Climate Change News & Discussions

[weatheriscool]

[weatheriscool]

[Time_Traveller]

Government's climate plan ruled unlawful by High Court

Friday 3 May 2024 12:36, UK



The government's plan to meet climate targets and green the economy has been ruled unlawful by the High Court.

The campaigning groups that brought the case had argued it relied too much on risky technologies and glossed over the risk of missing targets.

Judge Clive Sheldon upheld four out of the five grounds in the legal challenge.

Today ministers agreed to publish a new report within 12 months to comply with the ruling, but said the overarching plan had not been criticised and will remain government policy.

Katie de Kauwe, lawyer for one of the groups Friends of the Earth, called it an "embarrassing defeat for the government and its reckless and inadequate climate plans".

https://news.sky.com/story/governments- ... t-13127958

[wjfox]

Oldest ever ice offers glimpse of Earth before the ice ages

Climate snapshots suggest carbon dioxide levels were surprisingly modest during ancient warm period

22 APR 2024

Samples of eerie blue glacial ice from Antarctica are a staggering 6 million years old, scientists announced last week, doubling the previous record for Earth’s oldest ice. The ice opens a new window on Earth’s ancient climate—one that isn’t exactly what scientists expected.

Bubbles in the ice trap air from the Pliocene epoch, a time before the ice ages when the planet was several degrees warmer than today and carbon dioxide (CO2) levels may have been just as high as they are now. But an initial analysis of the bubbles suggests CO2 levels were rather low in the late Pliocene and only sank slightly between 2.7 million and 1 million years ago as the Pliocene ended, the ice ages began, and Earth headed toward a dramatic climate shift that caused ice ages to grow longer and deeper.

The results are preliminary, stresses Ed Brook, a geochemist at Oregon State University (OSU) and leader of the U.S. Center for Oldest Ice Exploration (COLDEX), which presented the discovery last week here in multiple talks at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly. But if even a tiny drop in CO2 can kick off a major climate change, Brook adds, “you know, we probably care about that.”

https://www.science.org/content/article ... h-ice-ages



Credit: JULIA MARKS PETERSON

[weatheriscool]

Computer models show heat waves in north Pacific may be due to China reducing aerosols
https://phys.org/news/2024-05-north-pac ... osols.html
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

A team of oceanographers and planetary scientists at the Ocean University of China, working with a pair of colleagues from the U.S. and one in Germany, has found via computer modeling, that recent heat waves in the north Pacific may be due to a large reduction in aerosols emitted by factories in China.

In their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes how they used several climate models and various factors that allowed them to find patterns that might be linked to the reduction of aerosols emitted into the atmosphere by China.

Over the past decade, the north Pacific has experienced multiple heat waves, leading to fish die-offs, toxic algae blooms and missing whales. Such heat waves have been generally attributed to global warming, but to date, no research has been able to pinpoint how global warming could cause such sudden and variable increases in a specific part of the planet.

[wjfox]

[Time_Traveller]

Venezuela may be first nation to lose all its glaciers

2 hours ago



Venezuela may be the first nation in modern history to lose all its glaciers after climate scientists downgraded its last one to an ice field.

The International Cryosphere Climate Initiative (ICCI), a scientific advocacy organisation, said on X that the South American nation's only remaining glacier - the Humboldt, or La Corona, in the Andes - had become "too small to be classed as a glacier", external.

Venezuela has lost at least six other glaciers in the last century.

With global average temperatures rising due to climate change, ice loss is increasing, helping to raise sea levels around the world.

"There has not been much ice cover on the last Venezuelan glacier since the 2000s", Dr Caroline Clason, a glaciologist at Durham University, told Newsround. "Now it's not being added to, so it has been reclassified as an ice field."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx8qv1nvdppo

[wjfox]

Just Stop Oil protesters in their 80s target Magna Carta

Friday 10 May 2024 13:54, UK

Two climate activists in their 80s have targeted the Magna Carta at the British Library.

Reverend Dr Sue Parfitt, 82, and Judy Bruce, an 85-year-old retired biology teacher, entered the library and tried to smash the glass case protecting the historic document using a lump hammer and chisel.

The pair, from the Just Stop Oil protest group, then held up a sign which stated: "The government is breaking the law".

They could be also be heard asking: "Is the government above the law?"

The Metropolitan Police said two people have been arrested on suspicion of criminal damage and are currently in custody.

https://news.sky.com/story/just-stop-oi ... a-13132732

[firestar464]

Damn just pour paint or something; please don't risk the artifacts

[Time_Traveller]

Just Stop Oil protesters in their 80s target Magna Carta

Friday 10 May 2024 13:54, UK

Two climate activists in their 80s have targeted the Magna Carta at the British Library.

Reverend Dr Sue Parfitt, 82, and Judy Bruce, an 85-year-old retired biology teacher, entered the library and tried to smash the glass case protecting the historic document using a lump hammer and chisel.

