Range Anxiety? Today’s Electric Cars Can Cover Vast Majority Of Daily U.S. Driving Needs

The Conversation - Jessika E. Trancik

Despite worries over the lower driving range of electric cars, most trips can be done with existing electric vehicles. unten44/flickr, CC BY

Electrifying transportation is one of the most promising ways to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, but so-called range anxiety – concern about being stranded with an uncharged car battery – remains a barrier to electric vehicle adoption. Is range anxiety justified given current cars and charging infrastructure?
It's a question my research group and I addressed in a paper published in Nature Energy, by taking a close look at this problem with a new model.
Specifically we asked: when looking down on the geographic area of the U.S. from a bird's-eye view, how many personal vehicles on the road daily could be replaced with a low-cost battery electric vehicle, even if daytime charging isn't available? Our analysis is, to our knowledge, the most expansive yet detailed study to date of how current and future-improved electric vehicle technology measures up to people's energy-consuming behavior.
We found nearly 90 percent of vehicles on the road could be replaced by a low-cost electric vehicle available on the market today. What's more, this number is remarkably similar across very different cities, from New York to Houston to Los Angeles. That is, there is a high potential for electrification of cars in both dense and more sprawling cities in the United States.
To realize this potential, however, the needs of prospective electric vehicle drivers have to be met on all days, even high-energy ones, such as days that require long-distance travel.
Two key innovations can enable this. The first is to predict the days on which drivers are likely to exceed the car's range, which our model is designed to do. And the second is institutional or business-model innovation to provide alternative long-range vehicles on those high-energy days. For example, conventional cars and eventually low-carbon, long-range alternatives, might show up at a user's door at the click of a button. This need may last for some time even as battery technology improves and charging infrastructure expands.

Vehicle range is not a single number
An electric vehicle's range is typically thought of in terms of a fixed number, but the number of miles covered on a single charge changes with factors including driving speed and style, and outdoor temperature. To understand the range of a car we need to look beyond the car itself to how people are behaving.
Over the last four years in my research group, we've built a model (called 'TripEnergy') of the second-by-second driving behavior of people across the United States, how they are likely to use heating and cooling systems in their cars, and how various electric and conventional vehicles would consume energy if driven in this way.

General Motors is developing the all-electric 2017 Chevrolet Bolt, which is designed to have a driving range of about 200 miles. General Motors

This approach gives us a probabilistic view of electric vehicle range. For example, for the Nissan Leaf, we find that 74 miles is the median range – based on driving patterns, half of the cars on the road in the U.S. would be able to travel this far, and half would not. (A Ford Focus electric performs similarly.)
There is a distribution in this range, which demonstrates how widely actual performance can vary. We estimate, for instance, that five percent of 58-mile trips could not be covered on one charge, and five percent of 90-mile trips could.

Evaluating electric vehicle technology against driving behavior
With the TripEnergy model in hand, we asked how many cars on the road could be replaced with a low-cost electric vehicle available today. We considered a case where drivers can only charge once daily, for example at home overnight. This allowed us to study a situation where only limited changes are needed to existing public charging infrastructure and cars can use power plants that would otherwise sit idle overnight.
We found that, given how people are driving across the U.S., 87 percent of cars on an average day could be replaced with a current generation, low-cost electric vehicle, with only once-daily charging. This is based on the driving behavior of millions of people across the U.S. across diverse cities and socioeconomic classes.
Switching from conventional to electric vehicles for those cars would cut emissions by an estimated 30 percent, even with today's fossil fuel based supply mix. In total, the trips taken by those cars represent roughly 60 percent of gasoline consumption in the U.S.
This large daily adoption potential is remarkably similar across both dense and more sprawling U.S. cities, ranging from 84 percent to 93 percent.
While it's true that people behave differently across cities – in how they use public transport, whether they own a car, and how often they drive the cars they own – when they do drive, we found that a similar number of cars in different cities fall within the range provided by a low-cost electric vehicle.

Returns on technology improvement
What if batteries improve, and allow for longer driving range for the same cost as current-generation lithium ion batteries?
The federal research agency ARPA-E has set a target for batteries to store roughly two times more energy by weight than today's batteries in electric vehicles. If that technical target is reached, we estimate that the 87 percent daily adoption potential estimate would rise to 98 percent, and the gasoline substitution potential would rise from 61 percent to 88 percent.
The 2017 Chevy Bolt and 2018 Tesla Model 3 are expected to achieve roughly similar increases in potentials at an increased cost compared to today's Nissan Leaf, though these costs are still close to the average cost of new cars.
The Tesla Model S travels even further but costs significantly more.
Even with substantial battery improvements, however, other types of powertrain technologies will be needed to cover those days with the highest energy consumption. This need may persist for some time, even with expanded charging infrastructure, due to a small number of very-high-energy days.

