16/12/2016

'The Arctic Is Unraveling,' Scientists Conclude After Latest Sobering Climate Report

InsideClimate News - Bob Berwyn

Unprecedented warming has sent the Arctic into uncharted territory, says latest NOAA report, as its science faces potential hostility from the Trump administration.
Secretary of State John Kerry, center, visited Norway this year, witnessing the impacts of a melting Arctic. Credit: Getty Images
The ill winds of climate change are irrevocably reshaping the Arctic, including massive declines in  sea ice and snow and a record-late start to sea ice formation this fall. Those were the sobering conclusions of the 2016 Arctic Report Card released Tuesday.
The report card is sponsored by the  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and co-authored by more than 50 scientists from Asia, North America and Europe. The data shows that the Arctic is warming at double the rate of the global average temperature. Between October 2015 and September 2016, temperatures over Arctic land areas were 2.0 degrees Celsius above the 1981-­2010 baseline, the warmest on record going back to 1900.
The report, released at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, clearly links the Arctic heatwave to a record-late start to formation of sea ice this fall, and to record high and low seasonal snow cover extent in the Northern Hemisphere. If the extreme warmth recorded in the Arctic this fall persists for the next few years, it may signal a completely new climate in the region, scientists said.
Jeremy Mathis, director of NOAA's Arctic Research Program, said the report highlights the clear and pronounced global warming signal in the Arctic and its effects cascading throughout the environment, like the spread of parasitic diseases in Arctic animals.
"We've seen a year in 2016 like we've never seen before ... with clear acceleration of many global warming signals. The Arctic was whispering change. Now it's not whispering. It's speaking, it's shouting change, and the changes are large," said co-author Donald Perovich, who studies Arctic climate at Dartmouth College.
Sustained observations of the Arctic is crucial to making science-based policy decisions, he added, a goal threatened by the inclusion of numerous climate deniers in President-elect Donald Trump's cabinet. This week, Trump's transition team posted a new "Energy Independence" website that repeats his previous intentions to open up vast areas for fossil fuel development and to scrap existing climate action plans.
Arctic ice doesn't care about politics, and what happens in the region now is critically important to the U.S., said Rafe Pomerance, chair of Arctic 21 and a member of the Polar Research Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
"What kind of Arctic do we want to have? It has to be one that maintains the stability of the climate system," he said. "The melting of Greenland is going to put an enormous hit on real estate values. The fate of Greenland is the fate of Miami. It's in the U.S. national interest to stop Greenland's ice sheet from melting. How are we going to bring it to a halt?"
The scientific report stands in stark contrast to the incoming administration's apparent intention to foster more fossil fuel development, he said.
"This is a byproduct of the poison of denialism, a political issue that has taken hold so deeply so that this is the kind of stuff that can be contemplated," he said. "Evidence doesn't mean anything, science doesn't seem to mean anything. They ought to take what's going on in the Arctic really seriously. This is a crisis. The Arctic is unraveling."
The report card underscores nearly a year of unusual conditions, said Lars Kaleschke, an Arctic researcher at the University of Hamburg who was not among the report's authors. Extremely warm air temperatures last January and February led to the smallest maximum winter sea ice extent on record, equaling the record set in  2015. And the return of extreme warmth in November led to a short period of ice retreat at a time when it's usually growing fast.
Kaleschke said he's become concerned by reports that the incoming U.S. administration may cut NASA's Earth observation budget, which includes many programs critical to understanding Arctic global warming changes.
"That would be a huge loss for the climate research community," he said. Those programs are critical to efforts to understand rapid Arctic changes. NASA's airborne IceBridge program, for example, helps confirm ice thickness measurements made by the European Space Agency's CryoSat program.
Kaleschke said Trump appears to have a clear anti-science attitude that will affect the world's ability to respond to climate change.
The  global warming signal was particularly evident in Greenland in 2016, said Marco Tedesco, a climate researcher with Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who was involved in the report.
"The Greenland Ice Sheet continued to lose mass in 2016. The melt onset was the second earliest and the melt season was 30 to 40 days longer than average in the northeast, he said. Spring snow cover extent in Greenland and other parts of the Arctic reached new record lows in spring and there's new evidence that snow depth is also decreasing, which would be a precursor to even earlier and faster melting."
Arctic permafrost is also releasing more greenhouse gases in the winter than plants can take up in the summer, making the Arctic a net source of heat-trapping pollution, he added.
Snow cover on land helps cool the entire Northern Hemisphere climate system, insulates soil and regulates the water cycle through the seasons.
Highlighting the the recent changes in the Arctic is even more important in light of the current political context, said University of Sheffield geographer Edward Hanna, who co-authored the report's chapter on air surface temperatures.
Air temperatures across the Arctic between January and March 2016 soared past previous record highs, with some locations reporting anomalies of more than 8 degrees Celsius. In recent decades, there have been more frequent surges of warm air from mid-latitudes far north into the Arctic. That lends support to the emerging hypothesis that the Arctic meltdown is changing the path of the jet stream, possibly leading to more sustained extreme weather events in the Northern Hemisphere, Hanna said.
The steady trend toward thinner, younger ice in the Arctic is also notable, suggesting the meltdown is irreversible.
"It's hard to see how the summer sea ice will survive," he concluded.

