Erica Cirino is a science photojournalist, covers stories about wildlife and the environment, most often related to biology, conservation and policy. She is based in New York and Copenhagen.
It is absurd to question whether we can afford to keep our planet liveable
Guardian Fiona Harvey 7 June 19, The chancellor has warned against cutting UK emissions to net zero. But failing to act will have dire consequences.
The chancellor, Philip Hammond, has written to the prime ministerto warn against adopting the strict targets on greenhouse gas emissions recommended by the government’s advisers.
His intervention, first reported by the Financial Times (£), raises the important question of whether or not it makes economic sense to save the planet.
If the question sounds absurd, that’s because it is. If we fail to move to a low-carbon economy, the consequences will be dire. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body of the world’s leading climate scientists convened by the UN, we must drastically reduce our emissions in the next decade to avoid a catastrophic situation in which droughts, floods, heatwaves and extreme weather across the globe devastate lives, destroy agriculture, lay waste to wildlife and force millions to flee.
Set against that, the costs – of £50bn a year in investment, according to the Committee on Climate Change(CCC), which set out the case last month for a target of net-zero emissions by 2050, or £70bn a year, according to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy – of maintaining our current lifestyles and orderly existences are trivial. The UK’s economy is worth roughly £2tn a year at present, so Hammond’s estimate of a £1tn cumulative cost by 2050 amounts to less than half of one year’s GDP in three decades.
Doug Parr, the chief scientist for Greenpeace UK, said: “The Treasury is putting their ideology before our wellbeing, and trying to shape the public debate for political ends. If you want to know whether a policy is good, include the benefits as well as the costs. In this case, the benefits include an economy fit for the 21st century, cleaner air, warmer homes, and maximising the chances of civilisation surviving. If reality doesn’t fit with the Treasury models, it’s the models that need to change.”…….
When we ask whether we can afford to tackle climate change, we are really asking – as the IPCC report and decades of climate science show us – whether we want humanity to survive in anything like our current structures. If our economic system stands in the way of doing so, perhaps it is the economics that are at fault. And economics, like politics, are just a human construct. The physics of the earth’s atmosphere are not. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/06/it-is-absurd-question-whether-we-can-afford-keep-our-planet-liveable
Arctic is thawing ever faster: permafrost collapse is further accelerating the release of carbon
Arctic Is Thawing So Fast Scientists Are Losing Their Measuring Tools BY Dahr Jamail, Truthout, June 3, 2019
We’ve never experienced anything like this: We are living with the full knowledge of our collapsing biosphere and watching huge portions of it vanishing before our very eyes. Meanwhile, the industrial growth society (as eco-philosopher, author and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy calls it) continues to grind on, and this veneer of normalcy persists one more day.
Yet simultaneously, a great awakening is occurring. Millions of people around the world are rising to protect what remains, working to mitigate the damage and to adapt to the drastically changing world. They are working to hold space for that which, despite seemingly overwhelming odds, may continue in the wake of this great collapse……….
dear reader, I urge you to find your own work that reconnects — or to find another way to ground yourself, as you read on, and as we each travel through another crises-ridden day into an increasingly bleak future.
That future is perhaps most visible at the poles. Greenland is melting much faster than previously understood, as melting has increased six-fold in recent decades, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We wanted to get a long precise record of mass balance in Greenland that included the transition when the climate of the planet started to drift off natural variability, which occurred in the 1980s,” study co-author Eric Rignot told CNN. “The study places the recent (20 years) evolution in a broader context to illustrate how dramatically the mass loss has been increasing in Greenland in response to climate warming.” Rignot added, “As glaciers will continue to speed up and ice/snow melt from the top, we can foresee a continuous increase in the rate of mass loss, and a contribution to sea level rise that will continue to increase more rapidly every year.”
The study also shows how sea level rise is accelerating, and will continue to do so with each passing year, as the effects compound upon themselves.
On that note, Indonesia recently announced it will be moving its capital city of Jakarta, partly due to the sinking of the land and sea level rise. This is a city of 10 million people.
