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]]>Samantha Burgess, a climate scientist associated with Europe’s Copernicus Climate Service stated that this past decade has seen the 10 hottest years on record in the last 125,000 years. In July, the hottest day had a global mean of 17.16 Celsius (62.89 Fahrenheit).
The newspaper article quoted Jennifer Francis, a scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, as saying, “The alarms are getting louder.” She cited wildfires and the rising number of extreme weather events including drought and atmospheric rivers produced by record amounts of water vapour in the atmosphere. Hundreds of billions of dollars in damages have happened in recent weather disasters. Those numbers, states Munich RE, the reinsurance giant will continue to rise.
Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech climate scientist, noted, “In the 1980s, Americans experienced one billion-plus weather and climate disasters on average every four months. Now, there’s one every three weeks and we already have the first of 2025 even though we’re only 9 days into the year.” That extreme event Hayhoe is referring to is the outbreak of numerous wildfires that have devastated a large swath of Greater Los Angeles in Southern California.
Michael Mann, a University of Pennsylvania climate scientist, says it is like watching “a dystopian sci-fi film…We are now reaping what we’ve sown.” What he is referring to is our fossil fuel addiction that is filling the atmosphere with warming greenhouse gasses and acidifying the ocean.
Climate change manifests itself in different ways across our planet. In Ecuador, what has been called an “extraordinary drought” is destroying the country’s transition to replace coal-fired thermal plants with hydroelectric power. The rivers are drying up across the country and elsewhere in South America including Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile and Argentina.
The same is happening elsewhere across the planet with hydroelectric facilities at places like Lake Mead and Lake Powell in the United States, Lake Arenal in Costa Rica, and rivers in China, Norway, Turkey Canada, Zambia and many other countries all experiencing drought within their borders with reported record-low water levels at hydroelectric facilities. Of these, Ecuador represents an extreme case because it has gambled on generating 70% of its electricity from hydroelectric facilities which today are incapable of meeting demand. The drought has meant power cuts and blackouts setting back the country’s economy and impeding poverty reduction efforts through rural electrification.
If the climate changes we are observing aren’t enough, the road to ruin in 2025 begins with Donald Trump’s ascendancy to his second presidency in the United States. Described by Christian Figueres, the former United Nations climate spokesperson as “a major blow to global climate action,” Trump’s second term will see the United States led by a man who has called climate change a hoax and often noted he doesn’t believe it is real. He will likely once again withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement and pull the country out of participating in United Nations global reporting about climate change. Many of the climate initiatives undertaken by President Biden through the Inflation Reduction Act will be reversed or watered down.
Trump has committed to continue to ramp up oil and natural gas production, following in the footsteps of his predecessor, one of the environmental contradictions of the Biden presidency.
Trump continues to question the need for electric vehicles (EVs) even though his biggest political donor is Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla. He thinks wind turbines are wiping out birds. He believes climate scientists have exaggerated how greenhouse gas emissions from human sources negatively impact the planet with those around him claiming that climate change is being used to control Americans through fear. He takes advice from non-scientists or those who are scientists but not knowledgeable on climate change that advocate for more carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere to create a greener Earth.
Meanwhile, at the Mauna Loa Global Monitoring Laboratory in Hawaii, atmospheric CO2 levels by the end of last December had reached 425.4 parts per million (ppm) up from 421.86 in December 2023. In 1958 when the first CO2 readings were taken at Mauna Loa, CO2 levels were at 313 ppm.
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]]>The post Is Global Warming Causing Groundwater Sources To Shrink? appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The survey notes that droughts on five continents, back-to-back El Niño events, and global warming represent the leading contributors to the observed changes. On the world map at the top of this article, the area outlined in Northeastern South America, including much of the Amazon River basin, appears to have been the triggering point for the rise in drought conditions with evapotranspiration increasing in frequency and intensity and spreading around the world. The decline in land-based water resources is consistent with the nine warmest years recorded in the modern era.
When land surface water decreases it almost always is balanced by increases in ocean and atmospheric water levels. We lose only a tiny amount to the mantle when continental plates slide beneath others, and we lose a tiny amount of hydrogen to space amounting to less than 1 Gigaton per millennium. We also gain water from extraterrestrial material in the form of meteorites which contain water. So we can assume that the global water cycle on Earth is a closed system.
When land-based water declines is it reflected in sea level rise. This is particularly true for ice loss from the world’s glaciers that are under onslaught from rising atmospheric temperatures.
