Is climate change gender-neutral? Not according to the U.N. Population Fund, which earlier today released a report arguing that women suffer disproportionately from the impacts of global warming. Especially in developing countries, they can't flee changes like desertification and sea-level rise as easily as young men, who aren’t as tied to children and households. They're often caught up in civil conflicts ignited by scarce resources. And they're more likely to fall victim to diseases caused by wetter weather patterns.

But on the flipside, the report argues, women are also in the best position to help mitigate both the causes and effects of rising temperatures—which is why policies to empower women, like targeted microloans and reproductive healthcare, shouldn't be treated as separate from climate policy.

The first part of this involves population: Letting women control their own reproductive destines is essential not only for their own well-being, but also to head off future emissions. Population growth, the UNFPA notes, has been responsible for between 40 percent to 60 percent of past emissions growth—and getting people to change their consumption habits has proven harder than simply helping women to make their own decisions on how many kids to have, through better education or access to birth control. (Surveys suggest that, in countries like Brazil or Ghana, women have an average of one more child than they originally planned on having.) This tends to be a sensitive topic in climate policy—Obama administration officials are too squeamish to even discuss it—but the UNFPA report tries to frame it as giving women what they want rather than as some nefarious attempt by rich countries to prevent poor women from having babies.

Beyond that, though, women are crucial to environmental management for things they can do, rather than things they can chose not to do. For example, women produce 60 percent to 80 percent of the food in developing countries, and often know agricultural techniques that sequester carbon and also keep fields in better shape. Women are more likely than men to use small loans to develop sustainable businesses—and tend to pay back the money at higher rates. And women in the developing world have been central to projects like Wangari Maathai's Green Belt movement, which has planted millions of trees against Kenya. Think of it as Nick Kristof meets Tom Friedman: keeping “women’s issues” separate from “climate issues” is a huge missed opportunity.

One of the uncertainties in predicting how the climate will respond to all the greenhouse gases we're belching up into the atmosphere is what will happen with the world's carbon sinks. Trees, ocean, and even the soil all absorb a huge fraction of the industrial carbon-dioxide we produce each year. But now a major new study from researchers at the British Antarctic Survey, led by the University of East Anglia's Corinne Le Quéré, has discovered that those sinks may be losing their ability to pull CO2 out of the air:

By studying 50 years of data on carbon emissions and combining with estimates of human carbon emissions and other sources such as volcanoes, the team was able to estimate how much CO2 is being absorbed naturally by forests, oceans and soil.

The team conclude in the journal Nature Geoscience that those natural sinks are becoming less efficient, absorbing 55% of the carbon now, compared with 60% half a century ago. The drop in the amount absorbed is equivalent to 405m tonnes of carbon or around 60 times the annual output of Drax coal-fired power station, which is the largest in the UK.

This has been something that's been predicted by climate models for awhile—as the ocean absorbs more CO2, it becomes more acidic and loses its ability to pull CO2 out of the air—but it hasn't really been observed until now. Likewise, another study published this week in Science by Columbia oceanographer Samar Khatiwala and colleagues finds that, indeed, the oceans do appear to be absorbing less and less CO2. (The study was the first time anyone's measured the build-up of man-made carbon in the ocean since the Industrial Revolution, a quantity that's hard to separate from all the background CO2 out there.) Granted, not all climatologists are so certain that carbon sinks are losing their powers—the Guardian nicely captures some of the back and forth:

But Le Quéré's conclusion on the decline of the world's carbon sinks is not universally accepted. Wolfgang Knorr of the University of Bristol recently published a study in Geophysical Research Letters, using similar data to Le Quéré, where he argued that the natural carbon sinks had not noticeably changed. "Our apparently conflicting results demonstrate what doing cutting-edge science is really like and just how difficult it is to accurately quantify such data," said Knorr.

The amount of CO2 that natural carbon sinks can absorb varies from year to year depending on climactic and other natural conditions, and this means that overall trends can be difficult to detect. Le Quéré said her team's analysis had been able to remove more of the noise in the data that is associated with the natural annual variability of CO2 levels due to, for example, El Niño or volcanic eruptions. "Our methods are different – Knorr uses annual data, we use monthly data and I think we can remove more of the variability."

