22 October 2015, BBC News, Bonn climate talks: Questions over cash dominate. Negotiators meeting in Germany say that questions over cash are the biggest barrier to a new global climate deal. The Bonn talks are the last chance for delegates to clarify their positions before the Paris conference that aims to seal a new binding treaty. Developing country delegates said clear guarantees on finance must be a core part of that compact. Officials said that finance was likely to be the very last issue to be resolved before a deal is struck. Money has always been at the root of difficulties in solving the climate issue. Developing countries point out that while they had done least to create the problems associated with more carbon in the atmosphere, they were the ones already feeling the greater impacts of a warming world. Howls of protest They have long sought significant flows of finance to help them curb their emissions and to cope with the storms and droughts expected to be more common in a changing climate. In Copenhagen in 2009, as countries tried to put together a comprehensive agreement, the richer nations promised to provide $100bn a year in climate finance from 2020. That deal ultimately failed, but countries are hoping to conclude a more ambitious agreement in Paris in December. Read More here
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22 October 2015, The Guardian. Perth’s double whammy: as sea levels rise the city itself is sinking. The city’s growing population means a growing demand for water, but as more and more water is drawn out of Perth’s acquifers, the land is slowly subsiding. Growing demand for water in Perth has caused the city to sink at up to 6mm a year and could be responsible for an apparent acceleration in the rate of sea level rise, according to new research released by Curtin University. The study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research in October, found that the rate of subsidence in Perth increased between 2000 and 2005, at the same time as the Water Corporation of WA increased the amount of water it was drawing from the city’s two main aquifers to meet the demands of a growing population. Will Featherstone, professor of geodesy at Curtin and the lead author of the study, described the effect as “like slowly letting the air out of a balloon”. “If you take the water out of the ground, the overburden of all the rocks above pushes down,” he told Guardian Australia. The city appears to be sinking at a rate of between 2mm and 6mm a year, variable throughout the Perth basin. The greatest change was measured at the seaside suburb of Hillarys, which has a GPS sensor to measure the rate of subsidence and a tidal marker operating side by side. Data for much of the Perth basin is patchy. A sinking city also has ramifications for the measurement of sea levels. A few years ago the rate of sea level rise in Western Australia was reported – not entirely accurately, it turned out – to be three times greater than the global average. Read More here
22 October 2015, Ralph Nader, The Downsides of Cheap Abundance. In college, Economics 101 is often described as the social science discipline that deals with the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. MIT Economist Paul Samuelson liked to focus on scarcity, or more specifically, the allocation of scarce resources. “Abundance” was always a pretty word with an idyllic connotation for Professor Samuelson. I often wonder why there weren’t a few classes about the real-life consequences of abundance, along with scarcity and people’s material welfare. The present generation of internet technology is a proper subject of study within an economic framework. It might help us understand what is happening to our society. Let’s start with today’s highly-touted information age. At our finger-tips is the greatest free trove of information in human history. We can get it quickly and efficiently. Are we more informed? Are we hungry for more information? Do we read more books in an era of record production of books? Do we know more about what our congressional and state legislators are about? Are we more knowledgeable about history and its lessons? Read More here
22 October 2015, Climate News Network, Hurricanes’ economic havoc as world warms. Analysis of insurance data convinces environmental economists that climate change is pushing up the cost of dealing with the disastrous effects of extreme weather events. Climate change could already be costing the US billions of dollars each year in hurricane damage alone. Economists from Mexico and Europe believe that somewhere between $2bn and $14bn of the financial costs of hurricane damage in 2005 could be attributed to the impact of global warming. This is a bold statement. But Francisco Estrada, an environmental economics researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and European colleagues report in Nature Geoscience that they have looked at the pattern of economic losses from hurricanes that matches a rise between 1990 and 2005 in the number and intensity of tropical cyclones. They say that this upward trend in loss “cannot be explained by commonly-used socioeconomic variables”. The distinction is an important one. Economic damage from climate-related events − ice storms, drought, flood, windstorms and heatwaves – has been on the increase for decades, but one explanation for this is population growth and economic development, even in the poorest regions. Read more here