Scientists say much of the Indian ocean archipelago could disappear under rising sea levels by the end of this century, and for the last few years its president Mohamed Nasheed has been waging a high-profile campaign to convince the rest of the world to cut greenhouse gas pollution.

Well, as of today, president Nasheed is president no more.

Nasheed resigned today after weeks of growing protests, capped off by a police mutiny this morning.

Nasheed said he resigned rather than use force to remain in power.

The now-former president was a political prisoner who became the Maldives’ first democratically-elected leader in 2008.  

But economic reforms cost him public support and religious conservatives accused him of being anti-Islamic.

Ultimately pressure against his government boiled over in the last few weeks after Nasheed ordered the arrest of a top judge, whom the president accused of being in the pocket of the political opposition.

Local journalist John James Robinson says the growing turmoil wasn’t surprising.

“Democracy was a very new concept in the country which had had thirty years of autocratic rule,” Robinson says, “so a lot of the concepts such as independent institutions, an independent judiciary, were all very very new.”

Nasheed handed power to the country’s vice president.

An official in Nasheed’s office called today’s events a coup, but the new president says Nasheed merely bowed to the will of the Maldivian people.

The former vice president says he’ll try to form a national unity government to run the country until elections next year.

The Maldives won’t sink before next year, but given the island’s general precariousness, it’s an inopportune moment for a political crisis.

In 2009, members of the Maldives’ cabinet donned scuba gear and used hand signals at an underwater meeting staged to highlight the threat of global warming to the lowest-lying nation on earth.

That’s a big shift from four years ago. Here’s what the Republican presidential candidate John McCain was saying about climate change.

“It’s real. It’s a danger to our planet, it’s a danger to the future of these young people who are in front of me and their children. And it’s got to be stopped.”

You won’t hear talk like that from any of the Republican presidential candidates this go-round. There’s a reason for that, said David King at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

“In a time of real economic distress, who is paying attention to global climate change? And especially if the costs of solving the reality of global climate change are so high they’re going to come directly in conflict with the economy, with jobs, and who wants to face that reality?”

But the Republican presidential candidates are more than just ignoring the issue, they’re running away from it. Take the case of Newt Gingrich. He appeared in a commercial in 2008 sitting on a couch next to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. The two politicians introduce themselves, then Pelosi says, “We don’t always see eye to eye, do we Newt?”

Gingrich responds, “No, but we do agree our country must take action to address climate change.”

Gingrich has had to answer repeatedly for that commercial during this campaign season. Here’s what he told Fox News.

“It’s probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years. It is inexplicable.”

Gingrich also said he’s scrapping a chapter about climate change in his new book.

William Moomaw with the Fletcher School at Tufts University said the Republican candidates are distancing themselves from the issue for ideological reasons. “They believe that addressing climate change will require government action, or even worse, intergovernmental action.”

Moomaw said to understand just how far the Republican Party has shifted on environmental issues, consider the case of the incandescent light bulb. President George W. Bush signed a law in 2007 that requires new bulbs to be 30 percent more efficient. Moomaw said many Republicans now see that law as a source of government intrusion.

“Candidates like Michele Bachmann were jumping up and down and shouting how they were going to repeal this – to be denied their right to put any lightbulb in any socket in America is just too much control, a loss of freedom.”

But it’s not just the Republican Party that’s not addressing climate change. President Obama has fallen virtually silent on the issue. If you visit his 2012 presidential Web site, you’d be hard pressed to find any mention of climate change and global warming. That’s a political calculation, said David King at Harvard.

“If there’s no benefit politically to talking about global climate change, then you just keep your mouth shut.”

Perhaps the president and the Republican candidates are simply following our lead. According to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center, Americans ranked global warming as the least important of 22 priorities, just behind campaign finance reform.

It’s the lowest lying country in the world with an average elevation of just one and a half meters above sea level. And if global carbon emissions continue unchecked, much of the 1,200 island archipelago could be underwater by the end of this century.

So the Maldives wants to lead by example in hopes that others will follow suit.

Diesel engines drive almost everything in the Maldives, from the ferries that run between the country’s islands to the electric generators that provide power to its 350,000 citizens. This island nation spends 15 percent of its GDP on diesel.

But the government of the Maldives is hoping to change that.

On an island at the southern tip of the Maldives, a metal tower equipped with small wind turbines rises hundreds of feet above the sand.

“This is called a wind resource assessment tower. And it will constantly monitor the direction of the wind, the speed, and all sorts of information is collected,” said Ahmed Zareer, the chairman of the local power company, Southern Utilities, which is trying to determine whether a wind farm makes sense here.

Until now, data on renewable energy resources here has been slim. But research and investment into renewables has been growing since the country’s president declared two years ago that the Maldives would go carbon neutral by the year 2020.

“We’re really really confident. It’s really quite possible,” said President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives. He says it’s possible for the Maldives to quickly squeeze carbon-based fuels out of its economy.

The challenge has special resonance here. If world carbon emissions continue at their present pace, much of the country could be lost underwater by the end of the century.

President Nasheed says it’s important for the Maldives to set an example for the rest of the world.

But he says the effort isn’t just about the environment.

“For us this is an economics issue. It’s a financial issue. We are becoming carbon neutral because it is cheaper than fossil fuels,” said Nasheed.

Or, at least Nasheed hopes it will be in the long run. For now, the transition to cleaner energy means investing between roughly $3 and $5 billion.