Jo House of the University of Bristol, who worked on the Nature Geoscience paper, said: "It is difficult to accurately estimate sources and sinks of CO2, particularly in emissions from land use change where data on the area and nature of deforestation is poor, and in modelled estimates of the land sink which is strongly affected by inter-annual climate variability. While the science has advanced rapidly, there are still gaps in our understanding."

So the jury's still out, but this is a pretty crucial issue. The study from the British Antarctic Survey—i.e., the one finding that carbon sinks are losing their ability to suck up our carbon—predicts that, as a result, the world is currently on pace to warm some 6°C (10.8°F) by the end of the century. And that, unless the world agrees to some sort of hard limits soon, emissions will likely fall briefly in 2009 as a result of the recession and then go up, up, up in 2010 and beyond.

(Flickr photo credit: hb19)

Hold the bluefin tuna—please. That's what scientists were urging last week at the annual meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT). Unless there's a total ban on catching Atlantic bluefin tuna this year, scientists argued, populations might collapse and never recover. (Next up would be the Southern and Pacific bluefin, and then... good-bye sushi.) Unfortunately, the fishing industry has a long history of ignoring scientific advice. And, this year, ICCAT agreed to reduce the number of tuna it would catch but still fish more than scientists were recommending:

The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna, ICCAT, reduced the total allowable catch for 2010 to 13,500 metric tonnes down from 22,000 tonnes in 2009. ...

As an additional precaution, it was that agreed that, if in the course of 2010, ICCAT scientists detect a serious risk of stock collapse, the fishery for Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin might be suspended completely.

The European Commission lauded this compromise, but scientists and conservation groups in the United States warned that this was still far higher than the limits necessary to save the species. "There is a strong likelihood that someone in this generation will be the last human to eat a bluefin tuna," says The Atlantic's Barry Estabrook. The bluefin’s last, best hope for survival might lie with another group with a long acronym: CITES, or the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna. They’ll meet in March 2010 to consider a proposal to ban international trade of the bluefin altogether. If that fails, we'll have one more example confirming Daniel Pauly's argument that the end of fish is closer than we'd like to think.

(Flickr photo credit: WWF International)

The Wall Street Journal blared the news today that the Senate won't vote on a climate bill until "some time in the spring," according to Majority Leader Harry Reid. Is that a shock? A new setback? Not that I can tell. The reporter, Ian Talley, insists that Reid's words reflect a "weakening political will to tackle a long-term environmental issue," but I don't really see much weakening here.

What's happening is that the health care debate is still gurgling along, so of course everything else is getting nudged back. But the key senators all seem to be proceeding more or less apace on a climate bill. The "tripartisan" talks between John Kerry, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman are still ongoing, and Kerry has promised to release an outline of the deal before the Copenhagen summit in December. Meanwhile, the Finance Committee, which is mired in health-reform land, is still planning to mark up the climate legislation around January. And then some of the other committees—like Agriculture and Commerce—will toss in their own two cents. All that translates into a floor debate… sometime in the spring. It's a sluggish process, sure. Lots of senators are still nervous about pushing ahead. But not a whole lot has changed, as best I can tell.

Yesterday, I noted that Europe's cap-and-trade system seems to be faring pretty well at cutting CO2 emissions. As a partial counterpoint, though, check out Eloi Laurent's analysis of the ongoing carbon-tax debate in France. The story here is that the E.U. cap-and-trade system has driven down emissions from France's largest industrial facilities and power plants, but that only tackles about half the problem. So even though France is one of the least carbon-intensive countries in Europe and gets most of its electricity from nuclear power, it's still seeing a rise in emissions from cars, trucks, and smaller stationary sources. That's why Sarkozy is now proposing a modest carbon tax in addition to the ETS to help the country meet its climate goals.

But that's where the wrangling begins: Laurent points out that it's possible to refund the proceeds from a carbon tax in a way that would actually boost incomes for the bottom 60 percent of the country. But, apparently, Sarkozy is taking a different route, compensating households through income taxes in a way that will "hurt one of the last bits of progressivity remaining in the tax system." What's more, Sarkozy's proposed carbon tax is only about half as high as an expert commission on the subject had recommended. Not surprisingly, even carbon taxes aren't immune from politics.

