Europe faces droughts, floods and storms as climate change accelerates
Europe and northern hemisphere are warming at faster pace than the global average and ‘multiple climatic hazards’ are expected, says study, Guardian, Arthur Neslen, 25 Jan 17. Europe’s Atlantic-facing countries will suffer heavier rainfalls, greater flood risk, more severe storm damage and an increase in “multiple climatic hazards”, according to the most comprehensive study of Europe’s vulnerability to climate change yet.
Temperatures in mountain ranges such as the Alps and the Pyrenees are predicted to soar to glacier-melting levels, while the Mediterranean faces a “drastic” increase in heat extremes, droughts, crop failure and forest fires.
Europe and the entire northern hemisphere are warming at a quicker pace than elsewhere, to the extent that tropical diseases such as West Nile fever are expected to spread across northern France by mid-century.
Hans-Martin Füssel, one of the lead authors of the European Environment Agency report, said that scientific evidence was pointing increasingly to a speeding up in the pace of climate change.
We have more data confirming that sea-level rise is accelerating,” he said. “It is not a linear trend, largely due to increased disintegration of ice sheets. There is also new evidence that heavy precipitation has increased in Europe. That is what is causing the floods. The [climate] projections are coming true.”
Earlier this month, Nasa, Noaa and the Met Office confirmed that 2016 had broken the record for the hottest year ever previously held by 2015, which had itself broken the record that had been held by 2014.
The new EEA report finds that land temperatures in Europe in the last decade were 1.5C warmer than the pre-industrial age, although near-surface temperatures – measured at a metre above ground level – were only 0.83C-0.89C warmer……..
In the Arctic, one of the most rapidly warming parts of the planet, many habitats for flora and fauna such as sea ice, tundra and permafrost peat lands have already been lost.
Oxygen-depleted ocean “dead zones” caused by agricultural fertilisers – particularly in the Baltic Sea – and ocean acidification fed by an influx of freshwater from melting continental ice will pose further threats to marine ecosystems, and the indigenous peoples who depend on them.
While retreating sea ice will open up the potential for greater resource exploitation, the report’s authors warn that “utilising Arctic oil and natural gas resources would challenge the transition to a low-carbon society, as it is recommended that two-thirds of known global fossil resources remain in the ground if the 2C warming limit of the UNFCCC [UN framework convention on climate change] is to be met.” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jan/25/europe-faces-droughts-floods-storms-climate-change-accelerates
January 27, 2017
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Sea Level Rise Estimate Grows Alarmingly Higher in Latest Federal Report https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24012017/sea-level-rise-global-warming-federal-report-donald-trump
NOAA’s latest report arrives, predicting worst-case scenario of 8 feet of rise by century’s end, just as Donald Trump takes office with pro-fossil fuel policies. New federal estimates say global sea levels could rise faster than previously thought, and the rise may be even worse in many coastal regions of the United States.
A new report, written by scientists with several federal agencies and universities, says that under a worst-case scenario, climate change could raise the oceans an average of more than 8 feet by 2100, about 20 inches more than a previous federal estimate published in 2012. The best case now projected would be an average of about a foot.
The report was delivered just as President Donald Trump took office, immediately working to undo President Barack Obama’s climate policies. On his inauguration day, pages mentioning climate change on whitehouse.gov were removed. Trump has promised policies to increase fossil fuel development in the U.S., and to undo Obama’s major emissions-cutting initiative, the Clean Power Plan.
Sea level rise will likely be worse in some regions of the U.S. because of ocean currents, wind patterns and settling sediments. The authors examined six scenarios with a range of probabilities in an effort to help state and local governments plan for sea level rise. Under all of them, the Northeast should expect higher waters than much of the rest of the globe. The Pacific Northwest and Alaska would likely experience lower-than-average increases under the best-case scenarios.
“The ocean’s not flat,” said William V. Sweet, one of the authors and a scientist at NOAA. “It’s not going to rise like water in a bathtub.”
The six scenarios are based on United Nations models of future greenhouse gas emissions, depending on whether countries rapidly slash pollution or continue burning fossil fuels as usual. The authors determined that the worst-case rise of more than 8 feet has only a 0.1 percent chance of occurring by 2100, even under a business-as-usual emissions scenario, but a rise of more than 1.5 feet is near certain with high emissions.
The increase in the estimates for global sea rise was partly due to new research on the Antarctic ice sheet, which is melting faster and appears to be more fragile than previously estimated, suggesting that some of the more pessimistic scenarios are increasingly likely.
The report also warned that moderate coastal flooding will become 25 times more likely with a 14-inch rise in the seas. That level could come anytime from 2030 to 2080 for most coastal cities, depending on their location and the world’s emissions. It would mean that a flood that now comes once every five years would be expected five times a year.
