Category: Climate News Roundup

Policy and Politics

Business leaders at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos urged political leaders and fellow businesses to seize the opportunity to invest in tackling climate change.  (Megan Darby and Karl Mathiesen of Climate Home News presented a contrast between the rhetoric and reality.)  Meanwhile, at home, President Trump imposed a 30% tariff on solar panels imported from China and South Korea.  This prompted a backlash among some conservatives and from South Korea, as well as several prognostications as to what it all means (e.g., Inside Climate News and Politico).  And solar wasn’t the only form of renewable energy facing restrictions.  Maine Gov. Paul LePage imposed a moratorium Wednesday on new wind energy projects in the western and coastal regions of the state.  He also established the Maine Wind Energy Advisory Commission – which will have meetings that are closed to the public and not subject to Maine’s Freedom of Access Act.

Lots of people have wondered how a temperature rise of 2°C was chosen as a “safe” rise in the Paris Climate Agreement.  Katharine Hayhoe answers that question in her latest Global Weirding video.  So, what could we do if the temperature rise exceeds a “safe” value?  One proposed policy choice is solar geoengineering, in which sulfur dioxide is injected into the upper atmosphere to reflect some of the incoming sunlight.  A big question is what would happen if we suddenly stopped doing that, given that the atmosphere would still contain lots of CO₂, which would rapidly push the temperature upward.  That question was addressed in a paper recently published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution and Robinson Meyer discussed it in The Atlantic.  And in Wired, Charles C. Mann, author of the book 1491, had an essay excerpted from his new book, The Wizard and the Prophet, in which he summarizes the history of climate change knowledge, right up to current discussions of geoengineering.  Over the last couple of years, I have provided several links to articles extolling the benefits of eating less meat.  Now, grazier Ariel Greenwood argues that a reduction in meat consumption can have unintended ecological consequences.  A number of films at the Wild and Scenic Film Festival in Nevada City, California, focused on climate change.  Daisy Simmons reported on them at Yale Climate Connections.

“A striking 68 percent of mayors agree that cities should play a strong role in reducing the effects of climate change, even if it means sacrificing revenues or increasing expenditures,” according to a report released Tuesday by the Boston University Initiative on Cities.  Its bad enough that climate research programs in the U.S. are facing funding cuts, but when our Canadian neighbors stop funding their Climate Change and Atmospheric Research program, which is very important for understanding the Arctic, things are getting pretty bad.  In a critique of international policies on climate change, New York Times columnist Eduardo Porter argued “that the greatest impediment to slowing this relentless warming is an illusion of progress that is allowing every country to sidestep many of the hard choices that still must be made.”  In that light, one may wonder about the motivations behind EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s concern for methane emissions.  To end this section on a positive note, I’m going to include an article that came out a week ago on Grist.  It profiles several conservatives (some of whom were inspired by Bob Inglis at RepublicEn) who constitute part of the “eco-right” and who are working to remove the partisanship surrounding climate change.

Climate

I have frequently provided links to papers on bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) as a way of achieving negative emissions of CO₂.  In a new paper in the journal Nature Climate Change, the authors argue that deploying BECCS technology on the scale needed to address climate change would use up massive amounts of water, fertilizer, and land.  It would also probably lead to large environmental problems and may even destabilize key planetary systems.

A new study, published in the journal Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, points out the threats to the Cuvette Centrale peatlands of Africa, the world’s largest intact tropical peatland.  At risk is the ability of the peatlands to sequester large amounts of carbon, preventing its release to the atmosphere as CO₂.  World Resources Institute’s Molly Bergen traveled to Central Africa and wrote about the four challenges in the fight to save the rainforests there.

“[I]t is unlikely the United States has ever seen such a sizable area of excessive tropical cyclone rainfall totals as it did from Harvey,” the National Hurricane Center said in a meteorological review of the storm released on Thursday.  Now, Texas is in a drought.

A new study published this week in Nature Climate Change examined 56 mountain glacier drainage basins worldwide and determined that roughly half had reached their “peak water” point, after which the amount of runoff each year will decline.  In 2016 two mountain glaciers collapsed in Tibet within three months.  Now, a paper in Nature Geoscience argues that climate change was the cause of both.

In a paper published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, a team of Chinese scientists reported that in 2017, the world’s oceans were the hottest ever recorded.

Scientists and engineers have long known that removing air pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and soot from power plant emissions to reduce air pollution could have the perverse consequence of making global warming worse.  Now a new paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters has quantified the effect, suggesting that the temperature increase could be between 0.5 and 1.0°C.

Energy

Forty-three businesses signed long-term agreements for a record 5.4 GW of clean power, including solar and wind, worldwide last year, according to a Bloomberg New Energy Finance report. That’s up from 4.3 GW in 2016 and is enough to displace at least 10 coal-fired power plants.  Budweiser said it has switched all of its U.S. brewing to renewable electricity and is adding a clean energy logo to its labels as part of a global shift to green power by its parent, Anheuser-Busch InBev.  Lloyd’s of London, the world’s oldest insurance market, has become the latest financial firm to announce that it plans to stop investing in coal companies.

There is no single plug system in use by all electric vehicle (EV) companies.  As EV sales increase and money is spent to expand charging networks, there is concern that much of that money will be wasted if EV manufacturers can’t agree on a standard plug soon.  Writing in The Guardian, Dana Nuccitelli argues that as the electric grid becomes greener, switching from gasoline-powered cars to EVs will become an important method for the U.S. to meet its share of carbon pollution cuts.  And on the subject of alternative-fueled vehicle, not only does the start-up Riversimple rely upon a hydrogen fuel cell for power, it has a new business model for an auto company – it will only lease its cars.

China’s emissions of CO₂ associated with the power sector increased last year after three years of declining emissions.  The increase was attributed to larger activity in the manufacturing sector.

A proposed direct-current transmission line, which would have carried 4,000 MW of renewable wind energy from Western Oklahoma to eastern Tennessee, has been shelved by the developer following continued opposition by the Arkansas congressional delegation.  That’s a shame, because one of the things limiting renewable energy expansion is lack of transmission infrastructure.

Puerto Rico’s governor said on Monday he intends to sell off the island’s power utility to the private sector.  As part of the plan, Puerto Rico would receive 30% of its power from renewable sources.

By August, five fully-electric barges capable of carrying 24 20-ft. containers will be operating on the canals of Belgium and The Netherlands.

These news items have been compiled by Les Grady, member and former chair of the CAAV steering committee. He is a licensed professional engineer (retired) who taught environmental engineering at Purdue and Clemson Universities and engaged in private practice with CH2M Hill, the world’s largest environmental engineering consulting firm. Since his retirement in 2003 he has devoted much of his time to the study of climate science and the question of global warming and makes himself available to speak to groups about this subject. More here.

Policy and Politics

Jack Gerard announced Wednesday he would step down as head of the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying association of oil and natural gas companies.  In a recent interview with Reuters, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt said, “The climate is changing. That’s not the debate. The debate is how do we know what the ideal surface temperature is in 2100?”  Dana Nuccitelli interviewed several climate scientists to answer that question.  Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R, FL), one of the founders of the Climate Solutions Caucus, was interviewed about the Caucus by Katherine Bagley for Yale Environment 360.  A report released Thursday by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that, during the first year of the Trump administration, science advisory panels all across the government have been decreased in size or disbanded.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report showed that President Trump’s arrival in the White House in 2017 coincided with a marked increase in concern about the environment among experts polled by the organization.  On Thursday, EPA Principal Deputy Assistant Administrator Barry Breen told a congressional oversight committee that the government needs to plan for the ongoing threat posed to Superfund sites from climate change.  A bipartisan group of more than 100 members of Congress is urging President Trump to recognize climate change as a national security threat.

In a two-part series on Yale Climate Connection, Michael Svoboda provided a brief description of each of the major books on climate change economics published between 2005 and 2018.  Chicago Review of Books‘ Amy Brady interviewed novelist C. Morgan Babst, author of the “climate fiction” novel The Floating World, on the social inequality of climate change.  Ivy Main finished summarizing the energy-related bills that have been filed with the VA General Assembly: Part 2 and Part 3.  If measures before the state legislatures in Washington and Oregon pass, there will be a price on CO₂ emissions from California to British Columbia.

Climate

An important new paper was published in the journal Nature on Monday.  It examined the value of equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), which is the amount the global average temperature of Earth would increase following a doubling of the CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere.  For a number of reasons, there is still considerable uncertainty associated with ECS.  This study allowed the scientists to narrow the ECS range to between 2.2 and 3.4°C, with a central value of 2.8°C (5.04°F), somewhat lower than the previous central estimate of 3.0°C.  If correct, this means that the worst-case scenario is less likely to happen, but so is the best-case.

