Lethal Heating: 01/20/17

20/01/2017

'Extreme Year': 2016 Declared Hottest Year On Record As Climate Change Builds On Big El Nino

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

The world's major meteorological agencies have declared 2016 to the hottest year on record - making it three new highs in as many years - as increases in greenhouse gases drove global warming.
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies said global sea and land temperatures last year were 0.99 degrees warmer than average for the 1951-1980 benchmark period, eclipsing the previous high set only a year earlier by 0.12 degrees.

The state of our climate in 2016
Australia is already experiencing an increase in extreme conditions from climate change - and it's projected to get worse.

The World Meteorological Organisation, which uses data from NASA, the UK Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, said temperatures in 2016 were about 1.1 degrees higher than the pre-industrial period, or about 0.83 degrees above the 1961-1990 reference period. That beat the 2015 record by 0.07 degrees.
"2016 was an extreme year for the global climate and stands out as the hottest year on record," said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.
As expected, all but one of the 16 hottest years on record have occurred this century. 1998 is the other year, and came at the end of the biggest El Nino on record.
Almost two decades on from that spike, 2016 was more than one-third of a degree higher, according to NASA data released on Wednesday. (See NASA chart below.)

"The trends, which we've seen since the 1970s, are continuing and have not paused in any way," Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute, told a media briefing.

A girl drinks water from an irrigation tube in northern India's Jammu region during a May heatwave. Photo: AP

Global temperatures have risen 0.7 degrees per decade since 1880, accelerating to a 0.17-degree per decade rate since 1970, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in its annual report.
Dr Schmidt said the recent El Nino probably boosted 2015 by about half a degree, compared with the trend, and just 0.12 degrees last year. The warming trend is contributing "about 90 per cent of the signal", he said.
Petteri Taalas, WMO's Secretary-General, said in a statement that "carbon dioxide and methane concentrations surged to new records. Both contribute to climate change".

Heatwaves
The record hot year was marked by heatwaves in South Asia and the Middle East, with Kuwait reaching 54 degrees in July - a reading that may be Asia's hottest on record.
Extraordinarily warm northern temperatures have slowed or reversed Arctic sea ice formation this winter, while at the southern end of the planet, Antarctic sea ice has also been tracking at record low levels in satellite data collected over more than three decades.
In combination, climate scientists in the past week have estimated the Earth has not had such low extent of sea ice in thousands of years. With less ice, less solar radiation is reflected back to space, ending up in the exposed seas instead - contributing to further build-up of warmth in the regions.
"Greenland glacier melt - one of the contributors to sea level rise - started early and fast," Mr Taalas said.
"The Arctic is warming twice as fast a the global average," he said. "The persistent loss of sea ice is driving weather, climate and ocean circulation patterns in other parts of the world."
(See NASA chart below for the areas of the planet with the biggest departures from the long-run average temperature.)

2017 outook
Dr Schmidt said he expected this year to see "a small negative push" in temperatures after three years of records.
"It's still going to be a top five year," although unlikely to be a fourth year of records, he said.
For its part, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimated 2016 global temperatures beat the previous year by 0.04 degrees. Differences in accounting for Arctic changes account for some of the discrepancy between agencies.
"Since the start of the 21st century, the annual global temperature record has been broken five times - 2005, 2010, 2014, 2015, and 2016," NOAA said.
"Despite the cooling influence of a weak La Nina in the latter part of the year, the year ended with the third warmest December on record for the globe."
El Nino years tend to spur global temperatures as changing wind patterns in the Pacific means the giant ocean absorbs less heat from the atmosphere. La Ninas reverse the process and tend to suppress global temperatures. (See chart below.)

The 2015-16 El Nino was the third-strongest on record. Conditions have been mostly neutral since the El Nino pattern broke down in the first half of last year.
For Australia, 2016 was the country's fourth hottest year according to mean temperature data going back to 1910.
Among other agencies recording last year as the hottest on record was Japan's Meteorological Agency, which released preliminary data earlier this week.