(Flickr photo credit: Joelle Maslaton)

As Lisa Lerer reports in Politico today, one of the steepest hurdles looming over the Senate climate bill is the fact that there are a lot of coal-state Democrats out there who want to see major changes to the legislation before they'll vote for it. Last week, 14 senators wrote Harry Reid demanding more protections for coal-heavy utilities. And the industry wants to see the bill's near-term emission targets relaxed. Currently, the Senate cap-and-trade program aims to cut greenhouse-gas emissions 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. Senators like Max Baucus have asked for 14 percent or 17 percent.

But here's a question: Would weakening the near-term targets really make the climate bill any cheaper? That's certainly the rationale behind loosening the cap. A less stringent cap means that there are more tradable pollution permits out on the market. Higher supply means that the price of carbon pollution falls—and therefore dirty energy becomes slightly cheaper. So the coal industry argues that a weaker near-term cap would ease potential rate increases on consumers and make the transition less onerous. (True, it'd also mean more and more CO2 piling up in the atmosphere, but set that aside for now.)

Anyway, that's the theory. The reality, though, could be quite different. As Raymond Kopp, director of Resources for the Future's climate program, points out, weakening the short-term cap—while keeping the target for 2050 in place—might actually do very little to budge carbon prices. That's because polluters are allowed to "bank" permits and save them for the future—if, for instance, they expect that carbon reductions down the road will be even harder. (After all, a cap-and-trade program, by design, targets the easiest cuts first.) So if the 2020 target is weakened, and there are more permits floating around in the early years, polluters will just buy up more of them to bank for later. The carbon price will be more or less the same as it would be if polluters had to make cuts. Indeed, EPA and EIA analyses of the climate bill bear this out.

Now, Kopp's prediction might not pan out—the EPA analysis assumes that polluters will have perfect information about the future when deciding whether to bank permits, and in the real world many companies don't. Plus, many companies may be short-sighted and use the permits in the short term to pollute, even when they should be saving them for later, when cutting pollution will likely be more expensive. Still, it's not a sure thing that a weaker short-term cap will make the bill any cheaper.

(Flickr photo credit: capitolclimateaction)

When people talk about climate change, it's common to envision a slow, drawn-out process that takes decades or longer to unfold. But, looking back through the historical record, rapid Day After Tomorrow-type shifts aren't exactly impossible. A new analysis of Greenland ice cores, led by William Patterson of the University of Saskatchewan, suggests that the Younger Dryas mini ice age, which swept through the Northern Hemisphere 12,800 years ago, engulfed Europe in just a few short months—not decades, as once thought.

That ice age set in after a glacial lake that covered most of northwestern Canada burst and poured into the North Atlantic, where the cold freshwater halted the Gulf Stream and rapidly cooled Europe and North America. Fortunately, although the melting of the Greenland ice sheet could in theory trigger something similar today, the 2007 IPCC report argued that this was "very unlikely" to occur in this century. Still, it's sort of shocking that a change like that could happen so quickly. (Actually, beyond the sensational headline, the real importance of the study is that Patterson and colleagues have developed a new technique to slice carbon isotopes and get more precise readings of the past climate—which, in theory, could help with projections of the future.)

Meanwhile, in other fascinating "climate stuff that happened in a long time ago," two Stanford researchers have an intriguing new theory for the mass extinction that took place 250 million years ago at the end of the Permian-Triassic period—in which 70 percent of all land species, including most dinosaurs, and 90 percent of all ocean species were wiped out.

The scientists, Norman Sleep and Darcy Ogden, argue that the "Great Dying" might've been caused by underground magma that came into contact with Siberia's tar-soaked coal deposits, burning the coal and blasting dust and ash into the stratosphere, along with heaps of carbon-dioxide. The dust would've cooled the planet (as aerosol pollution does), and then, once the ash settled, the CO2 would've heated things back up. Repeated coal explosions could've destabilized the climate. In any case, the theory's intriguing, but still not conclusive (not that the coal industry needs something else to answer for).

(Flickr photo credit: mikelens)

With the global talks over a climate treaty decelerating, Obama's trying to see if there are side deals to strike with China—something that could ease the worldwide talks along. So far, progress has been pretty modest. Earlier today, Obama met with Chinese President Hu Jintao and the two announced several key energy issues on which the countries would work together. There's $150 million over five years to start a joint "clean energy research center." There's cooperation on electric-vehicle standards and on sharing knowledge about energy efficiency. And there's a "road map" for renewable power and new cooperative deals on coal carbon capture. Nothing, though, on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. That's roughly what many climate-watchers were expecting, but they're still awfully small steps.