Both NASA and NOAA released their analyses of 2017 global average temperature on Thursday.  The agencies agreed that 2017 was the hottest year on record not influenced by El Niño.  When all years were included, NASA ranked 2017 as 2^nd, while NOAA ranked it as 3^rd.  The difference was due to the use of different methodologies by the two agencies.  Time Magazine presented a photo essay of how the ice in Antarctica is responding to the rise in temperature.

A major characteristic of human-caused climate change is the speed at which it is occurring.  This raises the question of whether the various species on Earth can adapt rapidly enough to survive.  In the case of Arctic ringed seals on the western shores of Svalbard, early indications are that they are doing well, except for one worrying thing, the survival of their pups.  On the other hand, musk oxen are not doing well, particularly when faced with increased winter rainfall.  And a study by scientists at Macquarie University in Australia revealed that high temperatures have a negative effect on zebra finch fertility.

Water stress is one of the factors that can lead to instability in a nation.  Also, water stress can be aggravated by climate change.  Consequently, a panel of retired U.S. military officials warned that water stress is likely to increase, with consequences for world stability.

Shifts in weather or ocean circulation can spark deadly marine heat waves, just as atmospheric shifts can bring droughts and heat waves on land.  Now, a new paper in the journal Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society has shown that three 2016 marine heat waves that killed whales, birds, corals, and shellfish from Australia to Alaska were many times more likely because of human emissions of greenhouse gases.  Erik Solheim, head of the UN Environment Programme, said that the battle to save the world’s coral reefs is at a “make or break point”.

The oceans contain significant amounts of methane hydrate, which is an ice-like structure on the ocean floor.  One concern has been that as Earth warms, these hydrates will melt, allowing the methane to make its way through the water to the atmosphere.  This would increase warming because methane is a strong greenhouse gas.  Now, a new study in Science Advances has provided data that suggest that methane released from the sea floor will be consumed by bacteria before it reaches the atmosphere.

Energy

Output from UK wind farms topped 10 GW for the first time, setting a new national record.  Saudi Arabia expects to install 4.125 GW of new renewable energy capacity this year, at a cost of $5 billion to $7 billion.  According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, world clean energy investment totaled $333.5 billion last year, up 3% from 2016 and the second highest annual figure ever, taking cumulative investment since 2010 to $2.5 trillion.  Reality is turning out to be very sobering for both India and Germany.  A top government official has told Reuters that India will need at least $125 billion to fund its ambitious plan to increase the share of renewable power in the country’s grid by 2022.  Germany will have to spend more than $1.2 trillion to meet even the lower end of the European Union’s 2050 target to reduce CO₂ emissions.

Dominion Energy plans to put nine of its older, inefficient, and rarely-used generating units across Virginia into dormant status.  They account for less than 1% of the company’s generation capacity.  This fits with a national trend reported by the U.S. Energy Information Agency, which reported that roughly 13 GW of coal-fired generating capacity would be retired this year across the U.S.  Meanwhile, Reuters reported that nearly two-thirds of U.S. coal producing states lost coal mining jobs in 2017, even as overall employment in the sector grew modestly.

The transportation sector was the largest source of CO₂ emissions in the U.S. for the second year in a row, according to an analysis from the Rhodium Group published Wednesday.  In a move that will help alleviate that problem, Ford announced this week that it will spend $11 billion by 2022 to develop electric vehicles and will bring 16 fully electric models to market by then.  It also plans to offer 24 plug-in hybrids.  Looking skyward, all of Norway’s short-distance airliners should be entirely electric by 2040, according to the chief executive of Avinor, the country’s airport operator.  Toward that end, Avinor plans to test a commercial route flown with a small electric plane with 19 seats, starting in 2025.

According to a new report from the International Renewable Energy Agency, all types of clean energy will fall within the cost range of fossil fuels in the next two years.  Robert Dieterich provided a detailed look at concentrated solar power with molten salt as a promising renewable energy technology that can provide electricity on demand 24 hours a day.

Thermal power plants for electricity generation, whether fossil fuel-fired or nuclear, require water for cooling, which can be a serious problem when water is periodically scarce, such as in India.  One way to alleviate the problem is to use more renewable energy.

A new paper in the journal Science of the Total Environment reported on a study examining the environmental, economic, and social sustainability of nine means of generating electricity, including fossils fuels, renewables and nuclear power.  The team found that when the three criteria were given equal weight, shale gas extraction by fracking ranked seventh, which placed it above coal, but far below wind and solar.

These news items have been compiled by Les Grady, member and former chair of the CAAV steering committee. He is a licensed professional engineer (retired) who taught environmental engineering at Purdue and Clemson Universities and engaged in private practice with CH2M Hill, the world’s largest environmental engineering consulting firm. Since his retirement in 2003 he has devoted much of his time to the study of climate science and the question of global warming and makes himself available to speak to groups about this subject. More here.

Policy and Politics

New York City is suing BP, Chevron, Conoco Phillips, Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell, seeking compensation for the billions of dollars it spends protecting the city from the effects of climate change.  “As climate change continues to worsen, it’s up to the fossil fuel companies whose greed put us in this position to shoulder the cost of making New York safer and more resilient”, Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement.  The city also will divest its pension funds of fossil fuel assets.  Oliver Milman reported on the response of economists to the announcement, and Bill McKibben discussed its implications.

On Monday, the five FERC commissioners voted unanimously to reject a DOE proposal to subsidize coal and nuclear plants to enhance grid reliability.  Murray Energy head, Robert E. Murray, was not happy with the decision, although he should be happy about the many items on his wish list that the Trump administration has fulfilled.  According to a report released Wednesday by the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, the Trump administration has undertaken a “systematic reduction” in presenting information and content about climate change on federal government websites.  On Wednesday, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland committed to joining the U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of states committed to meeting the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.  Furthermore, four lawmakers, two Republicans and two Democrats, joined the House Climate Solutions Caucus on Tuesday.

In a broad-ranging interview with Reuters, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt laid out his plans for 2018, which include repeal of the Clean Power Plan (CPP).  However, 12 Democratic state Attorneys General have said that Pruitt needs to recuse himself from all matters related to the repeal of the CPP because of his efforts to fight it while he was Attorney General of Oklahoma.  After opening up essentially all of the coasts of the lower 48 states to new oil and gas drilling, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke made an exception for Florida.  Other coastal states sought similar exemptions, but the American Petroleum Institute objected.  The Trump administration has taken the position that climate policies kill jobs, but California’s experience challenges that position.

Climate

2017 was the most expensive year on record for disasters in the U.S., NOAA reported on Monday.  According to a new study in the journal Science Advances, unless new protections are added, the number of people affected by devastating floods could skyrocket over the next 25 years as a result of increased rainfall intensity.  According to lead author Sven Willner of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, “More than half of the United States must at least double their protection level within the next two decades if they want to avoid a dramatic increase in river flood risks.”  As if to put an exclamation point on that statement, heavy rains hit California this week, causing deadly mudslides.

Climate Central has determined that 2017 was the third hottest year on record in the U.S. based on an evaluation of NOAA data.  Last week I provided a link to a study showing that it was the second hottest year globally.

One of the direst consequences of climate change will be the collapse of Antarctic glaciers, causing massive sea level rise and the associated displacement of millions of people from Earth’s coasts.  Now, a young glaciologist has a radical proposal for delaying and possible averting such an event.

Peter Sinclair has a new video, this one explaining why the eastern U.S. can be so much colder than Alaska.  However, a study by the World Weather Attribution project concluded that a cold outbreak like the one that just occurred is 15-times less likely to take place today due to global warming.  In addition, the effects of global warming on such cold outbreaks is to make them about 4°F warmer than they otherwise would have been.

About every two years there is a resurgence of the myth that Earth is about to enter a new “mini ice age”.  Dana Nuccitelli examined the data behind the myth and what climate science has to say about it.

The sex of Pacific green sea turtles, like other sea turtles, is determined by the heat of the sand in which the eggs are incubated.  The warmer the temperature, the greater the number of females.  New research, published Monday in Current Biology, found that the ratio of female to male Pacific green sea turtles from the Pacific Ocean’s largest and most important green sea turtle rookery was 116:1.  Sea turtles aren’t the only aquatic life being impacted by climate change.  A study published in Global Change Biology found that the structure of California mussel shells has changed in response to declining ocean pH resulting from more CO₂ in the atmosphere.

Energy

Renewable energy is moving forward in Australia with the announcement that construction will start this year on the world’s largest solar-thermal generation facility (150 MW) in South Australia.  Meanwhile, French utility Neoen announced that it will build a large battery storage system at the Kaban Green Power Hub in Queensland.  Closer to home, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that 25 GW of new electricity was added to the grid last year, with about half coming from renewable energy resources.  Dominion Energy is investing $1 billion in its solar fleet in Virginia and North Carolina, and now ranks among utilities with the largest solar portfolios, either operating or under development.