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China’s War On Coal Continues — The Country Just Canceled 104 New Coal Plants

Vox - Brad Plumer

A Chinese fisherman passes a coal powered plant on Shazai Island Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Because China is such a behemoth, its energy decisions absolutely dwarf anything any other country is doing right now. Case in point: Over the weekend, the Chinese government ordered 13 provinces to cancel 104 coal-fired projects in development, amounting to a whopping 120 gigawatts of capacity in all.

To put that in perspective, the United States has about 305 gigawatts of coal capacity total. The projects that China just ordered halted are equal in size to one-third of the US coal fleet. If the provinces follow through, it’s a very, very big deal for efforts to fight climate change.

This move also shouldn’t come as a big surprise. In recent years, China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, has been making major efforts to restrain its coal use and shift to cleaner sources of energy. When Donald Trump and other conservatives in the United States complain that China isn’t doing anything about climate change, they simply haven’t been paying attention.

China’s coal use is falling — and this may be a lasting shift

Back in 2013, China was using as much coal as the rest of the world combined, and it looked like coal use would keep growing astronomically forever. Local officials were planning hundreds of new coal plants as demand looked like it would keep soaring for decades.

Except then an odd thing happened. Since 2013, China’s coal consumption has actually fallen — due in part to a major economic slowdown but also in part to sluggish output in heavy industries like steel and cement that have traditionally accounted for half the country’s coal use. (The usual caveats about China’s murky energy statistics apply.)

Increasingly, many analysts suspect that this slowdown in coal consumption is a lasting shift — particularly as China transitions away from heavy industry and investment-driven growth and into a modern service-oriented economy that’s far less carbon-intensive. Going forward, China’s economy is expected to be focused more on retail shops and hospitals, less on steel and cement plants. Energy demand will slow.

On top of that, as China’s leaders start to take global warming seriously, the country has been making massive investments in clean energy. As part of the Paris climate deal, China has pledged to get 20 percent of its energy from low-carbon sources by 2030. The government is planning to install an addition 130 gigawatts of wind and solar by 2020 and making big bets on nuclear power. Some analysts suspect this growth in clean energy could be sufficient to satisfy much of the future growth in household electricity demand.

When you add those two trends together, many forecasters think China’s coal growth will either flatline or fall in the years ahead. One recent paper in Nature Geoscience predicted that China’s coal consumption may have already peaked in 2013. And if that’s true, then many of the hundreds of coal projects that China has on the drawing board will be flatly unnecessary.

China is now putting a hard limit on coal capacity — but there’s a catch

So that brings us to the recent cancellations. China currently has around 920 gigawatts of installed coal capacity — and many of those plants are already running at lower-than-expected capacity because of weak demand. But there are also hundreds of new coal plants in various phases of planning around the country that would bring total coal capacity nationwide up to 1,250 gigawatts.

That seems excessive, given recent trends. So in China’s latest five-year plan, Chinese officials put a hard cap on future coal capacity at 1,100 gigawatts. Then last week, they ordered provinces to cancel 104 coal projects in the works that were worth an estimated $30 billion. Of those, 47 projects were already under construction, according to a Greenpeace analysis.

Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst at Greenpeace who has been following this story closely for years, made a map of the plants targeted for cancellation:

(Greenpeace)

That said, there are a whole bunch of important asterisks here. First, Beijing has only ordered the provinces to cancel the plants. The provincial governments still have to actually comply. (And we’ve seen some provinces defy Beijing on overcapacity cuts before.)

Second, even under the new cap, Chinese coal capacity still has some room to expand going forward — which is why environmental groups like Greenpeace are calling on the government to go even further and cancel the rest of the dozens of new coal projects still in various stages of planning.

