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New research on the global climate impacts of a small nuclear war

How a small nuclear war would transform the entire planet  

As geopolitical tensions rise in nuclear-armed states, scientists are modelling the global impact of nuclear war.  https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00794-y, Nature,     Alexandra Witze,  18 Mar, 20, 

It all starts in 2025, as tensions between India and Pakistan escalate over the contested region of Kashmir. When a terrorist attacks a site in India, that country sends tanks rolling across the border with Pakistan. As a show of force against the invading army, Pakistan decides to detonate several small nuclear bombs.

The next day, India sets off its own atomic explosions and within days, the nations begin bombing dozens of military targets and then hundreds of cities. Tens of millions of people die in the blasts.

That horrifying scenario is just the beginning. Smoke from the incinerated cities rises high into the atmosphere, wrapping the planet in a blanket of soot that blocks the Sun’s rays. The planet plunges into a deep chill. For years, crops wither from California to China. Famine sets in around the globe.

This grim vision of a possible future comes from the latest studies about how nuclear war could alter world climate. They build on long-standing work about a ‘nuclear winter’ — severe global cooling that researchers predict would follow a major nuclear war, such as thousands of bombs flying between the United States and Russia. But much smaller nuclear conflicts, which are more likely to occur, could also have devastating effects around the world.

This week, researchers report that an India–Pakistan nuclear war could lead to crops failing in dozens of countries — devastating food supplies for more than one billion people1. Other research reveals that a nuclear winter would dramatically alter the chemistry of the oceans, and probably decimate coral reefs and other marine ecosystems2. These results spring from the most comprehensive effort yet to understand how a nuclear conflict would affect the entire Earth system, from the oceans to the atmosphere, to creatures on land and in the sea. ……….

Both India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in 1998, highlighting growing geopolitical tensions. By the mid-2000s, Toon was exploring a scenario in which the countries set off 100 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs, killing around 21 million people. He also connected with Alan Robock, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who studies how volcanic eruptions cool the climate in much the same way that a nuclear winter would. Using an advanced NASA climate model, the scientists calculated how soot rising from the incinerated cities would circle the planet. All around the dark, cold globe, agricultural crops would dwindle.

But after a burst of publications on the topic, Robock, Toon and their colleagues struggled to find funding to continue their research. Finally, in 2017, they landed a grant worth nearly US$3-million from the Open Philanthropy Project, a privately funded group in San Francisco that supports research into global catastrophic risks.

The goal was to analyse every step of nuclear winter — from the initial firestorm and the spread of its smoke, to agricultural and economic impacts. “We put all those pieces together for the first time,” says Robock.

The group looked at several scenarios. Those range from a US–Russia war involving much of the world’s nuclear arsenal, which

would loft 150 million tonnes of soot into the atmosphere, down to the 100-warhead India–Pakistan conflict, which would generate 5 million tonnes of soot6. The soot turns out to be a key factor in how bad a nuclear winter would get; three years after the bombs explode, global temperatures would have plummeted by more than 10 °C in the first scenario — more than the cooling during the last ice age — but by a little more than 1 °C in the second.

Toon, Robock and their colleagues have used observations from major wildfires in British Columbia, Canada, in 2017 to estimate how high smoke from burning cities would rise into the atmosphere7. During the wildfires, sunlight heated the smoke and caused it to soar higher, and persist in the atmosphere longer, than scientists might otherwise expect. The same phenomenon might happen after a nuclear war, Robock says.Raymond Jeanloz, a geophysicist and nuclear-weapons policy expert at the University of California, Berkeley, says that incorporating such estimates is a crucial step to understanding what would happen during a nuclear winter. “This is a great way of cross-checking the models,” he says.

Comparisons with giant wildfires could also help in resolving a controversy about the scale of the potential impacts. A team at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico argues that Robock’s group has overestimated how much soot burning cities would produce and how high the smoke would go8.

The Los Alamos group used its own models to simulate the climate impact of India and Pakistan setting off 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs. The scientists found that much less smoke would get into the upper atmosphere than Toon and Robock reported. With less soot to darken the skies, the Los Alamos team calculated a much milder change to the climate — and no nuclear winter.

The difference between the groups boils down to how they simulate the amount of fuel a firestorm consumes and how that fuel is converted into smoke. “After a nuclear weapon goes off, things are extremely complex,” says Jon Reisner, a physicist who leads the Los Alamos team. “We have the ability to model the source and we also understand the combustion process. I think we have a better feel about how much soot can potentially get produced.” Reisner is now also studying the Canadian wildfires, to see how well his models reproduce how much smoke gets into the atmosphere from an incinerating forest.

Robock and his colleagues have fired back in tit-for-tat journal responses9. Among other things, they say the Los Alamos team simulated burning of greener spaces rather than a densely populated city.