In other renewables news, an Xcel Energy solicitation set a new solar-plus-storage record after attracting a median price of $36 per megawatt-hour.  On-shore wind plus storage was even lower, with a median price of $21 per megawatt-hour.  After years of delays, the U.S. offshore wind industry is finally gaining momentum, with new projects being planned along the Atlantic coast.

In a new report, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis said “As the global transition toward renewables gains pace and as battery storage and electric vehicles technologies pick up momentum, China is setting itself up to dominate these sectors globally over the next several decades of this century.”  For now, if you’re moved to buy an EV or add battery storage to your house for ethical reasons, you might consider where the cobalt in those batteries comes from.  General Motors head Mary Barra has promised investors that the company will make money selling electric cars by 2021, in part by reducing the amount of cobalt in its batteries.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s monthly short-term energy outlook projects that by 2019 natural gas will provide 34% of U.S. electricity generation and coal 28%, primarily because natural gas is cheaper.  On the other hand, the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) approved an order Thursday that will require PG&E Corp., the state’s biggest utility, to use batteries rather than gas to meet peak electrical demand.  The PUC also voted on Thursday to require the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant to close in 2025.

A large number of bills dealing with renewable energy and energy efficiency have been filed for the current session of the Virginia General assembly.  Ivy Main posted a summary of the renewable energy bills.  The Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley Pipelines were also the subject of legislation in Virginia, where two Democratic Delegates and one Democratic Senator introduced a package of legislation aimed at protecting landowners, water sources, and public safety during construction of the pipelines.  Meanwhile, In North Carolina, regulators delayed a decision on the ACP’s clean water certificate until as late as February and postponed several other environmental permits.

Exxon has filed a petition in a Texas District Court in response to a series of civil lawsuits filed by coastal California communities that claim the company is responsible for damages caused by sea level rise.  According to Inside Climate News, “The petition claims that the California lawsuits are an extension of efforts by a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general pledged to holding fossil fuel companies accountable for climate change and born out of a meeting of green groups intent on ruining the industry.”

These news items have been compiled by Les Grady, member and former chair of the CAAV steering committee. He is a licensed professional engineer (retired) who taught environmental engineering at Purdue and Clemson Universities and engaged in private practice with CH2M Hill, the world’s largest environmental engineering consulting firm. Since his retirement in 2003 he has devoted much of his time to the study of climate science and the question of global warming and makes himself available to speak to groups about this subject. More here.

Policy and Politics

In the past, I’ve linked to articles about the House Climate Solutions Caucus, which maintains an equal number of Democrats and Republicans.  In a very thought-provoking article in E&E News, Zack Colman examined the views of the climate community about the Caucus.  There is a debate within the climate advocacy community about the best way to motivate people to act on climate change: make them aware of the dire consequences of inaction or give them hope that the problem can be solved.  Inspired by a recent paper in the journal Nature Climate Change, Guardian columnist Lucia Graves addressed this issue.  In collaboration with Reveal, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and PRX, Tegan Wendland of WBUR investigated the plight of people in coastal Louisiana who are threatened by flooding, by can’t afford to relocate without state aid, for which there is no money.

Last year President Trump disbanded a panel that was to prepare an addendum to the National Climate Assessment on the local impacts of climate change.  Now Columbia University has hired a panel member, who will reconvene much of the panel to prepare the report.  Because they were considered to be “potential burdens” to energy development, the Interior Department recently rescinded an array of policies designed to elevate climate change and conservation in decisions on managing public lands, waters, and wildlife.  On Thursday, the Trump administration unveiled a controversial proposal to permit drilling for oil and gas in most U.S. continental-shelf waters, including in protected areas of the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans.  Meanwhile, a tax on oil companies that generated around $500 million a year to fund the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund was allowed to expire this week.

The Paris Climate Agreement is based on the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) submitted by each country.  Numerous analyses have shown that those NDCs are insufficient to keep warming below 2°C.  Now, four researchers have analyzed the NDCs and argue that five major gaps need to be addressed if they are to become the long-term instrument for international cooperation on climate change.  Another aspect of climate science that could impact planning and policy decisions is attribution science, which is growing more robust in its ability to determine whether a particular extreme weather event was influenced by climate change.  Chelsea Harvey of E&E News has reviewed the status of attribution science and its implications for such things as liability.  If you periodically use Google to search for information on climate change you should be aware of how denier groups are using the search engine to spread their disinformation.

Climate

In a fascinating essay in The Guardian, Benjamin Franta, a Ph.D. student in the history of science at Stanford University, revealed that the oil industry was warned by Edward Teller in 1959 about the dangers of CO₂ emissions.

The weather is really cold right now in the eastern U.S., colder than we normally experience.  This raises the question of whether the current weather pattern has been influenced by climate change.  Several articles addressed that question this week, among them one by the Associated Press and another by Henry Fountain at The New York Times.  Likewise, a study in England examined the link between the warming Arctic and changes in British weather.  Andrew Freedman explained the term “bomb cyclone”, used to describe the winter storm.  Finally, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released an infographic addressing the impacts of climate change on extreme weather.

The three factors that determine our perception of temperature are dry-bulb temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed.  A recent paper in Nature Climate Change reported on modeling studies that examined those factors to determine just how comfortable (or uncomfortable) we’ll be as Earth warms.  Another study, by scientists from the Earth Institute at Columbia University, found that if we continue emitting CO₂ at current rates, by the 2070s high wet-bulb temperature readings (which reflect the combined effects of heat and humidity) that now occur maybe once a year could prevail 100-250 days of the year in large parts of the world.

One consequence of global warming is that the atmosphere holds more water vapor, thereby increasing precipitation in some places.  One of those places is Queen Maud Land, in East Antarctica, as documented in a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.  In that case, the precipitation is in the form of snow, which contributes to the buildup of ice sheets, partially counteracting their loss to the sea.  This raises the question of just how much such ice buildup reduces sea level rise from melting Antarctic glaciers.

The Paris Climate Agreement adopted a goal of limiting global average temperature rise due to climate change to 2°C, with an aspirational goal of 1.5°C.  Now a new paper in Nature Climate Change has concluded that there are substantial benefits to meeting the aspirational goal.  The authors found that aridification would emerge over about 20 to 30% of the world’s land surface if the temperature increase was 2°C, but the affected area would be reduced by two-thirds if warming was limited to 1.5°C.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service, a European Union monitoring center, said on Thursday that 2017 was the second hottest year on record.  It was also the hottest year without an El Niño event.  Last year was also a bad one for hurricanes, earthquakes, and fires, as reviewed by James Temple at MIT Technology Review.  As a result, the insurance industry had to pay out around $135 billion, the most ever, according to reinsurer Munich Re.  They also said that total losses, including those not insured, were $330 billion, the second highest ever.

A major study on coral bleaching was published Thursday in the journal Science.  It was the first to examine bleaching world-wide and found that the global proportion of coral being hit by bleaching per year rose from 8% in the 1980s to 31% in 2016.  Furthermore, it found that while the average reef bleached severely once every 25 or 30 years at the beginning of the 1980s, by 2016 the recurrence time was just 5.9 years.  As if that weren’t bad enough, another paper in the same issue of Science reported that ocean dead zones with zero oxygen have quadrupled in size since 1950, while the number of very low oxygen sites near coasts have multiplied tenfold.  Low oxygen levels are caused by a combination of high water temperatures, due to global warming, and fertilizer runoff.

Energy

The Arctic blast that has caused temperatures to plunge in the U.S. has revived arguments about which fuel source is the best for electricity generation under these circumstances.

Virginia-based Dominion Energy is buying SCANA Corp., the South Carolina company whose subsidiary, SCE&G, was building the abandoned V.C. Summer nuclear project.  The acquisition would leave SCANA as a subsidiary of Dominion.  Dominion Energy also completed a 71.4 MW solar energy facility in South Carolina, the state’s largest.  Unfortunately, according to recent reports, Virginia electric utilities, including Dominion, rank very low nationally in their energy efficiency.

The Appalachia Development Group has received approval for the first of two applications for a $1.9 billion U.S. Department of Energy loan to build an underground natural gas liquids storage hub in Appalachia, at a site to be determined.  The American Chemistry Council, a trade group for the chemical industry, estimates the facility could attract up to $36 billion in new chemical and plastics industry investment and create 100,000 new area jobs.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a permit late in December that will allow the Mountain Valley Pipeline to make 383 stream crossings and 142 passes through wetlands in six Virginia counties.  Three days later, the National Park Service issued a right of way for the pipeline to cross the Blue Ridge Parkway near milepost 136, not far from U.S. 221 in Roanoke County.

