E-Letter responses to:

p-forum: Brian C. O'Neill and Michael Oppenheimer CLIMATE CHANGE: Dangerous Climate Impacts and the Kyoto Protocol Science 2002; 296: 1971-1972 [Summary] [Full text] [PDF]

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Published E-Letter responses:

Nuclear Energy, The Only Practical Response

Michael Ardon   (29 July 2002)

Dangerous climate change and global food security

Colin D Butler   (29 July 2002)

Women and the Kyoto Protocol

Neha Pandey   (25 June 2002)

Nuclear Energy, The Only Practical Response 29 July 2002
Michael Ardon, professor emeritus of inorganic chemistry The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel Respond to this E-Letter: Re: Nuclear Energy, The Only Practical Response	O'Neill and Oppenheimer's excellent review of the dangers of global warming and the need to reduce burning of fossil fuels does not recommend practical ways to achieve short and intermediate reduction in fossil fuel burning. I believe that the only practical means to achieve this goal is by nuclear energy. Most of the polution by carbon dioxide emission takes place in the industrial countries, with the United States heading the list. With the industrialization of developing nations, the pollution by greenhouse gases is going up not down. This development cannot be stopped by energy saving campaigns in the industrialized nations. If fossil fuel burning is not replaced, in the near future, by alternative energy sources, in both the industrial and developing nations, the disasterous consequences pointed out by O'Neill and Oppenheimer are unavoidable. Alternative energy sources, such as wind power, solar energy, biomass, etc., can only be of marginal value in the next two decades and cannot replace a major portion of fossil fuel energy. The only present and near future alternative is nuclear energy. France's success in conversion to nuclear power shows that this can be done successfully within a short period. The three main energy consumers of fossil fuels are electric power production, motor vehicle traffic, and residential space heating. By converting motor vehicles to electric or hydrogen powered motors and space heating to air conditioning, most energy requirements could be met by increased electric power production. Thus, by conversion to nuclear power, fossil fuel burning could be drastically reduced within a few decades. The safety of modern nuclear power plants has been demonstrated in France for several decades. Safety and other important aspects of nuclear energy are documented in (1). The criminal negligence that caused the Chernobyl disaster should not continue to haunt civilization as a 20th century ghost. It is avoidable and the cumulative damage of fossil fuel burning exceeds by far even the damage of the avoidable Chernobyl disaster. Bibliography: 1. Forty-eight relevant documents are found at http://www.ecolo.org/base/baseen.htm 2. B. Comby, Environmentalists For Nuclear Energy (TNR Editions, France, 2001).
Dangerous climate change and global food security 29 July 2002
Colin D Butler, Post Doctoral Fellow National Centre for Epidemiology & Population Health, Australian National University, Canberra Austr Respond to this E-Letter: Re: Dangerous climate change and global food security	O’Neill and Oppenheimer ("Dangerous climate impacts and the Kyoto Protocol," Policy Forum, 14 June, p. 1971) suggest, as plausible thresholds for dangerous climate change, the large-scale eradication of charismatic ecosystems or a major discontinuity to the climate system. Another threshold may serve even better to focus policy makers on avoiding danger. This is the possibility that future climate change may cause regional food insecurity in heavily armed but politically unstable regions, of sufficient magnitude to risk adverse military, economic, and terrorism consequences that could be global in scale (1, 2). Most projections of future global food security either ignore the impact of climate change (3) or conclude that the gains in crop yields, as a result of CO2 fertilization and the release of new areas suitable for crop production, will at least offset any losses. Models produced by the Hadley Center and the Max Planck Institute predict regional declines in food production at low latitudes, especially in the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa (4, 5), but compensatory increases in North Asia and Canada. It will be problematic to satisfy the future demand for food in regions whose high population density in the middle of this century may reflect the agricultural abundance of earlier decades. To meet such demand would require a seamless climatic transition, whereby the increased agricultural capacity at high latitudes is in temporal harmony with the decline at lower latitudes. Further, this scenario assumes that the soil ecosystems at high latitudes will be suitable for large-scale cropping. Most problematic, given that large-scale migration is likely to be (increasingly) restricted, is the assumption that the increasingly hungry and poor populations adversely affected by climate change will be able to stimulate and reward the capital investment required to develop these agriculturally virgin lands. References 1. J. Lash, Science 294, 1789 (2001). 