Permafrost in the Arctic is now thawing so fast that scientists are literally losing their measuring equipment. This is due to the fact that instead of there being just a few centimeters of thawing each year, now several meters of soil can become destabilized in a matter of days.
Adding insult to injury, another study revealed that this permafrost collapse is further accelerating the release of carbon into the atmosphere, possibly even doubling the amount of warming coming from greenhouse gases released from the tundra.
Already in Greenland, the ice sheet’s melt season began about a month early while in Alaska, several rivers saw winter ice break up on their earliest dates on record.
The recent U.N. report showing that one million species are now in danger of going extinct has grave implications for the future of humanity…..
Earth
Disconcertingly, since 2001 forests in Canada have released more carbon than they have sequestered. This is due largely to climate disruption-fueled drought, higher temperatures and wildfires. ………
Meanwhile, the refugee crisis from rising seas and extreme weather events continues apace in Bangladesh. Already one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to sea level rise, it is now estimated that more than 10 million people there are estimated to lose their livelihoods in the next decade. The larger cities are already overwhelmed with the number of people streaming into them from the submerging coastal areas.
Water
Climate disruption-amplified, flood-inducing extreme weather events continue to make their mark around the planet………….
Fire
Just four months into 2019, the U.K. had already had more large wildfires than it had during the entirety of 2018……….
Air
A recent report shows how much warmer cities across the U.S. will be within one generation (by 2050).
“Every season in every city and town in America will shift, subtly or drastically, as average temperatures creep up, along with highs and lows,” reported Vox, which released the report. “Some of those changes — like summers in the Southwest warming by 4°F on average — will mean stretches of days where it’s so hot, it’ll be dangerous to go outside. Heat waves around the country could last up to a month.”
Denial and Reality
The U.S. is now one of the world’s leaders when it comes to climate change denial………. With the ongoing acceleration of the climate crisis, it is clear that even if we believe the best-case scenarios, governments are not reacting according to the gravity of the situation at hand. Each one of us, knowing what we now know, must take full responsibility for preparing ourselves for the adaptation required to live on this increasingly warming, melting world as civilizations and societies continue to disintegrate. https://truthout.org/articles/arctic-is-thawing-so-fast-scientists-are-losing-their-measuring-tools/
A harrowing scenario analysis of how human civilization might collapse due to climate change
New Report Suggests ‘High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End’ in 2050 https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/597kpd/new-report-suggests-high-likelihood-of-human-civilization-coming-to-an-end-in-2050 3 June 19
The climate change analysis was written by a former fossil fuel executive and backed by the former chief of Australia’s military. A harrowing scenario analysis of how human civilization might collapse in coming decades due to climate change has been endorsed by a former Australian defense chief and senior royal navy commander.
The analysis, published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, a think-tank in Melbourne, Australia, describes climate change as “a near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization” and sets out a plausible scenario of where business-as-usual could lead over the next 30 years.
On our current trajectory, the report warns, “planetary and human systems [are] reaching a ‘point of no return’ by mid-century, in which the prospect of a largely uninhabitable Earth leads to the breakdown of nations and the international order.”
The only way to avoid the risks of this scenario is what the report describes as “akin in scale to the World War II emergency mobilization”—but this time focused on rapidly building out a zero-emissions industrial system to set in train the restoration of a safe climate.
The scenario warns that our current trajectory will likely lock in at least 3 degrees Celsius (C) of global heating, which in turn could trigger further amplifying feedbacks unleashing further warming. This would drive the accelerating collapse of key ecosystems “including coral reef systems, the Amazon rainforest and in the Arctic.”
The results would be devastating. Some one billion people would be forced to attempt to relocate from unlivable conditions, and two billion would face scarcity of water supplies. Agriculture would collapse in the sub-tropics, and food production would suffer dramatically worldwide. The internal cohesion of nation-states like the US and China would unravel.