A Republican representative to the Florida House of Representatives has filed a bill to investigate and value the use of solar-plus-storage systems as a power source during natural disasters.  It will establish a pilot program to “encourage and demonstrate the effectiveness of distributed energy generation and energy storage technologies to provide for the energy needs of critical disaster resilience facilities located in areas of critical state concern during a natural disaster or declared state of emergency.”

These news items have been compiled by Les Grady, member and former chair of the CAAV steering committee. He is a licensed professional engineer (retired) who taught environmental engineering at Purdue and Clemson Universities and engaged in private practice with CH2M Hill, the world’s largest environmental engineering consulting firm. Since his retirement in 2003 he has devoted much of his time to the study of climate science and the question of global warming and makes himself available to speak to groups about this subject. More here.

Policy and Politics

Under the guise of enhancing “environmental stewardship around the world,” EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt met with officials in Morocco about their interest in importing natural gas from the U.S.  Environmental groups, Democratic lawmakers, and some industry experts noted that EPA has no formal role in overseeing natural gas exports.  Last week I included an article about Pruitt’s plans for the “red team/blue team” debate on climate science.  Well, this week, those plans were put on hold.  Since Pruitt took over as administrator of the EPA in March, more than 700 employees have either retired, taken voluntary buyouts, or quit.  The largest number was in the Department of Research and Development.  John Abraham had a column in The Guardian arguing that the Trump administration is being shortsighted by cutting funding for climate research.  Making good on French President Emmanuel Macron’s promise to provide research funding for climate scientists working in the U.S. who are worried about the political climate here, the French government unveiled a list of 18 “laureates”, 13 of them working in the U.S., who have won grants to conduct research in France.  Also on Tuesday, in concert with the One Planet conference in Paris to mark the second anniversary of the Paris Climate Agreement, the EU announced funding of €9bn for action on climate change.  The funds will be focused on sustainable cities, clean energy and sustainable agriculture.

On Monday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit heard arguments concerning the Trump administration’s request for a writ of mandamus to halt the climate change lawsuit brought by 21 children.  An administration attorney claimed that the discovery requests in the case were “burdensome” and that litigating the case could distract the executive branch from carrying out “its constitutional duties.”  Award-winning poet Megan Hunter published her first novel this month, entitled The End We Start From, and it is a work of climate fiction.  In an interview with Amy Brady, she said “I think that hope is actually essential if we are to take action: If there is no hope for the planet then there is no point doing anything.  And hope…[is] about recognizing the essentially unknown nature of the future…”

California and Washington state joined Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Chile on Tuesday in an agreement to step up the use of a price on CO₂ emissions as a central economic policy to slow climate change.  A new paper in the journal Climatic Change reported on a survey of Republican attitudes about climate change.  Clifford Klaus had an interesting piece in The New York Times about the people of Converse County, Wyoming, and their attitudes about energy and President Trump.  They would be very happy with Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s plan to boost coal.  In a report released on Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office said that the Pentagon must do more to prepare its overseas bases for the impacts of climate change.

Climate

Attribution studies were in the news this week.  Two dealt with Hurricane Harvey and its impacts.  As published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, scientists at the World Weather Attribution project calculated that the record rainfall experienced in Houston was made three times more likely because of climate change.  Furthermore, if we continue with business-as-usual CO₂ emissions, rainfall events on the same scale as Hurricane Harvey’s downpour could become up to ten times more likely by 2100.  The results are supported by the second study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, which found that Harvey’s rainfall was made 3.5 times more likely by climate change.  In a first for the American Meteorological Society’s annual report on the role of climate change in extreme weather events, their 2016 report, released this week, included three events that would not have happened without the increase in CO₂ level in the atmosphere.  Previous reports had never determined that events could not have occurred under “natural” conditions.  Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich summarized five cases from the report at The New York Times.  A number of additional attribution studies were presented at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in New Orleans and they were summarized by Joel Achenbach at The Washington Post.  In addition, the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit issued a report examining the climate change links of all extreme weather events that have occurred since the Paris Climate Agreement.

Also at the AGU meeting, Jeremy Mathis, director of the Arctic Research Program at NOAA, unveiled the Arctic Report Card 2017.  The report stated that the decline of Arctic sea ice is “outside of the range of natural variability and unprecedented” in the past 1,450 years and that the speed at which Arctic surface temperatures are rising is unprecedented in (at least) the past 2,000 years.  Indicative of the changes in Alaska, some temperature readings in Barrow (now known as Utqiagvik) were automatically deleted from the data record because they were so high they looked like outliers.

A paper published in the journal Earth’s Future examined potential sea level rise associated with the melting of Antarctic glaciers.  The paper reported on the first modeling study to take into consideration two new mechanisms that could lead to rapid collapse of the Antarctic ice sheets: disintegration of floating ice shelves and mechanical failure of tall ice cliffs facing the sea.  The study found that under a business-as-usual emissions scenario sea level could rise by 3 to 8 feet by the year 2100, much higher than projected by the last IPCC report.  Climate Central released a new version of their sea level rise maps to reflect the new findings.

Concerns are growing that because of increasing CO₂ levels, wheat, rice, and other staple crops could deliver less of some minerals and protein in decades to come than they do today.  In 2017, three reports highlighted what changes in those crops could mean for global health.

In the past I have provided links to articles about “negative emissions” technologies for removing CO₂ from the atmosphere and the necessity for their use to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.  Wired has published a long investigative piece about “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage”, or BECCS, which is one of those technologies.

Energy

New research, published in Nature Energy, measured the full lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of various electricity sources out to 2050. It showed that the carbon footprints of solar, wind and nuclear power are many times lower than coal or gas with carbon capture and storage.  This remained true after accounting for emissions during manufacture, construction and fuel supply.  Even though Florida is called the “sunshine state”, it gets most of its electricity from gas-fired power plants, with relatively little from solar.  The Center for Public Integrity had a rather long investigative piece about the electric power industry there.  It also released a report on the relationship between the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. government.

National Australia Bank says it will halt all lending for new thermal coal mining projects, although it will continue providing finance for coal projects already on its books.  Meanwhile, in Paris the World Bank announced on Tuesday that after 2019 it will no longer finance upstream oil and gas projects.  In response to the “Powering Past Coal Alliance,” which was launched by Canada and the UK, the Trump administration has proposed the “Clean Coal Alliance” to encourage cooperation on technologies that reduce the carbon footprint of coal.  It has not yet begun recruiting members.

Two recent research papers, one in Nature Geoscience and the other in Nature Scientific Reports, demonstrate clearly the perversity of nature.  The first paper, reporting on a modeling study, found that as Earth warms, wind patterns in the midlatitudes of the Northern Hemisphere will change and diminish somewhat, having a negative impact on wind energy installations.  The second paper reported on a study of wind energy potential in key regions of China from 1979 through 2015, and found that it had declined by about 10%.

According to GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association’s latest U.S. Solar Market Insight report, 2,031 megawatts of photovoltaic (PV) solar generation were installed in the U.S. in the third quarter of the year, resulting in the market’s smallest quarter in two years.  Appalachian Power has announced that its first PV solar generation project, a 15 MW facility, will be built in Rustburg, Va.  Global installations of solar PV panels are set to reach 108 GW next year according to forecasts by IHS Markit Ltd.  They project that the rate of installations will require a large percentage of global panel manufacturing capacity, driving prices up and making the economics of some projects questionable.

Babies born to mothers living near fracking sites have a higher chance of being underweight, according to new research published this week in the journal Science Advances, which surveyed data on more than 1.1 million births in Pennsylvania between 2004 and 2013.  On a 4-3 vote Tuesday, the Virginia Water Control Board approved the certification of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline with an amendment that prevents it from becoming effective until the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality finishes reviewing and approving a series of plans and mitigation measures.

Toyota Motor Corp. has strengthened its partnership with battery producer Panasonic Corp.  They will work together on solid-state batteries for electric vehicles (EVs), among other things.  As EVs replace cars powered by internal combustion engines, one thing that will change is the auto repair shop, simply because EVs have far fewer parts to break down.

Akshat Rathi continued his series in Quartz about “The Race to Zero Emissions.”  You can read Part 5 here, Part 6 here, Part 7 here, and Part 8 here.  In addition, he has provided a game to test your ability to reduce carbon emissions from electricity generation.

These news items have been compiled by Les Grady, member and former chair of the CAAV steering committee. He is a licensed professional engineer (retired) who taught environmental engineering at Purdue and Clemson Universities and engaged in private practice with CH2M Hill, the world’s largest environmental engineering consulting firm. Since his retirement in 2003 he has devoted much of his time to the study of climate science and the question of global warming and makes himself available to speak to groups about this subject. More here.