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15/12/2016

Fossil Fuel Divestment Is Worth $7tn Globally Yet Australia Still Clings To Coal

The Guardian - 

While the Australian government lags behind on climate change action, consumers, local councils and energy companies lead the way to clean energy
Protesters gather in Melbourne last week to demonstrate against the federal government's offer to Adani of a $1bn taxpayer-funded loan to build a railway line to its Carmichael coalmine. Photograph: Julian Smith/AAP
The Turnbull government has been an utter disappointment on so many things but nowhere as much as on the biggest issue of our time: climate change.
Unable to shrug off the legacy of the climate-denying Abbott government, it has been bullied out of any climate change ambition by science-denying fringe elements on the right.
The list of dishonourable mentions are long. Despite signing the Paris agreement last year, the Australian government has consistently undermined any efforts to keep the world below the safe level of 2C. Last week's backflip on the idea of a carbon-intensity emissions trading scheme – supported by most of the banks and the energy sector as the best way to reduce emissions and provide a level-playing field – is just the latest in a long line.
But the biggest worry is seeing Turnbull's coal-loving ministers push through the Adani mega coalmine in Queensland, replete with the offer of a $1bn taxpayer-funded loan to build a railway line through rich farmland to a coal terminal on the Great Barrier Reef. If constructed, the Adani mine will almost certainly condemn the Great Barrier Reef to the annals of history, not to mention blowing almost any chance of us living in a safe climate future.
But while climate change is mired in partisanship and cheap political point-scoring on a federal level, Australian organisations, driven by a strong market shift away from polluting fossil fuels, particularly coal, are leading the way towards the clean economy.
On Tuesday a report by global financial outfit Arabella shows that fossil fuel divestment is now worth an astounding A$7tn globally. It spans almost 700 organisations as diverse as the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, the City of Newcastle and the Australian National University.
This $7tn that is not invested in coal, oil and gas provides a significant financial indicator to back up what we already know: fossil fuels are on the nose.
While Australia may be lagging on a government level, many of our businesses are leading the world in waking up to the risks posed by fossil fuels and the opportunities of the new clean economy.
The Arabella report highlights that Australia has the most divestments per capita of any developed nation. And these organisations that have divested are by no means radical. It is groups such as the Australian Capital Territory's government, Australian Academy of Science, the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and the National Tertiary Education Union. Add to the mix almost 30 local government councils, 10 super funds, a handful of our top universities and you get the picture.
There is even a chance you live in a fossil-free council considering that more than one in 10 Australians now live in a council area that has sworn off fossil fuels.
In 350.org's work, we deal closely with banks, energy companies and organisations that are constantly weighing up the risks associated with fossil fuel investments. All of them have told us just how quickly things are changing.
The recently released Melbourne University sustainability plan acknowledges the changing market dynamics:
Companies which effectively manage environmental, social and governance responsibilities should yield better risk-adjusted returns over the long term.
And as coal enters structural decline, clean energy is booming. Consumers and local government are bypassing government barriers and again leading the way.Local governments, such as the City of Melbourne and others such as the ACT are teaming up to source their energy from renewables – thus providing security for investors to build more clean energy infrastructure.
The Renewable Energy Benefits: Measuring the Economics report that came out earlier this year showed that doubling renewable energy's current share of the global energy mix to 36% by 2030 would create 24 million jobs and deliver about half of the emissions reduction necessary under the Paris agreement.
For Australia this would boost our economy by 1.7%. The clean energy rush would create a swathe of new jobs in regional areas to meet the demand to transition from our dirty grid to the new renewable one.
Already we are seeing a transition that is well under way. Just last week Energy Australia announced an investment of $1.5bn into new wind and solar projects to meet its renewable energy target. It also announced support for a price on carbon – the same day the Turnbull government backflipped and said a carbon price was now off the table. Something is seriously wrong when the country's biggest climate polluters are calling for a tax on their operations and the government refuses to consider it.
Energy Australia's announcement is one of many from around the country: Eco Energy is building a new solar plant in regional Queensland; AGL is building solar plants across regional New South Wales, including a new one near Broken Hill; and Origin Energy is seeking to divest much of its oil and conventional gas assets to focus more on renewables.
The key now is to ensure our big three energy companies collectively push beyond our rudderless federal government, not fall into the idea that gas is the answer over coal, and quicken the pace to clean energy. It helps that at this point in time, both large-scale wind and solar projects are now cheaper than fossil-fuel energy sources.
Over the past few years, leadership from business has been the main driver in Australia's route to decarbonisation. But businesses can't bear the load alone and they have recognised this. In November, Andrew Vesey, the chief executive of AGL, was one of 17 eminent Australians who called on the government to stop blocking the transition, "facilitate and accelerate the inevitable closure of coal plants" and "create an attractive sustainable investment environment for clean energy".
If we are to benefit from the jobs of the new economy and ensure a safe future for the planet, Malcolm Turnbull and the energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, must stop listening to the science-denying members of their party and instead start making some real decisions about what our energy and economic future will look like.

