22/07/2019 –PARIS (Reuters) – French utility EDF <EDF.PA> could prolong planned outages at its two Golfech nuclear reactors because of a heatwave expected across France this week, the power utility said on Monday.
EDF plans to halt production at the 1,300 megawatt (MW) Golfech 2 reactor from Tuesday until July 29 and will stop power generation at Golfech 1 on Wednesday until same day next week.
The utility had said on Friday that it could halt electricity generation at the 2,600 megawatt (MW) Golfech plant in southern France because of high temperatures forecast on the Garonne river, water from which is used to cool the reactors.
EDF said on Monday that the current forecast for the end of the outages was based on available temperature forecasts and that the outages at both reactors could be prolonged.
The company’s use of water from rivers to cool its reactors is regulated by law to protect plant and animal life. It is forced to cut output when water temperatures rise or when river levels and the flow rate are low.
Another spell of sizzling temperatures is expected in France and much of western Europe this week, the second heatwave this summer. A record temperature of 46 degrees Celsius (114.8 Fahrenheit) was set in southern France last month.
Separately, EDF delayed the restart of its 1,500 MW Chooz 2 nuclear reactor by a couple days to Aug. 1, saying that the planned maintenance outage could be extended because of the amount of work required for its second 10-year overhaul.
(Reporting by Bate Felix; Editing by David Goodman)
Greta Thunberg awarded first Normandy Freedom Prize
Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg wins France’s first Freedom Prize, SBS News, A 16-year-old Swedish climate champion has received the first Freedom Prize in France, and has urged people to recognise the link between climate change and “mass migration, famine and war.”
Swedish teen climate change activist Greta Thunberg, whose Friday school strikes protesting government inaction over climate change helped spark a worldwide movement, has received the first Freedom Prize in France.
Flanked by two WWII veterans who sponsor the prize, the 16-year-old accepted the award at a ceremony in the northwestern city of Caen, Normandy, on Sunday.
“This prize is not only for me,” Greta said. “This is for the whole Fridays for Future movement because this we have achieved together.”
She said she would donate the AU$28,000 prize money to four organisations working for climate justice and helping areas already affected by climate change.
The prize was awarded before an audience of several hundred people and in the presence of several D-Day veterans, including France’s Leon Gautier and US native American Charles Norman Shay.
Greta said she had spent an unforgettable day with Mr Shay on Omaha Beach, one of the sites of the 1944 Normandy landings that launched the Allied offensive that helped end World War II.
Paying tribute to their sacrifice, she said: “the least we can do to honour them is to stop destroying that same world that Charles, Leon and their friends and colleagues fought so hard to save for us.”
Mr Shay said that young people should be prepared to “defend what they believe in.”………
She said the “link between climate and ecological emergency and mass migration, famine and war was still not clear to many people” and urged change.
23 July 2019byPeter Boyer Australia’s big dry is now its worst drought on record. Which is pretty much the way it is everywhere. Following a lead from our state and federal governments, today I’m going to avoid the delicate matter of future climate. Instead I’ll focus on what’s happening around us now.
Weather records tell us that June in Australia was 0.26C warmer than average and 31 per cent drier. The first half of 2019 produced the continent’s second warmest and seventh driest conditions in 120 years of records.
In those six months the Murray-Darling Basin had about half its normal rainfall. Basin residents might have coped with this in normal times, but these are not normal times. Dry, warm, high-evaporation weather since January 2017 has left them with conditions they’ve not seen before.
Now it’s official. Rainfall records reveal that today’s Murray-Darling experience is Australia’s worst drought on record – more severe than the Federation, the World War II, the Millennium or any other drought in our recorded history.
Bureau of Meteorology climatologist David Jones told a BOM seminar last week that proxy evidence indicates Australia hasn’t been as dry as this for two or three million years, long before humans existed. This puts the current state of our weather in a completely new place.
Numerous NSW and southern Queensland towns now have emergency water restrictions in place. Many towns in upper Darling catchments calculate their water storage as a few months at most. In Tenterfield they’re pumping already-depleted groundwater to try to keep storage levels stable.
