Climate Change News & Discussions

User avatar
wjfox
Site Admin
Posts: 8732
Joined: Sat May 15, 2021 6:09 pm
Location: London, UK
Contact:

Re: Climate Change News & Discussions

Post by wjfox »

"But the Green New Deal is too expensive! It's socialist, and unamerican."

/s







weatheriscool
Posts: 12968
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 6:16 pm

Re: Climate Change News & Discussions

Post by weatheriscool »

Study documents dramatic loss of remaining Pyrenees glaciers
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-documents ... ciers.html
by Aritz Parra
Europe's southernmost glaciers will likely be reduced to ice patches in the next two decades due to climate change, as the shrinking of ice mass on the Pyrenees mountain range continues at the steady but rapid speed seen at least since the 1980s, Spanish scientists say in a new study.

The Pyrenees, marking the natural border between Spain and France, saw three glaciers disappear or become reduced to stagnant strips of ice since 2011. In 17 of the two dozen remaining ice sheets, there's been an average loss of 6.3 meters (20 feet) of ice thickness.

Their mass also shrank over one-fifth on average, or 23%, in nearly one decade, according to the study published last week in the peer-reviewed Geophysical Research Letters. Its findings were announced to the media on Friday.
weatheriscool
Posts: 12968
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 6:16 pm

Re: Climate Change News & Discussions

Post by weatheriscool »

A recent reversal in the response of western Greenland's ice caps to climate change
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-reversal- ... d-ice.html
by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Greenland may be best known for its enormous continental scale ice sheet that soars up to 3,000 meters above sea level, whose rapid melting is a leading contributor to global sea level rise. But surrounding this massive ice sheet, which covers 79% of the world's largest island, is Greenland's rugged coastline dotted with ice capped mountainous peaks. These peripheral glaciers and ice caps are now also undergoing severe melting due to anthropogenic (human-caused) warming. However, climate warming and the loss of these ice caps may not have always gone hand-in-hand.

New collaborative research from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and five partner institutions (University of Arizona, University of Washington, Pennsylvania State University, Desert Research Institute and University of Bergen), published today in Nature Geoscience, reveals that during past periods, glaciers and ice caps in coastal west Greenland experienced climate conditions much different than the interior of Greenland. Over the past 2,000 years, these ice caps endured periods of warming during which they grew larger rather than shrinking.
weatheriscool
Posts: 12968
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 6:16 pm

Re: Climate Change News & Discussions

Post by weatheriscool »

The U.S. just had its hottest summer on record
Source: NBC News

Sept. 9, 2021, 1:05 PM MDT
The United States had its hottest summer on record this year, narrowly edging out the previous milestone that was set 85 years ago during the Dust Bowl.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday that the average temperature this summer for the contiguous U.S. was 74 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2.6 degrees warmer than the long-term average. The heat record caps off a season full of extremes, with parts of the country experiencing persistent drought, wildfires, record-breaking heat waves, hurricanes and other extreme weather exacerbated by climate change.

This summer beat the previous record set in 1936 by a hair, coming in at less than 0.01 degrees warmer than during the Dust Bowl year, when huge portions of the West and Great Plains were parched by severe drought. Though this year's summer was technically hotter than 1936, the very small gap puts the two years "neck and neck," in what NOAA called a "virtual tie."

Global warming is making heat waves and other extreme weather events both more likely and more severe, and climate scientists have said conditions this summer offer a glimpse of what could become more common in the future.
Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environ ... d-rcna1957
User avatar
wjfox
Site Admin
Posts: 8732
Joined: Sat May 15, 2021 6:09 pm
Location: London, UK
Contact:

Re: Climate Change News & Discussions

Post by wjfox »

User avatar
caltrek
Posts: 6509
Joined: Mon May 17, 2021 1:17 pm

Re: Climate Change News & Discussions

Post by caltrek »

The State of Climate Tech
by Dr. Celine Herweijer and Azeem Azhar

https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/services/sust ... h-2020.pdf

Extract:
(PWC) The big headline is that early stage investment into climate tech is growing fast. Over the past seven years, total funding for climate tech companies, rate of startup creation, and the average size of funding has continued to rise. For perspective, this research shows that in 2013 the early-stage venture funding for climate tech companies was about $418 million. However, in 2019, total venture funding increased to $16.1b, a more than 3750% increase. This is on the order of 3 times the growth rate of VC investment into AI, during a time period renowned for its uptick in AI investment.

…Investor participation in climate tech is fundamentally different to the noughties clean tech era. Climate tech funding seems to be coming from every corner of the market. More traditional venture capital firms are today at the table, growth stage investors including government backed asset managers and Private Equity players are getting involved in earlier stage deals to get exposure, and corporate players from oil majors and global consumer goods companies to Big Tech are playing important roles as strategic investors to scale approaches.

