Lethal Heating: 03/12/20

12/03/2020

Report Finds 76 Solutions Available Right Now To Slow Down Climate Change

ScienceAlert - Tessa Koumoundouros

Biogas is one of the 76 suggested solutions. (ollo/Getty Images)

We have all the solutions we need to avoid catastrophic warming, right now, claims a new report by Project Drawdown. And, not only are they easy to implement, they're far cheaper than doing nothing.
The Drawdown Review is a comprehensive analysis of the currently available solutions to the climate crisis, based on the work of scientists and researchers around the world, across many sectors, from finance to climate science.
The aim of the nonprofit Project Drawdown is to guide us all towards a future where the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop climbing and start to decline - the moment they refer to as 'drawdown'. That means we must start extracting fossil fuel emissions, such as CO2 and methane, from the atmosphere as well as stop spewing them into it.
"Drawdown is a critical turning point for life on Earth, and we must strive to reach it quickly, safely, and equitably," says the report.
Having already lost an entire decade to inaction, and recently receiving a glimpse of some very frightening consequences - the devastating loss of wildlife from Australia's unprecedented summer of fires - the urgency of such solutions are surely clear.
"The current path we are on is beyond dangerous," the report warns, "and it's easy to be paralyzed by that perilousness. Yet possibility remains to change it."
Project Drawdown estimates that by implementing the 76 solutions they've outlined, it would result in savings of up to around US$144 trillion of avoided climate damage and pollution-related healthcare costs. While the upfront cost could be up to US$26.2 trillion, this plan would allow us to achieve peak carbon dioxide by as early as the mid-2040s.
When they scientists grouped their solutions by sector, they were ranked like this:

Energy
Food waste, agriculture, land rehabilitation
Industry
Building efficiency
Transport

"We found that when we add together the 80-plus solutions to climate change, and these already exist, we have enough to get drawdown by between the 2040s and the 2060s depending on how decisively we act," co-author and climate scientist Jonathan Foley told the ABC.
The review outlines three key areas: reducing emission sources, protecting and increasing the natural systems that cycle these chemicals, and how to achieve these things while simultaneously improving society.
It of course calls for a rapid shift in how we generate electricity, with 30 percent of the solutions involving increasing efficiency in our energy use and another 30 percent on how to replace fossil fuels.
In what has come to be a heavily debated topic, the report maintains a role for nuclear in a rapid progress towards a carbon-free future.
A recent analysis from Stanford researchers also suggests such a shift is entirely possible with current technology, but unlike Project Drawdown, they believe this can be achieved entirely with renewable energy and do not agree nuclear power is necessary.
Some of Project Drawdown's suggested solutions, like switching to LED lighting and battery storage power, create nearly immediate savings.

Because they are cheaper to install them than simply maintaining the stuff they replace.
— Dr. Jonathan Foley (@GlobalEcoGuy) March 3, 2020

The report highlights the importance of not only preserving but increasing our natural carbon sinks, including protecting ecosystems and changing agricultural practices. Unfortunately though, world leaders from Australia to Brazil are allowing destruction of these vital carbon sinks to continue.
The report acknowledges this aspect, pointing out current commitments for mitigating climate change fall far short of what we need and some aspects are "politically unrealistic" at present. But it offers little analysis on how to counter this beyond a brief mention of "building people" power.
It also notes that other powerful solutions, often overlooked, include reducing food waste and providing women with better education and access to healthcare - which empowers them to have smaller families.
"What these results show is the utmost importance of all solutions implemented in parallel," explained Chad Frischmann, Vice President of Project Drawdown.
"The impacts of these technologies and practices occur only as part of an interconnected, integrated system. It is the implementation of this system of solutions that is the real solution to climate change."
Rather than argue in favour of changing our rampant consumerist culture or curtailing economic growth, they point out money is fuel for change. As such, the researchers favour shifts towards a circular economy and moving capital from the sources of problems to the solutions.
Nevertheless, it is a useful guide for individuals, communities and businesses ready to forge ahead with much needed changes, regardless of the challenges.
The review acknowledges that facing the climate crisis is an overwhelming task, but reminds us it is "also an invitation into deeply meaningful work."
"Business leaders can really step up and lead, not just be followers, not just be pushed by governments, but maybe help shape what regulations could be in the future to take advantage of this new emerging economy," Foley told Fast Company. "The smart businesses are not going to be just dragged kicking and screaming to a climate-safe future. They're going to be leading it."
If enough of us take on this challenge, then perhaps we can still make significant positive progress, despite the powerful institutions still trying to get in our way.
You can read the analysis of all 76 solutions in The Drawdown Review.

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Guest Post: World’s Intact Tropical Forests Reached ‘Peak Carbon Uptake’ In 1990s

Carbon Brief - Simon Lewis

Amazon forest canopy at dawn, Brazil. Credit: Dr Peter Vander Sleen.

Simon Lewis

Prof Simon Lewis is a researcher of global change science at the University of Leeds and University College London and is a contributing editor for Carbon Brief.