Dark seas

While that debate rages, Robock’s group has published results showing a wide variety of impacts from nuclear blasts.

That includes looking at ocean impacts, the first time this has been done, says team member Nicole Lovenduski, an oceanographer at the University of Colorado Boulder. When Toon first approached her to work on the project, she says, “I thought, ‘this sure seems like a bleak topic’.” But she was intrigued by how the research might unfold. She usually studies how oceans change in a gradually warming world, not the rapid cooling in a nuclear winter.

Lovenduski and her colleagues used a leading climate model to test the US–Russia war scenario. “It’s the hammer case, in which you hammer the entire Earth system,” she says. In one to two years after the nuclear war, she found, global cooling would affect the oceans’ ability to absorb carbon, causing their pH to skyrocket. That’s the opposite to what is happening today, as the oceans soak up atmospheric carbon dioxide and waters become more acidic.

She also studied what would happen to aragonite, a mineral in seawater that marine organisms need to build shells around themselves. In two to five years after the nuclear conflict, the cold dark oceans would start to contain less aragonite, putting the organisms at risk, the team has reported2.

In the simulations, some of the biggest changes in aragonite happened in regions that are home to coral reefs, such as the southwestern Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. That suggests that coral-reef ecosystems, which are already under stress from warming and acidifying waters, could be particularly hard-hit during a nuclear winter. “These are changes in the ocean system that nobody really considered before,” says Lovenduski.

And those aren’t the only ocean effects. Within a few years of a nuclear war, a “Nuclear Niño” would roil the Pacific Ocean, says Joshua Coupe, a graduate student at Rutgers. This is a turbo-charged version of the phenomenon known as El Niño. In the case of a US–Russia nuclear war, the dark skies would cause the trade winds to reverse direction and water to pool in the eastern Pacific Ocean. As during an El Niño, droughts and heavy rains could plague many parts of the world for as long as seven years, Coupe reported last December at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Beyond the oceans, the research team has found big impacts on land crops and food supplies. Jonas Jägermeyr, a food-security researcher at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, used six leading crop models to assess how agriculture would respond to nuclear winter. Even the relatively small India–Pakistan war would have catastrophic effects on the rest of the world, he and his colleagues report this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Over the course of five years, maize (corn) production would drop by 13%, wheat production by 11% and soya-bean production by 17% .

The worst impact would come in the mid-latitudes, including breadbasket areas such as the US Midwest and Ukraine. Grain reserves would be gone in a year or two. Most countries would be unable to import food from other regions because they, too, would be experiencing crop failures, Jägermeyr says. It is the most detailed look ever at how the aftermath of a nuclear war would affect food supplies, he says. The researchers did not explicitly calculate how many people would starve, but say that the ensuing famine would be worse than any in documented history.

Farmers might respond by planting maize, wheat and soya beans in parts of the globe likely to be less affected by a nuclear winter, says Deepak Ray, a food-security researcher at the University of Minnesota in St Paul. Such changes might help to buffer the food shock — but only partly. The bottom line remains that a war involving less than 1% of the world’s nuclear arsenal could shatter the planet’s food supplies.

“The surprising finding”, says Jägermeyr, “is that even a small-war scenario has devastating global repercussions”.

Nature 579, 485-487 (2020)

doi: 10.1038/d41586-020-00794-y

 

March 19, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change, environment, weapons and war | Leave a comment

World food supplies would be severely disrupted by even a “limited” nuclear war

Limited nuclear war could have big impact on world food supplies  https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-03/ru-lnw031120.phpIndia vs. Pakistan conflict could lead to worst food losses in modern history

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY  A WAR BETWEEN INDIA AND PAKISTAN USING LESS THAN 1 PERCENT OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS WORLDWIDE COULD LEAD TO THE WORST GLOBAL FOOD LOSSES IN MODERN HISTORY, ACCORDING TO A RUTGERS CO-AUTHORED STUDY THAT IS THE FIRST OF ITS KIND.

Sudden global cooling from a limited nuclear war along with less precipitation and sunlight “could disrupt food production and trade worldwide for about a decade – more than the impact from anthropogenic climate change by late (21st) century,” the study says.

While the impacts of global warming on agricultural productivity have been studied extensively, the implications of sudden cooling for global crop growth are little understood, notes the study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Our results add to the reasons that nuclear weapons must be eliminated because if they exist, they can be used with tragic consequences for the world,” said co-author Alan Robock, a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. “As horrible as the direct effects of nuclear weapons would be, more people could die outside the target areas due to famine.”

Robock co-authored a recent study in the journal Science Advances estimating that more than 100 million people could die immediately if India and Pakistan wage a nuclear war, followed by global mass starvation. The study focused on a war scenario that could occur between the neighboring nations in 2025, when they could have a combined 400 to 500 nuclear weapons.