The upshot on range constraints
For people to overcome range anxiety and feel comfortable buying an electric vehicle, they need to know their needs will be met on all days, including high-energy days. Predicting when this will occur – and in advance when buying a vehicle on how many days this will occur – is something that our model is well-suited for.

The expansion of car-sharing services makes it easier to get a car for a long-distance trip. davereid/flickr, CC BY-NC

Our model can, with limited input on travel distance, time and location, predict the probability of exceeding the car's range, and point to days where drivers need to turn to other, longer-range cars, for example withing households, or even within communities and through commercial car-sharing programs.
The results also shed light on the quantity of long-range cars that would be needed at the population level, a gap to be filled by private sector innovation as well as national and local policy.
Reasonable financing to help distribute the upfront costs over the car's lifetime and increasing the opportunities for charging, even if only once-daily, would also encourage EV adoption.
In all, our analysis shows that current electric vehicles can meet most daily driving needs in the U.S. Improved access to shared, long-range transport, alongside further-advanced batteries and cars and decarbonized electricity, provide a pathway to reaching a largely decarbonized personal vehicle fleet.

Links

• Explainer: For the future of electric vehicles, one size does not fit all
• Will the Tesla Model 3 recharge the U.S. electric vehicle market?
• Can Tesla's enthusiast customers help it sell the electric car for the everyperson?
• When will we have better batteries than lithium-ion for gadgets and electric vehicles?

World's Hottest Month Shows Challenges Global Warming Will Bring

The Guardian - Emma Graham-Harrison

July was hotter than any month globally since records began – but some areas, such as the Middle East, suffer more than others

High temperatures are hitting places already suffering from drought. Photograph: Ye Aung Thu/AFP/Getty Images

In Siberia, melting permafrost released anthrax that had been frozen in a reindeer carcass for decades, starting a deadly outbreak. In Baghdad, soaring temperatures forced the government to shut down for days at a time. In Kuwait, thermometers hit a record 54C (129F).
July was the hottest month the world has endured since records began in 1880, scientists have said, and brought a painful taste of the troubles people around the world may have to grapple with as global warming intensifies. Results compiled by Nasa showed the month was 0.84C hotter than the 1951-1980 average for July, and 0.11C hotter than the previous record set in July 2015.
The temperature increase last month was not all due to climate change. Part of the increase came from the tail end of the El Niño phenomenon, which spreads warm water across the Pacific, giving a boost to global temperatures.
But scientists said the July record, which came after a string of new month-high temperatures, was particularly striking because it came as the impact of El Niño faded, and added weight to fears that 2016 will go down in history as the hottest year since records began.
“Even if we have it augmented by El Niño, it’s quite concerning as a citizen to see that we are flirting with very high numbers, and a record is a record,” said Jean-Noël Thepaut, head of Europe’s Copernicus climate change service.
He had not expected such a warm July, and said that although his organisation did not forecast temperatures, the high temperatures continued through the start of August and made a record for the year extremely likely.
“What we can say over the last seven months is that every month has been a record; we are on good track to have another record year,” he said. Beyond immediate trends, longer-term weather patterns made clear the rise could not be dismissed as the impact of a severe El Niño, he said.
“One fact beyond what we are seeing today, among the last warmest years, 15 years have been obtained in the 21st century and we have not been in El Niño for 10 years. So there is a general longer-term trend,” Thepaut said.
The challenge for climate scientists, and politicians seeking to drive climate policy, has often been linking changes in global averages to shifting weather patterns at home that may or may not appear to reflect the worldwide data.