So how have NASA’s two GRACE satellites, launched to map Earth’s gravity field determined that land-based water levels are shrinking? Apparently, gravity field measurements give scientists the ability to see the movement and redistribution of water across the planet. Gravity field measurements help us to track changes in glaciers and continental ice sheets, sea levels, groundwater storage levels, ocean currents, and soil moisture.
The reason two satellites are needed is to precisely measure the tiny variations between them as each satellite passes over the same patch of planet recording changes as small as 10 micrometres.
Each day the two satellites deliver 200 atmospheric temperature and humidity profiles. They record ice sheet and alpine glacier mass losses from the Antarctic to Greenland and across the mountainous areas of the rest of the planet.
The data collected discerns what is causing sea level rise by recording the amount of meltwater from ice entering the world’s oceans. This allows climatologists to determine ocean thermal expansion is playing a more significant role in sea level rise when compared to melting land ice.
What the GRACE satellites are seeing is land-based water losses in 13 of the 37 largest aquifers as well as increases in ocean heat content resulting from increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions.
NASA Goddard meteorologist, Michael Bosilovich, notes that global warming is increasing the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere. That doesn’t necessarily translate into increases in total precipitation but it does trigger intense weather events that are often followed by long periods of no precipitation. This is causing soils to dry and become more compact making it harder for the water to percolate into underground aquifers. Bosilovich notes, “The problem when you have extreme precipitation is the water ends up running off.” Add to this warming temperatures that “increase both the evaporation of water from the surface to the atmosphere, and the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere, increasing the frequency and intensity of drought conditions.”
Matthew Rodell, one of the authors of the report in the journal, is a hydrologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and notes that the global land-based water declines correspond with the nine warmest years of the modern era. He states, “We don’t think this is a coincidence, and it could be a harbinger of what’s to come.”
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]]>The post We Are Witnessing A Disaster Intensification Loop In Extreme Weather Events appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>Here in Southern Ontario, rainstorms and wind events are more intense. Our summers are hotter. In winter we get polar vortices that cause precipitous temperature drops that can linger for weeks and then suddenly vanish. The world’s weather systems here and elsewhere appear to be increasingly out of whack.
Climate scientists tell us that no individual hurricane, tornado, thunderstorm or heatwave is proof of global warming, but disaster intensification over multiple events and years confirms the predicted consequences of a buildup of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
We have witnessed the greatest loop intensification threat this week after Hurricane Helene wreaked havoc from the Florida coast to North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Following it comes Hurricane Milton, which will have made landfall near Florida’s Tampa Bay by the end of today.
Helene sideswiped the Tampa Bay area and now just days after with above average Gulf of Mexico surface temperatures feeding Milton making it even more intense. Over 24 hours Milton saw maximum sustained wind speeds increase 56 kilometres (35 miles) per hour. As the hurricane approaches the shallows of Tampa Bay, Gulf water will pile up against the shoreline causing an enormous storm surge estimated to reach a height of 3 to 4.5 metres (10 to 15 feet). With fallen trees, and destroyed home debris from Helene’s near miss still being cleared as I write this.
With Milton’s winds expected in the Tampa Bay area by 2 p.m. today, the risk of flash flooding from the storm surge and precipitation across central Florida from the Gulf Coast to the Atlantic is high. The coastal cities of Tampa, Dunedin, Clearwater, Tarpon Springs, St. Petersburg, the Pinellas Peninsula, Sarasota, Bradenton and as far south as Port Charlotte will experience the storm surge and rain. The worst impact will be the Pinellas beach communities and the bay behind it. Inland, Orlando and other communities in central Florida will see the hurricane spawn tornadoes and produce rainfall amounts of between 15 and 45 centimetres (6 to 18 inches).
In recent studies of North Atlantic Ocean storms since 1990, 88% have experienced the kind of rapid intensification over 24 hours that we have seen with Helene and Milton.
Since 1990 the number of Category 3, 4 and 5 hurricanes has grown with research scientists pointing to higher atmospheric and higher ocean surface temperatures. It is the warmer ocean temperatures that make superstorms like Helene and Milton happen.
Similar phenomena have been seen in storms not originating in the North Atlantic. We are seeing more intense hurricanes off North America’s Pacific Ocean coast. Recent typhoons (the Western Pacific Ocean name for hurricanes) like Typhoon Krathon have exhibited rapid intensification. Kraton made landfall in Taiwan last week and then crossed over to mainland China. In September, Typhoon Yagi made landfall in Vietnam’s coastal provinces of Quang Ninh and Haiphong causing significant damage from winds, rain and storm surge.
