There's Never Been A More Pressing Time To Combat Climate Change

Huffington Post - Suzanne Harter

The election limbo mustn't stifle urgently needed action.

Every second counts. AFP/Getty Images

While Australia reels from an unsettled election, one thing remains clear: the next government will need to act quickly on climate change if we are to honour Australia's Paris Climate commitments.
In fact, without a change of policy from our federal government, we currently stand little chance of meeting our agreed targets to reduce climate pollution 26-28 percent by 2030 based on 2005 levels.
The Paris Climate agreement is designed to cut global carbon emissions as fast as possible and to achieve net zero climate pollution well before the end of the century.
It includes a goal to keep global warming below 2 degrees, and to pursue a 1.5 degree limit -- critical if we are to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change and to keep the world's coral reefs alive.
So, what does this mean for Australia's next government? The political chaos in Australia is reflected elsewhere, most notably the United Kingdom on the back of the Brexit vote and in the United States with a Presidential election next year. However, political uncertainty in these countries has not halted progress on climate change.
While the UK conservative government's Energy and Climate Change Secretary Amber Rudd has acknowledged that the UK's role in dealing with a warming planet may have been made harder by the Brexit vote, she nonetheless confirmed UK's commitment, saying "let me be clear: we remain committed to dealing with climate change."
This sentiment was reinforced last week when the UK government agreed to adopt a goal of cutting 1990-level carbon emissions 57 percent by 2030 -- keeping the country on target to meet its long-term, legally binding goal to reduce emissions by 80 percent by 2050.
In the US, President Obama has refused to bow to big polluter pressure against taking serious climate action. Not only has the US committed (alongside China) to ratify the Paris Agreement this year, last week President Obama signed onto a North American Climate, Clean Energy and the Environment Partnership with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
The partnership is far-reaching and includes a historic goal for North America to achieve 50 percent clean power generation by 2025 through clean energy development and deployment, clean energy innovation and energy efficiency. It is the kind of genuine carbon cutting action we need to see here in Australia.
But in the election chaos, Australia's climate policy is currently left sitting dormant -– susceptible to changing political whims. Climate leadership is now essential to transforming our massively polluting energy sector, and to provide the business and investment certainty needed for new clean investment.
Market Force researchers recently found that renewable energy lending by Australia's Big Four banks has fallen to a measly $216 million for the first six months of 2016. In stark contrast, renewable energy is a booming industry globally, yet underperforming in Australia after a massive 88 percent investment drop in 2014. US$28 trillion is expected to be invested globally in renewable energy and efficiency equipment by 2035; more than coal, oil and gas combined. Yet this growth is not being harnessed locally, and that needs to change.
Before the recent election, both major Parties committed to some form of climate policy review. The ALP will conduct an Electricity Modernisation Review and determine the mechanism that will be used to drive their 50 percent renewable energy target.
The Coalition has referred repeatedly to a 2017 climate policy review that appears to be the catch-all for all things climate and policy. The Direct Action Plan is still holding court as the Coalition's centrepiece climate policy, but with no additional funding in the latest budget, and emissions going up there genuinely is need for urgent review.
Climate policy cannot wait while the world moves around us, while we miss out on the wave of global investment that is happening in renewable energy and energy efficiency, and while we go backwards on our international climate commitments.
What's needed is an urgent broad-based review that prioritises the closure of dirty coal power stations and growth of renewable energy, that sets Australia on the path to efficient, effective and durable policy that will provide certainty for investors, and that rapidly turns the tide on Australia's growing climate pollution.

Links

• Pink Snow Looks Awesome, But Is Another Climate Change Indicator
• Coal Won't Solve Energy Poverty, Renewables Will
• If You're Younger Than 31, You've Never Experienced This
• Dying Coral Reefs Likely To Be Walloped For Third Year In A Row
• This Is Probably The First Mammal Extinct Because Of Man-Made Climate Change

First 6 Months Of 2016 Hottest Ever Recorded In New Zealand

Washington Post - Nick Perry | AP

FILE - In this Feb. 6, 2016 file photo, tourist relax at the end of the track at the Franz Josef Glacier in New Zealand. Ski fields are struggling to open and winter electricity consumption is down in New Zealand after the first six months of 2016 proved to be the hottest start to a year that scientists have ever recorded. Temperatures in the South Pacific nation were 1.4 degrees Celsius (2.5 Fahrenheit) above the long-term average for the first half of the year, according to the government-funded National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research. (Nick Perry/Associated Press)