Utility Chairman Ahmed Zareer says one of the big challenges is dealing with the high upfront cost of switching to renewables.

“When cities, people and countries develop, you have to pay a little bit of a higher price. We’re trying to adjust these prices to be very minimal,” Zareer said.

The effort includes researching which technologies are best for different parts of the country and then deploying them as cheaply as possible. The government is also offering incentives to citizens willing to invest in renewables on their own.

And they’re turning to innovative techniques like crowdsourcing for ideas on how best to deal with some of the country’s energy challenges. They’ve been spurred to do that in part because cost aside, the switch to renewables here will be complicated.

Solar panels can corrode in salty marine environments like this. Space is at a premium on many of the country’s tiny islands. And in most of the country, the wind only blows a few months a year. But the biggest challenge could be domestic politics.

President Nasheed is the Maldives’ first ever democratically elected leader. But much of the country is unhappy with his record so far and anti-government demonstrations are increasingly common.

Many who support the president’s energy goals say his clean energy plan won’t succeed without strong domestic political support. Sonu Shivdasani, is the founder and C.E.O. of Six Senses, a resort company that’s also aiming to make its properties carbon neutral.

“I think initially his promotion has been very global,” said Shivdasani of President Nasheed. “…underwater cabinet meeting that’s shown around the world, and quoted on CNN. So that’s really what he’s been doing so far. But he’ll need the support of every individual Maldivian if we’re going to meet the target.

But shoring up President Nasheed’s political support has sometimes meant making decisions that undercut his energy agenda. Among other things, he’s maintained an energy subsidy that keeps prices down but also reduces the incentive to use less.

And to keep up with current demand for electricity, the president is sticking with a plan inherited from the previous president to build a new diesel-fired power plant.

It’s a difficult balance in a place that’s already on the edge.

The threat from rising sea levels is clear on the island of Guraidhoo, where environment official Mohamed Zahir pointed a group of international visitors towards a patch of eroded shoreline.

“99 percent of the Maldives is reporting to the environment ministry they are having erosion problems,” Zahir told them.

Erosion – always a problem – has gotten much worse in recent years. Residents say water laps closer and closer to their homes each year.

Of course, what happens here in the Maldives will make only a tiny difference in global carbon emissions. Changes in say China or the US – the world’s two biggest emitters would matter a whole lot more.

But President Nasheed says that where he intends to lead the Maldives… the rest of the world will follow.

“We are 99 percent sure that we will be carbon neutral by 2020. And I believe that it’s not just going to be us. The economics will drive other countries also to do the same,” said Nasheed.

In fact, since Mr. Nasheed announced his goal two years ago, other countries – including Norway, Ethiopia and Costa Rica – have set similar goals.

They’re small fish in the climate change picture, but President Nasheed says it’s a start.

In the course of our reporting on carbon neutrality, we visited the island of Thulaadhoo in Baa Atoll. Watch translator Fazail Lutfi’s reflections on what has changed since his first trip there 20 years ago.

Silkworm farmer H. B. Manjunath talks with a solar technician about the solar panel installed on his rooftop. (Photo: Sonia Narang)

Sonia Narang reports from southern India on the growth of solar power in rural parts of the country. Small loans have made solar panels available to homes and businesses that otherwise suffer from India’s severe electricity shortage.

In Chemangala village in southern India, silk farmer H.B. Manjunath walks into a back room of a dark thatched roof cabin, flips on a light switch and watches as the cool light from the lamp illuminates hundreds of milky white silkworms crawling in a wooden box full of mulberry leaves. The worms need the crispy leaves to survive and spin their silk cocoons, but they’ll only do it when there’s continuous light. And Manjunath says that used to be very hard to come by.

“We had four or five hours of unscheduled power cuts everyday,” Manjunath says. “Sometimes, we would not have it at all.”

But that changed when Manjunath took out a small loan from his local bank to pay for a single solar panel and batteries to store the electricity. The 120 watt system generates enough power to illuminate the silkworms for three hours a day.

Now, Manjunath says, he’s not worried even if he doesn’t have grid power for 24 hours. “The solar works for us,” he says.

Manjunath’s bank loan was part of an effort in the southern state of Karnataka to promote affordable solar lighting in rural areas, an effort that’s in turn part of a national trend. India’s central government hopes to boost renewable sources of energy and install 20,000 megawatts of solar generating capacity over the next decade, to help fill a huge power gap in the country.

Five hundred million people today do not have electricity in the country. That’s nearly half the population. And even places that are hooked up to the grid can face daily blackouts.

Dr. Harish Hande, founder of the Bangalore-based solar company SELCO, says the need for energy is urgent, and not just so people can run their businesses or light their homes.

“It’s very important from a governance point of view, India’s social stability point of view, that we need to provide basic needs,” Hande says.

India’s economy is booming, but conventional sources of electricity just haven’t been able to keep up with the growth in demand in India. That’s one reason Hande spent years trying to convince local banks in Karnataka to offer small loans to rural families for renewable energy systems. In recognition of his efforts, Hande recently was awarded the prestigious Magsaysay Award, sometimes called the Asian Nobel prize.

Hande says solar lighting can have a profound emotional impact on the poor.

“A day laborer once told me that you would not understand what it actually means after a hard day’s work coming back to a house which is dimly lit,” Hande says. “The mood which is already down goes down deeper. Once you see bright light, it’s a different feeling. It’s a different way of life where you look forward to tomorrow. He says ‘I’m willing to pay for that.’”