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U.S. Energy Department Balks At Trump Request For Names On Climate Change

Reuters - David Shepardson

A child embraces a globe shaped balloon ahead of the start of the 2015 Paris World Climate Change Conference, known as the COP21 summit, in Rome, Italy , November 29, 2015. REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi
The U.S. Energy Department said on Tuesday it will not comply with a request from President-elect Donald Trump's Energy Department transition team for the names of people who have worked on climate change and the professional society memberships of lab workers.
The Energy Department's response could signal a rocky transition for the president-elect's energy team and potential friction between the new leadership and the staffers who remain in place.
The memo sent to the Energy Department on Tuesday and reviewed by Reuters last week contains 74 questions, including a request for a list of all department employees and contractors who attended the annual global climate talks hosted by the United Nations within the last five years.
Energy Department spokesman Eben Burnham-Snyder said Tuesday the department will not comply.
"Our career workforce, including our contractors and employees at our labs, comprise the backbone of (the Energy Department) and the important work our department does to benefit the American people," Burnham-Snyder said.
"We are going to respect the professional and scientific integrity and independence of our employees at our labs and across our department," he added. "We will be forthcoming with all publicly available information with the transition team. We will not be providing any individual names to the transition team."
He added that the request "left many in our workforce unsettled."
Andrew Rosenberg, an official at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the Energy Department "made the right choice in refusing this absurd and dangerous request. Federal agencies need the best available science to respond to the growing risk of climate change."
Reuters reported late Monday that former Texas Governor Rick Perry is expected to be named by Trump to run the Energy Department. The agency employs more than 90,000 people working on nuclear weapons maintenance and research labs, nuclear energy, advanced renewable energy, batteries and climate science.
The memo sought a list of all department employees or contractors who have attended any meetings on the social cost of carbon, a measurement that federal agencies use to weigh the costs and benefits of new energy and environmental regulations. It also asked for all publications written by employees at the department's 17 national laboratories for the past three years.
Trump transition officials declined to comment on the memo.
"This feels like the first draft of an eventual political enemies list," a Department of Energy employee, who asked not to be identified because he feared a reprisal by the Trump transition team, had told Reuters.
Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman, said in a news briefing on Tuesday that the queries "could have been an attempt to target civil servants," including "scientists and lawyers and other experts who are critical to the success of the federal government's ability to make policy."
By design, their work transcends the term of any one president, Earnest said.
Trump, a Republican, said during his election campaign that climate change was a hoax perpetrated by China to damage U.S. manufacturing. He said he would rip up last year's landmark global climate deal struck in Paris that was signed by President Barack Obama.
Since winning the Nov. 8 election, however, Trump has said he will keep an "open mind" about the Paris deal. He also met with former Vice President Al Gore, a strong advocate for action on climate change.
After that meeting, he picked Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a climate change skeptic, to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

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Scientists Are Frantically Copying U.S. Climate Data, Fearing It Might Vanish Under Trump

Washington Post - Brady Dennis

A satellite image of Hurricane Otto approaching the coast of Central America on Nov. 24. (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
Alarmed that decades of crucial climate measurements could vanish under a hostile Trump administration, scientists have begun a feverish attempt to copy reams of government data onto independent servers in hopes of safeguarding it from any political interference.
The efforts include a “guerrilla archiving” event in Toronto, where experts will copy irreplaceable public data, meetings at the University of Pennsylvania focused on how to download as much federal data as possible in the coming weeks, and a collaboration of scientists and database experts who are compiling an online site to harbor scientific information.
“Something that seemed a little paranoid to me before all of a sudden seems potentially realistic, or at least something you’d want to hedge against,” said Nick Santos, an environmental researcher at the University of California at Davis, who over the weekend began copying government climate data onto a nongovernment server, where it will remain available to the public. “Doing this can only be a good thing. Hopefully they leave everything in place. But if not, we’re planning for that.”
In recent weeks, President-elect Donald Trump has nominated a growing list of Cabinet members who have questioned the overwhelming scientific consensus around global warming. His transition team at the Department of Energy has asked agency officials for names of employees and contractors who have participated in international climate talks and worked on the scientific basis for Obama administration-era regulations of carbon emissions. One Trump adviser suggested that NASA no longer should conduct climate research and instead should focus on space exploration.