Even for 2°C of warming, more than a billion people may need to be relocated and in high-end scenarios, the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model with a high likelihood of human civilization coming to an end,” the report notes.
The new policy briefing is written by David Spratt, Breakthrough’s research director and Ian Dunlop, a former senior executive of Royal Dutch Shell who previously chaired the Australian Coal Association.
In the briefing’s foreword, retired Admiral Chris Barrie—Chief of the Australian Defence Force from 1998 to 2002 and former Deputy Chief of the Australian Navy—commends the paper for laying “bare the unvarnished truth about the desperate situation humans, and our planet, are in, painting a disturbing picture of the real possibility that human life on Earth may be on the way to extinction, in the most horrible way.”
Barrie now works for the Climate Change Institute at Australian National University, Canberra.
Spratt told Motherboard that a key reason the risks are not understood is that “much knowledge produced for policymakers is too conservative. Because the risks are now existential, a new approach to climate and security risk assessment is required using scenario analysis.”
Last October, Motherboard reported on scientific evidence that the UN’s summary report for government policymakers on climate change—whose findings were widely recognized as “devastating”—were in fact too optimistic.
While the Breakthrough scenario sets out some of the more ‘high end’ risk possibilities, it is often not possible to meaningfully quantify their probabilities. As a result, the authors emphasize that conventional risk approaches tend to downplay worst-case scenarios despite their plausibility.
Spratt and Dunlop’s 2050 scenario illustrates how easy it could be to end up in an accelerating runaway climate scenario which would lead to a largely uninhabitable planet within just a few decades.
“A high-end 2050 scenario finds a world in social breakdown and outright chaos,” said Spratt. “But a short window of opportunity exists for an emergency, global mobilization of resources, in which the logistical and planning experiences of the national security sector could play a valuable role.”
Trump administration to create a “climate review panel” led by climate denialist William Happer
Trump administration’s attack on climate science goes full-Orwell https://thebulletin.org/2019/05/trump-administrations-attack-on-climate-science-goes-full-orwell/?utm_source=Bulletin%20Newsletter&utm_medium=iContact%20email&utm_campaign=FullOrwell_05282019
By John Mecklin, May 28, 2019 The US political divide on climate change couldn’t be starker: Democrats argue over differences on a Green New Deal that would remake the US energy mix and quickly reduce the carbon dioxide emissions that are heating the planet; the Trump administration denies that human-caused climate change exists and tries to ridicule those silly ducks who believe the overwhelming global scientific consensus on the crisis. That divide has, however, taken on a new and ominous dimension with the Trump administration’s decision to attack the methods by which government climate science is produced.
In a ground-breaking piece, the New York Times reports that the federal government will no longer engage in “what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet and presenting a picture of what the earth could look like by the end of the century if the global economy continues to emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels.”
This effort to defang official US climate reporting appears aimed at making sure the government does not reproduce anything like the recent National Climate Assessment, which projected drastic results—”higher sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, crop failures, food losses and severe health consequences”—unless quick action to counteract climate change is taken. If followed through, the administration’s anti-science effort would limit the time frame allowed in government climate projections, so that, in the case of the US Geological Survey, those projections could not extend beyond 2040, even though the most severe effects of climate change are expected to occur in the decades beyond that arbitrary deadline.
In addition to hamstringing climate assessment methodology to make climate change seem a less serious problem than it is, the Trump administration is trying to create a climate review panel that would examine government regulations from, it seems clear, a climate change-denialist vantage. The effort to create the panel is led by 79-year-old physicist William Happer, a deputy assistant on the National Security Council “who had a respected career at Princeton but has become better known in recent years for attacking the science of man-made climate change and for defending the virtues of carbon dioxide—sometimes to an awkward degree,” the Times says, perhaps understating by use of the word “awkward.”
Among other things, Happer has said, “The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.”