The pair, from the Just Stop Oil protest group, then held up a sign which stated: "The government is breaking the law".

They could be also be heard asking: "Is the government above the law?"

The Metropolitan Police said two people have been arrested on suspicion of criminal damage and are currently in custody.

https://news.sky.com/story/just-stop-oi ... a-13132732

Is it time to use shatterless glass on these things so, they don't break in these situations.

[weatheriscool]

[weatheriscool]

[wjfox]

Brutal heatwaves and submerged cities: what a 3C world would look like

Sat 11 May 2024 05.00 BST

Global heating is likely to soar past internationally agreed limits, according to a Guardian survey of hundreds of leading climate experts, bringing catastrophic heatwaves, floods and storms.

Only 6% of the respondents thought the 1.5C limit could be achieved, and this would require extraordinarily fast, radical action to halt and reverse the world’s rising emissions from fossil fuel burning.

However, the experts were clear that giving up was not an option, and that 1.5C was not a cliff-edge leading to a significant change in climate damage. Instead, the climate crisis increases incrementally, meaning every tonne of CO2 avoided reduces people’s suffering.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... -look-like

[Time_Traveller]

Last summer hottest in 2,000 years, ancient trees reveal

1 hour ago

Clues hidden deep in the trunks of ancient trees have revealed that last summer was the northern hemisphere's hottest in 2,000 years.

Last year had already been confirmed as the world's warmest on record by a large margin, at least since 1850, due to climate change.

But tree rings, which record temperature information far further back than even Victorian scientific records, now show just how unprecedented last year's scorching temperatures were.

Researchers say that temperatures last June, July and August were nearly 4C warmer than the coldest summer two millennia ago.

Climate scientists have repeatedly shown that global temperatures have been rising rapidly in recent decades. According to the UN's climate body, the last time the world was consistently this warm may have been more than 100,000 years ago, external.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c72pp3yqzjyo

[weatheriscool]

[weatheriscool]

[wjfox]

DeSantis signs bill wiping climate change references from Florida law

14 hours ago

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) declared on X Wednesday that a bill he signed that removes climate change as a priority in state energy policy would restore "sanity" and reject "the agenda of the radical green zealots."

Why it matters: The bill that would also ban offshore wind turbines and bolster natural gas expansion after taking effect on July 1 comes as climate change's effects are already impacting Florida — notably a dangerous heat wave threatening the state's south this week that's already broken temperature records.

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/16/desant ... change-law

[Time_Traveller]

A second Trump presidency would target IEA's green focus, advisers say

May 16, 20245:15 PM GMT+1

WASHINGTON, May 16 (Reuters) - Donald Trump would likely push to replace the head of the International Energy Agency if he wins the U.S. presidential election to shift the energy watchdog's focus back to maximizing fossil fuel output instead of fighting climate change, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Paris-based IEA has provided research and data to industrialized governments for more than half a century to help guide policy around energy security, supply and investment. The United States provides around a quarter of the group's funding.

In recent years, the organization has broadened its focus beyond oil and gas supply to include clean energy, as member governments seek input on meeting their goals under the Paris climate agreement and accelerate a transition away from fossil fuel reliance.

That shift gathered pace during President Joe Biden's tenure – resulting in prescriptions on energy policy that angered global oil producers including Saudi Arabia, and which clash with Trump's self-described ‘drill, baby, drill’ energy agenda aimed at boosting the traditional oil and gas industries.

Reuters spoke with five people familiar with Trump's thinking on energy, including donors, policy experts and former Trump administration officials, all of whom said Biden's predecessor would likely pressure the IEA to bring it in line with his pro-fossil fuel policies if he was re-elected in November.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy ... 024-05-16/

[weatheriscool]

https://x.com/JohnMoralesTV/status/1791435796878102739

[weatheriscool]

Record low Antarctic sea ice 'extremely unlikely' without climate change, says scientists
https://phys.org/news/2024-05-antarctic ... imate.html
by British Antarctic Survey

Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have found that the record-low levels of sea ice around Antarctica in 2023 were extremely unlikely to happen without the influence of climate change. This low was a one-in-a-2000-year event without climate change and four times more likely under its effects. The results are published (20 May) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, in a paper titled "CMIP6 models rarely simulate Antarctic winter sea-ice anomalies as large as observed in 2023."

In 2023, Antarctic sea ice reached historically low levels, with over 2 million square kilometers less ice than usual during winter—equivalent to about ten times the size of the UK. This drastic reduction followed decades of steady growth in sea ice up to 2015, making the sudden decline even more surprising.

Using a large climate dataset called CMIP6, BAS researchers investigated this unprecedented sea ice loss. They analyzed data from 18 different climate models to understand the probability of such a significant reduction in sea ice and its connection to climate change.