Hande says many rural Indians are willing and able to pay for solar and other renewable sources of energy, if the cost can be spread out over time. That’s where the bank loans come in. Silk farmer Manjunath’s solar system cost $400 to install. That’s more than he would have been able to afford at once, but with the loan, he pays less than $7 a month.

Dr. Ashok Gadgil, an Indian physicist who’s now director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, says India’s critical shortage of conventional electricity has created a big niche for solar power.

“Acute electricity shortage means blackouts, and blackouts mean lost income and lost business,” Gadgil says. “So there are many, many opportunities where photovoltaic electricity for economically productive uses is viable in India even at the current prices.”

And the technology is starting to catch on in Karnataka. Silk farmer Manjunath says he was one of the first in his neighborhood to install the panels, but that word travels fast here, and more than 100 households have followed suit.

And the electricity isn’t just benefiting local businesses.

On a recent afternoon a group of energetic teenage boys gathered around the solar panel on Manjunath’s roof after school. The boys say they stick around Manjunath’s house during the evening hours to finish up their homework under the lamps.

“With solar power,” says one of the boys, “I can study continuously without stopping. And it doesn’t matter if there’s a power cut at night.”

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman, this is The World. In South Africa today the United States denied it’s trying to delay a new global climate deal until the year 2020. Some delegates at the UN climate talks underway this week in Durban think otherwise. They claim the US wants to delay the start of a legally binding treaty to cut greenhouse gas pollution because of political pressures at home. But chief US negotiator Todd Stern told reporters that the US supports a new European proposal for a global deal. That proposal was revealed just today, providing an unexpected glimmer of hope for substantial progress at this year’s climate summit. Whatever the outcome in Durban though it’s almost certain to be far short of what’s needed to meet the challenge posed by climate change over the next few decades. The process of trying to negotiate a new global treaty on greenhouse gases has nearly ground to a halt in the last few years. And that’s lead many observers to call for a different approach. Kelly Sims Gallagher is an associate professor of energy at environmental policy at the Fletcher School at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Kelly, has the UN process hit a wall in your opinion?

Kelly Sims Gallagher: I believe it has. It’s not that the United Nations process is fundamentally flawed, it’s that there isn’t any room or latitude within these negotiations for breakthrough ideas, for crossing issues, for…

Werman: So what do you see as promising alternatives?

Gallagher: In my view the United States and China need to have a different approach to these negotiations. The two countries need to step outside of the climate change issue and find a way to bridge their differences. And after they do that they can then bring a deal back to this negotiating forum.

Werman: Are you saying that these two huge greenhouse gas emitters should come up with some grand bargain that embraces a lot of environmental issues?

Gallagher: I’m saying that the two countries probably need to devise a grand bargain, but I think they probably need to look outside the environment in terms of tradeoffs to strike a deal.

Werman: And what about a little country like the Maldives? You know, that wouldn’t be part of that process, but are seriously affected and will be so in the next few years with sea rise?

Gallagher: I think it’s in their interest because fundamentally they need to get these two behemoth emitters to agree to emissions reductions. And that’s not happening in the UNFCCC process. The essence of the dilemma that we just repeatedly come up against is that the US and China won’t both agree to enter into an agreement.

Werman: What about just forgetting about trying to strike deals for binding emissions cuts and just pushing ahead on things like new adaptive energy technologies and market innovations that would help move the world away from fossil fuels?

Gallagher: Well, I’d argue that’s what we’ve been doing, but it’s clearly not enough because emissions are still rising and in fact, there was the biggest jump ever in annual emissions last year.

Werman: You know we ran a story on the show this week that was just hair raising in terms of ice melt and sea rise. After hearing that a lot of our listeners must be flabbergasted that global representatives can’t seem to get it together in Durban. Is it worth talking about who’s to blame for the failure of the UN climate process so far?

Gallagher: Well, it’s very hard not to point towards the United States because from 1992 and the original framework convention on climate change, the United States has failed to meet all of the commitments that it agreed to in these past treaties. And I don’t think anybody trusts at this point that the United States will actually achieve its 17% reduction that President Obama committed to in Copenhagen because there’s been no policy enacted to actually achieve that goal.

Werman: Well, the talks in Durban aren’t over yet, but tomorrow they will be. Do you hold out any hope for significant progress in the next 24 hours?

Gallagher: No.

Werman: Kelly Sims Gallagher, associate professor of energy and environmental policy at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, thanks a lot.

Gallagher: Thank you.

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Durban Climate Change Conference (Photo: United Nations)

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Even in the Maldives, Climate Change Seems a Remote Threat for Many

Sunset at Guraidhoo, Maldives (Photo: Lily Jamali)

Sea Levels May Rise Faster Than Expected

Emperor Penguins adults with chicks. (Photo: Michael Van Woert, NOAA NESDIS, ORA)

Climate Change Talks in South Africa

The UN climate change conference is in Durban, South Africa, from 28 November to 9 December 2011. (Photo: Cien)

Climate Talks Face Stalemate

Host Marco Werman speaks with climate policy expert Kelly Sims Gallagher about the stalemate in the UN climate negotiations. Gallagher says it’s time for the US and China to step outside the UN process and try to reach a grand bargain on climate and other issues. Read more …

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Sunset at Guraidhoo, Maldives (Photo: Lily Jamali)

It’s not just a child’s imagination at work. The waves have entered his home many times before. Rizmee’s father, Khalid, says their island has always had erosion problems. But in recent years, he says, the tides have grown more extreme:

“It’s getting worse every year,” Khalid Adam says, sitting atop concrete blocks the family has stacked as protection against a flood. “The monsoon season gets stronger each year. The environmental scientists are talking about the sea levels rising, and we’re seeing the same thing.”