I have searched my mind to find a proper description of the administration’s most recent, genuinely Orwellian efforts to distort rational truth-seeking on climate change and cannot come up with anything better than the quote given to the Times by Philip B. Duffy, the president of the Woods Hole Research Center, who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the government’s most recent National Climate Assessment: “What we have here is a pretty blatant attempt to politicize the science—to push the science in a direction that’s consistent with their politics.
“It reminds me of the Soviet Union.”
As USA lawsuit approaches, young climate activists ready for a day of action
Youth climate activists set for nationwide rallies ahead of landmark case, Guardian, Lee van der Vooin Oregon, 2 June 19 Young people to hold day of action on Saturday highlighting lawsuit as youth-driven climate movement grows, Students in Austin, Texas, want you to veg out. Kids in Westport, Connecticut will screen a film. And in rural North Carolina, activists will draw on a toxic spill to commemorate the environmental justice movement.
All of these rallies will be part of an international campaign on Saturday to spotlight environmental issues. Their message: I Am Juliana.
The slogan refers to the landmark court case in Oregon in which 21 youths are suing the United States government over climate change.
Named for Kelsey Juliana, a 23-year-old activist and college student, the case was filed in 2015 and is headed back to court on Tuesday. The campaign to raise its profile – dubbed #IAmJuliana or #AllEyesOnJuliana – is the brainchild of Our Children’s Trust, the organization behind the lawsuit, and Future Coalition, the not-for-profit network forged to empower youth after the Parkland shooting.
What’s unique about the campaign is what it signals: the infrastructure behind the youth climate movement is growing, decentralizing, and gaining momentum, all while activists set sights on the 2020 election. ….. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/31/i-am-juliana-climate-protests-youth-activism
Study in National Academy of Sciences proceedings shows that seas are rising faster than expected
Sea-level rise could be even worse than we’ve been led to expect, WP, By Editorial Board
ONE THING scientists are sure will happen as the world warms is that the seas will rise, putting millions of people at risk of land erosion, flooding and permanent displacement. But ask experts exactly how far oceans will advance, and their answer gets far more qualified. A study published May 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that previous estimates of how bad sea-level rise could get were too conservative — and that coastal communities must contemplate more severe, long-term impacts from humans’ addiction to fossil fuels.
Researchers asked leading experts on the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to provide their best updated estimates for the future of these frozen masses as temperatures spike. Aggregating these, the researchers concluded that the range of outcomes scientists now consider possible has shifted markedly toward more melting and, therefore, higher seas. ……
President Trump and those in his administration ignore scientists’ increasingly dire warnings to the peril of their children, grandchildren and the rest of humanity. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sea-level-rise-could-be-even-worse-than-weve-been-led-to-expect/2019/05/30/7eb5a7f8-7d9f-11e9-8ede-f4abf521ef17_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.89ffbe
To the Trump administration, fossil fuels are “Molecules Of U.S. Freedom”
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In a statement announcing an increase of natural gas exports, energy officials used the surprising new terms. The statement announces the expansion of a facility in Quintana, Texas, that produces liquefied natural gas (LNG) for worldwide export.…… https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/05/30/trump-administration-rebrands-carbon-dioxide-as-molecules-of-u-s-freedom/#2e2073ff3a24 |
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Merkel urges world to do all ‘humanly possible’ on climate change
SBS, 1 June 19 In her commencement address delivered at Harvard University in the United States, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has urged the world to join together to combat climate change.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday urged the world to do “everything humanly possible” to combat climate change and pledged to do her part.
“Climate change poses a threat to our planet’s natural resources,” Ms Merkel said in her commencement address delivered at Harvard University in the United States.
“It and the resulting crises are caused by humans.”,……. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/merkel-urges-world-to-do-all-humanly-possible-on-climate-chang
Volcanoes not the major cause of global warming
Humans and volcanoes caused nearly all of global heating in past 140 years, Guardian, Dana Nuccitelli 30 May 19
New study confirms natural cycles play little role in global temperature trends and tackles discrepancies in previous models, Emissions from fossil fuels and volcanoes can explain nearly all of the changes in Earth’s surface temperatures over the past 140 years, a new study has found.
