Lethal Heating: 07/11/17

11/07/2017

India Plants 66 Million Trees In 12 Hours In Record-Breaking Bid To Meet Paris Agreement Promise

India has broken its own world record by planting 66 million trees in just 12 hours, according to a Government official, in a bid to honour a pledge made at the Paris Climate Change Conference.
More than 1.5 million volunteers turned out on Sunday between 7am and 7pm to plant the massive number of tree saplings along the Narmada River in the state of Madhya Pradesh.
State Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan announced the new record on Twitter.
In 2016, India set the previous record when it planted more than 50 million trees in one day at more than 6,000 locations across the state of Uttar Pradesh.
Guinness World Records' adjudicators reportedly monitored Sunday's plantation and are expected to confirm the new record in the coming weeks.
Under the Paris Agreement, India agreed to spend $6 billion to reforest 12 per cent of its land and help mitigate the effects of climate change.

Other nations are also undertaking massive tree-planting efforts to reduce deforestation and climate change.
At the end of 2016, 10 African nations pledged to restore 31.7 million hectares of land as part of the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative.
In Australia, a team of engineers plan to use drones to plant 1 billion trees every year.
Dr Susan Graham has helped build a drone system that can scan the land, identify ideal places to grow trees, and then fire germinated seeds into the soil.
Deforestation and forest degradation make up 17 per cent of the world's carbon emissions — more than the entire world's transportation sector, according to the United Nations.
The planet loses 15 billion trees every year and much of it is cleared for farmland to feed the world's booming population, but it is feared this could be exacerbating climate change.

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Emperor Penguins May Disappear By The End Of This Century

American Association for the Advancement of Science - Lakshmi Supriya

Roger Tidman/FLPA imageBROKER/Newscom

Emperor penguins are known for braving the harsh Antarctic winters, but they might not be able to brave the harsh realities of climate change.
That’s the finding of a new study, which suggests that by the end of this century, the world’s largest penguins may be no more.
Previous research suggested that rapidly warming air and sea temperatures—which melt sea ice—might cause their numbers to plummet by as much as 19% by 2100.
But a new model looks at other factors, including how individual penguins deal with climate change by migrating to places with optimal sea ice coverage.
In their model of potential penguin migrations, researchers looked at how far penguins typically go and what factors figure in their decisions.
They used data previously collected from Pointe Géologie in Antarctica along with satellite images of penguin colonies that revealed information about their traveling and foraging behavior.
The model projects that for the next 2 decades, populations will remain stable, and may even increase slightly as the penguins move to locations that are more habitable.
After 2050, it all goes downhill.
Although the rate of population decline may vary, by the year 2100 almost all emperor penguins may be gone, the researchers write in an upcoming issue of Biological Conservation.
That’s because climate change will have rendered all their habitats inhospitable by then.
Gaining endangered status under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, the scientists say, may be one way of arresting what might otherwise be their final march.

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Half A Degree Warmer Means A Lot

Climate News Network - Tim Radford*

Half a degree doesn’t sound much. But if it gets any warmer, we will notice the difference soon enough.

Heavy rainfall is becoming more frequent across many parts of the world. Image: Roger Price from Hong Kong, via Wikimedia Commons

LONDON – Researchers now know the difference half a degree can make. They can tell you why 1.5°C warming would be better than a 2°C climb in average global temperatures, because even half a degree Celsius could mean greater extremes of heat, more overwhelming rainfall, and longer spells of warm weather.

And they know all this because they’ve seen it happen in the recent past. There is enough evidence, they say, in the observational record for the last half century to underline the importance of even half a degree.

Scientists from Germany and Switzerland outline the argument and identify the evidence in the journal Nature Climate Change.

In the last two centuries, the ratio of carbon dioxide, the result of extravagant fossil fuel use since the Industrial Revolution, has risen from around 280 parts per million to 400 ppm, and average global temperatures have risen around 1°C during that time.

The researchers matched temperature and climate records for the years 1960 to 1979 and 1991 to 2010, a period when the thermometer averages climbed by a whole half a degree.

Significant changes

They found that the intensity of extreme rainfall had increased by 9% over that period. The coldest winters were measurably less cold, and half of the global land mass had experienced changes of what they called “warm spell duration” of more than six days.

It is not that perceptible global warming made these extremes happen – extremes happen anyway – but the researchers think it made them more likely. By raising the temperature, humans loaded the climate dice.

“The hottest summer temperatures increased by more than 1°C in a quarter of global land areas, while the coldest winter temperatures warmed by more than 2.5°C,” said Peter Pfleiderer, a scientist with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and for Climate Analytics.

And his colleague Carl-Friedrich Schleussner said: “As we’re moving increasingly outside of the range of natural climate variability, we have to expect that impacts on agriculture, human and biological systems will be more pronounced.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has begun to prepare a special report on the impacts of a warming of 1.5°C, the target set by the world’s nations in the Paris Agreement of 2015.

“With the warming the world has already experienced, we have an actual record of warming to study, and we can see very clearly that a difference of 0.5˚C of warming really does matter.”

There is no certainty that the world’s nations can meet the Paris target and contain global warming, and limit climate change, because enough carbon dioxide has been emitted to take air temperatures over land to that level already.

The next decade could be critical, which is why researchers feel they need the evidence in as clear a form as possible.

“One of the pressing questions for scientists today is whether we know that limiting warming to 1.5°C instead of 2°C would make a difference in the future. We have to rely on climate models to predict the future, but given we now have observational evidence of around 1˚C warming, we can also look at the real life impacts this warming has brought,” Dr Schleussner said.

And the third signatory, Erich Fischer of ETH Zurich, said: “Communicating abstract quantities like differences in global mean temperature is difficult.

“With the warming the world has already experienced, we have an actual record of warming to study, and we can see very clearly that a difference of 0.5˚C of warming really does matter.”

*Tim Radford, a founding editor of Climate News Network, worked for The Guardian for 32 years, for most of that time as science editor. He has been covering climate change since 1988.

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