19/08/2021

(The Conversation) Seemingly Small Climate Changes Can Have Big Consequences

The Conversation - 

July 2021 was Earth’s hottest month on record and was marked by disasters, including extreme storms, floods and wildfires. Thomas Lohnes via Getty Images

Author
 is Distinguished Scholar, US National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Climate change has been accumulating slowly but relentlessly for decades.

The changes might sound small when you hear about them – another tenth of a degree warmer, another centimeter of sea level rise – but seemingly small changes can have big effects on the world around us, especially regionally.

The problem is that while effects are small at any time, they accumulate. Those effects have now accumulated to the point where their influence is contributing to damaging heat waves, drought and rainfall extremes that can’t be ignored.

The most recent report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is more emphatic than ever: Climate change, caused by human activities like burning fossil fuels, is having damaging effects on the climate as we know it, and those effects are rapidly getting worse.

Earth’s energy imbalance

An excellent example of how climate change accumulates is Earth’s energy imbalance. I am a climate scientist and have a new book on this about to be published by Cambridge University Press.

The Sun bombards Earth with a constant stream of about 173,600 terawatts (that is 12 zeros) of energy in the form of solar radiation. About 30% of that energy is reflected back into space by clouds and reflective surfaces, like ice and snow, leaving 122,100 terawatts to drive all the weather and climate systems around us, including the water cycle. Almost all of that energy cycles back to space – except for about 460 TW.

That remaining 460 TW is the problem we’re facing. That excess energy, trapped by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, is heating up the planet. That is the Earth’s energy imbalance, or in other words, global warming.

Outgoing radiation is decreasing, owing to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and leading to Earth’s energy imbalance of 460 terawatts. The percentage going into each domain is indicated. Kevin Trenberth, CC BY-ND
In comparison with the natural flow of energy through the climate system, 460 TW seems small – it’s only a fraction of 1 percent. Consequently, we cannot go outside and feel the extra energy. But the heat accumulates, and it is now having consequences.

To put that in perspective, the total amount of electricity generated worldwide in 2018 was about 2.6 TW. If you look at all energy used around the world, including for heat, industry and vehicles, it’s about 19.5 TW. Earth’s energy imbalance is huge in comparison.

Interfering with the natural flow of energy through the climate system is where humans make their mark. By burning fossil fuels, cutting down forests and releasing greenhouse gases in other ways, humans are sending gases like carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere that trap more of that incoming energy rather than letting it radiate back out.

Before the first industries began burning large amounts of fossil fuels in the 1800s, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was estimated at around 280 parts per million of volume. In 1958, when Dave Keeling began measuring atmospheric concentrations at Mauna Loa in Hawaii, that level was 310 parts per million. Today, those values have climbed to about 415 parts per million, a 48% increase.

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and increased amounts cause heating. In this case, the human increment is not small.

Where does the extra energy go?

Measurements over time show that over 90% of this extra energy is going into the oceans, where it causes the water to expand and sea level to rise.

The upper layer of the oceans started warming around the 1970s. By the early 1990s, heat was reaching 500 to 1,000 meters (1,640 to 3,280 feet) deep. By 2005, it was heating the ocean below 1,500 meters (nearly 5,000 feet).

The average global temperature change at different ocean depths, in zetajoules, from 1958 to 2020. The top chart shows the upper 2,000 meters (6,561 feet) compared with the 1981-2010 average. The bottom shows the increase at different depths. Reds are warmer than average, blues are cooler. Cheng et al, 2021, CC BY-ND

Global sea level, measured by flights and satellites, was rising at a rate of about 3 millimeters per year from 1992 to 2012. Since then, it been increasing at about 4 millimeters a year. In 29 years, it has risen over 90 millimeters (3.5 inches).

If 3.5 inches doesn’t sound like much, talk to the coastal communities that exist a few feet above sea level. In some regions, these effects have led to chronic sunny day flooding during high tides, like Miami, San Francisco and Venice, Italy. Coastal storm surges are higher and much more destructive, especially from hurricanes. It’s an existential threat to some low-lying island nations and a growing expense for U.S. coastal cities.

Some of that extra energy, about 13 terawatts, goes into melting ice. Arctic sea ice in summer has decreased by over 40% since 1979. Some excess energy melts land ice, such as glaciers and permafrost on Greenland, Antarctica, which puts more water into the ocean and contributes to sea level rise.