On a related note, Christina Larson has an excellent mythbusters-type piece in Foreign Policy on China's energy policies. I was mildly surprised to see that many experts disagree that China is "ahead" of the United States on renewable power—although Larson also nicely debunks the idea that there's some sort of energy "space race" to fret about. She also gets into the difficulties that the government in Beijing has in enforcing many of its low-carbon edicts (which I explored in a mag piece on China's green efforts awhile back). The article's one of the better summaries around of the state of play in China.

More: Jake Schmidt of NRDC argues that both China and the United States actually made some subtle-but-important shifts in their stances on emission reductions today. Definitely worth a read.

(Flickr photo credit: duck1984)

A new recycling idea is slowly catching on in restaurants and cities around the United States—the "zero waste" movement. The concept's simple enough: Produce less, avoid plastics and packaging that aren't biodegradable, recycle and compost what you can. With food waste making up some 13 percent of the junk that gets tossed in landfills, composting especially is becoming popular: Seattle has been offering residents separate that can be picked up for compost, and San Francisco has just made sorting mandatory. This isn't just some pointless hippie idea, either—there's a crucial climate angle:

When apple cores, stale bread and last week’s leftovers go to landfills, they do not return the nutrients they pulled from the soil while growing. What is more, when sealed in landfills without oxygen, organic materials release methane, a potent heat-trapping gas, as they decompose. If composted, however, the food can be broken down and returned to the earth as a nonchemical fertilizer with no methane by-product.

Now, it's slightly more complicated than this. Compost done at a large scale can produce some methane if the organic material doesn't get enough oxygen while decomposing. And experts have been debating for some time whether it's better, from a climate perspective, to compost, or to capture all that methane from landfills and use it to generate electricity. (Methane may be a potent greenhouse gas, but it's also a fairly clean fuel when burned for electricity, so these capture programs are a promising way to reduce emissions—some large landfills produce enough electricity to light up 6,000 homes.)

According to Josh Harkinson, recent evidence tilts in favor of of composting. A massive study by the Rodale Institute, published in Compost Science and Utilization, found that using compost for cropland sequesters a staggering 10,802 pounds more CO2 per hectare than conventional farming—that's as much as a good-sized car produces in a year. And using compost instead of raw manure for crops can also lead to less nitrate leaching, and hence less groundwater pollution.

Another option, of course, is just to do... both. In Oakland, the East Bay Municipal Utility runs a facility that takes sorted food waste, puts it through an anaerobic digester, in which bacteria chomp through the waste and produce methane, which is harvested for electricity. The leftover food material is then composted and used as soil fertilizer. According to the EPA, if 50 percent of our food waste went through these digesters, we could power some 2.5 million homes—and with lovely fertilizer to spare!

Granted, these plants can all be pretty expensive, but they're the sorts of projects that could, in theory, qualify for carbon offsets under a cap-and-trade system. But will they? Right now, the U.S. Composting Council is worried that that won't be the case under the House cap-and-trade bill, which sets strict performance methane standards for landfills (as opposed to the Senate version, which makes landfill projects eligible for offsets). The House bill, according to the USCC, would bias waste mangers toward capturing methane emissions from landfills rather than avoiding them in the first place by diverting them toward composting centers. I haven't seen this issue fully explored anywhere, but it's worth noting.

(Flickr photo credit: mjmonty)

Earlier today I was nodding along to Chris Orr's good-humored critique of 2012, but, you know, news like this makes me think more people really need to see the movie and learn not to antagonize supervolcanoes:

To ancient Romans the Phlegraean Fields hosted the entrance to Hades. In modern times it is better known as the site of a "supercolossal" volcanic eruption 39,000 years ago.

Will we see the next disaster coming? That's one of the questions an ambitious drilling project hopes to answer by sinking boreholes into Campi Flegrei, as the giant collapsed volcanic crater is now called. Starting as early as next month, the Campi Flegrei Deep Drilling Project is planning to drill seven holes in the region.

Though the researchers on this particular project point out that any risk is small, it will begin amid debate about whether such endeavours are safe, given the unknowns of a volcano's interior. A few say drilling might even trigger a major eruption.