Mercury hits the heights in Baghdad. Photograph: Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images

 “This is a global average, so it can be difficult for people everywhere to perceive it themselves,” said Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the LSE’s Grantham research institute on climate change and the environment.
As extremes become more common, however, that is also starting to change, even in places such as the UK where changes have so far been relatively more manageable.
“We can see that locally there is evidence of changes in many places – for instance, in the UK, our eight warmest years have all occurred since 2000, as have six of our seven wettest years, so the UK is becoming warmer and wetter.”
The provisional average temperature in the UK for July was 15.3C, which is 0.2C above the 1981-2010 long-term average, according to the Met Office.
However, it is well below the record set in 2006, the hottest UK month on record, when the average temperature was 17.8C.
The temperature increases in July were not spread evenly, with brutal heat across the Middle East potentially warning of troubles to come for a region that is particularly vulnerable to rising temperatures.
Climate scientists say individual areas of extreme weather cannot be directly linked to global warming even as overall temperatures rise, but they give an indication of the challenges to come in a hotter world.
“If the global mean [average] increases a certain amount, the temperatures in this region in summer will increase even more,” said Jos Lelieveld, an atmospheric researcher at the Max Planck institute for chemistry, who earlier this year published a report on how climate change would affect the Middle East and North Africa.
He warned then that large areas could become so hot that they would be virtually uninhabitable for human beings, and could trigger an exodus of hundreds of millions of refugees. The July temperatures just underlined the urgency of the crisis, he said.
“This worries me a lot because we have a lot of problems there already; there is a documented drought that has been going on for fifteen years,” he said. “This is already one of the driest regions in the world.”
Some experts think those problems have already contributed to the violence in the region, with some researchers claiming drought fuelled Syria’s civil war.
But perhaps because of the huge security and humanitarian crises crippling many countries there, most governments have spared little thought to dealing with a problem that seems less urgent, even if its fallout could be just as devastating.
“Climate change and challenges associated with it or provoked by it didn’t yet reach the attention of heads of states,” said Adel Abdellatif, a senior regional advisor with the UN development programme focused on climate change in the region.
“Attention is mainly paid to threats emanating from armed groups, and climate change threats are not seen within the framework of national security,” he said.
Adding to the problem is the fact that those likely to be most vulnerable to the flooding, droughts and rising temperatures are those least able to push for change, both within countries and across the region.
“Those affected by threats of climate change are the people living at the edge of vulnerability and in the frontline of the perfect storm,” said Abdellatif.
When Kuwait recorded temperatures of 54C this summer, the highest ever recorded in the eastern hemisphere, its relatively wealthy citizens were mostly able to combat the raging heat by turning on the air conditioning.
In neighbouring Iraq, where electricity supplies are sporadic, not everyone can afford coolers and millions of refugees were stranded under little more than tents in the desert, heat is much more dangerous.
The July temperatures have given added urgency to calls for governments to deliver on commitments made in Paris last year to limit temperature rises to 1.5C beyond pre-industrial levels – a limit not far off the record set in July.
“People should be in no doubt that global warming continues apace and that should focus governments on the task of delivering what was agreed in Paris last year,” said the LSE’s Ward.
Nasa’s records indicate July was about 1.3C warmer than the pre-industrial average, said David Karoly, a climate scientist from the University of Melbourne, who pointed out that Nasa’s baseline temperatures already included about 0.5C of warming in global temperatures.
Karoly said about 0.2C of that anomaly was likely to be owing to El Niño, leaving about 1.1C mostly caused by human-induced climate change.

Links

• July 2016 was world's hottest month since records began, says NASA
• Q&A smackdown: Brian Cox brings graphs to grapple with Malcolm Roberts
• Disasters like Louisiana floods will worsen as planet warms, scientists warn
• Climate change is here now and it could lead to global conflict
• Global warming likely to breach 2C threshold, climate scientists conclude
• Cooling Pacific has dampened global warming, research shows
• Global warming study finds no grounds for climate sceptics' concerns
• Food prices driven up by global warming, study shows
• Climategate scientists cleared of manipulating data on global warming
• Met Office warns of catastrophic global warming in our lifetimes
• Chinese government adviser warns that 2C global warming target is unrealistic

Climate Urgency: We've Locked In More Global Warming Than People Realize

The Guardian - Dana Nuccitelli

Today's carbon pollution will have climate consequences for centuries to come. We're in the midst of a critical decade

An Adelie penguin standing atop a block of melting ice in East Antarctica. Slowly-melting ice is a 'feedback' through which today's carbon pollution will heat the planet for centuries to come. Photograph: Reuters

While most people accept the reality of human-caused global warming, we tend not to view it as an urgent issue or high priority. That lack of immediate concern may in part stem from a lack of understanding that today's pollution will heat the planet for centuries to come, as explained in this Denial101x lecture:

Denial101x carbon cycle lecture by Gavin Cawley.

