President Obama is back in the United States after spending a week in Asia where climate change was almost always at the top of the agenda, and specifically, the United States and China’s joint responsibility for leadership on this important global issue.  As the world’s two largest emitters of greenhouse gas, and two of the world’s largest economies, both leaders acknowledged the important role their countries must play at the upcoming COP-15 meeting in Copenhagen.

U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao reach out to shake hands in Beijing November 17. (AP Images)

The U.S. and China represent two important factions at the negotiating table. As an industrialized country, the U.S. is by far the largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gas in the world; as a developing country, China has a much larger population and a rapidly growing economy that have already made it the largest total emitter, and its emissions will continue to grow. COP-15 negotiations will not produce an agreement without buy-in from both developed and developing countries, and specifically the compliance of the U.S. and China.

With Copenhagen only weeks away, Obama’s visit and a strengthened bilateral U.S.-China understanding could help move the talks forward. In an important sign of cooperation and solidarity, the two countries issued a joint statement emphasizing their commitment to take “significant mitigation actions” and work together to promote a sustainable outcome for the world.

There is still much disagreement over the details of what an enforceable and effective treaty will look like, particularly with regard to specific mitigation and greenhouse gas reduction targets, but the fact that China and the U.S. have publically agreed to the basic principles of what an outcome should be and affirmed their willingness to work together is a step in the right direction.

In his town hall meeting with future Chinese leaders in Shanghai, Obama stated, “Our nations hold something important in common, and that is a belief in the future.” Identifying such common values to address the common problems of our globalized world may be the most important way developed and developing countries can come together on climate change.

The second annual ExchangesConnect video contest launches today on a topic of global importance: “Change Your Climate, Change Our World.”

We won’t all fit around the table for the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December, but we will all feel the impacts of climate change on our daily lives.  How will climate change affect the people you know and the places you live?  How can we as individuals take meaningful steps to protect our environment? The ExchangesConnect contest is your chance to capture what you or someone you know is doing to make the world a healthier, safer, cleaner, more peaceful place for all of us.

You can upload a video entry of up to two minutes to http://connect.state.gov any time from now through January 12, 2010.  A panel of judges will select the most original, creative, effective and well-produced videos as the contest winners in early March and the winning videographers will receive an all-expense-paid international exchange trip through the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

You can get some tips for a winning video from one of last year’s winners here, or watch all of last year’s winning entries here. Last year’s winners came from Brazil, India and the U.S., so wherever you are in the world, grab your camera or mobile phone and let us know how you are combating climate change in your community!

To learn more about the contest or to join the State Department’s cross-cultural social network, check out the ExchangesConnect Web site.

Paint Your Roof White and Reduce Global Warming
– By Daniel Gorelick, 9 June 2009

Image by trillbilly

A house in Bermuda with a white roof.

In an interview with the British newspaper The Independent, Chu said:

“If you look at all the buildings and make all the roofs white, and if you make the pavement a more concrete-type of color than a black-type of color, and you do this uniformly … It’s the equivalent of reducing the carbon emissions due to all the cars in the world by 11 years.”

Let’s tackle energy conservation first. On a hot day, you’ll be much cooler wearing a white shirt than a dark shirt. This is because light colored objects reflect more sunlight. Dark objects absorb more sunlight than light colored objects; the absorbed light then radiates away from the object (or is emitted from the object) as heat. Your dark shirt is absorbing sunlight, and then releasing it as heat, which makes you feel hotter.

Image by Cool Roof Rating Council

A white roof reflects more light and radiates less heat than a dark roof.

A dark roof on a building is like a dark shirt. The roof absorbs sunlight, and then radiates heat into the building. The temperature inside the building increases, and we use energy ― in the form of air conditioning ― to cool the building. Paint the roof white (or use a reflective material, like white tiles), the roof absorbs less sunlight, less heat is radiated into the building, the temperature inside the building doesn’t increase as much and we don’t need to use as much energy to cool the building. That’s how painting a roof white conserves energy. In the United States, the California state government has become a leader in encouraging the use of white roofs or cool roofs.

White roofs may also reduce global warming.