Sea levels have already risen by more than 8 inches globally since 1880, with 3 inches coming since 1993. Tidal flooding “has increased by an order of magnitude over the past several decades,” the report says, “turning it from a rare event into a recurrent and disruptive problem.”
The authors note that 2 million Americans would likely see their homes permanently flooded if sea levels rise 3 feet. Twice that increase would inundate the homes of 6 million. Only the rosiest scenarios would avoid a 3-foot rise by 2100. The effects of global warming, of course, will continue long beyond that year.
“Even if society sharply reduces emissions in the coming decades,” the authors write, “sea level will most likely continue to rise for centuries.”
January 27, 2017
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Pope spurs Republicans to shift climate views, EurekAlert, 24 Jan 17 CORNELL UNIVERSITY After Pope Francis framed climate change as a moral issue in his second encyclical, conservative Republicans shifted and began to see environmental dilemmas in the same way, according to a new study led by Cornell University communication researchers.
“When Pope Francis issued his encyclical paper in June 2015, he emerged as a strong advocate for climate action,” said Jonathon P. Schuldt, assistant professor of communication. “He is in many ways uniquely positioned as a global moral authority – a religious authority – and his position is very visible.”
Schuldt, along with Adam R. Pearson of Pomona College and Rainer Romero-Canyas and Dylan Larson-Konar, both of the Environmental Defense Fund, sought to understand a mechanism for changing public opinion about climate change. Their research, “Brief Exposure to Pope Francis Heightens Moral Beliefs About Climate Change,” was published online in the journal Climatic Change, Dec. 30.
The pontiff addressed waste, culture and modern day ills in the encyclical. Climate change is a global problem with grave environmental, social, economic and political implications, the pope wrote. Many of the world’s poor live in areas particularly affected by phenomena related to global warming, and their subsistence depends on keeping Earth healthy. They have few resources to help them adapt to climate change, the pope said.
For this research, more than 1,200 U.S. adults were asked for their moral beliefs about climate change. …….https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-01/cu-psr012417.php
January 27, 2017
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Donald Trump will eliminate landmark climate protection plan, says first post on White House website http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-white-house-president-global-warming-climate-change-environment-a7538206.html
The Climate Action Plan was introduced four years ago as a national strategy for tackling climate change Andrew Griffin @_andrew_griffin 21 January 2017 Donald Trump’s first post on the White House website suggests destroying the US’s strategy to tackle climate change.
After President Trump took over the site, he posted six “Issues” to its home page. The first of those is an “America First Energy Plan”.
The first proposal in that document suggests getting rid of “burdensome regulations on our energy industry”. Those include getting rid of “harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the US rule”.
President Trump doesn’t suggest a replacement for any of those regulations, and goes on to suggest that getting rid of them will save money and keep America secure.The Climate Action Plan was landmark legislation introduced by Barack Obama in June 2013. It served as a “national plan for tackling climate change”, according to the government.
The key parts of the plan were divided into three sections. Those outlined plans to cut carbon pollution in the US, actions to get the country ready for the effects of climate change, and plans for how to lead international efforts to address global warming.No part of the Mr Trump’s environmental document makes any mention of climate change or global warming – something that President Trump has in the past said was just a Chinese hoax. The only mention of the environment calls for “responsible stewardship of the environment”, but that refers only to keeping water and air clean. “Lastly, our need for energy must go hand-in-hand with responsible stewardship of the environment,” the document reads. “Protecting clean air and clean water, conserving our natural habitats, and preserving our natural reserves and resources will remain a high priority.”It also says that Donald Trump will focus the Environmental Protection Agency onto “protecting our air and water”, and presumably away from climate policies.
President Trump says that his environmental policies will join up with his economic ones, by encouraging more spending in the US economy. The document says that he will encourage the burning of coal, and the use of shale oil and gas in the US.By doing so, he will be able to use the revenues to pay for the rebuilding of “roads, schools, bridges and public infrastructure” that he promised to his voters. It will also help stimulate the agriculture industry, he claimed. President Trump says that his environmental policies will join up with his economic ones, by encouraging more spending in the US economy. The document says that he will encourage the burning of coal, and the use of shale oil and gas in the US.That will also allow the US to achieve energy independence from the OPEC alliance of oil producing countries. But President Trump says he will continue to work with countries in the Gulf – many of which are in OPEC – “to develop a positive energy relationship as part of our anti-terrorism strategy”.The document also calls for a new focus on coal and a revival of the country’s coal industry. President Trump has claimed that he will do that by backing “clean coal” – but it’s not clear that such a thing would actually be possible and whether such thing as clean coal could actually exist.
