Sea-level rise – an Unmanaged climate risks to spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power plants.
Unmanaged climate risks to spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power plants: The case of sea-level rise https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421519306937?fbclid=IwAR3G1uXQ-mz1KU1_ENXztdqIdICVZPsgO6Rw-qvQ1jHHPiGPUuumd7OHcjw
Weather reporters joining the battle against climate change
Weathercasters Are Talking About Climate
Change—and How We Can Solve It https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2020/02/weathercasters-are-talking-about-climate-change-and-how-we-can-solve-it/
In recent years there’s been a seismic shift on climate change within the weather reporting community. MADDIE STONE THIS piece was originally published in Grist and appears here as part of our Climate Desk PARTNERSHIP.
For many years, as the science of human-caused climate change grew ever clearer, TV meteorologists avoided discussing the topic on air. Today, many weathercasters bring up climate change regularly. By embracing the science and presenting it in a simple, locally-relevant manner, TV meteorologists have managed to become some of the most effective and trustworthy climate change educators in the country.
Now some meteorologists are taking the conversation a step further and talking not just about the science of climate change, but how we can solve it.
At the 100th annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) in Boston earlier this month, a panel of broadcast meteorologists, climate communicators, and policy experts assembled to discuss how solutions to the climate crisis can be woven into TV weather reporting. While wading into politics on the air can carry career risks for many meteorologists, weathercasters are also uniquely positioned to educate the public about climate solutions in a nonpartisan way, whether that’s by delivering locally tailored forecasts of renewable power production or discussing climate resilience strategies in the wake of a major storm.
“Broadcasters have an unusually good platform from which to engage,” said Ed Maibach, the director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, during the panel. “You not only have the access but consistency of relationships with an audience.”
In recent years there’s been a seismic shift on climate change within the weather reporting community. In a 2011 survey of AMS members and the National Weather Association, less than 20 percent felt sure humans are the primary driver of global warming, a statistic that Maibach attributes, in part, to an “aggressive misinformation campaign by the Heartland Institute,” a climate change–denying think tank. But by 2017 that figure had jumped to 80 percent. That’s thanks largely to the efforts of the educators who organized Climate Matters, a climate reporting resource developed by the nonprofit Climate Central, the AMS, and various governmental and academic partners
Why Arctic glaciers are melting away at an accelerating rate
How the ocean is gnawing away at glaciers, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200203114350.htm
- Date:
- February 3, 2020
- Source:
- Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research
- Summary:
- The Greenland Ice Sheet is melting faster today than it did only a few years ago. The reason: it’s not just melting on the surface — but underwater, too. AWI researchers have now found an explanation for the intensive melting on the ice’s underside, and published their findings in the journal Nature Geoscience.
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The glaciers are melting rapidly: Greenland’s ice is now melting seven times faster than in the 1990s — an alarming discovery, since climate change will likely intensify this melting in the future, causing the sea level to rise more rapidly.
Accordingly, researchers are now working to better understand the underlying mechanisms of this melting. Ice melts on the surface because it is exposed to the sun and rising temperatures. But it has now also begun melting from below — including in northeast Greenland, which is home to several ‘ice tongues’. Each tongue is a strip of ice that has slid down into the ocean and floats on the water — without breaking off from the land ice. The longest ice tongue, part of the ’79° North Glacier’, is an enormous 80 km long. Over the past 20 years, it has experienced a dramatic loss of mass and thickness, because it’s been melting not just on the surface, but also and especially from below.
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Too much heat from the ocean
A team led by oceanographer Dr Janin Schaffer from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven has now identified the source of this intense underwater melting. The conclusions of their study, which the experts have just released in the journal Nature Geoscience, are particularly unsettling because the melting phenomenon they discovered isn’t unique to the 79° North Glacier, which means it could produce similar effects elsewhere. For the purposes of the study, the researchers conducted the first extensive ship-based survey of the ocean floor near the glacier, which revealed the presence of a two-kilometre-wide trough, from the bottom of which comparatively warm water from the Atlantic is channelled directly toward the glacier. But that’s not all: in the course of a detailed analysis of the trough, Janin Schaffer spotted a bathymetric sill, a barrier that the water flowing over the seafloor has to overcome. Once over the hump, the water rushes down the back of the sill — and under the ice tongue. Thanks to this acceleration of the warm water mass, large amounts of heat from the ocean flow past the tongue every second, melting it from beneath. To make matters worse, the layer of warm water that flows toward the glacier has grown larger: measured from the seafloor, it now extends 15 metres higher than it did just a few years ago. “The reason for the intensified melting is now clear,” Schaffer says. “Because the warm water current is larger, substantially more warmth now makes its way under the ice tongue, second for second.”
