Climate Change News & Discussions

[wjfox]

"But the Green New Deal is too expensive! It's socialist, and unamerican."

/s

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Study documents dramatic loss of remaining Pyrenees glaciers
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-documents ... ciers.html
by Aritz Parra

Europe's southernmost glaciers will likely be reduced to ice patches in the next two decades due to climate change, as the shrinking of ice mass on the Pyrenees mountain range continues at the steady but rapid speed seen at least since the 1980s, Spanish scientists say in a new study.

The Pyrenees, marking the natural border between Spain and France, saw three glaciers disappear or become reduced to stagnant strips of ice since 2011. In 17 of the two dozen remaining ice sheets, there's been an average loss of 6.3 meters (20 feet) of ice thickness.

Their mass also shrank over one-fifth on average, or 23%, in nearly one decade, according to the study published last week in the peer-reviewed Geophysical Research Letters. Its findings were announced to the media on Friday.

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A recent reversal in the response of western Greenland's ice caps to climate change
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-reversal- ... d-ice.html
by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Greenland may be best known for its enormous continental scale ice sheet that soars up to 3,000 meters above sea level, whose rapid melting is a leading contributor to global sea level rise. But surrounding this massive ice sheet, which covers 79% of the world's largest island, is Greenland's rugged coastline dotted with ice capped mountainous peaks. These peripheral glaciers and ice caps are now also undergoing severe melting due to anthropogenic (human-caused) warming. However, climate warming and the loss of these ice caps may not have always gone hand-in-hand.

New collaborative research from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and five partner institutions (University of Arizona, University of Washington, Pennsylvania State University, Desert Research Institute and University of Bergen), published today in Nature Geoscience, reveals that during past periods, glaciers and ice caps in coastal west Greenland experienced climate conditions much different than the interior of Greenland. Over the past 2,000 years, these ice caps endured periods of warming during which they grew larger rather than shrinking.

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The U.S. just had its hottest summer on record
Source: NBC News

Sept. 9, 2021, 1:05 PM MDT

The United States had its hottest summer on record this year, narrowly edging out the previous milestone that was set 85 years ago during the Dust Bowl.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday that the average temperature this summer for the contiguous U.S. was 74 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2.6 degrees warmer than the long-term average. The heat record caps off a season full of extremes, with parts of the country experiencing persistent drought, wildfires, record-breaking heat waves, hurricanes and other extreme weather exacerbated by climate change.

This summer beat the previous record set in 1936 by a hair, coming in at less than 0.01 degrees warmer than during the Dust Bowl year, when huge portions of the West and Great Plains were parched by severe drought. Though this year's summer was technically hotter than 1936, the very small gap puts the two years "neck and neck," in what NOAA called a "virtual tie."

Global warming is making heat waves and other extreme weather events both more likely and more severe, and climate scientists have said conditions this summer offer a glimpse of what could become more common in the future.

Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environ ... d-rcna1957

[wjfox]

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The State of Climate Tech
by Dr. Celine Herweijer and Azeem Azhar

https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/services/sust ... h-2020.pdf

Extract:

(PWC) The big headline is that early stage investment into climate tech is growing fast. Over the past seven years, total funding for climate tech companies, rate of startup creation, and the average size of funding has continued to rise. For perspective, this research shows that in 2013 the early-stage venture funding for climate tech companies was about $418 million. However, in 2019, total venture funding increased to $16.1b, a more than 3750% increase. This is on the order of 3 times the growth rate of VC investment into AI, during a time period renowned for its uptick in AI investment.

…Investor participation in climate tech is fundamentally different to the noughties clean tech era. Climate tech funding seems to be coming from every corner of the market. More traditional venture capital firms are today at the table, growth stage investors including government backed asset managers and Private Equity players are getting involved in earlier stage deals to get exposure, and corporate players from oil majors and global consumer goods companies to Big Tech are playing important roles as strategic investors to scale approaches.

The COVID-19 pandemic has not slowed investment activity. Since the crisis hit, major firms have pledged billions of dollars into this including Amazon’s $2 billion ‘Climate Pledge’ venture fund, Microsoft’s $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund, and Unilever’s €1 billion climate funds. In addition, close to 300 companies now have a commitment to achieve net zero emissions before 2050. Every commitment represents a demand signal—a new customer—in the market for a solution that helps them achieve that call. In many cases, the solutions are not yet available, and will need to be delivered by technologists and startups over the coming decades.

