Global Climate Change Science News

[Brian Peacock]

What that is is a statement of fact - we don't have time to wait. Did you read the article?

Limited progress IS being made, in some areas, and yet the rate of emissions is accelerating and along with it global mean temperatures and ecological decline.

I've been very clear about the content and context of my views on the promises of future tech, so repeating a mischaracterisation of those views is just letting your side of the discussion down. Indeed, referencing the "flaws of democratic decision making" speaks directly to the urgent and radical social, political and economic transformation needed to address climate change.

All of the tech in that list has, at some point, been proposed as a way to combat climate change, and none of it is capable of being implemented at the scale and in the time frames necessary under current paradigms. Despite the misleading impressions given by the glossy press releases of tech start-ups, Technologists will not be saving us all on their own any time soon.

[Sean Hayden]

[macdoc]

Time to wait for what? Some end of world ??? FFS we are not yet even past Holocene Maximum.
1.5 C above pre-industrial was always a pipedream.
Your constant handwringing with no concrete stated solutions gets old.

Here are countries making progress -
https://net0.com/blog/net-zero-countries

Renewable power on course to shatter more records as ...

International Energy Agency
https://www.iea.org › news › renewable-power-on-cou...
1 June 2023 — Global renewable capacity additions are set to soar by 107 gigawatts (GW), the largest absolute increase ever, to more than 440 GW in 2023

Renewable energy will produce 35% of global electricity by ...

World Economic Forum
https://www.weforum.org › agenda › 2023/03 › electr...
16 Mar 2023 — Renewable capacity will meet 35% of global power generation by 2025, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA)

even coal loving Australia

Clean Energy Council
https://www.cleanenergycouncil.org.au › news › austr...
18 Apr 2023 — Renewable energy accounted for 35.9 per cent of Australia's total electricity generation in 2022, up from 32.5 per cent in 2021. Australia has more than doubled

And
https://energydigital.com/top10/top-10- ... ble-energy

[pErvinalia]

IMG_0092.jpeg

[Brian Peacock]

Time to wait for what? Some end of world ??? FFS we are not yet even past Holocene Maximum.
1.5 C above pre-industrial was always a pipedream.
Your constant handwringing with no concrete stated solutions gets old.

Here are countries making progress -
https://net0.com/blog/net-zero-countries

Renewable power on course to shatter more records as ...

International Energy Agency
https://www.iea.org › news › renewable-power-on-cou...
1 June 2023 — Global renewable capacity additions are set to soar by 107 gigawatts (GW), the largest absolute increase ever, to more than 440 GW in 2023

Renewable energy will produce 35% of global electricity by ...

World Economic Forum
https://www.weforum.org › agenda › 2023/03 › electr...
16 Mar 2023 — Renewable capacity will meet 35% of global power generation by 2025, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA)

even coal loving Australia

Clean Energy Council
https://www.cleanenergycouncil.org.au › news › austr...
18 Apr 2023 — Renewable energy accounted for 35.9 per cent of Australia's total electricity generation in 2022, up from 32.5 per cent in 2021. Australia has more than doubled

And
https://energydigital.com/top10/top-10- ... ble-energy

And yet the rate of emissions is accelerating and along with it global mean temperatures and ecological decline. The science is increasingly robust on what that means for us and the biosphere - for our ways of living and for the ecologies upon which we depend.

Your personal reaction to my views appears to be leading you towards adopting a "Stop being so hysterical, Climate Change really isn't that bad!" position - as evidenced by your current reliance on the Holocene peak, which I think you believe defeats my objections to governmental inaction.

[Brian Peacock]

[Brian Peacock]

‘Astounding’ ocean temperatures in 2023 intensified extreme weather, data shows

“Astounding” ocean temperatures in 2023 supercharged “freak” weather around the world as the climate crisis continued to intensify, new data has revealed.

The oceans absorb 90% of the heat trapped by the carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, making it the clearest indicator of global heating. Record levels of heat were taken up by the oceans in 2023, scientists said, and the data showed that for the past decade the oceans have been hotter every year than the year before.

