Climate Links: January 2019

To Those Who Think We Can Reform Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis. Ben Ehrenreich. The Nation. Jan. 15, 2019.

Our only hope is to stop exploiting the earth—and its people.

Welcome to the future. It feels like it, doesn’t it? Like we have reached the end of something—of the days when the Arctic was not actually in flames, when the permafrost was not a sodden mush, when the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets were not rushing to join the quickly rising seas. Perhaps we have also, finally, reached the end of the days when we could soothe ourselves with lies, or delusions at least; when we imagined that we were the only masters here, that we could keep taking what we wanted, and that no one would ever have to pay. 

We are paying now. Twenty eighteen was the year that temperatures scraped 90 degrees in the Norwegian Arctic; that permafrost in northern Siberia failed to freeze at all; that wildfires burned on the taiga there, as well as above the Arctic Circle in Alaska and Sweden, in the moors of northern England, in Greece, and in California, where they showed no sense of poetic restraint whatsoever and reduced a place called Paradise to ash.

And where there wasn’t fire, there were floods: Hundreds died and millions were evacuated from rising waters in Japan, southern China, and the Indian state of Kerala. Venice flooded too, and Paris, where the Louvre had to close its Department of Islamic Arts, which it had consigned, ahem, to a basement. It was also the year the United Nations’ climate change body warned that, to avoid full-on cataclysm, we, the humans of planet Earth, would have just 12 years (11 now) to cut carbon emissions by 45 percent, and 32 years (31 and counting) to eliminate such emissions altogether. 

Still, the weather may be the least of our problems. The fire that razed Paradise displaced 52,000 people overnight, forcing many into the ranks of California’s swelling homeless population and what passes for a safety net these days: free berths on the asphalt in a Walmart parking lot. Millions more of us will become refugees when a mega-storm drowns Miami or Manila, and when the Bay of Bengal rises high enough to swallow Bangladesh. Narendra Modi’s India is ready, and has nearly finished stretching barbed wire across the entire 2,500-mile border with Bangladesh. By conservative estimates, climate change will displace a quarter of a billion people over the next 31 years. Most will not be wealthy, and most will not be white.

We do know, at least, how we got here. It was all that oil and coal that we burned, that we’re still burning. But that “we” is misleading. It isn’t all of us, and never was. As the Swedish scholar Andreas Malm recounts in Fossil Capital, his exhaustive account of the rise of the coal-powered steam engine, coal was initially embraced by a tiny subclass of wealthy Englishmen, the ones who owned the mills. They came to favor steam over hydropower in large part because it allowed them to erect factories in cities and towns—rather than submitting to the dictates of distant rivers and streams—giving them access to what we would now call a flexible workforce: masses of hungry urbanites accustomed to the indignities of factory labor, willing to toil for less, easily replaceable if they refused. 

[…] 

From its inception, then, the carbon economy has been tied to the basic capitalist mandate to disempower workers, to squeeze the most sweat out of people for the least amount of money. For the last 200-odd years, the exploitation of the planet has been inseparable from the exploitation of living human beings....

Trudeau's environmental record on the line in Canada election year. Leyland Cecco, Guardian. Jan. 2, 2019.

October’s parliamentary elections may hinge on the recent pipeline nationalisation and the government’s carbon tax plan

The Democrats Are Climate Deniers. Branko Marcetic, Jacobin. Jan. 28, 2019.

If the Democrats really believed the science on climate change, they'd be offering far more radical proposals. We have to make them.

Preliminary US Emissions Estimates for 2018. Rhodium Group. Jan. 8, 2019.

After three years of decline, US carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions rose sharply last year. Based on preliminary power generation, natural gas, and oil consumption data, we estimate emissions increased by 3.4% in 2018. This marks the second largest annual gain in more than two decades — surpassed only by 2010 when the economy bounced back from the Great Recession. While a record number of coal-fired power plants were retired last year, natural gas not only beat out renewables to replace most of this lost generation but also fed most of the growth in electricity demand. As a result, power sector emissions overall rose by 1.9%. The transportation sector held its title as the largest source of US emissions for the third year running, as robust growth in demand for diesel and jet fuel offset a modest decline in gasoline consumption. The buildings and industrial sectors also both posted big year-on-year emissions gains. Some of this was due to unusually cold weather at the start of the year. But it also highlights the limited progress made in developing decarbonization strategies for these sectors. The US was already off track in meeting its Paris Agreement targets. The gap is even wider headed into 2019.

Air travel is surging. That’s a huge problem for the climate. Umair Irfan. Vox. Jan. 13, 2019.

US airlines have an abysmal carbon footprint.

Warming Of Oceans Equivalent To An Atomic Bomb Per Second For 150 Years. Damian Carrington, Guardian. Jan. 7, 2019.

