Lethal Heating: 07/31/21

31/07/2021

(AU Canberra Times) Earth Overshoot Day Arriving Earlier In The Year

Canberra Times - Lanie Tindale

Consumption is having a marked effect on the Earth. Picture: Shutterstock

The day the world took up more resources than what Earth can regenerate in any given year hit on July 29 in 2021.

This is earlier than in any previous year.

Australia's Earth Overshoot Day was on March 22, only the third month on the calendar.

Sustainable Population Australia's Jenny Goldie said the day should fall on December 31 if humanity wants to return to it's natural resource base.

"Earth Overshoot Day gets earlier and earlier," she said.

"In the past 20 years, the date has come forward by three months.

"Global humanity is currently using natural resources 1.75 times faster than our planet's ecosystems can regenerate, the equivalent to using 1.75 Earths.

"If everyone consumed at the level of Australians, however, we would need over four Earths to provide resources and absorb our wastes."
If everyone consumed at the level of Australians, we would need over four Earths.
Jenny Goldie
She said continuing population growth had impacted global consumption.

According to ABS data, Australia's population was 25,694,393 people on December 31, 2020.

In 2019, there were 136,300 more people than the previous year.

Only 2.4 per cent of that growth can be attributed to net overseas migration.

"Australia's population growth was right down last year because of Covid-induced border closures which led to very low net migration," Ms Goldie said.

"In pre-Covid years, however, annual population growth often exceeded 400,000.

"Poorer countries have dates much closer to December so are less of a problem. For example, Papua New Guinea's Overshoot Day is 16 November.

"Nevertheless, such countries often have high population growth rates and they will have trouble moving the date back to December as they lift their people out of poverty and consume more."

The sustainability advocate said Australia should help developing countries in the region keep population stable as their economic situation developed.

"Australia must not only get its own house in order in terms of stabilising population, it must help others to do so through the foreign aid program, with more money directed to family planning, girls' education and gender equality," she said.

"Surely it would be imprudent of us to ignore the warnings of the world's scientists about the human growth enterprise, and unethical to bequeath an impoverished planet to our children."

Why climate change threatens public health. ABC News America

Links

(UK The Guardian) Governments Must Agree To End Use Of Coal Power, Says UK’s Cop26 President

The Guardian - Fiona Harvey

Alok Sharma ‘disappointed’ after ministers from more than 50 countries closed two-day meeting without full agreement

‘Unless we get all countries signed up to a coal phase-out, keeping 1.5C in reach is going to be extremely difficult,’ Alok Sharma said. Photograph: Leon Neal/PA

Governments around the world must agree to end the use of coal power to avoid the worst ravages of climate breakdown, the UK’s president of vital UN climate talks has said.

Ministers from more than 50 countries closed a two-day meeting in London on Monday without full agreement on phasing out coal, but with all countries agreeing to limit global heating to 1.5C, with fewer than 100 days to go before the Cop26 UN climate conference in Glasgow this November.

Alok Sharma, the UK’s president-designate of Cop26, said: “We were not able to get every country to agree to phasing out coal power, which was very disappointing. We will certainly have more discussions in the coming months …Unless we get all countries signed up to a coal phase-out, keeping 1.5C in reach is going to be extremely difficult.”

This week’s meeting was the first in-person meeting of climate and environment ministers since the last Cop [conference of the parties under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change] in December 2019, just before the Covid-19 outbreak became a pandemic.

The lack of in-person meetings has been an obstacle to achieving the progress needed on key issues including emissions cuts, technical agreement on implementing the Paris climate agreement, and climate finance.

Patricia Espinosa, the UN’s top climate official, called the discussions “extremely productive” but she added that many countries had not yet come forward with national plans on cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the next 10 years, which scientists have warned will be essential to holding temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

Small islands will be among those worst afflicted by climate breakdown, and many face inundation at temperatures higher than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

Molwyn Joseph, cabinet minister in Antigua and Barbuda, who led the delegation of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) at the London meeting, said: “The message from small island developing states (SIDS) appears to be well received.

"This provides a level of hope that the major emitters are beginning to understand their responsibilities and should be committed to keeping the 1.5C goal in reach. Major emitters, especially the G20, need to redirect all fossil fuel subsidies into renewable energy investments.”

Governments around the world were accepting of the need to support the most vulnerable countries, which were suffering climate-related extreme weather that was inflicting “serious loss and damage to their infrastructure and economies”, he said. “For SIDS, this is not abstract, this is real. This is a matter of climate justice.”

The UK and the UN also urged countries to come forward with concrete plans to hold heating to 1.5C, including targets on their national emissions for the next decade, and details of how they intend to reach their goals.