For the new study, scientists used a scenario of 5 million tons of black smoke (soot) from massive fires injected into the upper atmosphere that could result from using only 100 nuclear weapons. That would cool the Earth by 1.8 degrees Celsius (3.2 degrees Fahrenheit) and lead to 8 percent lower precipitation and less sunlight for at least five years.

Scientists included those climate changes in computer simulations by six different crop models for four major crops that account for 90 percent of global cereal production in terms of calories. The scientists found that corn calorie production would fall by 13 percent, wheat by 11 percent, rice by 3 percent and soybeans by 17 percent over five years. Total first-year losses of 12 percent would be four times larger than any food shortage in history, such as those caused by historic droughts and volcanic eruptions.

Analyses of food trade networks show that domestic reserves and global trade can largely buffer the loss of food production in the first year. But multiyear losses would reduce domestic food availability, especially in food-insecure countries.

By year five, corn and wheat availability would decrease by 13 percent globally and by more than 20 percent in 71 countries with a total of 1.3 billion people. Corn production in the United States and Canada – representing more than 40 percent of global production – would drop by 17.5 percent.

Robock said the scenario with 5 million tons of smoke was developed more than a decade ago. Scientists now think that 16 million tons of smoke could arise from a nuclear war between India and Pakistan since they now have more and bigger weapons and their potential targets are larger. This means the impacts could be three-fold larger.

Next steps include analyzing the impacts of more scenarios, including those generating more smoke. Scientists also want to study the economic impacts in greater detail, including food hoarding by countries and refusals to trade it. They will also look into other impacts of nuclear war, using more models and studying more crops, extreme cold snaps and greater fluctuations in ultraviolet light.

March 17, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Wake up world -to the climate emergency – Naomi Klein’s new book “On Fire”

To avoid climate catastrophe, it’s going to take a revolution of the mind, 

As we approach a turning point in our civilization’s journey, author Naomi Klein has been sounding the alarm about how to shift the current paradigm and loosen our deadly chokehold on the living world. Fast Company, BY ANNA LENZER, 15 Mar 20, 

Antarctica just hit 65 degrees, the highest temperature it’s ever recorded, and a sea in Siberia is “boiling” with methane. Major parts of the U.S. drinking water supply are contaminated with “forever chemicals”—so called because they virtually never degrade—that are linked to cancers and liver damage, among other health problems. Climate models used to forecast warming are running red-hot and giving us far less time than we thought to turn things around. And last July was the hottest month in the 140 years that records have been kept, the 415th consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th-century average.

There’s a growing sense that we’re approaching a turning point in our civilization’s journey, in which the path diverges between two extremes—a re-flourishing garden planet and a bleak, burning wasteland of increasingly rationed resources. We’re pushing on dominoes that could fall into a runaway series of irreversible tipping points and feedback loops that will leave us to do emergency triage and run rescue-salvage missions on a dying and incinerated planet for the rest of our days. Peak Life is in sight, possibly already behind us, and our current trajectory is about to fling us off the cliff.

The UN is raising the alarm that the mass extinction of plant and animal species—which has already decimated large swaths of the planet—risks collapsing into a catastrophic point of no return, and that halting this destruction of the web of life (along with our food and water security) requires an unprecedented transformation of civilization beginning immediately.

A series of global summits through the end of this year is intended to kick off this paradigmatic shift and to loosen our deadly chokehold on the living world.

A few days before the UN’s Climate Action Summit in New York last fall, author Naomi Klein launched her latest broadside against the forces of inertia with the now best-selling On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, a book designed to inspire a blueprint for the United States’ reemergence as a global climate leader………https://www.fastcompany.com/90475368/to-avoid-climate-catastrophe-its-going-to-take-a-revolution-of-the-mind

March 17, 2020 Posted by | climate change, resources - print, USA | Leave a comment

Message of climate hope

one of the world’s most influential climate advocates, Christiana Figueres, the architect of the Paris Agreement (as head of the UN climate change convention), is defined by her optimism. It is her superpower.

“So, for me, optimism is not simply the result of having attained something. It is rather a strategy, the input, the approach with which we must face climate change because it is the only way to enhance the probability of success.”

It’s an arresting thought – the only way to succeed, or merely survive, is to hope. Not a passive hope, but a hungry and angry hope, one that will force us to act.