The Trump transition team has issued a list of 74 questions for the Energy Department, asking officials there to identify which department employees and contractors have worked on forging an international climate pact as well as domestic efforts to cut the nation's carbon output. (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)

Those moves have stoked fears among the scientific community that Trump, who has called the notion of man-made climate change “a hoax” and vowed to reverse environmental policies put in place by President Obama, could try to alter or dismantle parts of the federal government’s repository of data on everything from rising sea levels to the number of wildfires in the country.
Michael Halpern, deputy director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists, argued that Trump has appointed a “band of climate conspiracy theorists” to run transition efforts at various agencies, along with nominees to lead them who share similar views.
“They have been salivating at the possibility of dismantling federal climate research programs for years. It’s not unreasonable to think they would want to take down the very data that they dispute,” Halpern said in an email. “There is a fine line between being paranoid and being prepared, and scientists are doing their best to be prepared. . . . Scientists are right to preserve data and archive websites before those who want to dismantle federal climate change research programs storm the castle.”
To be clear, neither Trump nor his transition team have said the new administration plans to manipulate or curtail publicly available data. The transition team did not respond to a request for comment. But some scientists aren’t taking any chances.
“What are the most important .gov climate assets?” Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist and self-proclaimed “climate hawk,” tweeted from his Arizona home Saturday evening. “Scientists: Do you have a US .gov climate database that you don’t want to see disappear?”
Within hours, responses flooded in from around the country. Scientists added links to dozens of government databases to a Google spreadsheet. Investors offered to help fund efforts to copy and safeguard key climate data. Lawyers offered pro bono legal help. Database experts offered server space and help organizing mountains of data. In California, Santos began building an online repository to “make sure these data sets remain freely and broadly accessible.”
Climate data from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have been politically vulnerable. When Tom Karl, director of the National Centers for Environmental Information, and his colleagues published a study in 2015 seeking to challenge the idea that there had been a global warming “slowdown” or “pause” during the 2000s, they relied, in significant part, on updates to NOAA’s ocean temperature data set, saying the data “do not support the notion of a global warming ‘hiatus.’”
In response, the U.S. House Science, Space and Technology Committee chair, Rep. Lamar S. Smith (R-Tex.), tried to subpoena the scientists and their records.
That effort launched by Holthaus is one of several underway to preserve key federal scientific data.
In Philadelphia, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, along with members of groups such as Open Data Philly and the software company Azavea, have been meeting to figure out ways to harvest and store important data sets.
At the University of Toronto this weekend, researchers are holding what they call a “guerrilla archiving” event to catalogue key federal environmental data ahead of Trump’s inauguration. The event “is focused on preserving information and data from the Environmental Protection Agency, which has programs and data at high risk of being removed from online public access or even deleted,” the organizers said. “This includes climate change, water, air, toxics programs.”
The event is part of a broader effort to help San Francisco-based Internet Archive with its End of Term 2016 project, an effort by university, government and nonprofit officials to find and archive valuable pages on federal websites. The project has existed through several presidential transitions.
At the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in San Francisco, where more than 20,000 earth and climate scientists have swarmed the city’s biggest conference center this week, an air of gallows humor marked many conversations. Some young scientists said their biggest personal concern is funding for their research, much of which relies on support from NASA and other agencies.
“You just don’t know what’s coming,” said Adam Campbell, who studies the imperiled Ross Ice Shelf of Antarctica.
But others also arrived at the meeting with a strengthened sense of resolve. Campbell was planning to join hundreds of other people at a rally Tuesday, organized in part by the activist group ClimateTruth.org, encouraging researchers to “stand up for science.” “People have felt a call to arms,” Campbell said. “We need to be outspoken.”

Donald Trump will enter the White House with an environmental policy agenda opposed to that of the Obama administration and many other nations that have pledged support to the Paris climate agreement. The Washington Post's Chris Mooney breaks down what a Donald Trump presidency will mean when it comes to climate change. (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)

Lawyers with the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund — which provides legal assistance to researchers facing lawsuits over their work on climate change — will be holding one-on-one consultations with researchers who think they might need help from a lawyer. And the organization’s table in the AGU exhibition hall is piled high with booklets titled “Handling Political Harassment and Legal Intimidation: A Pocket Guide for Scientists.”
“We literally thought about it the day after the election,” said Lauren Kurtz, the legal defense fund’s executive director. “I have gotten a lot of calls from scientists who are really concerned. . . . So it’s intended in some ways to be reassuring, to say, ‘There is a game plan; we’re here to help you.’”
The 16-page guide contains advice for government researchers who believe their work is being suppressed, as well as how scientists should react if they receive hate mail or death threats.
Holthaus, who encouraged scientists to flag key databases, said the effort to safeguard them is mostly precautionary.
“I don’t actually think that it will happen,” he said of efforts by an incoming administration to obscure or alter scientific data. “But I think it could happen. . . . All of these data sets are priceless, in the sense that if there is a gap, it greatly diminishes their usefulness.”
That’s the main concern for Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. He said he doubts that even the most hostile administration would try to do away with existing climate data, given the potential backlash.
“I think it’s much more likely they’d try to end the collection of data, which would minimize its value. Having continuous data is crucial for understanding long-term trends,” Dessler said. “Trends are what climate change is about — understanding these long-term changes. Think about how much better off the people who don’t want to do anything about climate change would be if all the long-term temperature trends didn’t exist.”
He added, “If you can just get rid of the data, you’re in a stronger position to argue we should do nothing about climate change.”

