Climate Change News & Discussions

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Oceans were the hottest ever recorded in 2022, analysis shows
Source: The Guardian

The world’s oceans were the hottest ever recorded in 2022, demonstrating the profound and pervasive changes that human-caused emissions have made to the planet’s climate. More than 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions is absorbed in the oceans. The records, starting in 1958, show an inexorable rise in ocean temperature, with an acceleration in warming after 1990.

Sea surface temperatures are a major influence on the world’s weather. Hotter oceans help supercharge extreme weather, leading to more intense hurricanes and typhoons and more moisture in the air, which brings more intense rains and flooding. Warmer water also expands, pushing up sea levels and endangering coastal cities.

The temperature of the oceans is far less affected by natural climate variability than the temperature of the atmosphere, making the oceans an undeniable indicator of global heating.

Last year is expected to be the fourth or fifth hottest recorded for surface air temperatures when the final data is collated. During 2022, we saw the third La Niña event in a row, which is the cooler phase of an irregular climate cycle centred on the Pacific that affects global weather patterns. When El Niño returns, global air temperatures will be boosted even higher.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ysis-shows

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The Highest Greenland Temperatures in 1000 Years
January 23, 2023

Introduction:

(EurekAlert) Recent high temperatures on the ice sheet in central and northern Greenland lies are unique, when compared to 1000 years of reconstructed climate conditions on the ice sheet. This is the main message of a new scientific study based on numerous updated ice core data.

The climate of the last 1000 years reconstructed

In the last decade ice core researchers from the Alfred Wegner Institute and the Niels Bohr Institute have collaborated to update existing ice cores with information from the most recent decades. Hence, several missions have been flown to remote locations on the Greenland ice sheet in order to drill new cores at locations where ice cores had been drilled some 30 years ago.

This has been done in order to get ice and snow samples from the latest decades.

Comparing the water isotopic composition in the recent samples with similar records reaching a millennium back in time it is possible to reconstruct climate from year 1000 all the way up to 2011.

The new temperature reconstruction shows that the most recent decade in the cores are some 1.5 degrees warmer than the long-term average.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/977368

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Fossil-Fuel Power Plants May Be on Their Last Legs
by Dan Gearino
January 28, 2023

Introduction:

(Mother Jones) The global energy transition has reached a pivot point, in which fossil fuels have likely peaked in their use for producing electricity and are about to enter a period of decline.

This is the idea at the heart of a new report from RMI (Rocky Mountain Institute), a nonprofit that does research and advocacy about the transition. The lead author, energy analyst Kingsmill Bond, makes a case that wind and solar power are going through growth that looks almost exactly like the trend lines for the early stages of transformative products and industries, across technologies and eras, like automobiles and smartphones.

The growth begins slowly, with high costs, and shifts into high gear as costs shrink and efficiency rises. The optimism in this outlook is almost jarring in its clarity, and in its contrast with the pessimism I see and feel every day as the threats of climate change become clearer.

The report argues that the fossil fuel demand has peaked in the electricity market in part because the annual growth in global electricity demand—about 700 terawatt-hours—is less than the electricity generated in 2022 by newly built power plants that have zero emissions, most of which were wind and solar plants. The report cites forecasts for a continuing increase in wind and solar development that will outpace the growth in electricity demand, a dynamic that will squeeze out the most expensive and dirtiest energy sources.

The use of fossil fuels for electricity shifted in 2018 from a long period of growth to a plateau in which there is no clear trend up or down as measured by the amount of electricity produced. The report says the plateau is likely to continue until about 2025, followed by a long-term decline.

Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/environmen ... n-energy/

caltrek’s comment: Ironically, for purposes of this forum, one of Certain Russian’s favored sayings is applied later in the article regarding Putin’s decision to launch a war of aggression against the Ukraine: “it was worse than a crime, it was a mistake.” According to the article, it was Talleyrand who first used this expression. (In a different context of course).

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AI Predicts We'll Breach Our Climate Goal in Just 10 Years
by David Nield
February 1, 2023

Introduction:

(Science Alert) Sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms have predicted that the world will be 1.5 °C hotter than it was before the Industrial Revolution by the early 2030s – another climate change alarm bell to add to the cacophony that's already being sounded.

And that's baked in, the AI says: it doesn't matter whether greenhouse gases rise or fall over the next decade, the 1.5 °C rise now can't be avoided. Bear in mind that limiting temperature increases to 1.5 °C was the ambitious goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The drastic measures originally proposed to cut emissions and stay under 1.5 °C of warming will now most likely be required to avoid a 2 °C increase, according to the authors of the new study. The 2 °C is pegged as when global warming consequences get significantly worse for life on the planet.

But we are already seeing a litany of climate impacts in the form of heatwaves, bushfires, floods, and storms with just 1.1 °C of global heating. So, limiting temperature increases as much as possible matters, because every fraction of a degree counts.

There's more: The AI model shows that even if greenhouse gas emissions rapidly decline to hit net zero by 2076, there's a 1 in 2 chance of hitting 2 °C of warming by 2054, and a 2 in 3 chance of hitting it between 2044 and 2065.

Read more of the Science Alert article here: https://www.sciencealert.com/ai-predic ... -10-years

For a presentation of the results of the study as presented in the journal PNAS: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2207183120

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The Battle of Lützerath Marks Beginning of a New Stage for Global Climate Movement
by Joáo Camargo
January 31, 2023

Introduction:

(Common Dreams) In early January 2023, in a tiny village in western Germany, tens of thousands of climate justice activists faced off against thousands of police in a showdown over the fate of the fossil industry in central Europe. The gigantic mobilization of means to secure the destruction of a village and the expansion of one of the world's largest open-pit coal mines—Garzweiler—in the center of Europe marks a new historical moment. To consider what happened in Lützerath as a defeat of the movement is to misunderstand history.

In Lützerath two historical forces clashed. On one side, the climate justice movement, which has been organizing for decades and since 2019 has become a global mass movement. In opposition to this was the German coal multinational RWE, backed by thousands of police coming from at least 14 German cities to defend the decisions of the German federal government and the government of North Rhine-Westphalia. More than symbolic, the battle of Lützerath was fought on the initiative of the climate justice movement to halt the extraction of 280 million tonnes of coal from beneath the devastated village.

Read more here: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/t ... lutzerath

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FFS.

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[caltrek]

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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[caltrek]

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