Environment

A new study from the University of Haifa finds that animals on either side of the Israel-Jordanian border exhibit different characteristics and behaviors:

The first study inspected the reptile population and revealed that the number of reptiles is similar on both sides, but the variety of species in the sandy areas of Jordan is significantly higher than the variety found in the sands of Israel. A second study revealed that Israeli gerbils are more cautious than their Jordanian friends, while a third study showed that the funnel-digging ant lion population in Israel is unmistakably larger than in Jordan.

According to the researchers, the differences between Israel and Jordan are primarily in the higher level of agriculture and the higher number of agricultural farms in Israel as opposed to Jordan's agriculture that is primarily based on nomadic shepherding and traditional farming. The agricultural fields on the Israeli side of the border not only create a gulf between habitats and thereby cause an increase in the number of species in the region, but they also hail one of the most problematic of intruders in the world: the red fox. On the Jordanian side, the red fox is far less common, so that Jordanian gerbils can allow themselves to be more carefree.

This follows an amazing Wall Street Journal story from two weeks ago describing how red deer still refuse to cross the German-Czech border, 20 years after an electric fence was taken down. The U.S.-Mexico border fence is also proving disruptive to migration patterns several species. 

Arbitrary political constructions though they may be, national borders are becoming natural ones as well. 

Some of the world's remaining communist countries (plus former Soviet Russia) are preparing to control the weather. Indeed, China, Russia, Venezuela, and Cuba are preparing ways to control precipitation -- hearkening back to something the X-Men guys thought up during the Cold War (see: Storm). 

Last a summer, Chinese government officials worried that it might rain on their parade, literally, during the Olympics. They fired rockets filled with dry ice and silver iodide into the clouds, to make them cough up any raindrops before Beijing. The process might have backfired, causing two fierce snowstorms. But Moscow's mayor seems undeterred by the weather -- he is using the same technology to deflect snowfall from his city, having military planes spray iodide clouds.

Venezuela isn't as concerned with deflecting precipitation. Chavez is trying to increase rainfall on parched areas of his country. And rather than simply ordering the cloud seeding to take place, he is going to do it himself, going airborne with a group of Cuban scientists.

"I'm going in a plane. Any cloud that crosses me, I'll zap it so that it rains," Chavez said.

JUAN BARRETO/AFP/Getty Images

For the past two years, 192 countries have participated in talks on the pressing issue of climate change, which will culminate in the Copenhagen summit next month. So far, more than 40 heads of state have agreed to attend, to act as negotiators and more importantly to demonstrate a firm commitment to ambitious targets. The growing list includes Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

But the RSVPs seem lost in the mail for the leaders of the countries considered to be the lynchpins of the deal -- China, the United States, and India. Hu Jintao, Barack Obama, and Manmohan Singh haven't committed yet -- and they should. This summer, Obama indicated he would not attend because Congress has not yet passed climate change legislation. He's since waffled a bit, saying he would if his appearance would close the deal. It's weak tea, and those calling for him to attend include Al Gore and Brazil's da Silva, who used his weekly radio address to implore Obama and Hu to make the trip.

It is less likely that Hu or Singh will attend. Their developing countries have been good negotiators, but reticent to commit to ambitious targets. (China recently called for keeping the Kyoto protocol instead.) If Obama commits, though, they would be a lot more willing -- and that should be reason for the U.S. leader to consider heading across the pond.

In other climate news, the International Energy Agency released its full World Energy Outlook yesterday. One choice doomsday passage:

For every year that passes, the window for action on emissions over a given period becomes narrower -- and the costs of transforming the energy sector increase. We calculate that each year of delay before moving onto the emissions path consistent with a 2°C temperature increase would add approximately $500 billion to the global incremental investment cost...A delay of just a few years would probably render that goal completely out of reach.

The headline on this story reads: "Obama will go to Copenhagen to clinch deal."

That's a touch misleading.

What the headline on this story should really read is: "Obama will go to Copenhagen if and only if his appearance is necessary in order to clinch a deal."

On one hand, this is good news. Even if the United States can't be a strong party in climate change negotiations, it is of vital importance that Obama act as a strong diplomat and negotiator on this issue. The whole world is at stake.

On the other hand, isn't this a bit rich? The U.S. slow-walk on this issue is part of the reason the Copenhagen negotiations have been so fraught. If a comprehensive agreement falters in December, the United States will be in no small part to blame. But its leader might parachute in at the last moment to save the day? Sigh.

LLUIS GENE/AFP/Getty Images

Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov -- the man behind the world's ugliest statue -- has a new grandiose project, keeping winter snow out of Moscow:

Moscow will blast clouds from the sky this winter to save money on snow removal, a city official said Wednesday, but the plan threatens to anger the surrounding region, which would have to cope with the extra powder. ....

Luzhkov is a long-time proponent of fighting clouds by spraying liquid nitrogen, silver, or cement particles into the cloud mass, which forces precipitation to fall before it can reach the capital and spoil holidays like Victory Day and City Day.

Last month, Luzhkov proposed expanding the technology to fight the snow drifts that snarl traffic every winter.