The world’s land surface currently removes around 30% of all human-generated CO2 emissions, with tropical forests playing a major role in this “carbon sink”.
Of particular importance are intact tropical forests, which, according to a landmark paper published in 2011, absorbed 15% of all human-generated CO2 emissions between 1990 and 2007.
This research found that intact tropical forests that are undisturbed by either logging or fires were, on average, getting larger over time – thought to be driven by rising atmospheric CO2 levels boosting photosynthesis.
However, new research published this week in Nature, by myself and colleagues, paints a much more alarming picture of the role of tropical forests in slowing climate change.
Utilising two large forest datasets in Af r ica and South America spanning 300,000 trees, we show that the carbon sink in tropical forest is in rapid decline.
In fact, according to our analysis, the ability of intact tropical forests to remove CO2 from the atmosphere reached its peak in the 1990s and has since been in decline.

Tropical turmoil
Forests act as a net carbon sink when the amount of carbon gained through tree growth and the establishment of new trees is larger than the amount lost through tree mortality.
To evaluate how the sink is evolving over time, we made use of tree data stretching back 30 years. Every few years in the study period, research teams measured every tree in 565 patches of intact forest across the Amazon, the Congo Basin and West Africa.

Measuring trees in Lope National Park, Gabon (left) and in the Peruvian Amazon (right). Credit: Prof Simon Lewis (left) and Dr Roel Brienen (right)

The results show that, in the 1990s, the average undisturbed tropical forest removed 0.57 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year from the atmosphere. But this figure declined to an estimated 0.38 tonnes of carbon by the 2010s.
This is a one-third reduction in the carbon sink strength of intact tropical forests in just two decades.
If we extrapolate our results to consider all of the planet’s remaining intact tropical forests, we find that carbon uptake peaked at 1.26bn tonnes of carbon per year in the 1990s. This figure represents around 17% of all human-generated CO2 emissions at that time.
By the 2010s, the global uptake ability of tropical forests declined to 0.68bn tonnes of carbon per year. This is equivalent to just 6% of human-caused CO2 emissions in the 2010s.
It is worth noting that, over the study period, both the per unit area sink strength declined by 33% and the area of intact tropical forest declined by 19%, which also reduced the total rate of carbon uptake.
Tropical forests are still an important carbon sink. However, according to our results, the feared sink-to-source transition of one on Earth’s major carbon sinks has begun. This is decades earlier than any climate-driven vegetation model has predicted.

Dying trees
To understand why the carbon sink is decreasing, we analysed various factors that could be affecting tree growth and death.
Models typically predict that rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere will boost plant growth. This is because plants use CO2 during photosynthesis, the process needed to fix carbon to grow trunks, branches, roots and leaves. The impact of rising CO2 levels on plant growth is known as the “CO2 fertilisation effect”.
Our analysis shows, for the first time using inventory data, that across Africa and the Amazon, more CO2 in the atmosphere is boosting forest growth and this effect is not diminishing over time – just as models predicted.
However, despite the CO2 fertilisation effect, the sink is in decline.
This is because of the climate impacts of rising CO2 levels. Namely, higher temperatures and stronger drought conditions are slowing plant growth – and killing trees.
Overall, our analysis reveals that the balance of the ongoing positive impact of CO2 on photosynthesis and the increasingly negative impacts of temperature and drought is progressively moving in the direction of shutting down the sink over time.
Another factor playing a role is the life history of trees. Dynamic forests where trees die younger see their carbon sink saturating sooner than less dynamic forests, which tend to be dominated by very large trees.

Africa vs Amazonia
As part of our analysis, we looked at how the rate of carbon uptake differs between the world’s two largest areas of intact tropical forest: the Amazon region and in equatorial Africa.
Our results show that the Amazon sink started declining first, starting in the 1990s, followed by Africa, where we see a sink decline in the best-monitored plots beginning about 2010.
Amazon forests are declining earlier and faster than African forests because of three groups of factors.
First, trees in Amazonia tend to be more dynamic than those in Africa, with trees dying at a higher rate, meaning that past gains growth leave the system sooner resulting in an earlier saturating sink.
Second, the Amazon tends to experience higher temperatures because it is closer to sea level, faster temperature rises, and more frequent and severe droughts than African forests have experienced over recent decades.
Third, Amazon forest species appear less resistant to droughts than African forests. This may be because of the long-term climate history of African forests. The region has weathered large range contractions in glacial periods of Earth’s history, leaving more adaptable species that have survived past episodes of rapid environmental change.
Overall, African forests are more robust to recent contemporary environmental change than Amazon forests, our analysis suggests. While African forests cover much less area than Amazon forests, for the period 2000-10, the carbon sink was the same on both continents.