Policy and Politics

The EPA will not block its scientists from freely discussing their work in public, Administrator Scott Pruitt promised lawmakers this week, in the wake of a recent incident in which researchers were barred from presenting findings on climate change at a conference.  However, he also told lawmakers that early in 2018 he plans to review the 2009 endangerment finding that climate change is a risk to human health by using the “red team/blue team” approach used by the military.  In further EPA news, the agency announced Wednesday that it will take comments on its proposed repeal of the Clean Power Plan at upcoming hearings in San Francisco; Gillette, Wyoming; and Kansas City, Missouri.  The dates, times and venues have not yet been announced.  The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee held Congress’ first hearings on climate science in 1976, and it resulted in passage of bipartisan legislation to establish a National Climate Program Office.  Today, the Committee is best known for being hostile to climate scientists.  What happened?  Inside Climate News reviewed the transformation of this powerful committee to help answer that question.

While Suniva and SolarWorld have continued to appeal to President Trump to impose tariffs on imported solar panels, installers and others have argued that a tariff will cause more jobs in solar installation to be lost than will be gained in solar panel manufacturing.  Greentech Media had a detailed summary of the hearings.  Both the House and Senate versions of the tax-cut bill contain provisions that pose a threat to the development of wind and solar power.  Paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr., who in turn had paraphrased the great abolitionist leader Theodore Parker, Bill McKibben wrote in Rolling Stone “The arc of the physical universe appears to be short, and it bends toward heat.  Win soon or suffer the consequences.”

More than 50 mayors from cities of all sizes wrapped up a climate change summit in Chicago on Wednesday, at which they signed a formal agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in their cities.  In order to do that, they will need to consider housing, land use, and transportation as a single system, since they are all intertwined, complementary, and reinforcing.  A recent study published in the journal BioScience showed how important it is to consider the sources used by any blogs you read on the subject of climate change.  Those that aren’t based on the peer-reviewed scientific literature can be very misleading.

Climate

In 2015 journalists from The New York Times accompanied a team of scientists to Greenland, where they were studying the fate of meltwater from the ice sheet.  The question being studied was whether the water flowed directly to the sea, or whether some was retained in cavities within the ice sheet.  The results of those studies have now been published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences and the Times has an interesting article about the study, complete with excellent graphics.  Another article in the Times, which I missed last week deals with the mental stress of climate change on Inuit people.  It is accompanied by some wonderful watercolors.

Several climate change models are used by climate scientists to project future warming.  Because of differences between them, they provide a variety of projections.  Scientists at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif. ranked the models by how well they simulated historical temperature changes.  When they then examined projections of future temperature changes they found that those that best simulated past temperature changes gave the highest projections of future changes, by around 15%, on average.

As wildfires once again raged across California, Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic examined the question of whether they were being made worse by climate change.  A paper this week in Nature Communication provided additional evidence linking the loss of Arctic sea ice with drought in California and extreme cold winter temperatures in the eastern U.S.  This does not bode well for the current California wildfires.  Another consequence of melting Arctic sea ice is more human activity, such as boat traffic and oil exploration.  As a consequence, conservationists are concerned about the impact on marine life that is not adapted to such activities.  One example is narwhals, which have a unique stress response that may not be compatible with human activities.

One impact of increased concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere is to make the oceans more acidic.  Consequently, scientists have been studying the impacts of increased acidity on a variety of marine species, such as shellfish.  A recent article in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, B, Biological Sciences reported on studies on mussels.  The acidity of sea water varies with location and in shallow coastal waters, where mussels grow, it also varies with time.  When the scientists subjected mussels to varying acidity levels they found that condition to be more stressful than constant exposure to waters with low acidity.

A new study in the journal The Condor: Ornithological Applications, found that some U.S. Pacific coast bird species are migrating earlier in the spring and later in the fall than they used to.  These changes appear to be linked to warmer, wetter climate conditions.  Climate change is also having an impact on birds in the UK, as documented in a new report.

Rivers in the Amazon are cycling between increasingly severe states of flood and drought, as predicted by climate change models, and the results are directly impacting local wildlife and the indigenous people who protect the forest, according to a new study published in the journal Conservation Biology.

Energy

A notice that was slated to be published Friday in the Federal Register by the Bureau of Land Management will suspend a rule to limit methane leaks from oil and gas operations on federal land.  On the other hand, the American Petroleum Institute announced on Tuesday that a consortium of oil and gas companies is undertaking a voluntary program to reduce their methane emissions.  Speaking of methane, last Friday the U.S. Forest Service gave its approval for the Mountain Valley Pipeline to cross the Jefferson National Forest and on Thursday of this week the Virginia Water Control Board approved the pipeline, its last major regulatory hurdle.  Finally, a note about pipelines in general.  Regulators are concerned that the oil leak from the Keystone Pipeline may have been caused by the weights that keep it from floating when it is below the water table.  One problem is that the regulators don’t know where the weights are.

Lithium-ion battery packs used in electric vehicles are selling at an average price of $209 a kWh, down 24% from a year ago and about a fifth of what it was in 2010, a Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) survey shows. Furthermore, according to a report by BNEF, the cost will likely fall to below $100 a kWh by 2025.  Of course, the price of the battery packs will depend in part on the price of lithium, which is now at a record high due to high demand and limited supply.  This is causing one of the world’s largest lithium producers to consider expanding into a fourth country.

According to new data from the U.S. Energy Information Agency (IEA), transportation has surpassed electricity generation as the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.  The transportation sector now emits 1.9 billion tons of CO₂ annually; the electric power sector emits 1.8 billion tons.  There is growing interest in electric vehicles (EVs) coupled with renewable energy as a way of reducing emissions from both sectors, but one deterrence is a lack of EV infrastructure.  This raises the question of whether car-sharing services can increase demand for both EVs and their infrastructure.  Of course, if the new EVs look as good as the concept cars shown at this year’s Los Angeles Auto Show, a lot of people won’t take too much convincing, particularly since EVs are cheaper to own and operate over four years than gasoline or diesel cars.  The IEA also reported that U.S. solar photovoltaic electricity output in the first nine months of 2017 grew 47% over the same period in 2016.

More than half of the EU’s 619 coal-fired power plants are losing money, according to a new report by Carbon Tracker.  Furthermore, stricter air pollution rules and higher carbon prices will push even more plants into unprofitability, with 97% losing money by 2030.

Read it and weep.  China’s share of the global market for protection against climate change more than tripled over the 13 years leading to 2015, according to a report commissioned by the German government and published by the Federal Environment Office.  Germany fell to second place and the U.S. finished third.

This week, Akshat Rathi started a series about carbon capture on Quartz.  The first article provided an overview, the second with the Allam cycle which uses supercritical CO₂ to drive the turbine in a gas-powered system to generate electricity, the third with negative-emissions concrete, and the fourth with a new process, invented by a teenager, that absorbs CO₂ at about 15% of the cost of the industry standard.  The series will conclude next week.

These news items have been compiled by Les Grady, member and former chair of the CAAV steering committee. He is a licensed professional engineer (retired) who taught environmental engineering at Purdue and Clemson Universities and engaged in private practice with CH2M Hill, the world’s largest environmental engineering consulting firm. Since his retirement in 2003 he has devoted much of his time to the study of climate science and the question of global warming and makes himself available to speak to groups about this subject. More here.

Policy and Politics

President Trump’s nominee to head NOAA, Barry Meyers, former CEO of AccuWeather, affirmed during his confirmation hearing on Wednesday that he accepts the scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming.  In addition, he said “I fully support the ability, as I said, of scientists to do their work unfettered.”  State department official Judith Garber said the U.S. is starting the process to ratify the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, which sets a phasedown path for HFCs, a group of potent greenhouse gases used as refrigerants in refrigerators and air conditioners.  President Trump’s trade representative requested more details about how low-cost imported solar panels have harmed U.S. manufacturers as the White House considers imposing tariffs.

Most of us concerned about climate change think of the Clean Power Plan (CPP) as a regulation to decrease CO₂ emissions.  In reality, it is much more, also reducing a host of other pollutants that impact human health, as was emphasized during testimony at the CPP hearings in Charleston, WV, this week.  Emily Atkin had an interesting commentary on the hearings in the New Republic.  While we were on break last week, Carbon Brief published an interview with everyone’s favorite climate scientist, Katharine Hayhoe.  It’s very interesting.  Writing at Southeast Energy News, Jim Pierobon examined the hurdles still to be faced as the McAuliffe and Northam administrations strive to have Virginia join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).

Climate

A new study, published in the journal PLoS One, has found that almost 14,000 coastal archeological sites and national monuments in the southeastern U.S. could be lost by the year 2100 because of sea level rise.  Meanwhile, in the Arctic, melting permafrost is threatening artifacts that have been preserved for centuries.  Speaking of sea level rise, in the last Weekly Roundup I provided a link to Bill McKibben’s review of Jeff Goodell’s new book The Water Will Come.  This week, Amy Brady posted an interview with Goodell.

