Solar Shines In Global Shift To Renewables

RenewEconomy - Tim Buckley

A 70 MW floating PV plant in construction in Anhui province, China

Solar energy is taking an increasingly prominent role in driving the ongoing transformation of global electricity generation markets alongside gains in storage, wind, hydroelectricity and energy efficiency.
IEEFA has today released a new report examining the global solar market and the ever-increasing scale of investment, the speed of implementation and the rapidly broadening range of applications that are becoming commercially viable e.g. concentrated solar power, floating solar, solar fish farms, commercial behind the meter applications, hybrid wind-solar-battery projects and in India, even solar-coal hybrid structures.
As readers of Renew Economy hear repeatedly, corporates, policy makers and regulators are all finding the speed of transformation hard to grasp, particularly in the crucial China and India markets, but the results of the past year are a good indicator of the trend.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) reports that 98 gigawatts (GW) of solar was installed globally in 2017, a 31% increase from the prior year.
Meanwhile – and just as important – BNEF estimates the levelized cost of solar dropped 15% year-on-year to US$86/MWh for capacity installed in 2017.
Leading the charge, China accounted for more than half the newly installed solar capacity, or some 53 GW, a figure that as recently as 2014 would have eclipsed the global total of solar installations.
While India’s current installation numbers aren’t as dramatic as China’s, the country is clearly embarking on a massive transformation of its electricity sector as well.
The country’s National Electricity Plan, released in March 2018, affirms national intentions to increase renewable energy capacity to 275 GW by 2027, with solar representing two-thirds of this total.
As renewables rise in India, thermal power capacity is forecast to decline to just 43% of the nation’s total in 2027, down from 66% today.
Major solar energy tenders are occurring every week in India (for May 2018 so far 1,000MW,500MW,750MW,200MWand 50MW) at prices now consistently 10-20% below the cost of existing domestic thermal power generation (and 50% below new imported coal fired power).
There is a remarkable buy-in across the country from the government through to the largest corporate incumbents like NTPC, Adani and Tata, each of whom are now amongst the largest and most aggressively ambitious investors in Indian renewables.
Only last week Tata Power committed to invest US$5bn to reach 12GW of renewables by 2028, such that more than half their capacity will be zero emissions sourced (up from zero in 2014 and 30% today).
Our report tracks the largest solar projects operational in the world, and the lead keeps changing. Adani commissioned the then world’s largest solar project at 648MW in Tamil Nadu in mid-2017, but it has slipped to the sixth position in less than a year – refer table.
By 2019 Rajasthan’s 2,225MW Bhadla industrial park is due for full commissioning; three times the size.
And Gujarat is now exploring a 5GW solar park ;double again.

