Lethal Heating: 12/16/18

16/12/2018

Global Warming Should Be Called Global Heating, Says Key Scientist

The Guardian - Jonathan Watts

UK Met Office professor tells UN summit Earth’s ‘energy balance’ is changing

The heatwave that hit the UK this summer was made 30 times more likely by human-caused climate change, according to the Met Office. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

“Global heating” is a more accurate term than “global warming” to describe the changes taking place to the world’s climate, according to a key scientist at the UK Met Office.
Prof Richard Betts, who leads the climate research arm of Britain’s meteorological monitoring organisation, made the comments amid growing evidence that rising temperatures have passed the comfort zone and are now bringing increased threats to humanity.
“Global heating is technically more correct because we are talking about changes in the energy balance of the planet,” the scientist said at the UN climate summit in Katowice, Poland. “We should be talking about risk rather than uncertainty.”
Earlier this month, the Met Office produced a new report that showed the searing heatwave that hit the UK this summer – along with other parts of the northern hemisphere – was made 30 times more likely by human-caused climate change.
Betts said the shifting climate was pushing some natural processes – such as the blossoming of trees and laying of eggs – out of sync. “That’s already happening. We are also seeing higher temperatures of heatwaves. The kind of thing we saw this year will happen more often.

“The risks are compounding all the time. It stands to reason that the sooner we can take action, the quicker we can rein them in.”
His views were echoed by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a professor of theoretical physics and founder of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. He said his recent Hothouse Earth report , which was one of the most widely quoted and downloaded studies of this year, had helped to change the language used to describe the climate crisis.
“Global warming doesn’t capture the scale of destruction. Speaking of hothouse Earth is legitimate,” he said.
The scientists expressed frustration at the slow pace of action by political leaders. In signing the 2015 Paris agreement, governments around the world aimed to keep global warming to within 1.5C to 2C above pre-industrial levels. But current commitments are far off track.
The Met Office upgraded its forecasts this week to show the planet is on track to warm by between 2.5C and 4.5C. “We have broadened out the range of possibilities,” said Betts, who is conducting a risk assessment based on the new projections. In the UK, he said the trend was towards wetter winters with more floods, hotter summers with more droughts interspersed with increasingly intense rain.
At 3C of change, Schellnhuber said southern Spain would become part of the Sahara. Even 2C, he said, could not be guaranteed as safe.

Water lines on the step banks of Algeciras reservoir in Librilla, Spain. Photograph: David Ramos/Getty Images

The Paris pact was a firewall, he said. “It’s not helping us to keep the world as it is now. We’ve lost this opportunity already. It’s a firewall against climate chaos.”Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, said “cracks” were starting to appear in the climate system that were pushing nature from being a friend that absorbs carbon dioxide to an enemy that releases carbon dioxide. These concerns are fuelled by the growing intensity of forest fires, the effect of melting ice-sheets on the jet stream, and the rising risk of permafrost thaw, which would release trapped methane.
Although he stressed it might not yet have passed a tipping point, he said the warnings were getting louder. “This shift from friend to foe is no doubt a scientific nightmare. That is the biggest worry that we have,” he said. “It does terrify me. The only reason we sit here without being completely depressed is that we see we have policy measures and technology to move in the right direction.
“We need to have a diagnosis just like a patient who comes to a doctor and gets a really bad diagnosis. But if the science is right, the technology is right, and the policy is right you can cure that very dire situation. There is no scientific suggestion that the door is shut.”
This week’s climate talks have crept forward with only small progress towards a new global rulebook, but emissions continue to rise and the planet continues to heat.
“Things are obviously proceeding very slowly,” said Betts. “As a scientist, it’s frustrating to see we’re still at the point when temperatures are going up and emissions are going up. I’ve been in this for 25 years. I hoped we’d be beyond here by now.”
Schellnhuber concurred. “I’ve worked on this for 30 years and I’ve never been as worried as I am today.”

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Pacific Nations Under Climate Threat Urge Australia To Abandon Coal Within 12 Years

The Guardian - Ben Doherty

Frustrated leaders appeal to ‘all OECD countries’ to phase out use as Australia signals support for new plants

Tuvalu, under acute threat from climate change, joins other Pacific nations to call on Australia to end coal-powered energy generation. Photograph: Warming Images/REX/Shutterstock