Water is now being carted to the small town of Guyra, 150 km away, but for Tenterfield that’s not an option – at least not a sustainable one. Its businesses and 4000 residents would need 1400 B-double truckloads a month, or nearly 50 each day, to sustain even minimal water use.
The list of towns threatened with losing their water supply is growing, including Warwick and Stanthorpe in Queensland. The larger centres of Tamworth, Armidale, Orange and Dubbo are lining up to join them if good rain doesn’t come this year. The Bureau is not hopeful of that happening.
Running out of water is a nightmare for any community. Cape Town almost ran out a year ago and is still in a tenuous position. In much-larger Chennai on India’s southeast coast, where it hasn’t rained for six months, the situation is dire. Monsoon rain is not expected for another month or two.
This city of 10 million people consumes over 500 million litres a day. The provincial government is now using trains to transport water every day from a half-full storage over 300 km away, but if the city were to run out completely that supply would have to increase 50-fold. That won’t happen.
Early monsoonal downpours in India’s Assam along with Nepal and Bangladesh have brought the opposite problem: too much water, displacing millions of people and killing over 100. Not far away in the high Himalayas, the rate of glacier melt has been found to have doubled in less than 20 years to more than eight billion tonnes a year. A scientific assessment published in June is a very bad omen for downstream communities depending on glacial meltwater.
Meanwhile America’s Pacific north-west is preparing for another nasty fire season. A scientific wildfire survey has just informed Californians, after their worst season ever last year, that the state’s summer fires have increased five-fold since the 1970s, with rising temperature the key cause.
Wildfire anxiety has spread northward, to the dark, dank forests of British Columbia. The Canadian province’s wildfire service has warned that abnormally high fire conditions will be experienced in coastal regions including Vancouver Island at least till the end of summer.
This comes after several summers of intense wildfires up and down the Canadian west coast, mostly started by lightning strikes. They have been especially devastating in new-growth forests, where less genetic diversity and lower tree density allows higher moisture loss.
Things are hotting up in the far north. Alert, a Canadian military base on Ellesmere Island in the high Arctic, normally has a daytime maximum around 7C in July, but it’s currently experiencing an unprecedented heatwave that has seen temperatures climb above 20C.
Canada’s chief climatologist, David Phillips, says this heatwave is just the latest indicator of what will be a long, hot Arctic summer. The main trigger, say scientists, was a dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice over the past decade that allowed the ocean to absorb much more heat from the sun.
Smoke has become a regular contributor to Arctic weather, and this year is no exception. These are not forest fires so much as peat fires. The dried-out tundra itself is now burning in Alaska and across wide Siberian expanses, sending choking black smoke into the air.
Among the many things I’ve left out are Darwin’s groundwater crisis, depleted Great Barrier Reef coral, Europe’s unprecedented June heat, vanishing Antarctic sea ice, chronic drought in Africa and the Americas and floods in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Did I mention climate change?
VICTIM of a chronic decline in government support, Hobart’s venerable environment and sustainability body, Sustainable Living Tasmania, has been forced to close its doors after nearly 50 years of quiet achievement. It will continue as a volunteer-run organisation with no office
Adani protest: French journalists arrested while filming anti-coal activities, Guardian
Journalists charged with trespassing after filming Frontline Action on Coal activists include Hugo Clément, Ben Smee@BenSmee, Mon 22 Jul 2019 Four journalists working for the public television network France 2 have been charged with trespassing for filming a protest near the Abbot Point coal terminal, in north Queensland, targeting the operations of the Adani group.
The group of journalists includes Hugo Clément, a reporter well known in France for his documentaries about climate change and environmental issues.
Clément and a crew were arrested while filming anti-coal activists from the group Frontline Action on Coal, which early on Monday morning set up a blockade outside the Abbot Point port. About 20 members of the environmental group gathered outside the port entrance from 7am. Two locked themselves to a concrete barrel on the roadway.