Christiana Figueres’s superpower could save the planet,  https://www.smh.com.au/national/christiana-figueres-s-superpower-could-save-the-planet-20200313-p549q7.html  Julia Baird, Journalist, broadcaster, historian and author, March 14, 2020 Optimism seems like sheer folly in many ways, especially today. The optimism of political leaders too often is deceptive and self-serving, more rooted in denial and ignorance than hope as they choke on smoke: “Climate change? Nothing to see here! Just the same old cataclysmic events as ever!” How can we be optimistic about a future in a world of flaming coastlines, disappearing species, smoke-dense CBDs, shelves emptied of basics like toilet paper and looming global recession?
Now we are all trying to wrap our heads around the potentially enormous impacts of the coronavirus pandemic; every day we sit an inch higher, meerkats scanning the news, on high alert, high adrenalin, ready to dive into our burrows at a moment’s notice.The bushfires snapped fingers in the faces of millions around the world, alerting those of us who weren’t aware to the real, catastrophic impacts of climate change – both today and in the future – and stirred many to argue for immediate action.
Then, too quickly, came the challenge and fear of a global pandemic. Calm is crucial, shutdowns widespread, recessions lie ahead. But beyond this threat, we cannot forget the need to secure the future of the planet.

No wonder people are overwhelmed about the future of the planet, feel helpless, overcome with grief and worried nothing is being done, that nothing can be done, that it’s all too late. Our children are having nightmares, wracked with a sense of loss before they full possessed anything. The term “eco-anxiety” was defined by the American Psychological Society as “”a chronic fear of environmental doom” in a 2017 report which cited evidence of people “deeply affected by feelings of loss, helplessness, and frustration due to their inability to feel like they are making a difference in stopping climate change”.

If you search for eco-anxiety online, the first question to pop up is: “How do I stop eco-anxiety?” Then comes “how to ease anxiety about  climate change” and “how to feel better about climate change”. Continue reading →

March 14, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change | 1 Comment

Polar ice melting at an accelerating rate

Polar ice caps melting six times faster than in 1990s  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/11/polar-ice-caps-melting-six-times-faster-than-in-1990s

Losses of ice from Greenland and Antarctica are tracking the worst-case climate scenario, scientists warn  Damian Carrington Environment editor @dpcarrington,Thu 12 Mar 2020   The polar ice caps are melting six times faster than in the 1990s, according to the most complete analysis to date.

The ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica is tracking the worst-case climate warming scenario set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists say. Without rapid cuts to carbon emissions the analysis indicates there could be a rise in sea levels that would leave 400 million people exposed to coastal flooding each year by the end of the century.

Rising sea levels are the one of the most damaging long-term impacts of the climate crisis, and the contribution of Greenland and Antarctica is accelerating. The new analysis updates and combines recent studies of the ice masses and predicts that 2019 will prove to have been a record-breaking year when the most recent data is processed.

The previous peak year for Greenland and Antarctic ice melting was 2010, after a natural climate cycle led to a run of very hot summers. But the Arctic heatwave of 2019 means it is nearly certain that more ice was lost last year.

The average annual loss of ice from Greenland and Antarctica in the 2010s was 475bn tonnes – six times greater than the 81bn tonnes a year lost in the 1990s. In total the two ice caps lost 6.4tn tonnes of ice from 1992 to 2017, with melting in Greenland responsible for 60% of that figure.

The IPCC’s most recent mid-range prediction for global sea level rise in 2100 is 53cm. But the new analysis suggests that if current trends continue the oceans will rise by an additional 17cm.

“Every centimetre of sea level rise leads to coastal flooding and coastal erosion, disrupting people’s lives around the planet,” said Prof Andrew Shepherd, of the University of Leeds. He said the extra 17cm would mean the number of exposed to coastal flooding each year rising from 360 million to 400 million. “These are not unlikely events with small impacts,” he said. “They are already under way and will be devastating for coastal communities.”

Erik Ivins, of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in California, who led the assessment with Shepherd, said the lost ice was a clear sign of global heating. “The satellite measurements provide prima facie, rather irrefutable, evidence,” he said.

Almost all the ice loss from Antarctica and half of that from Greenland arose from warming oceans melting the glaciers that flow from the ice caps. This causes glacial flow to speed up, dumping more icebergs into the ocean. The remainder of Greenland’s ice losses are caused by hotter air temperatures that melt the surface of the ice sheet.

The combined analysis was carried out by a team of 89 scientists from 50 international organisations, who combined the findings of 26 ice surveys. It included data from 11 satellite missions that tracked the ice sheets’ changing volume, speed of flow and mass.

About a third of the total sea level rise now comes from Greenland and Antarctic ice loss. Just under half comes from the thermal expansion of warming ocean water and a fifth from other smaller glaciers. But the latter sources are not accelerating, unlike in Greenland and Antarctica.

Shepherd said the ice caps had been slow to respond to human-caused global heating. Greenland and especially Antarctica were quite stable at the start of the 1990s despite decades of a warming climate.