Sea level rise will be one of the most significant impacts of climate change, and the Maldives is among the most vulnerable countries. Its 1,200 islands average only about five feet above sea level, and the country’s president, Mohamed Nasheed, has been trying to bring his country’s plight to international attention. Two years ago, just before the big climate summit in Copenhagen, Nasheed staged a world-class publicity stunt by holding a meeting of his cabinet six feet underwater, to “let the world know what… will happen to the Maldives, if climate change is not checked.”

Nasheed said at the time that at best the Maldives had only fifty to seventy years before rising seas threatened the country’s existence. And the prospects have only gotten worse since then. Five years ago a UN climate report forecast a possible two feet of sea level rise by the year 2100. Now many scientists are predicting an even more dramatic rise.

But even in a country where citizens could end up among the world’s first big wave of climate refugees, many don’t share their president’s concern.

Mohamed Firushan, a Fisherman who lives not far from Khalid Adam on Guraidhoo, says he just doesn’t believe sea level is rising. Firushan says he read on an Islamic website that a scientist had recently visited the area and said that there has been no change to the sea level in the last forty years.

Islam is the official religion here in the Maldives, and some Muslims here say that if their country is inundated, it’s God’s will.

But even some who grasp the science aren’t all that concerned.

During a recent class at the Maldives National University in the capital Male, lecturer Ghaanim Mohamed asked his students if they think Maldivians are as worried as they should be. “When President Nasheed did that underwater cabinet meeting,” Mohamed queried his class, “do you think that we really got the message? Do we really believe that we are in danger?

“Personally I don’t feel that we are in danger” one of his students responded. “Because really, if we are sinking, we’ll find other alternatives. For example, reclaiming the islands to two meters or four meters. If it is not four meters we will reclaim to six meters. Maldivians are very creative.”

The student’s comments reflect the culture of a small island nation where people long ago got used to trying to save and even expand their land, and where reclamation—creating new land out of sediment dredged up from the ocean—is an ongoing project.

Seventy five miles from Male, for instance, residents of the island of Thulaadhoo saw their once-congested island grow by more than 40 acres last year. The new land may still be vulnerable to sea level rise this century, but many here view the danger of inundation as a thing of the past.

Zubair Ibrahim, who owns a workshop where he makes the lacquered crafts this island is famous for, has lived all of his 46 years on Thulaadhoo, and he remembers when islanders constantly wondered when Mother Nature would strike next…

“Back then, during high tide,” Ibrahim says, “the waves would just come in to the island. People’s homes would get flooded. There was nothing much we could do. We would maybe put a sand bag or something.“

Reclamation has changed that, at least for the time being.

“Now we have forgotten those days,” Ibrahim says. “Now it does not flood.”

In a sign of his hopefulness about the future here, Ibrahim is starting a museum of Thulaadhoo crafts.

Reclamation work is happening throughout the Maldives, and it’s led to a sense among many that man has conquered nature. But reclamation is very expensive, and it may well not be enough to stay ahead of the advancing tides.

Some Maldivians say the gap between the reality of the threat and perceptions isn’t just a matter of culture or religion. They say it’s also political.

Hussain Yaamin, an opposition party member and part of Guraidhoo’s island council, says President Nasheed hasn’t focused on the issue enough here at home.

“He didn’t talk about it with the people,” Yaamin says. “He talks about it in the international conferences. So in this island, many of these peoples don’t have that idea. They don’t know what he’s talking about even.”

President Nasheed says he agrees that his government needs to do more to make people aware of what’s happening. But environment minister Mohamed Aslam says even here, it can be hard to get people concerned about something as seemingly far off as climate change.

“Climate change, it’s a slow process if you put it into a human timescale,” Aslam says. “It’s a bit like a smoker who continues to smoke knowing that ultimately he’ll face the consequences of it.”

Aslam acknowledges, thought, that many Maldivians might not be aware of the global nature of the problem.

Back on Guraidhoo, Khalid Adam doesn’t use phrases like “global warming” or know the exact predictions for sea level rise. He just worries about his home.

“There is the fear that we won’t be able to live here one day,” Adam says. “But we won’t just passively watch while our home gets destroyed.

And so he’ll keep trying to protect his home, for as long as he can.

Emperor Penguins adults with chicks. (Photo: Michael Van Woert, NOAA NESDIS, ORA)

The day after this year’s UN climate summit ends this Friday, a research team is scheduled to fly into a remote corner of Antarctica for a visit to the Pine Island Glacier. It’s the biggest ice shelf in western Antarctica. And it’s moving—fast.

“This is the fastest glacier in Antarctica,” says Robert Bindschadler of NASA, the expedition’s leader. “It’s going 4,000 meters a year, which converts to just over one foot every hour. So this ice is ripping along.”

Bindschadler says the reason the ice is moving so fast is because unusually warm ocean water is seeping in miles under the glacier’s forward edge, melting it from below.