Hurricanes arise when ocean surface temperatures exceed 27 Celsius (80 Fahrenheit) extending to a depth of 45 metres (150 feet). The total heat of the upper ocean is tapped into by low-pressure cells that form west of the African coast and then begin to travel east gaining angular momentum with constant fuelling from the water column beneath. Since spring of 2023, global ocean mean surface temperatures have been hotter than any previous period on record. June 2024 marked the 15th consecutive month of record surface ocean sea temperatures. The warmer ocean is making these storms 400 times more likely.
Since 1980, hurricanes and other tropical storms have cost the U.S., $1.4 trillion in damages. Of those storms responsible for at least $1 billion in damages, 70% underwent rapid intensification. The frequency of multiple rapid intensification hurricanes has been increasing at a rate of 1.2 per decade since 1980. Multiple rapid intensification hurricanes between 2000 and 2020 increased 82.43% when compared to the period from 1981 to 2000.
In superstorms like Milton, they experience episodes of strong wind shear causing convective bursts away from the eye of the hurricane. The storm grows larger as a result within a very short period.
For many years, meteorologists thought wind shear inhibited hurricane intensification, but with better data collection they are discovering that some moderate shear (5 to 10 metres per second or 9 to 16 feet) contributes to rapid intensification loops. Hurricane Milton has indeed been in sprint mode since it formed in the western Caribbean and it has exhibited moderate wind shear.
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]]>The post Will Global Warming Speed Up Human Evolution? appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>Charles Darwin described how natural selection (he didn’t use the word evolution until many later editions of his Origin of the Species) occurred leading to the emergence of new versions of species taking many generations and conceivably hundreds to thousands of years. What Darwin didn’t get right was how much time was needed for one or more new species to emerge.
Consider this. Several hundred thousand years ago many different human species lived on our planet. In the competition for food and the other necessities of life, Homo Sapiens emerged as the dominant species. Homo Sapiens’ dominance didn’t mean that Neanderthals, Denisovans, and earlier species like Homo Erectus didn’t live on, because they did. Today, the DNA of Neanderthals and Denisovans is in us. As climate change alters the appearance and behaviour of species around the planet, it is likely doing the same to us as we physically adapt to a hotter, drier world.
Although our ancestors first emerged in the tropics, we migrated to cooler areas of the planet over thousands of years and as we did our appearance changed. For those who moved closer to the poles, darker skin was no longer needed because sunlight was weaker. Even how fat in our bodies was stored and distributed changed in different environments. These variations didn’t turn Homo Sapiens into different species. Humans came up with the term race to identify the differences. But all of us on the planet today can produce offspring regardless of race which makes all of us Homo Sapiens.
Humans today have never been more homogenous. We can travel anywhere and interact with anyone. We live in artificial environments that air-condition us when it’s hot and heat us when it’s cold. Even with the current rate of global warming which by 2100 will make many areas of the planet increasingly inhospitable, we can carry our environment with us. If we remove the cocoon, however, the environment will once more assert itself and determine our evolutionary path.
Or we can go another way. Back in 2012, I wrote about an article I read that proposed it might be easier to re-engineer humans rather than try and stop global warming or, for that matter, population growth. Today through tools like CRISPR we can alter our DNA. It may be easier to change us than try to re-engineer the planet.
The new version of our Earth-based species could be smaller so that we would need less to eat in the face of fewer resources. We could alter our DNA to make us meat intolerant, turning humans into vegans which would free up land currently used for meat and dairy farming. We could make ourselves less reproductive to control population growth. We could make ourselves more altruistic and less warlike.
If we become spacefaring, we can alter our DNA to allow us to live in microgravity environments, or to make us more adaptable to living on Mars. The new versions of humans who leave Earth may become evolve into many new species designed for exotic environments, and no longer Homo Sapiens.
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]]>The post How Much Carbon Needs to be Drawn Down to Keep the Thermostat from Rising Above 1.5 Celsius? appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>One recent study pegged that a maximum warming response from an emission source takes between 6.6 and 30.7 years.
If true, it means the consequences of emitting CO2 or CH4 can be measured in the short term, and fully felt in terms of atmospheric warming within the generation responsible for it. This means that tracing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to an emitter should be possible for legal purposes. It also means that the emissions window is very short in terms of doing measurable climate change damage. Finally, for those seeking climate change mitigation, it means global warming counter strategies can be implemented much faster and achieve near-immediate results.