Fourteen of the World’s Largest Operating Solar Projects

Source: Company & Press reports, IEEFA estimates

China and India are hardly alone on this front, as scores of other countries embrace solar.
Saudi Arabia, for one, announced in March 2018 a plan to build 200 GW of solar capacity by 2030, yet another marker in the transition under way across global energy markets. The uptake of solar is gathering momentum too in Europe and the Americas.
As highlighted in The Climate Council’s new report “Renewables & Business: Cutting Prices & Pollution”, the rise of Australian commercial and industrial solar (particularly rooftop) is really starting to boom.
With record high electricity prices crippling businesses, this is expected to keep accelerating, such that even the deliberately flawed NEG is unlikely to to slow this trend.
Not-withstanding this lack of a central policy to sensibly transition our electricity system, Australia remains a world leader in the uptake of solar.
This month cumulative solar installs passed through 7GW. Every week we are reading about new solar investments each of A$100-200m or more for regional Australia, with the speed of construction and uptake clearly evident.
Last week saw the partial commissioning of Australia’s largest to-date solar plant under construction, that being Enel of Italy’s 220MW Bungala solar farm in Port Augusta.
The same week we saw Lighthouse Solar’s 100MW Clare solar farm grid connected – the biggest to date in Queensland.
But the list of projects underway is changing so fast it is impossible to keep up with the latest largest so far solar development. The Queensland government is trying, with a useful reference map.
Solar Reserve’sAurora150MW CSP with 1,100MWh storage is a leading example of Australia’s global leadership in deploying new solar technologies, with this development’s price for peaking electricity setting a new global benchmark low.
And following the brilliant success of Tesla’s South Australian lithium ion battery development, Victoria is now replicating this with two more distributed utility scale battery projects by Tesla and Fluence, one linked to a solar project.
Having shown the way in Australia, Tesla has now commissioned a 18MW Belgium storage system for grid stabilisation, with a 30-40MW virtual peaking solar power plant to come.
And having installed the U.K.’s largest to-date unsubsidised solar with storage power plant(10MW solar, 6MW of storage), Anesco is looking to install 380MW of UK solar and storage by 2020.
Floating solar – another innovation with multiple advantages – is rapidly scaling up.
While Australia is still just trialing this, having commissioned a 100kWsystem in January 2018 at Lismore’s sewage treatment plant, China commissioned a 40MW project in 2017 and has two 150MW projects nearing completion in 2018.
Meanwhile, Maharashtra has announced requests for proposals for 1,000MW of floating solar, with India’s Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) having issued an expression of interest in support of a national target of 10GWof floating solar being released back in December 2017.
Looking at the combination of our coking and thermal coal plus liquid natural gas (LNG) positions, Australia is one of the three largest exporters of fossil fuels globally.
We have major industries at clear stranded asset risk and potentially terminal decline over the very long term. Even our 64% global share of seaborne coking coal is threatened longer term by the combination of technology innovation and carbon emissions policies.
But there-in lies the need to pursue opportunities in industries of the future. Renew Economy provided a glimpse of what could be possible in terms of Australia with CWP’s $20bn 6GW of wind and 3GW of solar Pilbara mega-project for renewable energy exports at world scale.
A vision that might take a couple of decades to come to full fruition, but in doing so it could transform world energy markets entirely.
More immediately, the West Australian budget is a beneficiary of our growing position as a world leader in lithium ion processing.
Technology innovation, deflation, ever-larger scale and the constant breaking of records are the clear lessons of solar led energy transformation now underway.
Australia should be pursing the opportunities for investment, jobs and export industries of the future as a top national priority.

Links

• Corporations To Lead Charge Into Wind, Solar And Storage
• Solar And Wind Could Ease Australia's Water Shortage
• Bill Mckibben: 'There’s Clearly Money To Be Made From Sun And Wind'
• NEG: A Bipartisan Agreement To Disagree?
• Why Australia’s Wind And Solar Market Could Grind To A Halt
• Consumers Are Sick Of Coalition’s Coal Fantasy: They Are Going Solar
• Solar PV And Wind Are On Track To Replace All Coal, Oil And Gas Within Two Decades
• Stunning Drops In Solar, Wind Costs Mean Economic Case For Coal, Gas Is ‘Crumbling’
• Rain Or Shine: New Solar Cell Captures Energy From Raindrops
• Australia's Solar Power Boom Could Almost Double Capacity In A Year, Analysts Say
• Australia Rooftop Solar Boom Continues With Best January Ever

Flat Earthers vs Climate Change Sceptics: Why Conspiracy Theorists Keep Contradicting Each Other

The Conversation - Gareth Dorrian | Ian Whittaker

Would a flat Earth suffer from climate change? Shutterstock

Flat Earthism and the idea that human activity is not responsible for climate change are two of the most prevalent conspiracy theories today. Both have been increasing in popularity since the late 20th century. Currently, 16% of the US population say they doubt the scientifically established shape of the Earth, while 40% think that human-induced climate change is a hoax. But proponents of one of these theories are not necessarily proponents of the other, even though both are often motivated by a common mistrust of authority. In fact, they regularly contradict one another.
Flat Earthers, for example, tend to disbelieve organisations such as NASA on the shape of Antarctica – or indeed, that there is a southern hemisphere at all. Yet the president of the Flat Earth Society, Daniel Shenton, is quite convinced – presumably at least in part thanks to information from NASA – that climate change is happening and espouses a fairly conventional view on the subject.
Former White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci (dismissed by president Trump after ten days in office), meanwhile, believes that the Earth is in fact round, but does not believe in anthropogenic climate change, as he made clear in an interview with CNN.
Such selective reasoning is common among conspiracy theorists who often lack consistency with one other. Despite this, the media, celebrities and even politicians regularly make broad comparisons between climate change scepticism, Flat Earthism and other conspiracy theories.

