19 January 2018, World Resource Institute. Global Environmental Risks Are Keeping Davos Leaders Awake at Night. As movers and shakers — reportedly including President Trump – fire up their private jets to travel to Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, the Forum issued its annual Global Risks Report. For more than a decade, the report has been surveying the WEF’s network of business, government and civil society leaders, asking them to rank global risks based on both their impact and likelihood. In short, the report asks what keeps the global elite awake at night. The answer? Mounting environmental threats. 2 Takeaways from the Global Risks Report First, a majority (five of eight) of the risks respondents said were both most impactful and most likely to happen were environmental risks. These were extreme weather events, failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation, man-made environmental disasters, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, and natural disasters. A sixth, water crises, is labeled by the WEF as a societal risk, but it can also be considered an environmental risk. In other words, even while geopolitical and cyber risks are increasing and domestic politics in many countries are in turmoil, the leading decision-makers in business and government remain most concerned about the cluster of risks connected to the environment—many of them related to climate change. Read More here
Category Archives: PLEA Network
15 January 2018, Climate News Network, District heating warms cities without fossil fuels. Heating homes and offices without adding to the dangers of climate change is a major challenge for many cities, but re-imagined district heating is now offering an answer. A district heating scheme is a network of insulated pipes used to deliver heat, in the form of hot water or steam, from where it is generated to wherever it is to be used. As a way of providing warmth for thousands of homes, typically in multi-storey apartment buildings, district heating has a long history in eastern Europe and Russia. But the hot water it distributes typically comes from power stations burning coal or gas, which means more greenhouse gas emissions. Tapping into other forms of producing hot water, from renewable energy, bio-gas or capturing waste heat from industrial production, supermarkets or IT systems, provides alternative sources of large scale heating without adding to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Sweden has pioneered the switch from fossil fuels to other ways of heating water. The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency says the country has gone from almost exclusively relying on fossil fuels to being 90% powered by renewable and recycled heat in 2017. Read More here
11 January 2018, ABC News – Science: Forget Paris: Australia needs to stop pretending we’re tackling climate change. As the Bureau of Meteorology confirms another record-breaking year for temperatures in Australia, we should expect a sense of urgency to be creeping into Australia’s climate policy. Instead, we’re seeing the opposite. While 2015-17 were all within the hottest six years on record, our carbon emissions also continued to increase during the same period, including an all-time peak in 2017, when unreliable land-use data was excluded from the analysis. This is despite signing up to the Paris Agreement in 2015, which outlined a plan to reduce our carbon emissions by 26-28 per cent by 2030. Government data pushed out under the cloak of Christmas indicates that we will be about 140 million tonnes — or about 30 per cent — above that target based on current growth Government optimism at odds with UN: Despite last financial year’s continued emissions growth, Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg remains upbeat about Australia’s commitment to the Paris Agreement. “If you look on a yearly basis that is true [that emissions went up]. But if you look on the last quarter, they went down. If you look at the trend, it is improving. And when you talk about the 2030 target, which is our Paris commitment, the numbers that were most recently shown, indicate that they were 30 per cent better than when Labor were last in office,” the Minister told RN Breakfast. But his optimism is at odds with a number of experts, and is contrary to what was reported in the United Nations Emissions Gap Report (see below), 2017. “Government projections indicate that emissions are expected to reach 592 [million tonnes] in 2030, in contrast to the targeted range of 429-440 [million tonnes],” the report states.. Read More here
4 January 2018: The first complete temperature datasets for 2017 show that last year was the third in a row of exceptionally warm years, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) implemented by the European Weather Centre (ECMWF) can announce. One data set, produced by ECMWF, shows that the global average surface air temperature exceeded 14.7°C, making 2017:
- about 0.1°C cooler than the warmest year on record, 2016, and warmer than the previous second warmest year, 2015
- the warmest year on record not influenced by warming El Niño conditions in the tropical Pacific
- around 0.5°C warmer than the 1981–2010 climatological reference period
- an estimated 1.2°C warmer than the pre-industrial value for the 18th century.
Comparable results have been obtained by C3S from a reanalysis dataset produced by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA). The method used to produce the datasets is to combine millions of meteorological and marine observations, including from satellites, with models to produce a complete reanalysis of the atmosphere. The combination of observations with models makes it possible to estimate temperatures at any time and in any place across the globe, even in data-sparse areas such as the polar regions. The results support the provisional announcement by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) two months ago that 2017 was set to be among the three warmest years on record. Other datasets used in the WMO announcement, which are derived from monthly climatological data for a smaller number of long-term observing sites, are also expected to concur when they are released shortly. All datasets will contribute to the consolidated statement to be issued by WMO on 2017 temperatures. Read More here