WASHINGTON | Fri Mar 15, 2013 4:30pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. environmental regulators will likely delay finalizing rules to limit carbon emissions from new power plants, a measure that has been one of President Barack Obama's top strategies to fight climate change, the Washington Post reported on Friday.

The rules were proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) nearly a year ago. They are expected to be revised to set a separate standard for coal-fired plants, as opposed to natural-gas-fired plants, the newspaper said.

The administration had been expected to tackle emissions from existing power plants, which are responsible for a much larger volume of U.S. emissions, up to 40 percent, after finalizing the rules on new plants.

An administration official said the report was not accurate because the EPA was still working on the rule. The official did say that sifting through the massive volume of comments was time-consuming.

According to the EPA's regulatory tracker, the so-called greenhouse gas "New Source Performance Standard" for new power plants was projected to be finalized by the end of this month.

But EPA Administrator nominee Gina McCarthy, who was in charge of EPA rules as assistant administrator for the agency's office for air and radiation, hinted last month that finalizing the proposal may take extra time since it had received nearly 2 million comments on the rules.

McCarthy will face a Senate confirmation hearing in April, Capitol Hill sources said, and is expected to get pushback from lawmakers from states that are heavily reliant on coal.

The EPA proposal says new plants can emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour, a standard that effectively blocks construction of new coal-fired plants.

David Doniger, policy director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's climate and air program, said he has no evidence that the EPA plans to weaken the current proposal but warned that a deadline to finalize the rule is less than one month away.

"If they don't meet the deadline, environmental organizations will start taking the legal steps to get a court to force the deadline," he said.

He added that the EPA holds regular, informal consultations with various stakeholders including green groups and electric utilities to hear proposals for setting an emissions standard from existing power plants.

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner and Valerie Volcovici; Editing by John Wallace and Dale Hudson)

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Demonstrators carry a replica of a pipeline during a march against the Keystone XL pipeline in Washington, February 17, 2013.

WASHINGTON | Sun Feb 17, 2013 6:37pm EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Thousands of protesters gathered on the Washington's National Mall on Sunday calling on President Barack Obama to reject the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline proposal and honor his inaugural pledge to act on climate change.

Organizers of the "Forward on Climate" event estimated that 35,000 people from 30 states turned out in cold, blustery conditions for what they said was the biggest climate rally in U.S. history. Police did not verify the crowd size.

Protesters also marched around the nearby White House, chanting "Keystone pipeline? Shut it down." Among the celebrities on hand were actresses Rosario Dawson and Evangeline Lilly, and hedge fund manager and environmentalist Tom Steyer.

The event came days after a bipartisan group of U.S. senators made the latest call for Obama to approve the $5.3 billion pipeline, seen by many as an engine for job growth and another step toward energy independence.

A new poll by Harris Interactive showed 69 percent of respondents said they support construction of the pipeline, with only 17 percent saying they oppose it.

One of Sunday's main organizers, climate activist Bill McKibben, said that approving the pipeline, which would transport crude oil from the oil sands of northern Alberta to refineries and ports in Texas, would be akin to lighting a "carbon bomb" that could cause irreparable harm to the climate.

"For 25 years our government has basically ignored the climate crisis: now people in large numbers are finally demanding they get to work," said McKibben, founder of the environmental group 350.org.

Other major organizing groups on Sunday included the Sierra Club and the Hip-Hop Caucus.

The proposed TransCanada Corp project has been pending for 4-1/2 years. A revised route through Nebraska, which would avoid crossing sensitive ecological zones and aquifers, was approved by that state's governor last month.

Backers of Keystone, which would transport 830,000 barrels of oil per day, say it would provide thousands of jobs in the United States and increase North American energy security.

Environmentalists oppose the pipeline because the oil sands extraction process is carbon intensive, and say the oil extracted is dirtier than traditional crude oil.

