09/08/2018

Terrifying Insights Into Climate Change Could Build Legislative Momentum For Emissions Cuts, Researchers Argue

Phys.org - Christine Clark

New research in climate science indicates that extreme events, such as heat waves, the collapse of major ice sheets, and mass extinctions are becoming dramatically more probable. Though cuts in rising emissions appear unlikely with the stalled 2015 Paris agreement, University of California San Diego scientists argue that new developments present an opportunity to shift the politics around climate change.
Credit: University of California - San Diego
For the first time, scientists can make a strong case that no one is exempt from the extreme and immediate risks posed by a warming world.
The findings were recently published in a Foreign Affairs piece led by Veerabhadran Ramanathan, professor of climate and atmospheric sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and co-authored with David Victor, a professor of political science at UC San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS) and director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation. They collaborated with Pontifical Academy of Sciences and Social Sciences members Msgr. Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, Partha Dasgupta, and Joachim von Braun.
In the article, the authors outline a variety of grim impacts scientists predict will have on and food supply in the near future. But this does represent an opportunity: These same consequences from climate change on developing economies may give rise to the political capital needed to make deep cuts in carbon emissions.

Wealthier economies feeling the heat
Scientists long believed that because wealthier societies had the resources to adapt to a warmer world, that poor countries would suffer more, even though the wealthiest one billion people around the world are responsible for more than 50 percent of emissions. However, Ramanathan and Victor point out that new studies show that the rich are far more exposed than anyone realized—especially to deadly heat.
"Massive fires in Sonoma and Napa, the richest wine-growing areas in the United States, may have a larger political impact than distant crises—just as in Japan and super-fires in Europe are having a political impact there," the authors noted.
The opinion piece originated in a meeting organized in November 2017 at the Vatican by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Ramanathan, Sanchez Sorondo from the Vatican, and Dasgupta of Cambridge University. A declaration from the event urging governments and other stakeholders to take the scalable and practical solutions was signed by several Nobel laureates, the late physicist Stephen Hawking, California Gov. Jerry Brown, Rep. Scott Peters, and mayors of several major European cities.

 A hot planet is bad for human health
Today, scientists can also more clearly convey the rising risk of that will have major consequences for human welfare. For example, researchers forecast that beyond 2050, as much as 44 percent of the planet's land areas will be exposed to drying. This will lead to severe drought conditions throughout southern Europe, North America, much of southeast Asia, and most of the Amazon—affecting about 1.4 billion people. There is also a heightened risk of more extreme rainfall which will expose an additional two billion people to floods.
If realized, these disastrous predictions will have major impacts on human health in a variety of ways.
"Beyond 2050, there is a 50-percent probability that about half of the world's population will be subject to mean temperatures in the summer that are hotter than the hottest summer on record unless the world takes immediate and large-scale action," the authors wrote. "In the most highly populated regions of the world, by the end of the century, there are 10- to 30-percent chances of heat waves greater than 130 degrees Fahrenheit."
They added that heat and droughts threaten regions that produce much of the world's food. Food prices are expected to rise 23 percent by 2030, making food markets more volatile, and under heat stress, the nutritious content of food crops is declining.
"Extreme weather disasters also have negative impacts on mental health. When heat is over 130 degrees, whole societies can come unglued," the authors wrote.
And, to make matters worse, diseases transmitted by mosquitoes and other insects, such as malaria and dengue fever, seem likely to proliferate as the habitats of mosquitoes expand, thanks to climate change, indicating the worst is yet to come.

A silver linings playbook
Victor and Ramanathan urge, however, that there's still time to act and the scientific community can lead the effort: "To communicate these new findings, scientists also need to think about how they influence society, in particular, they should build new partnerships with groups that shape how societies frame justice and morality, including religious institutions."
In the years to come, it is expected that more than half of the population may be exposed to extreme heat waves and perhaps one-third to vector-borne diseases. With few immune to these negative effects, the authors recommend that activists along with the scientific community should seek alliance with faith leaders, health-care providers, and other community leaders as part of the strategy on combating climate change.
"In particular, even when they do not share the same notion of God, faith leaders should act both together and separately in their own communities to preserve human dignity and our common home." They added, "the silver lining in all of this, if there is one, is that a recognition of the nasty and brutish new normal may yet mobilize the political support needed to make a dent in global emissions."

