Why is Australia Trying to Control Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

There is a lot of misinformation floating around the blogosphere on the intentions behind Australia's recently announced climate change policy. A week ago, Stephen King listed a bunch of reasons for the policy, which does not include the true reason. And today there is a similar article on the Conversation from Paul Frijters. The real reason the government is acting is that following the

First Thoughts on the Australian Government's Climate Package

For those of you outside Australia, the federal government is announcing its planned climate change package today. They have the numbers in parliament to pass the legislation so we can expect this to actually happen this time. One surprise is the increase in the 2050 emissions reduction target from 60% to 80%. The carbon price will initially be $23 before a switch to carbon trading in 2015. After

CCEP Paper Published in PNAS

Just a few days ago I was talking about Robert Kaufmann's paper in PNAS and now we have a paper there is another paper in the journal deserving of a mention on this blog. Alessandro Tavoni, Astrid Dannenberg, Giorgos Kallis, and CCEP research associate Andreas Löschel have http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/06/27/1102493108.abstract?sid=783a6741-6285-4957-81a6-0542053f29a7">a paper on

Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998–2008

My colleague Robert Kaufmann (one of my PhD advisors and coauthor on several papers) has published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about the slowdown in global temperature increase between 1998 and 2008. The Guardian has pretty balanced coverage but all the bloggers I read seemed to be upset about it both people who support mainstream science and the climate change

Special Issue of Energy Economics

The latest issue of Energy Economics is a special issue on the economics of technologies to combat global warming. I haven't read the papers in detail yet, but there look to be several good overviews of the current state of play on the key issues in this area. Given the slowness with which countries are moving to put a price on greenhouse gas emissions, technology policies might end up being more

Price Floors in Emissions Trading to Reduce Policy Related Investment Risks: an Australian View

Frank Jotzo and Steve Hatfield-Dodds have a new CCEP working paper tiled: Price Floors in Emissions Trading to Reduce Policy Related Investment Risks: an Australian View, which is about the role of a price floor in a carbon emissions trading scheme in increasing the certainty of the investment environment. One of the downsides to emissions permit trading is that permit prices can be very volatile

IPCC Literature Deadlines

The following are the deadlines for papers that can be cited in the 5th IPCC Assessment Report. At least for Working Group III's contributions:Literature cutoff I: cited papers must be submitted to a journal (11 March 2013)Literature cutoff II: cited papers must be accepted by a journal (28 October 2013)So, if you want your work to have a chance to be cited in the Report, it needs to meet these

Countdown to Korea

I've booked my trip to Korea for the IPCC Working Group III 5th Assessment Report meeting in Changwon City. I'll also be giving a presentation on 18th July at the Korea Energy Economics Institute. My former student Sung-Kyun Kim started working there earlier this year after getting his PhD from RPI in economics. Work is starting up on the first draft of our chapter, known as the "Zero Order Draft

Omumbo et al. Revisit Temperature at Kericho, Kenya

Last year I wrote a series of http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2010/06/changes-to-cru-database.html">blogposts about the controversy over malaria and climate change in highland East Africa, and most specifically at Kericho, Kenya. Our previous research had shown that there was no signficant trend in temperature in various locations across Eastern Africa and so the increase in malaria morbidity

Grattan Institute Report on Australia's Carbon Emissions Reduction Policies

The Grattan Institute has put out a report reviewing the performance of Australia's policies to reduce carbon emissions. Maybe you are surprised to find that there are quite a lot of these, actually, including some semi-market based mechanisms. The most important of these is the Renewable Energy Target. Electricity generators have to generate 20% of electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

Global Trends in Carbon and Sulfur Emissions

I'm preparing a lecture on environmental economics for both my course "Economic Way of Thinking 1" at the Crawford School and as a guest lecture in an introductory economics course at the Treasury. I'm planning to open the lecture by presenting some global and regional trends, focusing on carbon and sulfur emissions. First the global trends using data from CDIAC and Steven Smith:and then data by

Why "Jevons Paradox" is an Argument for Stronger Action on Climate Change not Weaker

The 19th century economist William Jevons suggested that improvements in the efficiency of energy use devices could increase energy use rather than reduce it. The more efficient machines etc. would reduce the cost of production thereby increasing the amount demanded and sold and, therefore, the energy used to produce the products. The rebound effect is a modern statement of this idea: "Efficiency

Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations During Ancient Greenhouse Climates were Similar to those Predicted for A.D. 2100

That's the title of a paper published last year by Breecker et al. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Also see the commentary on the article). The key figure is this:The yellow band are previous estimates of atmospheric CO2 concentrations based on calcium carbonate in ancient soils. The revised estimates from this paper are marked in red and are more in agreement with

Australia's 2010 Emissions Projection Released

The Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency has released projections of Australian GHG emissions till 2020-30. They project that emissions will increase by 1.8% p.a. from 2010 to 2020. This is much faster growth than from 1990 to 2010. The reason is that reductions in land-clearing offset strong growth in other emissions in the latter period. And now there isn't much ability to reduce

CO2 Regulated from Today in the U.S.

From tomorrow, the EPA is regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Climate Progress has some good information on what is happening as does the New York Times. It is hard to say at this what will happen in the long-run. Most states seem to be cooperating with the EPA though Texas refuses. There is a lot of legal action in progress to try to stop the regulation. And there is a high probability

Most Popular Posts of 2010

In case you missed one of my more popular posts from 2010, I'm kicking off 2011 with a list of the top ten hits. Actually, I saw a bunch of other much bigger bloggers doing this and was curious what my most popular posts were:1. iamscientist. People are obviously very interested in learning more about this science social networking site.2. 2009 Journal Citation Report Released. And people want to

Marginal CO2 Abatement Cost Curves from EMF22

These are my first estimates of the marginal abatement cost curves for the four main regions based on the results of the EMF22 exercise. Here I have flipped the graph back 90 degrees again. This is private marginal cost for abating fossil and industrial emissions of CO2 using market exchange rates. The EU is the most expensive region for small cuts in emissions and India the cheapest. But for

Marginal CO2 Abatement Cost Curve for the US

So, I turned the graph 90 degrees and replaced tonnes of abatement by percent and got this:The percentage is emissions relative to business as usual. i.e. 100% means there is no abatement. 0% means there is 100% abatement. Yes, some models end up with negative emissions. And these are just fossil-fuel/industrial emissions of CO2. They assume that we will be burning biomass and sequestrating the

Marginal Abatement Cost Curve for China

The chart plots the carbon price in US Dollars (market exchange rate) against Gt of Co2 abated for China using the results from seven of the EMF-22 models. This is not really a cost curve as it includes data for different time periods and model scenarios. I've been struggling to model this data over the last 10 days or so on and off. But this is actually the first time I've plotted the data like

Polar View

Some nice maps from GISS showing temperature anomalies for November in the Arctic and Antarctic: It's clear from these, that though temperatures were low in NW Europe they were much higher than normal across Arctic Canada and Russia. For more information, visit Climate Progress