When sunlight is absorbed by a roof, the roof heats up and radiates heat in the form of  infrared light, which is invisible to humans (it has a longer wavelength than red light). Infrared light is emitted from the roof and reaches the atmosphere, where it is absorbed by gases and re-emitted as infrared light - a continuous cycle of absorption and emission that traps heat in the atmosphere and increases the temperature of the Earth. Gases that absorb and radiate infrared light are called greenhouse gases - these include water vapor, carbon dioxide and ozone.

Atmospheric gases don’t absorb much visible light, which is why sunlight reflected from a white roof ― visible light ― can travel through the atmosphere and escape into outer space.

Image by redskunk

These principles also apply to car roofs.

Incidentally, light is also absorbed by the Earth ― the ground, the soil ― and returned to the atmosphere as infrared light, where it is trapped as heat. This is the greenhouse effect. We can’t paint the Earth white to reduce global temperatures, but nature has helped us out a bit, in the form of ice. Polar ice caps and glaciers are like big, white roofs ― they reflect much of the incoming sunlight back into the atmosphere and out into space. Scientists and policymakers are concerned that melting ice will expose land, decreasing the amount of sunlight reflected back into space and increasing the amount absorbed by the Earth and trapped in the atmosphere as heat.

Researching this post I have found no reason why we should not be painting our roofs white (or using reflective tiles). Can you think of a reason not to do this? People might complain about having to look at a white roof, but does an aesthetic concern outweigh conserving energy and reducing global warming?

_____________________

In 2008, the Brazilian nonprofit One Degree Less partnered with Dr. Hashem Akbari, senior scientist at the DOE Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division, to promote international white-roof initiatives. Akbari’s Heat Island Group website tells all about high temperatures, cool roofs, vegetation and energy use. Around the world, the market for reflective roofing materials grows as regions, nations and communities look for ways to contribute to the effort to slow global climate change.

The Des Moines (Iowa) Public Library has a green roof. (USDA)

And speaking of vegetation, the movement to cover the roofs of homes and commercial buildings is growing worldwide. Read more about it in the following publications and websites:

Global Cooling: Increasing Worldwide Urban Albedos to Offset CO2 (PDF 356 KB) by Akbari and colleagues Surabi Menon, also at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and Arthur Rosenfeld, a member of the California Energy Commission in Sacramento.

Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, United States and Canada

The World Green Roof Infrastructure Network, a network of green roof organizations in countries around the world

Cities Alive!, a conference held October 19-21, 2009, in Toronto to bring together global best practices and leading-edge developments in terms of policy, research and designs focused on green roofs, walls and other forms of green infrastructure.

Climate 2009 / Klima 2009 will be held online November 2 – 6 to showcase the latest scientific findings on the social, economic and political aspects of climate change. The organizer is the Research and Transfer Centre-Applications of Life Sciences at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany. Registration is free. I just registered and the process is pretty easy.

Through scientific papers and posts, live webchats and videos, learn about new projects and innovative initiatives being undertaken in industrialized and developing countries by universities, scientific institutions, government bodies and nongovernmental organizations.

Conference partners include the World Meteorological Organization, the United Nations Environment Programme, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Sahara and Sahel Observatory, the Small States Network for Economic Development and many others.

The conference will be of special interest to researchers and academics who perform research and studies on aspects of climate change, companies, social institutions concerned with climate change, nongovernmental organizations and associations, government environment and planning agencies, banks, insurance companies, energy providers and anyone whose activities are influenced by climate change.

Along with the scientific papers at the heart of the e-conference, participants can expect to see a climate library with the latest studies, a collection of climate projects and funding sources and interactive elements like expert live chats, climate videos and podcasts.

The live chats will feature adaptation topics like funding adaptation to climate change, water and climate change, and strengthening adaptive capacities in developing countries.

And if you know about a climate project that should be highlighted at Climate 2009 / Klima 2009, send an e-mail to the organizers.

After the conference, let me know about your experience there and I’ll do the same.

… Millions of people around the planet — maybe even you — will have participated in the International Day of Climate Action organized by the grassroots campaign called 350.org.

On October 24, more than 4,000 simultaneous events took place in 170 countries to urge world leaders to work to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO₂), the main greenhouse gas culprit in global warming, in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million. More about that number in a minute.