So far humans have caused about 1°C warming of global surface temperatures, but if we were to freeze the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide at today's levels, the planet would continue warming. Over the coming decades, we'd see about another 0.5°C warming, largely due to what's called the "thermal inertia" of the oceans (think of the long amount of time it takes to boil a kettle of water). The Earth's surface would keep warming about another 1.5°C over the ensuing centuries as ice continued to melt, decreasing the planet's reflectivity.
To put this in context, the international community agreed in last year's Paris climate accords that we should limit climate change risks by keeping global warming below 2°C, and preferably closer to 1.5°C. Yet from the carbon pollution we've already put into the atmosphere, we're committed to 1.5–3°C warming over the coming decades and centuries, and we continue to pump out over 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year.

The importance of reaching zero or negative emissions
We can solve this problem if, rather than holding the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide steady, it falls over time. As discussed in the above video, Earth naturally absorbs more carbon than it releases, so if we reduce human emissions to zero, the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide will slowly decline. Humans can also help the process by finding ways to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it. Scientists are researching various technologies to accomplish this, but we've already put over 500 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Pulling a significant amount of that carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it safely will be a tremendous challenge, and we won't be able to reduce the amount in the atmosphere until we first get our emissions close to zero.
There are an infinite number of potential carbon emissions pathways, but the 2014 IPCC report considered four possible paths that they called RCPs. In one of these (called RCP 2.6 or RCP3-PD), we take immediate, aggressive, global action to cut carbon pollution, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels peak at 443 ppm in 2050, and by 2100 they've fallen back down to today's level of 400 ppm. In two others (RCPs 4.5 and 6.0) we act more slowly, and atmospheric levels don't peak until the year 2150, then they remain steady, and in the last (RCP8.5) carbon dioxide levels keep rising until 2250.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in the four IPCC RCP scenarios. Illustration: Dana Nuccitelli

As the figure below shows, in the first scenario, global warming peaks at 2°C and then temperatures start to fall toward the 1.5°C level, meeting our Paris climate targets. In the other scenarios, temperatures keep rising centuries into the future.

Global annual mean surface air temperature anomalies (relative to 1986–2005) from CMIP5 climate model runs. Discontinuities at 2100 are due to different numbers of models performing the extension runs beyond the 21st century and have no physical meaning. No ranges are given for the RCP6.0 projections beyond 2100, as only two models are available. Illustration: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

This is the critical decade
We don't know what technologies will be available in the future, but we do know that the more carbon pollution we pump into the atmosphere today, the longer it will take and more difficult it will be to reach zero emissions and stabilize the climate. We'll also have to pull that much more carbon out of the atmosphere.
It's possible that as in three of the IPCC scenarios, we'll never get all the way down to zero or negative carbon emissions, in which case today's pollution will keep heating the planet for centuries to come. Today's carbon pollution will leave a legacy of climate change consequences that future generations may struggle with for the next thousand years.
Five years ago, the Australian government established a Climate Commission, which published a report discussing why we're in the midst of the 'critical decade' on climate change:

The risks of future climate change – to our economy, society and environment – are serious, and grow rapidly with each degree of further temperature rise. Minimising these risks requires rapid, deep and ongoing reductions to global greenhouse gas emissions. We must begin now if we are to decarbonise our economy and move to clean energy sources by 2050. This decade is the critical decade.

Our is the first generation to understand the problems our carbon pollution is causing, and the last that can take the necessary action to prevent them from causing a climate destabilization. In addition to the Australian Climate Commission, 31 major scientific organizations recently warned policymakers that:

To reduce the risk of the most severe impacts of climate change, greenhouse gas emissions must be substantially reduced.

We have no excuse for inaction or complacency; the experts have clearly warned us. If we refuse to urgently act on this information, future generations will suffer the consequences of our failures today.

Links

• Q&A smackdown: Brian Cox brings graphs to grapple with Malcolm Roberts
• Climate scientists make a bold prediction about sea level rise
• Rejection of experts spreads from Brexit to climate change with 'Clexit'
• New research shows penguins will suffer in a warming world
• A climate scientist and economist made big bucks betting on global warming

Malcolm Roberts Leaves NASA 'Flummoxed' With Q&A Climate Claims

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

It probably takes a lot to faze Gavin Schmidt, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, but the outlandish views of Malcolm Roberts, the newly elected One Nation senator, can do it from half a world away.
On Monday night's Q&A program on the ABC, Roberts was venting his now well-worn view that there was no empirical evidence of climate change.

Q&A: Malcolm Roberts v science: The debate turned to Climate Change on Q&A and even physicist Brian Cox was dumbfounded by One Nation sentator-elect Malcolm Roberts' arguments.