Forest forecast
For the final part of our study, we used the knowledge gleaned from our datasets to construct statistical models for forecasting changes to future tropical forest carbon uptake.
Using future CO2, temperature and rainfall estimates alongside our models, we predict that, on average, the per unit area carbon sink in African forest will be 14% smaller by 2030 compared to 2010-15 levels, while the average Amazon forest sink will reach zero by 2035.
Parts of the intact Amazon that are affected by drought could turn from a carbon sink to a carbon source, according to our analysis. This will be because carbon losses from tree mortality overtake carbon gains from growth.
Overall, we predict a sink-to-source transition of one of Earth’s major carbon sinks, with the Amazonia sink saturating first, followed later by the African sink.
The chart below shows how the ability of African forests (blue) and Amazonian forests (red) to uptake carbon is projected to change by 2040, calculated using our measurement-based statistical models.
(The chart also shows how our measurement-based assessment of carbon uptake in Amazonian and African forests from 1990 to present compares with projections from statistical models, which are shown in light blue for Africa and pink for Amazonia.)

Estimates and projections of tropical carbon sinks. The study’s measurement-based estimates of carbon uptake in Amazonia and Africa are shown in red and blue, respectively. Light blue and pink show projections from statistical models. Source: Rammig et al. (2020) Data source: Hubau et al. (2020)

Policy implications
Our findings highlight several key messages for policymakers. First, on-the-ground tropical forest monitoring programs need funding, as the changes we predict are subtle and cannot be deduced from satellite data alone.
Second, tropical forests matter. For now, they are still a carbon sink and will always be a large store of carbon. Forests’ resistance to climate change is relatively high if left undisturbed. Controlling logging and fires is essential.
Third, the need to reduce emissions to net zero just got more urgent. If society leaves it too late to tackle emissions, nature will make the job of controlling climate change much more difficult.
Finally, avoiding a transition to a carbon source will require stabilising the climate by reaching net-zero emissions. If tropical forests sequester less carbon than models predict, an earlier date by which to reach net zero will be required to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

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(AU) Scientists Warn Of 'Critical Gaps' In Australia's Climate Science Capability

The Guardian - Graham Readfearn

Exclusive: Australia needs the expertise to predict changes which have a major impact across the country, a review finds

Cattle on a drought-affected property in NSW. There are gaps in Australia’s ability to understand the processes that underpin climate change, scientists say. Photograph: David Gray/Reuters

A government-backed review of Australia’s climate science capability has identified “critical gaps” in the nation’s ability to understand the processes that underpin climate change, with atmospheric modelling lagging other countries.
It found Australia was in danger of losing “critical expertise” needed to predict changes in major climate patterns, such as El Niño and the Indian Ocean Dipole, that have a major impact across the continent.
On atmospheric modelling, it found research had fallen “well behind those that lead the world”, partly because of a “lack of computational power and data storage”.
The report, seen by Guardian Australia and expected to be released this week, was requested by the government-appointed National Climate Science Advisory Committee to help develop a strategy in the area.
It was co-ordinated by the Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes (Clex), and finalised after a workshop and survey of researchers at academic institutions and government agencies.
The report focused on research into “climate processes”, which cover issues including the behaviour of clouds and how air moves in the atmosphere, and the dynamics of oceans and ice-covered regions.
It concluded the research effort across Australia was substantial, including a “very strong, world-leading effort” in observing the oceans. But while the country had a good foundation of research, coordination was lacking.
The survey found there were 466 full-time equivalent staff and students dedicated to investigating climate processes, but there was a “sub-critical mass” of research into aspects of atmospheric physics that were integral to phenomena like heatwaves and the cycle of El Niño and La Nina, a natural cycle that can have major influence on Australian rainfall and heat.
The report said: “The loss of expertise in these areas represents a critical threat to Australia’s ability to understand and predict such phenomena into the future. The shortage of expertise in these areas requires urgent correction.”
It said there was also evidence efforts to develop climate models were “approaching critical thresholds of under-resourcing and capacity limits”. While Australia was putting a “significant effort” into understanding the processes of the cryosphere – parts of the planet covered in ice – the efforts were fragmented.
In a summary, the report says: “The report concludes that a transformation of climate processes research into a community working collectively towards national goals in a common science framework is essential.
“Given the underpinning role of processes research for all other climate research this transformation provides the foundation for providing solutions to the climate-related societal challenges ahead.”
To combat the issues, the report suggested a “community-wide research network” be created, and short-term “accelerator institutes” funded to tackle key knowledge gaps.
In 2017, the Australian Academy of Science issued a report into Australia’s climate science capability that also identified risks. It said the team developing Australia’s weather and modelling system – Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (Access) – was a “small fraction of the size of groups building equivalent models for their regions in other countries”.
The report was requested by the National Climate Science Advisory Committee, which itself issued a report in June 2019 that was not made publicly available until 19 December 2019.
A Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment spokesman said the report was commissioned by the environment minister, Sussan Ley, and the science minister, Karen Andrews, after they received recommendations from the National Climate Science Advisory Committee.
He said it would “help ensure the government’s climate science activities are better coordinated and prioritised to maintain and strengthen Australia’s climate research capability”.
“The government is committed to climate science investment and is progressing the establishment of an enhanced climate science advisory group that will build on the work of the National Climate Science Advisory Committee to ensure that Australian decision makers have continued access to world class scientific information,” the spokesman said.

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