The heat also led to record levels of stratification in the oceans, where warm water ponding on the surface reduces the mixing with deeper waters. This cuts the amount of oxygen in the oceans, threatening marine life, and also reduces the amount of carbon dioxide and heat the seas can take up in the future.

Reliable ocean temperature measurements stretch back to 1940 but it is likely the oceans are now at their hottest for 1,000 years and heating faster than at any time in the past 2,000 years....

[Brian Peacock]

Climate paper suggests unless demand for resources is reduced, many other technical innovations are just a sticking plaster.

Human ‘behavioural crisis’ at root of climate breakdown, say scientists

Record heat, record emissions, record fossil fuel consumption. One month out from Cop28, the world is further than ever from reaching its collective climate goals. At the root of all these problems, according to recent research, is the human “behavioural crisis”, a term coined by an interdisciplinary team of scientists.

“We’ve socially engineered ourselves the way we geoengineered the planet,” says Joseph Merz, lead author of a new paper which proposes that climate breakdown is a symptom of ecological overshoot, which in turn is caused by the deliberate exploitation of human behaviour.

“We need to become mindful of the way we’re being manipulated,” says Merz, who is co-founder of the Merz Institute, an organisation that researches the systemic causes of the climate crisis and how to tackle them.

Merz and colleagues believe that most climate “solutions” proposed so far only tackle symptoms rather than the root cause of the crisis. This, they say, leads to increasing levels of the three “levers” of overshoot: consumption, waste and population.

They claim that unless demand for resources is reduced, many other innovations are just a sticking plaster. “We can deal with climate change and worsen overshoot,” says Merz. “The material footprint of renewable energy is dangerously underdiscussed. These energy farms have to be rebuilt every few decades – they’re not going to solve the bigger problem unless we tackle demand.”...

[Brian Peacock]

Somewhat related to the post above. A blip, or a worrying trend?

Third of UK teenagers believe climate change exaggerated, report shows

A third of UK teenagers believe climate change is “exaggerated”, a report has found, as YouTube videos promoting a new kind of climate denial aimed at young people proliferate on the platform.

Previously, most climate deniers pushed the belief that climate breakdown was not happening or, if it was, that humans were not causing it. Now, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has found that most climate denial videos on YouTube push the idea that climate solutions do not work, climate science and the climate movement are unreliable, or that the effects of global heating are beneficial or harmless.

Researchers from the CCDH gathered a dataset of text transcripts from 12,058 climate-related YouTube videos posted by 96 channels over almost six years from 1 January 2018 to 30 September 2023. They also included the results of a nationally representative survey conducted by polling company Survation which found 31% of UK respondents aged 13 to 17 agreed with the statement “Climate change and its effects are being purposefully overexaggerated”. This rose to 37% of teenagers categorised as heavy users of social media, meaning they reported using any one platform for more than four hours a day.

The report published on Tuesday shows a shift from the “old denial” – that climate change is not happening or not anthropogenic – to the “new denial”.

These new denial narratives that question the science and solutions for climate change constituted 35% of all climate denial on YouTube in 2018, but now represent the large majority (70%). Over the same period, the share of old denial has dropped from 65% to 30% of total claims...

[Brian Peacock]

Cookstove carbon offsets overstate climate benefit by 1,000%, study finds

Clean cookstove projects, one of the most popular types of carbon-offset schemes, are probably overstating their beneficial impact on the climate by an average of 1,000%, according to a new study.

Every year, an estimated 3.2 million people a year die prematurely from household air pollution caused by cooking with smoky fuels such as wood, paraffin or kerosene, which produce about 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Such cooking also drives deforestation and habitat loss, as people cut down trees for fuel. By switching from smoky fuels to cleaner alternatives such as electric cookers, cookstove projects in the developing world can have major health, social and environmental benefits: improving air quality, reducing the amount of time people spend collecting wood and slowing the loss of the world’s forests.