January 23, 2017
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The Scramble to Protect Climate Data Under Trump Fearing what might happen to the data that catalogues the details of climate change in an administration with so many climate deniers, researchers rush to save it. Inside Climate News Lisa Song and Zahra Hirji, 22 Jan 17 More than 250 people gathered at the University of Pennsylvania last week for Data Rescue Philly, one of the latest examples of a grassroots effort to save environmental and climate change data that scientists fear could vanish under the Trump administration’s many climate deniers.
Over two days, volunteers from academia, nonprofits and the tech industry were trained and then preserved data from more than 3,000 websites hosted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Bethany Wiggin, director of the Penn Program in the Environmental Humanities (PPEH), said the idea emerged from conversations recalling how government data became less accessible during the George W. Bush administration. Wiggin said a scan of agency websites showed that some data sets were archived in multiple locations, while others were more vulnerable.
Those concerns prompted PPEH and Penn Libraries to launch DataRefuge, which approaches the problem like a libraries project, placing “multiple copies [of data] in multiple places,” Wiggin said.
“The main goal is to make sure climate change research doesn’t slow down.”
A recent move by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to remove references to climate change from its website adds urgency to scientists’ concerns. In December, researchers and software engineers held a “guerrilla archiving event” in Toronto that focused on preserving Environmental Protection Agency data, and the leader of that effort attended Data Rescue Philly to offer advice.
DataRefuge events took place this week in Chicago and Indianapolis. The project is open to anyone who wants to attend.
The Penn project was in collaboration with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), an international group of university researchers and nonprofits that formed after Donald Trump’s victory to coordinate data rescue efforts. The amount of climate-related information stored on federal websites is overwhelming, and includes vital satellite imagery, sea-ice records, pollution inventories and decades of scientific studies. Wiggin said it’s impossible to save everything, and the goal is to prioritize the data most at risk of removal.
InsideClimate News spoke to Wiggin about the motivations, challenges and hopes for the project……… https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19012017/climate-change-data-science-denial-donald-trump?platform=hootsuite
January 23, 2017
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Trump White House Distorts Wages Figure on First Day, Climate Central By John Upton 22 Jan 17 Shortly after Donald Trump was sworn in as president on Friday, the White House said that eliminating power plant climate rules, a clean water rule and other environmental regulations would “greatly help American workers, increasing wages by more than $30 billion over the next 7 years.”
The statement, included on the White House’s website to justify Trump’s drive to eliminate environmental rules affecting the energy sector, was a distortion. And if it was true, it would represent wage gains equivalent to less than $20 per American every year. The figure was based on a paper produced by a Louisiana State University finance professor in 2015 on behalf of a fossil fuel industry nonprofit. The paper, which was not peer reviewed, investigated potential economic impacts if all protected federal lands were opened to unlimited oil, gas and coal mining.
The paper did not, however, analyze the potential impacts of other potential regulatory changes, such as eliminating Obama-era power plant climate rules, as the White House suggested.
“It seems that the White House mischaracterized the study,” said Ken Gillingham, a Yale economist who worked a year for the Obama White House. He also said the study was “problematic from start to finish.”
The paper assumed that lifting restrictions on fossil fuel extraction in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and all other protected American lands would lead to an unfettered boom in production of coal and other fossil fuels. That assumption and others were disputed by Gillingham and other experts.
“The long-term trend in terms of our overall electricity sector is very much away from coal,” said Adele Morris, a researcher at the nonprofit Brookings Institute who reviewed the paper. “So I don’t see why opening up a bunch more land is going to necessarily generate a lot more mining activity.”
The paper examined how the economic benefits from such mining and drilling booms nationwide might spill into other industries. It estimated a $32 billion growth in wages across the American economy every year for the next seven years. The findings were also mischaracterized and cited in more detail by Trump’s campaign in August.
Not only did the new administration and the Trump campaign misrepresent the regulations that were analyzed in the paper, they also understated its findings by claiming the “more than $30 billion” in increased wages would accrue over seven years instead of every year for seven years.
Projecting the true economic impacts of eliminating America’s environmental protections would be exceedingly difficult to calculate……….
estimates by Obama’s EPA and academics have concluded that the overall economy-wide benefits from the rules, called the Clean Power Plan, or CPP, would quickly climb into the tens of billions of dollars a year.
Among other things, those analyses consider savings from reduced future impacts of rising seas, worsening droughts, intensifying storms and other effects of climate change caused by fossil fuel pollution. The past three years have broken global heat records, amplifying disasters.
“To be clear, the air pollution benefits alone justify the CPP,” said Michael Wara, a Stanford Law environment expert who co-authored a Science article in 2014 with Stavins and other academics that examined the economic costs and benefits of the rules.