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Ski fields are struggling to open and winter electricity consumption is down in New Zealand after the first six months of 2016 proved to be the hottest start to a year that scientists have ever recorded.
Temperatures in the South Pacific nation were 1.4 degrees Celsius (2.5 Fahrenheit) above the long-term average for the first half of the year, according to the government-funded National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research.
That's the highest since record-keeping began more than a century ago, and significantly higher than the previous record of 1.1 Celsius above average, reached in 1938 and again in 1999.
Chris Brandolino, a scientist at the research agency, said Monday that ocean temperatures in the Tasman Sea to the west of New Zealand have been unusually warm this year and that warmer winds from the north have also predominated.
"What's happened in the background is that the Earth has continued to warm as greenhouse gas levels have risen," he said.
The agency reported that carbon dioxide levels recorded at a station near Wellington passed 400 parts per million in June for the first time. The threshold is seen as significant internationally as an indicator of climate change.
While many New Zealanders reveled in a summer that never seemed to end, commercial ski fields including Coronet Peak, Mount Hutt and Turoa have found themselves with little snow, electing to delay opening or operating with limited runs as the Southern Hemisphere winter gets underway.
Brandolino said the rise in average temperatures doesn't necessarily mean the ski season will be bad, "although if I'm a skier or snow enthusiast, record warm temperatures aren't going to bode well for me."
Transpower, the government agency which owns the national electricity grid, provided figures to The Associated Press showing that New Zealanders consumed about 2 percent less electricity in June than they did during the same month a year earlier, likely due in part to lower heating requirements.
The Transpower figures showed a June drop of 8 percent in Wellington and 7 percent in Christchurch compared with a year earlier. Those cities are typically cooler in winter than the largest city, Auckland, where the drop was 2 percent.
The June month was the third-hottest June ever recorded in New Zealand and the hottest ever recorded in Christchurch, according to the research agency.

Links

• This new Antarctica study is bad news for climate change doubters
• Study: climate change warming Asian waters, altering monsoon
• Antarctica's penguins could be decimated by climate change
• The world has the right climate goals — but the wrong ambition levels to achieve them

Australia To Get 52GW Of Solar Capacity In Dramatic Energy Transformation

Renew Economy - Mitchell King

The Australian infrastructure market is participating in a global energy transformation that will have a profound effect on our economy and financial markets.
We are fast approaching a tipping point in the transformation of energy markets from fossil fuels to renewables. This transformation will not be orderly, rather will be a disruptive transition that will produce significant winners and losers.
The solar industry will experience unprecedented growth, from 4GW currently to 52GW of capacity in the National Electricity Market by 2040. This will require an investment of approximately $40bn or $3bn per annum over this period in solar alone.

Global financial markets are not fully pricing the impact of climate change. The impacts of climate change will have far-reaching consequences for carbon intensive industries and global financial markets.
The Electricity sector is responsible for more than a third of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions. Fossil fuel energy producers and carbon intensive industries have been providing some disclosure to financial markets about emissions, which to date has been mostly voluntary. Regulators have been slow to ensure this data is presented on a consistent, comparable and understandable basis. Financial markets are not fully informed and are therefore not fully pricing climate change risks into equity and bond markets.
Many institutional investors are now actively divesting fossil fuel exposures in favour of non fossil fuel exposures and investment in renewable energy. These investors have long accepted the moral argument for divestment, however are now persuaded by the economic argument that investment in a non fossil fuel portfolio is likely to produce outperformance over the long term.
This is a very deliberate strategy, which is taking time and careful consideration to execute. President of the US$860 million Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Stephen Heintz recently presented the keynote address at the Divest Invest conference in Sydney. Heintz acknowledges that the carbon-fuelled capitalism of the 20th century has brought immense prosperity to the developed world, but at a huge cost. The Fund supports the scientific contention that in order to achieve the 1.5 degree Celsius target reduction agreed in Paris in 2015, that 60–80% of known fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground.
This means that companies owning those reserves lose material value, which provides investors the economic justification to support the moral case to divest these exposures. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, since 2014, has been divesting its 7 percent exposure to fossil fuels and by 2017 through its divest campaign, is expecting to deliver a zero exposure to fossil fuels.