“What if we force this snow to fall beyond Moscow? The Moscow region will have more water, bigger harvests, while we will have less snow,” he said at an award ceremony for Moscow’s best-kept yard. He said that using the Air Force to prevent massive snowfall would be three times cheaper than using the regular system of trucks and snow-melting stations.

City hall estimates that the project will save the city $10.2 million in snow removal. Needless to say, officials in the surrouding region are less than thrilled with the plan. Locals have also criticized Luzhkov's previous cloud prevention schemes, noting that they make "the cucumbers turn yellow."

Alexander Kadobnov/AFP/Getty Images

Today, the International Energy Agency said that global carbon emissions shrank 3 percent in 2009, due to the Great Recession. The Guardian reports that for only the fourth time in the past 50 years, the world emitted less of the greenhouse gas than it had done the year before, because of declining industrial production.

Which means, alas, that the world will likely be back to increasing emissions soon. Indeed, the IEA report notes that to avoid climate change and all the catastrophes it promises, countries don't have to shrink their economies, but do have to "[build] more than 350 new nuclear plants and 350,000 wind turbines in the next 20 years. [It] also estimates that by 2020, three-fifths of cars will need to use alternatives to the traditional internal combustion engine."

The IEA report reminded me of a fascinating study out of the London School of Economics, released last month. It found that promoting contraceptive use could be a lynchpin to combating climate change: fewer babies means fewer carbon-emitters, and fewer carbon-emitters means less climate change. 

That, in turn, reminds me of this. Oh dear.

After a slate of big speeches yesterday at the U.N. climate summit in New York, the jury is still divided on how significant the new carbon mitigation steps announced by China, India, Japan, and other countries are. (There's even a range of opinions on this site. But there seems to be a growing consensus on one thing: the US is increasingly seen as falling behind, isolated.

Funny that, in China, they saw this coming. This summer in Beijing, I spoke with one of the leading private-sector Chinese energy analysts, someone present at the last big round of climate negotiations held in Bonn. In between meetings, he and some of his colleagues had joked about something they called the "Chinese conspiracy." The gist was, as he put it, to view future climate talks as "an opportunity" and "to keep America off the table at Copenhagen."

He was kidding, of course, and even were he serious, he wouldn't have been speaking for the government. But as it happens, something like that scenario may be unfolding.

In the final weeks before Copenhagen, several countries, including China, are rushing to claim the mantle of leadership, to define what "success" means, and to offer their own proposals. At a press conference this morning in Washington, the director general of climate change for Mexico's ministry of the environment was talking about his country's proposal for the architecture of a redistributive "green fund," which would collect money from the world's economic leaders and then steer money toward green-friendly development in poorer countries. Next up, rumors are swirling of a coalition of Latin American countries preparing to offer their own pre-Copenhagen proposals.

As my colleague Joshua Keating noted, there was a great deal of anticipation ahead of Chinese president Hu Jintao’s speech this morning at the UN climate summit in New York. U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer, who has the at times unenviable job of cheerleading for progress in so far ho-hum international climate talks, even went so far as to say China was poised to become “a world leader on addressing climate change.”  A headline in yesterday’s Guardian fanned the flames: “China's president expected to announce radical climate change targets.”

It would have been hard for anything Hu might have said to live up to the hype.

In a speech that lasted less than ten minutes, Hu said that China intended to include “carbon intensity” targets in its next five-year economic blueprint. Hu stressed that China is taking steps to reduce future carbon emissions, at least as compared with business as usual. China is indeed already doing much more to expand renewable energy production than many western observes give it credit for.

But has China achieved, in de Boer’s words, “front-runner” status? Well, that stretches definition.

As Julian Wong, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, said: “Maybe they’re leading in specific policies, but it’s premature to say they’re a leader. Climate leader … I’m not quite sure what that would mean.”

Hu began his remarks by reiterating the principle of “differentiated” responsibilities for developed and developing countries. He didn’t make any pledges about carbon caps, or otherwise indicate a softening on China’s position going into Copenhagen. China still wants developed nations to largely foot the bill for its carbon mitigation efforts – an argument with some merit, but also many critics; in sum, hardly an open invitation to move climate talks forward.

Yet in a sense, the recent hype about China as a climate-change “leader” is less about what China is doing than about what the US isn’t doing.

The US Senate now seems unlikely to pass a climate bill before Copenhagen. Speaking to Bloomberg TV this morning, Senator John Kerry, head of the committee drafting climate legislation, now said he now hoped the Senate would begin to debate a climate bill before December – debate, not act on. Talk about lowered expectations.

And in his first full speech on climate change, delivered this morning in New York, President Obama said that “unease is no excuse for inaction,” but crucially he did not mention any emissions reduction targets or firm financial commitments. Obama’s climate speech was in a way even less remarkable than Hu’s.

The upshot is while China hardly has an undisputed claim to being the world “leader” in fighting climate change, it now seems to have pulled ahead in the global warming PR wars. That’s not a bad thing if it helps pressure Washington into action.

But it could be a bad thing if it gives China much greater leverage to set the terms of the debate and define what “success” means at Copenhagen. And unless the US steps up to the plate in the next three months, that’s exactly what will happen.