Climate Change News & Discussions

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caltrek
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All Who Can Should Pay Even for Their Basic Greenhouse Gas Emissions
February 7, 2023

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) Because GHG emissions are causing harmful climate change, scientists and philosophers have been wrestling with who has the right to produce greenhouse gases at all, and to what extent. Ever since this debate began in the 1990s, most people have been in agreement that while it is both fair and reasonable for people to refrain from inessential consumption, you cannot require people to stop producing what scientists call subsistence emissions – in other words, emissions necessary for securing the basic right to subsistence, such as access to food.
Conclusion:
“For example, if I have to steal your bicycle to rush to the emergency department due to a life-threatening condition, we can all agree that this would be morally permissible, but that does not mean that I don’t owe you anything. Even though I didn't do anything wrong, I should compensate you for stealing your bicycle and for any damage inflicted when I rushed to the emergency department on your bicycle.”

According to Göran Duus-Otterström, in essence, distinguishing between moral permissibility and exemption from responsibility when it comes to subsistence emissions means that people are morally permitted to produce subsistence emissions and that they should compensate for these emissions if they can. For example, the rich part of the world should pay for their subsistence emissions, either through emissions offset schemes or by paying for climate adaptations in low-income countries. The tension between subsistence emissions and climate change is therefore not as great as one might think.

“It is a mistake to think that we are not responsible for our emissions just because we have to produce them. We have a duty to offset even our subsistence emissions if we can do so without jeopardising our basic needs. It would be best if emissions compensation could be managed through our final tax bill each year, but in the meantime individuals should try to offset their emissions in the private market. And of course try to reduce their luxury emissions,” adds Göran Duus-Otterström.
[/quote] Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/978958
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Twice as Much Land in Developing Nations Will be Swamped by Rising Seas than Previously Projected, New Research Shows

February 7, 2023

Rising seas will swamp farmlands, pollute water supplies and displace millions of people much sooner than expected, scientists said last week, as they released new research that accurately calculates the vulnerability of coastal areas, especially in developing countries that have not had access to expensive coastal mapping technologies.

Sea level rise keeps speeding up, and “many coastal areas are lower than scientists thought they were,” said Ronald Vernimmer, lead author of the new study published last week in Earth’s Future, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Up until a few years ago, most estimates of how fast rising seas will inundate shorelines were based on radar measurements that can’t distinguish between tops of plants and buildings and the actual elevation of the ground beneath them, “and therefore overestimate surface elevation,” said Vernimmen, who works with the Dutch research firm Data for Sustainability.

The study he led analyzed global data from NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite, which uses light detection and ranging (lidar) to get more accurate measurements. A lidar instrument combines information from laser pulses, a scanner and a specialized GPS receiver to generate detailed three-dimensional information of features on the surface of the Earth.

The new study shows that every increment of sea level rise will cover more than twice as much land as older models predicted, and marks another advance in providing more accurate models of rising seas said Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who was not involved in the study.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/0702 ... g-nations/
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Antarctica sea ice melts to a record low
https://phys.org/news/2023-02-antarctica-sea-ice.html
The Antarctic Ocean area covered by ice has shrunk to a record low, exposing the thicker ice shelves buttressing Antarctica's ground ice sheet to waves and warmer temperatures, scientists reported Thursday.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center in the United States said Antarctica's sea ice fell to 1.91 million square kilometers (737,000 square miles) this week, the lowest extent since records began in 1979.

The previous all-time low was set last year.

"With a couple more weeks likely left in the melt season, the extent is expected to drop further before reaching its annual minimum," the NSIDC said in a statement.

Melting sea ice has no discernible impact on sea levels because the ice is already in ocean water.

But the sea ice rings Antarctica's massive ice shelves, the extensions of the freshwater glaciers that threaten catastrophic sea level rise over centuries if they continue melting as global temperatures rise.

The NSIDC said "much of the Antarctic coast" has water that is now without ice, "exposing the ice shelves that fringe the ice sheet to wave action and warmer conditions".

The Antarctic cycle undergoes significant annual variations during its summers of thawing and winters of freezing, and the continent has not experienced the rapid melting of the past four decades that plague the ice sheets of Greenland and the Arctic due to global warming.
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This is not the first, and probably will not be the last, article to note that the war in the Ukraine has led to an accelerated reliance on renewables because of threatened or curtailed supplies of natural gas.

What Europe Showed the World About Renewable Energy
by Rebecca Leber
February 21 , 2023

Introduction:
(Vox) One year ago, on the cusp of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it seemed unimaginable that renewable energy in Europe could overtake electricity from oil and gas.

But not even a year later, it did. By the end of 2022, wind and solar combined overtook natural gas in electricity generation. The latest data on Europe’s renewable transition tells a remarkably upbeat story about the hard things countries can accomplish on climate change with enough political will.

Before the Russia-Ukraine war, 40 percent of natural gas and 27 percent of oil imports to Europe came from Russia, and Europe lacked pipelines and terminals in locations that could distribute gas from other parts of the world like the US. After sanctions on Russian oil and gas, instability led to high price shocks, fuel shortages, and a brief uptick in coal usage this winter.

But the worst fears did not materialize, either. The risk was that the EU would fill the gap left by Russian sanctions with coal, the most polluting fossil fuel. And while coal did briefly make a comeback — fossil fuel generation rose last year by 3 percent — it was a temporary increase.

Meanwhile, solar energy especially is on an “unstoppable” track of growth, explained Dave Jones, an analyst at the global energy think tank Ember. Solar capacity in Europe doubled since 2018, and is on track to triple in the next four years.
Read more here: https://www.vox.com/climate/2023/2/21/ ... gy-russia
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'Everyone should be concerned': Antarctic sea ice reaches lowest levels ever recorded
Source: The Guardian

For 44 years, satellites have helped scientists track how much ice is floating on the ocean around Antarctica’s 18,000km coastline.

But across those four decades of satellite observations, there has never been less ice around the continent than there was last week.

In the southern hemisphere summer of 2022, the amount of sea ice dropped to 1.92m sq km on 25 February – an all-time low based on satellite observations that started in 1979.

But by 12 February this year, the 2022 record had already been broken. The ice kept melting, reaching a new record low of 1.79m sq km on 25 February and beating the previous record by 136,000 sq km – an area double the size of Tasmania.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... r-recorded
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