“In the case of Pine Island, we think that it’s melting at over a 100 meters per year right at the upstream end of the ice shelf. And you think the ice shelf by that amount, the glacier speeds up by many tens of a percent.”

Scientists compare what’s happening to the glacier to popping the cork on a champagne bottle. But in this case, what’s being held back is frozen water.

And it’s not just one glacier. There are signs of sudden, rapid melting across Antarctica, where all the corks on all the glaciers and ice sheets are holding back enough water to raise global sea levels more than 200 feet.

The faster that ice melts, the faster the world’s coastlines will be inundated. The problem is, no one saw this coming.

“It’s caught us all very much off guard,” says Bindschadler. “These are not the ice sheets that I was being taught when I was in graduate school. They are changing at magnitudes and at rates that were thought impossible just 15 years ago.”

That rapid melting is challenging assumptions on how much global warming will cause sea levels to rise this century.

The last major report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, in 2007, suggested a worst-case scenario of less than two feet of rise by 2100. But Virginia Burkett with the US Geological Survey, a lead author on the report, says there was a big caveat.

“The last IPCC report included sea level projections that were based primarily on thermal expansion,” of the water as it warms up, Burkett says. “And of course sea level is rising because of the combination of thermal expansion of sea water and ice sheet decline.”

The problem was that the science on ice sheet decline, or melting polar ice, just wasn’t good enough at the time, so the IPCC decided to leave it out of their final projections.

And even though the report’s fine print clearly stated that ice loss could accelerate substantially, that number of less than two feet has become a kind of default prediction for sea level rise.

Fast forward five years and scientists like Bindschadler and Burkett are now projecting a high-end scenario of about six feet of rising sea levels by the end of the century. Three times the 2007 projection.

That’s enough to make crowded coastal cities like Mumbai unlivable, and displace more than a 100 million people worldwide.
But some scientists say even a prediction of six feet may be too conservative.

Harold Wanless, chair of the Geology Department at the University of Miami, says all the projections by the IPCC and other scientific organizations are based on a gradual rise of sea level. But, Wanless says, “that’s not how it worked in the past.”

Scientists like Wanless are studying sediments from past warming periods to find clues as to how quickly sea levels changed. And what they’ve found is the stuff of Hollywood movies—rapid pulses in the 20-foot range, and on a time scale that could be not centuries, but decades.

“That’s in the line of possibility,” Wanless says.

And he warns that it’s time to start thinking about relocating things that countries don’t want to lose.

“Everything from national archives and our world seed banks, some of which are at much too low elevation. Military bases, things we wouldn’t want disrupted. And our nuclear power plants. Why are we even looking at the coast for those?”

Wanless believes the ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland have already passed their tipping point for runaway melting. The only question for him is how fast it will happen.

Most climate scientists don’t go that far. They say they still don’t understand the complex dynamics of ice melt enough to predict with confidence a 20-foot rise by the end of the century. But few are ruling it out.

Penn State Climatologist and IPCC co-author Richard Alley says a good analogy of the risk is driving a car.

The best scenario, Alley says, is that there’s no traffic. On the other hand, you might get a lot of traffic, or “you might get run over by a drunk driver.”

The drunk driver represents that rapid pulse of sea level rise.

Alley says even though the chances of him being hit are slim, he still bought a car with all the added safety features, just in case.

“If society dealt with risks of climate change the way I deal with drunk drivers,” Alley says, “it’s possible that we would be trying to slow down a little bit so that we could learn more before we get hit by something.”

What’s happening instead is more like stepping on the accelerator. As climate negotiators from the US, China and nearly every other country on earth met this week to again try to find elusive common ground on emissions cuts, new reports confirmed that global emissions of the heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide reached record levels last year.

Alley says the higher we crank up the planet’s thermostat, the higher the risk becomes that we’ll get hit by something nasty.

The UN climate change conference is in Durban, South Africa, from 28 November to 9 December 2011. (Photo: Cien)

International climate change negotiators are back at it his week in Durban, South Africa. Negotiators are scrambling to make significant progress in a process that seems to have fallen far behind the urgency of the the problem.

Anchor Marco Werman gets an update from the BBC’s environment correspondent, Richard Black.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman, this is The World, a coproduction of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston. International climate change negotiators are back at it this week in Durban, South Africa. Negotiators are scrambling to make significant progress in a process that seems to have fallen far behind the urgency of the problem. Just this week there’s a new report out confirming that global emissions of carbon dioxide jumped by the largest amount ever last year. Scientists warn that the rapid growth in greenhouse gas emissions is putting the earth on track to dangerous warming in the next few decades. But a global agreement to cut those emissions still seems a dim hope. The BBC’s environment correspondent, Richard Black, joins us from the UN climate change conference in Durban. It’s not news to the delegates there, Richard, that the earth’s surface continues to warm up and that greenhouse gas pollution is likely the biggest culprit. I’m wondering though how much of a jolt this new analysis gives the proceedings there in Durban to actually break the gridlock and reach an agreement on cutting emissions.

Richard Black: Well, you’re absolutely right, it certainly isn’t news and it’s worth remembering that virtually all of the governments here are also fully signed up to the intergovernmental panel on climate change, which is something that’s been sounding the alarm on this since 1997. So basically, we had the car crash in Copenhagen a couple of years ago when all those massive expectations of a big global deal just fell off the table with a resounding crash. So part of what this is about is trying to implement some of the much smaller bits that were agreed in principle last year at the summit in Mexico, and then look at what’s possible in the years ahead.