Barbara Pompili, France’s environment minister, told the Guardian: “It’s now time for the world to define the tools that will allow us to stay below 1.5C of global warming. After more than a year of a health crisis, this first physical meeting in London was an essential step for jolting the international community into action. We are 100 days away from the Cop. The countdown is on.”

Many participants and observers noted the recent extreme weather around the world – in Europe, North America, China and other countries – which has given an added impetus to the talks. London experienced torrential rain on Sunday, which led to flooding in many areas, even as the talks were taking place.

Espinosa said: “Recent and current extreme weather events have raised the level of attention not only for decision-makers, but the general public.”

Kat Kramer, climate policy lead at the charity Christian Aid, said: “At a time when the host city flooded with unusual rains, and in light of the catastrophic flooding in China last week, the sheer peril of climate change should be at the forefront of all ministers’ minds.

"We are endangering our own life raft – our shared planet. It is the people on the frontline, in the most climate-vulnerable countries who will suffer the most, although they have caused it the least.”

Links

(USA Scientific American) Act On Climate Emergency Now To Prevent Millions Of Deaths, Study Shows

Scientific American - Andrea Thompson

The human toll of carbon emissions will vastly magnify climate change’s economic costs

Credit: Getty Images

Every metric ton of carbon dioxide humans emit comes at a cost—not only in terms of the financial toll of the damage wrought by floods, heat waves and droughts but also the price in human lives.

Substantially curtailing emissions today could prevent tens of millions of premature deaths over the course of the 21st century, according to a new study that calculated this “mortality cost of carbon.”

The research, published on Thursday in Nature Communications, breaks out one piece of the social cost of carbon (SCC), a metric that calculates the future damages from carbon emitted today to put a price on those emissions. The SCC helps governments weigh the costs and benefits of climate regulations, mitigation projects and fossil fuel infrastructure.

The Biden administration is currently in the midst of revamping the U.S. federal government’s estimate of this metric to include the most recent science on climate impacts, as recommended by a 2017 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report. Those impacts include expected premature deaths. The Biden administration has temporarily put its SCC estimate at about $51 per metric ton, close to where it was in the Obama years—before the Trump administration slashed it to as little as $1 per ton.

R. Daniel Bressler, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University and author of the new study, was interested in looking at how SCC estimates would change if researchers included the most recent science on temperature-related deaths tied to climate change. He also broke out that component separately so that the human toll would be clearer.

To do so, Bressler updated a model created by economist William Nordhaus (who won a Nobel prize in economics for that model in 2018). It effectively links various climate scenarios to their economic impacts to calculate the social cost of carbon and determine the optimal plan for reducing emissions.

Bressler wanted to tweak the model to make climate-related mortality a bigger contributor to the overall cost of climate change and to incorporate extensive recent research on the matter. “There’s really been an explosion of literature [on the topic] over the last decade or so,” he says.

When Bressler incorporated that newer research, he calculated that—under a scenario in which emissions continue to grow—every 4,434 metric tons of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere in 2020 would result in one excess death globally by 2100. (For comparison, 3.5 Americans emit that much in their lifetime.)

Looking more broadly, one million metric tons of CO₂ emitted in 2020—or what 35 commercial planes, 216,000 cars or 115,000 American homes release in a year—would cause 226 premature deaths by the end of the century.

Factoring in those deaths increased the social cost of carbon from $37 to $258 per metric ton, effectively making it much more economically advantageous to reduce emissions now. It also makes rapidly reducing emissions and fully decarbonizing by 2050 more cost-effective, in comparison with the more tapered approach that Nordhaus’s model originally recommended.

The result is “quite a big difference in terms of what the suggested climate policy is,” Bressler says. Following a faster emissions reduction path instead of letting emissions continue to grow unabated would reduce premature deaths from about 83 million to nine million by 2100.

Bressler notes that his study has a wide uncertainty range and that the mortality figures only include deaths related to temperature. Ideally, disease transmission, floods and other climate-related impacts should also be factored in, but these elements have less research to draw on.

Bressler’s work is similar to what other scientists, including those at the Climate Impact Lab collaboration, are doing to revise the social cost of carbon, says Maureen Cropper, a University of Maryland economist and co-chair of the group that wrote the 2017 National Academies report.

Bressler’s estimate of the SCC is much higher than the Climate Impact Lab’s because of various economic assumptions he made, but translating this aspect of the social cost of carbon from more abstract dollar figures is valuable, Cropper adds. “When you put things in terms of people,” she says, “I think it does resonate.”

Links