Still, despite the substantial growth rates we find in this market as a whole, it is a nascent sector. Capital, for example, remains thin rather than bountiful. Founders talk of a shortage of choice of investor, and investors are finding strong deals but are keen to see this segment attract more of the best founders. Whilst the policy and regulatory environment is moving in the right direction, companies pioneering the high-risk capital-intensive breakthrough technologies still struggle to get through the valley-of-death and be market competitive without policy incentives.

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The Public is Pretty Confused by Climate Change Jargon
by Kate Yoder and Matthew Craft
September 1, 2021

https://grist.org/language/study-climat ... ng-points/

Introduction:

(Grist) If you’ve ever furrowed your brow trying to remember what “mitigation” meant, you’re not alone.

Many people don’t understand key terms experts use to talk about climate change, according to a recent study from researchers affiliated with the United Nations Foundation and the University of Southern California. Some of the most difficult-to-understand words were mitigation, referring to efforts to reduce emissions to slow down climate change, and carbon-neutral, when there’s no net increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the air.

Experts in a given field might think that technical language is more precise or more efficient than commonplace alternatives. But subjecting normal people to obscure terms can leave them feeling confused and disengaged and can sometimes encourage a head-in-the-sand response. Everyone has heard the advice “know your audience.” That’s easier said than done, especially since many specialists may not even realize what counts as jargon, with their non-expert days long in the past.

“Some of the people in our study were really concerned about climate change,” said Wändi Bruine de Bruin, a professor of psychology and behavioral science at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy. “If they don’t understand what you’re trying to tell them, you could be missing an opportunity to make a difference.”

The researchers landed on a shortlist of terms for the study by talking with experts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of U.N. scientists that released a dire report last month warning that greenhouse gas emissions were quickly destabilizing the climate with devastating and “irreversible” consequences. They picked words and phrases that were important for understanding climate policy but tend to get misinterpreted, like tipping point, carbon dioxide removal, and adaptation. Then the researchers interviewed 20 people, picked to provide a diversity of views, asking them to define these words and rate how easy they were to understand. The takeaway from the study: “many of the terms were unfamiliar or perceived as needlessly complex.”

[Yuli Ban]

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Heatwave model shows it is hotter in more places more often
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-heatwave-hotter.html
by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

New modeling shows that heatwaves across Europe have increased in both frequency and spatial extent over the past century.

Using a 100-year observational dataset and the latest techniques for modeling climate extremes has revealed the evolving dynamics of heatwaves across Europe under the influence of climate change.

Heatwaves can have catastrophic impacts on humans, settlements and the environment. They can cause illness or death, particularly for the frail or elderly, and trigger wildfires that destroy property and large tracts of wilderness.

Understanding the behavior of such extreme temperature events over space and time is important for planning and managing the present and future risk. However, most modeling to predict future heatwaves relies on simulation outputs from climate models, not direct observations, and uses inflexible models that may not accurately capture the dependence relationship among spatially associated locations under extreme conditions.

[erowind]

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Report Shows Nearly All Countries Off Track to Meet Paris Agreement Climate Goals
by Daniel Jackson
September 15, 2021

https://www.courthousenews.com/report-s ... ate-goals/

Introduction:

(Courthouse News) — Looking at dozens of countries responsible for 80% of the world's emissions, two research organizations tracking climate action determined Wednesday only Gambia is where it needs to be to hold back the warming of the globe by 1.5 degrees Celsius, the ultimate goal of the Paris Climate Accords.

A finger of a country that flanks the Gambia River in West Africa, the Republic of the Gambia stands apart from seven countries including the United Kingdom that the Climate Action Tracker's new rating system labels "almost sufficient." The United States and eight others are categorically insufficient, according to the report, which rates another 15 countries including China as "highly insufficient," and five countries — Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and Thailand — as "critically insufficient." For those bottom five, the report warns, "global warming would reach beyond 4°C" if all governments were to follow their leads.

Merely insufficient is an improvement for the United States, which the report notes has seen a "U-turn" on climate change policy under President Joe Biden. After the Trump administration withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, the tracker had marked the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gas as “critically insufficient” in its last survey.

There were 196 countries that signed on to the Paris accord, sometimes called the COP 21.

Chart from Climate Action Tracker released Sept. 15, 2021.
Image via Courthouse News

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Facebook Steps Up Fight Against Climate Misinformation – But Critics Say Effort Falls Short
by Kari Paul
September 16, 2021

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... nformation

Introduction:

(The Guardian) Facebook has announced new efforts to combat climate crisis misinformation on its platform, including by expanding its climate science center to provide more reliable information, investing in organizations that fight misinformation, and launching a video series to highlight young climate advocates on Facebook and Instagram.