350.org Rocks!! Love from the Rock of Polynesia Niue Island Niue Dive, Niue Fisheries, Niue Yacht Club, Niue Tourism highlighting issues of Coral Reef Bleaching, and more recently bought to our attention CO2 impregnated bodies of sea which cannot support sea life just like pockets of dead seas floating around out there.

Highlights of the day included 200 events across China; major rallies at iconic landmarks like the Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu and the Great Barrier Reef; 350 scuba divers holding an underwater protest in the Maldives; 200 events across the Middle East; and 350 Masaii children hosting a traditional dance on their parched fields in Kenya, where a killer drought is taking its toll right now on people and animals.

Photos and video footage of events all over the world were broadcast on giant screens at an event in New York City’s Times Square on October 24. Visit the 350.org website to see spectacular photos and videos.

A 350 human formation at the Infosys campus in Bangalore, India.

In the meantime, the organization’s name represents a raging debate about the safest concentration of greenhouse gases, especially CO₂, in the atmosphere. As of September 2009, that number is 384.78 (thanks to NOAA’s Earth System Research Lab) parts per million (ppm) by volume of air, up from about 280 ppm in pre-industrial times.

Some nations, leaders and scientists think we’ll be okay if we can hold CO₂ concentrations to 450 ppm; others, like 350.org and scientists like James Hansen think going beyond 350 ppm will push species off the planet and lead to irreversible physical and chemical changes on Earth.

Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, is known for his congressional testimony on climate change in the 1980s that helped raise broad awareness about global warming (and the aggravation his testimony caused the Bush administration).

“If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted,” Hansen and colleagues wrote in 2008 (Open Atmos. Sci. J. [2008], vol. 2, pp. 217-231), “paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO₂ will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.”

Other nations, leaders and scientists think holding CO₂ to 450 ppm will avoid the worst consequences of climate change. But even at 450 ppm there will be consequences.

In April, Warren Washington, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, and colleagues published a study that said cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 70 percent during this century would hold CO₂ concentrations to 450 ppm and the climate system would stabilize in about 2100 instead of continuing to warm.

The study also said that holding CO₂ to 450 ppm would have the following effects:

• Sea-level rise would be 14 centimeters (5.5 inches). The rise is from thermal expansion by warmer water. Add another 14 centimeters or more to this from melting ice sheets and glaciers, Washington said. Total sea level rise, even given constrained CO₂ concentrations, could be on the order of 1 meter.

• Arctic ice in summer would shrink by about a quarter in volume and stabilize by 2100.

• Arctic warming would be reduced by almost half, helping preserve fisheries and populations of sea birds and Arctic mammals in such regions as the northern Bering Sea.

“When you burn a molecule of CO2, it has a lifetime of 90 to 100 years in the atmosphere,” Washington told me during an interview at the time. “So even if you suddenly stopped all emissions, it would take a long time for the system to lower the amount of carbon dioxide. We’re already on a warming path, so the point of the study is that if we start taking steps to cut back on emissions by roughly 70 percent, we can probably avoid the worst effects.”

The National Mall in Washington, DC, is famous for its marble-chiseled memorials, but visitors might be surprised to find that a solar-paneled suburb has sprung up alongside the Washington Monument. The Solar Decathlon, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, takes place every two years and challenges university students from around the world to put their environmental design skills to the test.

Team Puerto Rico’s entry in the Solar Decathlon stays out of the shadow of the Washington Monument.

Twenty universities from the United States, Puerto Rico, Canada and Europe are competing this year to create a zero-energy home (ZEH) – one that produces as much energy as it uses and therefore draws no energy from the power grid – that would also be a comfortable and desirable place to live. Houses are judged on 10 criteria, from architectural design and marketability to hot water and provisions for home entertainment.
 
When the sun is shining, these homes can not only capture all the solar power they need, but also feed unused power to the grid for credit; when overcast, they can draw power from the grid as needed. The last phase of the competition measures the net energy used by the houses over the two-week contest. Teams must finish with a net metering score of zero or better (meaning they produced more energy than they used) to be eligible to win the competition.

  
This process of “net metering” is already at work across the United States, where solar users who produce excess energy receive credits that actually run their meters backwards. With an average annual cost of $1,600 for utility bills, environmentally friendly zero-energy homes are becoming more economically practical.