Other regions are also affected
In order to determine whether the phenomenon only manifests at the 79° North Glacier or also at other sites, the team investigated a neighbouring region on Greenland’s eastern coast, where another glacier, the Zachariæ Isstrøm, juts out into the sea, and where a large ice tongue had recently broken off from the mainland. Working from the surface of an ice floe, the experts measured water temperatures near the ocean floor. According to Schaffer: “The readings indicate that here, too, a bathymetric sill near the seafloor accelerates warm water toward the glacier. Apparently, the intensive melting on the underside of the ice at several sites throughout Greenland is largely produced by the form of the seafloor.” These findings will ultimately help her more accurately gauge the total amount of meltwater that the Greenland Ice Sheet loses every year.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Europe to be the first carbon neutral continent, and WITH NUCLEAR POWER EXCLUDED
Renew Extra 1st Feb 2020, Dave Elliott: With Climate Change at the top of the agenda, the EU aims to be the first carbon neutral continent, working towards net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with a new climate law being enacted soon. That’s taken some fighting for and fiddling, given the opposition from heavy coal users like Poland, but there’s a proposed Just Transition mechanism to help countries like that move to carbon neutrality, with nuclear excluded from support for this.
So renewables should boom even more. Renewables have
certainly been doing well. Germany will soon get around half of its power
from renewables, Portugal is already at over 54%, Denmark near 60%, while
Sweden is at 66% and Austria over 70%. By 2030 some of these countries
could be getting near 100% of their electricity from renewables and should
also be beginning to meet significant shares of their heat and transport
needs using renewables. Sweden already gets around 54% of all its energy
from renewables, Norway and Iceland are both at around 70%.
https://renewextraweekly.blogspot.com/2020/02/there-have-been-divergent-views-on.html
Climate strategies to stave off ecological disaster
 Media on Climate Crisis: Don’t Organize, Mourn, , NEIL DEMAUSE 31 JAN 2920 The year 2019 was, by all accounts, the year of climate awareness. To an unprecedented degree, in the three decades since scientists first warned of the imminent dangers of rising carbon emissions and the resulting global warming, we were transfixed by record-setting heat waves, wildfires in California and Australia, and, of course, Greta Thunberg’s sailboat visit to the US, capped off by her selection as Time‘s Person of the Year (12/23–30/19).Yet the newfound attention to climate came with a strange disjunction: Being aware of this massive threat to humanity hasn’t translated into much concerted action to stop it. As Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in the New Yorker (1/13/20):If in the past year (or the past decade) the world began to understand how dangerous climate change is, it certainly didn’t act like it. In the past ten years, more CO2 was emitted than in all of human history up to the election of JFK.
That same disconnect—recognizing the reality of climate change, but not who’s responsible or what could be done about it—is reflected in today’s media coverage of climate. ………….. It’s not that it’s hard to find explanations of which climate strategies would provide the greatest hope for staving off disaster. Project Drawdown, a site that GRADES POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS BY THEIR IMPACT,ranks better management of refrigerants, switching to wind and solar power, and changes in diet and food waste as among the most immediately effective measures. (Electric vehicles, a popular focus for those arguing that technology will save the day, rank a disappointing 26th, in part because they have a large carbon cost to manufacture and won’t help if they’re charged with fossil-fuel-generated electricity; biofuels only made it to 34th, though DRAWDOWN does include them as a possible stopgap measure until more truly renewable energy sources can be brought online.)
The Exponential Roadmap, a study by 22 Swedish scholars, rates switching to solar power, increasing recycling of materials, retrofitting buildings to be more energy-efficient, increasing use of electric vehicles and mass transit, switching to a plant-based diet and reducing deforestation among the most important actions to forestall the climate apocalypse.
None of these methods, climate experts warn, will be possible on a large scale solely by individual action; electric cars, as just one example, are still seen as too expensive and having too few charging stations, two items that are unlikely to be solved without a dramatic shift in government policies. So while that may spare readers from any unnecessary “self-flagellation,” the important corollary is that preventing climate catastrophe will require both individual consumer action and governmental action—as well as addressing the political reasons why governments have been so slow to act.
The media’s shift toward acknowledging the reality of climate change is welcome, if three decades too late, given that the IPCC has been sounding essentially the same alarm about a warming planet since 1988 (Guardian, 3/30/14). But the public presentation of the climate crisis remains carefully constrained to focus on the horrors awaiting us, not on what can be done to ward off the worst, or who stands in the way of doing so. When climate coverage leaves that out, it amounts to mourning the Earth without trying to save it.
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Katherine Hayhoe on A BETTER WAY TO TALK ABOUT THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Don’t start with fear, judgment, condemnation, or guilt. And don’t start with just overwhelming people with facts and figures. Do start by connecting the dots to what is already important to both of us, and then offer positive, beneficial, and practical solutions that we can engage in.
climate change affects the economy, the availability of natural resources, prices, jobs, international competition, and more. Failing to account for climate change in future long-range planning could lose us a competitive edge even in a best-case scenario, and potentially mean the end of a product line or an entire business in the worst case. By connecting climate impacts to what we already care about, we can recognize the importance and urgency of taking action.
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A BETTER WAY TO TALK ABOUT THE CLIMATE CRISIS GRETCHEN GAVETT, Harvard Business Review, JANUARY 30, 2020 Many of us care about the climate, but it can be challenging to talk about. It’s easy to get bogged down in stats and statistics, for one. And it can be nerve-racking to approach someone if you don’t already know what their beliefs on the topic are. Sometimes, it’s easier to just keep our mouths shut. Given the urgency of the climate crisis, however, many of us feel that silence is no longer an option. And Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, is the person to talk to about how to talk about climate change. Continue reading |
Need to include a No New Nuclear clause in climate emergency planning
Radiation Free Lakeland 1st Feb 2020, Kevin Frea is co-chair of the Climate Emergency Network and deputy leader of Lancaster City Council and has worked hard to sign local councils up declaring a climate emergency. “This movement is being led by every political group and is involving local people in planning the actions needed to cut carbon …
”. There is one critical action that is being missed – a No New Nuclear Clause! Last September members of Radiation Free Lakeland lobbied Lancaster City Council asking the council to include a No New Nuclear clause in their climate emergency planning.
The council agreed with us that renewables are the way forward and it is brilliant that council members are actively involved in local community renewable schemes.
However, they thought that including a No New Nuclear Clause in their
Climate Emergency Planning was not necessary. Because as Cllr Kevin Frea
said “Heysham, number 8 on the new nuclear plant list it is not likely to
go ahead”. This new nuclear nonchalence rather misses the point that the
continued push (billions of pounds of public money) for new nuclear is
decimating urgent steps towards renewables and energy efficiency. The sole
reason we are in the situation we are in is entirely down to the continued
efforts of the nuclear industry and its vested interests to suppress
renewables.
https://mariannewildart.wordpress.com/2020/02/01/14471/
As forests burn around the world, drinking water is at risk
As forests burn around the world, drinking water is at risk https://www.westhawaiitoday.com/2020/01/31/features/as-forests-burn-around-the-world-drinking-water-is-at-risk/
In Australia’s national capital of Canberra, where a state of emergency was declared on Friday because of an out-of-control forest fire to its south, authorities are hoping a new water treatment plant and other measures will prevent a repeat of water quality problems and disruption that followed deadly wildfires 17 years ago.
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“The forest area burned in Australia within a single fire season is just staggering,” said Stefan Doerr, a professor at Swansea University in England who studies the effects of forest fires on sediment and ash runoff. “We haven’t seen anything like it in recorded history.” The situation in Australia illustrates a growing global concern: Forests, grasslands and other areas that supply drinking water to hundreds of millions of people are increasingly vulnerable to fire due in large part to hotter, drier weather that has extended fire seasons, and more people moving into those areas, where they can accidentally set fires. More than 60% of the water supply for the world’s 100 largest cities originates in fire-prone watersheds — and countless smaller communities also rely on surface water in vulnerable areas, researchers say. When rain does fall, it can be intense, dumping a lot of water in a short period of time, which can quickly erode denuded slopes and wash huge volumes of ash, sediment and debris into crucial waterways and reservoirs. Besides reducing the amount of water available, the runoff also can introduce pollutants, as well as nutrients that create algae blooms. What’s more, the area that burns each year in many forest ecosystems has increased in recent decades, and that expansion likely will continue through the century because of a warmer climate, experts say. Most of the more than 25,000 square miles that have burned in Victoria and New South Wales have been forest, including rainforests, according to scientists in New South Wales and the Victorian government. Some believe that high temperatures, drought and more frequent fires may make it impossible for some areas to be fully restored. When rain does fall, it can be intense, dumping a lot of water in a short period of time, which can quickly erode denuded slopes and wash huge volumes of ash, sediment and debris into crucial waterways and reservoirs. Besides reducing the amount of water available, the runoff also can introduce pollutants, as well as nutrients that create algae blooms. What’s more, the area that burns each year in many forest ecosystems has increased in recent decades, and that expansion likely will continue through the century because of a warmer climate, experts say. Most of the more than 25,000 square miles that have burned in Victoria and New South Wales have been forest, including rainforests, according to scientists in New South Wales and the Victorian government. Some believe that high temperatures, drought and more frequent fires may make it impossible for some areas to be fully restored. Very hot fires burn organic matter and topsoil needed for trees and other vegetation to regenerate, leaving nothing to absorb water. The heat also can seal and harden the ground, causing water to run off quickly, carrying everything in its path. That in turn can clog streams, killing fish, plants and other aquatic life necessary for high-quality water before it reaches reservoirs. Already, thunderstorms in southeast Australia in recent weeks have caused debris flows and fish kills in some rivers, though fires continue to burn. “You potentially get this feedback cycle,” where vegetation can’t recolonize an area, which intensifies erosion of any remaining soil, said Joel Sankey, research geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. The role of climate change is often difficult to pin down in specific wildfires, said Gary Sheridan, a researcher at the University of Melbourne. But he said the drying effects of wildfire — combined with hotter weather and less rainfall in much of Australia, even as more rain falls in the northern part of the country — mean that “we should expect more fires.” But climate change has affected areas such as northern Canada and Alaska, where average annual temperatures have risen by almost 4 degrees since the 1960s, compared to about 1 degree farther south. As a result, the forested area burned annually has more than doubled over the past 20 to 30 years, said Doerr, from Swansea University. Although there might be fewer cities and towns in the path of runoff in those areas, problems do occur. In Canada’s Fort McMurray, Alberta, the cost of treating ash-tainted water in its drinking-water system increased dramatically after a 2016 wildfire. In the Western U.S., 65% of all surface water supplies originate in forested watersheds where the risk of wildfires is growing — including in the historically wet Pacific Northwest. By mid-century almost 90% of them will experience an increase — doubling in some — in post-fire sedimentation that could affect drinking water supplies, according to a federally funded 2017 study. “The results are striking and alarming,” said Sankey, the USGS geologist, who helped lead the study. “But a lot of communities are working to address these issues,” he added. “It’s not all doom and gloom because there are a lot of opportunities to reduce risks.” Denver Water, which serves 1.4 million customers, discovered “the high cost of being reactive” after ash and sediment runoff from two large, high-intensity fires, in 1996 and 2002, clogged a reservoir that handles 80% of the water for its 1.4 million customers, said Christina Burri, a watershed scientist for the utility. It spent about $28 million to recover, mostly to dredge 1 million cubic yards of sediment from the reservoir. Since then, the utility has spent tens of millions more to protect the forests, partnering with the U.S. Forest Service and others to protect the watershed and proactively battle future fires, including by clearing some trees and controlling vegetation in populated areas. Utilities also can treat slopes with wood chips and other cover and install barriers to slow ash runoff. They purposely burn vegetation when fire danger is low to get rid of undergrowth. Canberra’s water utility has built in redundancies in case of fire, such as collecting water from three watersheds instead of two, and it can switch among sources if necessary, said Kristy Wilson, a spokeswoman for Icon Water, which operates the system. Water can be withdrawn from eight different levels within the largest dam to ensure the best-quality water, even if there is some sediment, she said. That is paired with simpler measures such as using straw bales, sediment traps and booms with curtains to control silt, and physically removing vegetation around reservoirs and in watersheds to reduce fire fuel, she said. Eventually, some communities might need to switch their water sources because of fires and drought. Perth, on the western coast, has turned to groundwater and systems that treat saltwater because rainfall has decreased significantly since the early 1970s, said Sheridan of University of Melbourne. But, for now, millions of people will continue to drink water that originates in increasingly fire-prone forests. |
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Raging wilfires threaten Canberra, Australia’s capital city
Times 2nd Feb 2020, An inferno was raging near the Australian capital, Canberra, yesterday as a heatwave combined with high winds to prolong the country’s devastating bushfire season. The tiny Australian Capital Territory (ACT), between Sydney and Melbourne, declared a state of emergency as the fire, covering 140 square miles, threatened Canberra’s southern suburbs.
Meet the scientists quitting academia for climate activism
Meet the scientists quitting academia for climate activism, https://www.dw.com/en/meet-the-scientists-quitting-academia-for-climate-activism/a-51452337–12 Dec 2019, Emotional stress, burnout, and a sense of frustration at policy makers are driving some academics to take a different path in tackling climate change. DW spoke to three people to find out why they became activists.
Most people have the option to switch off from the terrifying media stories of how climate change is affecting the planet. This isn’t so easy for environmental scientists and academics who spend their days researching the consequences of climate change.
In a letter published in Science magazine in October this year, biologists Andy Radford, Stephen Simpson and Tim Gordon, said the loss of nature for people with a strong emotional attachment to it “triggered strong grief responses.”
They argued institutes needed to adapt strategies from “healthcare, disaster relief, law enforcement and military” for environmental scientists so they can manage their “emotional stress.”
After the letter a number of colleagues reached out to Radford, a professor at the University of Bristol, to express their comfort at the views being made public.
Caught between frustration at the disconnect between climate science and policy, and a hope inspired by burgeoning global climate protests in the last year, DW spoke to three people shunning academia in favor of activism.
Dr Wolfgang Knorr: ‘We know a lot less than we pretend to’
Dr Wolfgang Knorr, 53, researcher, physical geography and ecosystem science, and principal investigator (BECC), Lund University, Sweden
Knorr handed in his resignation in September 2019 after 27 years in environmental science. He believes his skills could be better applied as an activist, though he’s not yet sure what form this will take.
“My attraction to science has always been emotional. But in science, it’s all about keeping the emotions down, because they’re not wanted, basically. On the emotional level, I have this strong sense that there is a tremendous risk out there and we know a lot less than we pretend to.
In 2005, I joined the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council. On a daily basis, I would sit in meetings, debating new renewable energy schemes or whatever. On the train back, you read newspaper stories about climate change, but the next page will be economic news about expansion and GDP growth. At that time it became clear to me that there’s a dichotomy between the work and what’s going on in the rest of the world.
That gut feeling at that time continued until very recently — until the youth protests. There was a real step-change in public perception due to these protests. I would say, as a climate scientist, we’re following the lead of these protesters in a way, because it made me realize that I had a potential for being an advocate. I got a new perspective about what I could do with these skills.
I am hoping to find new uses for the skills that I used as a scientist, and make better use of them.”
Jess Spear: ‘I was really demoralized’
Jess Spear, 38, scientist, educator and socialist activist, RISE, Dublin
Spear left climate science in 2013 to work on a campaign in the US city of Seattle that elected its first socialist city councillor in a century. She moved to Dublin, Ireland, in 2017 and works for a new Irish left-wing group called Radical Internationalist Socialist Environmentalist (RISE).
“I worked at the US Geological Survey. It is much easier to be a scientist working as a civil servant than it is in academia. It wasn’t that stressful and was rewarding, but it wasn’t actually producing what I wanted in the world.
At the beginning of 2011 I was really demoralized about the state of the movement for climate action. There didn’t appear to be very many people concerned about it.
To see constant emission rises and failure of governments was like watching a train about to go off a cliff in slow motion. You know what’s going to happen. You feel powerless to do anything about it when you’re just one person.
In 2013 when I started to work in activism, I can remember standing in my kitchen, watching videos of Occupy Wall Street. It was like a light turning on. That was a life-changing moment for me because it opened up the possibilities for shifting away from finding solutions, to focusing on community activism.”
Mathieu Munsch: ‘What I’m doing now is much more meaningful’
Mathieu Munsch, 30, builder, educator and community activist, France
Munsch quit his PhD in climate change at Strathclyde University in Scotland after two and a half years in September 2018. He’s now constructing an eco-friendly house in rural France and has become involved in local politics.