The Infrastructure Market
In order to examine the impact of the energy market transformation, consider the structure of the Infrastructure industry. The infrastructure industry comprises economic and social infrastructure. Economic infrastructure has two components, energy and transport infrastructure.

To date, energy and transport infrastructure have operated somewhat independently, however, these sectors are now converging.
Disruption is occurring in global energy markets in part due to the rise in distributed solar power. This is driven by the dramatic reduction in solar system costs from scale economies achieved and associated developments in information and battery storage technology. Accelerating this disruption further is the transformation occurring in transport infrastructure, such as the commercialisation of electric vehicles.

History of Energy Infrastructure
The electricity grid was developed in the United States from the late 1880s by George Westinghouse as a centralised "in series" system comprising generation, transmission and distribution. Pricing signals to market participants were generally inefficient, occurring after each 30 minute interval requiring 24 hour advanced scheduling.


Modern Energy Infrastructure
The rollout of distributed power such as rooftop solar is an important component in the development of sophisticated network architecture. Modern networks using web based monitoring devices send pricing signals at 5 second intervals. Users are demanding energy independence and want to take control of their consumption and cost.
Users are demanding this be delivered on their iPhone app and be paid for load shedding in times of high system demand or participate in the sale of excess power generated by their solar systems. Technology now exists to "swipe" your energy bill which produces automated savings by use of tariff and usage algorithms.
Information Technology companies are also vitally interested in the pattern of energy consumption. These companies are investing heavily in innovating and developing IT solutions which will accelerate energy market disruption. Monitoring devices for example provide a real time signature of the profile of energy consumption including electric appliances used including from printers, refrigerators, pool pumps, hot water services and solar panel output.
IT companies will increasingly have an intimate understanding of energy consumption patterns by collecting data from such monitoring devices and have developed applications to manage and reduce energy consumption and in time aggregate data to create electricity micro networks to pay consumers more for their solar production.

The other disruption occurring in global energy markets is the increased focus on energy efficiency and related products, most notably the massive "change out" of incandescent lighting to Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs). The implementation of these efficiency measures will accelerate the mothballing of fossil fuel power stations, reduce load and associated network requirements.
Transmission and distribution companies will be required to manage their businesses in this new paradigm of reduced load and increased efficiencies. No longer will these companies be rewarded by building networks based on an assumption of increased energy demand.

Emergence of Australian Solar Market
Australia is blessed with a significant natural solar resource, having the highest level of solar irradiation in the world. Further, Australia has an abundance of suitable solar sites to exploit this resource.
Over the last six years installed solar costs have reduced by approximately 80 percent, whereas over the same period, retail tariffs have increased by approximately 75 percent.
The global migration of energy markets from fossil fuels to renewables is occurring rapidly such as in the United States during 2015, where solar and wind developments represented approximately 65% of new installed energy production.


Evolution of Solar financing product into the mainstream to create demand
Solar companies in Australia are now following overseas market precedents and are installing fully maintained solar systems for zero upfront payment, using financed solutions such as Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) and leases.
The Australian solar market to date has been dominated by approximately 1.3 million residential users who have cash funded and installed around 3.8GW of rooftop solar systems. The Australian solar market is expected to follow overseas trends to a funded market such as in the United States where over 60 percent of solar systems are sold utilising power purchase or lease agreements, compared to just 5 percent in Australia.
The commercial & industrial and utility segments of the Australian solar market are much less penetrated despite providing a better load match of solar production to consumption.
The emergence of third party financed solar systems will further accelerate the roll out of solar systems across the country.

Electric Vehicles and emergence of battery technology
Now let's overlay the transformation occurring in transportation infrastructure to energy infrastructure markets. Imagine over the next two decades the majority of vehicles made will be electric and use solar power combined with battery storage at home, office and in neighbourhood mini-grids.
Energy markets in the medium term will be further transformed by innovation in battery technology arising from scale economies gained from production of these "mobile batteries on wheels" (electric vehicles) and utility scale battery systems, such as that being trailed in South Australia.