Louisiana State professor Joseph Mason, the author of the paper that underpinned the White House’s claims on Friday, did not respond to emails or a voice message seeking comment. A spokesman for the Institute for Energy Research, the fossil fuel-backed nonprofit that commissioned the study, also did not respond, nor did Trump’s press team…….. http://www.climatecentral.org/news/trump-fabricates-wages-figure-on-first-day-21098
January 23, 2017
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Global warming never ‘paused’ and could soon accelerate, warns Nasa scientist
Dr Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, describes suggestions that climate change had slowed down or stopped as ‘delusional’ and ‘bunk’, The Independent, Ian Johnston Environment Correspondent 21 January 2017 The idea that global warming “paused” has been comprehensively refuted by the record warm temperatures over the last three years – and the rate of increase could soon start to accelerate, a leading Nasa scientist has warned.
Dr Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said some people had been “confused” by temperatures that were below the average rate of increase, mistaking what was simply a blip as the sign of a long-term trend.
But the last three years have each seen successive, record average global temperatures, according to Nasa’s figures, partly fuelled by the natural El Nino effect, but mostly because of human-induced climate change.
This, Dr Schmidt said, was “almost certainly” just another blip as random factors take temperatures above the average rising trend, which remains virtually the same as it has since the late 1990s.
But he also said the rising amount of energy being put into the atmosphere and oceans as a result of greenhouse gas emissions had led scientists to believe the pace of global warming would get faster over the next decades…….http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/global-warming-never-paused-acclerate-climate-change-nasa-scientist-gavin-schmidt-environment-a7538116.html
January 23, 2017
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Trump supporters don’t like his climate policies, Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists, 20 JANUARY 2017 Dana Nuccitelli Recent surveys jointly
conducted by Yale University and George Mason University found that a majority of Republicans (including a plurality of conservative Republicans) support US participation in international climate agreements like the Paris accords. They support regulating or taxing carbon pollution. And they want the United States to get much more of its energy from renewables, and less from fossil fuels.
Yet they also voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, who pledged to “cancel” the Paris climate agreement (though he has since waffled), and to kill the Clean Power Plan and its carbon pollution regulations. And he seems to strongly prefer coal to wind and solar energy, which he has inaccurately described as “not working on large-scale” and “very, very expensive.”………
Republican support for climate-change mitigation policies is broad but shallow. They would prefer that the government take action to curb carbon pollution, but for most, the issue won’t impact their votes.
However, the fossil fuel industry is a major Republican Party donor. Which means that for many Republican politicians, the incentives are thus quite clear—if they obstruct climate policies, they’re rewarded with campaign donations, and they’re not penalized at the ballot box by conservative voters who only mildly disapprove of their actions.
Donald Trump didn’t receive particularly substantial fossil fuel funding during his presidential campaign, which may help explain his wobbly stance on climate change. He simply doesn’t seem to have put much thought into the subject or consider it a high priority, quite like most of his supporters. But many of his nominees to powerful government positions like Scott Pruitt have benefited from oil industry donations, and Trump even nominated the chief executive officer of the world’s largest oil company to be his Secretary of State.
It’s in those key government roles where the rubber meets the road. If Trump’s nominees are approved, the fossil fuel industry will have powerful allies in his administration, and if they do enough damage to America’s efforts to curb carbon pollution, Trump and the GOP may eventually pay the electoral price…….http://thebulletin.org/trump-supporters-don%E2%80%99t-his-climate-policies10411#.WINK_ptkX2s.twitter
January 23, 2017
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Decoding Trump’s White House Energy Plan , Climate Central, By Bobby Magill , 20 Jan 17 Just as President Donald Trump took the oath of office and the White House scrubbed its website of Obama climate change information, it posted Trump’s “America First Energy Plan,” which is replete with misinformation and specious claims about climate and energy policy.
The White House’s new energy plan repackages Trump’s campaign promises to reignite America’s declining coal industry, kill the Obama administration’s Climate Action Plan and exploit all of America’s fossil fuel reserves to achieve energy independence — an idea that ignores that America’s oil and gas is part of a truly global fossil fuels market.
Throughout his campaign, Trump expressed
contempt for the Obama administration’s climate policies, which were critical to the success of the Paris Climate Agreement — the international pact aiming to stop global warming from reaching what the world’s scientists agree are dangerous levels.
Obama’s climate and energy policies encouraged the development of low-carbon renewable sources and discouraged the use of coal for electricity as a way to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming.
