Climate Change News & Discussions

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caltrek
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Big New Incentives for Clean Energy Aren’t Enough – the Inflation Reduction Act Was Just the First Step, Now the Hard Work Begins
by Daniel Cohan
August 19, 2022

Introduction:
(The Conversation) The new Inflation Reduction Act is stuffed with subsidies for everything from electric vehicles to heat pumps, and incentives for just about every form of clean energy. But pouring money into technology is just one step toward solving the climate change problem.

Wind and solar farms won’t be built without enough power lines to connect their electricity to customers. Captured carbon and clean hydrogen won’t get far without pipelines. Too few contractors are trained to install heat pumps. And EV buyers will think twice if there aren’t enough charging stations.

In my new book about climate solutions, I discuss these and other obstacles standing in the way of a clean energy transition. Surmounting them is the next step as the country figures out how to turn the goals of the most ambitious climate legislation Congress has ever passed into reality.

Two outcomes matter: how deeply U.S. actions slash emissions domestically, and how effectively they cut the costs of clean technologies so that other countries can slash their emissions too.
Conclusion:
After years of gridlock, there’s reason to celebrate Congress passing three bills that will do more to cut U.S. emissions than any legislation in history. But much more will be needed to reach the nation’s climate goals and to make clean energy more affordable at home and abroad.
Read more here: https://theconversation.com/big-new-in ... s-188693
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Risk of catastrophic California 'megaflood' has doubled due to global warming, researchers say

by Louis Sahagún
https://phys.org/news/2022-08-catastrop ... lobal.html
Even today, as California struggles with severe drought, global warming has doubled the likelihood that weather conditions will unleash a deluge as devastating as the Great Flood of 1862, according to a UCLA study released Friday.

In that inundation 160 years ago, 30 consecutive days of rain triggered monster flooding that roared across much of the state and changed the course of the Los Angeles River, relocating its mouth from Venice to Long Beach.

If a similar storm were to happen today, the study says, up to 10 million people would be displaced, major interstate freeways such as Interstates 5 and 80 would be shut down for months, and population centers including Stockton, Fresno and parts of Los Angeles would be submerged—a $1 trillion disaster larger than any in world history.

It would also likely be "bigger in almost every respect" than what scientists have come to call the "ARKStorm scenario" of 1862, said climate scientist Daniel Swain, co-author of the study published Friday in the journal Science Advances.
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A historical perspective on glacial retreat
https://phys.org/news/2022-08-historica ... treat.html
by Franziska Schmid, ETH Zurich
Researchers at ETH Zurich and WSL have for the first time reconstructed the extent of Switzerland's glacier ice loss in the 20th century. For this purpose, the researchers used historical imagery and conclude that the country's glaciers lost half their volume between 1931 and 2016.

Glaciers are melting rapidly—and since the 2000s, scientists have been recording and researching changes in their volume more and more precisely. In contrast, hardly anything is known about how glaciers changed during the 20th century. Although there are a handful of studies that reconstruct the surface topography of individual glaciers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these partially show large discrepancies with existing models when it comes to estimating the corresponding glacier volume.

In a study that has just been published in the scientific journal The Cryosphere, a team of researchers from ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL have reconstructed the topography of all Swiss glaciers in 1931. Based on these reconstructions and comparisons with data from the 2000s, the researchers conclude that the glacier volume halved between 1931 and 2016.
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caltrek
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Lima Becomes First Latin American Capital to Back Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty
by Brett Wilkins
August 22, 2022

Introduction:
(Common Dreams) City lawmakers in Lima, Peru on Monday unanimously passed a motion calling for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, a proposed global mechanism for tackling the source of most of the greenhouse gas emissions that are fueling the climate emergency.

Lima councilors voted 39-0 in favor of a FFNPT, making the city the first Latin American capital to endorse the proposed treaty.

Carlo André Ángeles Manturano, the Lima council member who introduced the motion, said the measure shows his "commitment to continue promoting the necessary actions at the local, national, and international level to combat climate change."

"As we face the climate emergency as a society, the lack of firm commitments to action by our authorities and our governments is what brings us ever closer to irreversible damage," he explained. "It is necessary to take firm action on one of our principal threats, the proliferation of fossil fuels, an industry that is projected to produce 110% more emissions than what is required to limit warming to 1.5°C by 2030."

"That is why," added Ángeles, "on behalf of the metropolitan government of Lima, I presented the motion to join this crusade and call for the non-proliferation of fossil fuels in the city of Lima, and requesting the Peruvian national government to replicate this action and endorse the Fossil Fuel Treaty."
Read more here: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022 ... on-treaty
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caltrek
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Fighting Climate Change is Wildly Popular but Most Americans Don’t Know That
August 22, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) Just after the U.S. Congress passed the nation's most substantial legislation aimed at battling climate change, a new study shows that the average American badly underestimates how much their fellow citizens support substantive climate policy. While 66-80% of Americans support climate action, the average American believes that number is 37-43%, the study found.

“It’s stunning how universal and shared that idea is, among every demographic,” said Gregg Sparkman, the paper’s first author who did this work as a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton and is now an assistant professor at Boston College.

The research, co-authored by Elke Weber, the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment and professor of psychology and the School of Public and International Affairs, was published in Nature Communications today.

The study found that conservatives underestimated national support for climate policies to the greatest degree but, liberals also believed that a minority of Americans support climate action. The misperception was the norm in every state, across policies, and among every demographic tested, including political affiliation, race, media consumption habits, and rural vs. suburban. The actions that the researchers surveyed were major climate policies that could play a role in the United States mitigating climate change, including a carbon tax, siting renewable energy projects on public lands, sourcing electricity from 100% renewable resources by 2035, and the Green New Deal. The trend of Americans largely underestimating such support held true for every single policy.