Decommissioning of coal fired power stations
Demand in the National Electricity Market in Australia peaked around 2008. The peak occurred due to the effect of reduced demand brought about by the Global Financial Crisis and associated business closures. Over 4,000 megawatts of distributed solar power has been built in Australia up to 2015 (think of 2 Loy Yang A power stations).
It is highly unlikely that any new coal fired generation capacity will ever be built in the Australian National Electricity Market. Old coal fired power station "dinosaurs" such as in Port Augusta, South Australia have now been decommissioned, removing approximately 5 million tonnes per annum of Co2e, making the State free of coal fired generation. South Australia is a world leader in renewable energy with a target penetration of 50 percent by 2025.


Winners and Losers
The effect of the proliferation of solar, electric vehicles, battery storage and technology will have a profound effect on the Australian electricity market and in turn the economy.
Coal fired generators will be gradually retired, gas-fired peaking stations replaced by solar and wind. Hourly despatch periods of zero grid level demand will occur within a decade.
Globally, coal companies are already the big losers and have been part of an early structural shift by investors, banks and stakeholders to disrupt these assets. Coal consumption is rapidly declining and production and prices with it. New electricity capacity is predominantly solar, wind and other renewables as industrial production is decoupling from traditional coal and gas fired energy production.
Transmission or network companies will be well placed to benefit from centralised battery storage and system management in concert with electricity system operators who stand to be winners if they are able to participate in the disruption. Network companies will have an important role to play in providing ongoing power quality, stability and reliability in partnership with an increasingly competitive off grid and micro-grid market.
Distributors on the other hand are likely to be losers as they are being faced with the "death spiral" (grid cost maintenance increases at the same time as the capital cost of solar decreases), and will be under pressure by electricity regulators to justify excess capacity no longer required in a modern network configuration. These electricity regulators will inevitably reduce the value of network infrastructure assets and allowable returns and therefore asset values.
Oil companies are the next sector to be impacted negatively by a structural shift to electric vehicles, which is expected to occur as early as 2025. It is forecast that an electric car with a 320km range will cost US$25,000 or less.

Impact of Energy Market Transformation
It is highly likely that financial markets are currently mispricing climate change risk.
Over the next decade mainstream financial markets will progressively rebalance their portfolios away from fossil fuel exposures and increasingly redirect capital to non-fossil fuel exposures and direct investment in renewables. Superannuation fund members are urging their trustees take action and require companies disclose their carbon impacts.
Australian investors are becoming interested in investment in the solar sector as it exhibits many of the characteristics prevalent in the early years of Infrastructure investment in Australia. These factors include long term contracted revenues, high operating margins and returns which are often CPI linked and not correlated to traditional equity or bond markets. It is however early days and infrastructure managers are applying their skills to aggregate solar infrastructure investment opportunities to capture the interest of mainstream institutional investors.
Investors are now actively seeking commercial returns from investments on offer in the Australian solar industry. In so doing, investors are able to powerfully apply their capital to achieve long term environmental and social benefits and accelerate Australia's transition from fossil fuels toward a lower carbon society.

*Mitchell King is the founder and Managing Director of Lighthouse Infrastructure. He is regarded as a leading global infrastructure fund manager who over the past two decades has been active in acquiring, managing and raising capital for infrastructure assets that leave a sustainable legacy for future generations. Development, financing and management of solar infrastructure assets has been a deliberate strategy of Lighthouse to participate in the development of the renewables industry that will fundamentally transform the energy industry in Australia to a lower carbon society over the next two decades.

Links

• UK’s National Grid sees major boost for solar, electric vehicles and batteries
• Solar panels power spacecraft into Jupiter’s orbit, 800 million ams away from sun
• UK solar energy breaks record — almost 24% of electricity demand
• NBN Co completes installation of solar PV across network
• The potential implications of the Federal Election for clean energy