But critics say the new push, announced on Thursday, falls short and will allow vast amounts of climate misinformation to slip through the cracks.

Facebook has long been criticized for allowing misinformation about the climate crisis to proliferate on its platform. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, admitted in a 2021 April congressional hearing that climate misinformation is “a big issue”. In the past, the company has said such misinformation accounts for “a very low percentage of total misinformation on the service” but declined to share figures.

Climate change and misinformation experts have said lies on the platform can spread quickly. The climate denial watchdog groupInfluenceMap in October 2020 found dozens of climate denial ads had been viewed more than 8m times after slipping through the social network’s filters.

In March 2021, 13 environmental groups, including the Union of Concerned Scientists and Greenpeace, sent Zuckerberg a letter* calling on him to commit to monitoring climate disinformation and provide more transparency about the scale of the problem.

*https://foe.org/news/groups-facebook-cl ... e-disinfo/

[erowind]

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[raklian]

The activist in this clip is clearly in the right (if you personally reader are daft enough to disagree you’ll see your own folly in due time one way or another I promise.) Yet, the barrage of uncivil ganging up on him and robotic repetition of propaganda by the hosts is unbelievable in a so-called “democratic” country. It’s ironic, the moron in the suit claims fascism without even understanding what it is and is closer to being a fascist himself than he realizes.

Yeah, it's quite a common occurrence in nearly all "democratic" nations. It's been bothering me for a while.

[caltrek]

This is a public document, so copyright related size limitations to citation need not apply.

Biden Administration's Environmental Protection Agency to Limit Climate-warming Gases Used in Refrigeration

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-roo ... mmitments/

Introduction:

(White House) Today, the Biden Administration is announcing a set of historic actions to phase down super-polluting hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), bolster the competitiveness of American industries, and maintain and create hundreds of thousands of good-paying, union jobs across the country. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will release a new rule, alongside other interagency actions, that together represent one of the most impactful federal efforts to reduce climate pollution in decades. HFCs are potent greenhouse gases found in a range of appliances and substances, including refrigerators, air conditioners and foams. These harmful pollutants have an impact on warming our climate that is hundreds to thousands of times greater than the same amount of carbon dioxide. HFCs are exacerbating climate change and extreme weather events – and the corresponding public health threats, physical damage, and economic costs.

Today’s actions build on a foundation of widespread support from Democrats and Republicans, industry leaders, and environmental organizations, all of whom supported the bipartisan American Innovation and Manufacturing (AIM) Act passed last year. These steps are expected to result in reductions of more than 4.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent by 2050 — equal to nearly three years of U.S. power sector emissions at 2019 levels — making today’s announcement one of the most consequential climate actions taken by the federal government in years. Today’s actions will make the U.S. domestic approach consistent with key provisions contained in the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement to reduce the consumption and production of HFCs. That amendment, if implemented worldwide, can prevent up to one half a degree Celsius of warming this century.

As directed in the AIM Act, the final rule from EPA will establish a landmark climate protection program that will phase down the production and consumption of HFCs by 85% below baseline levels within the next 15 years. The United States is already a leader in innovation and manufacturing of HFC alternatives, and today’s actions will ensure that American industries remain competitive in this expanding global market. EPA’s rule establishes an allowance allocation and trading program to reduce HFCs, and creates a robust compliance and enforcement system. In addition, EPA is committing to addressing the use of HFCs in products, and is currently reviewing more than a dozen petitions to restrict HFC use in a wide range of applications. Together, these actions will ensure that American communities and workers reap the climate and economic benefits of the phasedown of HFCs. EPA estimates the cumulative benefits of today’s rule — more than $272 billion through 2050 — will benefit populations that may be especially vulnerable to damages from climate change, and will result in significant compliance savings for industry.

Reflecting President Biden’s whole-of-government approach to tackling the climate crisis, six agencies are today taking several steps to build on this progress. Together, the new commitments will support U.S. industries and workers and protect communities from climate pollution and other impacts.

The Administration is taking coordinated steps across the federal government to catalyze reductions in HFCs, through four main action areas:

Preventing illegal trade, production, use, and sale of climate-damaging HFCs by leveraging collaboration across the federal government, and preparing for enforcement actions to deter and punish violations of the law.

Supporting the development of HFC alternatives in partnership with other federal departments and agencies, the private and public sector, states, and other key stakeholders.

Managing HFC stocks to promote use of recovered HFCs from retired equipment to offset the need for newly manufactured HFCs, and leveraging the federal government’s purchasing power to support use of alternatives and reclaimed HFCs for federal facilities, equipment, and fleets.
Advancing research and testing to identify HFC alternatives and technologies.