Among those exasperated was fellow panelist, Brian Cox, the physicist and rock star science communicator of this generation, who told Roberts: "I could sit here and read out figures until I'm blue in the face".
Indeed, how much data do you want?
Richard Muller, a former prominent sceptic US scientist, re-examined 14 million temperature observations from 44,455 sites across the world going back to 1753. The results prompted a "total turnaround" in his views, as my colleague Ben Cubby wrote in 2012.
"Our results show that the average temperature of the earth's land has risen by 2½ degrees fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of 1½ degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases," Professor Muller wrote.
Roberts, a former coal engineer, and then manager of the Galileo Movement, was unimpressed.
"We've based our views on empirical science, and there's nothing in the Muller study to undercut that," Roberts told Cubby at the time. Climate change science had been captured by "some of the major banking families in the world" who form a "tight-knit cabal", he insisted.

Record global temperatures are being set at an unprecedented rate. Photo: Iwan van Hagen

That sense of capture - if not the sinister anti-semitic hints that prompted even fellow denier commentator Andrew Bolt to distance himself from Roberts - remains four years on.
Anyway, when Cox pulled out some charts on Q&A from US space agency NASA showing a clear upward trend in global temperatures, Roberts readily dismissed the data as "corrupted" and "manipulated".

Former coal miner and now One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts says NASA data on climate change is 'corrupted'. Photo: Robert Shakespeare

Roberts' argument, apparently, is that the world was hotter in the 1930s but NASA had altered the figures to make the current era look warmer. (According to one take, the issue is whether the continental US was warmer in 1934 than in the hot years of 1998 or 2006 - but 2012 then blew away all previous records.)

Record heat - again
Roberts wasn't to know it but NASA's regular monthly readings on global temperature were just hours from being released.
A glance at the chart below released overnight suggests herculean efforts would be needed to make the 1930s look warmer than any recent decade, let alone the current one. Note, too, the prediction for this year.

Meanwhile, Schmidt, the climate modeller who is also the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, was clearly following the live Australian debate on Q&A.
In rapid succession, Schmidt fired out a dozen tweets, bemused by the claims of manipulation.
His world-renowned centre had been estimating global temperature changes since 1981, and the data has been available to the public since 2007, Schmidt said.

Spot the 'pause'
Mind you, the NASA data is scary enough to concern anyone paying attention.
Since July is typically the hottest month of the year given the preponderance of land in the northern hemisphere now in summer, a record hot July also means we just posted the warmest for any month on record.
For more than a year, each month has set records for heat, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
However, Roberts and his friends routinely claim the world hasn't warmed in the past two decades - the senator plucked out 1995 as the beginning of the "pause" on Monday.
Usually the starting point is 1998 when a record large El Nino made for a temperature spike that took some years of background warming to eclipse.
But now we have 2005, 2010, 2014 and 2015 all exceeding 1998, with 2016 a 99 per cent chance of being yet hotter, Schmidt says. (NOAA in 2015 ruled out any slowdown in global warming.)
Here's how this year is tracking, courtesy of Schmidt again:

July 2016 was the hottest month since the instrumental records began.

Japan 'corrupted' too
Other data out on Monday from the Japan Meteorological Agency - no doubt corrupted too, in Roberts' musings - echoed NASA's results.
According to JMA, last month was the hottest July in records going back to 1891.
It was 0.44 degrees above the 1981-2010 base that it uses, and narrowly above the previous record set just a year earlier.
Last month's temperature anomaly was also 0.14 degrees above the July that came at the end of that huge 1997-98 El Nino.
(See chart below with the black line indicating surface temperature anomaly, the blue line showing the five-year running mean and the red line showing the long-term linear trend.)

Roberts, of course, won't be moved.

'It does sound outlandish'
For Roberts to be right, at least 80 science academies around the world have to be wrong, as would almost 100 per cent of the scientists publishing work in the field.
John Cook, a climate communications research fellow at the University of Queensland, is part of a crew offering a free lecture series  "Making Sense of Climate Science Denial" to help explain why "empirical science" will never sate Roberts or sceptics like him.
As Cook notes, the onus really should sit with Roberts to explain why so many changes predicted by climate science are being observed - such as cooling in the upper atmosphere as less heat escapes to space because of the additional greenhouse gases accumulating in the biosphere.
But Roberts and One Nation find an easier target in the messengers.
The party wants "a Royal Commission (or similar) into the corruption of climate science and identify whether any individual or organisation has misled government to effect climate and energy policy".
One Nation also demands a "review the Bureau of Meteorology to ensure independence and accountability for weather and climate records including public justification of persistent upward adjustments to historical climate records", while the CSIRO must also be investigated.
If Monday night's QandA was any guide, Roberts now will be granted a regular perch to air his nonsense, serving a useful purpose for those wanting to delay or reverse action to curb consumption of coal, oil and gas.
"It does sound outlandish," Roberts told Cubby in 2012. "I, like you, was reluctant to believe it [but] there are significant things going on in Australia that people are waking up to".
For Australian voters, the nightmare of electing Roberts and One Nation to the senate has just begun.

