Carbon emission reduction: News and technology

[pErvinalia]

Capitalism FTW!

[macdoc]

and tropical regions experience episodes of extreme heat and humidity for weeks at a time that would bring deadly risks to people who work outdoors.

The regions at most risk are not the tropics. The closer to the poles the greater the climate risks. The Arctic warms at 4 x the tropics.
The tropics expand north and south ....so now what was the Sahara is moving north into S Europe while the Sahel gets wetter ( S Sahara )

And Baltic Sea dwellers get warm beaches.

as for the furthest north ....fugedaboudit.
They've had to invent new words for the species moving north never seen before in the area

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39092-2

[Brian Peacock]

How Climate Change Could Affect Arsenic In Rice

Rice is a staple food for more than half of the global population. It is consumed on a daily basis by more people than either wheat or maize, also known as corn.

So it is with some concern that scientists have unveiled a recent finding: that as carbon emissions rise and the Earth continues to warm, so too will arsenic levels in rice.

The presence of arsenic in rice has long been known as a problem. Almost all rice contains arsenic. The harmful, naturally occurring chemical can accumulate in the soil of paddy fields, leaching into the grains of rice grown there. But the amounts found in rice grains can vary considerably from well below the recommended limits set by regulatory bodies to several times higher.

Yet, consuming even low amounts of inorganic arsenic through food or drinking water can lead to cancers and a range of other health problems, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Researchers around the world have been working on ways to reduce the levels of arsenic in rice – and in the meantime, there are ways of cooking it that can extract some of this harmful element from grains.

But a new study of inorganic arsenic accumulation has found it may become a greater problem due to climate change. The researchers grew 28 different strains of paddy rice at four different locations in China in experimental conditions over a 10-year period.

They found that arsenic levels in the rice increased as carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere and temperatures rise. Then epidemiologists modelled how, at current rice consumption levels, these arsenic levels could affect people's health. They estimated that the corresponding increases in arsenic levels in rice could contribute approximately 19.3 million more cancer cases in China alone....

Think I'm going start eating small amounts of Victorian paint to build up my homoeopathic immunity.

[pErvinalia]

Adapt or die.

[Brian Peacock]

A salient point. But I doubt the facts will stop govts branding climate protestors terrorist though.

A silent majority of the world’s people wants stronger climate action. It’s time to wake up

A superpower in the fight against global heating is hiding in plain sight. It turns out that the overwhelming majority of people in the world – between 80% and 89%, according to a growing number of peer-reviewed scientific studies – want their governments to take stronger climate action.

As co-founders of a non-profit that studies news coverage of climate change, those findings surprised even us. And they are a sharp rebuttal to the Trump administration’s efforts to attack anyone who does care about the climate crisis.

For years – and especially at this fraught political moment – most coverage of the climate crisis has been defensive. People who support climate action are implicitly told – by their elected officials, by the fossil fuel industry, by news coverage and social media discourse – that theirs is a minority, even a fringe, view.

That is not what the new research finds.

The most recent study, People’s Climate Vote 2024, was conducted by Oxford University as part of a program the UN launched after the 2015 Paris agreement. Among poorer countries, where roughly four out of five of the world’s inhabitants live, 89% of the public wanted stronger climate action. In richer, industrialized countries, roughly two out of three people wanted stronger action. Combining rich and poor populations, “80% [of people globally] want more climate action from their governments.”

The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication – which, along with its partner, the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, is arguably the global gold standard in climate opinion research – has published numerous studies documenting the same point: most people, in most countries, want stronger action on the climate crisis.

A fascinating additional 89% angle was documented in a study published by Nature Climate Change, which noted that the overwhelming global majority does not know it is the majority: “ndividuals around the globe systematically underestimate the willingness of their fellow citizens to act,” the report states....

[Brian Peacock]

UK Tories commit to going full anti-science on climate.

Tory energy spokesman claims UN climate experts are ‘biased’

The Conservative party’s energy spokesperson has attacked leading climate scientists as biased and claimed Kemi Badenoch could take the UK out of the Paris climate agreement.

Andrew Bowie, the acting shadow secretary for energy, told the Guardian that the target of reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 – passed into law by Theresa May – was “arbitrary” and “not based on science”.

He also indicated that the UK’s participation in the 2015 Paris climate agreement was up for reconsideration in the party’s ongoing review of key policies. The only other country to have withdrawn from the agreement is the US, twice, under Donald Trump.

Bowie said: “We are not climate deniers and while we believe in getting to net zero, what we shouldn’t do is be hamstrung by arbitrary targets such as a date of 2050, which was concocted simply because it was a good end point as a date. There’s no scientific rationale for choosing 2050 as the point to which we should reach net zero.”

...

Bowie said of the IPCC: “They’re biased towards their worldview, which is that we need to reduce climate emissions by a certain arbitrary date. That is not conducive to the overall economic wellbeing of this country.”

He added: “There’s quite a few scientists that say we don’t need to get to net zero by 2050.” Bowie and his office were unable to name such scientists when pressed...

my bold

What did I tell ya?

This is also the position of Reform, the UK's newly-minted right-wing party under Farage.

[Brian Peacock]

Methane leaks from dormant oil and gas wells in Canada are seven times worse than thought, study suggests

Methane emissions from Canada's non-producing oil and gas wells appear to be seven times higher than government estimates, according to a new study led by researchers at McGill University. The findings spotlight a major gap in the country's official greenhouse gas inventory and raise urgent questions about how methane leaks are monitored, reported and managed.

"Non-producing wells are one of the most uncertain sources of methane emissions in Canada," said Mary Kang, Associate Professor of Civil Engineering at McGill and senior author on the paper. "We measured the highest methane emission rate from a non-producing oil and gas well ever reported in Canada."

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas. Over a 20-year period, it traps about 80 times more heat in the atmosphere than the same amount of carbon dioxide. It's also associated with air pollution and health risks. Kang's team directly measured methane emissions from 494 wells across five provinces using a chamber-based method and analyzed well-level data such as age, depth and plugging status.

The national emissions estimate they arrived at—230 kilotonnes per year—is sevenfold higher than the 34 kilotonnes reported in Canada's National Inventory Report. The study was published in Environmental Science & Technology.

There are more than 425,000 inactive oil and gas wells across Canada, most of which are in Alberta and Saskatchewan. This means that the number of measured wells is very small, at only 0.1 percent.

"One surprising finding was just how much the drivers of emissions varied between provinces," said Kang. "We thought geological differences within provinces would matter more, but the dominant factors appear to be at the provincial scale, likely due to variations in policy and operational practices."

The results reveal that a small fraction of wells—especially unplugged gas wells—are responsible for the vast majority of non-producing well methane emissions. Kang says targeting these high emitters would be an efficient way to reduce emissions...

Related: World energy methane emissions near record high in 2024: IEA