A case example is worth considering. When a coal-burning thermal power plant emits CO2 and other GHGs, the local increase in atmospheric levels is abrupt. Then the GHGs get diffused with carbon gasses getting absorbed by local forests, soil, the nearby ocean and any other natural carbon sinks within the vicinity. That means the immediate spike in GHGs slowly declines. The warming caused by the increased GHGs and their radiative forcing is, as a result, delayed. But natural carbon sinks can only absorb carbon emissions for so long. Even the ocean, the largest carbon sink on the planet, has its limits.
Another factor to consider is the size of the GHG emission pulse coming from that plant or factory. The larger the amount of GHGs, the slower the uptake by natural carbon sinks. That means the bigger the GHG radiative forcing on the atmosphere which, of course, knows no boundaries. That means the GHG radiative contribution gets distributed across the globe, further complicating the ability to measure single sources of these emissions and their cumulative impact over time.
One thing, however, is certain. When a power plant, factory, oil refinery, or other polluting source adds GHGs to the atmosphere, the warming effect can be quick, something not fully described in the literature looking at anthropogenic causes for global warming.
One study I looked at calculated that 93% of peak warming from a new emission source can be realized in 10 years. Does that mean an immediate GHG emissions reduction can determine within a very small time window, the future level of atmospheric warming? If so, then the emission reductions we do today can immediately benefit the planet in decades, not centuries.
If we were to implement carbon capture technology to the maximum, could we reverse global warming? According to a study done by Wood Mackenzie, to stop temperatures from rising beyond 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) we would need to capture 7 billion tons of CO2 and other GHGs per year going forward. But current and planned carbon capture technology, if everything gets built, doesn’t come close to that number. The planned global carbon capture capacity on the books amounts to 1.4 billion tons sequestered annually, a far cry from 7 billion, and likely to see global atmospheric temperatures 2.5 Celsius (4.5 Fahrenheit) higher than today by 2050.
At the upcoming COP28, in the United Arab Emirates, the United Nations annual gathering will include a great deal of discussion by fossil fuel companies about their commitment to implementing carbon removal technologies. Their credibility should be questioned considering the number of carbon capture projects partially funded by local government partners that these companies have abandoned in the past.
In Canada, the Pathways Alliance represents a partnership of major oil sands producers who express a commitment to reach net-zero GHG emissions from operations through carbon capture and storage. The Pathways fact sheets describe capturing CO2 from more than 20 oil sands facilities and transporting it over a 400-kilometre (almost 250-mile) pipeline to deposit it in a geologically stable underground formation where it will be permanently sequestered.
How much have the partners spent on the project so far? As of March of this year, about $10 million. How much do they estimate the project will cost? $16.5 billion which is not small change. So how much are the partners committed to putting their money into the project? It looks like about $7.6 billion or 46% of the total cost. Where is the rest of the money to come from? Government. If true to form as we have seen in many past carbon capture projects, will the partners bail as the costs mount well beyond project estimates? My guess is highly likely.
And should the Pathways Alliance complete the project, how many tons of GHGs will be removed annually? Around 12 million tons in total. Compare that to the 70 million tons the current oil sands projects produce annually and it amounts to a mere 17.1% of the total.
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]]>The post The New Climate Norm: Predictable Unpredictability appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The climatologists and weather people who measure Earth’s temperatures informed the general public that this past July was hotter than any previous month on Earth since humans began keeping temperature records. Four 4 out of 5 on the planet experienced warming affecting 6.5 billion on one or more days during the month.
Atmospheric heat never experienced before was recorded from the U.S. Southwest to China. Of 4,711 reporting cities across the planet, 4,019 noted that July was the hottest month ever experienced by them.
António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General announced, “The era of global boiling has arrived.” One can forgive Guterres for the hyperbole since he has been calling for the nations of the world to take global warming seriously for as long as I can remember.
What are climate scientists concluding from what is being observed?
These higher temperatures and unusual weather patterns leading to unseasonal wildfire outbreaks, monsoon-like deluges that cause inland and coastal flooding, and more powerful hurricanes (typhoons or cyclones depending on which oceans you are in) align with current climate models that continue to improve in terms of accurate predictive capability.
Climatologists have been modelling the climate for more than 50 years. It appears that current real-time data collection, computers, and artificial intelligence have produced long-term forecasts that are coming true.
But what climatologists are saying is rather interesting. They conclude that predictions of unpredictability are coming true and moving the planet in a dangerous direction leading to climate instability. Climate scientist, Claudia Tebaldi of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, notes that “we need to be ready for more surprising behaviour.”