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Green Energy Producers Just Installed Their First Trillion Watts

Bloomberg - 

The next trillion will cost $1.2 trillion by 2023, almost half of the price-tag for the first, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance


The Way Humans Get Electricity Is About to Change Forever

Global wind and solar developers took 40 years to install their first trillion watts of power generation capacity, and the next trillion may be finished within the next five years.
That’s the conclusion of research by BloombergNEF, which estimated the industry reached the 1-terrawatt milestone sometime in the first half of the year. That’s almost as much generation capacity as the entire U.S. power fleet, although renewables work less often than traditional coal and nuclear plants and therefore yield less electricity over time.
The findings illustrate the scale of the green energy boom, which has drawn $2.3 trillion of investment to deploy wind and solar farms at the scale operating today. BloombergNEF estimates that the falling costs of those technologies mean the next terrawatt of capacity will cost about half as much – $1.23 trillion – and arrive sometime in 2023.
"Hitting one terrawatt is a tremendous achievement for the wind and solar industries, but as far as we’re concerned, it’s just the start,"said Albert Cheung, BloombergNEF’s head of analysis in London. "Wind and solar are winning the battle for cost-supremacy, so this milestone will be just the first of many.’’



The world had a total of about 6.2 terrawatts of installed capacity in 2016, about 1 terrawatt of that being coal plants in China, according to the research group. Like all milestones, reaching 1 terrawatt is an arbitrary mark that scratches the surface of the debate about how much renewables will contribute to the world's energy system.
Each power plant works at a different ``capacity factor,’’ a measure capturing both the efficiency of the facility in generating electricty and how often it works. On average, wind farms have a capacity factor of about 34 percent worldwide, meaning they work about a third of the time, according to BloombergNEF. Some of the best sites have factors above 60 percent. For solar photovoltaics that track the sun, those readings range from 10 percent in the U.K. to 19 percent in the U.S. and 24 percent in Chile's Atacama desert. By comparison, coal plants have a 40 percent capacity factor and nuclear sometimes double that.
Even so, the terrawatt of installed capacity for renewables marks substantial growth for an industry that barely existed at the start of the century. More than 90 percent of all that capacity was installed in the past 10 years, reflecting incentives that Germany pioneered in the early 2000s that made payouts for green power transparent for investors and bankers alike.
Asian nations absorbed 44 percent of the new wind and 58 percent of solar developments to date, with China account for about a third of all those installations.
Wind made up 54 percent of the first terrawatt but solar is expected to overtake wind in early 2020. China has led the world in installing solar power over the last five years holding 34 percent of global solar capacity and it’ll continue to be the world’s largest market for both power sources, reaching 1.1 terrawatts in the country by 2050.
``As we get into the second and third terrawatts, energy storage is going to become much more important,’’ Cheung said. ``That’s where we see a lot of investment and innovation right now.’’

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Don’t Despair – Climate Change Catastrophe Can Still Be Averted

The Guardian - 

The future looks fiery and dangerous, according to new reports. But political will and grassroots engagement can change this
‘A new scientific report says that even fairly modest future carbon emissions could set off a cascade of catastrophe.’ Wild fire in Athens, Greece. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
This is the summer when, for many, climate change got real. The future looks fiery and dangerous. Hot on the heels of Trump, fake news and the parlous state of the Brexit negotiations, despair is in the air. Now a new scientific report makes the case that even fairly modest future carbon dioxide emissions could set off a cascade of catastrophe, with melting permafrost releasing methane to ratchet up global temperatures enough to drive much of the Amazon to die off, and so on in a chain reaction around the world that pushes Earth into a terrifying new hothouse state from which there is no return. Civilisation as we know it would surely not survive. How do we deal with such news?
As a research scientist in this field, I can give some nuance to the headlines. One common way of thinking about climate change is the lower the future carbon dioxide emissions, the less warming and the less havoc we will face as this century progresses. This is certainly true, but as the summer heatwave and the potential hothouse news remind us, the shifts in climate we will experience will not be smooth, gradual and linear changes. They may be fast, abrupt, and dangerous surprises may happen. However, an unstoppable globally enveloping cascade of catastrophe, while possible, is certainly not a probable outcome.
Yet, even without a hothouse we are on track to transform Earth this century. The world, after 30 years of warnings, has barely got to grips with reducing carbon dioxide emissions. They need to rapidly decline to zero, but after decades of increases, are, at best, flatlining, with investments in extracting new fossil fuels continuing, including last month’s scandalous announcement that fracking will be allowed in the UK. Temperatures have increased just 1C above preindustrial levels, and we are on course for another 2C or 3C on top of that. Could civilisation weather this level of warming?
The honest answer is nobody knows. Dystopia is easy to envisage: for example, Europe is not coping well with even modest numbers of migrants, and future flows look likely to increase substantially as migration itself is an adaptation to rapid climate change. How will the cooler, richer parts of the world react to tens of millions of people escaping the hotter, poorer parts? Throw into the mix long-term stagnating incomes for most people across the west and climate-induced crop failures causing massive food price spikes and we have a recipe for widespread unrest that could overload political institutions.
It is then easy to see these intersecting crises dovetailing with calls from the new far-right populists for strong authoritarian leaders to solve these problems. Inward-looking nationalists could then move further away from the internationalism needed to ensure the continuation of stable global food supplies and to manage migration humanely. And without cooperative internationalism serious carbon dioxide mitigation will not happen, meaning the underling drivers of the problems will exacerbate, leading to a lock-in of a deteriorating, isolationist, fascist future.
Climate cascade: feedback loops could amplify one another,
pushing Earth towards ‘hothouse’ state, warn scientists

