1. A study published in the journal Science reports that the current level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere – about 390 parts per million – is higher today than at any time in measurable history — at least the last 2.1 million years. Previous peaks of CO2 were never more than 300 ppm over the past 800,000 years, and the concentration is rising by around 2 ppm each year.
2. The World Meterological Organization reported that 2000-2009 was the hottest decade on record with 8 of the hottest 10 years having occurred since 2000.
3. 2009 will end up as one of the 5 hottest years since 1850 and the U.K.’s Met Office predicts that, with a moderate El Nino, 2010 will likely break the record.
4. The National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that while a bit more summer Arctic sea ice appeared in 2009 than the record breaking lows of the last two years, it was still well below normal levels. Given that the Arctic ice cover remains perilously thin, it is vulnerable to further melting, posing an ever increasing threat to Arctic wildlife including polar bears.
5. The Arctic summer could be ice-free by mid-century, not at the end of the century as previously expected, according to a study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
6. Recent observations published in the highly respected Nature Geosciences indicate that the East Antarctica ice sheet has been shrinking. This surprised researchers, who expected that only the West Antarctic ice sheet would shrink in the near future because the East Antarctic ice sheet is colder and more stable.
7. The U.S. Global Change Research Program completed an assessment of what is known about climate change impacts in the US and reported that, “Climate changes are already observed in the United States and… are projected to grow.” These changes include “increases in heavy downpours, rising temperature and sea level, rapidly retreating glaciers, thawing permafrost, lengthening ice-free seasons in the ocean and on lakes and rivers, earlier snowmelt, and alterations in river flows.”
8. According to a report by the US Geological Survey, slight changes in the climate may trigger abrupt threats to ecosystems that are not easily reversible or adaptable, such as insect outbreaks, wildfire, and forest dieback. “More vulnerable ecosystems, such as those that already face stressors other than climate change, will almost certainly reach their threshold for abrupt change sooner.” An example of such an abrupt threat is the outbreak of spruce bark beetles throughout the western U.S. caused by increased winter temperatures that allow more beetles to survive.
9. The EPA, USGS and NOAA issued a joint report warning that most mid-Atlantic coastal wetlands from New York to North Carolina will be lost with a sea level rise of 1 meter or more.
10. If we do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the century, some of the main fruit and nut tree crops currently grown in California may no longer be economically viable, as there will be a lack of the winter chilling they require. And, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S. production of corn, soybeans and cotton could decrease as much as 82%.

(CNN) — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Copenhagen early Thursday morning amid concerns that time is running out at the climate change summit for world leaders to agree a deal to combat global warming.

Yvo de Boer, the U.N.’s top climate official, admitted Wednesday evening that negotiations had unexpectedly stalled and said that the next 24 hours would be crucial.

The conference’s Danish hosts had been expected Wednesday to table a text intended to establish a basis for further negotiations. But de Boer said he did not know if the Danish text had been tabled.

“The cable car has made an unexpected stop,” De Boer told journalists. On Monday he had said that the “cable car” was halfway up the mountain and that the rest of the ride would be “fast, smooth and relaxing.”

Clinton is among dozens of senior-level figures joining the negotiations in the final days in an effort to push the summit towards a global deal limiting carbon emissions to replace the Kyoto Protocol. U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to join the talks Friday.

“The Secretary and the President decided that she could play a useful role in helping close gaps in our climate talks there by traveling to Copenhagen and personally participating,” a spokesman for the U.S. State Department said.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was among world leaders to arrive at the summit Wednesday. He told reporters aboard his flight to Denmark that he intended to assert China’s “sincerity and determination” to work with the international community to tackle climate change,” according to the official Chinese government Web site.

“I hope the meeting, with joint efforts made by various parties, will yield fair, reasonable, balanced and achievable results,” he said.

Japan became the latest country to pledge climate aid to developing nations Wednesday, offering $15 billion by 2012 to help vulnerable states mitigate against the impact of global warming. Earlier in the week the European Union pledged $9.4 billion for the same purpose.

Climate change activists attempted to disrupt the summit Wednesday, resulting in around 250 arrests. Protesters had hoped to get inside the Bella Center, where the talks are being held, to set up a “people’s assembly” but police used pepper spray and dogs to contain the demonstrations.