Should all of us be worried about our climate future? Is the 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) rise in mean atmospheric temperature about to breach leading to climate tipping points?
Interesting comments from James Skea, who is now heading up the United Nations’ IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), believes we may be overstating the climate crisis.
In an interview with Der Spiegel, the German news weekly, Skea states “We should not despair and fall into a state of shock…If you constantly communicate the message that we are all doomed to extinction, then that paralyzes people and prevents them from taking the necessary steps to get a grip on climate change.”
Skea acknowledges that we are headed in a dangerous direction but notes, “The world won’t end if it warms by more than 1.5 degrees.” Skea is a physicist whose doctoral thesis was on energy research. He’s not a climatologist. Why he heads up the IPCC is beyond my understanding.
But it should be no surprise with his background he believes the way out of the climate mess is to use technology, and in particular carbon capture and storage (CCS) to reverse global warming.
Skea notes that as individuals we can change our behaviour but that no scientist should be telling people how to live or what to eat. I wonder what my doctor would say to that.
Instead, Skea wants the IPCC to do less “doom and gloom reporting” and more positive activities to advise city and town planners, landowners and businesses. He states, “With all these things it’s about real people and their real lives, not scientific abstractions. We need to come down a level.”
In other words, Skea wants climatologists to cool the rhetoric and get governments and businesses to start spending money on climate fixes. I wonder if the energy industry is all in on Skea’s narrative of business action. From my perspective and the research and reporting I have done for the last 14 years, I don’t think the industry most responsible for global warming is on the same page. Fossil fuel companies continue to drag their feet and at every opportunity ask for government subsidies and handouts. These include public funds to support CCS projects, the kind of projects this same industry has bailed out from repeatedly leaving public debt and facilities never built or unfinished.
So what’s predictable in all this? Those who speak from energy interests continue to be predictable even when they are heading up the IPCC. And unpredictability is very much what we are living with today and will be in the future.
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]]>The post Even An AI Is Telling Us We Have Already Missed Making The Paris Climate Agreement 1.5 Celsius Target appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The study using AI comes from Stanford University and Colorado State and appears in the January 30, 2023 edition of the journal PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for the United States.
The AI used is a neural network that has been trained using climate models and fed historical temperature observations. The neural network’s predictions on historic temperature shifts have been dead on which has provided the researchers with a sense of assurance that the AI’s future predictions are likely dead on.
What is the AI predicting? A forecast that has 1.5 Celsius being reached between 2033 and 2035. mean warming of the atmosphere will happen. The study concludes that “even if the climate forcing pathway is substantially reduced in the near term” which means regardless of what actions we take to reduce emissions between now and the mid-2030s, atmospheric temperatures will cross the 1.5 Celsius threshold with a “high probability of reaching the 2 Celsius threshold by mid-century.” A rise of 2 Celsius is equivalent to 3.6 Fahrenheit degrees hotter. The probability of reaching that threshold is weighted as four-in-five by 2060.
So how do you train a neural network to become a climatologist? The research team fed maps of annual mean temperatures including anomalies to it. The maps covered a geographic range of 72 degrees of latitude and 144 of longitude. The neural network then weighed the data input and minimized any perceived biases. Once trained on submitted data the neural network was asked to make sample predictions of temperature rise within a historic frame of reference outside the geographic parameters of the data input. These out-of-sample predictions validated the neural network’s capability of forecasting future climate change.
Noah Diffenbaugh, a Stanford climate scientist, and Elizabeth Barnes, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University, affirmed their belief that the world will hit the 2 Celsius rise even as emissions decline over the next several decades. Why? Because of the latency effect of carbon emissions already in the atmosphere. In other words, there already is a 2 Celsius rise built in that will play out by the time in question.
These findings contradict the consensus produced by scientists and policymakers who produce the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. Their most recent predictions state that the 2 Celsius mark will not be reached if greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be drawn down to net zero before 2080.
Where is the thermometer now? The researchers used an acid test to see if the AI could predict that number. It did this by looking at the history studied between 1980 and 2021 data, stating that global mean atmospheric temperatures would be 1.1 Celsius (2 Fahrenheit) higher than pre-Industrial Revolution temperatures by 2022. That accuracy astonished Diffenbaugh who in a Stanford news release stated that he was surprised by the AI. He states “The fact that the AI has such high accuracy increases my confidence in its predictions of future warming.”
Going forward the AI has predicted atmospheric temperatures to have a one-in-two chance by 2054 of hitting the 2.0 Celsius threshold, and a two-in-three chance of crossing it between 2044 and 2065. The chart below provides a sample of the AI’s low and high prediction levels between now and 2065.