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14/12/2016

Methane From Food Production Might Be The Next Wildcard In Climate Change

The Conversation -  |  |  |  |  | 

Rice paddies are one of the major sources of methane in agriculture. Amir Jina/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND
Methane concentrations in the atmosphere are growing faster than any time in the past 20 years. The increase is largely driven by the growth in food production, according to the Global Methane Budget released today. Methane is contributing less to global warming than carbon dioxide (CO₂), but it is a very powerful greenhouse gas.
Since 2014, methane concentrations in the atmosphere have begun to track the most carbon-intensive pathways developed for the 21st century by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The growth of methane emissions from human activities comes at a time when CO₂ emissions from burning fossil fuels have stalled over the past three years.
If these trends continue, methane growth could become a dangerous climate wildcard, overwhelming efforts to reduce CO₂ in the short term.
Methane concentration pathways from IPCC and observations from the NOAA measuring network (Saunois et al 2016, Environmental Research Letters). The projected global warming range by the year 2100, relative to 1850-1900, is shown for each pathway.
In  two papers published today (see here and here), we bring together the most comprehensive ensemble of data and models to build a complete picture of methane and where it is going – the global methane budget. This includes all major natural and human sources of methane, and the places where it ends up in methane “sinks” such as the atmosphere and the land.
This work is a companion effort to the global CO₂ budget published annually, both by international scientists under the Global Carbon Project.

Where does all the methane go?
Methane is emitted from multiple sources, mostly from land, and accumulates in the atmosphere. In our greenhouse gas budgets, we look at two important numbers.
First, we look at emissions (which activities are producing greenhouse gases).
Second, we look at where this gas ends up. The important quantity here is the accumulation (concentration) of methane in the atmosphere, which leads to global warming. The accumulation results from the difference between total emissions and the destruction of methane in the atmosphere and uptake by soil bacteria.
CO₂ emissions take centre stage in most discussions to limit climate change. The focus is well justified, given that CO₂ is responsible for more than 80% of global warming due to greenhouse gases. The concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere (now around 400 parts per million) has risen by 44% since the Industrial Revolution (around the year 1750).
While CO₂ in the atmosphere has increased steadily, methane concentrations grew relatively slowly throughout the 2000s, but since 2007 have grown ten times faster. Methane increased faster still in 2014 and 2015.
Remarkably, this growth is occurring on top of methane concentrations that are already 150% higher than at the start of the Industrial Revolution (now around 1,834 parts per billion).
The global methane budget is important for other reasons too: it is less well understood than the CO₂ budget and is influenced to a much greater extent by a wide variety of human activities. About 60% of all methane emissions come from human actions.
These include living sources – such as livestock, rice paddies and landfills – and fossil fuel sources, such as emissions during the extraction and use of coal, oil and natural gas.
We know less about natural sources of methane, such as those from wetlands, permafrost, termites and geological seeps.
Biomass and biofuel burning originates from both human and natural fires.
Global methane budget 2003-2012 based on Saunois et al. 2016, Earth System Science Data. See the Global Carbon Atlas at http://www.globalcarbonatlas.org. LARGE IMAGE

 Given the rapid increase in methane concentrations in the atmosphere, what factors are responsible for its increase?

Uncovering the causes
Scientists are still uncovering the reasons for the rise. Possibilities include: increased emissions from agriculture, particularly from rice and cattle production; emissions from tropical and northern wetlands; and greater losses during the extraction and use of fossil fuels, such as from fracking in the United States. Changes in how much methane is destroyed in the atmosphere might also be a contributor.
Our approach shows an emerging and consistent picture, with a suggested dominant source along with other contributing secondary sources.
First, carbon isotopes suggest a stronger contribution from living sources than from fossil fuels. These isotopes reflect the weights of carbon atoms in methane from different sources. Methane from fossil fuel use also increased, but evidently not by as much as from living sources.
Second, our analysis suggests that the tropics were a dominant contributor to the atmospheric growth. This is consistent with the vast agricultural development and wetland areas found there (and consistent with increased emissions from living sources).
This also excludes a dominant role for fossil fuels, which we would expect to be concentrated in temperate regions such as the US and China. Those emissions have increased, but not by as much as from tropical and living sources.
Third, state-of-the-art global wetland models show little evidence for any significant increase in wetland emissions over the study period.
The overall chain of evidence suggests that agriculture, including livestock, is likely to be a dominant cause of the rapid increase in methane concentrations. This is consistent with increased emissions reported by the Food and Agriculture Organisation and does not exclude the role of other sources.
Remarkably, there is still a gap between what we know about methane emissions and methane concentrations in the atmosphere. If we add all the methane emissions estimated with data inventories and models, we get a number bigger than the one consistent with the growth in methane concentrations. This highlights the need for better accounting and reporting of methane emissions.
We also don’t know enough about emissions from wetlands, thawing permafrost and the destruction of methane in the atmosphere.