Some energy penetrates into land, about 14 TW. But as long as land is wet, a lot of energy cycles into evapotranspiration – evaporation and transpiration in plants – which moistens the atmosphere and fuels weather systems. It is when there is a drought or during the dry season that effects accumulate on land, through drying and wilting of plants, raising temperatures and greatly increasing risk of heat waves and wildfire.

Consequences of more heat

Over oceans, the extra heat provides a tremendous resource of moisture for the atmosphere. That becomes latent heat in storms that supersizes hurricanes and rainstorms, leading to flooding, as people in many parts of the world have experienced in recent months.

Air can contain about 4% more moisture for every 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.55 Celsius) increase in temperature, and air above the oceans is some 5% to 15% moister than it was prior to 1970. Hence, about a 10% increase in heavy rain results as storms gather the excess moisture.

Again, this may not sound like much, but that increase enlivens the updrafts and the storms, and then the storm lasts longer, so suddenly there is a 30% increase in the rainfall, as has been documented in several cases of major flooding.

Cyclone Yasa heads for Fiji in December 2020. It was the fourth most-intense tropical cyclone on record in the South Pacific. NASA Earth Observatory

In Mediterranean climates, characterized by long, dry summers, such as in California, eastern Australia and around the Mediterranean, the wildfire risk grows, and fires can be readily triggered by natural sources, like dry lightning, or human causes.

Extreme events in weather have always occurred, but human influences are now pushing them outside their previous limits.

The straw that breaks the camel’s back syndrome

So, while all weather events are driven by natural influences, the impacts are greatly magnified by human-induced climate change. Hurricanes cross thresholds, levees break and floods run amok. Elsewhere, fires burn out of control, things break and people die.

I call it “The straw that breaks the camel’s back syndrome.” This is extreme nonlinearity, meaning the risks aren’t rising in a straight line – they’re rising much faster, and it confounds economists who have greatly underestimated the costs of human-induced climate change.

The result has been far too little action both in slowing and stopping the problems, and in planning for impacts and building resilience – despite years of warnings from scientists. The lack of adequate planning means we all suffer the consequences.

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(Reuters) Analysis: Benchmark Of Big Oil On Methane Emissions Shows ‘Significant Gap’ Between Reality And Reporting

Reuters - Terry Slavin

Tackling methane emissions, a greenhouse gas 84 times more potent than CO2 in the short term, should be low-hanging fruit for oil and gas producers: something they can do cost-effectively, and with far greater climate impact than investing in renewables, or in further-out technologies such as hydrogen and carbon capture and storage.

Chevron personnel work at a fracking site near Midland, Texas, U.S. August 22, 2019. Picture taken August 22, 2019. REUTERS/Jessica Lutz

And unlike CO2, which is 90% about the end use of their products, methane sits squarely in the industry’s wheelhouse.

A main component of both natural gas and oil, the odourless and colourless gas is either intentionally released or leaks during the drilling of wells; through incomplete combustion of gas; and in production, processing, trans¬portation and storage.

Because methane is shorter-lived in the atmosphere, it has taken a backseat to CO2 in the fight against climate change. But that changed in May, when the UN Environment Programme reported that cutting methane emissions by half this decade could stave off nearly 0.3° of warming by the 2040s.

Its message was supported by the IEA’s Methane Tracker, which found that oil and gas operations worldwide emitted more than 70m tonnes of methane into the atmosphere last year, equal to the energy-related CO2 emissions from Europe.

“Early action on methane emissions will be critical for avoiding the worst effects of climate change,” says Dr Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA). “There is no good reason to allow these harmful leaks to continue, and there is every reason for responsible operators to ensure that they are addressed.”

Certainly the big listed oil and gas producers have made a play about efforts to reduce methane emissions, which they report to investors and regulators, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But numerous academic studies using satellites have shown that the sector’s methane emissions are substantially higher than annual greenhouse gas estimates (GHGI) by the EPA.

Research carried out for the Environmental Defense Fund in 2012-2018 found actual methane emissions were 60% higher than data reported to the EPA, while the latest study, in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, estimates that in its latest GHGI the EPA under-reports methane emissions from oil production by a factor of two.