Technologies like this are particularly timely and relevant as countries around the world head to Copenhagen, Denmark, this December to discuss how best to tackle the global challenges of climate change.  Improving home energy efficiency and incorporating more renewable resources, like solar, into the energy mix may be an important step toward reducing carbon emissions.

You can chat with some of the solar decathletes behind these homes live via Web chat through America.gov on Tuesday morning, October 20, at 9:00am EST.

To find out more, check out:

Flickr Feed from the Solar Decathlon

America.gov interviews with Solar Decathlon teams

The Smart-Grid Revolution

The Solar Decathlon

weADAPT is a collaboration among leading adaptation-oriented organizations that works to make the latest scientific information about climate adaptation accessible to a wide audience.

SEI

The adaptation website includes new tools for communicating, understanding and interpreting adaptation strategies, climate data and guidance based on the experiences and knowledge of a growing ― more than 600 registered users ― weADAPT community.

The Stockholm Environment Institute, the University of Cape Town and a growing number of partners have developed the weADAPT platform over the past two years, with exciting developments ahead.

Check out the case studies and adaptation guidance at the wikiADAPT website, read about adaptation success stories, and explore the newly released weADAPT adaptation layer in Google Earth.

SEI

And take a look at the new weADAPT blog site and entries by Anna Taylor, research associate at SEI-Oxford.

The Montreal Protocol is perhaps the single most
successful international environmental agreement to date.

            – Kofi Annan, U.N. Secretary-General, 2003

Talks are ramping up around the world among national and climate leaders about how to craft an ambitious but fair response to the changing climate system. The eyes of the world will be on Copenhagen December 7-18, when these negotiations take place among parties of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Some experts are worried that an agreement won’t be reached. Others are concerned that there will be an agreement but it won’t be strong enough to prevent the worst consequences of a warming Earth. There is disagreement about the responsibilities of developed and developing nations in reducing emissions of greenhouse gases and questions about the economic viability of changing the way nations fuel and power themselves.

As global anxiety rises, it might be good to remember that the situation isn’t entirely new. Once before, 22 years ago, developed and developing nations came together and made decisions that prevented a major environmental calamity. If we can do it once, maybe we can do it again.

On September 16, 1987, representatives of 24 nations signed the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. For 22 years, the protocol, now ratified by 196 countries ― all the states in the world ― has limited the production and use of nearly 100 substances that destroy stratospheric ozone.

Over decades, scientists had discovered that these chemicals in the stratosphere were creating an “ozone hole” – an area of exceptionally depleted ozone over stratosphere over the Antarctic that appears from August to October in the Southern Hemisphere. This is important because the ozone layer in the stratosphere absorbs up to 99 percent of the sun’s high-frequency ultraviolet light that is potentially damaging to life on Earth.

The protocol is unique, and maybe uniquely successful, because of something called the multilateral fund.

(NASA)

Since 1990, to help developing nations meet their obligations under the treaty, the Multilateral Fund for the Implementation of the Montreal Protocol and four U.N. agencies have provided support. As of July, 49 industrialized countries had contributed more than $2.5 billion to the fund, which has approved 6,000 projects and activities in 148 countries. The multilateral fund was the first financial mechanism to be created under an international treaty.

“The developed world took the responsibility to help developing countries,” Anne Douglass, deputy project scientist for NASA’s atmosphere-monitoring Aura spacecraft, told me during the protocol’s 2007 anniversary, “and that’s a really important model.”

“Accumulating evidence indicates that the phase-out of substances known as chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, has since 1990 alleviated the progression of climate change by as much as 12 years,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a September 16 statement.

“International cooperation on CFCs is a timely affirmation that, through unity of purpose and concerted action, we can minimize risks to our planet and build a safer world for future generations,” he added. “It is a lesson we must take to heart as we prepare for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December.”

Read here about the North American proposal to phase down the use of heat-trapping hydrofluorcarbons under the Montreal Protocol, and here for a story from NASA on Earth without ozone.

To adapt to climate change, you need at least two things — advance knowledge of the climate changes and what they will affect, and a way to get that information before the changes occur.

Today, forecasters can predict things like floods, sunny days and hurricanes. That’s weather, and it can be forecast on a scale of days to weeks. Climate is like weather, but spans seasons to decades. Forecasting climate events like rising sea-surface temperatures or droughts is a lot harder than forecasting weather.