The way forward
At a time when global CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels and industry have stalled for three consecutive years, the upward methane trend we highlight in our new papers is unwelcome news. Food production will continue to grow strongly to meet the demands of a growing global population and to feed a growing global middle class keen on diets richer in meat.
However, unlike CO₂, which remains in the atmosphere for centuries, a molecule of methane lasts only about 10 years.
This, combined with methane’s super global warming potency, means we have a massive opportunity. If we cut methane emissions now, this will have a rapid impact on methane concentrations in the atmosphere, and therefore on global warming.
There are large global and domestic efforts to support more climate-friendly food production with many successes, ample opportunities for improvement, and potential game-changers.
However, current efforts are insufficient if we are to follow pathways consistent with keeping global warming to below 2℃. Reducing methane emissions needs to become a prevalent feature in the global pursuit of the sustainable future outlined in the Paris Agreement.

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Bill Gates Leads New Fund as Fears of U.S. Retreat on Climate Grow

New York Times - Hiroko Tabuchi | Henry Fountain

Bill Gates has teamed up with the University of California system, led by Janet Napolitano, left, for his new investment fund. Christophe Ena/Associated Press 
President-elect Donald J. Trump has bred fears that the United States will take a back seat in global efforts to tackle climate change.
Could a billion-dollar investment fund led by Bill Gates and his fellow technology titans fill the void?
Mr. Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, announced on Monday the start of a fund to invest in transformative energy research and development to reduce the emissions that cause climate change. The work would supplement and build on basic research already underway at government labs that may be threatened by the incoming administration.
Despite Mr. Trump’s expressed skepticism about climate change and his appointment of fossil fuel advocates to his cabinet, Mr. Gates said he expected the president-elect to recognize that government funding of basic research would eventually be good for business, jobs, infrastructure and other economic elements that Mr. Trump campaigned on.
“It’s a good deal,” Mr. Gates said.
Mr. Gates’s new investment fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, is intended to capitalize on the government-backed research through partnerships with the University of California system and other institutions.
Mr. Trump has not talked extensively about his views on energy research to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But he has named people who reject established climate science to some crucial administration positions, including the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Those being considered to head the Department of Energy, which coordinates and funds a lot of advanced energy research, have backgrounds in the fossil fuel industry. And a recent questionnaire circulated at the department by Mr. Trump’s transition team included requests for the names of employees shaping United States climate policy — raising concerns that the administration is looking to cut back on efforts to control planet-warming emissions.
“We don’t have any inside knowledge of what the energy policies of this administration will look like,” said Mr. Gates, who said he had a brief telephone call with Mr. Trump several weeks ago but declined to describe it further. “It’s possible they will reduce energy research. But it’s also significantly possible they would increase energy research.”
Mr. Gates’s remarks came during a telephone interview in which he described details of the investment fund. The backers include Mr. Gates and 19 other investors, including Jack Ma, founder of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, and the venture capitalists John Doerr and Vinod Khosla. The fund will have a life span of 15 to 20 years.
The fund will consider investing in electricity generation and storage, transportation, agriculture and energy-system efficiency. Seed money for start-ups and projects ready for commercialization, among other efforts, will be considered, fund officials said.
Solar panels in the Palm Springs area of California. Bill Gates backs a string of clean-energy projects, including a nuclear reactor start-up and a company developing batteries made from nontoxic materials. Credit Lucy Nicholson/Reuters, via Reuters
Mr. Gates’s plans to establish a fund were first announced at the United Nations climate talks in Paris in November 2015. At the same meeting, the United States and about 20 other nations pledged to double their spending on clean-energy research and development under a plan called Mission Innovation.
Mr. Gates said that in the year since Paris, a number of countries had followed through on the plan. “I do hope the U.S. and other countries continue along the Mission Innovation path,” he said.
Mr. Gates backs a string of clean-energy projects, including the nuclear reactor start-up TerraPower, and Aquion Energy, a company developing batteries made from nontoxic materials like saltwater. Mr. Gates also provided seed money for Carbon Engineering, a start-up led by the Harvard University physicist David Keith that is testing a process to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
But those projects have yet to yield real-world results. Eight years after it was founded, TerraPower has not built a working prototype. Last year, it said that it was shifting some of its focus away from what had appeared to be a promising “traveling-wave reactor” design that burns fuel made from depleted uranium. The start-up is now exploring a different nuclear concept based on molten chloride reactor technology, which uses a molten salt mixture, instead of water, as the primary reactor coolant.
And while scientists see carbon-capture methods as a potential game changer in efforts to stabilize the global climate, they fear the technology would remain prohibitively expensive.
The elusiveness of concrete breakthroughs — and the long time frames and significant capital required for energy start-ups to develop materials, hardware and technology — have underscored the difficulty venture capitalists have faced so far in funding breakthroughs, as well as in generating returns for investors.
One oft-cited study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found venture capital investors lost over half of the $25 billion they plowed into the clean-technology sector from 2006 to 2011; it declared the venture capital model for the sector “broken.”
Mr. Gates said that his new fund would tap into scientific expertise “way more than any venture fund would have.” He said the fund would announce a management team within three months.
“We’re going to have a very deep scientific team both at the companies itself and as our advisers,” he said.
A powerful ally, he said, is the University of California system, which is a partner in the fund.
Janet Napolitano, president of the system, said the schools had “hundreds of scientists working on the issue of how do you create an affordable, reliable energy supply that doesn’t contribute to the greenhouse gas problem.”
Another major difference, Mr. Gates said, was that the fund’s investors were in it for the long haul. They saw the value of waiting decades for a big reward.
“And once you can make cheap electricity reliably,” he said, “there’s a huge market for it.”