The COVID-19 pandemic has not slowed investment activity. Since the crisis hit, major firms have pledged billions of dollars into this including Amazon’s $2 billion ‘Climate Pledge’ venture fund, Microsoft’s $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund, and Unilever’s €1 billion climate funds. In addition, close to 300 companies now have a commitment to achieve net zero emissions before 2050. Every commitment represents a demand signal—a new customer—in the market for a solution that helps them achieve that call. In many cases, the solutions are not yet available, and will need to be delivered by technologists and startups over the coming decades.

Still, despite the substantial growth rates we find in this market as a whole, it is a nascent sector. Capital, for example, remains thin rather than bountiful. Founders talk of a shortage of choice of investor, and investors are finding strong deals but are keen to see this segment attract more of the best founders. Whilst the policy and regulatory environment is moving in the right direction, companies pioneering the high-risk capital-intensive breakthrough technologies still struggle to get through the valley-of-death and be market competitive without policy incentives.
Don't mourn, organize.

-Joe Hill
User avatar
caltrek
Posts: 6509
Joined: Mon May 17, 2021 1:17 pm

Re: Climate Change News & Discussions

Post by caltrek »

The Public is Pretty Confused by Climate Change Jargon
by Kate Yoder and Matthew Craft
September 1, 2021

https://grist.org/language/study-climat ... ng-points/

Introduction:
(Grist) If you’ve ever furrowed your brow trying to remember what “mitigation” meant, you’re not alone.

Many people don’t understand key terms experts use to talk about climate change, according to a recent study from researchers affiliated with the United Nations Foundation and the University of Southern California. Some of the most difficult-to-understand words were mitigation, referring to efforts to reduce emissions to slow down climate change, and carbon-neutral, when there’s no net increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the air.

Experts in a given field might think that technical language is more precise or more efficient than commonplace alternatives. But subjecting normal people to obscure terms can leave them feeling confused and disengaged and can sometimes encourage a head-in-the-sand response. Everyone has heard the advice “know your audience.” That’s easier said than done, especially since many specialists may not even realize what counts as jargon, with their non-expert days long in the past.

“Some of the people in our study were really concerned about climate change,” said Wändi Bruine de Bruin, a professor of psychology and behavioral science at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy. “If they don’t understand what you’re trying to tell them, you could be missing an opportunity to make a difference.”

The researchers landed on a shortlist of terms for the study by talking with experts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of U.N. scientists that released a dire report last month warning that greenhouse gas emissions were quickly destabilizing the climate with devastating and “irreversible” consequences. They picked words and phrases that were important for understanding climate policy but tend to get misinterpreted, like tipping point, carbon dioxide removal, and adaptation. Then the researchers interviewed 20 people, picked to provide a diversity of views, asking them to define these words and rate how easy they were to understand. The takeaway from the study: “many of the terms were unfamiliar or perceived as needlessly complex.”
Don't mourn, organize.

-Joe Hill
User avatar
Yuli Ban
Posts: 4631
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:44 pm

Re: Climate Change News & Discussions

Post by Yuli Ban »

And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
weatheriscool
Posts: 12968
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 6:16 pm

Re: Climate Change News & Discussions

Post by weatheriscool »

Heatwave model shows it is hotter in more places more often
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-heatwave-hotter.html
by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

New modeling shows that heatwaves across Europe have increased in both frequency and spatial extent over the past century.

Using a 100-year observational dataset and the latest techniques for modeling climate extremes has revealed the evolving dynamics of heatwaves across Europe under the influence of climate change.

Heatwaves can have catastrophic impacts on humans, settlements and the environment. They can cause illness or death, particularly for the frail or elderly, and trigger wildfires that destroy property and large tracts of wilderness.

Understanding the behavior of such extreme temperature events over space and time is important for planning and managing the present and future risk. However, most modeling to predict future heatwaves relies on simulation outputs from climate models, not direct observations, and uses inflexible models that may not accurately capture the dependence relationship among spatially associated locations under extreme conditions.
User avatar
erowind
Posts: 544
Joined: Mon May 17, 2021 5:42 am

Re: Climate Change News & Discussions

Post by erowind »

https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/defa ... -et-al.pdf



Official consensus scientists are starting to catch up to what I've been reading for the past two years. (People on Arctic Sea Ice Forums have been saying this for well over a decade.)
This is an official government think tank saying that 4C by 2100 is locked in with 90% certainty even if countries meet their current emissions targets (which they aren't already.)
The median statistic chance under current policy is 5C with a 10% chance of reaching 7C.
The 10% chance is in a scenario where there is a stall or relapse in emissions reduction policy.
Which concerns me greatly because I know most countries are already not hitting those targets.
Which for me means we are in the 7C scenario right now unless our socio-economic system changes entirely.
Post Reply