Autoridades ambientales denuncia que Alcaldes no quieren saber del cambio climático

Un poco de sensatez criticada acá

Extinct and unmourned

From The Economist (Jul 6th 2009)

A database of endangered creatures fails to list those most at risk

ONE of the problems facing nature conservationists is that they often have little idea what is being lost. The places where flora and fauna flourish are frequently remote, inaccessible or both. It is one thing to know that the Amazonian rainforest or the seas off the Sahara desert are threatened. It is quite another to know which species in those ecosystems will be lost if they are badly damaged. The recent launch of a database containing details of creatures threatened with extinction is supposed to change that, but the task looks daunting.

When nature conservation first became a popular cause, in the early 1960s, one of its champions was Peter Scott, a British naturalist, artist and Olympic yachtsman, and son of the ill-fated polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott. He decided to draft lists of endangered species, known as the Red Data books, for a body called the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Letters were sent from the union’s base in Morges, Switzerland, to naturalists, asking them to to assess the status of different species of animal and to grade them into one of five categories: very rare and getting rarer; less rare but threatened; stable; unknown; and formerly rare but now no longer in danger.

In due course particulars about many species arrived in Morges. These concentrated on what conservationists now call “charismatic” species: apes, lemurs, marsupials, parrots, polar bears, turtles and whales. Their global numbers were duly recorded along with their degree of endangerment, the state of their habitats and details of measures being taken to protect each species. It may have been scientific but it was also a very bureaucratic way of identifying where action was needed.

In June the Zoological Society of London launched an online version of Scott’s books. It unpicks the existing global lists held in Morges and examines them at the national level. It should thus be possible to identify which species are at risk of extinction within any given country’s borders. The database contains details of more than 50,000 species in 40 countries and regions, such as the Baltic Sea.

That may sound impressive, but it is not. It demonstrates that whole swathes of the world have been left unexamined. Countries missing from the list include some of the world’s most biodiverse nations, such as Indonesia and Madagascar. Even Brazil, with its Amazonian rainforests, is absent. Just six countries in the Americas are identified as containing endangered species, along with nine in Africa, nine in Europe and 11 in Asia.

The list’s sparsity shows that in the parts of the world where biodiversity is greatest and conservation planning is most important, conservationists lack the information with which to prioritise their efforts. These are the places where extinctions are likely to be occurring most rapidly, and species are probably disappearing without their existences ever having been documented.

The Convention on Biological Diversity, an international treaty that was adopted in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, was supposed to encourage the 191 countries that signed it to develop national strategies for the conservation and sustainable use of their biological diversity. A decade later a target was set to halt the decline in biodiversity by the end of 2010. Your correspondent suspects that it will be impossible to demonstrate whether or not that target has been achieved, if only because no one knows how many species there are on the planet.

FY 2007 Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Japan

Japan's GHG emission in FY2007 totaled 1.374 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent. The figure is 2.4% higher than the previous year and 9.0% higher than the base year of the Kyoto protocol.

Don’t Waste Time Cutting Emissions

By BJORN LOMBORG, From the NY Times of April 24, 2009

WE are often told that tackling global warming should be the defining task of our age — that we must cut emissions immediately and drastically. But people are not buying the idea that, unless we act, the planet is doomed. Several recent polls have revealed Americans’ growing skepticism. Solving global warming has become their lowest policy priority, according to a new Pew survey.

Moreover, strategies to reduce carbon have failed. Meeting in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, politicians from wealthy countries promised to cut emissions by 2000, but did no such thing. In Kyoto in 1997, leaders promised even stricter reductions by 2010, yet emissions have kept increasing unabated. Still, the leaders plan to meet in Copenhagen this December to agree to even more of the same — drastic reductions in emissions that no one will live up to. Another decade will be wasted.

Fortunately, there is a better option: to make low-carbon alternatives like solar and wind energy competitive with old carbon sources. This requires much more spending on research and development of low-carbon energy technology. We might have assumed that investment in this research would have increased when the Kyoto Protocol made fossil fuel use more expensive, but it has not.

Economic estimates that assign value to the long-term benefits that would come from reducing warming — things like fewer deaths from heat and less flooding — show that every dollar invested in quickly making low-carbon energy cheaper can do $16 worth of good. If the Kyoto agreement were fully obeyed through 2099, it would cut temperatures by only 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit. Each dollar would do only about 30 cents worth of good.

The Copenhagen agreement should instead call for every country to spend one-twentieth of a percent of its gross domestic product on low-carbon energy research and development. That would increase the amount of such spending 15-fold to $30 billion, yet the total cost would be only a sixth of the estimated $180 billion worth of lost growth that would result from the Kyoto restrictions.

Kyoto-style emissions cuts can only ever be an expensive distraction from the real business of weaning ourselves off fossil fuels. The fact is, carbon remains the only way for developing countries to work their way out of poverty. Coal burning provides half of the world’s electricity, and fully 80 percent of it in China and India, where laborers now enjoy a quality of life that their parents could barely imagine.

No green energy source is inexpensive enough to replace coal now. Given substantially more research, however, green energy could be cheaper than fossil fuels by mid-century.

Sadly, the old-style agreement planned for Copenhagen this December will have a negligible effect on temperatures. This renders meaningless any declarations of “success” that might be made after the conference. We must challenge the orthodoxy of Kyoto and create a smarter, more realistic strategy.