02/12/2018

World Must Triple Efforts Or Face Catastrophic Climate Change, Says UN

The Guardian - 

Rapid emissions turnaround needed to keep global warming at less than 2C, report suggests
The drought-stricken La Sorrueda reservoir in Gran Canaria, Spain. Rising emissions could trigger extreme weather events around the world, the UN says. Photograph: Reuters
Countries are failing to take the action needed to stave off the worst effects of climate change, a UN report has found, and the commitments made in the 2015 Paris agreement will not be met unless governments introduce additional measures as a matter of urgency.
New taxes on fossil fuels, investment in clean technology and much stronger government policies to bring down emissions are likely to be necessary. Governments must also stop subsidising fossil fuels, directly and indirectly, the UN said.
Gunnar Luderer, one of the authors of the UN report and senior scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said: “There is still a tremendous gap between words and deeds, between the targets agreed by governments and the measures to achieve these goals.
“Only a rapid turnaround here can help. Emissions must be reduced by a quarter by 2030 [to keep warming to no more than 2C (3.6F) above pre-industrial levels] and for 1.5C emissions would have to be halved.”
In all, a tripling of effort may be needed to keep warming to less than 2C, meeting scientific advice on avoiding the most dangerous effects of climate change.
Greenhouse gas emissions continued their long-term rise last year, according to the UN, but they could be brought under control. There are promising signs, such as investment from the private sector in renewable energy and other technologies to cut carbon, but these are currently insufficient to meet scientific advice.
Joyce Msuya, deputy executive director of UN Environment, said: “The science is clear: for all the ambitious climate action we’ve seen, governments need to move faster and with greater urgency. We’re feeding this fire, while the means to extinguish it are within reach.”
Global emissions have reached what the UN has called “historic levels” of 53.5 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, and are showing no signs of peaking, despite a levelling off in the past decade.
The report came a day after Donald Trump said he did not believe his own administration’s latest report warning about the dire risk of inaction on climate change.
Last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of the dire effects of allowing global warming to reach 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. The world has a little over a decade to bring down greenhouse gas emissions before such dangerous levels of warming become inevitable.
Only 57 countries, representing 60% of global greenhouse gas emissions, are on track to cause their emissions to peak before 2030. If emissions are allowed to rise beyond that, the IPCC has said countries are likely to breach the 1.5C limit, which will trigger sea-level rises, droughts, floods and other extreme weather events.
On Monday, the biggest review of climate change in the UK for a decade found that flooding was likely to become more severe and summers could become more than 5C hotter within 50 years.
The UN’s warning comes before key talks in Poland next month, when governments will meet to discuss how to implement the commitments made in Paris in 2015. According to the Paris agreement, the first global pact to bind both developed and developing countries to a specific temperature goal, governments must do all they can to stop warming reaching 2C above pre-industrial levels, with an aspiration to limit warming to no more than 1.5C.
Jian Liu, the chief scientist at UN Environment, said some of the necessary policies were clear and available, if there was political will to implement them. “When governments embrace fiscal policy measures to subsidise low-carbon alternatives and tax fossil fuels, they can stimulate the right investments in the energy sector and significantly reduce carbon emissions. If all fossil fuel subsidies were phased out, global carbon emissions could be reduced by up to 10% by 2030.”
Carbon pricing is one way of achieving this, but has run into difficulties as taxes are often unpopular and schemes to reduce carbon through emissions trading are often contested by businesses and other interests.
Greenhouse gas emissions stalled soon after the global financial crisis of a decade ago, then quickly resumed their rise, to the consternation of climate experts. For three years before 2017 they fell once again, but last year there was an increase. Emissions are expected to rise further this year, pointing to an emissions gap between what countries promised in Paris and what their policies are delivering.
Another problem is that infrastructure such as buildings, transport networks and energy generation that is built now to rely on fossil fuels will in effect lock in future emissions for the lifetime in which that infrastructure operates, usually up to 50 years.
Changing the way we construct infrastructure is therefore essential, but many companies and governments still rely on old measures of economic performance and old ways of generating energy and constructing buildings.
Jennifer Morgan, the executive director of Greenpeace International, said: “The window of opportunity is starting to close and if we fail to act now the opportunity will be gone. Failure to act will lock in catastrophic global warming that will change the planet irrevocably and condemn millions to suffering. What are governments waiting for?”
Stephanie Pfeifer, the chief executive of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, said some businesses were taking action. “Investors understand the opportunity presented by the move to a low-carbon economy. The right signals from government will help to unlock low-carbon investment from the private sector.”