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Trump's Transition: Sceptics Guide Every Agency Dealing With Climate Change

The Guardian - 

With at least nine senior members of transition team denying basic scientific understanding, president-elect’s choices demonstrate pro-fossil fuels agenda
Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt, Trump’s nominee for head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has claimed scientists disagree about the causes of global warming. Photograph: Nick Oxford/Reuters
The heads of Donald Trump’s transition teams for NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior and the Department of Energy, as well as his nominees to lead the EPA and the Department of the Interior, all question the science of human-caused climate change, in a signal of the president-elect’s determination to embark upon an aggressively pro-fossil fuels agenda.
Trump has assembled a transition team in which at least nine senior members deny basic scientific understanding that the planet is warming due to the burning of carbon and other human activity. These include the transition heads of all the key agencies responsible for either monitoring or dealing with climate change. None of these transition heads have any background in climate science.
Trump has also nominated Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt to lead the EPA and is expected to pick congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers to head the interior department. Pruitt has claimed that scientists “continue to disagree” about the causes and extent of global warming while McMorris Rodgers has said that former vice-president Al Gore, who has championed climate action, “deserves an ‘F’ in science.”
The president-elect has vowed to pursue an “America first” energy policy that will open up a new frontier in domestic coal, oil and gas extraction while eviscerating the effort to combat climate change, which Trump has previously called a “hoax”.
Trump is personally invested in this agenda. According to his latest financial disclosure records, Trump held investments in the fossil fuel companies Shell, Halliburton, Total and Chevron. His largest energy investment was in BHP Billiton, with the documents showing a stake worth up to $1.015m.
Trump also had interests in Energy Transfer Partners and Phillips 66, which are behind the controversial Dakota Access pipeline that Trump wants to see completed. Jason Miller, a Trump spokesman, has said that Trump sold all of his shares in June but has produced no evidence to prove this.
Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said of Trump’s choices: “These are people that had slipped out of the conversation, we haven’t been even debating them in years because they were so out of step with where the American public and business is going on climate change.
“Now they’ve leapfrogged into the White House. The world has been turned upside down and it feels like basic science is up for debate. Will we now have to debate whether gravity exists too?”

EPA
Myron Ebell, head of the EPA transition team, is director of energy and environment at the libertarian thinktank the Competitive Enterprise Institute and chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group that opposes “global warming alarmism”.Ebell has said that the scientific consensus on climate change is “phoney” and that scientists are part of an effort to spread falsehoods that will result in millions of people being “further impoverished by the higher energy prices resulting from the alarmists’ policy agenda”.
He has suggested that “alarmists could also be prosecuted for denying or grossly underestimating the deleterious effects of their energy-rationing policies on human flourishing”.
Other members of the EPA transition team have been plucked from rightwing thinktanks with fossil fuel funding. Amy Oliver Cooke, of the Independence Institute, has said she is an “energy feminist because I’m pro-choice in energy sources”. She has lashed out at “global warming alarmism” on Twitter and claimed falsely in 2014 that there had been 16 years without any global warming.
David Kruetzer, of the conservative Heritage Foundation, has erroneously claimed there has been “global cooling” in recent years while David Schnare, a former EPA lawyer, said last year that “for the last 18 years, the global temperature has been level”. Schnare’s statement is incorrect.

Department of the Interior
Doug Domenech, head of the interior department transition team, has said carbon dioxide is a “trace greenhouse gas” and has railed against “climate alarmists”.
Domenech is a former Virginia secretary of resources and is now part of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which states the “forgotten moral case for fossil fuels” as its mission. Trump’s plan to open up more land for drilling will “reinvigorate communities across the nation, especially those most seriously impacted by the current restrictive energy policies”, Domenech wrote in November.

NASA
Chris Shank, deputy chief of staff to the Republican congressman Lamar Smith, is leading Trump’s landing team at NASA. Last year, Shank said: “The rhetoric that’s coming out, the hottest year in history, actually is not backed up by the science – or that the droughts, the fires, the hurricanes, etc, are caused by climate change, but it’s just weather.”
NASA has an internationally venerated climate research operation that may be winnowed away under a Trump administration. Bob Walker, a Trump adviser and climate sceptic, has suggested completely removing NASA’s $1.9bn Earth sciences budget and focusing instead on deep space exploration.