The only way to bend these odds means a concerted effort by all producers of GHGs to reduce the output of carbon dioxide, methane and other atmospheric-warming gasses from every aspect of their operations. It is no longer a question of meeting the lower 1.5 Celsius objective, but avoiding the 2 Celsius scenario with unintended and unpredictable consequences for the planet’s ecosystems.
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]]>The post Where are the Leaders to Meet the Challenges of the 21st Century? appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>What I said then was, “we need to find leaders to provide us with guidance to achieve our common planetary goal. National self-interest cannot continue to impede all of humanity. We are a global society and we need to make global decisions about managing our ecological footprint. That way we can find a sustainable medium for all in the remainder of the 21st century and beyond.”
Have we found leaders in government, business, technology, and science, that can help us navigate the challenges we presently face and that lie ahead? Based on the decade, and our indifferent lack of progress on climate change issues, it appears that there remains a dearth in the type of leaders needed to make the tough and responsible choices.
The planet and humanity need a livable climate future, and our chance of collective success is predicated on actions coming from leaders in governments, industry, academia, and the media.
I recently joined the Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL). Its founder, Marshall Saunders, once stated, “I realized that ordinary people like me would have to organize, educate ourselves, give up our hopelessness, and gain the skills to be effective with our governments.”
Saunders had a good idea. If leaders were struggling to address difficult problems, maybe an educated public could help them be more effective. In this way, political leaders could provide acts of courage to use their positions in government to enact policies to tackle such an enormous challenge as climate change.
Today, CCL, which Saunders began in the US in 2007, has grown to have supporters in 185 countries, all advocating for putting a price on carbon pollution as a market mechanism to reduce our collective emissions. CCL meets with legislators, and the media as informative subject experts sharing information and ideas on how to keep global warming in check.
They along with other climate change activists have seen some successes through international forums like the annual COP meetings under the auspices of the United Nations. The progress has been slower than most of us who are environmentalists would like to see. But at the Glasgow COP 26, in November 2021, a number of new initiatives and commitments were announced backed by governments, financial, and business leaders. Here are a few of them:
All of the above are positive steps. But what still is missing are mechanisms for adjudicating global activity on climate change including measuring the performance of nations, and industry sectors. This weakness of the Paris Climate Agreement signed by almost every country in the world at COP 21 is still encumbering progress in combatting global warming.
Countries pledged to reduce carbon emissions but the hard and fast target commitments and measurable milestones have remained largely missing. That’s why since 2015, except for the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise rather than plateau or fall making interim goals for 2030 more elusive. And the 2050 net-zero goal is being ignored by some countries such as China and India who have set 2060 and 2080 respectively to achieve net-zero.
Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, in her speech to the attendees at Glasgow COP 26 put a historical perspective on the lack of action on climate change while pointing to purposeful and decisive actions in other areas affecting the global economy. She stated:
“The central banks of the wealthiest countries engaged in $25 trillion of quantitative easing in the last 13 years…Of that, $9 trillion was in the past 18 months to fight the pandemic. Had we used that $25 trillion to purchase bonds to finance the energy transitions or the transition of how we eat or how we move in transport, we would now, today, be reaching that 1.5 Celsius limit that is so vital to us.”
When the leader of a small island nation points to how misguided our policies continue to be it is an indictment of global leadership.
Today’s world leaders are happy to throw money at the fossil fuel industry in the form of subsidies. They are happy to subsidize big agriculture, forestry, mining, car companies, land developers, and other business players who lobby them and are happy to receive government largesse.
If this money were to be redirected to tackle climate change through sound mitigation and adaptation practices all of us would be the beneficiaries. We are talking about redirecting trillions of dollars that today are going into the wrong hands to finance the degradation of the planet.
So why are our government and financial leaders happy to continue to finance the instruments of our potential extinction, rather than preserve the only inhabitable planet that we know of at present in this Universe?
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]]>The post COP26 Shows Up the Lack of Collective Leadership in the Face of a Prolonged Future Threat appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>What it gets right is this:
Recognizing the science of climate change as being an important driver for actions and policy.
What it gets wrong:
Not recognizing that science should be the requisite driver in everything we do to adapt to and mitigate global warming.
What it says about ending the mining and burning of coal:
It calls for countries to phase out coal recognizing that it is the largest human activity contributing to greenhouse gas emissions.
What it doesn’t say about ending coal:
It establishes no firm dates or targets to eliminate mining of coal or using it for thermal power generation.