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Climate Change Already A Health Emergency, Say Experts

The Guardian - 

Deadly heatwaves and spread of diseases affect people’s health today – report
Farmers on the outskirts of Guwahati, India. The country lost the equivalent of 7% of its total working hours due to extreme heat in 2017. Photograph: EPA 
People’s health is being damaged today by climate change through effects ranging from deadly heatwaves in Europe to rising dengue fever in the tropics, according to a report.
Billions of hours of farmwork has been lost during high temperatures and global warming has damaged the ability to grow crops, it said.
The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change was produced by 150 experts from 27 universities and institutions including the World Health Organization and the World Bank.
“The findings are clear and the stakes could not be higher,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general. “We cannot delay action on climate change. We cannot sleepwalk through this health emergency any longer.”
The report sets out the impacts of global warming on health in stark terms. ”A rapidly changing climate has dire implications for every aspect of human life, exposing vulnerable populations to extremes of weather, altering patterns of infectious disease, and compromising food security, safe drinking water and clean air,” it said.
Nick Watt, the executive director of the Lancet Countdown, said: “These are not things happening in 2050 but are things we are already seeing today. We think of these as the canary in, ironically, the coalmine.”
On Tuesday the UN said action to cut carbon emissions must be tripled to avoid catastrophic warming. International climate change negotiations were due to resume on Monday in Poland.
The Lancet report said the lack of progress “threatens both human lives and the viability of the national health systems they depend on, with the potential to overwhelm health services”.
A survey in the report of leaders of almost 500 global cities found half expected their public health infrastructure to be seriously compromised by climate change, meaning systemic failures such as the shutdown of hospitals.
A heatwave in Europe this summer was linked to hundreds of premature deaths in the UK alone. MPs said in July that the UK was “woefully unprepared” for heatwaves.
The Lancet report says populations in Europe and the eastern Mediterranean are at higher risk than those in Africa and south-east Asia because of the high proportion of vulnerable and elderly people living in cities.
As temperatures rise across the world, the report says 157 million more vulnerable people were subjected to a heatwave in 2017 than in 2000. Hot conditions directly damage health via heatstroke, but dehydration and exacerbation of conditions such as heart disease are also very dangerous. Heat also worsens air pollution and mental health problems.
Prof Kristie Ebi, of the University of Washington, said: “Increased mortality in extreme heatwaves is happening now [but] there is abundant evidence that communities are not prepared for the ongoing increases in the frequency, intensity and duration of heatwaves.”
The Lancet report said 153bn hours of work were lost in 2017 due to extreme heat, 80% of it in agriculture. Almost half the losses were in India, equivalent to 7% of its total working population, while China lost the equivalent of 1.4% of its workers. “This has led to vast losses for national economies and household budgets,” said Prof Joacim Rocklöv of Umeå University in Sweden.
Relatively small changes in temperatures and rainfall could cause large changes in the transmission of infectious diseases spread via water and mosquitoes. The ability of the dengue fever virus to be transmitted – its “vectorial capacity” – reached a record high in 2016, according to the report, 10% above a 1950s baseline. The danger from cholera risk was also rising in regions such as the Baltic states where the sea has been warming rapidly.
Doctors not involved in the report said it presented convincing evidence. “It is clear that climate change is directly impacting our health,” said Howard Frumkin, head of the Wellcome Trust’s Our Planet, Our Health programme. “All sectors must prioritise action on climate change if we are to significantly reduce the potentially devastating impact on our planet and our health, affecting generations to come.”
Prof Paul Ekins, of University College London, said the health benefits of tackling climate change had long been undervalued, with just 5% of funding for adaptation to global warming being spent on health.
“These benefits are enormous, near-term and affect our health immediately,” Ekins said. “If you factor in these benefits, cutting emissions to [keep the temperature rise below] 1.5C is going to be a net benefit to humanity in monetary terms.”
The Lancet report noted some promising trends, such as the phase-out of coal and the growth of electric cars.
Prof Hilary Graham, of the University of York and part of the Lancet Countdown team, said linking health and climate change could help spur further action. “Health is what people feel. It makes a direct connection with their lives and the lives of people they care about like their children and grandchildren.”

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Five Myths About Climate Change

Washington Post - Katharine Hayhoe

Smoke rises from chimneys of the gas boiler houses as the temperature dropped to minus 14 degrees Celsius in Moscow, Russia, 29 November 2018. According to a report by the UN, CO2 emissions have gone up for the first time in four years. (Maxim Shipenkov/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Katharine Hayhoe
Katharine Hayhoe is a professor and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. She is a lead author on volumes one and two of the Fourth National Climate Assessment.
The Fourth National Climate Assessment — the work of 13 federal agencies and more than 350 scientists, including me — is clear: The Earth is warming faster than at any time in human history, and we’re the ones causing it. Climate change is already affecting people, and the more carbon we produce, the more dangerous the effects over the coming century. Nevertheless, many people continue to believe and propagate some misleading myths. Here are the five I hear most frequently.