2. D. Kennedy, Science 295, 405 (2002). 3. N. Alexandratos, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 96, 5908 (1999). 4. G. Fischer, M. Shah, H. van Velthuizen, F.O. Nachtergaele, Global agro-ecological assessment for agriculture in the 21st Century (International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, 2001). (available at http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Admin/INF/recent-pubs/gaea/ ). 5. M. L. Parry, C. Rosenzweig, A. Iglesias, G. Fischer, M. Livermore, Global Environ. Change 9 (Supplemental Issue), s51 (1999).
Women and the Kyoto Protocol 25 June 2002
Neha Pandey, Coordinator, Climate & Women Group Sarojini Naidu Government Girls Post Graduate College, Shivaji Nagar, Bhopal, India Respond to this E-Letter: Re: Women and the Kyoto Protocol	It is surprising that the otherwise insightful Policy Forum by O'Neill and Oppenheimer (14 June, p. 1971) did not acknowledge the gender aspects of the Kyoto Protocol. Exploring how a dangerous level of climate change might impact women and how they can contribute to mitigation through local actions would have made the analysis more robust. There are reasons for such a concern (1): different consumption patterns between men and women, comparative vulnerability of women to climate change, and the role that women can play in climate change mitigation. Compared to men, women spend several additional hours daily working in household and farms. Disproportionate workload needs careful consideration in a warming world because social, economic, nutritional, and healthcare planning does not account for the unequal distribution of work between genders (2). Adaptive capacity to cope with climate change is determined by education, wealth, skills, equity, empowerment, and ability to spread risk and absorb shocks. Poor rural women lacking on these counts are the most vulnerable to climate change, which is particularly evident at the time of drought, flood, earthquake, storms, and other natural disasters (3). Women pollute less than men (4). For example, in Sweden, the average carbon dioxide emission from men’s mode of transportation was 53% higher compared to the carbon dioxide emissions from women’s mode of transportation (4). But this fact is often forgotten in policy formulation for climate change mitigation. By virtue of their close interaction with natural, social, and economic systems, women can better comprehend local causes and consequences of dangerous anthropogenic interferences to climate. People who are aware of the reasons of climate change are more likely to act responsibly and support policies to mitigate climate change (5). But awareness programmes may be needed in countries like India, where only one-third of the respondents in a sample of more than one thousand educated people could perceive a correct concept of biodiversity, acid rain, desertification, and threats posed by the loss of biodiversity (6). It is necessary to take into consideration the gender economics of the Kyoto Protocol (1) and involve women as active and equal partners in decision-making on Clean Development Mechanism, capacity building, technology transfer, vulnerability studies, and projects for climate change mitigation and adaptation (7, 8). If corrective measures to end gender inequity are taken, institutional mechanisms appropriate for local actions for climate change mitigation can develop. In shaping a sustainable society, creative strength of 50% of the world’s population cannot be ignored. References 1. N. Pandey, Conserv. Ecol. (in press). 2. J. A. Levine et al., Science 294, 812 (2001). 3. J. J. McCarthy et al., Climate change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2001). 4. A. Carlsson-Kanyama et al., Soc. Nat. Resources 12, 355 (1999). 5. R. E. O'Connor et al., Risk Decision Pol. 3, 145 (1998). 6. S. Pruthi et al., Curr. Sci. 77, 1589 (1999). 7. N. Wamukonya, M. Skutsch, Energy Environ. 13, 115 (2002). 8. C. Roncoli et al., Climate Res. 19, 119 (2001).