Links

• One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts makes cringeworthy debut on Q&A
• Q&A: One Nation's Malcolm Roberts continues to deny the existence of climate change 
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Global Analysis - June 2016
• One Nation's Malcolm Roberts maintains climate change denial
• The senator from Wonderland dons his special aluminium helmet
• Epic Middle East heatwave could be global warming's hellish curtain-raiser

The Australian Government Just Gave Millions Of Dollars To An Overseas Coal Mining Company

Junkee - Osman Faruqi

The federal Coalition government has been crying poor when it comes to investing in science and innovation. They've slashed more than $100 million and hundreds of jobs from the CSIRO, and wound back a number of climate change focused programs. Which is a smart thing to do when sea levels are rising and ice caps are melting, right? But despite cutting environmental programs and research, the government has managed to find $24 million to fund so called "clean coal" technologies.
Last week the Minister for Resources, Senator Matt Canavan, announced the details of seven grants worth nearly $24 million funded through the "Carbon Capture and Storage Research Development and Demonstration Fund". The largest grant, worth nearly $9 million, was handed over to Swiss company Glencore. The government also handed over $700,000 to multi-national oil firm Shell, and gave millions to the CSIRO — but only to test carbon dioxide storage programs.
So what are carbon dioxide storage programs, why are we funding them and do they work?

What Is Carbon Capture And Storage?
Coal is the biggest contributor to global climate change. The burning of fossil fuels like coal leads to the release of carbon dioxide, which then enters our atmosphere and leads to global warming through the greenhouse effect. Scientists are telling us that we need to stop burning coal and rapidly invest in clean, renewable energy technologies that are less harmful to the environment if we want to avoid runaway climate change.
But because this is Australia and our politicians love ignoring the advice of scientists, we've managed to avoid the shift to renewable energy, and are still obsessed with mining and burning coal. That's where carbon capture comes in. The idea is to physically capture the carbon dioxide released from the burning of coal and bury it somewhere underground so it doesn't enter the atmosphere. Sounds like a crazy plan cooked up by a Bond villain? That's because it basically is.
The problem with carbon capture and storage is that it doesn't work. And trying to make it work will cost a lot of money. Money that would be better spent on building proven alternatives to coal like solar and wind power. The UK government this year scrapped its $1.7 billion carbon capture and storage program and will instead look at alternative ways of reducing emissions.
Last week's announcement shows that our government is still committed to carbon capture and storage. They've slashed $100 million from the CSIRO, much of it from climate change mitigation and adaptation programs, and spent $24 million on an unproven, expensive technology.

Subsidising Massive Coal Companies Doesn't Make Any Sense
Glencore is a massive, multinational commodities company that made a $10.5 billion profit last year. So why exactly are Australian taxpayers giving them millions of dollars to experiment with carbon capture and storage? The grant will be used to test whether or not it's viable to inject carbon dioxide emissions from a nearby coal fired power plant deep underground. The Group Executive for Glencore's global coal business, who also happens to be Chairman of the World Coal Association, is absolutely stoked.
"The Project highlights the important role Australia is playing in developing innovative, practicable and scientifically sound solutions" he said in a press release. Though when you think about it there's nothing particularly innovative, practical or scientifically sound about spending millions of dollars trying to bury carbon dioxide underground.
Regardless of the wider context, spending tens of millions of dollars on an unproven technology would be a very silly thing to do. But in the face of massive funding cuts to the CSIRO and environment programs more generally, it's particularly dumb and reckless. We know how to reduce emissions: we need to invest in renewable energy. Australia is the sunniest country on Earth but solar power only makes up 2.4 percent of our energy mix.
This latest announcement makes the government's priorities perfectly clear. Despite all of Malcolm Turnbull's talk about innovation and creating jobs in new industries, he's choosing to cut the CSIRO, the organisation that gave us Wi-Fi, in order to fund an old industry like coal. The rest of the world is making the switch to renewables. We desperately need to catch up before we get left behind, and we can't do that if we're paying companies like Glencore and Shell to literally bury our emissions underground.