The research refutes the popular climate denial myth that recent global warming is merely a result of natural cycles….. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/30/humans-and-volcanoes-caused-nearly-all-of-global-heating-in-past-140-years
A new way to remove CO2 from the air – (perhaps – or too good to be true?)
Scientists Have Found A Way To Remove CO2 From Air, Which May Reverse Global Warming, https://www.indiatimes.com/technology/science-and-future/scientists-have-found-an-easy-way-to-remove-co2-from-air-reduce-global-warming-368327.html A number of research teams around the world are currently working towards scrubbing all the excess carbon dioxide from the air. It’s one of the prime reasons we are seeing record breaking rise in temperature across India this summer.Not only could this do wonders to push back global warming, but we can also put all of that CO2 to good use in other applications. Take this research team from the University of Toronto Engineering for instance. They’ve developed a new electrochemical path to transform carbon dioxide that’s been pulled from the atmosphere into valuable products like jet fuel or plastics.
“Today, it is technically possible to capture CO2 from the air and, through a number of steps, convert it to commercial products,” says Professor Ted Sargent who led the research team. “The challenge is that it takes a lot of energy to do so, which raises the cost and lowers the incentive. Our strategy increases the overall energy efficiency by avoiding some of the more energy-intensive losses.”
The previous direct-air carbon capture method does so by forcing air through an alkaline liquid solution. The CO2 dissolves in the liquid, forming a carbonate. To use that captured CO2 however, it has to be turned back into a gas, which is the convoluted part. It requires adding chemicals to the carbonate to turn it into a solid salt, and then heat that powder to a whopping 900-degrees Celsius to regain CO2 gas. That heating method is what’s responsible for the energy wastage that makes this sub-optimal.
This team’s new method instead uses an electrolyzer, a device that uses electricity to power a chemical reaction. Electrolyzers are sometimes used to produce hydrogen fuel from water, and this team realised they can also use it to release the CO2 from dissolved carbonate, skipping the heating entirely.
The electrolyzer also has a silver-based catalyst that immediately converts the CO2 into a gas mixture known as syngas. Syngas can be easily turned into a wide variety of products, including jet fuel and plastic precursors.
“This is the first known process that can go all the way from carbonate to syngas in a single step,” says Sargent.
According to the team’s reports, their method has an overall energy efficiency of 35 percent, much higher than current methods. They do believe there’s scope to improve that, and it can of course be scaled up to an industrial level given enough time.
When that happens, we might actually be able to set up giant plants, the sole purpose of which is to scrub carbon dioxide from our air, and turn it into products we can use, helping reverse climate change in the process.
Climate change is already gravely threatening American nuclear reactors
Jon Tidon 30 May 19 Hate to say it. It is true though. Expect a nuclear accident in the United States soon.
Trump has deregulated supervision of the 97 old nuclear reactors, in America.
Sixty of the old, beat-up, reactors are in flood zones and hurricane zones. The others are so old and decrepit, that any inclement-unpredictable weather, could cause a nuclear accident.
The soil in much of the Midwestern United States, Southeastern USA, and in the Southern United States is saturated with water from flooding, this year. That is the way it is now, in May 2019.
The soil is saturated from atmospheric rivers of rain, moving in quickly and, dumping their massive loads of water. The atmospheric-river phenomenon has been going on, for more than 10 years now, in the United States.
Atmospheric rivers of rain that come put of nowhere.
Hurricanes have grown progresssively worse and more numerous, in the past 10 years .
A deadly one-two punch of spring floods and later, Tropical storms and hurricanes, is upon us again.
The combination of flooding-saturation and then serial Hurricanes, cause Mega Climate Disasters. It also increases the probability of a Nuclear Accident in these regions, where there are numerous reactors.
We saw it with Hurricane Florence in Carolina, Harvey in Texas, Maria in Florida and Puerto Rico.
