31 July 2015, Renew Economy, Investors have lost their shirts on Peabody; now taxpayers are in the line of fire: The U.S. coal sector is in financial distress, a fact that’s been apparent for some time now and is made more evident with this week’s second-quarter earnings report from Peabody Energy. Peabody continues to tank for the main reasons many other major coal producers continue to tank: It made too many top-of-the-cycle, multibillion-dollar debt-funded acquisitions and its executives have continued to pretend that they can’t see the oversupply in a seaborne coal market that is in structural decline. Meanwhile, Alpha Natural Resources has been delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, Arch Coal is fighting to stay in play, and Walter Energy filed for bankruptcy this month. Some key detail from the latest numbers on Peabody, the biggest non-government-owned coal producer in the world: Read More here
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30 July 2015, New Scientist, Earth now halfway to UN global warming limit – Earth now halfway to UN global warming limit: IT’S the outcome the world wants to avoid, but we are already halfway there. All but one of the main trackers of global surface temperature are now passing more than 1 °C of warming relative to the second half of the 19th century, according to an exclusive analysis done for New Scientist. We could also be seeing the end of the much-discussed slowdown in surface warming since 1998, meaning this is just the start of a period of rapid warming. “There’s a good chance the hiatus is over,” says Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. “The slowdown in warming since 1998 was partly due to oceans taking up more heat. That could be over”. Last year was the hottest since records began, but only just. With an El Niño now under way – meaning warm surface waters in the Pacific are releasing heat into the atmosphere – and predicted to intensify, it looks as if the global average surface temperature could jump by around 0.1 °C in just one year. “2015 is shaping up to smash the old record,” says Trenberth. The UN negotiations on climate change aim to limit warming to 2 °C above pre-industrial temperatures. There is, however, no agreement on how to define pre-industrial temperature, says Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading, UK. Because some global temperature records only begin in 1880, the period 1880 to 1899 is the easiest “pre-industrial” baseline for measuring warming. It is somewhat misleading, though, because the 1880s were particularly cold after the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano. The period 1850 to 1899 is a better baseline, says Hawkins. What’s more, there are several long-term records of global annual average surface temperatures. All differ slightly because they use slightly different data sets and have their own ways of adjusting for relocations of weather stations and changes in instrumentation over time. Read More here
30 July 2015, Science Daily, Drought’s lasting impact on forests. Forests across the planet take years to rebound from drought, storing far less carbon dioxide than widely assumed in climate models. In the virtual worlds of climate modeling, forests and other vegetation are assumed to bounce back quickly from extreme drought. But that assumption is far off the mark, according to a new study of drought impacts at forest sites worldwide. Living trees took an average of two to four years to recover and resume normal growth rates after droughts ended, researchers report today in the journal Science. “This really matters because in the future droughts are expected to increase in frequency and severity due to climate change,” says lead author William R.L. Anderegg, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Utah. “Some forests could be in a race to recover before the next drought strikes.” Forest trees play a big role in buffering the impact of human-induced climate change by removing massive amounts of carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere and incorporating the carbon into woody tissues. The finding that drought stress sets back tree growth for years suggests that Earth’s forests are capable of storing less carbon than climate models have calculated. Read More here
30 July 2015, The Conversation, Fact Check: Would Labor’s renewable energy plan cost consumers $60 billion? (It) will mean a massive bill, perhaps A$60 billion or more, that will have to be carried by the consumers of Australia. – Prime Minister Tony Abbott, speaking to reporters about Labor’s plan to source half the nation’s power from renewable energy sources by 2030, July 27, 2015. Abbott’s quote, a response to the new Labor policy to set a goal of 50% renewable energy by 2030, appears to be drawing on reported comments by Paul Hyslop, chief executive of ACIL Allen – the company used by the government’s Warburton review into the existing Renewable Energy Target (RET). The prime minister’s office sourced the A$60 billion figure to an article in The Australian last week that quoted Hyslop saying of Labor’s 50% renewables pledge that: If this were met by wind power it would require 10,000 to 11,000 additional turbines… with capital costs for the turbines alone of $65 billion. Hyslop’s ACIL Allen colleague, Owen Kelp, told Sky News this week that the A$60 billion was a “fairly simplistic, back-of-the-envelope calculation”. When asked by The Conversation for a copy of any calculations to see how the A$65 billion capital costs figure was reached, Hyslop said the internal analysis was not publicly available, but explained that: To get to the 50%, you need about another 80,000 gigawatt-hours… To build that with renewables, the current cheapest technology would be wind. We estimate between 10,000 and 11,000 additional wind turbines with a bottom end estimate of around $65 billion in capital costs… Would it have an impact on consumers? It really depends on the trade-off on the cost of funding the subsidy versus the downward pressure on electricity prices. We don’t know exactly what that would look like. That would be a significant piece of modelling. Read More here