In a statement Frontline Action on Coal said Clément and others were told by police they were “obstructing the railway” while filming the protests.
“Without warning, all four Frenchmen were immediately placed in handcuffs and put into police vehicles,” the statement said.
The group was taken to a police station in the nearby town of Bowen. They were released on bail on Monday afternoon and ordered to face the local magistrates court in September.
Clément said he spent several hours in a cell after being arrested while filming a protest, which included two demonstrators locking their hands inside a concrete barrel.
“We were just filming the action at the blockade of the highway and police came straight to us and arrested us without a word, without saying anything,” Clément said.
“They took us into a cell for seven hours.”
He said he and his crew, who work for French public broadcaster France 2, were charged with trespassing and released on conditional bail, which included that they not go within 20km of the Carmichael site.
“We didn’t understand why they arrested us because we weren’t doing anything wrong, we were just doing our jobs by filming the action,” he said.
Guardian 19th July 2019 Britain’s first climate “citizens assembly” opened its final session
on Saturday morning at which more than 50 Londoners will decide on
carbon-cutting measures they want their district to enact in order to
confront climate change.
Camden’s Citizens Assembly, convened to
interrogate what locals, neighbourhoods and the council can do for the
environment, is deliberating action that would reduce fossil fuel usage in
homes and public buildings and on roads. The wishlist will be considered by
the council as it draws up an environment action plan for 2020.
The outcome
of the assembly will be closely watched by other councils planning to
follow suit this year, and by Westminster which will hold its own national
climate assembly in the autumn. Council officials say there is a clear
intention to implement at least some of the recommendations.
“I hope
there will be some concrete action that we can take forward as a
council,” said Georgia Gould, the council leader. “That’s the idea of
it being an open process – you are letting go of that control. Our
climate is in a crisis and we need to act in radical new ways and this
assembly is part of developing those new ideas.”
Ideas being considered
include community energy projects such as solar panels on schools, GP
surgeries and public buildings, a revolution in heating buildings that
favours air source heat pumps over old-style gas boilers, better insulation
and urban greening.
July on course to be hottest month ever, say climate scientists
If global trends continue for another fortnight, it will beat previous two-year-old record, Guardian, Jonathan Watts @jonathanwatts17 Jul 2019 Record temperatures across much of the world over the past two weeks could make July the hottest month ever measured on Earth, according to climate scientists.
The past fortnight has seen freak heat in the Canadian Arctic, crippling droughts in Chennai and Harare and forest fires that forced thousands of holidaymakers to abandon campsites in southern France and prompted the air force in Indonesia to fly cloud-busting missions in the hope of inducing rain.
If the trends of the first half of this month continue, it will beat the previous record from July 2017 by about 0.025C, according to calculations by Karsten Haustein, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford, and others.
The hot weather and lack of rainfall throughout the year have led to very low levels of groundwater, which contributes to the volume and flow of rivers, said Violaine Bault, hydrologist at French Geological Survey BRGM.
When groundwater decreases and there is no rainfall, rivers dry up.
French state-controlled utility EDF said on Tuesday that due to flow forecasts for the Rhone river, electricity generation could be restricted at its Bugey, St-Alban and Tricastin nuclear power plants from Saturday, July 20.
The nuclear plants, with a combined capacity of around 10,800 megawatts, use water from the river as coolant.
EDF’s use of water is regulated by law to protect plant and animal life. It is obliged to reduce output during hot weather when water temperatures rise, or when river levels and the flow rate are low.
The company said two nuclear reactors at the St. Alban plant and one at Bugey could be impacted over the weekend, but production losses are expected to be lower from Monday……… http://saudigazette.com.sa/article/572195
BANNG 12th July 19 Blowers asks what might happen at Bradwell if the East coast floods again as in 1953 During the night of 31 January/1 February, 1953, in the moonlit dark, dead heart
of winter, the Essex Coast was struck by a surging storm, flooding the
creeks, overpowering the sea defences and leaving a trail of disruption,
destruction and death in its wake. I recollect my own astonishment when
walking to church that Sunday morning at the sight of the flooded factories
of the Hythe at Colchester.