Guardian graphic. Source: Stockholm Resilience Centre

However, taking a step back from the gloom, we face the same three choices in response to climate change as we did before this scorching summer: reduce greenhouse gas emissions (mitigation), make changes to reduce the adverse impacts of the new conditions we create (adaptation), or suffer the consequences of what we fail to mitigate or adapt to. It is useful to come back to these three options, and settle on the formula that serious mitigation and wise adaptation means little suffering.
Despite this basic advice being decades old, we are heading for some mitigation, very little adaptation, and a lot of suffering. Why is this happening? This is because while the diagnosis of climate change being a problem is a scientific issue, the response to it is not. Leaving fossil fuels in the ground is, for example, a question of regulation, while investing in renewable energy is a policy choice, and modernising our housing stock to make it energy efficient is about overcoming the lobbying power of the building industry. Solving climate change is about power, money, and political will.
And that means talking about climate change and engaging in politics at all levels. One way to put climate change centre stage in the next general election could be to approach the candidates of key marginal seats to discuss whether they would support serious climate-related legislation. In return hundreds of supporters of climate legislation would door-knock and leaflet these constituencies to support them. A serious grassroots conversation would occur, it would become an election issue, and a large group of people outside parliament and inside it would be poised to lobby for the necessary transformative legislation on mitigation and adaptation.
Thinking about climate change as a practical political problem helps avoid despair because we know that huge political changes have happened in the past and continue to do so. The future is up to us if we act collectively and engage in politics. To quote Antonio Gramsci: “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” Looked at this way, we can see the politics as a battle between a future shaped by fear versus a future shaped by hope.
That hope is built on a better story of the future and routes to enact it. The outline of this story is that given the colossal wealth and the scientific knowledge available today, we can solve many of the world’s pressing problems and all live well. Given that our environmental impacts are so long-lasting, the future is the politics we make today.

*Simon Lewis is professor of global change science at University College London and the Univesity of Leeds, and co-authored The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene (Pelican) with Mark Maslin

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This Graphic Explains Why 2 Degrees Of Global Warming Will Be Way Worse Than 1.5

Vox - David Roberts

Signatories to the Paris climate agreement — every country in the world, unless and until the US drops out in 2020 — agreed to what is by now a familiar goal: “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.”
How important is that difference, though? How much worse would 2 degrees be than 1.5? Is it worth the extra effort — and it would be a truly heroic effort — to limit temperature rise to that lower target?
It’s been difficult to answer those questions, in part because they are value-laden and incredibly complex, but also due to a paucity of research. While there’s been a great deal of work done on the difference between, say, 2 and 4 degrees warming (which would be catastrophic), there’s been less modeling around 1.5 and no comprehensive comparison of 1.5 and 2.
Happily, a 2016 study in the journal Earth System Dynamics tackles this directly. Over at CarbonBrief, Roz Pidcock has a great rundown on the study that gets into the background and some of the implications.
Best of all, the team at CarbonBrief (which you should really bookmark) has compiled the relevant comparisons in the study into a single clear, aesthetically pleasing graphic:
Your terrifying climate graphic of the day
CarbonBrief
It’s like a weather forecast! From hell.