Why Climate Change Is An Education Issue

The Japan Times - Felipe Calderon*



NEW YORK – Climate change affects us all, but we still are not acting as quickly as we should to address its causes, mitigate the damage and adapt to its effects. Many people don't understand the risks climate change poses to global economic and social structures. And, sadly, many who do understand are dismissive of the far-reaching benefits a global shift to sustainability and clean energy would bring about.
According to a recent Pew study, seven out of 10 Americans classified as political independents were not very concerned that climate change would hurt them. Worse still, Yale University researchers recently found that 40 percent of adults worldwide have never even heard of climate change. In some developing countries, such as India, that figure climbs to 65 percent.
These figures are discouraging, but they can be improved. The Yale study concluded that "educational attainment tends to be the single strongest predictor of public awareness of climate change." By investing in quality education, we can set the next generation on the right path to addressing this global problem.
Education and climate action work together in three ways. For starters, education fills knowledge gaps. Understanding how climate change is already having an impact on one's life can have practical benefits. This is especially true for poor populations that are most vulnerable to crop failures and natural disasters, such as landslides and floods, caused by climate change. Populations that must rebuild from scratch after each new catastrophe miss out on opportunities for rapid development. By understanding that their world is changing — and that the likelihood of future disasters is increasing — these populations can build resilience and learn to adapt to the sudden and slow stresses of a changing climate.
Second, education challenges apathy. Knowing the measures available to address climate change can open up vast opportunities for economic growth. Global investors should be made to understand that sustainable solutions can increase wellbeing and create additional economic opportunities. To take one example, in Niger, education and improved farming techniques helped double real farm incomes for more than one million people, while restoring huge tracts of severely degraded land. In the United States, as of 2014, there were more jobs that depended on solar energy than on coal mining.
Still, many people insist that implementing measures to mitigate the effects of climate change is too costly to our current way of life. According to the Pew study, almost seven out of 10 people believe that, given the limitations of technology, they would have to make major lifestyle changes. This does not have to be the case, and education can challenge the kind of skepticism that forecloses opportunities for climate-smart living.
Finally, education furnishes the technical knowledge needed to build a better future through innovation — one that includes clean and safe energy, sustainable agriculture and smarter cities. Broadening access to education would lead to more homegrown innovation — entrepreneurs spotting opportunities to address local problems. Globally, we cannot rely on knowledge centers such as Silicon Valley or Oxford to develop a silver bullet to the climate problem. Solutions may come from tech hubs, but they will also come from villages and developing cities, from farmers and manufactures with vastly different perspectives on the world around them. And this will create a virtuous cycle. It is easier for educated people to migrate and integrate into new societies, sharing the knowledge they've brought with them.
Fortunately, younger generations today are better educated and more committed to reducing their own carbon footprint than previous generations were. They are leading the way and forcing us all to reconsider our own actions. But we must broaden the availability of education worldwide to ensure that their efforts are not in vain.
In recognition of education's importance, the government of Norway, under the visionary leadership of Prime Minister Erna Solberg, has established the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity, of which I am a member. We will meet this week in Oslo, and it's my hope that we will confront the challenges of our time and act on the knowledge that education is our best problem-solving asset.
Addressing the dangers of climate change is not only an existential imperative; it is also an opportunity to move toward a cleaner, more productive and fairer path of development. Only an educated global society can take the decisive action needed to get us there.

*Felipe Calderon, former president of Mexico, is chair of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate.

Links

• Climate change implicated in France floods
• Warmer waters due to climate change are altering South Asian monsoons and East Asian rains, study finds
• 'Cause for alarm' as May temperatures break global records in Earth's hottest spring yet: NASA
• Scientists blame El Nino, man-made warming for turning vibrant U.S. marine reserve into coral graveyard

'Climate-Aligned' Investments Tipped To Soar But Australia's Role Remains Hazy

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Sunrise or sunset?: Green investments face an uncertain future in Australia. Photo: Bloomberg