I wonder what might happen to the low-lying
lands around the Blackwater if such a storm surge occurs again and if,
heaven forbid, a new nuclear power station had been built at the Bradwell
site. What must be recognised is that, with global warming and rising seas,
destructive storm surges, flooding and coastal erosion are quite likely
events over the lifetime of a new nuclear plant on the vulnerable shores of
Bradwell. In the circumstances it is difficult to conceive how the site can
be considered potentially suitable now, let alone into the next century
when decommissioning and radioactive waste management will become hazardous
operations.
Floods across subcontinent displace millions in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, Millions of people have been displaced across India, Nepal and Bangladesh after monsoon rains triggered flash floods and landslides over the past week. ABC News, 15 July 19
Key points:
Monsoon rains have triggered widespread flooding and landslides across three countries
Over two million people have been displaced as a result of the floods
Nepal has recorded the most fatalities, with 55 people confirmed dead
India’s north-eastern state of Assam has been hit hard by the floods brought by the monsoon, with at least 1.5 million people displaced and 10 dead.
In the Chittagong division of Bangladesh, there have been 10 deaths and about 500,000 displaced as 200 villages have been flooded.
The disaster’s death toll has been highest in Nepal, which recorded 55 fatalities on Sunday, with 30 missing and 33 injured, the Government said.
Ten thousand people have been displaced from their homes as incessant monsoon rains pounded many areas in the country since Thursday, submerging large swathes of land, inundating homes and destroying bridges and roads across the country.
Feeling Anxious About Climate Change? Therapists Say You’re Not Alone
There’s no official clinical diagnosis, but the psychiatric and psychological communities have names for the phenomenon of worrying about the Earth’s fate: “climate distress,” “climate grief,” “climate anxiety” or “eco-anxiety”, People, By Victoria Knight , July 15, 2019
Therapist Andrew Bryant says the landmark United Nations climate reportlast October brought a new mental health concern to his patients.
“I remember being in sessions with folks the next day. They had never mentioned climate change before, and they were like, ‘I keep hearing about this report,’” Bryant said. “Some of them expressed anxious feelings, and we kept talking about it over our next sessions.”
The study, conducted by the world’s leading climate scientists, said that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, by 2040 the Earth will warm by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius). Predictions say that increase in temperature will cause extreme weather events, rising sea levels, species extinction and reduced capacity to produce food.
Bryant works at North Seattle Therapy & Counseling in Washington state. Recently, he said, he has been seeing patients with anxiety or depression related to climate change and the Earth’s future.
Often these patients want to do something to reduce global warming but are overwhelmed and depressed by the scope of the problem and difficulty in finding solutions. And they’re anxious about how the Earth will change over the rest of their or their children’s lifetimes.
Although it is not an official clinical diagnosis, the psychiatric and psychological communities have names for the phenomenon: “climate distress,” “climate grief,” “climate anxiety” or “eco-anxiety.”
The concept also is gradually making its way into the public consciousness.
In a June 23 episode of the HBO series Big Little Lies, one of the main character’s young daughters has a panic attack after hearing about climate change in school. And other recently released TV shows and movies have addressed the idea.
An April survey by Yale and George Mason universities found that 62% of Americans were at least “somewhat worried” about climate change. Of those, 23% were “very worried.”
Both younger and older generations express worry, although younger Americans generally seem more concerned: A 2019 Gallup poll reported that 54% of those ages 18 to 34, 38% of those 35 to 54 and 44% of those 55 or older worry a “great deal” about global warming.
There is no epidemiological data yet to show how common distress or anxiety related to climate change is. But, people say these feelings are real and affect their life decisions.
The ‘Historical Jigsaw of Climate Deception’: Private Notes Show How Big Oil Spread Climate Science Denial DeSmogBlog, By Mat Hope • Thursday, July 11, 2019 We’ve all heard the dodgy arguments: ‘the science is uncertain’, ‘climate change is natural, not down to humans’, ‘science has been hijacked by politics’… Now a new cache of documents sheds light on the origins of the disinformation.
