Michael Bloomberg Takes On The Coal Industry

The New Yorker - Carolyn Kormann

The former New York City mayor lays out his vision for the future of clean energy. Photograph by Ray Tamarra / GC / Getty

On Monday afternoon, Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire businessman and former three-term mayor of New York City, escaped to a deserted ballroom at the Grand Hyatt, in midtown Manhattan, to talk about climate change. Moments earlier, he had announced to attendees of the Bloomberg New Energy Finance summit that his philanthropic organization was partnering with the Canadian and British governments to expedite the global eradication of coal mining. His two new partners—Catherine McKenna, Canada’s minister of environment and climate change, and Claire Perry, the United Kingdom’s minister of state for energy and clean growth—came along for the discussion.
As the only person not representing a country, Bloomberg, in his new role as the U.N.’s special envoy for climate action, seemed like a substitute for American leadership—an alternative to the climate-denying Trump Administration, which Bloomberg called “a meshuggener.” But he immediately brushed aside the idea that the federal government, in this country, at least, can have a major impact on fuel sources or climate policy. “Coal will go away in any place where there’s a free market, for sure, because the market just forces that, the economics force it,” he told me. “O.K., the federal government can change some environmental regulations, but companies are going to put in the environmental safeguards anyway. Their stockholders are insisting on it, their employees are insisting on it, their customers are insisting on it, and, at the state level, they’re insisting on it.” Of greater concern, he said, are countries in which “the government has set the price for coal or whatever and is subsidizing it.” Last fall, McKenna and Perry founded the Powering Past Coal Alliance, which aims, in part, to help these countries adopt cleaner fuels. Sixty nations, states, cities, and companies have so far joined its polyglot roster.
At a few points during the conversation, Bloomberg returned to the idea that future targets for eliminating coal plants—2030 for developed countries; 2040 for China; 2050 for the rest of the world—don’t resonate with the public. “Twenty-anything sounds a long ways away, and so people don’t get their heads around it,” he said. “If you want people to sign on to an environmental issue, convince them that it is not climate change, it’s the environment. You say, ‘It’s your kid who’s going to go to the hospital with an asthma attack.’ ” Bloomberg drew an analogy with another of his causes, the fight against tobacco. “If you smoke—and you’ve got to be really stupid to smoke—then Darwin is at work,” he said. “The trouble with this stuff, what we’re talking about here, is you can do stupid things that hurt everybody for a long time.” McKenna noted that, in Ontario, once coal power was entirely eliminated, the province went from having fifty smog days a year to none.
One of the summit’s speakers, earlier in the day, was Rick Perry, the Secretary of Energy, who is an unashamed supporter of the coal industry. (Last week, a former D.O.E. employee petitioned for whistle-blower status, alleging “evidence of criminal corruption, obstruction of justice, and ethics violations” related to Perry’s relationship with the coal tycoon Robert Murray.) In his remarks, Perry said that his department was currently examining an emergency request from FirstEnergy Solutions, one of the largest electric utilities in the country, for help saving its struggling nuclear and coal plants. The company recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and was asking Perry to invoke an obscure provision of the Federal Power Act that would keep its plants online by guaranteeing their profits. (One of the company’s D.C. lobbyists, Jeff Miller, was the campaign manager for Perry’s 2016 Presidential run.) Critics such as Nora Mead Brownell, who served on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under George W. Bush, have argued that granting FirstEnergy’s request would be a heavy-handed intervention in a competitive power market. Brownell called the request a “real tragedy.”
“It does not help that our federal government is opposed to some rational things and is putting out some of the drivel that they do,” Bloomberg said. “But I would say that President Trump has been phenomenally helpful in galvanizing the pro-environmental people.” To date, Bloomberg Philanthropies has spent a hundred and twenty-five million dollars on its anti-coal campaigns, funnelling much of the money to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal initiative, which targets communities where coal plants are located. (Some has also gone to job-training charities in coal country, to support out-of-work miners.) Since Bloomberg first became active on the issue, in 2011, fifty per cent of this country’s coal plants have been retired. His hope, he said, is to see just a handful of coal plants left in the United States in a few years. The next thing to worry about, he continued, is the shipping industry. “They use this terrible bunker oil,” he said. He could start by addressing his own foundation’s investments: Bloomberg Philanthropies has divested its portfolios from coal but not from oil or gas.
On Tuesday, however, Perry’s old friend and campaign supporter Robert Murray, the founder and C.E.O. of Murray Energy, the biggest private coal company in the country, addressed the summit. “I’m probably the only coal guy in this room,” he said. Murray owns a large number of the domestic mines that sell coal to FirstEnergy, and he was there to make the case that coal is the only reliable fuel source that this country has—especially during extreme weather events such as this winter’s bomb cyclone. It was his opinion that the federal government must intervene. “It’s probably the only option right now,” he said. “We have the responsibility to make sure grandma doesn’t die on the operating table.” Perry, in his speech, had been more circumspect about FirstEnergy’s request. “It’s not the only way,” he said. McKenna, for her part, believes that the reliability question is a canard. “There’s this idea that you need to have coal for stability of the grid, and that’s just not true,” she said. In Canada, she noted, eighty per cent of energy is clean, meaning that the nation’s electric grid is mostly not backstopped by coal.
Murray Energy holds about three billion dollars in coal reserves. Bloomberg is worth fifty billion. Whom will the Trump Administration heed?

