19 December 2017, DeSmog, Pruitt’s Plan to Debate Climate Science Paused as Science Confirms Human Link to Extreme Weather. The same week that a slew of new scientific reports confirmed just how much humans are changing the climate, and in turn, the rest of the planet, Environmental Protection Agency Chief Scott Pruitt’s plans for a “Red Team, Blue Team” debate of this very same science were put on hold. The military-style exercise that would falsely pit the overwhelming majority of climate scientists against a handful of non-experts is an eight-year-old talking point of the notorious climate-denying think tank the Heartland Institute (which is likely not surprised by this development). Meanwhile, last week in New Orleans, several groups of prominent climate scientists shared their latest findings at the world’s largest gathering of Earth and planetary scientists. The roughly 25,000 attendees of the American Geophysical Union annual meeting included scientific leaders from academia, government, and the private sector. Clear and Present Climate Science These peer-reviewed reports make it clear that any meaningful climate debate in the future should not be over the degree of humanity’s role in climate change, but to what degree the climate has changed already and what can be done to stop it. The American Meteorological Society’s 2016 “State of the Climate” report offers the first examples of extreme weather events not possible in a preindustrial climate. “Climate change was a necessary condition for some of these events in 2016, in order for them to happen,” Jeff Rosenfeld, editor in chief of the Bulletin of the American Metrological Society, said at a press conference. “These are new weather extremes made possible by a new climate. They were impossible in the old climate.” Read more here
Yearly Archives: 2017
18 December 2017, Inman, The coastal mortgage time bomb. Experts worry that if insurers start to pull out of flood-prone seaside communities, it could cause a crisis worse than 2008. 2017 will be remembered as the year the water came. Hurricane Harvey dropped as much as 60 inches of rain on parts of Houston, shattering American meteorological records. Hurricane Irma was the strongest tropical storm ever recorded outside the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, and plowed through Florida in early September, turning Miami’s main drag into a raging river. And Category 4 Hurricane Maria pulverized Puerto Rico with 150-mph winds, leaving the island in darkness and ruin. Altogether, the three storms will cost the U.S. more than $200 billion, which would make 2017 the most expensive hurricane season on record.Yet there is every reason to expect that the towns and the cities hit by the hurricanes of 2017 will be rebuilt — even, eventually, devastated Puerto Rico. Thank the federal government — when a storm or flood strikes a community, Washington is there with generous disaster relief, either through billions of dollars in direct aid or through the cushion of federally-subsidized flood insurance plans. The confidence in the federal government’s backing keeps lenders sending money to disaster-hit communities, which encourages residents to stay put and rebuild, rather than flee for safer areas. This in turn ensures that tax money keeps flowing to local governments. That’s why New Orleans, more than 10 years after suffering through one of the worst hurricanes on record, now has a tax base twice as large as it did before Katrina, and why the South Florida city of Homestead is nearly three times as populous as it was before Hurricane Andrew flattened it in 1992. Read More here
14 December 2017, The Conversation, Not just heat: even our spring frosts can bear the fingerprint of climate change. In recent years, scientists have successfully identified the human fingerprint on hot years, heatwaves, and a range of other temperature extremes around the world. But as everyone knows, climate change affects more than just temperature. The “signal” of human-induced climate change is not always clear in other weather events, such as cold snaps or episodes of extreme rainfall. Three new studies, released today as part of a special edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, take a closer look at two such events, both of which happened in southern Australia in mid-2016: the frosts that hit Western Australia’s South West, and the extremely wet weather that hit much of southeastern Australia during that year’s winter and early spring. Perhaps surprisingly, WA’s frosts showed a fingerprint of climate change, due to changes in weather patterns. Meanwhile, there was very little climate change signal in the extreme rainfall that hit the southeast. While there is a clear human-driven upward trend in Australia’s average temperatures and the future of southern Australia is projected to be dry in the cool seasons, last year Australia experienced its wettest winter and September on record. Meanwhile, September in WA’s South West brought up to 18 frost nights across the region – the most on record in some locations. An increasing temperature trend would limit the number of extreme cold events, and broadly speaking this is true for Australia. So what caused the record frost risk in South West WA in September 2016? For the northern hemisphere, a “wobbly” jet stream has been proposed as the cause of periodic blasts of extreme cold weather. In this theory, human-driven changes to atmospheric circulation cause Arctic air to temporarily extend southwards over populated areas, bringing Arctic weather in spite of the background warming trend. But this kind of theory hasn’t been examined in depth for Australia. Read More here
14 December 2017, The Guardian, National Australia Bank stops all lending for new thermal coal projects. National Australia Bank says it will halt all lending for new thermal coal mining projects, becoming the first major Australian bank to phase out support of thermal coal mining. While the bank will continue providing finance for coal projects already on its books, NAB said an orderly transition to a low-carbon Australia was critical for the economy and for continued access to secure and affordable energy. “While we will continue to support our existing customers across the mining and energy sectors, including those with existing coal assets, NAB will no longer finance new thermal coal mining projects,” the bank said in a statement on Thursday. “This is a market-leading position for an Australian bank and is even stronger than the position taken by Commonwealth Bank last month because it is formal policy,” Greenpeace campaigner Jonathan Moylan said. The Commonwealth Bank indicated to shareholders in November that it would not fund new, large coal projects, saying its support for coal would continue to decline as it helps finance the transition to a low-carbon economy. ING has promised to phase out coal within a decade and has committed to stop funding any utility company which relies on coal for more than 5% of its energy. ANZ and Westpac both have policies that limit lending to new coal projects under certain conditions. “NAB has lifted the bar above its competitors by becoming the first major bank to end lending to all new thermal coal mining,” said Julien Vincent, executive director of environmental finance advocates Market Forces. “This policy means NAB joins the ranks of dozens of banks and insurance companies globally that are withdrawing from this most climate-polluting of industries.” The World Bank has also announced it will “no longer finance upstream oil and gas, after 2019” in an effort to be consistent with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5C. Read More here