Writing in Nautilus, Victor Gomes cataloged seven climate change impacts you may not have considered.  One impact not covered by Gomes is on the tiny creatures in the oceans that form the base of the food chain.  Amorina Kingdon took a brief look at them at Hakai Magazine.  Another consequence that you may not have considered is an increase in the number of child brides in Africa.

In a report to its clients on Tuesday, Moody’s Investors Service Inc. explained how it incorporates climate change into its credit ratings for state and local bonds.  If cities and states don’t deal with risks from surging seas or intense storms, they are at greater risk of default, and hence they will have to pay a higher interest rate for their bonds.  Speaking of risks, an analysis by NOAA showed the amount of rain that defines a “100-year storm” has risen by 3 to 5 inches in the Houston area since the last estimates were put in place in 2002.  Instead of expecting 12 to 14 inches in a day during a 100-year storm, the data show the area should expect 15 to 18 inches.

A report released Tuesday by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation said that the fashion industry currently creates 1.2 billion tons of carbon emissions per year–more than emissions from international flights and shipping combined.  It called on the fashion industry to alter its practices in order to become more sustainable.

A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined 20 conservation, restoration, and land management actions that could help the world reach the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.

Warm waters in the Bering and Chukchi Seas have hampered sea ice development this fall.  And that’s not all.  A new report completed by 90 scientists for the Arctic Council concluded that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the mid-latitudes and is likely to see average warming of up to 5°C as early as 2040.

Energy

Bloomberg New Energy Finance held a conference this week in Shanghai on the future of energy in Asia.  Anindya Upadhyay and Iain Wilson presented some of the highpoints from the conference for Bloomberg Technology, including the projection that the growing market for electric vehicles (EVs) will cut oil demand by 8 million barrels a day by 2040.  Furthermore, according to a UBS global autos survey released Tuesday, EVs will make up 16% of all car sales by 2025.  However, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, battery prices need to drop by more than half before electric vehicles will be competitive with cars powered by internal-combustion engines, something that is likely to happen by 2026.  Before Thanksgiving I included information about Tesla’s new long-haul truck.  Now Bloomberg Technology has questioned whether Elon Musk’s claims are achievable.

According to data from the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, between January 2010 and November 2017, natural gas pipelines leaked a total of 17.55 billion cubic feet of gas, killed nearly 100 people, and injured close to 500.  Jonathan Thompson of High Country News has prepared an interesting infographic using that data.  ExxonMobil was the only American-owned company to sign an agreement with seven other energy firms to crack down on emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that producers tend to emit along the natural gas production chain.  A new study, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, sought to measure methane emissions from cattle, swine, and poultry production.  They found that total U.S. livestock methane emissions were 19.6 billion pounds per year, a figure close to that determined by the EPA.  Fuel cell technology based on methane as the energy source can produce electricity with fewer CO₂ emissions than a gas-fired turbine.  Consequently, they are being considered by some companies for powering their data centers.

Shell is increasing the capital expenditure for its new energies division, to $1billion-$2billion a year for 2018-2020, up from a previous plan of up to $1bn a year by 2020.  Furthermore, its new climate change target aims to cut the net carbon footprint of its products by 50% by 2050, and by 20% by 2035.  In addition, Shell has partnered with top carmakers to deploy ultra-fast chargers at 80 European highway sites in 2019.

About 5% of all K-12 schools in the U.S. are powered by the sun, and their solar capacity has almost doubled in the last three years, according to a new study by the Solar Energy Industries Association, The Solar Foundation, and Generation 180, a clean energy nonprofit.

The world’s largest lithium-ion battery has officially been turned on in South Australia.  The 100 MW battery, produced by Tesla, is paired to the neighboring Hornsdale Wind Farm, owned by French company Neoen, to bring greater reliability and stability to the state’s electricity grid.  Hyundai Electric & Energy Systems Co. is building a 150 MW unit that will go live in about three months in Ulsan near South Korea’s southeast coast.

About 2,800 new hydroelectric dams are planned across a region stretching from Slovenia to Greece, 37% of which will be built in protected areas such as national parks or Natura 2000 sites, sparking fears of disappearing mountain rivers and biodiversity loss.

India’s Minister for New & Renewable Energy expressed confidence that the country could achieve 200 GW of operational renewable energy capacity by March 2022 instead of the current target of 175 GW.

These news items have been compiled by Les Grady, member and former chair of the CAAV steering committee. He is a licensed professional engineer (retired) who taught environmental engineering at Purdue and Clemson Universities and engaged in private practice with CH2M Hill, the world’s largest environmental engineering consulting firm. Since his retirement in 2003 he has devoted much of his time to the study of climate science and the question of global warming and makes himself available to speak to groups about this subject. More here.

Policy and Politics

The Trump administration used its only public forum at the U.N. climate talks in Bonn on Monday to promote fossil fuels and nuclear energy, prompting Michael Bloomberg to tweet, “Promoting coal at a climate summit is like promoting tobacco at a cancer summit”.  Meanwhile the UK and Canada launched a global alliance of 20 countries committed to phasing out coal for electrical energy production.  Environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert provided her take on the activities of the Trump administration.  One of the accomplishments of the Paris Climate Agreement was the concept that all nations had a responsibility to fight climate change and should contribute what they could, “in light of different national circumstances”.  There has been a movement in Bonn to walk that back and divide the world’s countries into two groups, which many countries, both developed and developing, oppose.  French president Emmanuel Macron promised to replace the $2 million annual donation withdrawn by the U.S. from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  On Saturday, Nov. 11^th, Virginia became the latest U.S. state to commit to action on climate change, becoming a member of the Under2 Coalition of leading sub-national governments at a side event hosted during COP23 in Bonn.  On Thursday, Virginia’s Air Pollution Control Board unanimously approved a rule that would cap emissions from the electricity sector beginning in 2020 and reduce them by 30% over a decade. In addition, Virginia would join nine other states in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).

There is a civil war brewing within the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).  At issue is whether they should support withdrawal of the 2009 endangerment finding for CO₂ and other greenhouse gases that is the basis for the Clean Power Plan.  In a chilling article in The Washington Post, Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis report on a closed-door meeting of climate change deniers who were critiquing the Trump administration on its dismantling of environmental regulations.  Almost as chilling is Robinson Meyer’s article in The Atlantic, in which he says that most progressive voters “trust that Democrats have a legislative plan to resolve [the] climate crisis, and that the party only needs to be granted control of Congress to pass it.  But nothing of a similar scale exists, and some of the Senate’s most vocal Democrats on the issue resist formulating one.”  Some good news: U.S. Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R FL), who started the House Climate Solutions Caucus, and May Boeve, executive director of 350.org, were presented with this year’s John F. Kennedy New Frontier Awards on Thursday evening at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

In a very informative New Yorker article about atmospheric CO₂ removal, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote: “Carbon-removal plants could be built anywhere, or everywhere.  Construct enough of them and, in theory at least, CO₂ emissions could continue unabated and still we could avert calamity.  Depending on how you look at things, the technology represents either the ultimate insurance policy or the ultimate moral hazard.”  Speaking of insurance and hazards, the major insurance companies recently said that the potential damage from severe weather events may become so unpredictable that it is impossible to model, which is an unacceptable risk to them.  The issue of damages from climate change has been important at COP23, causing Julie-Anne Richards of the Climate Justice Programme to say “A climate damages tax on the fossil fuel industry is one way to reverse the injustice of climate change, and ensure the fossil fuel industry pays for its damage – not poor people.”

Climate

Solar radiation management (SRM) is one form of geoengineering, whose objective is to decrease the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface, thereby cooling the planet and buying time for reduction of CO₂ emissions.  Now a new paper in Nature Communications has found that if aerosols were released just from the northern hemisphere, other parts of the world could face an increase in droughts, hurricanes, and storms.

According to a new paper published in Nature Scientific Reports, better soil management could boost carbon stored in the top layer of the soil by up to 1.85 Gt/year, about the same as the carbon emissions of transport globally.  Another paper, this one in the journal Nature Communications, concluded that by adopting organic farming practices, in combination with other changes, the projected world population in 2050 could be fed without increasing the amount of land under cultivation, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  This paper was met with skepticism by the agricultural community.

A new study by NASA scientists, published in Science Advances, reported that public officials in charge of preparing for sea level rise need to consider the melting rate of specific glaciers, not just their aggregate impact.  This is because as glaciers melt, they become lighter, which impacts gravitational forces in their vicinity, thereby influencing whether nearby land masses rise or fall.  Speaking of melting glaciers, scientists have long known that West Antarctica has many more melting glaciers than East Antarctica.  Now a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters has found that West Antarctica receives more heat from within the Earth than East Antarctica.  In Sunday’s Washington Post, Bill McKibben had a review of Jeff Goodell’s book The Water Will Come.