Shepherd said it took about 30 years for the ice caps to react. Now that they had a further 30 years of melting was inevitable, even if emissions were halted today. Nonetheless, he said, urgent carbon emissions cuts were vital. “We can offset some of that [sea level rise] if we stop heating the planet.”

The IPCC is in the process of producing a new global climate report and its lead author, Prof Guðfinna Aðalgeirsdóttir, of the University of Iceland, said: “The reconciled estimate of Greenland and Antarctic ice loss is timely.”

She said she also saw increased losses from Iceland’s ice caps last year. “Summer 2019 was very warm in this region.”

March 14, 2020 Posted by | ANTARCTICA, ARCTIC, climate change, Reference | Leave a comment

Coronavirus poses threat to climate action

Coronavirus poses threat to climate action, says watchdog
IEA warns that Covid-19 could cause a slowdown in world’s clean energy transition, Guardian,  Jillian Ambrose, Fri 13 Mar 2020 The coronavirus health crisis may lead to a slump in global carbon emissions this year but the outbreak poses a threat to long-term climate action by undermining investment in clean energy, according to the global energy watchdog.The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects the economic fallout of Covid-19 to wipe out the world’s oil demand growth for the year ahead, which should cap the fossil fuel emissions that contribute to the climate crisis.

But Fatih Birol, IEA’s executive director, has warned the outbreak could spell a slowdown in the world’s clean energy transition unless governments use green investments to help support economic growth through the global slowdown……..https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/12/coronovirus-poses-threat-to-climate-action-says-watchdog

March 14, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change | 1 Comment

Groups question the viability of the three coastal sites for UK’s new nuclear plants

Hinkley, Sizewell and Bradwell, Stop Hinkley 10th March 2020, A meeting between representatives of groups opposing new nuclear development, the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) the independent nuclear safety regulator, and the Environment Agency discussed how the ONR regulates against external hazards.
However, fears about the impact of sea level rise on proposed new nuclear power stations at Hinkley in Somerset, Sizewell in Suffolk and Bradwell in Essex remain. The meeting was organised by the ONR in response to questions and a Freedom of Information (FOI)
request submitted by the Stop Hinkley Campaign to the ONR in September
2018. According to minutes of meetings held by ONR’s group of climate
change experts, projections of sea level rise for the year 2100 contain
“considerable uncertainty” and ” small changes to UK storm systems can
alter the height of storm surges significantly”. Crucially, sea level has a
huge effect on the severity of storm surges. An increase in sea level of
one metre could mean that a storm of a severity currently expected only
once every thousand years is likely to occur once every decade. The meeting
took place in Bridgwater on 28th January 2020. Stop Hinkley was joined by
Together Against Sizewell C (TASC) and Blackwater Against New Nuclear Group
(BANNG). The groups are questioning the viability of the three coastal
sites which are all vulnerable to the impacts of flooding, storm surges and
coastal processes which will inevitably intensify in coming years.

http://www.stophinkley.org/PressReleases/pr200310.pdf

March 12, 2020 Posted by | climate change, UK | Leave a comment

Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus?

Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus?   Owen Jones  Guardian, 6 Mar 2020  No Cobra meetings, no sombre speeches from No 10, yet the consequences of runaway global heating are catastrophic, It is a global emergency that has already killed on a mass scale and threatens to send millions more to early graves. As its effects spread, it could destabilise entire economies and overwhelm poorer countries lacking resources and infrastructure. But this is the climate crisis, not the coronavirus. Governments are not assembling emergency national plans and you’re not getting push notifications transmitted to your phone breathlessly alerting you to dramatic twists and developments from South Korea to Italy.More than 3,000 people have succumbed to coronavirus yet, according to the World Health Organization, air pollution alone – just one aspect of our central planetary crisis – kills seven million people every year. There have been no Cobra meetings for the climate crisis, no sombre prime ministerial statements detailing the emergency action being taken to reassure the public. In time, we’ll overcome any coronavirus pandemic. With the climate crisis, we are already out of time, and are now left mitigating the inevitably disastrous consequences hurtling towards us. While coronavirus is understandably treated as an imminent danger, the climate crisis is still presented as an abstraction whose consequences are decades away. Unlike an illness, it is harder to visualise how climate breakdown will affect us each as individuals. Perhaps when unprecedented wildfires engulfed parts of the Arctic last summer there could have been an urgent conversation about how the climate crisis was fuelling extreme weather, yet there wasn’t.  In 2018, more than 60 million people suffered the consequences of extreme weather and climate change, including more than 1,600 who perished in Europe, Japan and the US because of heatwaves and wildfires. Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe were devastated by cyclone Idai, while hurricanes Florence and Michael inflicted $24bn (£18.7bn) worth of damage on the US economy, according to the World Meteorological Organization.As the recent Yorkshire floods illustrate, extreme weather – with its terrible human and economic costs – is ever more a fact of British life. Antarctic ice is melting more than six times faster than it was four decades ago and Greenland’s ice sheet four times faster than previously thought. According to the UN, we have 10 years to prevent a 1.5C rise above pre-industrial temperature but, whatever happens, we will suffer.