A spokesman for the Copenhagen police told CNN that the majority of arrests had taken place outside the center but there had been no serious injuries.

While the protests were going on outside, inside it was being announced that Danish minister Connie Hedegaard had resigned as president of the U.N. climate change summit.

“The resignation is essentially procedural,” CNN’s Phil Black said, “and she’ll be replaced by the Danish prime minister. It’s a reflection of the fact that the talks are now at the high-level phase, and it was deemed appropriate that the PM should now take over.”

As 2009 draws to a close we look at Trendwatching’s 10 great macro trends.

Forget the recession: the societal changes that will dominate 2010 were set in motion way before we temporarily stared into the abyss. More »

Urban culture is the culture. Extreme urbanization, in 2010, 2011, 2012 and far beyond will lead to more sophisticated and demanding consumers around the world. More »

Whatever it is you’re selling or launching in 2010, it will be reviewed ‘en masse’, live, 24/7. More »

Closely tied to what constitutes status (which is becoming more fragmented), luxury will be whatever consumers want it to be over the next 12 months. More »

Online lifestyles are fueling and encouraging ‘real world’ meet-ups like there’s no tomorrow, shattering all cliches and predictions about a desk-bound, virtual, isolated future. More »

To really reach some meaningful sustainability goals in 2010, corporations and governments will have to forcefully make it ‘easy’ for consumers to be more green, by restricting the alternatives. More »

Tracking and alerting are the new search, and 2010 will see countless new INFOLUST services that will help consumers expand their web of control. More »

Next year, generosity as a trend will adapt to the zeitgeist, leading to more pragmatic and collaborative donation services for consumers. More »

With hundreds of millions of consumers now nurturing some sort of online profile, 2010 will be a good year to introduce some services to help them make the most of it (financially), from intention-based models to digital afterlife services. More »

2010 will be even more opinionated, risqué, outspoken, if not ‘raw’ than 2009; you can thank the anything-goes online world for that. Will your brand be as daring? More »

“Biochar Will Save the World!” proclaims a group page on Facebook.  Popular mechanics writes of an “ancient charcoal” that can “put the brakes on global warming.”  More than its prospects as a carbon sink or a fuel, biochar has massive prospects for development (the economic kind) for developing countries and emerging markets.  But is it really that simple? A very wise Finance professor* once told me, “Anytime anybody tells you they have a market for that, be very suspicious.”  It’s not that biochar couldn’t work, but that the market to make it work would have to be nuanced and highly regulated.

“One of the dangers of a biochar industry in developing countries is that you can divert your biochar to fuel or that you can somehow create more of a demand for wood which would be completely counterproductive.  What is a more sustainable system is to use agricultural and wood wastes,” explains Dr. Simon Shackley, at the UK’s Biochar Research Institute in Edinburgh.

Biochar as a fuel is in the middle of a hierarchy of fuels commonly used in developing countries. Dr. Shackley explains that the poorest tend to use wood, then charcoal, then propane.  In developed countries charcoal is a luxury fuel, and it would be “absurd” for people in developed countries to all of a sudden switch to heating our homes with it.  There in lies the problem: biochar is viable on the market as both an agricultural tool and as a fuel in developing countries.

The best strategy then, according to Shackley, is to find sustainable feed stocks.  He gives an example, “if you’ve got a rice paddy system… the rice husks are thrown into the paddy field and they decompose for methane, which is a very powerful greenhouse gas. So in that case, it’s much more efficient to put the rice husk into a pyrolysis or gasification machine, carbonize it, and put that into the field and you’re returning the nutrients to the soil.” And then you get a carbon negative process.  Depending on the machine, the pyrolysis process itself can produce energy that can be used as well.

Sounds great, right?  In principle, sure.

Few problems:

In terms of accounting biochar is only carbon neutral or negative if the biochar is replanted into the soil right away and not used as a fuel.  More likely is that it is stored. Shackley says that common practice is not to count pyrolysis process in the CO2 footprint.  Pyrolysis does produce CO2.  And if the biochar isn’t planted but used as a fuel then it is carbon positive. Sure it emits less carbon than fossil fuels, but using it as a fuel would distort its price as an agricultural input.