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California Pledges $15 Billion to Combat Climate Change
by Matthew Renda and Nick Cahill
September 23, 2021

https://www.courthousenews.com/californ ... te-change/

Introduction:

(Courthouse News) — California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill that will allocate $15 billion toward a suite of programs intended to help the state combat climate change while building resiliency in a region of increasing temperatures and declining precipitation.

Newsom signed the bill in Sequoia National Park in front of two large sequoia trees wrapped in foil due to the dangers of the nearby KPM Complex Fire, which has so far blackened 36,000 acres among some of the world’s oldest and largest trees.

“These trees date back to 3,300 years ago, so you can’t rebuild a giant sequoia,” Newsom said.

The governor used the ceremony to tout California’s approach to combating climate change but to also encourage the federal government to come to an agreement to pass President Joe Biden’s agenda that seeks to increase federal spending for a more climate-resilient infrastructure that is less dependent on fossil fuels.

“They are wringing their hands in Washington, D.C., and here we are in California getting things done,” Newsom said.

Jon Wallace, Operations Section Chief, looks over General Sherman where the historic tree was protected by structure wrap from fires at Sequoia National Park, California, Wednesday, Sept. 22, 2021.
AP Photo/Gary Kazanjian

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Hundreds of Thousands Take to Streets Worldwide for 'Uproot the System'
by Jake Johnson
September 24, 2021

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/ ... te-strikes

Introduction:

(Common Dreams) Young people by the hundreds of thousands took to the streets across the globe on Friday to deliver a resounding message to world leaders: The climate crisis is getting worse, and only radical action will be enough to avert catastrophe and secure a just, sustainable future for all.

From Pakistan to Italy to Germany to the Philippines, the worldwide "Uproot the System" actions marked the largest climate demonstrations since the coronavirus pandemic forced campaigners to take their protests online last year. Climate activists in developing countries—where access to vaccines is limited due to artificial supply constraints and hoarding by rich nations—were still forced to limit the size of their demonstrations Friday as a public health precaution.

"Last time it was digital and nobody was paying attention to us," Yusuf Baluch, a 17-year-old activist from the Pakistani province of Balochistan, told Reuters. "In the global north, people are getting vaccinated so they might be out in huge quantities. But in the global south, we are still limited."
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, whose solitary sit-down strike outside her home country's parliament in 2018 helped spark the global Fridays for Future movement, said that "it has been a very strange year and a half with this pandemic."

"But of course, the climate crisis has not disappeared. It's the opposite—it's even more urgent now than it was before," said Thunberg, who on Friday joined a large demonstration in Berlin, which was hammered by massive, climate-linked floods in July.

Edit: Narrative for the Next Global Climate Strike: September 24, 2021: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b25 ... 7nNSE/edit

[weatheriscool]

Observations confirm that aerosols formed from plant-emitted compounds can make clouds brighter

by University of Eastern Finland
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-aerosols- ... ghter.html

Brighter clouds reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface, thereby cooling the surface. Emissions of organic compounds from vegetation increase with increasing temperature, thus having the capability to slow down climate warming.

Atmospheric aerosols scatter and absorb solar light, and influence the formation of clouds. However, these processes are not yet completely understood, which leads to significant uncertainties when estimating the role of aerosols in climate change. In order to reliably estimate the effect of humans on climate change, we need to be able to separate the effects of natural and anthropogenic aerosols.

The study by Finnish researchers, published in Nature Communications, estimated the impact of volatile organic compounds emitted by boreal forests on aerosol concentration and cloud properties. The analysis was based on aerosol observations at the Hyytiälä SMEAR II station in Finland and remote sensing observations of cloud properties over Southern Finland from NASA's spaceborne MODIS instrument. The observations showed that biogenic aerosols formed from volatile organic compounds reduced the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface by scattering more radiation back to space. Furthermore, these aerosols increased the amount of cloud droplets and made clouds more reflective. Both processes become stronger as temperature increases, indicating that these natural aerosols can slow down the warming of climate. The magnitudes of the radiative effects of these processes are similar and their combined effect is significant when compared with the radiative effect of anthropogenic aerosols in the boreal region. Therefore, this natural mechanism needs to be considered in more detail in climate model simulations.

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Biden Administration's Environmental Protection Agency to Limit Climate-warming Gases Used in Refrigeration

Here is a link to an article commenting on that news release:

https://theconversation.com/us-china-co ... ime-160241

[wjfox]