To fund these initiatives, which are often dubbed “nature-based-solutions”, projects sell on the greenhouse gas reductions as carbon credits. Each credit represents a tonne of carbon dioxide – which companies then use to “offset” their emissions, sometimes claiming their products and services are “carbon neutral”.

But a new study published in the journal Nature Sustainability has found that cookstove projects that generate carbon offsets are overstating their climate benefits by 1,000% on average.

The findings have been disputed by Verra and Gold Standard, both leading certifiers of carbon credits, which say the evidence in the study does not back the conclusions drawn.

While many offsetting schemes said they were funding “clean” cookstoves, most did not meet World Health Organization standards, according to the assessment by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

Analysis of common rules to produce the offsets found that projects were allowed to overstate how often people used the stoves and the resulting benefits for nearby forests, dramatically inflating the benefit to the climate and biodiversity, researchers said...

[Brian Peacock]

‘How to greenwash’: propane industry tries to rebrand fuel as renewable

Members of a propane industry lobbying group strategized to downplay the full climate impacts of propane and market it as “renewable” or “clean energy”, recordings reviewed by the climate newsletter Heated and the Guardian reveal.

The Propane Education & Research Council (Perc), a US lobbying group, has spent nearly $30m over the last two years on advertisements for the fossil fuel, according to data compiled by Drilled, a multimedia reporting project focused on climate accountability. The ads often promote propane, the vast majority of which is a by-product of natural gas or crude oil refining, as a form of clean and renewable energy.

But in a public November 2022 meeting recorded by the Energy and Policy Institute, Perc board members acknowledged that that characterization was inaccurate.

“Twenty-five percent [of people consider] natural gas to be renewable, in this millennial and gen Z bucket,” an unidentified Perc board member said. “There’s a perception out there – not reality, but that’s perception. We can attach to that for propane.”

“You can’t say natural gas is renewable,” Perc board member Leslie Woodward cautioned.

“Perception”, the unidentified board member repeated.

Erin Hatcher, Perc’s senior vice-president of communications and marketing, agreed that propane should be perceived as clean energy. “We don’t want to be in that coal bucket,” she is heard saying on the recording. “We want to be in that clean energy bucket.”...

[Brian Peacock]

Judge throws out case against Greta Thunberg and other London protesters

Greta Thunberg and four others charged with public order offences over a protest in London have been cleared after a judge ruled that they had no case to answer.

Thunberg was charged alongside Christofer Kebbon, Joshua James Unwin, Jeff Rice and Peter Barker with “failing to comply with a condition imposed under section 14 of the Public Order Act”.

They had been taking part in a protest outside the InterContinental hotel in Mayfair, the venue for the Energy Intelligence Forum (EIF), a fossil fuel industry summit attended by corporate executives and government ministers.
All were arrested after the senior officer at the scene enacted the section 14 order to impose conditions on the protest, which had blocked access to and from the hotel for guests and EIF delegates.

At the conclusion of the prosecution case on Friday, the second day of their trial at Westminster magistrates court, Judge Laws agreed that the crown had failed to present enough evidence to prove their case.

Laws said the conditions imposed on protesters were “so unclear that it is unlawful”, which meant “anyone failing to comply were actually committing no offence”.

The judge said the protest was “throughout peaceful, civilised and non-violent” and he criticised evidence provided by the prosecution about the location the demonstrators should be moved to, saying the only helpful footage he received was “made by an abseiling protester”.

He added: “It is quite striking to me that there were no witness statements taken from anyone in the hotel, approximately 1,000 people, or from anyone trying to get in. There was no evidence of any vehicles being impeded, no evidence of any interference with emergency services, or any risk to life.”...

[macdoc]

[macdoc]

Maybe not a good move to go to your aside from Putin

Atlantic Ocean circulation nearing ‘devastating’ tipping point, study finds
Collapse in system of currents that helps regulate global climate would be at such speed that adaptation would be impossible

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... tudy-finds

[Brian Peacock]