Links

• More than 20 Countries Launch Global Alliance to Phase Out Coal
• Sometimes Fighting Climate Change Means Breaking the Law
• There’s a Dangerous Bubble in the Fossil-Fuel Economy, and the Trump Administration Is Making It Worse
• Au Revoir: Trump Exits the Paris Climate Agreement

5 Plants and Animals Utterly Confused By Climate Change

New York Times - Livia Albeck-Ripka | Brad Plumer

Global warming is causing spring to arrive early and autumn to come late in many places, and not all species are adapting at the same rate.

Lauren Kolesinskas for The New York Times

Every year, as the seasons change, a complex ballet unfolds around the world. Trees in the Northern Hemisphere leaf out in the spring as frost recedes. Caterpillars hatch to gorge on leaves. Bees and butterflies emerge to pollinate flowers. Birds leave the Southern Hemisphere and fly thousands of miles to lay eggs and feast on insects in the north.
All of these species stay in sync with each other by relying on environmental cues, much as ballet dancers move to orchestral music.
But global warming is changing the music, with spring now arriving several weeks earlier in parts of the world than it did a few decades ago. Not all species are adjusting to this warming at the same rate, and, as a result, some are falling out of step.
Scientists who study the changes in plants and animals triggered by seasons have a term for this: phenological mismatch. And they’re still trying to understand exactly how such mismatches — like the blooming of a flower before its pollinator emerges — might affect ecosystems.
In some cases, species might simply adapt by shifting their ranges, or eating different foods. But if species can’t adapt quickly enough, these mismatches could have “significant negative impacts,” said Madeleine Rubenstein, a biologist at the United States Geological Survey’s National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center.
“If you look at the past history of climate on earth, there has never been such a dramatic, rapid, change in the climate,” said Andrea Santangeli, a postdoctoral researcher at the Finnish Museum of Natural History. “Species have to respond really fast,” he said, “that’s really unprecedented.”
Here are five examples of mismatch, just one of the many threats that species face from global warming, that scientists have discovered so far:

An orchid’s sex life turns bleak
The early spider orchid relies on deception to reproduce. Each spring, the orchid, whose bulbous crimson body looks like an insect, releases a pheromone that tricks solitary male bees into thinking the plant is a mating partner — a key step for pollination.
This ruse, which scientists call pseudocopulation, works because the orchid tends to bloom during a specific window each spring — shortly after lonely male bees emerge from hibernation but before female bees appear.
Yet with spring coming earlier, female bees are now emerging sooner and luring the male bees away from the lovelorn orchid, according to a 2014 study from Britain.
By examining data collected in herbariums and in the field over a century, the researchers found that the gap between the times when male bees and female bees emerge shrinks by about 6.6 days for each degree Celsius of warming, giving the orchid less opportunity to reproduce.
“The main finding is that things are getting increasingly bad for orchid pollination,” said Anthony Davy, a professor of biological science at the University of East Anglia, and the lead author of the paper. For this orchid — which is already rare — the future looks bleak, he said.