Links

• $23.7 million for carbon capture and storage
• Back to basics on coal's role in climate change
• A global shift to 100% renewables is not just cleaner – it's about equality
• Carbon capture and storage: Trouble in store
• Clean Energy Australia Report

We Have Almost Certainly Blown The 1.5-Degree Global Warming Target

The Conversation - Andrew King | Benjamin J. Henley

The Great Barrier Reef is already feeling the effects of climate change. AAP/Supplied

The United Nations climate change conference held last year in Paris had the aim of tackling future climate change. After the deadlocks and weak measures that arose at previous meetings, such as Copenhagen in 2009, the Paris summit was different. The resulting Paris Agreement committed to:

Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognising that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.

The agreement was widely met with cautious optimism. Certainly, some of the media were pleased with the outcome while acknowledging the deal's limitations.
Many climate scientists were pleased to see a more ambitious target being pursued, but what many people fail to realise is that actually staying within a 1.5℃ global warming limit is nigh on impossible.
There seems to be a strong disconnect between what the public and climate scientists think is achievable. The problem is not helped by the media's apparent reluctance to treat it as a true crisis.

The 1.5℃ limit is nearly impossible
In 2015, we saw global average temperatures a little over 1℃ above pre-industrial levels, and 2016 will very likely be even hotter. In February and March of this year, temperatures were 1.38℃ above pre-industrial averages.
Admittedly, these are individual months and years with a strong El Niño influence (which makes global temperatures more likely to be warmer), but the point is we're already well on track to reach 1.5℃ pretty soon.
So when will we actually reach 1.5℃ of global warming?

Animated timeline showing best current estimates of when global average temperatures will rise beyond 1.5℃ and 2℃ above pre-industrial levels. Boxes represent 90% confidence intervals; whiskers show the full range. Andrew King, Author provided

On our current emissions trajectory we will likely reach 1.5℃ within the next couple of decades (2024 is our best estimate). The less ambitious 2℃ target would be surpassed not much later.
This means we probably have only about a decade before we break through the ambitious 1.5℃ global warming target agreed to by the world's nations in Paris.
A University of Melbourne research group recently published these spiral graphs showing just how close we are getting to 1.5℃ warming. Realistically, we have very little time left to limit warming to 2℃, let alone 1.5℃.
This is especially true when you bear in mind that even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions right now, we would likely experience about another half-degree of warming as the oceans "catch up" with the atmosphere.

Parallels with climate change scepticism
The public seriously underestimates the level of consensus among climate scientists that human activities have caused the majority of global warming in recent history. Similarly, there appears to be a lack of public awareness about just how urgent the problem is.
Many people think we have plenty of time to act on climate change and that we can avoid the worst impacts by slowly and steadily reducing greenhouse gas emissions over the next few decades.
This is simply not the case. Rapid and drastic cuts to emissions are needed as soon as possible.
In conjunction, we must also urgently find ways to remove greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. At present, this is not yet viable on a large scale.

Heatwaves in Europe in 2003 killed tens of thousands of people. EPA PHOTO/BELGA/JACQUES COLLET

Is 1.5℃ even enough to avoid "dangerous" climate change?
The 1.5℃ and 2℃ targets are designed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. It's certainly true that the more we warm the planet, the worse the impacts are likely to be. However, we are already experiencing dangerous consequences of climate change, with clear impacts on society and the environment.
For example, a recent study found that many of the excess deaths reported during the summer 2003 heatwave in Europe could be attributed to human-induced climate change.
Also, research has shown that the warm seas associated with the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef in March 2016 would have been almost impossible without climate change.
Climate change is already increasing the frequency of extreme weather events, from heatwaves in Australia to heavy rainfall in Britain.
These events are just a taste of the effects of climate change. Worse is almost certainly set to come as we continue to warm the planet.
It's highly unlikely we will achieve the targets set out in the Paris Agreement, but that doesn't mean governments should give up. It is vital that we do as much as we can to limit global warming.
The more we do now, the less severe the impacts will be, regardless of targets. The simple take-home message is that immediate, drastic climate action will mean far fewer deaths and less environmental damage in the future.