Werman: So what are the key sticking points right now? Does it still come down to the same kind of place we’ve been for the last few years, the inability of the US and China, which are by far the largest greenhouse polluters, to commit to substantial cuts in their emissions?

Black: Yeah, it’s interesting. You’ve got lots of these big countries that have subtly different positions, so there’s no doubt, for example, that the US is now being joined by Canada. Canada sees itself, it wants to parallel the US as closely as it can, so both of them are unwilling to do anything looking up to 2020. China has got its own system, a five year plan. And then we have India, which over the last couple of years has been rather conciliatory, but this year has a new environment minister who’s being very hard line in saying that as a major developing country they shouldn’t really have to do very much. You’ve got the small island states and some of the least developed countries that are very worried about climate impacts, and they’re pushing for a lot of progress as soon as possible. And they’re largely backed by the European Union, which also wants to get cracking on talks for a new deal as soon as possible. And as you can see, Marco, there are very different visions of what the future ought to hold.

Werman: Now, the goal ultimately is an agreement on greenhouse gas emissions, but you’re saying the conference participants are kind of going to focus on smaller goals. Give us an example or two of those smaller goals and how that might lead the conference ultimately to a big agreement.

Black: Okay, so sure, so the one in which there’s probably most likelihood of actually finalizing something here is what’s called technology transfer. In the United Nations climate convention it’s acknowledged that developed countries should help poorer countries to develop cleanly. So one of the ways of doing this obviously is to transfer clean technology from rich countries where [inaudible 3:15] has been developed into the poorer countries. But there are issues there for example, over intellectual property. So how do you get an agreement there which satisfies everyone and you can actually start doing something on the ground? So that’s the kind of smaller agreement that may well be finalized here.

Werman: But you know, the real thing is to kind of get back to the ideas of the Kyoto Protocol, and that protocol expires next year. It’s the only truly global treaty right now on greenhouse gases. What happens then?

Black: Well, that’s a very good question and this is one of the things that’s brought urgency to the talks in the last couple of years. The protocol itself doesn’t expire. What expires are the commitments that a number of developed countries have made under it to reduce the greenhouse gas emission. So there’s a little concern around, particularly in developing countries, that if the EU and the other countries inside the Kyoto Protocol don’t make new pledges inside that protocol which kick in pretty soon, is the protocol a shell with no meaningful content even though it continues to exist? That’s the concern.

Werman: So if the Kyoto Protocol does become a shell as you say, and there is no agreement coming out of Durban, I mean it looks like the results in Durban could potentially be pretty dismal. I mean what is the bare minimum you expect to come out of this round of talks?

Black: Anything is possible and when you analyze what negotiators have been putting into the public domain, obviously they don’t give away everything at this stage. They probably don’t give away everything until the final night. But it could be a complete car crash. Equally, you could emerge with all these technical things from last year being tied up and you could end up with agreement of how to go forward, another try if you like, in reaching a global treaty. Anything across that spectrum is possible at the moment.

Werman: We’ll be checking back in through the week at the UN Climate Change Conference in Durban. The BBC’s Richard Black speaking with us from Durban, thanks so much.

Black: My pleasure.

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• At the annual meeting of the Society of Environmental Journalists last month in Miami, the chair of the University of Miami’s Geography department, Harold Wanless, told a packed auditorium that “we should think about putting things we don’t want to lose—like national archives—safely away from the coast.” We’ve put so much CO2 in the atmosphere, Wanless said, that “we’re probably looking at sea level rise of 20-40-60 feet before the climate equilibrates.  And it’s happening faster than we thought it would.  It’s possible that we’re already seeing the beginnings of it now, with rapidly accelerating ice loss in Antarctica and Greenland.”

Four years ago, the 194-nation Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast sea level rise of at least six inches to two feet by the year 2100, but Wanless believes we may instead see “rapid pulses of the 1-10 meter range”—that’s 3.3 to 33 feet—in this century.

• Wanless’s warnings, and those of veteran climate researchers like NASA’s Jim Hansen, are based on the excess carbon dioxide that’s already been emitted into the atmosphere and projections for future emissions.  But reports in the last two weeks from the International Energy agency and the US Department of Energy both found that global emissions of CO₂, the most important greenhouse pollutant, continue to defy projections, and reached record levels in 2010.  The head of the DOE’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center told the Associated Press that the latest figures put global emissions higher than the worst case projections from the IPCC just four years ago.

•The IEA report suggests that given the lack of progress in controlling greenhouse emissions so far, the world has just six years in which to take drastic action to reduce greenhouse emissions sufficiently to avoid a rise of at least 2° C, the upper limit of what’s considered “safe”.  The report found that 80% of the total energy-related CO₂ emissions that would lead to that temperature rise are already “locked in,” and that with the rapid economic growth of the developing world the other 20% will be locked in by 2017. That means any further emissions after 2017 put us over the edge into the danger zone.  (Of course many researchers argue that the threshold for dangerous warming is actually much lower.)

•A draft summary of the IPCC’s latest major report obtained by Agence France Press states that the impact of climate change on weather events and rising sea levels are already measurable and “very likely”—that is a probability of 90% or greater —to become worse or even intolerable.  The same report forecasts a rise in average global temperatures of up to 5° C (9° F) by 2100.