Pacific countries vulnerable to climate change have urged Australia to abandon coal power generation within 12 years, and to prohibit new coal plants or expansion of existing plants.
The call from 15 small Pacific island states came one day after the Australian government called for expressions of interest in new power generation projects, indicating it would be prepared to use taxpayer money to underwrite new coal plants.
Leaders warned Australia’s relations in the Pacific were being eroded by a perceived intransigence in Canberra over coalmining.
As the COP24 UN climate talks in Poland remained stalled over an unwillingness from major emitters to commit to further carbon emissions cuts, frustrated Pacific states, traditional allies of Australia, said the world must abandon coal-powered energy generation.
The Fijian prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, the outgoing president of COP23, said: “We call on all OECD countries to quickly phase out their use of coal by 2030 and for all other countries to phase out their use of coal by 2040. There must be no expansion of existing coal mines or the creation of new mines.”
Australia and the US have both this week said publicly they have no plans to begin phasing out coal-generated power.
“The United States has an abundance of natural resources and is not going to keep them in the ground,” Donald Trump’s international energy and climate adviser, Wells Griffith, told a US-government-run panel discussion on fossil fuels at the UN climate talks.
Australia’s ambassador for the environment, Patrick Suckling, told the same panel: “Fossil fuels are projected to be a major source of energy for a significant time to come.”
Asked whether the Pacific declaration on abandoning coal was directed specifically at Australia and the US, Bainimarama was curt but diplomatic: “We request that everybody increases their ambition – that goes for everyone, all countries.”
The prime minister of the Cook Islands, Henry Puna, told the Guardian the phase-out of coal was critical to the survival of Pacific island states.
“We have made that call,” he said. “It is not directed at any one country, but it applies to all. We know that coal power plants are a significant cause of the climate change we see affecting the whole world.”
The Tuvalu prime minister, Enele Sopoaga, cited the Boe Declaration, which Australia signed in Nauru in September, stating that climate change was the single greatest threat to the security and wellbeing of Pacific peoples.
“It is unfortunate that we are hearing that Australia might continue to go on coalmining, opening up new mines, [such as] the Adani project [for the Carmichael mine in Queensland],” Sopoaga said.
“I was in Canberra last week. I spoke to PM Scott Morrison, and the understanding I got from him was that, yes, they are seriously looking into coal efficiency … and also relooking at the proposal for the Adani project. I said, ‘Prime minister, our partnership onwards, bilateral or regional, in this period of the Boe Declaration, will be centrally influenced by coalmining in Australia and I hope you set a pathway to move away from coalmining and focusing on renewable energy’.”
Sopoaga told the Guardian he proposed an annual high-level meeting between Australia and Pacific partners, specifically focused on countering climate change in the region.

Fijian PM Frank Bainimarama and Cooks Islands counterpart Henry Puna at Katowice. Photograph: Czarek Sokołowski/AP

Bill Hare, director of climate analytics and former Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report lead author, said the Pacific states were right to be concerned about coal.
“Their call for an end to coal by 2030 – including new mines – is highly relevant to Australia – their regional neighbour,” Hare said. “The timing is important, just as the government announces plans to underwrite a new coal-fired power station. I hope Australians will listen, even if their government won’t.”
The Pacific island states also called for the establishment of an international protection regime to protect people displaced by climate change.
While Australia has publicly positioned itself with the United States, representatives from several countries say it has played a constructive role inside the negotiating rooms at the climate talks, where the “rule book” for the implementation of the 2015 Paris agreement is being hammered out.
The environment minister, Melissa Price, met the UN secretary general, António Guterres, after the secretary general flew back to Poland, concerned the talks had reached an impasse.
A spokesman for the minister said, as a courtesy, she would not be discussing details of her meetings at the COP.
Price told the Guardian: “Australia takes a technology-neutral approach to our electricity generation. We are focused on reducing emissions through a range of technologies while maintaining the stability and reliability of our grid and keeping electricity prices down.”
But Australia’s schism with the Pacific islands over climate change is a diplomatic discomfort. As China has rapidly increased its involvement and influence across the Pacific through massive infrastructure projects and loans, Australia has sought to buttress its position as the regional hegemon, with a new commitment of $2bn for infrastructure.
But its perceived political intransigence on climate, particular its commitment to maintaining, and even expanding, coal power generation, is alienating it from Pacific neighbours – historic allies, many of which are low-lying atoll nations experiencing the effects of climate change most acutely.

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15-Year-Old Greta Thunberg Speaks Truth To Power In Katowice

CleanTechnica - Steve Hanley

15-year-old Greta Thunberg of Sweden took the stage at the COP 24 climate conference in Katowice, Poland this week to castigate world leaders for their lack of concerted action to prevent an existential crisis as the world gets hotter.
Much like the apocryphal tale of the small child who dared point out the king was wearing no clothes, Thumberg stripped away all the artifice and pretense that lies at the heart of the climate denial meme and challenged her elders to act rather than extemporize.

Fifteen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg addressed the U.N. plenary last night in Katowice, Poland, condemning global inaction in the face of catastrophic climate change.

Her remarks may have been prompted in part by the disgraceful actions of the United States delegation, which had the effrontery to conduct a seminar about why burning more coal and fossil fuels is actually a smart thing to do.
That tawdry stunt perfectly illustrated the monumental ignorance and self interest that underlies the Trump maladministration from the Oval Office — which might be better described as the Offal Office — on down to every member of the government installed since this alleged president took office.
Thunberg told her audience, “Our civilization is being sacrificed to the opportunity for a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money.” It doesn’t get any clearer than that. It’s so obvious even a child can see it! “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to your children.” Ouch.
So who is this impudent upstart? Thunberg attracted international attention earlier this year when she elected to skip school and protest in front of the Swedish parliament for a month after her country experienced unprecedented heat waves and wildfires over the course of the summer.
In her vigil, she demanded her government implement the promises it made at the Paris climate summit in 2015.
Her example has led many other school children around the world to create their own protests on Fridays to demand their governments do the same.

“You only speak of green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular. You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake. What I hope we achieve at this conference is that we realize that we are facing an existential threat. This is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced. First we have to realize this and then as fast as possible do something to stop the emissions and try to save what we can save.”
Greta Thunberg

Watch the video. Share it with your friends. Invite people to watch it with you — again and again.
This is the message that has to be internalized by every living person.
Time is short. We can’t wait for new elections, new technology, new attitudes. We have to act. Now. We are not parts of discrete clans with scores to settle. We are one people and we are destroying our home.
If we can’t agree on that one simple concept, there truly is no hope for humanity.

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