Political uncertainty after the weekend's indecisive federal elections could further hinder Australia's development of business tools needed to tackle climate change, leaving it lagging further behind other nations, analysts say.
Investors are stepping up funding for so-called "climate-aligned" or green bonds, with the tally rising 16 per cent compared with 2015 to $US694 billion ($924 billion), according to the fifth annual report, Bonds and Climate Change: The State of the Market in 2016 compiled by HSBC.
The tally, which counts bonds explicitly labelled green or those whose main target is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or build resilience to climate impacts, must multiply if economies are to finance their decarbonisation in time to avoid dangerous warming.
"Some $US2.5-3 trillion of capital is needed each year in climate change-related investments, with 60-70 per cent of that going to emerging markets," the report said, adding an "adequate" level of such bond issuance should be in the order of $US1 trillion a year by 2020.
The report noted Australian issuance of unlabelled climate-aligned bonds is still small – in the order of $2.5 billion – and dominated by rail operator Aurizon.
"With finalisation of the historic Paris Agreement in late 2015, more investors are realising the need to align their portfolios to the goal of limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees,"  said Emma Herd, chief executive of the  Investor Group on Climate Change.
Three of the big four banks will join the Australian launch of the bonds report in Sydney on Monday, with Treasury Corporation Victoria and Flexigroup joining the discussion on climate finance.
However, analysis by climate finance campaign group Market Forces has found lending by the big four to renewable energy projects has dropped so far this year – and fallen short of their declared intensions.
In the first half of 2016, ANZ and Commonwealth Bank made no new loans to the sector, while NAB lent $88 million and Westpac $73 million. The half-year total of about $162 million compared with $516 million a year earlier, Market Forces said, citing public details of the deals.
The CBA lagged the other three, lending $904 million to the renewables sector since 2008 out of a total of $6.014 billion by the big four.
"While renewable energy is a boom industry globally, here in Australia the sector has been starved of the support and certainty it has needed for far too long," Julian Vincent, Market Forces' executive director, said.
"But at the same time, if the banks are seriously behind the goal of cleaning up our energy sector, they can't credibly hide behind policy."
John Connor, chair of The Climate Institute, called on the Turnbull government if it retains office to bring forward its planned 2017 review of climate policies to bolster investor confidence in the sector.
Mr Connor noted the UK government, even amid the chaos of the Brexit vote on Britain leaving the European Union, last week agreed to adopt a goal of cutting 1990-level carbon emissions 57 per cent by 2030.
Much work needs to be done.
A paper published in Nature last week, including by some Australian-based researchers,  found that national emissions targets as pledged in Paris would fall far short of the sub-2 degree warming goal. Instead, they imply a median warming of 2.6-3.1 degrees by 2100 compared with pre-industrial levels.

Links

• Investors in world's top coal shipper Glencore pass climate-change motion
• Climate change slams global economy, study from Stanford and Berkeley shows
• Climate change response must include slower population growth
• Apple, Google, Microsoft among companies with biggest climate change credentials
• 'We need a miracle': Bill Gates Q&A on climate change
• Disaster resilience key to managing climate change, say insurers
• Climate change a 'huge' financial risk, warns Bank of England

This New Antarctica Study Is Bad News For Climate Change Doubters

Washington Post - Chris Mooney


On Sept. 19, 2014, the five-day average of Antarctic sea ice extent exceeded 20 million square kilometers for the first time since 1979, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The red line shows the average maximum extent from 1979 to 2014. (NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio/Cindy Starr)