Trump and his transition team called those policies job killers. He falsely claimed that Obama’s policies alone have forced the coal industry into decline. Coal has been on a long, steady decline since 2008 when natural gas was made cheap and abundant because of fracking. Natural gas overtook coal as America’s largest source of electricity for the first time in history in 2016.
The White House’s “America First Energy Plan” reflects those claims and Trump’s disdain for climate science and renewable energy. Here is a paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of the plan:
Energy is an essential part of American life and a staple of the world economy. The Trump Administration is committed to energy policies that lower costs for hardworking Americans and maximize the use of American resources, freeing us from dependence on foreign oil.
Few people question that energy is essential, but Trump’s statement that his administration is committed to low-cost energy and maximizing the use of American resources is seen by many as code for unfettered exploitation of oil, coal and natural gas in the U.S. Trump has called renewables “an expensive way of making the tree-huggers feel good about themselves,” and says a cheaper way to energy independence is through oil, gas and coal.
Fossil fuels are abundant in the U.S. thanks to fracking, which brought about the shale oil and gas boom of the past decade. But oil drilled in the U.S. isn’t necessarily staying in the U.S. and contributing to energy independence. Congress lifted a 40-year ban on oil experts a year ago, and now U.S. oil is being shipped all over the world, even as the U.S. is importing oil from Canada and the Middle East.
At the same time, the costs of renewables has been falling dramatically in recent years, and America’s largest oil refiner and carbon emitter — Texas — has become the nation’s leader in wind power production.
Trump’s skepticism of renewables contrasts starkly with Obama, who said that wind and solar power are a critical a component of energy independence. For too long, we’ve been held back by burdensome regulations on our energy industry. President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule. Lifting these restrictions will greatly help American workers, increasing wages by more than $30 billion over the next 7 years.
“Burdensome regulations” has long been Republican messaging for what they consider odious Obama-era climate policies and regulations that encourage the use of renewables and natural gas instead of fossil fuels to address climate change, or restrict the development of oil and gas on federally owned public lands and waters.
For example, one of Obama’s last-minute actions was to close off most of the Arctic Ocean off of Alaska’s North Coast for oil and gas development as a way to protect the seashore from oil spills and prevent more and more of the carbon pollution driving climate change. That followed a moratorium on coal leasing on federal lands and the closure of large swaths of the Atlantic coast to future oil drilling.
Each of those moves angered fossil fuel boosters in the Republican Party and were motivated in part by Obama’s Climate Action Plan, which involved a variety of measures to help slash America’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Trump’s claim that lifting those and other restrictions would increase workers’ wages by more $30 billion wildly mischaracterizes the potential for workers to benefit from killing U.S. climate policy. The figure seems to come from a 2015 report by Louisiana State University banking professor Joseph R. Mason, which was released by the Institute for Energy Research, an oil-industry funded organization run by Trump’s energy transition team chief,Tom Pyle.
The report claims that $32 billion in annual worker wages over seven years would be earned if all of America’s public lands were opened to oil, gas and coal development — even the lands protected by law from energy development, including wilderness areas and national parks.
That means Trump is saying that if Yellowstone, the White House lawn, Yosemite Valley, the Great Smoky Mountains and Mt. Rushmore were opened to fracking, workers would reap billions in benefits.
Sound energy policy begins with the recognition that we have vast untapped domestic energy reserves right here in America. The Trump Administration will embrace the shale oil and gas revolution to bring jobs and prosperity to millions of Americans. We must take advantage of the estimated $50 trillion in untapped shale, oil, and natural gas reserves, especially those on federal lands that the American people own. We will use the revenues from energy production to rebuild our roads, schools, bridges and public infrastructure. Less expensive energy will be a big boost to American agriculture, as well.
“Sound” energy policy is a play on “sound science” in an effort to lend it legitimacy.
It is true that the U.S. has vast untapped domestic energy sources — and that includes renewables. While fracking and the shale oil and gas boom led to discoveries of millions of barrels of oil that were once thought too expensive to reach, renewables are some of America’s largest untapped sources of energy.
For example, America’s offshore wind power potential is so huge that if fully developed, offshore wind farms could produce four times the electricity currently generated in the U.S. today, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. America’s first offshore wind farm was completed in December, with more expected to be built over the next five years.
Trump’s estimated $50 trillion in untapped oil and gas reserves is a huge mischaracterization of the fossil fuels that can be developed in the U.S., said Mark Squillace, a professor of natural resources law at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
“The problem with numbers like this is that they do not tell the whole story,” Squillace said. “The United States certainly has vast oil and gas and coal reserves and if you just add them up and multiply by their market value you get a big number. But most of those reserves cannot be economically developed any time in the foreseeable future.”