Pandemics and the climate crisis may go hand in hand, too: research suggests that changing weather patterns may drive species to higher altitudes, potentially putting them in contact with diseases for which they have little immunity. “It’s strange when people see the climate crisis as being in the future, compared to coronavirus, which we’re facing now,” says Friends of the Earth’s co-executive director, Miriam Turner. “It might be something that feels far away when sitting in an office in central London, but the emergency footing of the climate crisis is being felt by hundreds of millions already.”

Imagine, then, that we felt the same sense of emergency about the climate crisis as we do about coronavirus. What action would we take? ….. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/05/governments-coronavirus-urgent-climate-crisis

March 7, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change | Leave a comment

The world’s Big Oil giants now turn to plastics to grow their industries

PLANET PLASTIC, How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades, Rolling Stone, By TIM DICKINSON, MARCH 3, 2020

March 7, 2020 Posted by | business and costs, climate change, Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

Big climate change policy unlikely no matter who wins the White House

Big climate change policy unlikely no matter who wins the White House

Amy Harder Don’t hold your breath for big climate policy changes — even if a Democrat wins the White House.

Why it matters: Congress is likely to remain gridlocked on the matter, leading to either more of the same with President Trump’s re-election or a regulatory swing back to the left no matter which Democrat wins — but far short of a legislative overhaul.

The big picture: Climate change is reaching a new high-water mark as a political concern for American voters, and Democratic presidential nominees are promising aggressive policies.

  • That in and of itself is a sea change from prior elections. Even still, these worries and pledges are unlikely to translate into any major new laws in the next few years (at least).

Here’s why, with potential scenarios mapped out.

Trump wins re-election

While Trump is uniquely unpredictable in presidential history, he’s made it clear since moving into the White House that he’s not interested in pursuing any sort of actual climate legislation on Capitol Hill.

More of the same is most likely, in two important ways:

  1. More curtailing of environmental regulations — and defending them in court.
  2. More pressure on other actors — like companies, states and other countries — to take bigger action on their own as the void of U.S. presidential leadership grows.

Any Democrat wins

All Democrats have aggressive climate plans, but it’s an open question whether any would first push climate legislation over other priorities — especially health care………

Regardless of congressional priority, any Democratic president would swing Washington’s executive-action pendulum far back in the other direction. …..

A progressive Democrat wins

… like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. ……This type of all-encompassing and hyper-aggressive legislation is unlikely to get universal support among Democrats (to say nothing of universal Republican opposition) — which makes them extremely unlikely to get through the Senate.

  • This is because Democrats with more moderate ideologies or those representing energy-intensive states are unlikely to support the broader socioeconomic measures and such aggressive moves away from fossil fuels, partly because many of those jobs are represented by unions……..

A more moderate Democrat wins

… like Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar or Michael Bloomberg.

I anticipate these politicians would be (relatively) more open to trying to work with Republicans on climate change than their progressive counterparts……

As Congress talks climate policy, carbon price gets no love

New lobbying urging Congress to support a price on carbon emissions is not convincing lawmakers to warm up to the policy.

Why it matters: A carbon price is widely considered one of the most economically efficient ways to tackle climate change. But, economics be damned, its politics remain deeply unpopular. https://www.axios.com/climate-policy-changes-unlikely-7ecf6cc3-c42c-4d7c-b492-41d73433a015.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top

March 3, 2020 Posted by | climate change, election USA 2020, politics | Leave a comment

Climate action? – you simply couldn’t build enough nuclear reactors

New Scientist 26th Feb 2020, Paul Dorfman, University College London Energy Institute, UK; Tom Burke,E3G; Steve Thomas, University of Greenwich, UK; Jonathan Porritt,
environmental campaigner; and David Lowry, Institute for Resource and
Security Studies. Reporting the decline of nuclear power generation, you quote Michael Shellenberger’s view that nuclear power is necessary to prevent climate change (8 February, p 20).

This view is truly dangerous. Climate change poses a number of unique challenges to humanity. One of the most difficult is that the world not only needs to get to a specific place
– a carbon-neutral global energy system – but also must get there by a specific time – the middle of the century. Otherwise the policy fails.