2 degrees will be much worse than 1.5 in some places
In terms of heat extremes, the authors write, “the additional 0.5°C increase in global-mean temperature marks the difference between events at the upper limit of present-day natural variability and a new climate regime, particularly in tropical regions.”
Around the Mediterranean, freshwater availability will drop by almost twice as much at 2 degrees as at 1.5 — 17 percent versus 9 percent.
Some high-latitude regions may benefit from the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees (though such benefits will be wiped out if temperature subsequently continues rising). But even getting up to 2 degrees, “tropical regions like West Africa, South-East Asia, as well as Central and northern South America are projected to face substantial local yield reductions, particularly for wheat and maize.”

TXX measures heat extremes; WSDI measures the number of long (6-plus-day) hot spells. Earth Systems Dynamics
As for sea level rise, relative to 1.5 degrees, 2 degrees would mean 10 centimeter higher levels and a 30 percent higher rate of increase by 2100.
Coral reefs, though, are pretty screwed no matter what. In a 1.5 degree scenario, the percentage of the world’s coral reefs at risk hits 90 percent in 2050 but declines to 70 percent in 2100. In a 2 degree scenario, they’re all at risk.
We will have more information on this comparison when the IPCC completes its special report on the impacts of 1.5 degrees later this year. But the new Earth System Dynamics study already confirms what many scientists have been warning for years: 2 degrees is not a “safe” threshold. Negative impacts are already underway and will only get worse.

Stopping warming at 1.5 degrees would require major, sustained global action
We don’t have very long to make up our minds. The window for hitting 1.5 degrees is rapidly closing. Here’s another terrifying graphic from CarbonBrief, showing how many years remain before the “carbon budget” for various temperatures is used up:

CarbonBrief
At our present rate of emissions, our carbon budget for a good (66 percent) chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees will be used up in six years. Except, oops, that graphic is two years old, so now it’s down to four years.
To hit the brakes at 1.5 degrees, global carbon emissions would need to immediately begin plunging, faster than they ever have, and hit zero by 2050 (and then go negative):

Oil Change International
That would require the equivalent of the US mobilization for World War II, only global, and sustained for the rest of the century. The chances of that happening seem ... remote. For all we know, Trump will still be in office when the 1.5 degree budget is used up.
But we should be clear about the decision we are making, even if we’re only making it by not making a decision.
By delaying the necessary work of decarbonization, we are consigning millions of people in tropical regions to less food and in the Mediterranean to less water — with all the attendant health problems and conflict. We’re allowing more heat waves and higher seas. We’re giving up on the world’s coral reefs, and with them the hundreds of species that rely on them.
And even then, the decision will still face us: 2 degrees or 3? Again, it will mean more heat waves, more crop losses, more water shortages, more inundated coastal cities, more disease and conflict, millions more suffering.
And even then, the decision: 3 degrees or 4?
The longer we wait, the more human suffering and irreversible damage to ecosystems we inscribe into our collective future. But there’s no hiding, no escaping the imperative to decarbonize. It must be done if our species is to have a long-term home on Earth.
Seems like the smart thing would be to get on with it.

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Barrier Reef Foundation Grant 'Unthinkable, Mind-Blowing', Former Board Member Says

ABC News - Josh Robertson | Liam Fox

A member of the Myer family dynasty who played a key role in establishing the Great Barrier Reef Foundation (GBRF) has condemned a $444 million federal grant to the body as "shocking and almost mind-blowing".
The latest comments increase pressure on Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull for making what critics branded a "captain's call" in allocating the funding.
Michael Myer was a financial supporter of the GBRF and a member of its board for two years until 2002, when he quit in part over concerns about its "corporate" direction and the growing involvement of figures from the fossil fuels industry.
Yesterday, it was revealed governance experts and lawyers from Environmental Justice Australia believed the grant contravened the Federal Government's own guidelines.
Mr Myer told the ABC it was "unthinkable" for the Government to award the largest ever non-profit grant to an organisation with six staff members "without due diligence, without a proper tender process, without a request".
But the Federal Environment Department told the Senate the deal complies with all Government rules for grants and former deputy secretary of the Finance Department Stephen Bartos described it as "unusual but ....entirely legal".
"The notion of an organisation with six staff members suddenly having to manage $440 million, from a not-for-profit and philanthropic point of view is unheard of," Mr Myer said.
"It actually is quite shocking and almost mind-blowing. I think the Government's judgment is really poor."
Mr Myer said the Government was "greenwashing" by using GBRF "to be seen to be doing something for the reef" but via an organisation that would not be "unduly politicising it around climate change".
"If you read the fine print, they also say they don't want to rock the boat on the issue, they don't want to be politicising it, they don't want to be connecting the dots because it'll step on a lot of toes politically."
The federal funding agreement states that GBRF will "seek to address the highest priority threats to the reef", but does not mention climate change, only specifying "poor water quality and crown of thorns starfish outbreaks".