In another verse of a now familiar refrain, a fossil fuel industry group in the 1990s publicly promoted arguments to undermine confidence in climate science while internally acknowledging their products were driving up temperatures.
A cache of meeting minutes, briefings, and emails uncovered by the Climate Investigations Center shows how industry group the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) used its financial clout and political connections to cast doubt on mainstream climate science until its disbandment in 2002. The GCC would for decades cast doubt on the veracity of climate science and strategically spread the message that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was a politicised body, to discourage regulatory reform that would hit coalition members’ profits.
The documents show that the group, which counted fossil fuel giants Exxon, Shell, and Peabody among its members, knowingly pushed misinformation on climate change even as the GCC internally acknowledged humans’ impact on the climate “cannot be denied”. Some of those same companies have been the recent targets of lawsuits seeking damages for climate change impacts.
“These documents are another stain on the fossil fuel industry’s track-record as a disingenuous rogue agent in climate science and politics,” Geoffrey Supran, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University researching climate science denial, told DeSmog. “They further illustrate the sophisticated combination of inside- and outside-lobbying used by the fossil fuel industry to protect their status quo business operations.”
Peddling Denial
Within the GCC, the Science and Technology Assessment Committee (STAC) took responsibility for assessing contemporary climate science and formulating strategic arguments to undermine it. The STAC was chaired by Mobil Oil’s Lenny Bernstein. Mobil, Exxon, and Texaco (now part of Chevron) all contributed five staffers to the committee.
An internal 1994 document outlining “issues and options” for the GCC to consider regarding “potential global climate change” shows the group’s outright climate science denial.
The document concludes that “the claim that serious impacts from climate change have occurred or will occur in the future has not been proven” and “consequently, there is no basis for the design of effective policy action that would eliminate the potential for climate change.”
The GCC’s disinformation strategy extended beyond casting aspersions on the science to the process of gathering evidence for the major IPCC reports, the documents show.
Porter Womeldorff, an Illinois Power Company employee and co-chair of the STAC, suggested the group focus on the politicisation of the IPCC process.
And that’s exactly what the GCC did. In an internal document from 1996, the GCC boasted that its criticism of the IPCC’s processes had been picked up more widely by the mainstream media:
“Publications which have joined in questioning the IPCC approach to conforming technical reports to summaries include the NYTimes, Wall St. Journal, Energy Daily, and Nature.”
This followed a 1995 report that noted with glee a Nature editorial taking aim at the IPCC for a press-release that the erstwhile journal considered to be needlessly attention seeking.
Harvard’s Supran, who recently testified to the European Parliament about Exxon’s history of climate science denial, told DeSmog that the documents “help fill in pieces of the historical jigsaw of climate deception by the fossil fuel industry”.
Climate change is worsening wildfires, new study highlights
Research shows that warming temperatures are likely fueling more deadly and devastating fires. Think Progress
E.A. CRUNDEN JUL 15, 2019, New research this week provides fresh evidence about the connection between climate change and wildfires, specifically in California, where experts say global warming is a key factor in the state’s deadly and increasingly devastating fire seasons.The findings coincide with an already-vicious wildfire season in parts of North America, including on the West Coast and in parts of Canada. One state garnering particular attention is Alaska, where a major heat wave has been linked to many of the fires that have hit the state this year.
A new study in the American Geophysical Union’s Earth Future journal closely inspects the factors that can lead to wildfires, ultimately concluding that a “warming climate” is a decisive driver in many cases. That trend is particularly true in the North Coast and Sierra Nevada regions in California — the main area the study focuses on — where brutal wildfires last year completely destroyed entire towns, in addition to killing dozens of people and costing over $3 billion in damages.