Paces like Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas are saturated with water now. The water in the Atlantic and Gulf Of Mexico is hotter and higher, than it has ever been. People could not go to the beach, along much of the Gulf of Mexico on Memorial day because, the surf flooded the beaches. The beaches were flooded, from high winds and storming in the Gulf of Mexico. Similar phenomenon preceded the Horrendous Hurricane seasons, of the past few years. The surface of the Gulf is warmer than ever.
Nuclear power, useless against climate change, is itself threatened by climate change’s weather extremes
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Nuclear power is not the answer in a time of climate change, https://aeon.co/ideas/nuclear-power-is-not-the-answer-in-a-time-of-climate-change Heidi Hutner, Erica Cirino-November 2018, In the Woolsey Fire scorched nearly 100,000 acres of Los Angeles and Ventura counties, destroying forests, fields and more than 1,500 structures, and forcing the evacuation of nearly 300,000 people over 14 days. It burned so viciously that it seared a scar into the land that’s visible from space. Investigators determined that the Woolsey Fire began at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a nuclear research property contaminated by a partial meltdown in 1959 of its failed Sodium Reactor Experiment, as well as rocket tests and regular releases of radiation. The State of California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) reports that its air, ash and soil tests conducted on the property after the fire show no release of radiation beyond baseline for the contaminated site. But the DTSC report lacks sufficient information, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It includes ‘few actual measurements’ of the smoke from the fire, and the data raises alarms. Research on Chernobyl in Ukraine following wildfires in 2015 shows clear release of radiation from the old nuclear power plant, calling into question the quality of DTSC’s tests. What’s more, scientists such as Nikolaos Evangeliou, who studies radiation releases from wildfires at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, point out that the same hot, dry and windy conditions exacerbating the Woolsey Fire (all related to human-caused global warming) are a precursor to future climate-related radioactive releases.
With our climate-impacted world now highly prone to fires, extreme storms and sea-level rise, nuclear energy is touted as a possible replacement for the burning of fossil fuels for energy – the leading cause of climate change. Nuclear power can demonstrably reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Yet scientific evidence and recent catastrophes call into question whether nuclear power could function safely in our warming world. Wild weather, fires, rising sea levels, earthquakes and warming water temperatures all increase the risk of nuclear accidents, while the lack of safe, long-term storage for radioactive waste remains a persistent danger.
 The Santa Susana Field Laboratory property has had a long history of contaminated soil and groundwater. Indeed, a 2006 advisory panel compiled a report suggesting that workers at the lab, as well as residents living nearby, had unusually high exposure to radiation and industrial chemicals that are linked to an increased incidence of some cancers. Discovery of the pollution prompted California’s DTSC in 2010 to order a cleanup of the site by its current owner – Boeing – with assistance from the US Department of Energy and NASA. But the required cleanup has been hampered by Boeing’s legal fight to perform a less rigorous cleaning. Like the Santa Susana Field Lab, Chernobyl remains largely unremediated since its meltdown in 1986. With each passing year, dead plant material accumulates and temperatures rise, making it especially prone to fires in the era of climate change. Radiation releases from contaminated soils and forests can be carried thousands of kilometres away to human population centres, according to Evangeliou. Kate Brown, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (2019), and Tim Mousseau, an evolutionary biologist at the University of South Carolina, also have grave concerns about forest fires. ‘Records show that there have been fires in the Chernobyl zone that raised the radiation levels by seven to 10 times since 1990,’ Brown says. Further north, melting glaciers contain ‘radioactive fallout from global nuclear testing and nuclear accidents at levels 10 times higher than elsewhere’. As ice melts, radioactive runoff flows into the ocean, is absorbed into the atmosphere, and falls as acid rain. ‘With fires and melting ice, we are basically paying back a debt of radioactive debris incurred during the frenzied production of nuclear byproducts during the 20th century,’ Brown concludes. Flooding is another symptom of our warming world that