He said the figure originates from Kathy Hartnett White, a Trump advisor affiliated with the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, who told Fox Business in June that the U.S. is sitting on $50 trillion of oil and gas, “but the government is stopping us from getting it.”…….
President Trump will refocus the EPA on its essential mission of protecting our air and water………….Trump’s energy policy says nothing about climate change, which will be made drasticly worse if the U.S. develops as much oil, gas and coal as Trump suggests.
America’s air and water have been kept clean over the past 40 years because of environmental laws enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency, which Trump previously said he wants to abolish. Trump has appointed one of the EPA’s most ardent foes to head the agency — Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who has sued the EPA 14 times and is involved in a lawsuit aiming to kill one of Obama’s most sweeping climate policies.
During his confirmation hearing, Pruitt said he wants states to have more control over how they are regulated by the EPA, suggesting that the federal laws protecting America’s air and water would be applied unevenly from state to state. Some states are much more vigilant in enforcing environmental regulations and have more resources than others,
Trump has said nothing about how a weakened EPA would accomplish his goal of keeping America’s air and water clean.http://www.climatecentral.org/news/decoding-trumps-white-house-energy-plan-21097
January 23, 2017
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It also appeared to remove any reference to combating climate change, a topic that had been featured prominently on the White House site under President Barack Obama. The page that once detailed the potential consequences of climate change and the Obama administration’s efforts to address it vanished on Friday just as President Trump was sworn in. It now redirected to a broken link: “The requested page ‘/energy/climate-change’ could not be found.”
In its place, listed among the top issues of the Trump administration, was a page entitled, “An America First Energy Plan.”
The incoming administration vows to eliminate “harmful and unnecessary policies” such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the United States rule. The first represents a variety of efforts Obama pursued to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, while the second is a rule issued by the EPA to protect not only the largest waterways but smaller tributaries that others believe should fall under the jurisdiction of states rather than the federal government.
The new White House site says that Trump would “refocus the EPA on its essential mission of protecting our air and water.”
It also says the incoming president will pursue “clean coal technology,” a reference to efforts to remove carbon dioxide emissions from coal-burning plants and bury those emissions in the ground to use them to enhance oil recovery. The Obama Energy Department has already been funding a variety of projects in this area. Though, without nearby enhanced oil recovery projects, the technology is not economic. Trump’s White House site says the new administration would aim at “reviving America’s coal industry.”
January 21, 2017
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People of color are bracing for climate injustice under Trump, Guardian, Elizabeth C Yeampierre, 20 Jan 17 When things are bad for everyone, they are particularly bad for people of color – which doesn’t bode well as the Trump administration sets up shop. hen things are bad for everyone, they are particularly bad for people of color. The Trump administration is about to legitimize injustice in all of our communities. People of color have endured the extraction of our land and labor – and its legacy – since the creation of these United States. Now, we are bracing ourselves for worse things to come.
The environmental and climate justice movement has had substantial successes on both the local and national fronts. We have cleaned up brownfields, stopped the siting of power plants, facilitated community-based planning for climate adaption and resilience, all while developing a framework known as Just Transitions, which rejects the “dig, burn, dump” economy and wants to push it away from an extractive economy to a regenerative one.
Always frontline-led and solutions–oriented, we have been working diligently to operationalize this transition through such initiatives as community-owned solar, offshore wind and local cooperatives that model another way to live without a carbon footprint. Energized by the momentum created by the People’s Climate March and the breadth of knowledge shared by the Climate Justice Alliance’s Our Power Campaign, the last few years have been all about the possibilities.
And then Trump was elected.
The solutions to unresolved environmental justice crises in low-income communities of color that the environmental and climate justice movement and allies have been diligently working to resolve now suddenly appear unattainable……..
Our communities across the nation have struggled but survived with administrations that moved slowly. We have never faced an administration that on all underlying tenets of climate justice – including the very existence of climate change – is at best indifferent and at worst actively antagonistic.
The appointments of climate denier Scott Pruitt as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, fossil fuel-backed Ryan Zinke as head of Department of Interior, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, neo-Confederate Jeff Sessions as attorney general and fast food executive Andrew Puzder as secretary of labor all constitute direct attacks on these tenets and communities of color.
As we face a full-scale assault on our very existence, we are planning, organizing, building, educating and resisting with an understanding of what this means for our communities.https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/19/trump-administration-climate-change-people-of-color-injustice
January 21, 2017
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Climate change will hurt crops more than it helps them, study suggests, WP By Chelsea Harvey January 19 Out of the many consequences of climate change, from melting glaciers to changing weather patterns, its effect on agriculture has emerged as one of the most complex issues for scientists to investigate. It’s also among the most globally significant.