What it says about ending fossil fuel subsidies:
It calls for countries to stop subsidizing fossil fuel exploration and development projects.
What it doesn’t say about ending subsidies:
It establishes no firm dates or targets to make this a reality.
What it says about mean temperature rise:
The draft contains an expression of alarm and concern that we have already produced a mean increase in atmospheric temperatures of 1.1 Celsius (1.98 Fahrenheit) degrees above 1950 measurements.
What it doesn’t say about rising temperatures:
The atmospheric temperature increase doesn’t describe the variable nature of what that rise means. Remember that a mean increase of 1.1 Celsius is an averaging out of diurnal changes (highs and lows throughout day and nighttime), over land and water, over mountains and deserts, and over varying latitudes. That translates to much hotter weather in places already verging on the uninhabitable. For example, the 1.1 Celsius rise is causing record daytime high temperatures already in places like Pakistan, India, Iran, and Australia where 50 Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) is becoming more common than rare. That is a temperature halfway to the boiling point of water and is enough to make asphalt melt.
What it calls for in terms of adaptation:
It states that global warming’s impact on people and nature calls for national adaptations plans, and the urgent scaling up of actions to increase adaptive capacity and reduce vulnerability for those in areas of the planet most at risk from current and future climate change.
What it lacks in addressing adaptation:
There is no collective means to enforce contributions from the Developed World countries to finance adaptation capacity to those areas most vulnerable. What there is an urgent request to create meaningful climate financing for adaptation.
What it says about mitigation:
The goals of the Paris Climate Agreement remain, to hold mean temperature increases below 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) and pursue limiting the warmth to 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-Industrial Revolution levels.
The wording calls for “meaningful and effective action” this decade including the establishment of a “work program” to measure progress by all parties with the goal to establish “rapid, deep and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions, including reducing global carbon dioxide emissions by 45 percent by 2030 relative to the 2010 level and to net-zero around mid-century.”
It also expresses “serious concern” that submitted nationally determined contributions from nations participating in COP26 don’t come close to the above-stated goals. And it notes that some of the nations that signed the Paris Climate Agreement are derelict in not having submitted their nationally determined contributions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The wording calls for these nations to have their numbers complete before COP27 to be held in November of 2022.
What it doesn’t say about mitigation:
There is no collective series of measures to enforce any type of compliance to meet the 2.0 or 1.5 Celsius temperature thresholds as limits established in Paris back in 2015. Although a global stocktaking is expressed in wording within the COP26 draft, the process that was called for in Article 6 of the Paris agreement lacks a structure to make the planetwide effort work seamlessly. In other words, the lack of a rule book for all nations to follow means enforcement, should a country not do what it has pledged, is missing.
And finally what hasn’t been stated in the draft is the reality of where we are actually heading:
Based on the latest climate change analysis appearing in my morning newspaper today, global mean-atmospheric temperatures will rise by 2.4 Celsius (4.32 Fahrenheit) degrees by 2100. This conclusion is based on looking at the current efforts and national commitments of countries at COP26.
The analysis which was presented at the COP26 summit yesterday shows global greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030 will almost be twice as high as required to keep the 2.0 and 1.5 Celsius Paris goals within reasonable sight. Based on best-case scenarios with every nation fully implementing emission-reduction targets they have committed to, the analysis points to atmospheric warming of no less than 1.8 Celsius (3.24 Fahrenheit) degrees by 2100. But can we even manage that with so many nations negligent in making commitments, and with no rule book?
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]]>Food insecurity is directly linked to human population growth. Where our population is growing the fastest, that’s where we find threats of famine. And that also coincides with where humans are poorest and most susceptible to anthropogenic climate change.
Climate change, the world population of both humans and livestock, declining natural resources, and the continuation of poor policy decision-making are all contributing the food insecurity globally. Let’s address these issues:
By 2050 the world’s atmosphere over land and oceans will all have warmed further whether we start ratcheting down carbon emissions immediately or not. The latent effects of current greenhouse gasses (GHGs) in the atmosphere, in particular, carbon dioxide (CO2) make this forecast a certainty.
The IPCC’s latest report states we are already seeing land atmospheric temperatures 1.59 Celsius (2.86 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial revolution values. And median atmospheric temperatures over our oceans have risen 0.88 Celsius (1.58 Fahrenheit). By 2050 the two numbers will continue to climb.
What is the implication for agricultural production in tropical and subtropical zones of the planet? The change in temperatures will also mean changes to precipitation patterns. It means land once suitable for particular crops will become less suitable. And crop yields on more marginal agricultural lands will likely be impacted negatively.