Global warming has heated the oceans by the equivalent of one atomic bomb explosion per second for the past 150 years, according to analysis of new research. 

More than 90% of the heat trapped by humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions has been absorbed by the seas, with just a few per cent heating the air, land and ice caps respectively. The vast amount of energy being added to the oceans drives sea-level rise and enables hurricanes and typhoons to become more intense. Much of the heat has been stored in the ocean depths but measurements here only began in recent decades and existing estimates of the total heat the oceans have absorbed stretch back only to about 1950. The new work extends that back to 1871. Scientists have said that understanding past changes in ocean heat was critical for predicting the future impact of climate change.

A Guardian calculation found the average heating across that 150-year period was equivalent to about 1.5 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs per second. But the heating has accelerated over that time as carbon emissions have risen, and was now the equivalent of between three and six atomic bombs per second. “I try not to make this type of calculation, simply because I find it worrisome,” said Prof Laure Zanna, at the University of Oxford, who led the new research. “We usually try to compare the heating to [human] energy use, to make it less scary.” She added: “But obviously, we are putting a lot of excess energy into the climate system and a lot of that ends up in the ocean,. There is no doubt.” The total heat taken up by the oceans over the past 150 years was about 1,000 times the annual energy use of the entire global population.

Accelerating changes in ice mass within Greenland, and the ice sheet’s sensitivity to atmospheric forcing. Michael Bevis et al, PNAS. Jan. 22, 2019.


Permafrost Is Warming Around the Globe, Study Shows. That's a Problem for Climate Change. Bob Berwyn, InsideClimateNews. Jan. 16, 2019.

Rapid changes in the long-frozen soil are raising concerns about a surge of planet-warming greenhouse gases as the permafrost thaws.

Climate Forecast: World Is “Sleepwalking into Catastrophe”. Anne C. Mulkern, E&E News, Scientific American. Jan. 17, 2019.

In an annual World Economic Forum report, climate change, extreme weather and biodiversity loss were named among the highest global risks

If you can't deny it, downplay it. How capitalists talk about climate change. Rob Larson and Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs. Jan. 13, 2019.


We Need to Accept We're Likely Underestimating the Climate Crisis. Jack Holmes, Esquire. Jan. 22, 2019.

Three new reports in the last month suggest we are.

Are We Living Through Climate Change’s Worst-Case Scenario? Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic. Jan. 15, 2019.

“We’re a lot closer than we should be,” one Stanford scientist warned.

When climate scientists want to tell a story about the future of the planet, they use a set of four standard scenarios called “representative concentration pathways,” or RCPs. RCPs are ubiquitous in climate science, appearing in virtually any study that uses climate models to investigate the 21st century. They’ve popped up in research about subjects as disparate as southwestern mega-droughts, future immigration flows to Europe, and poor nighttime sleep quality. 

Each RCP is assigned a number that describes how the climate will fare in the year 2100. Generally, a higher RCP number describes a scarier fate: It means that humanity emitted more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere during the 21st century, further warming the planet and acidifying the ocean. The best-case scenario is called RCP 2.6. The worst case is RCP 8.5.

“God help us if 8.5 turns out to be the right scenario,” Jackson told me. Under RCP 8.5, the world’s average temperature would rise by 4.9 degrees Celsius, or nearly 9 degrees Fahrenheit. “That’s an inconceivable increase for global temperatures—especially when we think about them being global average temperatures,” he said. “Temperatures will be even higher in the northern latitudes, and higher over land than over the ocean.” 

This scenario could still be in the planet’s future, according to Zeke Hausfather, an analyst and climate scientist at Berkeley Earth. Since 2005, total global greenhouse-gas emissions have most closely tracked the RCP 8.5 scenario, he says. “There may be good reasons to be skeptical of RCP 8.5’s late-century values, but observations to-date don’t really give us grounds to exclude it,” he recently wrote. 

Even if we avoid RCP 8.5, the less dramatic possibilities still could lead to catastrophic warming. Jackson, the Stanford professor, warned that every emissions scenario that meets the Paris Agreement’s 2-degree Celsius “goal” assumes that humanity will soon develop technology to remove carbon directly from the atmosphere. Such technology has never existed at industrial scales.

“Even some [of the scenarios] for 3 degrees Celsius assume that at some point in the next 50 years, we will have large-scale industrial activities to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere,” he said. “It’s a very dangerous game, I think. We’re assuming that this thing we can’t do today will somehow be possible and cheaper in the future. I believe in tech, but I don’t believe in magic.”

Climate change tipping point could be coming sooner than we think. Holly Evarts, Columbia Engineering. Jan. 23, 2019.

Global carbon emissions reached a record high in 2018, rising by an estimated 3.4 percent in the U.S. alone. This trend is making scientists, government officials, and industry leaders more anxious than ever about the future of our planet. As United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said at the opening of the 24th annual U.N. climate conference on 3 December 2018, “We are in deep trouble with climate change.” 