Taken together, what’s emerging from this and other news is a new and extremely scary understanding of what we’re doing to the global climate.  Climate change isn’t something that’s going to happen mostly in some far distant future—it’s happening now.  It’s not something that will happen gradually and smoothly—it’s going to unfold in dramatic fits and starts.  And it’s not something we have the luxury of time to deal with later—the window of opportunity to avoid dangerous climate change could be closed well before the end of this decade.

And yet the only global mechanism for doing anything about this real and present danger—the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, often referred to as the Kyoto process—has virtually ground to a halt, with little more than face-saving agreements coming out of the last two summits in Copenhagen and Cancun, and little hope for anything more at the upcoming Durban meeting, largely because the world’s top two greenhouse polluters—the US and China—have been unable to come to grips internally with the challenge. 

The political system in the US is gridlocked on the issue, and despite huge investments in solar and other renewable energy technologies, China shows no signs of being able to dampen its ever-growing appetite for coal.  Until the governments in Washington and Beijing can muster the political will to make extremely tough domestic decisions, and agree to move ahead together in making a quick transition from fossil fuels, no part of the above outlook will change significantly.

And for that to happen, it might just have to get a lot hotter and stormier.

“It’s not good to show to your friends,” Nsubuga said with a laugh.

Nsubuga manages to maintain his sense of humor, even as the coffee farm where he works in central Uganda has been hit hard by drought.

Earlier this year, not a drop of rain fell for six months. Some of the coffee trees here died. Others produced only a few red berries.

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight … nine,” Nsubuga said counting the coffee berries on an entire tree.

And even some of those berries offer only a hollow promise.

Nsubuga: “This one is big, but when you open inside there is actually nothing. So you may think that you have coffee, but there is no bean,”

JB: “And that’s because of drought?”

Nsubuga: “Yes, because of drought.”

A Change in the Weather Pattern

Prolonged drought is a new challenge for Uganda’s coffee farmers. The Robusta variety that Nsubuga grows is believed to have originated in this part of Africa.

And it thrives on central Uganda’s predictable waves of sun and rain. Predictable, at least, until the last few years.

“It is obvious there is a change in the weather pattern,” said Africano Kangire, who heads up Uganda’s Coffee Research Center just outside of the capital Kampala. “You can feel it. You can see it.”

Kangire says the change in weather patterns here means unpredictable droughts. And when it does rain, there are sudden downpours.

“Now rains come very strongly and very harshly,” Africano said.

That means trouble for coffee farms here, not to mention people. Last year, major flooding near Uganda’s Mt. Elgon wiped out more than 60,000 coffee trees and killed nearly 400 people.

Temperatures are also going up here, according to the United Nations development program. And that may be linked to another growing problem — coffee pests and diseases.

Rising Temperatures

Farmer Pauline Chelangat grows Arabica coffee beans on the same land where she was born, in the cool mountains of Eastern Uganda. She and a neighbor point to a tree speckled with orange dots — coffee leaf rust, a fungus previously found in only in warmer, lower altitudes.

But the rust is moving up Uganda’s mountain sides. And some believe it’s because of the rising temperatures.

Chelangat first saw the rust here last year at about 5,900 feet. She says it starts on the leaf and “then it goes almost, I call it like a cancer.”

It then spreads to the rest of the plant and kills it.

“So the only solution is to uproot it completely and replant a new plant,” Chelangat said.

Farmers in the area have been doing that. But it’s expensive.

“You will find that it has affected the farmers’ income,” Chelangat said.

Global Pattern

Of course a lot of factors affect coffee farmers’ income here in Uganda and elsewhere, just as a lot of factors affect the weather. But researchers say that what’s happening here fits into a global pattern.

“I think what we’re seeing in East Africa, with alternating droughts and floods, it’s consistent with climate change,” said Peter Baker, senior scientist with the UK-based Center for Agricultural and Bioscience International.

Baker says a growing chorus of researchers is documenting increasingly chaotic weather and growing weather-related stresses in coffee-producing areas around the world.

“There’s quite good scientific data coming in from various parts of the world, that when it rains it rains more and when it doesn’t rain it rains less as it were. Which is exactly what you’d expect with climate change,” Baker said.

And Baker points out that coffee grows in a relatively narrow climatic range, so there aren’t a lot of options for farmers to take their operations elsewhere.

“Therefore we have to make some choices and plan accordingly,” Baker said.

He says most of the changes needed to keep pace with climate change are beyond the scope of what a single coffee farmer can do. For instance, he says, the entire industry needs better infrastructure to manage water and work to develop heartier varieties of coffee.

One Partial Solution–Shade Trees

But farmers like Ahmed Nsubuga can’t afford to wait for these advances. He’s doing his best to adapt as quickly as possible.

One change Nsubuga’s farm has made is to plant more coffee under a canopy of shade trees.

“The canopy is very light. The light can really pass through directly to the crops,” Nsubuga said.

Shading the coffee trees keeps them and the soil cooler, so they lose less water through evaporation.

“In the long run, they can help protect your coffee from drying up,” Nsubuga said.

There are other benefits as well. Leaves falling off the shade trees help fertilize the soil when they break down. And the shade trees themselves provide important habitat for birds and other animals.

So far the change has paid off. The shade-grown coffee fared much better than other trees during the recent drought.

But as for the increasingly unpredictable weather patterns, Nsubuga says there’s only so much he can do.

“We all leave those to prayers. God. Divine intervention,” he said.