could lead to nuclear disaster. Many nuclear plants are built on coastlines where seawater is easily used as a coolant. Sea-level rise, shoreline erosion, coastal storms and heat waves – all potentially catastrophic phenomena associated with climate change – are expected to get more frequent as the Earth continues to warm, threatening greater damage to coastal nuclear power plants. ‘Mere absence of greenhouse gas emissions is not sufficient to assess nuclear power as a mitigation for climate change,’ conclude Natalie Kopytko and John Perkins in their paper ‘Climate Change, Nuclear Power, and the Adaptation-Mitigation Dilemma’ (2011) in Energy Policy. Proponents of nuclear power say that the reactors’ relative reliability and capacity make this a much clearer choice than other non-fossil-fuel sources of energy, such as wind and solar, which are sometimes brought offline by fluctuations in natural resource availability. Yet no one denies that older nuclear plants, with an aged infrastructure often surpassing expected lifetimes, are extremely inefficient and run a higher risk of disaster. ‘The primary source of nuclear power going forward will be the current nuclear fleet of old plants,’ said Joseph Lassiter, an energy expert and nuclear proponent who is retired from Harvard University. But ‘even where public support exists for [building new] nuclear plants, it remains to be seen if these new-build nuclear plants will make a significant contribution to fossil-emissions reductions given the cost and schedule overruns that have plagued the industry.’ Lassiter and several other energy experts advocate for the new, Generation IV nuclear power plants that are supposedly designed to deliver high levels of nuclear power at the lowest cost and with the lowest safety risks. But other experts say that the benefits even here remain unclear. The biggest critique of the Generation IV nuclear reactors is that they are in the design phase, and we don’t have time to wait for their implementation. Climate abatement action is needed immediately. ‘New nuclear power seemingly represents an opportunity for solving global warming, air pollution, and energy security,’ says Mark Jacobson, director of Stanford University’s Atmosphere and Energy Programme. But it makes no economic or energy sense. ‘Every dollar spent on nuclear results in one-fifth the energy one would gain with wind or solar [at the same cost], and nuclear energy takes five to 17 years longer before it becomes available. As such, it is impossible for nuclear to help with climate goals of reducing 80 per cent of emissions by 2030. Also, while we’re waiting around for nuclear, coal, gas and oil are being burned and polluting the air. In addition, nuclear has energy security risks other technologies don’t have: weapons proliferation, meltdown, waste and uranium-worker lung-cancer risks.’ Around the world, 31 countries have nuclear power plants that are currently online, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. By contrast, four countries have made moves to phase out nuclear power following the 2011 Fukushima disaster, and 15 countries have remained opposed and have no functional power plants. With almost all countries’ carbon dioxide emissions increasing – and China, India and the US leading the pack – the small Scandinavian country of Denmark is an outlier. Its carbon dioxide emissions are decreasing despite it not producing any nuclear power. Denmark does import some nuclear power produced by its neighbours Sweden and Germany, but in February, the country’s most Left-leaning political party, Enhedslisten, published a new climate plan that outlines a path for the country to start relying on its own 100 per cent renewable, non-nuclear energy for power and heat production by 2030. The plan would require investments in renewables such as solar and wind, a smart grid and electric vehicles that double as mobile batteries and can recharge the grid during peak hours. Gregory Jaczko, former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the author of Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator (2019), believes the technology is no longer a viable method for dealing with climate change: ‘It is dangerous, costly and unreliable, and abandoning it will not bring on a climate crisis.’ Edited by Pam Weintraub |
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Young voters supported Europe’s Greens – big winners in European elections
Guardian 28th May 2019 Europe’s Greens, big winners in Sunday’s European elections, will usetheir newfound leverage in a fractured parliament to push an agenda of urgent climate action, social justice and civil liberties, the movement’s leaders say. “This was a great outcome for us – but we now also have a great responsibility, because voters have given us their trust,” Bas Eickhout, a Dutch MEP and the Greens’ co-lead candidate for commission president, told the Guardian.