Fabricated data?
In the field of global climate change, scientific bodies often are accused, even by those in power, of fabricating data. But such criticism is often deeply flawed. Take those sceptics, for example, who believe that climate change is occurring, but because of natural – rather than man-made – causes. If one argues that data has been fabricated to show warming where there is none, one cannot then also imply that warming is occurring after all, but naturally. Either there is warming or there is not. Similarly, Flat Earthers who state that images showing Earth’s curvature are due to the shape of a camera lens, themselves believe in a disc which by definition has a curved edge.
Indeed, one of the few commonalities which exist between all major conspiracy theories is that somehow scientists and governments are involved in a grand conspiracy for reasons unknown.
A major part of the scientific anthropogenic climate change argument is that there is an increase in temperature extremes in both summer and winter. Evidently, a Flat Earth model cannot support this; in fact, the most accepted Flat Earth model, which maintains that the sun rotates in a non-variable circular orbit over the flat disk, implies that there should be no seasons at all, let alone multi-decadal seasonal extremes due to climate change. Nevertheless, to quote Shenton:

Climate change is a process which has been ongoing since (the) beginning of detectable history, but there seems to be a definite correlation between the recent increase in worldwide temperatures and man’s entry into the industrial age.

In this instance, the president of the Flat Earth Society is correct. Anthropogenic climate change sceptics, on the other hand, are often willing to accept the science behind the Earth’s natural cycles, which they blame – instead of human activity – for the world’s weather woes. Clearly, we again find an implicit difference of opinion between a Flat Earth model, and a non-anthropogenic climate change one.

Climate change: a ‘global’ problem. Shutterstock

It is also clear that many climate change sceptics believe in the (approximately) spherical Earth, even if only subconsciously, by their use of scientifically accepted global maps when discussing data – not to mention when calling it “global” warming.

And what about aliens?
If governments and scientists are so untrustworthy and steeped in corruption, then why would one believe them on any issue? Where does the line of trust actually fall? Why would a person who mistrusts governments and scientists on the shape of the Earth, not hold the same politicians and scientific organisations similarly bogus on the issue of climate change? Or alien abductions, chem trails, or anything else?
But the problem isn’t likely to go away any time soon. The US has the highest number of believers in both flat-Earthism and anthropogenic climate change scepticism, and the UK is not far behind. The US also has a high number (more than 50%) of senior political figures who deny man-made climate change, not to mention a democratically elected leader vocally believing the same. There are also numerous well-known celebrities who question the established shape of our planet.
While of course scientists can play the blame game, it could be that the scientific method itself is a major limiting factor in communicating results with the public. Science is not just a body of knowledge, but a method of critical thinking.
Scientists, by necessity, have to communicate their findings in a certain rigid way focusing on probabilities, certainty values and confidence intervals. These can appear dry or baffling to the public. But by providing more easily understandable narratives we can make scientific discussions with the public more productive.
In today’s complex world of social media narratives, the engagement of scientists with the public is more crucial than ever. Thankfully, current funding for public engagement training and activities is accessible to scientists with a passion for communication and conversation, enabling them to communicate facts rather than “fake news”.

Links

• I watched an entire Flat Earth Convention for my research – here's what I learnt
• You don’t need to build a rocket to prove the Earth isn’t flat – here’s the simple science
• How to reason with flat earthers (it may not help though)
• How Big Oil distorts climate change reality with tweaks in language
• 'It's All About Vested Interests': Untangling Conspiracy, Conservatism And Climate Scepticism
• Once Were Sceptics: What Convinced These Scientists That Climate Change Is Real?
• How To Win The Climate Wars – Talk About Local ‘Pollution’ Not Global Warming
• What Should You Say To A Climate Change Skeptic?
• Climate Change Skepticism Fueled By Gut Reaction To Local Weather
• These Are The Best Arguments From The 3% Of Climate Scientist 'Skeptics.' Really.
• Why Climate Skeptics Are Wrong

Save Our Bugs! How To Avert An Insect Armageddon

The Guardian - Hugh Warwick

Insects are the backbone of a healthy global ecosystem – but their numbers are facing catastrophic decline due to climate change. So, what can you do to help?