For a number of years now, climate change skeptics have argued that there’s a key part of the Earth’s climate system that upends our expectations about global warming, and that is showing trends that actually cut in the opposite direction.
This supposed contrary indicator is the sea ice that rings the Antarctic continent, and that reached a new all-time record extent of  7.78 million square miles in September 2014 (see above). As that record suggests, this vast field of ice has been expanding in recent years, rather than shrinking. That means it’s doing the opposite of what is happening in the Arctic, where sea ice is declining rapidly — and also that it’s doing the opposite of what we might expect in a warming world.
Scientists don’t fully understand why Antarctic sea ice is growing — suggested explanations have posited more glacial melt dumping cold fresh water into the surrounding seas, or the way the Antarctic ozone hole has changed the circulation of winds around the continent. In a new study in Nature Geoscience, though, researchers with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., along with colleagues from the University of Washington in Seattle and Australia, suggest that the phenomenon is simply the result of natural variability of the climate system — driven, in this case, by changes in the tropical Pacific Ocean that reverberate globally.
“When you get changes in [sea surface temperatures] in some areas of the tropics, you affect precipitation, that affects the amount of energy released in the atmosphere,” said Gerald Meehl, the study’s lead author and a climate scientist with NCAR. “That starts affecting, through this kind of chain reaction process, circulation at great distances away.”
The new study confirms that the ice floating around Antarctica has been expanding — indeed, the expansion has accelerated since around the turn of the century. But that’s also around the time that a cycle dubbed the “Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation,” or IPO, shifted into a negative phase, which is characterized by ocean surface cooling in the tropical Pacific, and particularly its eastern part around the equator.
This is the same phenomenon that, scientists such as Meehl believe, helped fuel a global warming “slowdown” or “hiatus” during the 2000s (see also here). Heat was in effect buried deep below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, rather than bursting forth and influencing the globe, during this period.
But what’s new in the latest study is the suggestion that this negative IPO phase had consequences that stretched all the way to the Southern Ocean waters surrounding Antarctica — and that this, in turn, explains why most climate models didn’t predict the observed growth of Antarctic sea ice.
Most of the state-of-the-art climate change model simulations run to help support the 2013 report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change did not capture the growth of Antarctic sea ice that has occurred of late. Rather, the average of these models suggested that this ice should decline. This shows that skeptics who have cited the growing ice are raising a serious concern — this anomaly really does cry out for an explanation.
But the new study finds that in the small minority of climate change simulations that do happen to correctly capture these natural changes in the Pacific, and the global warming “slowdown” to boot, there is also growth in Antarctic sea ice. These are the models, it appears, that happened to get the role of natural variability in the Pacific right — or more specifically, to get the timing right for a phase shift in this ocean.
Out of “262 realizations of 2oth century climate, 10 of those got this observed slowdown of global warming happening at about the same time as in the observations, at the same magnitude,” Meehl said. “And for those 10, there was the negative phase of the IPO, and it also has the signature of Antarctic sea ice.”
But how could a naturally occurring climate wobble in the tropical Pacific Ocean translate into more Antarctic sea ice?
Here, the research suggests the key factor is how the state of that ocean in turn influences an Antarctic atmospheric phenomenon called the Amundsen Sea Low, a low-pressure region off the Antarctic coast that lies more or less directly south of the tropical Pacific.
This low-pressure region deepens (or sees its pressure drop even further) in negative IPO conditions, the study finds, which drive cooler seas in the eastern tropical Pacific. As this shift reverberates across the globe, it in turn means that down in Antarctica, winds increase in force around the area of low pressure at the center of the Amundsen Sea Low (winds blow inward toward regions of lower pressure). These stronger winds, in turn, push sea ice outward and away from the Antarctic continent, which leaves room for more ice to form in the gaps that are created — and increases the extent of sea ice overall.
“The dramatic decrease in Arctic sea ice, which currently exceeds model predictions and could exhibit a record or near-record low this year, is fairly straightforward to understand in terms of the unprecedented warming in the Arctic,” Michael Mann, a climate researcher at Penn State University, said in an email in response to Meehl’s study.
“By contrast, Antarctic sea ice is more complicated. It is dominated by what we refer to as ‘dynamical effects,’ especially the strength and position of the westerly winds over the southern ocean. Those dynamical effects are governed to a large extent by natural, internal climate variability, and it is unsurprising that the very modest increase in Antarctic sea ice in recent decades can be explained in terms of them.”

Granted, the precise causes behind the recent growth in Antarctic sea ice probably will be debated for some time. After all, there is much that scientists still don’t understand about this enormous but exceedingly remote region. Recent research continues to make new discoveries about why ice floating atop the southern ocean behaves in the way it does, for instance, and even about how it helps drive the circulation of ocean waters in the region, and therefore, around the world.
As for the future, Meehl says he thinks that the IPO has now turned back, and doesn’t think Antarctic sea ice will keep expanding in the same way. Notably, the ice did not continue its streak of breaking records in 2015. “Averaged over the next 5 to 10 years, if this is all correct, this increase in Antarctic sea ice extent would stop growing, maybe start shrinking a little bit,” he said.
For now, though, the new research suggests that two phenomena that have furnished some of the most popular arguments among climate change skeptics and doubters in the past several years — growing Antarctic sea ice, and a global warming slowdown or “hiatus” during the 2000s — can perhaps both be chalked up to simple natural climate variability, superimposed on top of a global warming trend.
And if that’s right, it means that despite heated debate over both of these matters, neither manages to dent — at all — the main message about ongoing global warming.

Links

• Climate change skeptics may be about to lose one of their favorite arguments
• The Antarctic ozone hole has finally started to ‘heal,’ scientists report
• Antarctica’s penguins could be decimated by climate change
• Study: climate change warming Asian waters, altering monsoon
• The world has the right climate goals — but the wrong ambition levels to achieve them

Solar Energy to Power India of the Future

World Bank

Summary India’s plan to ramp up solar power generation to 100 GW by 2022 is among the largest in the world. It will help bring sustainable, clean, climate-friendly electricity to millions of India’s people. The World Bank Group (WBG) is helping India deliver on its plans with more than $1 billion in lending over FY 2017. This is the Bank’s largest-ever support for solar power in any country. The WBG is also backing the India-led International Solar Alliance which aims to promote solar use globally by mobilizing $1 trillion in investments by 2030.