Van Jones, Obama's former green jobs adviser, said if the president approved the pipeline just weeks after pledging to act on climate change, it would overshadow other actions Obama takes to reduce pollution.

"There is nothing else you can do if you let that pipeline go through. It doesn't matter what you do on smog rules and automobile rules - you've already given the whole game way," said Jones, who is president of Rebuild the Dream, a non-government organization.

Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the lone member of Congress to speak at the rally, told Reuters Obama risked creating a "credibility gap" if he approved the pipeline.

"He would have to roll out a very complete and very strong package to offset something that on its own is described by government scientist as ‘game-over' on climate," he said.

Still, some of Obama's core constituents favor the pipeline, including the labor union AFL-CIO's building and construction unit, which sees the potential for job creation for its members, and certain Democratic lawmakers.

In January, nine Democratic senators joined 44 Republicans in urging the president to approve Keystone XL.

(Reporting By Valerie Volcovici; editing by Ros Krasny and Mohammad Zargham)

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LONDON | Thu Jan 31, 2013 4:21am EST

LONDON (Reuters) - Growing palm oil trees to make biofuels could be accelerating the effects of climate change, new research showed on Wednesday, adding further weight to claims the crop is not environmentally sustainable.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, an international team of scientists examined how the deforestation of peat swamps in Malaysia to make way for palm oil trees is releasing carbon which has been locked away for thousands of years.

Microbes then penetrate the carbon and the harmful greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is released, which is thought to be the biggest contributor to global warming.

Unsustainable methods of growing crop-based biofuels have come under fire as environmentalists question the emissions savings they make, the agricultural land they occupy and whether the growth of certain crops contribute to deforestation.

More than 80 percent of palm oil is grown in Indonesia and Malaysia. According to some estimates, an area the size of Greece is cleared every year for palm oil plantations.

As governments and companies look to biofuels to provide a low-carbon alternative to fossil fuels in transport, the industry has expanded rapidly.

Palm oil is especially attractive because it is cheaper than rapeseed oil and soybean oil for biodiesel.

However, leaked European Union data has shown palm oil biodiesel to be more polluting than conventional gasoline when the effects of deforestation and peatlands degradation is taken into account.

In their study, the research team measured water channels in palm oil plantations in the Malaysian peninsular which were originally peatland swamp forest.

They found ancient carbon came from deep in the soil, then broke down and dissolved into nearby streams and rivers as deforestation occurred.

"We have known for some time that in South East Asia oil palm plantations were a major threat to biodiversity (..) and that the drainage could release huge amounts of carbon dioxide during the fires seen there in recent years," said Chris Freeman, one of the authors of the report and an environmental scientist at the University of Bangor in Wales.

"But this discovery of a 'hidden' new source of problems in the waters draining these peatlands is a reminder that these fragile ecosystems really are in need of conservation," he added.

There are approximately 28,000 sq km of industrial plantations in Malaysia, Sumatra and Borneo and there are even more planned, making them a major contributor to peat swamp deforestation in the region, the paper said.

"Our results are yet another reminder that when we disturb intact peat swamps and convert them to industrial biofuel plantations, we risk adding to the very problem that we are trying to solve," said Freeman.

The research team included scientists from the British universities of Leicester and Bangor, the Open University, the Met Office Hadley Centre, the Natural Environment Research Council Radiocarbon Facility in Scotland, the University of Palangka Raya in Indonesia and water research institute Deltares in the Netherlands.

(This story has been refiled to add Open University in last paragraph)

(Editing by James Jukwey)

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The sun rises behind Fiddlers Ferry coal fired power station near Liverpool, northern England, December 15 2008.

OSLO | Thu Jan 3, 2013 7:15am EST

OSLO (Reuters) - An agreement by almost 200 nations to curb rising greenhouse gas emissions from 2020 will be far more costly than taking action now to tackle climate change, according to research published on Wednesday.