On Wednesday, Carbon Action Tracker released a report prepared by three independent European research groups, saying that current policies meant the world was headed for warming of 3.4°C by 2100, down from 3.6°C it predicted a year ago.  Unfortunately, even if all countries adhere to their pledges under the Paris Climate Agreement, global temperature rise will exceed 3°C.  Deutsche Welle examined what five cities would experience under such a situation.

A modeling study published in Nature Geoscience found that with business-as-usual climate change, mid-latitude storms could travel further before reaching their maximum intensity and, as a result, countries further from the equator, including the UK and the U.S., could face more frequent and more intense storms during winter months.

The extreme rains that inundated the Houston area during Hurricane Harvey were made more likely by climate change, according to a new study by MIT hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  The work also suggested that such extreme flooding events will become more frequent as Earth continues to warm.

Energy

After three years of almost flat emissions, global CO₂ output is expected to rise in 2017.  Much of that rise is due to increased CO₂ emissions by China.  Somini Sengupta of The New York Times analyzed the apparent contradiction between China’s desire to lead on climate change and its continued reliance on coal.  However, coal-fired power capacity across China will be capped at 1,100 gigawatts by 2020 as they work to increase transmission capacity to make better use of their renewable energy.  Increasing the use of hydrogen in power generation, transportation, heating, and industry could deliver around 20% of the total carbon emission cuts needed to limit global warming to safe levels by mid-century, according to a report released at COP23 by the Hydrogen Council.

A growing number of insurance companies increasingly affected by the consequences of climate change are selling holdings in coal companies and refusing to underwrite their operations.  However, none of the major U.S. insurers such as Berkshire Hathaway, AIG, and Liberty Mutual have taken action.  In an effort to make its sovereign wealth fund less vulnerable to a permanent drop in oil prices, Norway has proposed dropping oil and gas companies from its benchmark index, which would mean cutting its investments in those companies.

The supply surge from U.S. shale oil and gas will beat the biggest gains seen in the history of the industry, the International Energy Agency predicted in its annual World Energy Outlook.  By 2025, the growth in American oil production will equal that achieved by Saudi Arabia at the height of its expansion, and increases in natural gas will surpass those of the former Soviet Union.  The report also projected that renewable energy is likely to grab a bigger share of the market in the coming decades, generating more electricity than coal by 2040.  Zeke Hausfather provided an in-depth summary of the report at Carbon Brief.

Dozens of groups and individuals filed requests this week challenging FERC’s certificate orders approving the Atlantic Coast (ACP) and Mountain Valley (MVP) pipelines.  Contending that FERC’s approvals for the ACP and MVP violate the Natural Gas Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the Constitution, the groups called on the Commission to immediately stay its certificate orders pending rehearing.

On Thursday evening Tesla introduced its new long-haul truck, which will travel 500 miles at 60 mph on a single charge and accelerate to 60 mph in 5 sec empty and 20 sec fully loaded.  Bloomberg analyzed the truck and what it will take to succeed, particularly given the rivals that are already working hard.

According to 50 States of Grid Modernization, a new policy update from the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center, in the third quarter of 2017, there were 184 actions on grid modernization proposed, pending, or enacted across 33 states and the District of Columbia.

These news items have been compiled by Les Grady, member and former chair of the CAAV steering committee. He is a licensed professional engineer (retired) who taught environmental engineering at Purdue and Clemson Universities and engaged in private practice with CH2M Hill, the world’s largest environmental engineering consulting firm. Since his retirement in 2003 he has devoted much of his time to the study of climate science and the question of global warming and makes himself available to speak to groups about this subject. More here.

Policy and Politics

During Senate hearings on Wednesday, Kathleen Hartnett White, President Trump’s nominee to head the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, when asked about the link between human activity and climate change, acknowledged that there was probably some human contribution, but said “the extent to which I think is very uncertain.”  On Thursday, the Senate confirmed William Wehrum on a 49-47 vote to head the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation.  Also on Thursday, the EPA proposed a rule to repeal tighter emissions standards for heavy-duty trucks with older engines that had been put into place by the Obama administration.  Moving in the opposite direction, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality will begin presenting its draft greenhouse gas reduction program next week to the state’s Air Pollution Control Board for approval to create the state’s first cap-and-trade program, possibly by joining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative to become the 11th member of the multi-state cap-and-trade system.  When Robert Litterman, chairman of the Risk Committee at Kepos Capital, decided to apply the basic tenets of Wall Street risk management to climate change, he came to the conclusion that carbon taxes should be higher than anything proposed or enacted almost anywhere in the world.  He also decided that a carbon tax would be a great way to eliminate the deficit in the current Republican tax reform plans.

In a very interesting essay on disaster planning in an age of climate change, Brad Plumer of The New York Times quoted Dr. David Titley, who heads a climate center at Pennsylvania State University: “If climate adaptation is a marathon, we’ve run about the first 50 yards so far.  Grudgingly.”  Part of our adaptation should be to fix the National Flood Insurance Program.  Bob Henson of Weather Underground took a deep dive into why that has been so difficult.  With respect to planning, New Zealand’s climate change minister hopes to create an experimental humanitarian visa for climate refugees.  Planning requires that we know what is happening with the climate.  Consequently, 26 scientists published a paper in the journal Earth’s Future, which was released Thursday, that calls for a coordinated and expanded measurement network focused on answering key scientific questions about Earth’s climate.

At COP 23 in Bonn, Syria announced it plans to join the Paris Climate Agreement, leaving the U.S. as the only country not on board.  Because of his plans to remove the U.S. from the Agreement, President Trump is, “for the time being,” not invited to a climate change summit to be held in Paris in December, according to an official in French President Macron’s office.  “We Are Still In”, the organization established in response to President Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Agreement, has opened the U.S. Climate Action Center, a pavilion and forum where dozens of American leaders will convene throughout the negotiations.  China under President Xi Jinping is moving to shape the consensus on how to rein in greenhouse gases after President Donald Trump decided to scale back U.S. involvement.  The head of the Africa group of climate negotiators said on Thursday that the wealthiest countries on earth are failing to take seriously the need to speed up the money they have promised to help the poor cope with climate change.  One example of the need is Fiji, a small island nation that is facing climate adaptation costs over ten years that exceed its GDP.  Meanwhile, Michael Bloomberg, U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change, announced a $50 million commitment to partners worldwide to catalyze a global effort to move nations away from coal dependence.  The New York Times has an interesting infographic showing how far we have to go to keep warming below 2°C.

Climate

Let’s start off with a little hope!  Damian Carrington, environment editor at The Guardian wrote on Wednesday about “the seven mega-trends that could beat global warming.”  And in an opinion piece at MacLean’s, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe wrote: “It’s not the science of climate change that we must emphasize to prevent ‘dangerous human interference with the climate system.’  It’s the immediacy of its impacts, and the hope its solutions offer for a better future for us all.”  On the other hand, while David Roberts at Vox agrees that it is futile to emphasize the science to conservative elites, he argues that the way to win the climate warsis to do “everything possible to publicize their intransigence and make it core to their identity” so they end up crying “‘Hey, We Like Clean Energy Too!’”

In a statement released on Thursday, NOAA formally declared that La Niña conditions were present in the tropical Pacific Ocean.  Andrew Freedman explained what this might mean for winter weather in the U.S. and Canada.  Vox presented some interesting graphics of climate change data.

A study published Monday in Geophysical Research Letters found that algal growth was more important than deposited dust and soot to the darkening of ice in one region of western Greenland.  Dark ice melts more rapidly than clean ice.  On the other side of the Arctic, black guillemots nest on Cooper Island, an uninhabited strip of land 5 miles offshore near Barrow, Alaska.  They have been studied each summer since 1975, providing one of the longest, continuous records of the impact of climate change on a single species.

Like the U.S., data from New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research indicates that their winter has decreased in length by a month over the last 100 years.

On Wednesday, a subcommittee of the House Science Committee held a hearing on geoengineering, which was quite informative and without the usual posturing.  One of the witnesses, Douglas MacMartin, is a co-author on five papers examining by simulation the impacts of the injection of sunlight-reflecting aerosol particles into the stratosphere.  They were published together in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres this week.  One reason some climate scientists are beginning to consider geoengineering is their inability to model cloud behavior.  How and where clouds move and how that will change as the climate warms and the atmosphere becomes either more or less polluted remain among the biggest unanswered questions in climate science.

In case you haven’t had a chance to look at Part 1 of the National Climate Assessment that was released last week, Sabrina Shankman has a summary at Inside Climate News.  In another article there, Georgina Gustin wrote: “Scientists at the University of Hawaii at Manoa reviewed medical literature to identify ways in which the body responds to heat and how organs are affected.  They calculated that there are 27 ways, physiologically speaking, for a person to die from extreme heat.”