A Columbia Engineering study, published today in Nature, confirms the urgency to tackle climate change. While it’s known that extreme weather events can affect the year-to-year variability in carbon uptake, and some researchers have suggested that there may be longer-term effects, this new study is the first to actually quantify the effects through the 21st century and demonstrates that wetter-than-normal years do not compensate for losses in carbon uptake during dryer-than-normal years, caused by events such as droughts or heatwaves. 

Anthropogenic emissions of CO2—emissions caused by human activities—are increasing the concentration of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere and producing unnatural changes to the planet’s climate system. The effects of these emissions on global warming are only being partially abated by the land and ocean. Currently, the ocean and terrestrial biosphere (forests, savannas, etc.) are absorbing about 50% of these releases—explaining the bleaching of coral reefs and acidification of the ocean, as well as the increase of carbon storage in our forests. 

“It is unclear, however, whether the land can continue to uptake anthropogenic emissions at the current rates,” says Pierre Gentine, associate professor of earth and environmental engineering and affiliated with the Earth Institute, who led the study. “Should the land reach a maximum carbon uptake rate, global warming could accelerate, with important consequences for people and the environment. This means that we all really need to act now to avoid greater consequences of climate change.”

What can you do to prepare when you can't? Albert Bates. Jan. 20, 2019.


Capricious foes, Big Sister & high-carbon plutocrats: irreverent musings from Katowice’s COP24. Kevin Anderson. Jan. 10, 2019.

1) An Orwellian tale: myths & hidden enemies 

A quick glance at COP24 suggests three steps forward and two steps back. But whilst to the naïve optimist this may sound like progress, in reality it’s yet another retrograde bound towards a climate abyss. As government negotiators play poker with the beauty of three billion years of evolution, climate change emissions march on. This year with a stride 2.7% longer than last year – which itself was 1.6% longer than the year before. Whilst the reality is that every COP marks another step backwards, the hype of these extravaganzas gives the impression that we’re forging a pathway towards a decarbonised future. 

For me the fantasy-land of COP24 was epitomised at the UK’s ever-busy Green is Great stand. Here, the nation that kick-started the fossil-fuel era, regaled passers-by with a heart-warming tale of rapidly falling emissions and a growing green economy. This cheerful narrative chimed with those desperate to believe these annual junkets are forging a decarbonised promise-land...

[which reminds me of those f'g TV commercials our federal govt has spent our tax dollars on producing to propagandize us into believing that the Kinder Morgan pipeline makes Canada somehow greener]


The new elite’s phoney crusade to save the world – without changing anything. Anand Giridharadas, Guardian. Jan. 22, 2019.

Today’s titans of tech and finance want to solve the world’s problems, as long as the solutions never, ever threaten their own wealth and power. 

UK has biggest fossil fuel subsidies in the EU, finds commission. Damian Carrington, Guardian. Jan. 23, 2019.

Subsidies for coal, oil and gas are not falling despite EU pledges to tackle climate change

IEA Chief: EVs Are Not The End Of The Oil Era. Tsvetana Paraskova, OilPrice.com. Jan 22, 2019.

Electric vehicles (EVs) today are not the end of global oil demand growth, nor are they the key solution to reducing carbon emissions, Fatih Birol, the Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), said during the ‘Strategic Outlook on Energy’ panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday. 

According to Birol, analysts need to put things into perspective and consider that five million EVs globally is nothing compared to 1 billion internal combustion engine (ICE) cars. 

“This year we expect global oil demand to increase by 1.3 million barrels per day. The effect of 5 million cars is 50,000 barrels per day. 50,000 versus 1.3 million.” 

“Cars are not the driver of oil demand growth. Full stop,” Birol said. 

Drilling Towards Disaster: Why U.S. Oil and Gas Expansion Is Incompatible with Climate Limits. Kelly Trout, Price of Oil. January 16, 2019.

A new study released by Oil Change International and 17 partner organizations examines the urgent need for U.S. leadership to manage a rapid and just decline of fossil fuel production. 

The United States should be a global leader in winding down fossil fuel use and production. Instead, the U.S. oil and gas industry is gearing up to unleash the largest burst of new carbon emissions in the world between now and 2050. At precisely the time in which the world must begin rapidly decarbonizing to avoid runaway climate disaster, the United States is moving further and faster than any other country to expand oil and gas extraction. 

Key findings include: 

Unprecedented Oil & Gas Expansion: Between 2018 and 2050, U.S. drilling into new oil and gas reserves could unlock 120 billion metric tons of new carbon pollution, which is equivalent to the lifetime CO2 emissions of nearly 1,000 coal-fired power plants. If not curtailed, U.S. oil and gas expansion will impede the rest of the world’s ability to manage a climate-safe, equitable decline of oil and gas production. 