This leads to the second problem: logistics.  Shackley describes the process, “You’ve got a lot of movement of material: you’ve got to grow it somewhere, you’ve got to use quite a lot of land to grow it, you’ve got to move it [left over wastes], you’ve got to store it, you’ve got to process it, you’ve then got to store the biochar before it goes onto the field.  And if you’re talking about very large volumes, you’ve got to store it somewhere.”

In biochar manufacture and use there is a temporal delay: Shackley says often the feedstock waste from agriculture will come from the end of a harvest, but the most useful time to use it would likely be the following spring or summer.  Logistics are a huge part of the process but those details are often glossed over.

Only loosely mentioned is a third problem: no one is entirely certain of the optimum composition of biochar for maximum temporal carbon sequestration. An article about biochar on MNN mentions in passing, “Plowing biochar into soil sequesters the carbon for a long time — biochar fields have been found in South America dating back thousands of years and still full of their carbon solids.” A long time sure, but it depends on what it’s made of.**  Scientists may be able to test terra preta to see what it’s been made of in the past, but other materials will be used to create modern biochar.

So why not only make biochar from certain specific materials?  Simplistically: Soil contains bacteria and mineral nutrients that help plants grow.  Biochar contains minerals as well that are beneficial to plant growth, which makes it beneficial as a fertilizer.  Different biochar compositions could provide optimum minerals depending on the soil composition.  It’s common sense that in order to be sustainable, biochar be composed of native organic materials. So, wherever it’s used its make up will vary.

Biochar can be made of almost any material and some materials, according to Dr. Saran Sohi, a soil specialist at the UK Biochar Research Institute, are more stable than others.  Stability determines how long carbon will be trapped (sequestered) in the soil.  There’s not yet been enough research to determine how long certain materials will sequester carbon.

“When you pyrolyze material you end up with a complex substance. And some of that is volatile,”  explains Shackley. Any biochar used as an agricultural fertilizer (carbon sink) will have to be stable for well over 100 years,  “Ideally we want to keep 75-80% of carbon in a stable form for hundreds of years.  If it all comes out as CO2 after 100 years, in my view, it isn’t worth it…. Because if we haven’t solved the problem, and it all comes out again in 100 years time …you could get billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide back in the atmosphere and we might be having a severe climate crisis and it could be disastrous.”

Forth, the market model is uncertain on several levels:  Sohi says that more research must be done on biochar composition so that the benefits to farmers (i.e. increased crop yield) can be clearly enumerated.  Until then a market price for biochar as a fertilizer will be hard to pin down. It will also be difficult to displace traditional chemical fertilizers with this “natural” alternative, where the added yields are certain. Any market in developing countries where charcoal is used as a fuel (even as a low-carbon alternative) and an agricultural input must be heavily regulated: in order that charcoal remains cheap enough to be used as a low cost agricultural input, to prevent people trading the biochar at profit to be used as fertilizer (rather then fuel too), then from turning to another fuel that might degrade the environment.

After years of colossal f-ups, the development community has to come to an agreement that aid must be nuanced– that is, designed specific to the environment in which it’s implemented.  The financial crisis(es) have shown us that we need heavy market regulation, not just of financial markets but commodities as well.  In order to address climate change we need to use all of the technology at our disposal, which includes biochar.  But unless we take our time, and correctly implement its use, biochar could do more harm than good. The US’s biochar bill might be something to be weary of. Shackley points out that such a bill will drive more investment into research and make certain that regulators ask the right questions about safety and benefits.  On the other hand, history has shown that governments dolling out money must be monitored to make certain processes are safe.  More research must be done on biochar, its use should not be rushed into, and the market must be heavily regulated.

* Dr. Paulo dos Santos, SOAS.

**For example manure, palm tree litter are more volatile.

Ann Danylkiw is a freelance new media journalist specializing in green economics and finance. She is completing an MSc in Finance and Development Economics at SOAS in London. A small but fierce personality, her latest obsessions include spicy hot chocolate, vegan pumpkin pie, graphic novels, and Indonesia.  She will be covering Cop15 for a coalition of blogs including solveclimate.com, where she is a regular contributor.

Article re-published with permission.