Department of Energy
Thomas Pyle, who is leading the Department of Energy transition team, is president of the American Energy Alliance, a group that advocates for fossil fuel development. Pyle, a former lobbyist for Koch Industries, has opposed the deployment of electric vehicles and said that human influence on the climate has “yet to be determined”.
Trump’s shortlist for cabinet positions also contains climate change deniers and pro-drilling advocates.
Rick Perry, the former Texas governor and climate sceptic, is being considered for secretary of energy, reports say. He would lead a department he was unable to name in a 2011 presidential debate when listing government bodies he would scrap.
Kevin Cramer, a congressman and potential energy secretary, said in 2012 that “we know the global climate is cooling. Number one, we know that. So the idea that CO2 is somehow causing global warming is on its face fraudulent.”

 Other positions
Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson is reportedly a top contender for secretary of state. Photograph: Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters
Rex Tillerson, chief executive of Exxon Mobil, is reportedly a top contender for secretary of state, a year after it emerged that Exxon spent years covering up and denying climate science despite being well aware of the science of global warming.
Steve Bannon, who will be one of Trump’s closest advisers in the White House, has given a platform, via his rightwing website Breitbart, to climate change conspiracy theorists such as the British writer James Delingpole, who has called climate activists “scum” guilty of trying to “advance the cause of global governance”.
Bannon also has a little-known link to environmental work via his involvement in Biosphere 2, a $200m research facility in the mountains outside Tucson, Arizona. As chief executive of the project in the early 1990s, Bannon oversaw experiments that attempted to simulate how the world, represented by thousands of plants and animals housed within a giant glass dome, would cope with air pollution and climate change.
Two disgruntled colleagues, Abigail Alling and Mark Van Thillo, were fired in 1994 after breaking into Biosphere 2 to warn other members of Bannon’s management style. During court proceedings against the duo, Bannon admitted to calling Alling a “bimbo” and threatening to kick her “ass”. He managed the project until it was transferred to Columbia University in 1996.
Trump has threatened to withdraw the US from international climate agreements, cut clean energy spending and loosen regulations for fossil fuel companies. He received $700,000 from oil and gas interests during his election campaign – a sizable amount but still $100,000 less than Hillary Clinton and nowhere near the $10.4m raised by Trump’s Republican primary opponent Jeb Bush.
Robert and Rebekah Mercer, two prominent Republican donors, supported Trump and their financing of climate science denial will likely reverberate at the White House.
The Mercers have backed the Heartland Institute and Heritage Foundation, conservative groups that have tried to discredit climate scientists, and via their foundation bankrolled initiatives such as the Berkeley Earth and Oregon Petition projects. Both endeavors attempted to reveal flaws in mainstream climate science, only to validate scientists’ findings and mislead the public, respectively.
The Koch brothers, who have previously bankrolled candidates who promised to water down environmental protections, largely sat out of the 2016 presidential election but their influence on Trump is now coming to bear through the many groups they fund.
Koch-backed groups supply a number of advisers and transition staff that Trump now relies upon and the conservative network is now sounding upbeat about the new president. Green groups, which were briefly cheered when they saw Al Gore march into Trump Tower for a meeting on Monday, now bitterly complain that this was a smokescreen for Trump’s nakedly anti-environment agenda.
“We are seeing the wholesale move of people associated with climate misinformation campaigns into Trump’s administration in a big way,” said Robert Brulle, a sociology and environmental scientist at Drexel University. “Myron Ebell, for example, is the leader of the climate counter-movement that opposes any restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.
“Trump is getting two pushes – one from the conservative movement and another from fossil fuel interests. If it was one or the other, it wouldn’t be so strong, but they are combined. It’s pretty clear that his administration will be sympathetic to fossil fuel interests. Whether they achieve that is another matter because there will be stiff resistance from the environmental movement and also there will be international concern. We’ll soon see how influential that concern is.”
While Trump can certainly hamper the effort to avoid dangerous climate change, there will be limits to his reach. The plummeting cost of solar and wind energy and the woes of the coal industry can’t be reversed by a president. Cities and certain states, most notably New York and California, have vowed to forge ahead with emission cuts, vehicle electrification and energy efficiency measures.
Federal agencies do have undeniable clout. The EPA oversees clean air and water standards, the Department of the Interior is responsible for millions of acres of public land, including prized sites such as Yellowstone national park and the Everglades. Fossil fuel interests may have deep roots in the Trump administration but it’s unlikely that the American public will tolerate the dissolution of popular protections that have been in place for the past 40 years.
“I think it’s likely there will be a quick failure followed by a correction,” said Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman for South Carolina. “You get found out at the EPA pretty quickly. It’s not like Fema, where there is a hurricane only once in a while. There will be plenty of opportunities to display incompetence and there won’t be the scapegoat of Barack Obama to blame anymore.
“Donald Trump has made promises to coal and also to natural gas. The problem is that these promises are inconsistent with each other and that will be revealed. The question is how quickly coal miners, and others, will realize that they have been had.”

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