Now a new dataset, seen by Reuters, has become the first to attribute methane emissions to individual companies and benchmark them on their performance, using global satellite data of 7km resolution as well as ultra-high-resolution satellite probes in Canada and U.S., which have accuracy of 25m or better.

It finds some significant discrepancies between expected emissions from the major oil and gas producers, based on their disclosures and policies, and how they are performing in reality, according to Geofinancial Analytics, which is collaborating with Signal Climate Analytics in a year-long project with Reuters.com assessing the climate performance of the biggest 250 global emitters.

Geofinancial Analytics’s MethaneScan® benchmark scores the oil and gas producers based on observed methane emissions in the year to this July. This first snapshot, of the top 15 producers, finds that oil super-majors Royal Dutch Shell and Chevron are the worst performers, followed by ConocoPhillips, Marathon Oil and ExxonMobil.

While Suncor, TotalEnergies and Pioneer Natural Resources performed better among the group, all scored well below “best”, an indication of no methane emissions.

The benchmark also compares observed emissions with how the companies would have been expected to perform based on a combined metric of their methane intensity reports, regulatory filings, commitment to transparent reporting, and safety incidents.

Again, Shell and Chevron under-performed, while scores for Equinor, EOG, ENI, Suncor and Total were relatively well aligned with company self-disclosures and expectations.

Mark Kriss, CEO of Geofinancial Analytics, said “Scientific studies are showing a very significant contribution [from oil and gas producers] and a very significant increase in that contribution in the last 10 years on this critical issue. We need to know where these point sources are coming from, not just at the regional level, but at the company and wellhead level.

“We are starting to see that some companies are managing this better than others… They are all clustering in the ‘not so good’ area, and some are hovering on poor, but none are anywhere near the ‘best’ zone.”

Geofinancial analysed 600,000 medium-resolution satellite scans of 3m wellheads in North America, Brazil, Australia and Europe, but ultra-high resolution satellite imagery is currently only available for facilities in the U.S. and Canada. Outside North America, the benchmark is built on association with elevated methane at 7km of resolution.

In the North American context, Kriss said Shell’s performance was the biggest surprise, given its commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050 and its announced target to keep methane emissions intensity for operated oil and gas assets below 0.2% by 2025.


FILE PHOTO - A combination of file photos shows the logos of five of the largest publicly traded oil companies: BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and Total. REUTERS/File Photo
“The airborne methane in the environs of Chevron and Shell across all their on-shore wellheads in the geographies we cover were slightly higher than Exxon’s,” he said. This is particularly the case in facilities in the Gulf region, he said.

 Geofinancial’s findings were shared with Shell, ConocoPhillips and Chevron, which all defended their efforts to tackle methane emissions, including their own use of high-resolution satellites, while taking issue with the benchmark’s methodology.

A ConocoPhillips spokesman said: “We believe the benchmark has limitations such as emissions in a certain area being attributed to a company based on wellhead density, and other non-well site emissions being ignored (for example, third-party pipelines).

Furthermore, in areas like the Permian, where operators work in close proximity to one another, our experience has been that it is hard for satellites to accurately pinpoint the source of emissions.”

A Chevron spokesman said: “We are concerned that the underlying data and assumptions used in [Geofinancial’s] analysis may not be sufficiently robust to accurately attribute emissions to specific operators or support the generation of a company-by-company credit-style ranking for methane emissions in select basins in North America.”

However, it added: “Over time, their models and analysis have the potential to improve as additional information becomes available to them.”

Shell took issue with the large number of wellheads Geofinancial had attributed to the company. “Shell currently owns and operates fewer than 2,000 onshore wellheads in all of North America”, a spokesperson said.

She added: “We are taking actions to effectively reduce our emissions and have previously announced a target to keep methane emissions intensity for operated oil and gas assets below 0.2% by 2025, which we are achieving.”

Kriss said ownership data used in the benchmark, which includes majority-owned subsidiaries, is based on corporate filings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulatory agencies.

“There’s always a lag between publicly available data and what the company knows is true. But we need to rely on the public data, because that’s the only way we can have an objective, comprehensive view of what’s going on,” he said.

Geofinancial’s methodology doesn’t let companies off the hook in the case that they may have divested of high-polluting and aging assets, and attributes methane emissions of divested assets for five years, but at a declining rate.