Bees drinking from a bird bath. Photograph: Derek Turner/Barcroft Media

Already beset by degraded landscapes and a toxic environment, insects are going to suffer a catastrophic decline in numbers unless climate change is controlled, according to new research from the University of East Anglia. This is on top of the alarming collapse reported in Germany, where 75% of the flying insect biomass has vanished from protected areas in less than 30 years.
Insects are the backbone of a healthy ecosystem and the consequences of their absence will be global. Is there anything we can do other than despair? Insects will need stepping stones to move around the country as the climate changes. Here are some ways you can help.
If you have a garden, make it part of the solution. Insects need food and we have destroyed 97% of our wildlflower meadows. The charity Buglife has a great guide that shows which plants help which insects: winter flowers such as hellebore, erica and mahonia for pollinators such as bees; evergreen shrubs and climbers for bugs such as woodlice and spiders.

Watching a dragonfly is great fun. Photograph: Kim Taylor/NPL/Alamy

Insects need water – make sure you have some in your garden. Watching bees drink at the bird bath is fun; better still is watching dragonflies emerge from your wildlife pond.
Look beyond your own patch and lobby your council to turn verges into highways for insects. Plants help insects, which help mammals, bats, amphibians, reptiles and birds to thrive. We need to fix the system, not just an isolated component.
B-Lines, a series of insect pathways running through the countryside, are the best way to help on a national scale. You can help by writing to your MP and asking them to support Ben Bradley’s Protection for Pollinators bill. The “B-Line bill” will make the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs take this innovative landscape ecological solution seriously. It passed the first stage of the process through parliament unopposed.

Links

• Urgent Climate Action Required To Protect Tens Of Thousands Of Species Worldwide, New Research Shows
• The projected effect on insects, vertebrates, and plants of limiting global warming to 1.5°C rather than 2°C
• Keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees C helps most species hold their ground
• Limiting warming to 1.5 degree C would save majority of global species from climate change
• Restricting global warming to 1.5C could ‘halve’ risk of biodiversity loss
• Climate Change Threatens Thousands of Species in Our Lifetime
• Media reports on the draft IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C

Water Shortages To Be Key Environmental Challenge Of The Century, NASA Warns

The Guardian - Fiona Harvey

Freshwater supplies have already seriously declined in 19 global hotspots – from China to the Caspian Sea – due to overuse, groundbreaking study shows

The Theewaterskloof Dam, a key source of water supply to Cape Town, South Africa ahead of the current water crisis. Photograph: Halden Krog/AP 

Water shortages are likely to be the key environmental challenge of this century, scientists from NASA have warned, as new data has revealed a drying-out of swaths of the globe between the tropics and the high latitudes, with 19 hotspots where water depletion has been dramatic.
Areas in northern and eastern India, the Middle East, California and Australia are among the hotspots where overuse of water resources has caused a serious decline in the availability of freshwater that is already causing problems. Without strong action by governments to preserve water the situation in these areas is likely to worsen.
Some of these hotspots were previously undocumented or poorly understood: a region in north-western China, in Xinjiang province, has suffered dramatic declines despite receiving normal amounts of rainfall, owing to groundwater depletion from industry and irrigation.

NASA has identified more than 30 hotspots where freshwater is in particular danger

Guardian graphic. Source: NASA

The Caspian Sea was also found to be showing strong declines owing to similar forces, which is resulting in a shrinking shoreline. Previously, this change had been attributed to natural variability, but the new report demonstrates it was caused in large part by the diversion and extraction of water from rivers that feed it, for agriculture and industry. This depletion mirrors the well-known fate of the disappearing Aral Sea in the same region: because the Caspian Sea is much bigger it would take millennia to disappear altogether, but its shrinking shoreline and pollution will cause major problems throughout its borderlands.

Shrinking Aral Sea 2000-2017. The shoreline had already greatly receded in 2000.