Spring comes early, but the flycatcher doesn’t
The European pied flycatcher runs on a tight schedule each spring.
From its wintering grounds in Africa, the bird flies thousands of miles north to Europe to lay eggs in time for the emergence of winter moth caterpillars, which appear for a few weeks each spring to munch on young oak leaves.
By timing this just right, the flycatchers ensure there’s enough food around when their hungry chicks hatch. In a series of studies in the 2000s, however, scientists in the Netherlands showed that many flycatchers were starting to miss this narrow window.
As spring temperatures warmed, oak trees were leafing out earlier and peak caterpillar season was arriving up to two weeks sooner in some places. But many flycatchers, which appear to schedule their departure from Africa based on the length of day there, were not getting to Europe early enough for their spring meals.
In the parts of the Netherlands where peak caterpillar season had advanced the fastest, the scientists later found, flycatcher populations dwindled sharply. “That was the big discovery that suggested this mismatch could have real consequences for populations,” said Christiaan Both, an ecologist at the University of Groningen.

 Scientists who study the changes in flora and fauna triggered by seasons have termed this phenomenon ‘phenological mismatch’ Getty

Birds and tractors get too close for comfort
Climate change doesn’t just cause missed connections. In some cases, the advance of warmer weather can lead to perilous meetings.
In Finland, for example, the Northern lapwing and Eurasian curlew have usually built their ground nests on barley fields after farmers have sown their crops in the spring. But as temperatures have risen, the birds are now increasingly laying their eggs before the farmers get to the fields, which means their well-concealed nests are more likely to get destroyed by tractors and other machinery.
Looking at 38 years of data, researchers found that farmers in Finland are now sowing their fields a week earlier in response to warmer temperatures, but the birds are laying their eggs two to three weeks earlier. “This has created a phenological mismatch,” said Mr. Santangeli, the lead author of the study. “The response we’ll see is declines of these birds.”

Caribou show up late for lunch
Caribou in western Greenland follow a strict seasonal diet. In the winter, they eat lichen along the coast. In the spring and summer, they venture inland to give birth to their calves and eat the Arctic plants that grow there.
As Greenland has warmed up and sea ice has declined, however, those inland Arctic plants have been emerging earlier — with some plant species now greening 26 days earlier than they did a decade ago. But the caribou have not shifted their migration as quickly. And scientists have documented a troubling trend in the region: More caribou calves appear to be dying early in years when the spring plant growth preceded the caribou’s calving season.
While that study only found a correlation between warmer temperatures and caribou calf deaths, “it’s consistent with the idea that mismatch is disadvantageous,” said Eric Post, an ecology professor at the University of California, Davis. When Arctic plants green up earlier, they may become tougher and less nutritious by the time the caribou get there and start eating them.
Why don’t the caribou speed up their migration? One possibility is that their reproductive cycles respond most strongly to seasonal signals like the length of the day, whereas plants respond more strongly to local temperatures, which are rising.
In theory, if given enough time, the caribou might eventually adjust as natural selection takes its course and favors individuals that calve earlier. But with the Arctic warming faster than the rest of the globe, Dr. Post said, “the question is whether things are changing too fast for evolution to matter.”

The snowshoe hare has a wardrobe malfunction
Climate change doesn’t just cause mismatches in the spring. Consider the snowshoe hare, whose fur coat has evolved to change from brown to white during the winter for camouflage. As the earth has warmed, however, snow cover in the hare’s habitat melts sooner, leaving the animal more exposed to predators.
“Camouflage is critical to keep prey animals alive,” said L. Scott Mills, a professor of wildlife biology at the University of Montana who studies the impacts of camouflage mismatch on species like the snowshoe hare.
For every week the hare is mismatched, Dr. Mills and his colleagues found, it had a 7 percent higher chance of being killed by predators like the lynx.
Currently, the hare is only mismatched by a week or two. But by midcentury, Dr. Mills said, that could extend up to eight weeks. If that were to happen, he said, the hare “would start declining toward extinction.”
There is some good news for the snowshoe hare, however. Where evolution was previously thought to take millions of years, scientists now think an animal like the hare could adapt in five to 10 generations, especially if those parts of the hare population which are more adaptable are protected.
“It does give us an avenue for hope,” Dr. Mills said. “It’s not a foregone conclusion that species with phenological mismatch are going to go extinct.”