In a new peer-reviewed article in the journal Nature Climate Change, scientists from World Weather Attribution and the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research wrote that they had developed techniques that “make it possible to assign extreme events to human-induced climate change and historical emissions” and “allow losses and damage associated with such events to be assigned country-level responsibility.”

Energy

Renewables combined with energy storage technologies could generate enough secure power to cover the world’s entire electricity demand by 2050 while proving cheaper than the current fossil-fuel dominated system, according to a study by German non-profit Energy Watch Group and the Lappeenranta University of Technology in Finland, released on Wednesday at COP23 in Bonn.

China Energy Investment Corp. plans to invest $83.7 billion in shale gas development, chemical manufacturing, and underground storage of natural gas liquids derivatives in West Virginia over 20 years, according to a memorandum of understanding.  European governments have drastically underestimated methane emissions and will miss their Paris Agreement goals unless they urgently scale down its use, a major new study by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research has found.

According to the International Energy Agency’s new “Energy Access Outlook 2017” report, the number of people without access to electricity fell to 1.1 billion in 2016 from 1.7 billion in 2000.  More than 100 million people have gained electricity access every year since 2012, much of it with renewable energy.

The Energy Storage Association, in collaboration with Navigant Research, has released a white paper entitled “35×25: A Vision for Energy Storage”, which charts a path toward 35 GW of new energy storage systems by 2025.

On Wednesday, the EU proposed sharp automobile emission cuts over the next decade to support the Paris Climate Agreement and compete with China by spurring electric vehicle (EV) production.  To be prepared for greater penetration of EVs in the market, filling stations are experimenting with ways to retain their customers’ loyalty after they buy an EV.

These news items have been compiled by Les Grady, member and former chair of the CAAV steering committee. He is a licensed professional engineer (retired) who taught environmental engineering at Purdue and Clemson Universities and engaged in private practice with CH2M Hill, the world’s largest environmental engineering consulting firm. Since his retirement in 2003 he has devoted much of his time to the study of climate science and the question of global warming and makes himself available to speak to groups about this subject. More here.

Policy and Politics

The 600-plus-page Climate Science Special Report, which is Volume 1 of the fourth National Climate Assessment, has been released by the White House.  It concludes that it is “extremely likely” that human activities are the “dominant cause” of global warming.  President Donald Trump’s pick to lead NASA, Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), was slammed by Senate Democrats on the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation during his nomination hearing Wednesday, while he waffled on the scientific consensus about climate change.  Also on Wednesday, President Trump’s nominee to be the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s chief scientist, Sam Clovis, withdrew his name from consideration.  He previously had admitted in a letter to Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, that he has no academic credentials in science or agriculture.  On Thursday, the Senate confirmed the appointments of Republican Kevin McIntyre and Democrat Richard Glick to FERC, giving the commission a full panel for the first time in two years.  Rep. Lamar Smith (R, TX), climate change denier and Chair of the House Science Committee, has announced that he will not seek reelection in 2018.

The four commissioners of the U.S. International Trade Commission on Tuesday voiced their support for tariffs and other import restrictions to protect domestic solar companies from an influx of cheap solar panels being produced overseas, but South Korea’s trade ministry said it may consider filing a complaint with the World Trade Organization if tariffs are imposed.  According to a new report entitled “Creating Markets for Climate Business”, released by the International Finance Corporation, a subsidiary of the World Bank, at least one trillion dollars are being invested globally in ways to reduce the threat of climate change.  On the other hand, a report, co-authored by Corporate Accountability, asserts that global negotiations seeking to implement the Paris Climate Agreement have been captured by corporate interests and are being undermined by powerful forces that benefit from exacerbating climate change.

A new report published by World Resources Institute suggests that 49 countries have already seen their greenhouse gas emissions peak, representing around 36% of current global emissions.  Another 8 countries representing another 23% of emissions have commitments to peak in the next decade or so.  In addition, according to the latest Low Carbon Economy Index from PwC, the carbon intensity of the world’s economy fell 2.6% in 2016, although that falls well short of the 6.3% rate needed to keep temperature increases under 2°C.  Meanwhile, the Trump administration will promote coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy as an answer to climate change during a presentation at the UN’s COP23 climate talks Nov. 6-17 in Bonn, Germany.  Entitled “The Role of Cleaner and More Efficient Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Power in Climate Mitigation,” it will have speakers from Peabody Energy, a coal company; NuScale Power, a nuclear engineering firm; and Tellurian, a liquefied natural gas exporter.

Climate

Tens of millions of people will be forced from their homes by climate change in the next decade, creating the biggest refugee crisis the world has ever seen, according to a new report from the Environmental Justice Foundation.  Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office has projected that by 2075 10 million Americans, most in coastal areas, will be impacted by climate change, causing government spending on disaster relief to increase.  Even more dire warnings have come from the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP), which released its annual emissions gap report this week.  The report warned that current pledges to cut emissions are only sufficient to hold warming to 3°C.  With that much warming, hundreds of millions of urban dwellers around the world face their cities being inundated by rising seawaters.  Writing at Carbon Brief, Zeke Hausfather summarized the UNEP report and discussed the six actions recommended to close the emissions gap.

This year Sri Lanka has faced what U.N. officials describe as the worst drought in 40 years.  With harvests expected to fall by as much as 50% and rice facing the worst harvest in a decade, the drought has accelerated migration from the countryside to the major cities.

A new study, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, found that as the winds around Antarctica intensify with rising global temperatures, they will enable warmer water from the depths to reach the base of the Totten Glacier’s floating ice shelf, accelerating its flow to the ocean.

The British medical journal Lancet has released a new meta-analysis that examines data from many studies to assess the impacts of climate change on health.  However, the analysis has been criticized because of its methodologies.

In a long piece in bioGraphic, Hannah Hoag writes “Years of sampling have shown that the Arctic Ocean is losing its distinctly Arctic traits and becoming increasingly more like the Atlantic. Its sea ice is melting, its water warming. In response, animals from warmer climes are encroaching, leading to a reorganization of its biodiversity.”  She then continues to describe research activities seeking to understand the changes occurring.

Driven by a combination of human activities and the El Niño weather phenomenon, concentrations of CO₂ in the Earth’s atmosphere surged to a record high in 2016, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization said on Monday.  The 2016 increase was 50% higher than the average of the past 10 years.  On a related note, the length of the U.S. winter is shortening, with the first frost of the year arriving more than one month later than it did 100 years ago, according to more than a century of measurements from weather stations nationwide.

Energy

Wind Europe, which promotes wind power in Europe, said in a press release that European wind energy set a new record on October 28, producing over 24% of the EU’s electricity demand.

In 2015, Mark Jacobson, a Stanford University professor, and colleagues, published a widely-cited paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) asserting that the U.S.’s electrical needs could be met fully by solar, wind, and hydroelectric power by 2050-2055.  This year, Christopher Clack, previously with NOAA and the University of Colorado, Boulder, but now with Vibrant Clean Energy, and coauthors, published a critique in the same journal of the Jacobson et al. paper, challenging its conclusions, followed by a rebuttal by Jacobson et al. and a reply by Clack et al. to the rebuttal.  Now in an unusual move, Jacobson has filed a $10 million law suit against Clack and the NAS.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said in a unanimous opinion that the Energy Department fulfilled its legal obligations under the National Environmental Policy Act and other laws when approving liquefied natural gas export terminals in Maryland, Louisiana and Texas.

The federal tax credit for electric vehicles will be eliminated under the tax reform plan introduced by Republicans in Congress.  Even if it survives, Tesla and Chevy Bolt buyers will soon face the limits built in to the current credit.

Using the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus as a test case, New York will be experimenting with a new micro-grid pricing system for renewable electricity.  The system has been designed to encourage the campus to sell electricity from its onsite solar panels, batteries or other generators to doctors’ offices and businesses in the vicinity.  And on the subject of renewable energy, according to financial adviser Lazard Ltd., it is starting to become cheaper to build and operate solar and wind farms than to continue to operate aging coal-fired and nuclear power plants in parts of the U.S.

Argentina plans to start building two new nuclear reactors in 2018, a 720 MW reactor to be built by a Canadian company and the Argentinian state nuclear company, and a 1,150MW reactor to be built by the China National Nuclear Corp.

These news items have been compiled by Les Grady, member and former chair of the CAAV steering committee. He is a licensed professional engineer (retired) who taught environmental engineering at Purdue and Clemson Universities and engaged in private practice with CH2M Hill, the world’s largest environmental engineering consulting firm. Since his retirement in 2003 he has devoted much of his time to the study of climate science and the question of global warming and makes himself available to speak to groups about this subject. More here.