Myth No. 1: Climate scientists are in it for the money.
When the second volume of the National Climate Assessment was released on Nov. 23, Rick Santorum, a Republican former senator from Pennsylvania, took to CNN to proclaim that climate scientists “are driven by the money that they receive.” Former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) appeared on the network the next day declaring the report to be “made by scientists that get paid to further the politics of global warming.”
I was one of the report’s authors. How much did I earn for the hundreds of hours I spent on it? Nothing. Nearly every day, climate scientists are accused of venality. Our other purported sins include fabricating data, selling out to “big green” — which supposedly tethers our grant money to doom-and-gloom findings — and fanning the flames of hysteria to further our nefarious agenda.
The reality is that nearly every climate scientist could make at least the same amount of money — and often much more — in a different field, including the oil industry. And the money we do receive in grants doesn’t go into our pockets. A $1.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation provided me with a mere $37,000 a year, all of which went to paying for the proposed work, including a graduate researcher, a computer and publication fees. (In summer, I do some climate-focused consulting with cities and water districts to cover my salary when I’m not teaching.) Santorum, meanwhile, receives a substantial income from serving as a consultant to Consol Energy, a coal company; and according to OpenSecrets.org, DeLay has received nearly $740,000 from the oil and gas industry.

Myth No. 2: The climate has changed before. It's just a natural cycle.
Last fall, when the first volume of the National Climate Assessment was released, White House spokesman Raj Shah responded that “the climate has changed and is always changing.” President Trump himself has embraced this position, claiming that the climate “will change back again.” This line is a popular one with people who dismiss climate change by maintaining that we’ve had ice ages before, as well as warm periods, and so the warming we’re seeing now is just what the Earth has always done.
But we can look at the natural factors that affect the climate. First, over the past few decades, energy from the sun has been going down , not up, so if changes in the sun’s energy drove our temperature, we should be getting cooler, not warmer.
Others argue that we’re getting warmer because we’re recovering from the last ice age. But ice ages — and the warm periods in between — are caused by the Earth’s orbital cycles, and according to those cycles, the next event on our geologic calendar is another ice age, not more warming.
We can also rule out volcanoes, which do produce heat-trapping gases, but less than 1 percent of the CO2 that humans produce. And big eruptions, when they happen, cool the Earth instead of warming it. In other words, the climate change we’re experiencing now definitely isn’t natural.

Myth No. 3: Climate scientists are split on whether it's real.
We often hear that climate scientists are split 50-50 when it comes to whether global warming is occurring. “Each side has their scientists,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told Politico in 2014. Trump echoed that rhetoric on “60 Minutes” this October, telling Lesley Stahl, “We have scientists that disagree” with human-caused global warming.In reality, more than 97 percent of climate scientists agree that global warming is happening and that humans are causing it. At least 18 scientific societies in the United States, from the American Geophysical Union to the American Medical Association, have issued official statements on climate change. And it’s been more than 50 years since U.S. scientists first raised the alarm about the dangers of climate change with the president — at the time, Lyndon B. Johnson. The public confusion has been manufactured by industry interests and ideologues to muddy the waters.

Myth No. 4: Climate change won't affect me.
We often think the most widespread myth is that the science isn’t real. But according to public opinion polls by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication , the most prevalent misconception — one that the majority of us have bought into — is that climate change just doesn’t matter to us. While 70 percent of American adults agree that climate change is happening, only 40 percent of those surveyed believe it will harm them personally. Sure, it’ll hurt polar bears, and maybe people who live on low-lying islands in the South Pacific. But the world has warmed by just 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, since 1900. What’s the big deal?
Climate change is a threat multiplier that touches everything, from our health to our economy to our coasts to our infrastructure. It makes heat waves stronger, heavy precipitation events more frequent and hurricanes more intense, and it nearly doubles the area burned by wildfires . It supercharges natural disasters like Hurricane Harvey and the Camp Fire, as those suffering the effects of these events know firsthand. Climate change is no longer a distant issue in space or time: It’s affecting us, today, in the places where we live.

Myth No. 5: It's cold outside — global warming can't be real.
Whenever a cold snap brings out our winter parkas, there’s a politician or pundit saying, Global warming? Global cooling, more like! Trump has done so repeatedly, tweeting just before Thanksgiving, “Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS — Whatever happened to Global Warming?” In 2015, Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) brought a snowball to the Senate floor in an attempt to reject the reality of climate change.
But cold weather doesn’t rebut the data that shows the planet is warming over climate time scales. Think of it this way: Weather is like your mood, and climate is like your personality. Weather is what occurs in a certain place at a certain time. Climate is the long-term average of weather over decades. The fact it was cold and snowy one day last week? That’s weather. Global warming or not, cold days still occur, particularly in winter. But since 2000, we’re seeing far more new hot-temperature records than cold ones. In fact, in 2017, we saw more than 10,000 cold-temperature records broken at weather stations across the United States. And more than 36,000 high-temperature records were broken the same year.

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