Nsubuga hopes for divine intervention, because ultimately, he says, coffee farmers can’t control the weather.

Thousands of protesters march outside the White House, urging US President Barack Obama to stop the planned pipeline between Canada and the US.

Some geographers say the phrase refers to the seven largest bodies of water: The Pacific, Atlantic, Indian and Southern Oceans.

Then there’s the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.

But forget about seven seas. The International Hydrographic Organization says there are more than 100 of them.

For now, we’ll settle for the name of the sea you’d be facing if you were standing on the Maldive Islands, looking east.

The answer is the Laccadive Sea which separates the Maldive Islands from southern India and Sri Lanka.

The Maldives are only about five feet above sea level, so there’s big concern the islands’ days ware will become inundated as sea levels rise in the coming century.

Marco Werman talks with documentary filmmaker John Bowermaster in the Maldives.

In the agricultural belt of southeastern Australia, an area called the Murray-Darling Basin, farmers and ranchers are up in arms about a government plan to dramatically cut their water use. The plan comes after a 12-year drought and decades of river diversions took a huge toll on the environment.

But head almost a thousand miles to the north and it’s a very different story. In rural Queensland, farmers never had much access to water. And many seem happy to keep it that way.

Cattle rancher Angus Emmott, 48, has lived in the interior of northeast Australia his whole life. His closest neighbor is some 10 miles away. I asked him what he does if he needs to borrow some milk or sugar. His answer: “Well, we milk our own cow.”

It’s not just the solitude that makes this life challenging. The climate isn’t exactly cooperative either.

(Map: Wilderness Society)

“We get an average of 12 inches of rain a year, but that’s a bit of a misnomer, calling it an average, because some years we get as low as one inch,” said Emmott. “Other years, we just had 40 inches. You do get an average in the long run, I guess, but it’s very, very irregular.”

Creeks and rivers do run through this area. But in dry years, they’re channels of dust. And scientists say the dry years could become even more severe with climate change.

Emmott and other ranchers could build dams and store water for the lean years; that’s what they do in the rich agricultural areas 1,000 miles to the south. And that would make life a heckuva a lot easier. But Emmott doesn’t want to do that.

“These rivers out here, well the rivers across northern Australia, are in relatively good condition. And because these rivers are in great shape, we have the opportunity to actually be a little smart how we develop this country,” said Emmott. “We can actually make sure that we don’t damage the attributes to these rivers that make them so important.”

(Photo: Angus Emmott)

“It’s a pretty simple equation in the Australian Outback: the limiting factor on growth is almost always water,” said wildlife biologist Barry Traill with the Pew Environment Group. He took me on a drive through the Outback and explained how this area gets its scarce water. It’s a boom and bust cycle. Ranchers and nature rely on floods that originate 500 miles north in tropical Australia.

“The floods will come through and they’ll keep going for 500 or 800 miles south of us, and they’ll go into country, which has had, in many cases, no rain, no effective rain, for years,” said Traill. “You get these lush green flood plains, several kilometers wide, iridescent green floods plains, going thru these harsh, red sand dune desert. It’s an extraordinary contrast.”

Traill has been working with ranchers like Angus Emmott to protect this system and prevent the damming of these rivers. A coalition of ranchers and conservationists got a law passed by the State of Queensland in 2005 to permanently safeguard these waterways. But each river has to qualify on a registry first, one by one, to get protection.

Conservationists know they’re racing against the clock. According to government projections, Australia’s population could grow by more than 50 percent by mid-century.

Barry Traill (Photo: Jason Margolis)

“Ten years ago we got a taste of what could happen here,” said Traill. “There was a proposal to put in a very large cotton irrigation farm, but that was, fortunately, I think, very strongly opposed by local people.”

Traill says large-scale irrigation could’ve destroyed the delicate ecosystem here. That’s why it’s so important to get the rivers protected soon.

But not everybody here is happy about more regulation.

“It costs you more to actually get the paperwork done than it does to do the job,” said rancher Sam Coxon. His family has been grazing sheep in the interior of Queensland since his great-great grandfather walked 1200 miles here from southern Australia (Victoria) with his herd of sheep in 1887.

Coxon looks every bit the part of outback rancher, his cowboy hat pulled low over his blistered red skin. Coxon said he knows how to care for his land, and that includes needing to irrigate crops. “These small areas of irrigation, they’re to prevent more damage to this environment by weeds. We are about the environment. Without a good environment, we haven’t got a living,” said Coxon.

Coxon’s existing irrigation rights won’t be affected by any new regulations. And he can still buy more water on the free market. Still, he argued that if the river near him is protected, they’re essentially being legislated into forever remaining a dusty outpost. “Look, I mean, it’s the way the world is going. We’re becoming a nanny state,” said Coxon.

Sam Coxon (Photo: Jason Margolis)

“Regularly we get people from around the area who will all come down here and have a barbeque and sit around, watch the sunset and catch up with each other. We haven’t got the roar of traffic in the background. I don’t know, there’s just something about being out in the real bush,” said Emmott as he surveyed the scene with a contented smile.

But the ‘real bush’ as Emmott knows it is threatened. As climate patterns shift and Australia’s population grows, that ever-so precious resource – water – will undoubtedly become even more coveted.

UPDATE: The Queensland government announced the permanent protection of three rivers in western Queensland in December, 2011. Environmental groups say this will protect 10 million acres.