As the world’s population approaches 8 billion people — and is expected to exceed 9 billion before midcentury — protecting global food security has become a top priority for scientists and policymakers alike. And figuring out how climate change might affect the world’s future crop yields is a major concern.
[U.S. scientists officially declare 2016 the hottest year on record. That makes three in a row.]
Previous studies have suggested a “nonlinear behavior of U.S. [crop] yields,” said Bernhard Schauberger, a PhD student and researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. One study suggested that in temperatures above 86 degrees, crops suddenly experience strong declines, he noted.
Now a new study, led by Schauberger along with colleagues from institutes around the world, reaffirms the idea that high temperatures could seriously harm the production of some of the world’s most important food crops, including corn, soybeans and wheat. And that could have big implications for the world’s food supply — as the paper notes, these three crops alone account for about a third of total harvested land worldwide. ………https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/01/19/yet-another-study-suggests-that-climate-change-will-hurt-crops-more-than-it-helps-them/?utm_term=.cfee81eee106&wpisrc=nl_green&wpmm=1
January 21, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
2 WORLD, climate change |
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Parts of United States are heating faster than globe as a whole A new study shows the Northeast USA will reach the dangerous 2°C warming threshold faster than most of the rest of the planet, Guardian, John Abraham, 17 Jan 17, A new study shows the Northeast USA will reach the dangerous 2°C warming threshold faster than most of the rest of the planet,
Global warming obviously refers to temperature increases across the entire globe. We know the Earth is warming, we know it is human-caused, we have a pretty good idea about how much the warming will be in the future and what some of the consequences are. In fact, when it comes to the Earth’s average climate, scientists have a pretty good understanding.
On the other hand, no one lives in the average climate. We live spread out north, west, east, and south. On islands, large continents, inland or in coastal regions. Many of us want to know what’s going to happen to the climate where we live. How will my life be affected in the future?
This type of question is answered in a very recent study published by scientists from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The team, which includes Dr. Raymond Bradley and researcher Dr. Ambarish Karmalkar looked specifically at the Northeastern United States. They found that this area will warm much more rapidly than the globe as a whole. In fact, it will warm faster than any other United States region. The authors expect the Northeast US will warm 50% faster than the planet as a whole. They also find that the United States will reach a 2 degree Celsius warming 10–20 years before the globe as a whole.
So why does this matter? Well first, it matters because some of the effects people will experience are directly tied to the temperature increase in their region. For instance, we know that warmer air leads to more intense precipitation. In fact, we are already observing increases in very heavy rainfall across the United States (especially in the Northeast). Based on this new research, that trend will only get worse. It means that winters in this region will get warmer and wetter – more winter precipitation will likely occur as rain rather than snow. This affects the availability of water into the spring months. It also means that summers will have more intense heat waves which will lead to more severe droughts.
However, there is another impact to this study……..https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/jan/17/parts-of-united-states-are-heating-faster-than-globe-as-a-whole
January 20, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
climate change, USA |
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Zika outbreak ‘fuelled by’ El Niño and climate change, Skeptical Science 13 January 2017 The combination of a strong El Niño event and human-caused climate change created optimal conditions for the recent outbreak of the Zika virus in South America, a new study says.
The spread of Zika during 2015-16 caused hundreds of thousands of infections, a surge in cases of birth defects linked to the disease, and saw athletes withdrawing from the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
The warm conditions of 2015-16 were “exceptionally conducive” to mosquitoes spreading the disease across the continent, the researchers say, helped by the lack of natural immunity in the South American population.
And their results suggest there is a significant risk of summer outbreaks of Zika in the southeastern states of the US, southern China and southern Europe………
The new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that the outbreak was very likely fuelled by the unusually high temperatures of the last two years – a result of a very strong El Niño event on top of ongoing human-caused climate change.
El Niño is a weather phenomenon that originates in the Pacific Ocean, which tends to increase global temperature for a couple of years by releasing heat from the ocean to the atmosphere. The El Niño that developed in 2015 – and petered out in June 2016 – was one of the strongest on record.
Climate influence
An outbreak of Zika needs three main ingredients, says lead author Dr Cyril Caminade, a research associate in the Institute of Infection and Global Health at the University of Liverpool. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The minimum requirement for a vector-borne disease outbreak is the presence of competent mosquito vectors (Aedes mosquitoes), the presence of the pathogen (Zika is believed to have entered Brazil in 2013 but the World cup in 2014 must have helped too), and the presence of a suitable host (humans).”