Credits: Modis/Terra/NASA

The comprehensive study, the first of its kind, took data from the NASA Grace (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellite mission to track trends in freshwater from 2002 to 2016 across the globe.
“What we are witnessing is major hydrologic change. We see for the first time a very distinctive pattern of the wet land areas of the world getting wetter, in the high latitudes and the tropics, and the dry areas in between getting drier,” said James Famiglietti, of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, and co-author of the paper published today in Nature. “Within the dry areas we see multiple hotspots resulting from groundwater depletion.”
Climate scientists, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have predicted such a global trend. The new paper’s authors said it was too soon to confirm whether their observations were definitely the result of global warming, but said their results showed a “clear human fingerprint” on the global water cycle.
The study is unprecedented, as the Grace data allowed the scientists to see in detail the changes in freshwater resources around the world, even where locally amassed data has been scarce or unavailable. By linking the satellite data with local monitoring, they added another crucial dimension.
Marc Stutter, of the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, who was not involved with the study, said: “Such new data add insight into how we manage both obvious surface waters and hidden subsurface water stores [as] the satellite techniques see vital hidden water reserves under our feet, much like an x-ray to see the health of our unseen water reserves.”
He said it provided an early warning that could allow better management of water resources across the world, which was needed.
In northern India, groundwater extraction for irrigation of crops such as wheat and rice have caused a rapid decline in available water, despite rainfall being normal throughout the period studied. “The fact that extractions already exceed recharge during normal precipitation does not bode well for the availability of groundwater during future droughts,” the authors said, adding that the much-discussed melting of Himalayan glaciers was of only minor significance in the period studied.
In Iraq and Syria, widespread over-reliance on groundwater has resulted from the construction by Turkey of 22 dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, over the last three decades. This has made the area the biggest hotspot identified by the study, outside of sparsely or uninhabited regions such as Antarctica and Greenland, with water resources nearly a third below their normal state.

A boy walks through a dried up irrigation dyke in the village of Sayyed Dakhil in southern Iraq where drought threatens agriculture and livelihoods. Photograph: Haidar Mohammed Ali/AFP/Getty Images

Jonathan Farr, senior policy analyst at the charity WaterAid, said governments must take note of the findings and increase their role in preserving water resources and providing freshwater to people in a sustainable manner. “This report is a warning and an insight into a future threat. We need to ensure that investment in water keeps pace with industrialisation and farming. Governments need to get to grips with this,” he said, pointing to estimates that between $30bn and $100bn of investment was needed per year to provide freshwater where needed.
Sustainable solutions were available, he said. “We have been solving the problem of getting access to water resources since civilisation began. We know how to do it. We just need to manage it, and that has to be done at a local level.”
Providing access to clean water provides knock-on benefits to health, education, equity and the economy, he added, so investment in water assets yields both economic and social dividends.

Links

• How Cape Town was saved from running out of water
• Water shortages could affect 5bn people by 2050, UN report warns
• 'It was too hot, even to leave home': stories from the world's hottest year
• Global water shortages to deliver 'severe hit' to economies, World Bank warns
• Smarter urban water: how Spain's Zaragoza learned to use less
• Smarter urban water: why Melbourne needed to catch and store
• China's mega coal power bases exacerbate water crisis – in pictures
• Tajikistan facing water shortages and climate extremes, report warns
• Adelaide latest victim of global water shortages

Adapt Or Die: Can Evolution Outrun Climate Change?

CBS News



Across the planet, animal and plant species are on the run. A rapidly changing climate is shifting when and where plants blossom, and forcing creatures big and small to migrate and learn new tactics for survival.
It's a trend that's likely to accelerate as scientists expect to see more extreme weather events — intensifying storms and droughts, and greater temperature fluctuations on land and sea. To understand the impact, researchers are flocking to a unique, living lab: the Galapagos Islands.
The Galapagos, a remote, rocky archipelago 500 miles off the coast of Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean, are home to animals that don't exist anywhere else in the world — animals so unique that they inspired Charles Darwin to formulate the theory of evolution after his famous voyage aboard the H.M.S. Beagle in the 1830s.
Species like giant tortoises, marine iguanas, flightless cormorants and finches with finely-tuned beaks evolved in isolation here over millions of years — since long before humans walked the Earth. But today, those that fail to adapt to their changing environment within the space of a few brief generations may face the prospect of extinction.