Links

• Climate Change Denialists Say Polar Bears Are Fine. Scientists Are Pushing Back.
• Shell predicted dangers of fossil fuels and climate change in 1980s
• Washington's cherry blossoms bloom later this year
• Fiji’s existence threatened by ‘frightening new era’ of climate change
• Warm water rapidly melting Antarctica from below due to climate change

Climate Change Is Slowing Atlantic Currents That Help Keep Europe Warm

The Conversation - Peter T. Spooner

Natalie Renier/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Author provided

The ocean currents that help warm the Atlantic coasts of Europe and North America have significantly slowed since the 1800s and are at their weakest in 1600 years, according to new research my colleagues and I have conducted. As we’ve set out in a new study in Nature, the weakening of this ocean circulation system may have begun naturally but is probably being continued by climate change related to greenhouse gas emissions.
This circulation is a key player in the Earth’s climate system and a large or abrupt slowdown could have global repercussions. It could cause sea levels on the US east coast to rise, alter European weather patterns or rain patterns more globally, and hurt marine wildlife.
We know that at the end of the last major ice age, rapid fluctuations in the circulation led to extreme climate shifts on a global scale. An exaggerated (but terrifying) example of such a sudden event was portrayed in the 2004 blockbuster film The Day After Tomorrow.


The Day After Tomorrow - Official® Trailer

The recent weakening we have found was likely driven by warming in the north Atlantic and the addition of freshwater from increased rainfall and melting ice. It has been predicted many times but, until now, just how much weakening has already occurred has largely remained a mystery. The extent of the changes we have discovered comes as a surprise to many, including myself, and points to significant changes in the future.
The circulation system in question is known as the “Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation” (AMOC). The AMOC is like a giant conveyor belt of water. It transports warm, salty water to the north Atlantic where it gets very cold and sinks. Once in the deep ocean the water flows back southwards and then all around the world’s oceans. This conveyor belt is one of the most important transporters of heat in the climate system and includes the Gulf Stream, known for keeping western Europe warm.
Climate models have consistently predicted that the AMOC will slow down due to greenhouse gas warming and associated changes in the water cycle. Because of these predictions – and the possibility of abrupt climate changes – scientists have monitored the AMOC since 2004 with instruments strung out across the Atlantic at key locations. But to really test the model predictions and work out how climate change is affecting the conveyor we have needed much longer records.

Looking for patterns
To create these records, our research group – led by University College London’s Dr David Thornalley – used the idea that a change in the AMOC has a unique pattern of impact on the ocean. When the AMOC gets weaker, the north-eastern Atlantic Ocean cools and parts of the western Atlantic get warmer by a specific amount. We can look for this pattern in past records of ocean temperature to trace what the circulation was like in the past.
Another study in the same issue of Nature, led by researchers at the University of Potsdam in Germany, used historical observations of temperature to check the fingerprint. They found that the AMOC had reduced in strength by around 15% since 1950, pointing to the role of human-made greenhouse gas emissions as the primary cause.
In our paper, which also forms part of the EU ATLAS project, we found the same fingerprint. But instead of using historical observations we used our expertise in past climate research to go back much further in time. We did this by combining known records of the remains of tiny marine creatures found in deep-sea mud. Temperature can be worked out by looking at the amounts of different species and the chemical compositions of their skeletons.


Introduction to ATLAS

We were also able to directly measure the past deep ocean current speeds by looking at the mud itself. Larger grains of mud imply faster currents, while smaller grains mean the currents were weaker. Both techniques point to a weakening of the AMOC since about 1850, again by about 15% to 20%. Importantly, the modern weakening is very different to anything seen over the last 1,600 years, pointing to a combination of natural and human drivers.
The difference in timing of the start of the AMOC weakening in the two studies will require more scientific attention. Despite this difference, both of the new studies raise important questions regarding whether climate models simulate the historical changes in ocean circulation, and whether we need to revisit some of our future projections.
However, each additional long record makes it easier to evaluate how well the models simulate this key element of the climate system. In fact, evaluating models against these long records may be a crucial step if we hope to accurately predict possible extreme AMOC events and their climate impacts.

Links

• Anomalously weak Labrador Sea convection and Atlantic overturning during the past 150 years
• What Caused the Younger Dryas Cold Event?
• On The Driving Processes Of The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (pdf)
• Introduction to ATLAS