26 October 2016, Bloomberg, Magical Thinking Won’t Stop Climate Change. World leaders have started to generate some real optimism with their efforts to address global climate change. What’s troubling, though, is how far we remain from getting carbon emissions under control — and how much wishful thinking is still required to believe we can do so. The Paris agreement on climate change has garnered the national signatories needed to go into force on Nov. 4. Some economists see it as a promising framework for cooperation among many different countries, especially if those not pulling their weight suffer penalties such as trade sanctions. There’s even talk of aiming for the more ambitious goal of keeping global temperatures within 1.5 degrees Celsius or less of their pre-industrial level, as opposed to the currently agreed 2 degrees. Meanwhile, another major international deal has been reached to phase out greenhouse gases used in refrigeration systems, and solar energy technology continues its rapid advance. For all the progress, though, the gap between what needs to happen and what is happening remains large. Worse, it’s growing. Consider, for example, how far the planet remains from any of the carbon emission trajectories in which — according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — global warming would remain below 2 degrees. Even in the most lenient scenarios, we would have to be cutting net emissions already. Yet under the pledges countries have made in the Paris framework, emissions will keep increasing sharply through at least 2030, as this chart from a recent commentary in the journal Science illustrates….. The gap is probably even bigger than the chart suggests. As climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters argue, an element of magical thinking has crept into the IPCC projections. Specifically, they rely heavily on the assumption that new technologies will allow humans to start sucking carbon out of the atmosphere on a grand scale, resulting in large net negative emissions sometime in the second half of this century. This might happen, but we don’t know how to do it yet. The assumptions about negative emissions amount to a bizarre step in what ought to be a cautious and conservative analysis. The IPCC scenarios essentially ignore the vast uncertainty surrounding a technology that does not yet exist, and about our ability to ramp it up to the required scale. To eliminate that much atmospheric carbon, as geophysicist Andrew Skuce estimates, we would need an industry roughly three times as big as the entire current fossil fuel industry — and we would need to create it fast, building something like one new large plant to capture and store carbon every day for the next 70 years. Does that sound likely? Read More here
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24 October 2016, NASA, Studies offer new glimpse of melting under Antarctic glaciers. Two new studies by researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine (UCI), detect the fastest ongoing rates of glacier retreat ever observed in West Antarctica and offer an unprecedented direct view of intense ice melting from the floating undersides of glaciers. The results highlight how the interaction between ocean conditions and the bedrock beneath a glacier can influence the glacier’s evolution, with implications for understanding future ice loss from Antarctica and global sea level rise. The two studies examined three neighboring glaciers in West Antarctica that are melting and retreating at different rates. Smith, Pope and Kohler glaciers flow into the Dotson and Crosson ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica, the part of the continent with the largest loss of ice mass. A study led by Bernd Scheuchl of UCI, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on Aug. 28, used radar measurements from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellite and data from the earlier ERS-1 and ERS-2 satellites to look at changes in the glaciers’ grounding lines — the boundary where a glacier loses contact with bedrock and begins to float on the ocean. The grounding line is important because nearly all glacier melting takes place on the underside of the glacier’s floating portion, called the ice shelf. If a glacier loses mass from enhanced melting, it may start floating farther inland from its former grounding line, just as a boat stuck on a sandbar may be able to float again if a heavy cargo is removed. This is called grounding line retreat. Read More here
17 October 2016, Renew Economy, Historic climate deal reached on potent refrigerant gases. After almost a decade of efforts to achieve a climate benefit of up to 0.5°C reduction in global temperature by the end of the century, 197 nations have finally reached agreement on the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol. At the conclusion of unprecedented overnight negotiations extending past 7am last Saturday in the Rwandan capital, a face-saving compromise was finally achieved. Negotiations at the Montreal Protocol on an amendment to include the hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs, potent synthetic greenhouse gases used primarily as refrigerants, began in earnest in 2009. But the first concerted efforts to draw international attention to the problem of projected rapid growth in HFC emissions began at the UNFCCC COP13 in Bali in 2007, where the London and Washington based Environmental Investigation Agency worked for two weeks with several large boxes of briefing notes to teach observers and negotiators alike to speak about the “F for Forgotten” F-gases.Highly regarded scientific papers by the Dutch climate scientist Guus Velders (et. al.) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in 2007 and 2009 were crucial in gaining the attention of the highest levels of the Obama administration, and so the long road to the historic agreement in Kigali last week began. As Obama’s Presidential statement on the agreement concludes, “diplomacy is never easy”. In spite of its flaws and shortcomings, the compromise brokered to deliver the climate legacy sought by the US is a significant achievement. Jubilation that might have been expected by the achievement of the “largest temperature reduction ever achieved by a single agreement” (according to one seasoned observer) has been tempered by delays in implementation of restrictions on use of HFCs granted to a block of recalcitrant developing countries including India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and Arab Gulf states. Read more here
22 October 2016, The Economist, Let the haggling begin – With the announcement of a national carbon price, Justin Trudeau opens a new phase of his government. “THIS is betrayal,” thundered Saskatchewan’s long-serving premier, Brad Wall. His grievance: the decision this month by Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to set a minimum price for carbon emissions that all provinces would have to adhere to. Since taking office nearly a year ago, Mr Trudeau and his ministers have spent much of their time consulting the provinces (and ordinary Canadians) on such issues as judicial reform and defence. His carbon-price announcement marks a transition from talking to acting, and a new contentious phase in relations between the federal government and the ten provinces. Canada’s grand political bazaar, in which the prime minister and the premiers strike the bargains that determine how the country will be governed, is again open for business. Despite Mr Wall’s profession of shock, the carbon-price policy is no surprise. Mr Trudeau has made it plain that, unlike his Conservative predecessor, Stephen Harper, he takes the threat of climate change seriously. One of his first acts in office was to agree last December to sign the Paris climate accord, under which Canada is to reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases by 30% below the levels of 2005 (see chart). The deadline is 2030. Although Canada emits just 2% of the world’s greenhouse gases, it is one of the world’s biggest emitters per person. Without carbon pricing, it will not keep its climate promises. Read More here