Daily Climate Links: 4/4/2016

Last Month Was The Hottest March In The Global Satellite Record, And The Arctic Is Still Sizzling. Joe Romm. Climate Progress.

Higher highs and higher lows — the warming trend is quite clear in the satellite data

University of Toronto rejects call to dump holdings in fossil fuel industry. National Observer.

The University of Toronto has rejected recommendations to sell off its fossil fuel investments, but says it will consider environmental, social and governance factors in making investment decisions.

China's Carbon Emissions May Have Peaked, But It's Hazy. New York Times.

But determining if China’s carbon emissions have peaked and are declining is difficult. Scientists measure emissions by extrapolating from official energy data and can provide only rough estimates for emissions from individual countries. Conclusions about whether a country’s emissions have peaked are definitive only in hindsight, years after the fact. Even then, economic changes could result years later in a resurgence in emissions.

Problems with the accuracy of Chinese data make figuring out what is happening here particularly challenging. A paper published late last month by the journal Nature Climate Change warned that preliminary energy statistics from China were unreliable, and that “the most easily available data is often insufficient for estimating emissions.”

Renewable energy demands the undoable. Climate New Network.

Switching to renewable energy as fast as the world needs to will require changes so massive that they are unlikely to happen, scientists say.

To even come close to achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement, 50% of our energy will need to come from renewable sources by 2028, and today it is only 9%, including hydropower. For a world that wants to fight climate change, the numbers just don’t add up to do it

These 11 photos illustrate an Arctic in crisis — and hint at what could be in store for the rest of our planet. Business Insider.

Study Confirms World’s Coastal Cities Unsavable If We Don’t Slash Carbon Pollution. Joe Romm. Climate Progress.

The Danger of a Runaway Antarctica. New York Times.

Antarctica at Risk of Runaway Melting, Scientists Discover. Climate Central.

Sea level has risen a lot — 10 to 20 meters — in warm periods in the past, and our ice sheet models couldn’t make the Antarctic ice sheet retreat enough to explain that...

Assessments by the United Nations and others have previously assumed the effects on Antarctica’s ice sheet would be negligible as temperatures rise. The new study is the latest in a growing list of peer-reviewed papers that rejects that optimistic scenario as unrealistic.