Atmospheric emissions of carbon dioxide fell in 2009.

There are two small points worth noting here: (1) we are in a recession, and one would expect global carbon emissions to correlate positively with the level of economic activity; (2) during the same period carbon emissions rose in China and India by nine and six percent, respectively. So all in all it’s not particularly good news, especially when one considers that the overall emissions reduction in 2009 was just 1.3%.

The data in question, or, to be more precise, fossil fuel emissions estimates, come from a paper by Oslo-based climatologist Gunnar Myhre and others which was published recently in the journal Environmental Research Letters. This is an addendum to a study published last year by the same authors, which details a method for calculating annual carbon emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels by combining data from an established dataset with BP’s annual statistics.

So what else do Myhre and his colleagues have to say?

• Emissions from oil and gas have decreased, whereas those from the burning of coal have remained stable;
• China is now responsible for 24% of global fossil fuel emissions.

Chinese carbon emissions have increased more than can be accounted for by economic growth. To explain this the researchers highlight the country’s high level of carbon-intensive infrastructure investment (including the building of wind turbines), and an export sector that rapidly recovered from the worldwide financial crisis.

Further reading

Myhre et al., “Addendum to ‘A fast method for updating global fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions’”, Env. Res. Lett. 5, 039701 (2010)

The Middle East media focus may for the moment be on the peace talks between Israel and Palestine currently underway in Washington DC, but it appears other things are afoot, albeit relatively minor.

From a somewhat content-lite press release I learn that two British conservative MPs recently returned from a visit to Lebanon. At the invitation of the self-declaredly anti-extremist organisation IMAN Worldwide, Foreign Affairs Committee member Andrew Rosindell and Tory Arabist Daniel Kawczynski met with various Lebanese government ministers and other political figures, including Sheikh Mohammad Al Hajj Hassan, leader of the anti-Hezbollah Free Shiite Movement.

Quite what the British parliamentarians hoped to achieve during their trip to Lebanon is not clear from either the PR puff or the IMAN report of the meeting, but it is interesting to see western politicians engaging with Shiite Muslim colleagues who are not in the pay of Tehran.

Former British prime minister and current unroyal mint Tony Blair is someone I find quite maddening. Blair may be an arrogant, conceited shit, but at the same time I have a grudging respect for him. Which is more than I can say for his immediate successor.

Bjørn Lomborg may not be a climate denier, but during this past decade he has certainly been a pain in the arse in the public debate around anthropogenic climate change. Consider, for example, Lomborg’s consummate media tartery, together with his often absurd soundbite rhetoric, and cherry-picking of data to support an error-ridden “sceptical environmentalist” thesis that has resulted in books selling by the container load.

And now, to cap it all, the Copenhagen-based game theorist and business school professor is calling for $100bn a year to be invested globally in tackling what he describes as “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today”, and “a challenge humanity must confront”. Oh, and there’s another book on the way. The cheeky sod.

To give him due credit, however, Lomborg is quite correct when he says that anthropogenic global warming is not the end of the world. Actually, one should more accurately state that global warming most likely isn’t the end of the world. But then, as the BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin discovered to his cost, scientifically illiterate media types don’t do risk and uncertainty.

Back to Lomborg. The new proposal being floated with great media fanfare appears to be sound, and the amount of money involved is small when one considers the scope and seriousness of the problem, and compares the remedy with spending on natural disaster management and mitigation.

Via John Rentoul’s twittering

Following a Google search for online references to his old school friend Henry Rishbeth, whose passing I noted in March of this year, John Harris wrote a few lines in memory of Henry, and offered the text for publication…

Henry and I were at were at school together in Cambridge from the age of about four till eighteen! First Nursery School and then Perse School.

He was always the brightest in the class, consistently winning prizes. I remember we had a teacher for maths (not a mathematician at all – these were the war years) who, at the end of a test, would ask: “Rishbeth, what is the maximum?” i.e., Henry always got all the questions right and the maximum possible marks.

I guess that in today’s (yesterday’s?) slang he would have been called a nerd or geek, and surely deeply into computers, etc. Not many interests as far as one knew outside study and of course railways (His house almost backed onto the Cambridge-London line). I was surprised to read that he was evidently a committed christian.

Just before he left school he began to be rather successful as a long distance runner – cross country I think. And then the tragedy of contracting polio during national service.

I continued to see him occasionally as an undergraduate, but then, as happens our paths diverged. I am pleased to know how much he achieved and the respect he earned.

John Harris

More than two weeks ago I cited an interesting paper on atmosphere-biosphere feedbacks and climate change that had just been published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

That study was considered highly newsworthy by the editors of Nature, such that the paper by Almuth Arneth et al. got a special mention in dispatches emailed to science journalists a week or so before publication. And for very good reason; the paper is a major contribution to a very important area of scientific research and policy debate.

I was somewhat disappointed at the time of publication to discover that Arneth’s institution – Lund University in Sweden – had failed to give its scientists the full and expected PR treatment for such a significant piece of work. Only on Wednesday of this week did the university press office release a statement about the paper.

Ploughing the fields in Panmunjon (photo: Kim Jae-Hwan/AFP/Getty Images)

From an interview with Beijing-based economist Patrick Chovanec…

“For most of us, I think, North Korea occupies the same imaginary plane of existence as Mordor. But it is real, and one thing I came to appreciate is that most North Koreans are normal people living in abnormal conditions. It’s the only world they know, and they try to make sense of it, and cope with it, as best they can. I don’t know how things will play out, but one can only hope they find their way to join the rest of us intact.”

Rarely are we granted such intimate portraits of life in North Korea. Chovanec’s account of his strictly guided tour of the world’s most closed society is similar to others I’ve read, but what strikes me about this one is the depth of the language used to describe the scenes witnessed and very human reaction to them.

“The second important thing I learned is gratitude. It sounds corny, but it’s not. It really wasn’t all that long ago that a big chunk of mankind lived under systems like this. We look back now and it seems inevitable – the fall of the Berlin Wall, China opening up – but it wasn’t inevitable. I’m grateful to be able to go home at the end of my trip, and I’m grateful for the people whose convictions and sacrifices made it so this kind of place is an anomaly in today’s world, and not the rule.”

Progress.

Independent MPs are set to become kingmakers in a coalition government, following Australia’s tightly fought general election.

See here for the full story.

The Labor Party’s relatively poor showing in the election, under the leadership of Barry-born carrot-top and coupster prime minister Julia Gillard, is also seen as a major advance for Seionyst plans to bring political misery to Wales’ uppity second colony in the southern hemisphere.