The study showed a link between consuming conservative media and high levels of misperception, even when controlling for personal politics. The researchers also found that living in a red state, and having less exposure to climate marches or protests was linked to a greater discrepancy between estimates of popularity and actual popularity of climate policies. According to the paper, supporters of climate action outnumber opponents two to one, but Americans falsely perceive nearly the opposite to be true. Sparkman said that this underestimation of support is problematic because people tend to conform to what they think others believe, which would weaken actual support for such policies.
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/962606

caltrek’s comment: This is one reason I think gloom and doom prophets may be doing more harm than good. Sure, there is a hell of a lot of bad news coming out about draughts, famines, forest fires, floods, etc. Still, anyway you slice it, 66-80% public support is impressive.
I think this also points to the real culprits in our march to the stupidity singularity: politicians who care more about carbon-based fuel industry campaign donations than they do about public support.
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caltrek
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Current Warming in Northwestern Siberia is Recorded as the Strongest of the Last 7,000 Years August 25, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) The north of Western Siberia is recording the warmest summers of the last 7,000 years. While for several millennia the temperature of the region was following a general cooling, in the 19th century there has been an abrupt change with rapidly rising temperature that has reached its highest value in the recent decades. These findings were published today in Nature Communications.

Thanks to multiple field expeditions aimed at collecting subfossil wood performed over the last 40 years, dendrochronologists of the Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), and the Ural Federal University (UrFU), have eventually been able to create a unique and extraordinary-long tree-ring width chronology from the Yamal region allowing to track the course of summer temperature over the past 7,638 years. With support from colleagues of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, and of the University of Geneva, they have been able to perform analyses to confidently reconstruct and characterize the temperatures over the full period and with annual resolution.

“Due to changes in the Earth's orbit we would have expected a continuous, slow and gradual decrease of incoming summer solar energy and thus temperature at the subpolar latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere during last 8-9 millennia. However, how recorded by the trees growing in Yamal, this cooling trend has been interrupted in the middle of the 19th century, when temperature began to rise very quickly and reached the highest values in recent decades,” says Rashit Hantemirov, Leading Researcher of the Laboratories of Dendrochronology of the Ural Branch of the RAS and Natural Science Methods in the Humanities of UrFU.
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/962811

caltrek’s comment: A nice example of collaboration between Russian and Europeans academics. Too bad the political leaders can’t get along like that.
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caltrek
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A Study Indicates that China’s Cities Leading the Way on Carbon Reduction
August 25, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) Thirty-eight Chinese cities have reduced their emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) despite growing economies and populations for at least five years - defined as proactively peaked cities, a new study reveals.

A further 21 cities have cut CO2 emissions as their economies or populations have ‘declined’ over the same period - defined as passively emission declined cities.

The experts discovered that ‘emission peaked’ cities, such as Beijing and Taizhou (Zhejiang province), achieved emission decline mainly due to efficiency improvements and structural changes in energy use, whilst ‘declining’ cities, such as Fuxin (Liaoning province) and Shenyang (Liaoning province), are likely to have reduced emissions due to economic recession or population loss.

They recommend that instead of using a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, emission targets of cities need to be set individually considering cities’ resources, industrialisation levels, socio-economic characteristics, and development goals.

Super-emitting cities with outdated technologies and lower production efficiency should develop stringent policies and targets for emissions reduction, while less developed regions could have more emission space for economic development.
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/962819
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caltrek
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Climate Extremes: The Energy Required for Adaptation Calls for Stronger Mitigation Efforts
August 25, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) A new study published today in Nature Communications by researchers from the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the European Institute on Economics and the Environment and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine finds that adapting to climate change will require more energy than previously estimated, leading to higher energy investments and costs. Avoiding this additional energy burden is another important benefit of ambitious mitigation that so far has remained neglected in the academia, the public debate and the international negotiations.
Read more of the EurekAlert article here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/962817

For the more lengthy study published in Nature Communications : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-32471-1

caltrek’s comment: Another reason why calling recent legislation the Inflation Reduction Act is valid as something more than just a public relations stunt. That act includes significant mitigation efforts to address climate change and provisions to develop new energy sources.
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caltrek
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Nontoxic Material Found to be Ultra-strong Solar Energy Harvester
August 25, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) Solar cells are vital for the green energy transition. They can be used not only on rooftops and solar farms but also for powering autonomous vehicles, such as planes and satellites. However, photovoltaic solar cells are currently heavy and bulky, making them difficult to transport to remote locations off-grid, where they are much needed.

In a collaboration led by Imperial College London, alongside researchers from Cambridge, UCL, Oxford, Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin in Germany, and others, researchers have produced materials that can absorb comparable levels of sunlight as conventional silicon solar cells, but with 10,000 times lower thickness.

The material is sodium bismuth sulfide (NaBiS2), which is grown as nanocrystals and deposited from solution to make films 30 nanometers in thickness. NaBiS2 is comprised of nontoxic elements that are sufficiently abundant in the earth’s crust for use commercially. For example, bismuth-based compounds are used as a nontoxic lead replacement in solder, or in over-the-counter stomach medicine.

Yi-Teng Huang, PhD student at the University of Cambridge and co-first author, commented: “We have found a material that absorbs light more strongly than conventional solar cell technologies and can be printed from an ink. This technology has potential for making lightweight solar cells which can be easily transported or used in aerospace applications.”
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/962812
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raklian
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To know is essentially the same as not knowing. The only thing that occurs is the rearrangement of atoms in your brain.
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