Lethal Heating: 12/31/16

31/12/2016

India To Reach 57% Renewable Penetration By 2027, Forecasts Government

PV Magazine - Ian Clover

Bullish ten-year energy blueprint suggests India will surpass renewable targets outlined in Paris Agreement by more than 50% and three years ahead of schedule.

Solar power in India is surging towards its 100 GW by 2020 goal, but that pace is expected to continue beyond that date.

The Indian government is expecting the country to source 57% of its energy requirements from renewables by 2027 – three years and many percentage points ahead of the 2030 target of 40% agreed to in Paris at COP21 last year.
This bold statement by India’s Central Electricity Authority is outlined in a draft ten-year energy blueprint that projects private investment in India’s solar and wind industries to drastically increase over the next decade, propelling installations to new heights and smashing the already-ambitious targets.
According to the plan, India will have installed 275 GW of renewable energy by 2027 – with more than half of figure likely to come from solar.
Piyush Goyal, the Indian energy minister, has also confirmed that there will be no new coal-fired power plants built until at least 2027 as the country hedges its energy future on renewable energy and takes seriously its pledges made under the Paris Agreement.
Despite public government funding in solar and wind power still way short of the levels required to meet the 175 GW of renewable capacity by 2022 goal, an influx of overseas capital has arrived in 2016, with more of the same likely in the forthcoming years.
Around $20 billion has been committed to India’s soaring solar sector by Taiwan’s Foxconn and Japan’s Softbank, with domestic assistance arriving in the form of India’s Bharti Enterprises. Indian developers are also jostling for greater prominence, with Tata pledging to draw 40% of its energy from renewable source by 2025, and Adani and Azure Power stepping up their solar investments.
“India is moving beyond fossil fuels at a pace scarcely imagined only two years ago,” Tim Buckley, director at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told the Guardian. “Goyal has put forward an energy plan that is commercially viable and commercially justified without subsidies, so you have big global corporations and utilities committing to it.”

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Climate Change Driving Birds To Migrate Early, Research Reveals

The Guardian - Nadia Khomami

A University of Edinburgh study finds birds are arriving at breeding grounds too soon, causing some to miss out on food

Birds with long migrations are expected to suffer most, as other species reach breeding grounds before them. Photograph: Gerry Penny/EPA

Migrating birds are responding to the effects of climate change by arriving at their breeding grounds earlier as global temperatures rise, research has found.
The University of Edinburgh study, which looked at hundreds of species across five continents, found that birds are reaching their summer breeding grounds on average about one day earlier per degree of increasing global temperature.
The main reason birds take flight is changing seasonal temperatures and food availability. The time they reach their summer breeding grounds is significant, because arriving at the wrong time, even by a few days, may cause them to miss out on vital resources such as food and nesting places. This in turn affects the timing of offspring hatching and their chances of survival.
The research included species that travel huge distances, such as the swallow and pied flycatcher, as well as those with shorter migrations, such as the lapwing and pied wagtail. British swallows fly through western France, across the Pyrenees, down eastern Spain into Morocco, and across the Sahara, to spend their winter in South Africa from around September or October.
Migrating swallows can cover 200 miles a day at speeds of 17-22 miles per hour, with a maximum flight speed of 35mph.
The pied flycatcher, a bird slightly smaller than a house sparrow, is a summer visitor to the UK and breeds mainly in western areas of the country, before spending the winter in west Africa.
The northern lapwing, which is about 30cm long from beak to tail, can be seen across the British Isles throughout the year, favouring farmland, wetland and meadows during the breeding season and pasture and ploughed fields during the winter months.
The University of Edinburgh researchers examined records of migrating bird species dating back almost 300 years. They drew upon records from amateur enthusiasts and scientists, including notes from 19th-century American naturalist Henry David Thoreau.
They hope their study, published in the Journal of Animal Ecology and supported by the Natural Environment Research Council, will help scientists better predict how different species will respond to environmental changes. Long-distance migrants, which are shown to be less responsive to rising temperatures, may suffer most as other birds gain advantage by arriving at breeding grounds ahead of them.
Takuji Usui, of the university’s school of biological sciences, said: “Many plant and animal species are altering the timing of activities associated with the start of spring, such as flowering and breeding.
“Now we have detailed insights into how the timing of migration is changing and how this change varies across species. These insights may help us predict how well migratory birds keep up with changing conditions on their breeding grounds.”

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The Great Barrier Reef Is Dying, And Global Warming Set The Scene

Washington Post - Editorial Board

Dead table corals killed by bleaching on Zenith Reef on the northern Great Barrier Reef in Australia. (Greg Torda/Courtesy of ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies via Reuters)

ALL YEAR, it has been a real-time environmental catastrophe. The Great Barrier Reef, an unparalleled ecological treasure that supports all sorts of sea life and a range of human needs, not to mention a huge tourist economy, has seen the largest coral die-off ever recorded. If this were a rare event, separated by many years from the next big die-off, the reef would rebound. But in the age of climate change, scientists say this and other tragedies are frighteningly likely to be compounded.

Experts have been tracking the destruction for months, announcing their final conclusions Nov. 29. They found that across a long stretch of the northern end of the reef, an average of 67 percent of the coral died, according to aerial and diver observations. In these zones, the reef’s lively colors have been replaced by antiseptic white of “bleached” coral. Though weather events helped spare other areas this degree of destruction, the reef’s northern portions had been the most pristine.
In this case, the problem appears to have been water temperature, which was up to two degrees warmer than the normal summer peak. This threw off the delicate balance between the coral organisms and the algae that provide them sustenance. Natural variability may have played some role in raising the temperature — it was an El Niño year, which means the Pacific Ocean was hotter. But global warming probably set the scene. Australian scientists concluded that this year’s coral crisis was rendered far more likely because of climate-change-related ocean warmth. As the planet continues to warm, human influence will be more and more likely to interact with natural variation in dangerous ways. Among other things, that means all that dead coral may not have a chance to rebound.
Rising ocean temperatures, sadly, are not the only threat human greenhouse-gas emissions pose to coral. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere translates into more acidic oceans, which erode coral structures. Then there are the more mundane threats that harm sea life, including coral. Fishermen use explosives to kill and capture ocean creatures. Urban and agricultural runoff makes water cloudy, inhibiting the photosynthesis on which reefs depend.
Scientists are racing to figure out how to help reefs survive the onslaught they are likely to face in coming years, examining corals that do better under stressful conditions and considering ways to preserve those that might struggle. But if human beings are to preserve crucial biodiversity — which comes with a range of benefits, from underpinning food chains to revealing lifesaving drugs — they have no choice but to curb the underlying problems. Greenhouse-gas emissions must come down, and countries that are not properly managing their runoff or their fishing industries must tighten their rules.

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