Current modelling points to an expanded temperate farming zone in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. But it also shows climate variability and a frequency increase in extreme conditions from hot to cold, and wet to drought. And current modelling shows a decrease in tropical and sub-tropical farming as air temperatures become too hot for plants, animals, and the farmers who tend to both.
Increasing CO2 which is expected to hit 550 parts per million by 2100, will have both negative and positive consequences for plants. The planet will be greener when viewed from space but crops will be less nutritious. And whether in North or South America, Eurasia, Australasia or in Pacific island nations, what we grow and where we grow will change. In areas today such as sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia, where we already are seeing chronic undernourishment, food production and food safety will further destabilize.
Why will increased atmospheric warming impact food safety? Because the altering conditions will affect disease vectors, the integrity of harvested crops, access to freshwater, and an increase in food reliability. All of these conditions will further impact human and livestock populations, affect labour productivity, increase poverty, and see a rise in mortality.
In addition, the cost of food will become a factor of a warming climate. Rising prices will affect affordability and make those who are the poorest suffer most. Currently, the world is witness to a climate change famine in Madagascar. In the future, vulnerable areas like the southern half of the Indian subcontinent, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia may experience similar conditions.
The drying out of continental interiors in North America, Asia, and Australia will reduce crops yields. And even if the poleward march of warming temperatures opens up new farming opportunities, the variable quality of the soils and the nutritional content of yields will mean less reliability for food security.
Recent advances in farming practices, science, and technology are helping to counter the narrative described above. These advances along with improvements to infrastructure in Developing World countries will help reduce crop losses, improve post-harvest food preservation, and upgrade transportation from field to table to ensure better distribution to consumers.
At a recent webinar I attended on farming and climate change, I listened to farmers and agribusiness people describe improving practices that pull CO2 from the air into the soil. They talked about perennial polyculture, cover and intercropping farming and why adding carbon to the soil helps increase yields while drawing down on atmospheric CO2 to mitigate global warming.
But what wasn’t discussed was genetic crop science, probably the most important technological and scientific breakthrough to have direct implications for future food security globally. What this is all about is the improvement to plants through genetic editing using a variety of tools and techniques including CRISPR, the gene-splicing breakthrough I have written about before, to give farmers the ability to grow more even in the face of extreme growing conditions caused by climate change.
These genetic technologies provide an answer to a planet whose human population continues to climb even in the face of global warming and its impact on food production. With current world population growth, the need for farmers to increase production by 50% to meet food demand in 2050 is apparent. And diets are changing with the Developing World’s increased demand for more meat and dairy in their populations’ diets. This demand is leading to Amazon, African and South Asian deforestation pressures to make more agricultural land available.
Then there is the government regulatory bias against genetically modifying plants and animals supported by environmental groups such as Greenpeace who see evil in the science, and have labelled these products as “Frankenfoods.” Today to get a genetically modified crop approved can take two or more years. And whereas most governments on the planet believe in the science associated with our COVID-19 pandemic response, where agriculture is concerned, however, they reject the science imposing arbitrary regulation heavily influenced by uninformed consumer pressures.
Arable land on our planet is reaching a finite limit in tropical and subtropical countries. Encroachment into forested and more marginal growing areas (i.e., the deforestation of the Amazon basin in Brazil) is only a temporary fix to what will be a chronic shortage as global warming increases.
But genetic science gives us the means to achieve more on less. Take, for example, China. The country has less arable land today than in the past. Urbanization, industrialization, and environmental degradation continue to impact arable farmland negatively. Climate change and extreme weather such as droughts are causing desertification. The result is that China has to produce more food on fewer hectares of land. That’s why the country today is the world’s largest investor in genetic research on crops. Chinese see this as insurance to help it feed 1.3 billion which is expected to peak at 1.4 billion by 2030. Genetic research and tools help China to fight the impact of climate change on crops leading to new versions of plants that are resistant to heat and drought, needing fewer pesticides and herbicides and absorbing nitrogen from the air and root systems rather than needing fertilizers manufactured from fossil fuels. Today China is self-sufficient in food but its ongoing fear of climate change has the government focused on using genetics to ensure a future with no food scarcity or famine.
The tools are readily available. The science is proven. For food security humanity needs the science of genetics to improve plants and animals that we depend on for nutrition and survival. And governments that currently follow policies that pander to the uninformed, need to recognize the validity of this science and these tools to keep food scarcity from becoming the future reality.
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