An iguana perches on the Galapagos' rocky coast. CBS News

CBSN Originals traveled to the Galapagos to see firsthand how the effects of both climate change and adaptation are playing out right now.

The coral detective
Marine biologist Jon Witman from Brown University comes to the Galapagos regularly to monitor the effects of climate change on the evolutionary process.
"It's been stated that the Galapagos is the natural laboratory for evolution. And we're saying that it's a natural laboratory for studying climate change and evolutionary responses to climate change," Witman told CBS News' Adam Yamaguchi.
He said evolutionary changes that once unfolded over hundreds of thousands of years are now happening before our eyes.
"It's a major new perspective in evolutionary biology and ecology, because it's forcing ecologists like me to think about adaptation and natural selection on the period of ten years or so," he said.
Witman's team is focused on understanding the impact underwater, diving to inspect the health of coral reefs and see how changes in water temperature may be shaping changes in marine species.
Part of what they're looking for is the impact of repeated El Niño systems, which he calls "the greatest modulator of climate on the planet." El Niño is a complex weather phenomenon that results in a warming of Pacific Ocean waters, which can devastate marine populations. Its counterpart, La Niña, cools the water and helps foster growth and recovery in the ecosystem.
These warming and cooling cycles test the resilience of species to withstand opposite extremes.
Coral will bleach and eventually die if the water becomes too warm or too cold. And since 90 percent of marine species — from algae all the way up the food chain — rely on the habitat of coral reefs, the consequences are far-reaching.

Creatures that could disappear with the Great Barrier Reef 1/16

Pygmy seahorse (Hippocampus Bargibanti)

This minute master of camouflage survives by adapting its body to closely resemble sea fans, the soft coral it calls home.It's just one of the many creatures that could disappear along with the Great Barrier Reef because of global warming. Credit: Reinhard Dirscherl/ullstein bild via Getty Images

Witman is concerned about evidence that climate change may make the naturally-occurring El Niño and La Niña cycles more frequent and more extreme — pushing nature's resilience to a breaking point. Will animals be able to cope?
"That's the $64 million question that we want to answer," he said. "Yes and no. I think the no part is that the El Niño stress may recur so frequently that the species that are stressed don't have enough time to recover before the next El Niño comes.
"There's no doubt we are in an unprecedented period of global stress in terms of climate impacts. And basically  the natural world is being hit by what I call the big three. Certainly climate change is up there. Habitat destruction by humans is absolutely key. And we're also adding pollution to the ecosystem. It sounds pretty grim, and it is grim."

The penguin wrangler
There are fewer than 1,000 Galapagos penguins on the islands, and Gustavo Jimenez is on a mission to capture every last one of them. The researcher and his team work day and night to chase down and scoop up the birds so that they can be measured and studied, then released back into the wild.
"We're worried what happening in the planet. The planet is just — is one, just one house for everybody, for every species. So we know we need to protect them," Jimenez said.
He's tracking the health of the penguins and whether they're having babies. The data he gathers on this endangered species will be critical to understanding how the changing climate may affect their feeding and breeding patterns — and may help find clues to evolutionary changes the species is undergoing.
Their survival is not assured. The planet is currently experiencing one of the greatest extinction events since the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago. While extinction is a natural phenomenon, with one to five species historically being lost each year, these days it's occurring at 1,000 to 10,000 times the natural rate. Dozens of species worldwide are being lost forever every single day.

The Galapagos Islands are home to many unique bird species. CBS News

It's a threat potentially facing the flightless cormorant, a bird Yamaguchi calls an "oddity of evolution." Somewhere around two million years ago, its evolutionary path diverged from other cormorants and it lost the ability to fly. The Galapagos cormorants didn't need to fly; they could find all the food they needed in the waters off the islands' jagged rocks, so they developed powerful legs and webbed feet to help them become strong swimmers instead.
Penguins share those rocks, nesting in pairs in the cave-like crevices. Jimenez said climate change is having a noticeable impact on them, forcing penguins to move their nests to higher ground. The researchers keep a record of each location.
The penguins' ability to adapt — which helped this species thrive near the equator while most penguins chill in Antarctica — offers their best hope for the future. But this time around, they may not have millions of years to figure it out.
"Maybe the time is smaller than before, and the problem is how they could adapt … in that short time," Jimenez said.

