29 October 2015, Yale Connections, Long-Term Drought Impacts on Trees. Scientists find that droughts harm trees for longer than previously understood. ANDEREGG: “We’ve known for decades that drought has harmful effects on trees. That during drought they grow slower and they have a higher chance of death.” That’s William Anderegg, a biologist at the University of Utah. He says until recently, researchers were not clear about what happened to the trees after a drought ended. So his team looked at the growth of trees after severe drought in more than a thousand forests across North America, Europe, and Asia. They found that even four years after a drought, trees continued to grow more slowly than normal. ANDEREGG: “Trees take up about a quarter of human emissions of CO2 each year, and that’s a very big slowing effect on climate change. So if droughts cause forests to take up less carbon, that could very much speed up the pace and the severity of climate change.” Anderegg says it is too early to know what the long-term implications will be. ANDEREGG: “Some of our best models suggest that forests could be relatively resilient and others suggest they could really die off en masse and lose a lot of their carbon to the atmosphere. And we don’t know which of those is more likely.” But Anderegg says that the future of the world’s forests is still in our hands. ANDEREGG: “I always like to emphasize that a lot of that future does depend on human decisions and what we do about climate change.” Read More here
28 October 2015, The guardian, Paris climate deal will not include global carbon price, says UN climate chief. Christiana Figueres tells investor event that a climate deal to be agreed in Paris in December will not be able to come up with a global carbon price. A climate change deal to be agreed in Paris in December will not be able to come up with a global carbon price, the United Nations’ climate chief, Christiana Figueres, said on Tuesday. Big multinational companies and investors, and most recently oil majors, have called for a global carbon price to help spur investments in low-carbon energy. A global carbon price would help to create an incentive for operators of power plants and factories to switch to cleaner fuels such as gas or to buy more energy-efficient equipment. When the European Union launched a carbon trading scheme in 2005 there were expectations this would eventually lead to a global carbon scheme by 2020 worth around $2 trillion. But the difficulties of bringing together different carbon schemes from countries around the world means the goal of a global carbon price remains elusive. Read More here