You simply couldn’t build enough nuclear reactors fast enough, even to
replace the existing reactors that will reach the end of their life by
2050, let alone to replace fossil fuels in the existing electricity system
or in the more electricity-intensive global economy we are currently
building. This would be true even if we were willing and able to overcome
all the other unsolved problems that nuclear reactors face. These include
their affordability, accidents, waste management, nuclear weapons
proliferation, the scarcity of talent and system inflexibility.

https://www.newscientist.com/letter/mg24532710-200-editors-pick-you-simply-couldnt-build-enough-nuclear-reactors/

March 2, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change | Leave a comment

Antarctic ice walls protect the climate

March 2, 2020 Posted by | ANTARCTICA, climate change | Leave a comment

Nuclear lobby attacks Australia’s Nuclear Prohibition laws

Jim Green, Online Opinion, 27 Feb 2020, https://onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=20758&page=0  

Nuclear power in Australia is prohibited under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act 1999. A review of the EPBC Act is underway and there is a strong push from the nuclear industry to remove the bans. However, federal and state laws banning nuclear power have served Australia well and should be retained.

Too cheap to meter or too expensive to matter? Laws banning nuclear power has saved Australia from the huge costs associated with failed and failing reactor projects in Europe and North America, such as the Westinghouse project in South Carolina that was abandoned after the expenditure of at least A$13.4 billion. The Westinghouse / South Carolina fiasco could so easily have been replicated in any of Australia’s states or territories if not for the legal bans.

There are many other examples of shocking nuclear costs and cost overruns, including:

* The cost of the two reactors under construction in the US state of Georgia has doubled and now stands at A$20.4‒22.6 billion per reactor.

* The cost of the only reactor under construction in France has nearly quadrupled and now stands at A$20.0 billion. It is 10 years behind schedule.

* The cost of the only reactor under construction in Finland has nearly quadrupled and now stands at A$17.7 billion. It is 10 years behind schedule.

* The cost of the four reactors under construction in the United Arab Emirates has increased from A$7.5 billion per reactor to A$10‒12 billion per reactor.

* In the UK, the estimated cost of the only two reactors under construction is A$25.9 billion per reactor. A decade ago, the estimated cost was almost seven times lower. The UK National Audit Office estimates that taxpayer subsidies for the project will amount to A$58 billion, despite earlier government promises that no taxpayer subsidies would be made available.

Nuclear power has clearly priced itself out of the market and will certainly decline over the coming decades. Indeed the nuclear industry is in crisis ‒ as industry insiders and lobbyists freely acknowledge. Westinghouse ‒ the most experienced reactor builder in the world ‒ filed for bankruptcy in 2017 as a result of catastrophic cost overruns on reactor projects. A growing number of countries are phasing out nuclear power, including Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, Taiwan and South Korea.

Rising power bills: Laws banning nuclear power should be retained because nuclear power could not possibly pass any reasonable economic test. Nuclear power clearly fails the two economic tests set by Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Firstly, nuclear power could not possibly be introduced or maintained without huge taxpayer subsidies. Secondly, nuclear power would undoubtedly result in higher electricity prices.

Nuclear waste streams: Laws banning nuclear power should be retained because no solution exists to for the safe, long-term management of streams of low-, intermediate- and high-level nuclear wastes. No country has an operating repository for high-level nuclear waste. The United States has a deep underground repository for long-lived intermediate-level waste ‒ the only operating deep underground repository worldwide ‒ but it was closed from 2014‒17 following a chemical explosion in an underground waste barrel. Safety standards and regulatory oversight fell away sharply within the first decade of operation of the U.S. repository ‒ a sobering reminder of the challenge of safely managing dangerous nuclear wastes for tens of thousands of years.

Too dangerous: The Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters results in the evacuation of over half a million people and economic costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars. In addition to the danger of nuclear reactor meltdowns and fires and chemical explosions, there are other dangers. Doubling nuclear output by the middle of the century would require the construction of 800−900 reactors. These reactors not only become military targets but they would produce over one million tonnes of high-level nuclear waste containing enough plutonium to build over one million nuclear weapons.

Pre-deployed terrorist targets: Nuclear power plants have been described as pre-deployed terrorist targets and pose a major security threat. This in turn would likely see an increase in policing and security operations and costs and a commensurate impact on civil liberties and public access to information. Other nations in our region may view Australian nuclear aspirations with suspicion and concern given that many aspects of the technology and knowledge-base are the same as those required for nuclear weapons.

Former US Vice President Al Gore summarised the proliferation problem: “For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal … then we’d have to put them in so many places we’d run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale.”

Too slow: Expanding nuclear power is impractical as a short-term response to climate change. An analysis by Australian economist Prof. John Quiggin concludes that it would be “virtually impossible” to get a nuclear power reactor operating in Australia before 2040. More time would elapse before nuclear power has generated as much as energy as was expended in the construction of the reactor: a University of Sydney report concluded that the energy payback time for nuclear reactors is 6.5‒7 years. Taking into account planning and approvals, construction, and the energy payback time, it would be a quarter of a century or more before nuclear power could even begin to reduce greenhouse emissions in Australia (and then only assuming that nuclear power displaced fossil fuels).