Quick measures to cut emissions would give a far better chance of keeping global warming within an agreed U.N. limit of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6F) above pre-industrial times to avert more floods, heatwaves, droughts and rising sea levels.

"If you delay action by 10, 20 years you significantly reduce the chances of meeting the 2 degree target," said Keywan Riahi, one of the authors of the report at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.

"It was generally known that costs increase when you delay action. It was not clear how quickly they change," he told Reuters of the findings in the science journal Nature based on 500 computer-generated scenarios.

It said the timing of cuts in greenhouse gases was more important than other uncertainties - about things like how the climate system works, future energy demand, carbon prices or new energy technologies.

The study indicated that an immediate global price of $30 a metric ton on emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas, would give a roughly 60 percent chance of limiting warming to below 2C.

Wait until 2020 and the carbon price would have to be around $100 a metric ton to retain that 60 percent chance, Riahi told Reuters of the study made with other experts in Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia and Germany.

And a delay of action until 2030 might put the 2C limit - which some of the more pessimistic scientists say is already unattainable - completely out of reach, whatever the carbon price.

"The window for effective action on climate change is closing quickly," wrote Steve Hatfield-Dodds of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia in a separate commentary in Nature.

Governments agreed to the 2C limit in 2010, viewing it as a threshold to avert dangerous climate change. Temperatures have already risen by 0.8 degree C (1.4F) since wide use of fossil fuels began 200 years ago.

ECONOMIC SLOWDOWN

After the failure of a 2009 summit in Copenhagen to agree a worldwide accord, almost 200 nations have given themselves until 2015 to work out a global deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions that will enter into force in 2020.

Amid an economic slowdown, many countries at the last U.N. meeting on climate change in Qatar in December expressed reluctance to make quick shifts away from fossil fuels towards cleaner energies such as wind or solar power.

Each U.S. citizen, for instance, emits about 20 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. There is no global price on carbon, only regional markets - in a European Union trading system, for instance, where industrial emitters must pay off they exceed their CO2 quotas, 2013 prices are about 6.7 euros ($8.83) a metric ton.

The report also showed that greener policies, such as more efficient public transport or better-insulated buildings, would raise the chances of meeting the 2C goal.

And fighting climate change would be easier with certain new technologies, such as capturing and burying carbon emissions from power plants and factories. In some scenarios, the 2C goal could not be met unless carbon capture was adopted.

($1 = 0.7585 euros)

(Scientist corrects carbon price to $30 a tonne from $20 in paragraph 6)

(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

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LONDON | Fri Dec 14, 2012 11:20am EST

LONDON (Reuters) - International climate scientists are more certain than ever that humans are responsible for global warming, rising sea levels and extreme weather events, according to a leaked draft report by an influential panel of experts.

The early draft, which is still subject to change before a final version is released in late 2013, showed that a rise in global average temperatures since pre-industrial times was set to exceed 2 degrees Celsius by 2100, and may reach 4.8 Celsius.

"It is extremely likely that human activities have caused more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperatures since the 1950s," the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) draft report said.

"Extremely likely" in the IPCC's language means a level of certainty of at least 95 percent. The next level is "virtually certain", or 99 percent, the greatest possible certainty for the scientists.

The IPCC's previous report, in 2007, said it was at least 90 percent certain that human activities, led by burning fossil fuels, were the cause of rising temperatures.

The draft was shown on a climate change skeptic blog.

The IPCC said the unauthorized, premature posting of the draft may lead to confusion because the report was still work in progress and was likely to change before it is released.

A United Nations conference last week aimed at curbing emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for global warning yielded no progress and three countries - Canada, Russia and Japan - have abandoned the Kyoto Protocol limiting the emissions.

The United States never ratified it in the first place, and it excludes developing countries where emissions are growing most quickly.

Countries agreed to extend Kyoto to 2020, but only those covering less than 15 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions signed up. Developing nations said they would push next year for a radical U.N. mechanism to compensate them for the impact of climate change.