Kriss said that in Shell’s case, the discrepancy may be partially accounted for by the large number of inactive wells associated with Shell’s legacy operations over decades as well as recent divestitures, which have not yet been discounted in MethaneScan’s scores.

He pointed out that all scores incorporate abandoned wells, which, though no longer on companies’ books, “can be a significant source of recurring methane emissions over long periods of time”.

An analysis of EPA data from 2019 by energy consultancy M.J. Bradley & Associates in May showed that methane leakage doesn’t go away when big oil and gas companies divest of older and dirtier assets – often to smaller players where there is far less transparency, and less incentive to tackle the issue.

The analysis found that five of the industry’s top 10 emitters of methane were little-known oil and gas producers. The biggest polluter, privately owned Hilcorp Energy, had bought up old gas wells in northern New Mexico from ExxonMobil in 2017, which that year reported its greenhouse gas emissions had fallen 20%.

It’s a trend that will only accelerate as the heat gets turned up under the industry in the wake of this week’s report from the IPCC.

Kris described the current MethaneScan® benchmark as “just the beginning of a new era of radical transparency” on methane emissions by the oil and gas sector. He said future benchmarks would be improved as Geofinancial added observations from another eight ultra-high-resolution satellites by the end of 2022.

David Lubin, chairman of Signal Climate Analytics, said that Geofinancial Analytics’ methane emissions observations are a critical component of Signal’s ongoing work with Reuters tracking the levels of transparency among the 250 largest publicly traded greenhouse gas emitters.

Later in 2021, he said, Signal will add a Transparency Ratio™ to its company-level assessments, which will compare their public disclosures with real-world requirements for transparency on emissions where they have the most impact.

“While companies are surely disclosing volumes of emissions data, and metrics, often in support of company narratives on climate action, real transparency can only be achieved when the most critical emissions for a sector are fully disclosed by the company,” Lubin said. “From the work of Geofinancial, it’s clear that for the oil and gas sector any claim of transparency must include a full accounting of methane emissions.”

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(Eurasia Review) Australia And New Zealand React To IPCC Report Warning With Rhetoric Rather Than Action – OpEd

Eurasia Review - Kalinga Seneviratne

Three of the major groups of islands in the Pacific Ocean: Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The most comprehensive report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a dire warning to countries in the Pacific region where rising sea levels and increasing temperatures could wipe out island nations and make dry habitats uninhabitable.

But the two major powers in the region—Australia and New Zealand—have reacted to the report with defensive rhetoric rather than moving to implement immediate action to save the region.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison under pressure from the growing environmental movement to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions responded by saying: “I will not be signing a blank cheque on behalf of Australians to targets (to reduce greenhouse emissions) without a plan”.

He indicated that Australia’s response will be with new technology to address the problem. An argument some observers believe is a strategy to buy time until Australia could make a killing on selling new green technology to the world.

Meanwhile, in New Zealand, scientists criticized the government’s stated action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as a target set “two governments ago”, for which Prime Minister Jacinta Arden reacted by arguing that such criticism is unfair, as her government is in the process of responding to the report’s findings by planning “our emission reductions and our carbon budgets”.

“It would be unfair to judge New Zealand based on what essentially were targets that were set some time ago when we are now undertaking an incredibly heavy piece of work to lift our ambition and lift our emissions reductions,” Arden argued, pointing out that New Zealand has already decided to bring agriculture into the emission trading scheme “which no other country has done”.

Emissions trading is a market-based approach to controlling pollution by providing economic incentives for reducing the emissions of pollutants.

Nick Golledge, a professor of Glaciology at the Victoria University of Wellington, one of the lead writers of the IPCC report’s chapter on oceans, writing in ‘The Conversation’ explained that whether or not the worst-case scenario plays out or not remains uncertain, but what is increasingly beyond doubt is that global mean sea level will continue to rise for centuries to come.

“The magnitude of this depends very much on the extent to which we are able, collectively, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions right now,” he argues.“The underlying message remains the same. The longer we wait, the more devastating the consequences.”

For some time, the small island nations of the South Pacific, such as Tuvalu and Kiribati, have been worried about their nation getting submerged with seawater before the end of the century, and have been making plans to relocate their populations.

In October 2017, the new Labour government led by Arden announced that they would issue an experimental humanitarian visa to bring in 100 environmental refugees from Pacific Island countries to New Zealand each year.