Links

• Turning up the heat: how the diplomatic push for 1.5℃ unfolded in Paris
• How 1.5 became the most important number at the Paris climate talks
• A matter of degrees: why 2C warming is officially unsafe
• This is what will happen to the climate in the next 100 years

'Calm Waters' Likely To Elude Embattled CSIRO Chief Larry Marshall

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Larry Marshall, the embattled chief executive of the CSIRO, is clearly hoping for anger within his agency over his handling of the hundreds of job cuts will subside.
In the past few weeks, he has visited sites from Canberra to Hobart, hobnobbing at morning and afternoon teas with small groups of staff, apparently avoiding the large Q&A sessions that sparked staff booing, a complaint of bullying and at least one walkout earlier this year.

CSIRO chief executive Larry Marshall can expect fierce grillings from senators if he retains his job. Photo: Andrew Meares

"Thanks to everyone in Team CSIRO who has worked tirelessly across the organisation to navigate us through this storm, to calmer waters ahead," Dr Marshall said in an email on Monday.
The prompt for the email, though, is one reason those calmer times may remain out of reach of the former Silicon Valley venture capitalist charged with running Australia's premier research agency, which marks its centenary in 2016.
The email was to welcome the move by Greg Hunt, the new Science Minister, to intervene in the agency's affairs, directing it to restore 15 climate research positions that Dr Marshall had deemed surplus to "Team CSIRO's" needs.
Removing Mr Hunt's spin on the $37 million funding during 10 years revealed Dr Marshall was given no extra cash to top up its $730 million-plus annual funding from the budget for the move. Instead, the CEO has to find the money from within.
Mr Hunt's rapid action marks a complete reversal of the mantra of his predecessor, Chris Pyne, that CSIRO was "an independent statutory agency governed by a board of directors", largely left to its own devices.
"I would think Larry Marshall could have had a stiff drink when he discovered Hunt was appointed science minister," says Andy Pitman, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science based at the University of NSW.

CSIRO cuts: Scientist questions future in Australia
Climate expert Dr Annette Hirsch is currently working in Switzerland and says the recent cuts to the CSIRO will make a 'huge influence' on her decision to come back to Australia. 

As Environment Minister Mr Hunt had already been active, working with Chief Scientist Alan Finkel and others to salvage a climate science centre that would preserve at least 40 of the 140 climate researchers. CSIRO managers had been exploring how to cut, transfer or outsource almost all of them.
Mr Hunt has offered his "strong support" for Dr Marshall in his role, and a senior government source denies patience with the chief has run out.

Not out?: Larry Marshall at the SCG, trying to rouse CSIRO leaders in September 2015. 

Still, that official says "it's going to be interesting" to see how Dr Marshall will cope with having to adjust his previous downgrading of climate research and handle a more hands-on minister who is himself "intent on repurposing the agency".
Another signal test will come when the CSIRO board decides whether to extend Dr Marshall's tenure beyond the end of 2016. The board had been tipped to accept the endorsement by the Turnbull government – made barely a week before the election was called – at its June meeting.
"Not yet" was reportedly Dr Marshall's answer to staff in Canberra asking about his contract extension last week. Fairfax Media sought confirmation from CSIRO.
Whether Dr Marshall can cast off the disarray of the past six months, which included multiple grillings by a Senate and incessant leaks to the media by disgruntled staff, remains an open question.
Response to his plans revealed by Fairfax Media in February to slice 350 jobs so soon after the Paris climate summit in late 2015 included international alarm and a petition signed by thousands.
In the end, just 20 climate positions are now slated to go. The other divisions hit– Land and Water, Data61 and manufacturing – were less successful in mounting a public case, and they will carry the bulk of about 275 job losses all up.
Ken Lee, one of the architects of the climate cuts, has opted to exit too. The head of the Oceans and Atmosphere unit and an expert in oil leaks, will depart for his native Canada in early 2017, according to an email sent to staff on Thursday.
Longer term, the loss of top scientists and capability will make it harder to lure and retain the next generation of talent, says John Church, a world-renowned sea-levels expert who will leave on August 19 after his position was made redundant.
Those going include researchers such Saul Cunningham, an award-winning ecologist, or Fiona Walsh, whose work on Indigenous communities will disappear with the closing of the Alice Spring research centre.
Dr Church declines to join the Greens in demanding Dr Marshall join those departing but wonders if an exit might not be too far off.
"If he's come this far and still not had his contract extended, why does he want to stay?," Church says.

Links

• Hunt: CSIRO to predict climate changes 10 years into future
• Scientists rue loss of technical edge at CSIRO
• The scientist at sea
• Hunt orders CSIRO climate science U-turn