Third, while any slowdown in Chinese coal demand is good news for climate change, it’s not great news for climate change. If the world wants to avoid drastic global warming — typically defined as 2°C or more — then it’s not enough for China’s CO2 emissions to simply plateau. They have to fall, very drastically. Doing that will require more than simply canceling any future coal plants. It will mean either retiring existing coal plants and replacing them with cleaner sources (as the United States is currently doing) or retrofitting the plants with carbon capture technology and burying their emissions underground.

Finally, there’s an important political angle here. China’s struggle to curtail coal use is putting thousands and thousands of miners out of work, and if it moves too fast, it risks unrest in key coal-producing regions (something US politicians are familiar with). Last year, Prime Minister Li Keqiang announced the central government would need to set aside $15.3 billion for areas ravaged by unemployment. He also promised that future job growth in other sectors would help absorb losses in the declining coal and steel sectors. But no one knows if China can pull off this tightrope act.

Which is all to say that this week’s big coal plant cancellation is just one (important) chapter in a story that’s going to unfold over many decades, with plenty of twists and reversals still to come.

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Turnbull Backs Cleaner Coal For Hitting Renewable Target

The Australian - Rosie Lewis

Malcolm Turnbull inspects a coastguard boat in Brisbane yesterday. ‘My approach to energy is absolutely pragmatic’. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

Australia should be a world leader in demonstrating that carbon emissions can be lowered by replacing ageing electricity generators with new and emerging technologies to produce cleaner coal, Malcolm Turnbull has declared.

The Prime Minister also hit back at Tony Abbott days after he called on Mr Turnbull to dump the renewable energy target, saying renewables had a “role” to play in reaching the government’s carbon reduction target of up to 28 per cent by 2030.

As revealed in The Australian yesterday, research commissioned by the Turnbull government has estimated the country’s emissions would be cut by up to 27 per cent if coal-based power generation ran on “ultra-super-critical-technology” used in other parts of the world.

Carried out by the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, the research showed emissions would be reduced even further — by up to 34 per cent — if the technology now in development was adopted across Australia.

Mr Turnbull acknowledged coal would be part of the world’s energy mix “for a very, very long time” as he attacked the Labor state of South Australia, which generates 40 per cent of its energy through wind, for having the “most expensive and the least reliable electricity” in the country.

“We are the biggest coal exporter in the world. If anybody, if any country has a vested interest in demonstrating that clean coal and cleaner coal with new technologies can make a big contribution to our energy mix and at the same time reduce our emissions in net terms — it’s us,” Mr Turnbull said.

“Our approach, and my approach, to energy is absolutely pragmatic and practical ... Renewables have a role. Fossil fuels have a role. Every type of energy — storage, all of it — has an important role to play.”

Mr Turnbull said it was “wrong” to be ideological about the nation’s energy mix after Mr Abbott wrote in The Weekend Australian that the government should urgently scrap the mandatory RET, insisting the focus should be on what is most affordable.

The Minerals Council of Australia said the Department of Industry’s projections showing new coal generation technologies could reduce emissions “sharply” were consistent with emissions savings being achieved around the world.

“With high efficiency low emissions (HELE) coal technologies as clean as gas plants, countries accounting for nearly half of global CO2 emissions are deploying these technologies to meet their emissions targets under the 2015 Paris Agreement,” the council’s chief executive Brendan Pearson said.

“These HELE plants deliver secure, affordable energy while lowering CO2 emissions by as much as 50 per cent compared with existing plants. As the adoption of carbon capture and storage technologies increases, these emissions savings will increase to 90 per cent.”

Resources Minister Matt Canavan said Asian countries were not only reducing carbon emissions by installing supercritical coal-fired power but they were doing so “at a cost cheaper than many other emissions reducing options”.

“When reducing the carbon emissions of our power stations we should seek to do so at the lowest cost,” he told The Australian.

Replacing sub-critical technology with super-critical technology saves CO2 at a cost of between US$15 to US$25 a tonne in Southeast Asia, according to the World Coal Association.

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