The story clarifies, as always, that supervolcanoes aren't like ordinary volcanoes—Campi Flegrei is much, much bigger than nearby Vesuvius, and has most of metropolitan Naples sitting within its caldera. A major eruption like the one that happened 39,000 years ago would "leave large parts of Europe buried under a thick layer of ash." In any case, the story clarifies toward the end that the risks of setting off an eruption (say, by piercing a high-pressure magma chamber and releasing trapped gases) do seem to be minimal, but that would be quite the "oops."

(Flickr photo credit: angeloaversa)

Via Elana Schor, a group of automakers, utilities, and shipping companies have banded together to form the Electrification Coalition, which will lobby for a massive federal push toward electric vehicles in the coming months. The coalition's extensive "roadmap" argues that plug-in hybrids and all-electric vehicles could make up a whopping 75 percent of all vehicle-miles traveled in the United States by 2040. (Notably, the report implicitly assumes that Americans will keep driving more and more in the decades to come, and that efforts to become less auto-dependent or curb sprawl won't get very far.)

Now, if electric cars could make that kind of rapid progress, it'd be a huge deal. The cars could largely run on our existing electric infrastructure, assuming we had a smart grid or smart chargers to power cars up during off-peak hours. Plus, even if all those plug-in vehicles were being charged by coal and gas plants, carbon-dioxide emissions would still fall, since electric motors are far more efficient than combustion engines. (Ideally, though, many vehicles would be charged by non-fossil energy—if anything, electric vehicles would make good storage options for wind power, which largely cranks up at night.) Plus, the United States could eliminate its need for oil imports, which would mean more stable prices at the "pump" and fewer dollars sent abroad to places like Saudi Arabia.

But is a massive electrification push doable? It all depends. The necessary infrastructure won't likely materialize on its own, even if the price of oil rose. The government will have to offer incentives to set up charging stations, and it would ideally start in a few key "ecosystem" cities. Once the technology's demonstrated and reaches a critical mass, it'd be more likely to catch on. One snag, though, is that battery prices will have to keep dropping for electric cars to become anything more than a niche product. (And not everyone's so sure that batteries will naturally keep getting cheaper and more powerful, the way microchips have—in October, Lux Research singled out slow advances in battery technology as a major hurdle for the electric-vehicle industry.)

The report also notes that consumer behavior will have to change. Right now, when buying cars, people tend to focus far more on the sticker price of a vehicle and less on how much it will cost to drive a car over the course of its lifetime. Electric cars may be cheaper to drive per mile, especially if oil prices keep rising, but most people are psychologically repulsed by their high upfront cost. And, the coalition argues, Congress isn't likely to hike gas taxes in the coming year.

Indeed, that last point is one reason why Better Place's big idea for electric vehicles could catch on—under their system, Better Place owns the batteries and charges you for every mile you drive, much like cell-phone companies do. As a result, the company can in theory charge less for the car itself, since customers aren't buying the battery. (Better Place isn't a member of the Electrification Coalition, although they would also benefit from trial cities with a well-developed charging infrastructure; they'd just add their battery-swapping stations to let people drive longer distances without recharging.)

(Flickr photo credit: Argonne National Laboratory)

There's a fairly basic question about climate policy that gets asked a lot: Can a cap-and-trade program actually cut carbon-dioxide emissions? Set aside the question of cost and the endless debate over whether a mythical carbon tax would be sleeker. Can a cap on carbon actually do what it's supposed to do? Right now, the best example of an up-and-running cap-and-trade system is in Europe. And, for years, the continent was seen as a hopeless failure at cutting emissions. But judging by the latest data, the evidence is fairly encouraging that a carbon cap can actually work.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, members of the EU-15 had agreed to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions 8 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. To get there, the EU set up its Emissions Trading System, which first got underway in 2005. Initially, the program got ensnarled in all sorts of embarrassing mishaps: Regulators gave away way too many pollution permits (so that companies could easily comply with the cap without making any cuts) and utilities were allowed to hike up rates without having to reduce emissions. The whole plan looked like a total flop. But, by 2007, the kinks were getting smoothed out, and, as a Lehman Brothers analysis concluded, the system "succeeded, and fairly quickly, in imposing a price on carbon."

That carbon price appears to have had an impact. According to new data from the European Environment Agency (EEA), all of the EU-15 members except Austria are now on track to exceed their Kyoto obligations. In fact, the group as a whole will likely slash emissions more than 13 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. That's not as ambitious as the 20 percent figure European leaders have been murmuring about, but it beats what Kyoto demanded. So how'd they do it? Here's the breakdown: