Climate Change

Michael E Mann is one of the world’s most influential climate scientists. He rose to prominence in 1999 as the co-author of the “hockey-stick graph”, which showed the sharp rise in global temperatures since the industrial age. This was the clearest evidence anyone had provided of the link between human emissions and global warming. This made him a target. He and other scientists have been subject to “climategate” email hacking, personal abuse and online trolling. In his new book, The New Climate War, he argues the tide may finally be turning in a hopeful direction. Another development in the “climate war” is the entry of new participants. Bill Gates is perhaps the most prominent. His new book, How to Prevent a Climate Disaster, offers a systems analyst approach to the problem, a kind of operating system upgrade for the planet. What do you make of his take? I want to thank him for using his platform to raise awareness of the climate crisis. That said, I disagree with him quite sharply on the prescription. His view is overly technocratic and premised on an underestimate of the role that renewable energy can play in decarbonising our civilisation. If you understate that potential, you are forced to make other risky choices, such as geoengineering and carbon capture and sequestration. Investment in those unproven options would crowd out investment in better solutions. Gates writes that he doesn’t know the political solution to climate change. But the politics are the problem buddy. If you don’t have a prescription of how to solve that, then you don’t have a solution and perhaps your solution might be taking us down the wrong path.

Guardian 27th Feb 2021 read more »

The world will heat by more than 1.5C unless nations produce tougher policies, a global stocktake has confirmed. Governments must halve emissions by 2030 if they intend the Earth to stay within the 1.5C “safe” threshold. But the latest set of national policies submitted to the UN shows emissions will merely be stabilised by 2030. The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, called it a red alert for our planet.

BBC 26th Feb 2021 read more »

The world is wildly off track meeting the Paris Agreement goal of holding temperature rises to 1.5°C, despite a recent series of more ambitious national climate plans by the European Union, the UK and other countries, a United Nations assessment has found. While new carbon-cutting proposals will bend the curve of global emissions, they are still nowhere near the cuts required to stave off the devastating consequences of breaching the 1.5°C threshold. A UN analysis of plans from 74 countries, accounting for almost a third of global emissions, found they would reduce those nations’ emissions by 0.5 per cent by 2030, compared with 2010 levels. However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that global emissions must fall by about 45 per cent by 2030 to stand a chance of staying below 1.5°C.

New Scientist 26th Feb 2021 read more »

The latest UN Climate Change report on our collective emissions trajectory makes for grim reading. With the first tranche of updated national climate targets in, global emissions are set to fall by less than 1% between 2010 and 2030. The IPCC says 45% cuts are needed to hold temperature rise to 1.5C this century. It is a huge gap and one that the “ratchet” mechanism of the Paris Agreement was supposed to progressively close.

Climate Home News 26th Feb 2021 read more »

Business Green 26th Feb 2021 read more »

Independent 26th Feb 2021 read more »

iNews 26th Feb 2021 read more »

UN: New national climate pledges will only cut emissions ‘by 2%’ over next decade.

Carbon Brief 26th Feb 2021 read more »

The Environment Agency plans our response to flooding and other major environmental incidents on the basis of what we call the Reasonable Worst Case scenario. The RWC for climate sounds like this: Much higher sea levels will take out most of the world’s cities, displace millions, and make much of the rest of our land surface uninhabitable or unusable. Much more extreme weather will kill more people through drought, flooding, wildfires and heatwaves than most wars have. The net effects will collapse ecosystems, slash crop yields, take out the infrastructure that our civilisation depends on, and destroy the basis of the modern economy and modern society. If that sounds like science fiction let me tell you something you need to know. This is that over the last few years the Reasonable Worst Case for several of the flood incidents the EA has responded to has actually happened, and the Reasonable Worst Case scenarios are getting larger. The impacts of the changing climate are already being felt. In Storm Christoph last month we saw rivers, including the Mersey, rise to levels that did not just break records but smash them. In many parts of the country the waters got to within a centimetre of the top of our flood defences. Those defences protected 49,000 homes and families from the destruction, damage and misery flooding causes. Sadly some 500 homes did flood, and every one of those is personal tragedy. But it was nearly much, much worse.

Environment Agency 25th Feb 2021 read more »

The Atlantic current system which maintains mild weather in Europe is at its weakest in over a millennium, most likely because of climate change, scientists have found. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is part of a system of ocean currents which acts as a conveyor belt to move water around the Earth, redistributing heat and acting as a key link in maintaining the world’s climate. It began a serious slowdown around 1850 and is now at its lowest point in 1,000 years, according to a new study in the journal Nature Geoscience. It is not certain what the impact of further weakening will be on weather patterns, but scientists believe it could bring more heatwaves in Europe, and sea level rise on the east coast of the US.

Telegraph 25th Feb 2021 read more »

Times 26th Feb 2021 read more »

Guardian 25th Feb 2021 read more »

UN chiefs want to transform the world by putting nature back at the heart of global decision-making, arguing that the global economic shutdown triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic is an opportunity to change the planet for the better: for a stable climate, for cleaner air and water, and for a richer natural environment, thanks to the UN survival plan. The goal? A more sustainable and more equitable world by 2030, a carbon-neutral world by 2050, a curb on global pollution and waste and a halt to ever-accelerating rates of wildlife extinction worldwide. The methods? One of the first, in Making Peace With Nature, the new United Nations Environment Programme report, will be to incorporate what conservationists call “natural capital” into measures of national economic performance.

Climate News Network 26th Feb 2021 read more »

Polar bears and narwhals are using up to four times as much energy to survive because of major ice loss in the Arctic, according to scientists. Once perfectly evolved for polar life, apex predators are struggling as their habitats shrink and unique adaptations become less suited to an increasingly ice-free Arctic, researchers say.

Guardian 24th Feb 2021 read more »

A practical guide to tackling the climate crisis – podcast. The first UN climate change conference was held in 1995 in Berlin. More than two decades later, our planet remains on track for three degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. The answer to avoiding this catastrophe is both simple and staggeringly complicated: drastically reducing and reversing the amount of carbon dioxide entering our atmosphere. How do we do this? Science correspondent Natalie Grover speaks to Prof Mike Berners-Lee, author of There is No Planet B, who has crunched the numbers on everything from carbon offsetting and green investments to e-bikes.

Guardian 25th Feb 2021 read more »

Boris Johnson and Sir David Attenborough have both warned world leaders that climate breakdown represents the single gravest threat to global security, as the UK Prime Minister today chaired the first ever UN Security Council meeting focused on the climate change. Marking the first time a UK PM has chaired the UN Security Council in around three decades, the virtual session saw Johnson urge nations to take urgent action to address the climate crisis or risk worsening conflict, displacement and insecurity.

Business Green 23rd Feb 2021 read more »

The climate crisis presents the “biggest threat to security that modern humans have ever faced”, Sir David Attenborough told a UN meeting held today. Speaking at the first UN Security Council meeting on climate and security, Sir David said that the world had “left the stable and secure climatic period that gave birth to our civilisation”.

Independent 23rd Feb 2021 read more »

Climate change will bring “huddled masses” of climate refugees to the borders of richer nations unless the world takes action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday. Mr Johnson said climate change posed a grave threat to international peace and security. Urgent action was required to guarantee global security in the years to come, he stressed. The Prime Minister was chairing a meeting of the UN Security Council convened to focus on climate change and security. It is the first time a British leader has chaired the Security Council since 1992.

iNews 23rd Feb 2021 read more »

The climate emergency is already hitting “worst case scenario” levels that if left unchecked will lead to the collapse of ecosystems, with dire consequences for humanity, according to the chief executive of the Environment Agency. Warning that this is not “science fiction”, Sir James Bevan said on Tuesday that in recent years several of the “reasonable worst case scenarios” had happened in the UK, with more extreme weather and flooding. And he urged politicians to take action to reduce emissions and adapt to the “inevitable” impacts of the climate emergency.

Guardian 23rd Feb 2021 read more »

Climate change is profoundly altering our oceans and marine ecosystems. Some of these changes are happening quickly and are potentially irreversible. Many are taking place silently and unnoticed. In recent years, tipping points – thresholds where a small change could push a system into a completely new state – have increasingly become a focus for the climate research community. However, these are typically thought of in terms of unlikely changes with huge global ramifications – often referred to as “low probability, high impact” events. Examples include the slowdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and the rapid disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet. In a new paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, my co-authors and I instead focus on the potential for what we call “high probability, high impact” tipping points caused by the cumulative impact of warming, acidification and deoxygenation.

Carbon Brief 23rd Feb 2021 read more »

The Prime Minister will warn the UN Security Council today [Tuesday] that unless we take urgent action to tackle climate change, the world risks worsening conflict, displacement and insecurity. He is chairing a virtual session of the Council to call on members to help the most vulnerable countries adapt to the impact of climate change and take steps to cut global emissions to net zero by 2050. It is the first time a British Prime Minister has chaired the UNSC in nearly 30 years and the first leader-level discussion on climate at the Security Council. Sir David Attenborough will also speak to the 15 members of the UNSC by video, before UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and Sudanese climate activist Nisreen Elsaim brief the Security Council live. The impacts of climate change are already being felt around the world, with the effects of rising temperatures and extreme weather forcing population movements and creating competition over increasingly scarce natural resources. Of the 20 countries ranked most vulnerable to rising global temperatures, 12 are already in conflict.

10 Downing Street 23rd Feb 2021 read more »

WESTMINSTER ignored repeated Scottish Government requests to be consulted over plans to hold the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, internal correspondence has revealed.

The National 21st Feb 2021 read more »

Emails between the two governments show that Holyrood officials were forced to rely on news articles and press releases to gather key information about where the UK stood in its bid to host the UN’s flagship climate conference. Scottish Government officials asked for more information about the status of the UK’s bid four times without response between 12 and 19 of June 2019, the correspondence – released under freedom of information legislation – shows. One described themselves as sounding “like a broken record” as a result.

The Ferret 19th Feb 2021 read more »