Risk management 'an afterthought'
Both GBRF and the Government have been at pains to defend the massive grant.
Mr Turnbull and Federal Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg told the GBRF chairman about the grant in April, 11 days after Cabinet's expenditure review committee voted to seek a "commercial partner" for a reef conservation plan.
Labor has called on GBRF to hand the money back, with Opposition Leader Bill Shorten declaring it "an ongoing scandal [and] a very good example of why we need a national integrity commission".
Mr Myer, who has publicly supported the Greens and opposes the Adani mine, said his scathing views on the grant were informed by almost 40 years' involvement in the Myer Foundation, one of Australia's leading philanthropic organisations.
He said it was extraordinary that the grant agreement set aside $22 million for "scaling up activities" such as risk management plans to ensure proper governance, which should be done before money is handed over.
"In a normal tender process, if you were tendering for the grant, you would have done that work upfront," he said.
"You would have worked with your prudential authorities, you would have done your risk management, you would have shown how you were going to manage that money.
"But to be doing it as an afterthought, after the money has been given and it's in the bank account, again is quite extraordinary.
"I would suggest it's not a wise use of funds."
Mr Myer said he was involved with GBRF "pretty much at the get go", joining its board in 2000.
He said the original intent of the foundation was to help scientists collaborate with reef research funding from business and philanthropists.
"[But] I felt that it was going to become a more corporate type of board, whereas I really wanted to see a more activist type of board in terms of developing policies around the reef and having an influence on policy," he said.
"I don't think it had a deliberate intention to 'greenwash'."
But he said the GBRF board and its supporters came to feature "a lot of players" from fossil fuel-oriented industries, which raised "big questions" about climate change impacts on the reef.
"There is a cognitive dissonance … on the one hand saying the reef is really precious to us, it's an icon, we must protect it, but on the other hand actively pursuing policies that have the opposite effect," he said.
"For mine, that is happening in a big way here."

'We need to match global action with local projects'
The Great Barrier Reef Foundation is a small environmental charity with a board comprised of representatives of Australian business, science and philanthropy. It is supported by companies including BHP, Qantas, Rio Tinto, Google and Orica.
A spokeswoman for GBRF said Mr Myer had "not been involved with the foundation for 14 years so it's not surprising that he may not be familiar with our work and processes to protect the reef".
She said GBRF funded projects chosen by an expert science advisory committee — including from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, the Australian Institute of Marine Science and CSIRO — and that corporate partners had no role in this.
"The foundation is clear that climate change is the biggest threat to the reef and we need to match global action on progress towards the Paris Agreement with local projects that can protect and restore the reef," she said.
The Great Barrier Reef Foundation's newly appointed chief scientist, UQ Professor Peter Mumby, said he hoped the political debate would not detract from efforts to protect the reef.
"It's very clear from the science that local management has a very big role to play … climate change is the other big part of that story," he said
"We really can't afford to lose momentum now."
Professor Mumby said the foundation had "no fear of tackling the tough projects".
"In the five years I've been involved with them as a funded researcher I've seen them focus very heavily on solutions to climate change … so I'm very comfortable with the way things are moving. I just hope we can keep on course.
"From my point of view the Great Barrier Reef Foundation is in a good position to utilise these resources."
A spokesman for Mr Frydenberg declined to comment.
The Government has previously said the grant was awarded transparently because it had published its partnership agreement.
The agreement indicates GBRF has months of administrative work before it can channel funds into projects to improve reef health.
It states that when awarding contracts, GBRF will adhere to principles of "open, transparent and effective competition" — principles the Government's critics have said it ignored.
GBRF's partnership management committee includes marine scientist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, former Queensland chief scientist Geoff Garrett and former University of Queensland vice-chancellor Paul Greenfield.

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