The IPCC said it had "high confidence" that human activity had caused large-scale changes in oceans, in ice sheets or mountain glaciers, and in sea levels in the second half of the twentieth century, according to the draft.

It said some extreme weather events had also changed due to human influences.

THREAT TO CITIES

The draft's scenarios forecast a rise in temperatures of between 0.2 and 4.8 Celsius this century - a narrower band than in 2007. But in almost all of the scenarios, the rise would exceed 2 degrees Celsius.

Governments pledged in 2010 to try to stop global temperatures rising by more than 2 degrees, a threshold seen by scientists as the maximum to avoid more extreme weather, droughts, floods, and other climate change impacts.

Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were the highest in 800,000 years, according to the draft report.

The draft also said that sea levels were likely to rise by between 29 and 82 centimeters by the end of the century - compared to 18-59 centimeters projected in the 2007 report.

Rising sea levels are a threat to people living in low-lying areas, from Bangladesh to the cities of New York, London and Buenos Aires. They open up the risk of storm surges, coastal erosion and, in the worst case scenario, the complete swamping of large areas of land.

The IPCC carries weight because it brings together all scientific research on climate change and informs policymakers.

Many countries want to study the final IPCC report before signing up to a new global pact to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The draft included a possible future acceleration of ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland, which was omitted in 2007. It stopped short of including some research carried out since 2007 that suggested seas may rise by up to 2 meters by 2100.

(Editing by Tom Pfeiffer)

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A pedestrian walks across a bridge above a main road on a day with high air pollution in Beijing June 6, 2012.

OSLO | Fri Jul 27, 2012 10:23am EDT

OSLO (Reuters) - Scientists are finding evidence that man-made climate change has raised the risks of individual weather events, such as floods or heatwaves, marking a big step towards pinpointing local costs and ways to adapt to freak conditions.

"We're seeing a great deal of progress in attributing a human fingerprint to the probability of particular events or series of events," said Christopher Field, co-chairman of a U.N. report due in 2014 about the impacts of climate change.

Experts have long blamed a build-up of greenhouse gas emissions for raising worldwide temperatures and causing desertification, floods, droughts, heatwaves, more powerful storms and rising sea levels.

But until recently they have said that naturally very hot, wet, cold, dry or windy weather might explain any single extreme event, like the current drought in the United States or a rare melt of ice in Greenland in July.

But for some extremes, that is now changing.

A study this month, for instance, showed that greenhouse gas emissions had raised the chances of the severe heatwave in Texas in 2011 and unusual heat in Britain in late 2011. Other studies of extremes are under way.

Growing evidence that the dice are loaded towards ever more severe local weather may make it easier for experts to explain global warming to the public, pin down costs and guide investments in everything from roads to flood defenses.

"One of the ironies of climate change is that we have more papers published on the costs of climate change in 2100 than we have published on the costs today. I think that is ridiculous," said Myles Allen, head of climate research at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute.

"We can't (work out current costs) without being able to make the link to extreme weather," he said. "And once you've worked out how much it costs that raises the question of who is going to pay."

Industrialized nations agree they should take the lead in cutting emissions since they have burnt fossil fuels, which release greenhouse gases, since the Industrial Revolution. But they oppose the idea of liability for damage.

Almost 200 nations have agreed to work out a new deal by the end of 2015 to combat climate change, after repeated setbacks. China, the United States and India are now the top national emitters of greenhouse gases.

Field, Professor of Biology and Environmental Earth System Science at the University of Stanford, said that the goal was to carry out studies of extreme weather events almost immediately after they happen, helping expose the risks.

"Everybody who needs to make decisions about the future - things like building codes, infrastructure planning, insurance - can take advantage of the fact that the risks are changing but we have a lot of influence over what those risks are."

FLOODS

Another report last year indicated that floods 12 years ago in Britain - among the countries most easily studied because of it has long records - were made more likely by warming. And climate shifts also reduced the risks of flooding in 2001.