In the United States, for example, a critical effort to forecast droughts and warn those who will be affected has been underway for 13 years.

The governor of Nebraska leads a discussion during a 2004 Western Governors Association meeting. (© AP Images)

In 1996, governors from most of the U.S. western states, where drought is a serious problem, decided to change the way the nation responded to droughts, which was to wait for a drought to arrive and then deal with it. By 2003, the Western Governors Association and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had formed a partnership and proposed a structure for a national drought early warning system for the 21st century.

The idea was to improve and expand the data compiled from drought indicators like surface water supply, precipitation, a meteorological drought scale, stream flow, crop status, snowfall, sea surface temperatures, soil moisture and more. The system could then integrate the physical data with data about socioeconomic and environmental impacts like agriculture and wildfire losses.

That was the easy part. Next, they had to meet with land and water resource managers, coastal developers, farmers, ecologists, fisheries managers and tribal officials to see what kind of drought-forecasting information each one needed. Then they had to deliver the drought warnings in a non-technical format that people on the ground could understand and use.

After a lot of research, work and communication, today the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) is an interagency and interstate coordination program with an online portal (http://www.drought.gov).

“NIDIS begins by coordinating existing information on the impact of drought, and drought as affected by climate change and variability, into one framework ― that of an early warning information system,” NIDIS Director Roger Pulwarty told me earlier this year.

Early warning involves drought forecasting based on climate projections and the area’s drought history, developing possible outcomes for coming drought events, and estimating how long a drought might last and how severe it might be. NIDIS has been a big success in the United States and has drawn interest from India, Australia, the Mediterranean and the Caribbean.

In my next blog entry about NIDIS, find out how a range of U.S. government agencies began working with regional groups, state officials, local communities and tribal groups to develop the sort of early warning system that is a prototype for climate change adaptation in the United States and around the world.

“Our foot is stuck on the gas pedal. We have to pull it off.”
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, September 3, Geneva

On September 3, the day before the final session at the World Climate Conference-3 in Geneva, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke urgently to delegates from 165 countries and to members of the press. He had just returned from the Arctic, where he’d sailed for nine hours from the world’s northernmost settlement to reach the polar ice rim.

Ban Ki-moon visits polar ice rim September 1 to highlight climate change. (UN photo/Mark Garten)

He went to see for himself the visible impacts of climate change and, he said, “to inject much-needed urgency into the climate-change debate. I went to the Arctic to raise again political leadership among the leaders of the world. I will continue to speak out on this issue until we seal a deal. A deal that will be comprehensive, balanced and equitable and fair for the future of human beings.”

The U.N. Seal the Deal campaign seeks a focus in Copenhagen on five issues:

• Individual targets industrialized countries will set to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
• Actions developing countries will take to limit the growth of their emissions.
• Finances that will be made available to developing countries unable to act without support.
• An efficient institutional mechanism for disbursing funds and an equitable, accountable, governance structure.
• A framework that will bolster the climate resilience of vulnerable countries and protect lives and livelihoods.

“The Copenhagen climate change conference is less than three months away,” he said. “Indeed, it is closer than that. We have only 15 negotiating days left. We are very much pressured by this time. We have to resolve some of the most complex issues within 15 days.”

To mobilize world leaders, the U.N. is holding a daylong summit for heads of state on climate change September 22 at U.N. Headquarters in New York called the United Nations Leadership Forum on Climate Change.

In Geneva, Daniel Reifsnyder, deputy assistant secretary for environment and sustainable development at the U.S. State Department, said President Obama plans to take part in the New York meeting.

The summit aims to advance the negotiations for Copenhagen but is not a negotiating session, according to the summit Web site. “It provides a forum where leaders can discuss fundamental issues, find common ground and provide guidance to their negotiators,” the site said.

And it won’t be a traditional U.N. meeting, where heads of state make live opening statements as the summit begins. Instead, they will be able to send in video statements that will be available at the U.N. Headquarters and on YouTube beginning September 22.

In my next blog entry, hear about the U.S. National Integrated Drought Information System, a prototype for the kind of user-friendly climate early warning system that everyone was talking about in Geneva.