warming is a looming problem. Even in the United States, two decades of energy industry disinformation is finally wearing off: Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Gore have finally blown most doubt away. But many fewer people realize either the real magnitude of the problem or the speed with which it may be bearing down on us.

Here’s the short course. Before the Industrial Revolution, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was roughly 280 parts per million. CO2, by virtue of its molecular structure, regulates how much of the sun’s energy stays trapped in our narrow envelope of atmosphere—Mars, which has very little, is cold; Venus, with a lot, is hellish. We were in a sweet spot, where human civilization developed and thrived. But as we burned coal, gas, and oil, the extra carbon dioxide that combustion produced began to accumulate in the atmosphere. By the late 1950s, when people first started to measure it, atmospheric concentrations were already above 315 parts per million. Now, that number has reached 380 parts per million, and its rise has accelerated: In recent years, we’ve been adding about 2 parts per million annually to the atmosphere. And, predictably, the temperature has begun to rise.

Twenty years ago, when global warming first came to public consciousness, no one knew precisely how much carbon dioxide was too much. The early computer climate models made a number of predictions about what would happen if we doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to 550 parts per million. But, in recent years, as the science has gotten more robust, scientists have tended to put the red line right...