The key facts on global warming are already known and leaders should not wait for the next edition of the UN climate panel's report to step up action, the body's top scientist says. The 4th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released in 2007, "is very clear," Rajendra Pachauri told AFP in Paris, before a five-day meeting of the body in Brest, France. The fifth multi-volume assessment, which summarises peer-reviewed science to help policy makers make decisions, is due out in 2013/14. "We have enough evidence, enough scientific findings which should convince people that action has to be taken," he said after a round-table discussion with French Environment Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet. "Based on observation, we know that there will be more floods, more drought, more heat waves and more extreme precipitation events. These things are happening," Pachauri said. Pachauri, whose organisation shared the Nobel Peace prize in 2007 with former US vice-president Al Gore, announced that a special IPCC report on the relation of extreme weather events and disasters to climate change, and how to adapt to them, would be released on November 19. The much anticipated report will review efforts by scientists to connect the dots between well identified long-term climate change trends and short-term weather patterns. While scientists agree that the risk of more violent storms and flooding will rise over time, it remains difficult to attribute any single weather event to climate change, they say. Pachauri cautioned that the widely accepted goal of preventing average global temperatures from increasing by more than 2 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial times is fast slipping beyond reach.
Scientists create carbon sponge

Scientists in the United States have created an entirely new porous material which has a high capacity for capturing carbon dioxide. The procedure is usually expensive and energy intensive, but this time scientists say it is relatively low cost and it may be useful to capture emissions from coal-fired power stations. Australian experts say it is a fundamental advance but is still many years away from practical application. Dr Kai Landskron and his colleagues at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania have created the new kind of porous material that has a high capacity to take up carbon dioxide. "We can make this material also in a pretty simple way, actually simpler than most other materials can be made," he said. "We can make them from relatively inexpensive building blocks in simple solution reactions - by so-called polycondensation reactions." Dr Landskron says the material could be easily manufactured on a large scale. Dr Lincoln Paterson runs the Carbon Capture program at the CSIRO and says Dr Landskron's work is a fundamental advance. "It still needs to be taken a long way towards practical application but it's exciting that these sorts of advances are being made and it's a fertile area for research," he said. "The tests they've got so far are that it performs extremely well in the laboratory and it uses low cost materials." But Dr Paterson says the research is still years away from practical application. "It's a bit hard to say how many years because this research is proceeding at different speeds depending on funding and resources and the whole debate that's going on at the moment about the price of carbon," he said.
Shipping industry agrees CO2 emission standards

New ships will have to meet internationally agreed carbon dioxide emission standards, thanks to a deal agreed in London last week. But only from 2019. And there are no plans to extend the rules to existing ships. The agreement, reached at the UN's International Maritime Organization, comes after years of negotiations. It is a rare step forward for climate negotiators at a time when an overall deal on global carbon emissions looks ever more remote. Of the world's top 10 shipping nations, only China voted against. The other objectors were Brazil, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Chile. It remains to be seen if they will bow to the majority decision. The deal makes the shipping industry the first to introduce global mandatory CO2 standards. It requires all new ships above 400 tonnes and delivered after 2015 to improve their energy efficiency by 10 per cent. The target rises to 30 per cent by 2024. However, a loophole means developing nations can apply for a waiver until 2019. The IMO said that if no waivers applied, the deal could reduce emissions by between 45 and 50 million tonnes a year by 2020. A coalition of environmental groups, the Clean Shipping Coalition, warned the agreement could result in most new ships registering with countries that get a waiver. Peter Boyd, CEO of the Carbon War Room, an NGO set up by entrepreneur Richard Branson to find "gigatonne-scale emissions reductions", said the "real prize" was extending efficiency improvements to the world's existing 60,000 ships. They currently emit almost a billion tonnes of CO2 a year, around 3 per cent of total human-induced emissions.