One major impetus was what he saw as a conflict with his values as an academic concerned about the environment if he continued on a certain career path.
“Strathclyde has a big engineering department that does research on fracking. It receives funding from the oil industry. Professors within my departments, theirpension funds were invested in fossil fuels.
In the first year, I still had some faith that I was doing the right thing. But it became more and more obvious to me that I was never going to be able to have a successful career, access to a pension and all of that if for me to benefit from that, the current economic system would need to continue functioning, and therefore we would go into catastrophic climate change. It became a wake-up call that I needed to get out of that system.
I experienced some burnout, specifically when I was spending eight hours of my day on the computer reading documents about climate change. It was pretty emotionally heavy, even though I don’t think I was in the deep despair that I know some people experience.
Something that helped me cope was giving time to activist groups. But it’s only leaving and finding a completely different way to do things that helped me overcome the stress and burnout.
Since I left, I’ve had people contacting me over Twitter as well, specifically for the decision, and one of them said, ‘Oh, yeah, I did exactly the same thing two years ago. I feel like what I’m doing now is much more meaningful.”
These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity and length
Could geoengineering strategies help tackle climate change?
Could geoengineering strategies help tackle climate change? DW, 31 Jan 2020, A range of technologies — loosely defined as ‘geoengineering’ — are being explored as responses to climate change. Yet their effectiveness, and whether they should be implemented at all, is debated among scientists.Australia’s bushfires have brought the devastating consequences of a warming world into sharp relief. And with modelling pointing to temperature increases of between three and four degrees Celcius by 2100 in a business-as-usual scenario, predictions suggest such extreme events are set to become more frequentV.
What if we could reverse the warming that is fueling drought and causing flooding around the world?
That is exactly what organizations like the US-based non-profit Foundation for Climate Restoration (F4CR), are proposing. The group wants to restore carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere to under 300 parts per million, as was the case in the pre-fossil fuel age. Today, the global average measures more than 400 parts per million.
“I’m very interested in leaving [behind] a world where our children can survive,” Pieter Fiekowsky, an MIT-trained physicist who founded F4CR in 2015, told DW. To him, “that clearly requires getting CO2 back to safe levels.”
According to the foundation, achieving that involves “climate restoration,” that is, making sure we’re collectively removing more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than we produce. The foundation believes around a trillion tons of carbon dioxide needs to be extracted.
That would require large-scale implementation of nature-based or artificial technologies to suck vast quantities of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere to cool the planet — strategies that fall under the loose definition of “geoengineering.” However, which technologies are best suited, and whether to implement them at all, is hotly debated among scientists.
Climate benefits
Rob Jackson, an earth systems scientist at Stanford University,believes that restoring the climate to what it once was is a better goal than merely stabilizing Earth’s temperatures.
“We need a new story, a new narrative around climate change,” says Jackson, who argues this should involve ambitions that go beyond merely limiting the damage of climate change. “[Climate restoration] will bring climate benefits. It will save lives by reducing air pollution. It will provide a host of other benefits.”
One solution proposed by F4CR in awhite paper last year entails restoring marine habitats that store carbon, such as underwater kelp forests. Another is a form of concrete that binds carbon as it’s made, which was used recently to build a new terminal at San Francisco airport……….
“I think these long-term goals [of climate restoration] take away focus from the really important challenge that we have today of bending the emissions curve downward,” says Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London.
There is also concern that geoengineering technologies could create a false sense of security that increased emissions could be removed. Rogelj says ecosystems unable to adapt to current warming are not likely to return even if temperatures decrease……..
A middle ground?
Bhowmik believes it should be possible to achieve a net decline in greenhouse gases without resorting to the most radical geoengineering approaches. The Exponential Roadmap report published in 2019, in which Bhowmik led the modelling work, lays out a strategy focused heavily on nature-based solutions.
To follow that roadmap, the world would need to halve global greenhouse gas emissions every decade from 2020 onwards, improve agricultural practices so farmland absorbs rather than emits carbon, restore large areas of forest and protect carbon-storing ecosystems like peatlands.
“If you follow that route, it would actually be possible by the end of this century to have a substantial reduction in the atmosphere greenhouse gas concentrations. And soon thereafter we will reach the level that was in the preindustrial period,” Bhowmik believes.