The World Bank Group is moving to help India deliver on its unprecedented plans to scale up solar energy, from installing solar panels on rooftops to setting up massive solar parks.
This will catapult India to the forefront of the global effort to bring electricity to all, mitigate the effects of climate change, and set the country on a path to become the 'India of the future'.
"The world must turn to (the) sun to power our future," India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi said at the historic COP21 climate conference in Paris last year. "As the developing world lifts billions of people into prosperity, our hope for a sustainable planet rests on a bold, global initiative."
Unveiling its own bold initiative, India pledged that it would derive at least 40% of its energy needs from renewable sources by 2030.
This includes plans for the development of 100 GW of solar energy by 2022, an extremely ambitious target considering the world's installed solar power capacity in 2014 was 181 GW.
Supporting India's solar push is a key part of WBG President Jim Yong Kim's agenda as he visits the country this week. Over FY 2017, the World Bank hopes to provide more than $1 billion to support India's solar plans.
"India's plans to virtually triple the share of renewable energy by 2030 will both transform the country's energy supply and have far-reaching global implications in the fight against climate change," said Kim.
"Prime Minister Modi's personal commitment toward renewable energy, particularly solar, is the driving force behind these investments.
The World Bank Group will do all it can to help India meet its ambitious targets, especially around scaling up solar energy."

"The world must turn to (the) sun to power our future. As the developing world lifts billions of people into prosperity, our hope for a sustainable planet rests on a bold, global initiative."
Narendra Modi
Prime Minister of India

The World Bank has already approved a $625 million loan that will support the Government of India's Grid Connected Rooftop Solar program by financing the installation of solar panels on rooftops across India.
The project draws funds together from the Bank, as well as from the Clean Technology Fund of the Climate Investment Funds (CIF), and will mobilize additional funding from public and private investors.
The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank Group's private sector arm, is supporting the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh set up the 750-MW ultra-mega solar power project in Rewa. This will be the largest single-site solar power project in the world.
IFC will help structure and implement the transaction to help attract investments of about $750 million.  IFC was one of the earliest financiers of wind and solar power in India, and helped develop the country's first grid-connected solar power project.
While in India, Kim is also extending support for the International Solar Alliance (ISA).
The alliance, spearheaded by India and France at COP21, brings together 121 countries and aims to mobilize a trillion dollars in investments to increase the use of solar energy. By signing an agreement with the ISA in New Delhi, the WBG paves the way for it to partner with the alliance's member countries to help them deliver on their individual objectives.
In India, the WBG has a number of initiatives in the pipeline.
These include developing solar parks, promoting innovative solutions to generate and store solar power, and providing support for solar mini-grids.
The Bank's backing will help increase the availability of private financing, introduce new technologies, build capacity for solar rooftop units, and enable the development of common infrastructure to support privately developed solar parks across India.
India is already planning to develop one of the largest solar parks in the world.
The 2 GW park in the southern state of Karnataka is expected to generate enough electricity to power nearly 1 million households. The park's supply of clean, renewable solar energy will help reduce CO₂ emissions by 20 million tons a year, and save 3.6 million tons of natural gas which is used to generate electricity.
The success of the solar auction for the park highlights the potential for more such large scale renewable projects in the country.
Generating clean renewable electricity is crucial for India where nearly 300 million people—about a quarter of its population—live without access to electricity.
Today, India is one of the lowest per capita consumers of electricity in the world; even when people are connected to the electricity grid, they face frequent disruptions.
Add to that the projected economic growth and the increase in population, and the demand for energy in India is expected to double by 2040.
"With around 300 days of sunshine every year, India has among the best conditions in the world to harness solar energy.
The rapid expansion of solar power can improve the quality of life for millions of Indians, especially for its poorest citizens. It can also create thousands of jobs in the solar industry and underpin progress in all areas of development, helping the country fulfil its dream of becoming the 'India of the future'," said Onno Ruhl, World Bank Country Director in India.
Solar Powers Brighter, Greener Future for India

Links

• Press Release: World Bank, India Sign Deal to Boost Solar Globally
• Climate Investment Funds (CIF)
• Carbon Finance for Sustainable Development: 2015 Annual Report
• Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty
• State and Trends of Carbon Pricing 2015