The study looks closely at rising temperatures in California, which has experienced an uptick of 1.80 degrees Celsius (3.25 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1896, most of that since the 1970s. Wildfires are a naturally occurring phenomenon and common to that wooded area, especially during warm weather when moisture evaporates from vegetation and dries out soil. But with temperatures spiking at record rates, the study notes, the already-active fire season is becoming more and more severe. ……. HTTPS://THINKPROGRESS.ORG/CLIMATE-CHANGE-CALIFORNIA-WILDFIRES-ALASKA-TEMPERATURES-NEW-RESEARCH-2CC12958A05A/
Climate change: Why aren’t we changing our lives to combat it? The National, Scotland, By Mairi McFadyen, – WHETHER we want to admit it or not, climate breakdown is already upon us: there are record-breaking heat waves, flash floods, wildfires. Climate change does not cause all of these things to happen, it amplifies them. This is not happening in some far-off place, it is the weather where you are.
If we read the science and we acknowledge climate breakdown to be true, what is our response? What does it really mean to face up to our climate reality?…….
The reality is that “normal life” – a privilege we in the West have enjoyed for the past 70 years or so – cannot continue……..
CLIMATE ACTION
IN the course of my adult lifetime, we could have stopped this. More than half of the carbon emitted through burning fossil fuels has happened in the past………
OVER the past year I have been working with a collective of activists called Enough!, a Scottish response to our global social, economic and ecological crises. We see that our current economic system and climate crisis are fundamentally linked. We see that inequality, oppression, injustice, power and ecological breakdown are all connected by the same story: that the economy must keep growing – no what matter what the cost.
The deep logic of capitalism is to grow more capital, achieved through the processes of exploitation, accumulation and extraction:
“We’re already taking far more than can be replaced and we can see the consequences all around us: climate change, deforestation, soil depletion, perpetual war, mass extinction of species. It has got so bad that we are threatening the very basis of all of life itself … We have a choice to make: prioritise growth, or prioritise life. We can’t do both.”
(TheRules.org)
Any climate action must therefore challenge and prefigure alternatives to economic growth. If we don’t, our economy will be our endgame.
Mainstream approaches to climate solutions, however, have been based on maintaining current economic systems.
Policymakers have responded by advocating “sustainable growth” or “green growth” – the idea that we can somehow keep growing our economy while simultaneously reducing our impact by “decoupling” GDP from the use of natural resources.
A new report published this month by Make EuropeSustainable for All (MESA) concludes that there is no empirical basis for this approach. It is impossible.
If we are serious about the climate, our only option now is to degrow. We need to explore new economic models that undercut the drivers of growth and find new ways of measuring progress and wellbeing. We need to discuss caps on resource use, tradable energy quotas and targeted downscaling of specific industries.
The kind of transformation that is called for is much more radical than a large-scale decarbonisation and conversion to renewable energy, as many imagine. It’s about radically relocalising, drastically reducing the amount of transportation of goods and people around the world, changing our approach to agriculture and much, much more……….. https://www.thenational.scot/news/17769134.climate-change-aren-39-t-changing-lives-combat/
Somerset County Gazette 14th July 2019 Jo Smolden: AT a time when climate change discussions are in everyone’s minds, and individuals are looking at what energy they are
using and the waste they are producing, the French company EDF is moving
thousands of HGVs full of aggregate across the county and making the
biggest pile of concrete this country has ever seen at Hinkley next to the
Severn Estuary.
Taking into account the carbon footprint of such large
infrastructure projects, remember this starts with uranium mining where
around 1% is usable, the rest is immediately radioactive waste for
indigenous people to deal with. The end of the nuclear process is high
level, dangerous, radioactive waste having to be looked after for hundreds
of thousands of years.
Should we not be questioning how something with such
a huge carbon footprint is being dumped on the next generations to somehow
deal with?
The biggest concern of all this having been planned using last
century technology so long ago, is the impact of global warming and sea
level rise predictions of today. Is the base of the structure high enough
to keep the nuclear reactor and waste stores safe for the next 160-plus
years? There is no flexibility with nuclear, do we want such a hazardous
fixed structure on our coastline? So many questions and EDF can’t
possibly reassure us with any of this as they have committed themselves, to
this white elephant.