Too thirsty: Nuclear power is extraordinarily thirsty. A single nuclear power reactor consumes 35‒65 million litres of water per day for cooling.

Water consumption of different energy sources (litres / kWh):

* Nuclear 2.5

* Coal 1.9

* Combined Cycle Gas 0.95

* Solar PV 0.11

* Wind 0.004

Climate change and nuclear hazards: Nuclear power plants are vulnerable to threats which are being exacerbated by climate change. These include dwindling and warming water sources, sea-level rise, storm damage, drought, and jelly-fish swarms. Nuclear engineer David Lochbaum states. “I’ve heard many nuclear proponents say that nuclear power is part of the solution to global warming. It needs to be reversed: You need to solve global warming for nuclear plants to survive.”

In January 2019, the Climate Council, comprising Australia’s leading climate scientists and other policy experts, issued a policy statement concluding that nuclear power plants “are not appropriate for Australia – and probably never will be”.

By contrast, the REN21 Renewables 2015: Global Status Report states that renewable energy systems “have unique qualities that make them suitable both for reinforcing the resilience of the wider energy infrastructure and for ensuring the provision of energy services under changing climatic conditions.”

First Nations: Laws banning nuclear power should be retained because the pursuit of a nuclear power industry would almost certainly worsen patterns of disempowerment and dispossession that Australia’s First Nations have experienced ‒ and continue to experience ‒ as a result of nuclear and uranium projects.

To give one example (among many), the National Radioactive Waste Management Act dispossesses and disempowers Traditional Owners in many respects: the nomination of a site for a radioactive waste dump is valid even if Aboriginal owners were not consulted and did not give consent; the Act has sections which nullify State or Territory laws that protect archaeological or heritage values, including those which relate to Indigenous traditions; the Act curtails the application of Commonwealth laws including the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 and the Native Title Act 1993 in the important site-selection stage; and the Native Title Act 1993 is expressly overridden in relation to land acquisition for a radioactive waste dump.

No social license: Laws banning nuclear power should be retained because there is no social license to introduce nuclear power to Australia. Opinion polls find that Australians are overwhelmingly opposed to a nuclear power reactor being built in their local vicinity (10‒28% support, 55‒73% opposition); and opinion polls find that support for renewable energy sources far exceeds support for nuclear power (for example a 2015 IPSOS poll found 72‒87% support for solar and wind power but just 26% support for nuclear power). As the Clean Energy Council noted in its submission to the 2019 federal nuclear inquiry, it would require “a minor miracle” to win community support for nuclear power in Australia.

The pursuit of nuclear power would also require bipartisan political consensus at state and federal levels for several decades. Good luck with that. Currently, there is a bipartisan consensus at the federal level to retain the legal ban. The noisy, ultra-conservative rump of the Coalition is lobbying for nuclear power but their push has been rejected by, amongst others, the federal Liberal Party leadership, the Queensland Liberal-National Party, the SA Liberal government, the Tasmanian Liberal government, the NSW Liberal Premier and environment minister, and even ultra-conservatives such as Nationals Senator Matt Canavan.

The future is renewable, not radioactive: Laws banning nuclear power should be retained because the introduction of nuclear power would delay and undermine the development of effective, economic energy and climate policies based on renewable energy sources and energy efficiency. A December 2019 report by CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator finds that construction costs for nuclear reactors are 2‒8 times higher than costs for wind or solar. Levelised costs for nuclear are 2‒3 times greater per unit of energy produced compared to wind or solar including either 2 hours of battery storage or 6 hours of pumped hydro energy storage.

Australia can do better than fuel higher carbon emissions and unnecessary radioactive risk. We need to embrace the fastest growing global energy sector and become a driver of clean energy thinking and technology and a world leader in renewable energy technology. We can grow the jobs of the future here today. This will provide a just transition for energy sector workers, their families and communities and the certainty to ensure vibrant regional economies and secure sustainable and skilled jobs into the future. Renewable energy is affordable, low risk, clean and popular. Nuclear is not. Our shared energy future is renewable, not radioactive.

More Information

* Don’t Nuke the Climate Australia, www.dont-nuke-the-climate.org.au

* Climate Council, 2019, ‘Nuclear Power Stations are Not Appropriate for Australia – and Probably Never Will Be’, https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/nuclear-power-stations-are-not-appropriate-for-australia-and-probably-never-will-be/

* WISE Nuclear Monitor, 25 June 2016, ‘Nuclear power: No solution to climate change’, https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/806/nuclear-power-no-solution-climate-change

Dr. Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia.

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