Climate restoration got a boost in September 2019 when F4CR joined scientists, venture capitalists and youth activists at a UN Forum aiming to spur investment for a range of nascent technologies to reverse global warming.
Even though there’s disagreement on what — if any — form climate restoration should take, most scientists do agree that it shouldn’t be a replacement for mitigating climate change or helping communities around the world cope with the impacts of rising temperatures.
That includes F4CR. “Climate restoration is a critical third pillar,” says Rick Parnell, CEO of the organization. “[It’s] a third leg of the stool, along with mitigation and adaptation.” https://www.dw.com/en/geoengineering-projects-climate-change/a-52117714
UK government could save money, promote health, by energy efficiency programmess
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Edie 30th Jan 2020, By implementing stronger policies around walking, cycling, electric vehicles and energy efficiency in homes, the Government could save the NHS at least £3.7bn per year. That is according to a new report from think-tank Green Alliance. Drawing on research by CREDS, a body convening research from academics at 15 UK universities. The report concludes that improved policies on active travel and electric mobility could save the NHS £2.5bn in costs annually, mainly through reduced rates of cardiovascular and lung problems, as well as diabetes. This saving could be realised if just 1.7% of car journeys made annually in England are replaced by walking or cycling.
Green Alliance claims this shift could also improve air
quality, quality of life and public satisfaction with local authorities and Government. |
New interactive flood-risk map shows that global vulnerability to sea level rise is worse than previously understood.
Eastern Daily Press 23rd Jan 2020, Huge swathes of the Broads, the Fens and even parts of Great Yarmouth and Norwich could be under water in 30 years unless drastic action is taken to halt global warming.
That is the shocking conclusion drawn from a new
interactive flood-risk map built by US-based researchers who claim that
global vulnerability to sea level rise is worse than previously understood.
Doomsday clock now closest ever to midnight, due to climate and nuclear dangers
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Doomsday Clock nears apocalypse over climate and nuclear fears, BBC, 23 Jan 2020, The symbolic Doomsday Clock, which indicates how close our planet is to complete annihilation, is now only 100 seconds away from midnight.The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) said on Thursday that the change was made due to nuclear proliferation, failure to tackle climate change and “cyber-based disinformation”.
The clock now stands at its closest to doomsday since it began ticking. Last year the clock was set at two minutes to midnight – midnight symbolises the end of the world – the same place it was wound to in 2018…….. The idea began in 1947 to warn humanity of the dangers of nuclear war……….. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51213185 |
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Greta Thunberg says climate demands ‘completely ignored’ at Davos
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Greta Thunberg says climate demands ‘completely ignored’ at Davos, https://www.sbs.com.au/news/greta-thunberg-says-climate-demands-completely-ignored-at-davos 24 Jan 2020, Greta Thunberg says she isn’t surprised that calls to disinvest in fossil fuels have fallen on deaf ears at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg said calls to the corporate elite meeting in Davos to immediately disinvest in fossil fuels had been ignored. “We had a few demands (coming into the World Economic Forum). Of course these demands have been completely ignored. We expected nothing less,” Thunberg told reporters in the Swiss ski resort on the last day of the conference. Thunberg was a highlight of the 50th edition of the conference, drawing massive attention including barbs by US Secretary Steven Mnuchin who on Thursday told the teen to go “study economics”. Asked about Mnuchin’s comments, the Swede said: “Of course it has no effect. We are being criticised like that all the time.” “If we cared about that, we would not be able to do what we do. We put ourselves in the spotlight.” The spat between Mnuchin and Thunberg underlined the tensions over climate change at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, where governments and major firms have come under pressure to act now on global warming. Asked about the 17-year-old’s demand for an immediate halt to investment in fossil fuels, Mnuchin said on Thursday: “Is she the chief economist? Who is she? I’m confused,” adding after a pause that it was “a joke”. “After she goes and studies economics in college, she can come back and explain that to us.” In a speech on Tuesday, US President Donald Trump castigated the “prophets of doom” that predict a climate “apocalypse”, in comments widely seen as an attack on Thunberg who sat in the audience. But either by accident or design, there was no meeting between Trump and Thunberg at the forum. |
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26 April – Chernobyl: Inside the Meltdown airs on National Geographic on Sunday 26th April from 4pm
29 April – Nuclear Expert Webinar #1 – Radiation Impacts on Families with Mary Olson and Cindy Folkers
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Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
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