There are then a series of factors that affect how far and how quickly an outbreak can spread. Some are socio-economic – such as poverty, access to sanitation, and the availability of healthcare and vaccines – but the climate ultimately “sets the background” to disease transmission, Caminade says……..
climate change has the potential to push vector-borne diseases like Zika into higher latitudes and altitudes, says Caminade. Though the scale of any outbreak will depend on other non-climate factors too, he adds……..https://www.skepticalscience.com/zika-outbreak-fuelled-el-nino-climate-change.html
January 16, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
climate change, SOUTH AMERICA |
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Thanks, Obama: 6 Big Climate Accomplishments From President Obama’s Tenure, Clean Technica, January 12th, 2017 Originally published on The Climate Reality Project.
“……….Here are six big climate accomplishments from President Obama’s time in office……..
THE CLEAN POWER PLAN In 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released the Clean Power Plan, the first-ever standards to reduce carbon pollution from existing power plants. The EPA projected the plan would bring many, many benefits for Americans, including creating tens of thousands of jobs, saving US citizens as much as $155 billion in energy costs between 2020—2030, and helping prevent some 90,000 asthma attacks in children by 2030.
The benefits didn’t end at our borders, either, as the plan showed the rest of the world we were serious about reducing emissions, leading to a landmark climate deal with China in 2015 that helped energize international climate talks at COP 21. These talks led to the historic Paris Agreement being forged in December 2015.
The Clean Power Plan was a cornerstone of the US commitment to reduce overall emissions 26—28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025 in the agreement.
A BAN ON DRILLING IN US-OWNED PARTS OF THE ARCTIC AND ATLANTIC OCEANS In December, President Obama worked to seal his environmental legacy by permanently banning offshore drilling in Arctic and Atlantic waters controlled by the US federal government – an incredible 3.8 million acres. This is an important move not only to protect marine life, but also to protect our climate. This is especially important in the Arctic. According to NOAA, the region is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world on average.
Some have gone as far as to call President Obama the “Ocean President” because he’s protected more marine areas from development than any other president before him. Since the beginning of Obama’s presidency, his administration has quadrupled the area of protected waters around the US.
COAL LEASING MORATORIUM Between 2009 and 2014, companies mined enough coal on public lands to put more than 3.9 billion metric tons of carbon pollution into the atmosphere. That’s the equivalent emissions of over 825 million cars on the road – every year.
In January 2016, though, the climate community had a major win when the Department of the Interior put a temporary freeze on leasing our public lands for coal mining (called a moratorium). The moratorium is a big deal because when coal is burned for energy, it creates more carbon dioxide per unit than any other fossil fuel.
The bottom line? When we lease our federal lands for coal, we’re helping fuel climate change. The moratorium – though temporary – helps stop that.
PROPOSED NEW FUEL ECONOMY STANDARDS One of the more important moves by the Obama Administration (and it’s gone under the radar in some ways) has been to significantly push fuel economy standards for the vehicles filling our roads and highways – and sending carbon pollution into the atmosphere. In 2011, the White House proposed new fuel economy standards for passenger vehicles, requiring an average performance equivalent of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. The administration also finalized new fuel economy standards for commercial trucks, vans, and buses, which are projected to save over 500 million barrels of oil and save American drivers an estimated $50 billion in fuel costs.
These new standards are the most ambitious any US president has implemented, and will save consumers money at the pump, decrease greenhouse gas emissions, and reduce US demand for oil.
IMPROVING ENERGY EFFICIENCY IN HOMES AND BUSINESSES The Obama Administration has focused on increasing energy efficiency not only to protect our environment, but also save Americans money and create jobs. One of the major ways the White House is accomplishing this is through the Better Buildings Challenge, a US Department of Energy initiative focused on making homes, commercials buildings, and industrial plants more energy efficient.
The Better Buildings Challenge is projected to improve energy efficiency in commercial buildings by 20 percent by 2020 through investments in upgrading offices, universities, hospitals, and other commercial buildings. It’s also projected to save companies and business owners about $40 billion per year on energy bills, which can be used to hire more workers and benefit companies in other ways.
CUTTING METHANE EMISSIONS In May 2016, the EPA announced final regulations to curb harmful methane emissions from new and modified oil and gas facilities. These first-ever federal methane pollution standards are a big part of how the US will reach its goal of cutting this pollution by 40–45 percent from 2012 levels by 2025.
While there’s less methane than CO2 in the atmosphere, it’s much more powerful than carbon dioxide in trapping heat – 84 times more potent over 20 years, in fact. Which means it can still do a lot of harm to our climate. These new rules will help rein in the millions of tons of methane the oil and gas industry is leaking into the air, and is a big climate win for the Obama Administration – and all of us………. https://cleantechnica.com/2017/01/12/thanks-obama-6-big-climate-accomplishments-president-obamas-tenure/
January 16, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
climate change, politics, USA |
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