Expansion Hot Spots: Some 90% of U.S. drilling into new oil and gas reserves through 2050 would depend on fracking; nearly 60% of the carbon emissions enabled by new U.S. drilling would come from the epicenters of fracking – the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico and the Appalachian Basin across Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. 

Coal – Too Much Already: Given U.S. coal mining should be phased out by 2030 or sooner if the world is to equitably achieve the Paris Agreement goals, at least 70% of the coal in existing U.S. mines should stay in the ground. 

These findings show that leadership is urgently needed towards a U.S. fossil fuel phase-out that aligns with climate limits, takes care of workers and communities on its front lines, and builds a more healthy and just economy for all in the process. 

Key recommendations for what U.S. policymakers must do to show real climate leadership:

1. Ban new leases or permits for new fossil fuel exploration, production, and infrastructure;
2. Plan for the phase-out of existing fossil fuel projects in a way that prioritizes environmental justice;
3. End subsidies and other public finance for the fossil fuel industry;
4. Champion a Green New Deal that ensures a just transition to 100 percent renewable energy; and
5. Reject the influence of fossil fuel money over U.S. energy policy.

Eight charts show how ‘aggressive’ railway expansion could cut emissions. Jocelyn Timperley, CarbonBrief. Jan. 30, 2019.

Global transport emissions could peak in the 2030s if railways are “aggressively” expanded, says the International Energy Agency (IEA). 

Rail is among the most efficient and lowest emitting modes of transport, according to the IEA’s new report focusing on the opportunities it offers for energy and the environment. 

In particular, urban and high-speed rail hold “major promise to unlock substantial benefits”, the report says, which include reducing greenhouse gas emissions, congestion and air pollution.

OPINION: SOONER OR LATER, WE HAVE TO STOP ECONOMIC GROWTH — AND WE’LL BE BETTER FOR IT. Richard Heinberg Ensia. Jan. 8, 2019.

The end of growth will come one day, perhaps very soon, whether we’re ready or not. If we plan for and manage it, we could well wind up with greater well-being.

The Green New Deal: How We Will Pay For It Isn't 'A Thing' - And Inflation Isn't Either. Robert Hockett, Forbes. Jan. 16, 2019.


8 percent of Americans recently changed their minds on climate. What gives? Kate Yoder, Grist. Jan. 16, 2019.

what the headline doesn't tell you: of those that have changed their minds on climate change in the last year, they haven't ALL become more concerned... about 85% of mind-changers are more concerned, but 15% have actually said they are LESS concerned

Shift the focus from the super-poor to the super-rich. Ilona M. Otto et al, Nature Climate Change. Jan. 28, 2019.

Fig. 1: The estimated carbon footprint of a typical super-rich household of two people.

We need to rethink everything we know about global warming. Jan. 20, 2019.

Israeli researcher claims his calculations show scientists have grossly underestimated the effects of air pollution.

The world’s scientific community has known for a long time that global warming is caused by man-made emissions in the form of greenhouse gases, while global cooling is caused by air pollution in the form of aerosols. 

In a new study published in the journal Science, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Prof. Daniel Rosenfeld argues that the degree to which aerosol particles cool the earth has been grossly underestimated. 

Aerosols are tiny particles of many different materials that get into the air, like dust and vehicle exhaust. They cool our environment by enhancing the cloud cover that reflects the sun’s heat back to space.  

Rosenfeld says his findings necessitate a recalculation of climate-change models to more accurately predict the pace of global warming. 

He and his colleague Yannian Zhu from the Meteorological Institute of Shaanxi Province in China developed a new method that uses satellite images to calculate the effect of vertical winds as well as aerosol cloud droplet numbers. Until now, it was impossible to separate the effects of rising winds, which create the clouds, from the effects of aerosols, which determine clouds’ composition. 

Using this new methodology, Rosenfeld and his colleagues were able to more accurately calculate aerosols’ cooling effects on the Earth. They discovered this effect is nearly two times higher than previously thought. 

But this finding does not necessarily mean we can stop worrying about global warming. Rosenfeld has several theories about why temperatures are rising despite the aerosol effect. 

“If the aerosols indeed cause a greater cooling effect than previously estimated, then the warming effect of the greenhouse gases has also been larger than we thought, enabling greenhouse-gas emissions to overcome the cooling effect of aerosols,” Rosenfeld said.

Aerosol-driven droplet concentrations dominate coverage and water of oceanic low level clouds. Daniel Rosenfeld, Science. Jan. 17, 2019.

Adelaide breaks its all-time heat record, hitting 46.6C, in extreme Australia heatwave. Guardian. Jan. 24, 2019.

huge animal culls, including thousands of camels dying of thirst that had to be shot to put them out of their misery