“Our voters, especially the younger generation, for many of whom we are now their first choice, are deeply
concerned about the climate crisis, and they are pro-European – but they feel the EU is not delivering. They want us to change the course of Europe.”https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/28/greens-eu-election-mandate-leverage-climate-policy
concerned about the climate crisis, and they are pro-European – but they feel the EU is not delivering. They want us to change the course of Europe.”https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/28/greens-eu-election-mandate-leverage-climate-policy
Scotland the first country to set legally binding annual emission reduction targets
Scotsman 29th May 2019 , Scotland is leading way by being first country to set legally binding annual emission reduction targets, writes Jamie Livingstone, head of Oxfam Scotland. Earlier this month, Environment Secretary Roseanna Cunningham reaffirmed in the Scottish Parliament the First Minister’s declaration that we are facing a “climate emergency”.
It’s a phrase that’s suddenly in vogue among political leaders from Edinburgh to Cardiff, London, Dublin and
beyond. It’s not hard to see why. Politicians are feeling the climate heat after schoolchildren went on strike and campaigners brought prominent locations, including in Edinburgh, to a standstill.
A recent poll by Stop Climate Chaos Scotland shows 70 per cent of people in Scotland support further action on climate change. It follows dire warnings by climate scientists that we have until 2030 to avert a climate catastrophe.
Political language is, it seems, catching up with reality. And not before time. When I hear the words “climate emergency”, I picture Jenipher, a young woman from the Mulanje district of southern Malawi. When I met her in 2016, Malawi was suffering from the worst drought the country had experienced in over 30 years, one made worse by climate change. Jenipher’s crops had withered; her family was starving; her life depended on the rain
coming next season.
Wide swathe of USA affected by major tornadoes -to the alarm of climate scientists
Tornadoes Cut Across Unusually Wide Swaths of US, Raising Alarm for Climate Scientistshttps://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/05/27/tornadoes-cut-across-unusually-wide-swaths-us-raising-alarm-climate-scientists “There’s reason to believe major outbreak days are getting worse.” by Julia Conley, staff writer,
As the death toll in Oklahoma rose to six Monday amid an outbreak of nearly 200 tornadoes across the Midwest in recent days—as well as in areas far less accustomed to them—climate scientists said such patterns may carry warnings about the climate crisis and its many implications for extreme weather events.
In Oklahoma, tornadoes touched down in at least two cities, including El Reno and Sapulpa, over the weekend, injuring dozens and leveling a number of homes. The tornado that hit El Reno, a suburb of Oklahoma City, was given an EF3 rating, with wind speeds up to 165 miles per hour. Only about five percent of tornadoes are given an EF3 rating or higher.
Outside the Midwest, at least one twister touched down near Washington, D.C., with reports of tornadoes in Texas and Colorado, and Chicago facing a tornado watch on Monday.
While tornadoes have long been a fixture in the Midwest, meteorologist Eric Holthaus tweeted last week that there is “reason to believe major outbreak days…are getting worse,” while climate scientists are examining links between the storms and the climate crisis.
The so-called “Tornado Alley,” which covers parts of Texas and Kansas as well as Oklahoma, appears to be growing, according to a study published in Nature last year—making tornadoes more frequent in states that rarely saw them previously including Arkansas, Mississippi, and eastern Missouri.
“What all the studies have shown is that this particular part of the U.S. has been having more tornado activity and more tornado outbreaks than it has had in decades before,” Mike Tippett, a mathematician who studies the climate at Columbia University told PBS Newshour earlier this year.
As the Kansas City Star reported on Sunday, scientists believe the warming of the globe—fueled by human activities like fossil fuel extraction—is contributing to higher amounts of water vapor in the atmosphere, causing heavier rainfalls which can spawn tornadoes.
The increase in destructive tornadoes across wider swaths of the country than in previous decades “may be suggestive of climate change effects,” Purdue University researcher Ernest Agee told the Star. And the unusual occurrence of tornadoes in far more densely-populated areas than those that frequently see such weather events has led to concerns that tornadoes will become more deadly and destructive than they’ve been in the past
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