But, New Zealand dropped the idea when Pacific Islanders didn’t want it, and instead, they asked Wellington to institute approaches to reduce emissions and support adaptation measures, and provide legal migration pathways and not refugee status.

The Secretary-General of the 18-nation Pacific Islands Forum Henry Puna warns that the world is on the brink of a climate catastrophe, with just a narrow window for action to reverse global processes predicted to cause devastating effects in the Pacific and worldwide.

The Pacific Islanders have been alarmed by the findings in the report that says extreme sea-level events that happened once in 100 years could happen every year before the end of this century.

Puna feels that governments, big businesses, and other major emitters of the world should listen to the voices of those already enduring the unfolding environmental crisis.

“They can no longer choose rhetoric over action. There are simply no more excuses to be had. Our actions today will have consequences now and into the future for all of us to bear,” he told Radio New Zealand (RNZ). “The factors affecting climate change could be turned around if people acted now.”

The latest IPCC report has taken into account environmental changes that have taken place around the world in the seven years since the last report and stressed the need for rapid emission reductions in the coming years to avoid the worse climatic disasters that will come with more than 1.5 degrees C warming.

 Australian emission reduction targets are consistent with warming reductions that will deliver 2-3 degrees C of warming, which would result in cascading natural disasters the IPCC report warns.

Just over a year ago, Australia had the worst forest fires in a century that cost an estimated 34 lives and burnt 18.6 million hectares, and cost billions of dollars in damages to farm property and communities.  Earlier this year, after concerted lobbying, Australia succeeded in avoiding the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier reef been designated as “in danger” by UNESCO.

Meanwhile, the Indian-owned Adani company, which operates as Bravus Mining and Resources in Australia, and has faced a fierce community-based opposition across the country to its mining project in Queensland, announced in June that they have started coal mining operations at their Carmichael mine and the first shipments to India will begin later this year.

It has already secured markets to export 10 million tonnes of coal a year, which they claim are high-grade coal that gives a “clean energy” mix. “India gets the energy they need and Australia gets the jobs and economic benefits in the process,” says Bravus CEO David Boshoff on its website.

Even before the IPCC report was released, the Morrison government’s stance has been that it will not put an additional burden on Australian taxpayers to save the world, and countries like India and China need to play a greater role in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.

A commentary published by the Sydney Morning Herald from Andrew McConville, chief executive of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, reflected the Morrison government’s standpoint.

He argued that his industry could be part of delivering what he calls a “clean energy mix” and you cannot simply ban hydrocarbons and hope for the best.

“For too long, the climatic change conversation has been a simple good-v-evil debate,” he notes. “Either give up your Hilux, stop international travel, change the way you work, cook and heat your home—and put the entire resources industry under a bus—or fail to achieve net-zero emissions.”

McConville says that if the industry folds up the government will lose $66 billion of royalties they pay “that build hospitals, police stations, roads, and schools”, the $450 million of investments they pour into rural communities, and the 80,000 direct and indirect jobs they provide.

Hinting at diversifying their operations to benefit from greenhouse emission reduction technology industry, he says their industry is making billions of investments in emission reduction technologies because “we need to do more, especially in the major emission-intensive economies of China and India if we want to make a dent in reducing emissions”.

University of Canterbury’s Professor Bronwyn Harward who was a member of the IPCC report’s core writing team, says that developed countries are under pressure to act now, and it is not enough just to make a nice speech at the ‘Paris Accord’ conference in Glasgow in November.

“If the rest of the world did what we (New Zealand) do we will be 3 degrees warmer,” she argues, adding that what is needed is social action such as providing free public transport in cities and introducing traffic congestion charges and creating new carbon-neutral jobs.

“So bring the thinking together, bring our Ministry of Social Development in with our Ministry for the Environment start thinking what does a new lower carbon economy actually look like that works for the people?” argues Prof Harward.

Coral Pasisi, a senior adviser at the regional science agency, the Pacific Community, told RNZ that the next 10 years were critical for the region.

“All of the assessments done to date suggest that anything above 1.5-degree warming is going to be dire. And up until recently, even with the best commitments made by countries, within the next 10 years we’re likely to exceed the 2.5 degrees in warming,” she noted.

“We know that above 2 degrees (we will see) up to 99 percent coral reef death rates which affect the whole ecosystem on which Pacific populations depend for their food security.”

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