Previously, the European heatwave of 2003 that killed perhaps 70,000 people was the only extreme where scientists had discerned a human fingerprint. In 2004, they said that global warming had at least doubled the risks of such unusual heat.

The new statistical reviews are difficult because they have to tease out the impact of greenhouse gases from natural variations, such as periodic El Nino warmings of the Pacific, sun-dimming volcanic dust or shifts in the sun's output.

So far, extreme heat is the easiest to link to global warming after a research initiative led by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the British Meteorological Office.

"Heatwaves are easier to attribute than heavy rainfall, and drought is very difficult given evidence for large droughts in the past," said Gabriele Hegerl of the University of Edinburgh.

Scientists often liken climate change to loading dice to get more sixes, or a baseball player on steroids who hits more home runs. That is now going to the local from the global scale.

Field said climate science would always include doubt since weather is chaotic. It is not as certain as physics, where scientists could this month express 99.999 percent certainty they had detected the Higgs boson elementary particle.

"This new attribution science is showing the power of our understanding, but it also illustrates where the limits are," he said.

A report by Field's U.N. group last year showed that more weather extremes that can be linked to greenhouse warming, such as the number of high temperature extremes and the fact that the rising fraction of rainfall falls in downpours.

But scientists warn against going too far in blaming climate change for extreme events.

Unprecedented floods in Thailand last year, for instance, that caused $45 billion in damage according to a World Bank estimate, were caused by people hemming in rivers and raising water levels rather than by climate change, a study showed.

"We have to be a bit cautious about blaming it all on climate change," Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the Met Office's Hadley Centre, said of extremes in 2012.

Taken together, many extremes are a sign of overall change.

"If you look all over the world, we have a great disastrous drought in North America ... you have the same situation in the Mediterranean... If you look at all the extremes together you can say that these are indicators of global warming," said Friedrich-Wilhelm Gerstengabe, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

(Additional reporting by Sara Ledwith in London; Editing by Louise Ireland)

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SINGAPORE | Sun Jul 29, 2012 1:07pm EDT

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - From giant whirlpools to currents 1,000 km wide, scientists said on Monday they have uncovered how vast amounts of carbon are locked away in the depths of the Southern Ocean, boosting researchers ability to detect the impact of climate change.

Oceans curb the pace of climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. The Southern Ocean is the largest of these ocean carbon sinks, soaking up about 40 percent of mankind's CO2 absorbed by the seas.

But until now, researchers were unsure what mechanisms were involved because of the remoteness and sheer size of the Southern Ocean.

"By identifying the mechanisms responsible for taking carbon out of the surface layer in the ocean, we're in a much better situation to talk about how climate change might impact that process," said oceanographer Richard Matear, one of the authors of the Southern Ocean study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The team of British and Australian scientists found that currents that take carbon from the surface to the depths occur at specific locations, not uniformly across the ocean as previously thought.

They found that a combination of winds, currents and whirlpools create conditions for carbon to be drawn down into the deep ocean to be locked away for decades to centuries. Some of the plunging currents were up to 1,000 km (600 miles) wide.

In other areas, currents return carbon to the atmosphere as part of a natural cycle.

But overall, the Southern Ocean is large net carbon sink, the authors say, calculating the area between 35 and 65 degrees south takes up the equivalent of 1.5 billion metric tons (1.65 billion tons) of CO2 a year, or more than the annual greenhouse gas emissions of Japan.

Scientists worry that a warming planet could disrupt this natural pattern by changing wind patterns and ocean currents.

Matear said by figuring how the Southern Ocean worked and using a new monitoring network of robotic ocean-going devices researchers will get a much better handle on how the seas between Australia and Antarctica are changing.

"Climate change will definitely interact with this process and modulate it," Matear, of Australia's state-funded Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, told Reuters.

(Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

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