Darwin's finches today
Researcher Jaime Chaves is a self-described "bird geek" who's taken an interest in studying Darwin's finches — the very species that helped inspire Charles Darwin's landmark book, "The Origin of Species," in 1859.
Darwin documented how the beaks of these small birds varied from island to island to take advantage of available food sources. Those with sharp beaks feasted on insects while others with short, stout beaks plucked seeds from the ground. Natural selection meant those best suited to their environments thrived and multiplied, while others struggled and died out. Eventually they developed into 14 distinct species.
Chaves and his team string up very fine netting between the trees to capture finches for study.
"We're gonna analyze and collect the data on their morphology, that is, how different their beaks are," he explained. "The beak shape is one of those traits in birds that is so key because it will determine the fate of that group."
Chaves and his students track minute changes, year to year, in the shapes and sizes of the finches' beaks as the flocks adapt to the varieties of food available. Those with inadequate beaks don't survive. And because the finches breed two or three generations every year, "in so little time, you can see evolution in action," he said.
These rapid adaptations may give it an advantage for survival in a changing world. In 2017, researchers discovered that an entirely new species had been formed when a wayward bird mated with another finch species and produced offspring. Chaves expects to see more of that happening globally as various species migrate.
But it won't always work. "Many species will not be able to make it," he said, echoing the concerns Jimenez expressed for the penguins and Witman for the coral ecosystem. "For many species in which you have this limitation of time, you might be too late."
It may be the ultimate test of the survival of the fittest, and many species — even our own — could lose out.
"I think the issue right now that we have is that the changes are happening in such a short period of time. The same amount of change that you've seen happening in a couple of millions of years has happened in the last 40 years," Chaves said. "From our perspective of humans, we have understand that it's our responsibility that these changes are happening because [of] our own mishandling of the planet."
It's no longer enough for animals to evolve. They have to adapt now, adapt fast — or die.

Links

• Mass coral bleaching hits the Great Barrier Reef – again
• Saving Florida's coral reef through underwater gardening
• Penguins quickly disappearing from Antarctica due to climate change
• Report: Human-caused climate change exacerbates extreme weather
• New giant tortoise species found in Galapagos Islands
• Satellite images reveal major changes in water availability worldwide
• Tourism's impact on climate is getting worse, study says

The EU's Plan To Set A Goal Of Zero-Emissions By 2050 Could Be A Big Deal For Climate Action

Quartz - Akshat Rathi

Reuters/Maxim Shemetov

When the Paris climate agreement was signed in 2015, it was a milestone in taking action against climate change. It set a clear goal—to keep global average temperatures from rising above 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels—and got every country on board (including the US, which can’t leave the accord till 2020).
And, yet, despite the progress, in 2017, the United Nations said that most countries are far behind on emissions reductions. When the world set a new record high for greenhouse-gas emissions in the same year, it lent support to the belief that if more ambitious targets are not set soon, then we will cross the crucial 2°C and face climate catastrophe.
Now the EU, the third largest emitter in the world, is standing up to the challenge. Miguel Arias Cañete, the EU climate head, announced in a blog post that the bloc is aiming to cut emissions to zero by 2050. The goal already has the backing of the European Parliament, and the EU will be launching public consultations within the next few weeks.
If the EU succeeds in binding itself to the target, it could be a big deal for climate action. Though smaller countries both within the EU and outside have committed to a zero-emissions goal— the EU would be the largest emitter to commit to it. It would set a benchmark for other countries to shape their policies for such a goal. As Quartz reported previously:

The zero-emissions goal is acknowledged in Article 4 of the text of the Paris climate agreement, though it doesn’t set a date for when the world should reach that target (it does say that rich countries need to get there sooner than poor ones). Most scientists agree that the zero-emissions target date for the world as a whole should likely be early in the second half of the century.

Previously, the EU had committed to cutting emissions by up to 95% of 1990 levels by 2050. It may seem like the previous goal is quite close to zero emissions, but the task of cutting emissions gets much harder the closer you try to get to zero.
That’s because it would mean cutting all emissions in sectors that currently don’t have effective technological means to achieve it. Take aviation—we currently don’t have any viable zero-emissions planes for passenger travel. In other cases, if we do have technology to cut emissions, then it is quite expensive. Take the cement industry—it produces carbon dioxide because of the use of its raw materials (beyond fossil fuels), and the only way to reduce its emissions are through capturing the carbon dioxide and storing it underground. There are only a handful of small cement plants testing the technology and hoping they can find ways to make it cheaper for larger scale deployment.
To be sure, it’s important to clarify that the EU’s goal is to get to “net-zero” emissions. It means that, by 2050, there may still be some permissible greenhouse-gas emissions for industries or sectors that haven’t found a viable alternative. But those emissions will have to be offset through negative-emissions technology, which will require capturing carbon dioxide from the air. Unlike an electric airplane, negative-emissions technology is not fantasy. There are three companies that boast of its commercial use, but it does come at a high cost.

Links

• Emissions Gap Report
• After years of holding steady, carbon emissions are now moving in the wrong direction
• The way scientists define climate goals has given the world a false sense of hope
• The Race to Zero Emissions
• Article 4 Paris climate agreement (pdf)
• The world’s first “negative emissions” plant has begun operation—turning carbon dioxide into stone

Scholar: Dumping Fossil Fuels By 2050 Needed To Save Climate

Washington Post - Menelaos Hadjicostis Associated Press



NICOSIA, Cyprus — Getting rid of fossil fuels by mid-century and making the switch to large-scale renewable energy sources and nuclear power offers the best chance of meeting the climate change targets set out by the Paris accord, a prominent American economist said Friday.
Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs said the world’s ways of producing and using energy need to change “much faster, much more dramatically” than political leaders looking to tap hydrocarbon reserves understand.
“So, if we want to move to zero emissions we better get the idea to move away from fossil fuels faster than Shell oil company thinks we can,” Sachs told a conference in the Cypriot capital on the climate change challenges faced by Mediterranean countries and the Middle East.
Sachs said climate change bringing desertification, drought, crop failures and rising sea levels are putting the region’s agriculture “in dire threat.”
“It’s worked well for the last 8,000 years and we’re going to ruin it in this generation, and that’s crazy,” said Sachs, who also serves as an adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on sustainable development.
“This is the tinder of conflict, of mass migration, or all the things we don’t handle decently,” he added.
Sachs says the best approach is to set up interconnected power grids where emissions-free electricity from renewable energy sources in one region could be transmitted elsewhere.
For instance, an interconnected grid would enable North African and the Middle Eastern countries harnessing their ample solar power potential to transmit generated electricity to colder and less sunny northern Europe.
Sachs hailed China as the current world leader in the energy interconnection project and urged Europe to draw up similar plans.
Although opposing exploitation of east Mediterranean gas deposits, he urged countries moving ahead with such projects to take steps and steeply curb carbon emissions while preparing their economies for carbon-free electricity generation to fire up everything from cars, to ships and factories.
Sachs, who also heads Columbia University’s Earth Institute, said Mediterranean countries could work together to draw up proposals on mitigating the challenges they face and submit them to a high-level U.N. climate summit set for September, 2019.

Links

• Utah teens convince lawmakers to recognize climate change
• Scholar: Dumping fossil fuels by 2050 needed to save climate
• Lawsuit contends energy lease sales will affect environment
• County sues top oil companies for downplaying global warming
• Talks on climate rules inch on, despite lack of leadership
• France's Macron backs European unity amid US tensions
• Stronger fuel standards make sense, even when gas prices are low
• Climate change may scuttle Caribbean's post-hurricane plans for a renewable energy boom
• Wanted: Leaders to lead on climate change
• Shell takes its turn in the climate change spotlight
• UN body reaches agreement to cut global shipping emissions
• Court rules Exxon must provide documents in climate probe
• Eugene climate trial date set
• October trial date set for 'climate kids' lawsuit
• Half of Earth's satellites restrict use of climate data
• Fiji damaged by cyclone, PM sees 'frightening' weather ahead