Arguments
Explaining climate change science & rebutting global warming misinformation
Scientific skepticism is healthy. Scientists should always challenge themselves to improve their understanding. Yet this isn't what happens with climate change denial. Skeptics vigorously criticise any evidence that supports man-made global warming and yet embrace any argument, op-ed, blog or study that purports to refute global warming. This website gets skeptical about global warming skepticism. Do their arguments have any scientific basis? What does the peer reviewed scientific literature say?
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #14, 2020
Posted on 8 April 2020 by doug_bostrom
52 Articles
Physical science of global warming & effects
Observations & observational methods of global warming & effects
Will heat stress take its toll on milk production in China?
Mechanisms of enhanced ocean surface warming in the Kuroshio region for 1951–2010 (open access)
Lifeform indicators reveal large‐scale shifts in plankton across the North‐West European shelf
Modeling & simulation of global warming & global warming effects
Is deoxygenation detectable before warming in the thermocline? (open access)
Climate State Dependence of Arctic Precipitation Variability
Changes in temperature and rainfall extremes across East Asia in the CMIP5 ensemble
The irreversible emissions of a permafrost ‘tipping point’
Posted on 7 April 2020 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Carbon Brief by Dr Christina Schädel
Across vast swaths of the northern hemisphere’s higher reaches, frozen ground holds billions of tonnes of carbon.
As global temperatures rise, this “permafrost” land is at increasing risk of thawing out, potentially releasing its long-held carbon into the atmosphere.
Abrupt permafrost thaw is one of the most frequently discussed “tipping points” that could be crossed in a warming world. However, research suggests that, while this thawing is already underway, it can be slowed with climate change mitigation.
- Explainer: Nine ‘tipping points’ that could be triggered by climate change
- Guest post: Could the Atlantic Overturning Circulation ‘shut down’?
- Guest post: The irreversible emissions of a permafrost ‘tipping point’
- Guest post: Could climate change and deforestation spark Amazon ‘dieback’?
- Guest post: How close is the West Antarctic ice sheet to a ‘tipping point’?
Yet, what is irreversible is the escape of the carbon that has been – and is being – emitted. The carbon released from permafrost goes into the atmosphere and stays there, exacerbating global warming.
In short, what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.
Could the Atlantic Overturning Circulation ‘shut down’?
Posted on 6 April 2020 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Carbon Brief by Dr. Richard Wood and Dr. Laura Jackson
Generally, we think of climate change as a gradual process: the more greenhouse gases that humans emit, the more the climate will change. But are there any “points of no return” that commit us to irreversible change?
The “Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation”, known as “AMOC”, is one of the major current systems in the world’s oceans and plays a crucial role in regulating climate.
- Explainer: Nine ‘tipping points’ that could be triggered by climate change
- Guest post: Could the Atlantic Overturning Circulation ‘shut down’?
- Guest post: The irreversible emissions of a permafrost ‘tipping point’
- Guest post: Could climate change and deforestation spark Amazon ‘dieback’?
- Guest post: How close is the West Antarctic ice sheet to a ‘tipping point’?
It is driven by a delicate balance of ocean temperatures and salinity, which is at risk from being upset by a warming climate.
The latest research suggests that AMOC is very likely to weaken this century, but a collapse is very unlikely. However, scientists are some way from being able to define exactly how much warming might push AMOC past a tipping point.
Overturning
The figure below shows an illustration of the AMOC. In the North Atlantic, warm water from the subtropics travels northwards near the surface and cold – and, hence, more dense – water is travelling southwards at depth, typically 2–4km below the surface.
In the north, the warm surface water is cooled by the overlying atmosphere, converted to cold, dense water, and sinks to supply the deep, southward branch. Elsewhere, the cold water upwells and is warmed, re-supplying the upper, warm branch and completing the circuit.
Schematic of the AMOC. The red pathways show warmer water nearer the surface, while the purple pathways show colder, more dense water moving at depth. Credit: Met Office
2020 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #14
Posted on 5 April 2020 by John Hartz
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Story of the Week...
North Atlantic's capacity to absorb CO2 overestimated, study suggests
Research into ocean’s plankton likely to lead to negative revision of global climate calculations
Phytoplankton blooms are visible from space in this 2017 satellite image taken of the Gibraltar strait. Photograph: Suomi/VIIRS and Modis/Nasa
The North Atlantic may be a weaker climate ally than previously believed, according to a study that suggests the ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide has been overestimated.
A first-ever winter and spring sampling of plankton in the western North Atlantic showed cell sizes were considerably smaller than scientists assumed, which means the carbon they absorb does not sink as deep or as fast, nor does it stay in the depths for as long.
This discovery is likely to force a negative revision of global climate calculations, say the authors of the Nasa-backed study, though it is unclear by how much.
“We have found a misconception. It will definitely impact the model of carbon flows,” said Oregon State University microbiologist Steve Giovannoni. “It will require more than just a small tweak.”
Oceans' capacity to absorb CO2 overestimated, study suggests by Jonathan Watts, Environment, Guardian, Apr 3, 2020
Click here to access the entire article.
2020 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #14
Posted on 4 April 2020 by John Hartz
Editor's Choice
Bill McKibben on Solidarity in the Time of Social Distancing
HEATED is a new 6-episode, limited-run podcast series that shows how COVID-19 and the climate crisis cannot be separated. In a series of up-to-the-minute interviews, HEATED newsletter's Emily Atkin connects the dots on how two of the most pressing issues of our time are really one and the same. First up: Bill McKibben, a leader in the climate movement for more than 20 years as a journalist, author, and co-founder of 350.org.
Bill McKibben on Solidarity in the Time of Social Distancing by Emily Atkin, HEATED/Drilled News, Apr 1, 2020
Click here to access a transcript of the podcast
YouTube's Climate Denial Problem
Posted on 3 April 2020 by Guest Author
This video was made by zentouro
In January of 2020, AVAAZ released a report investigating YouTube and Climate Misinformation. Let's talk about it.
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #13, 2020
Posted on 1 April 2020 by doug_bostrom
46 Articles
Physical science of global warming & effects
Greenhouse effect: the relative contributions of emission height and total absorption
Observations & observational methods of global warming & effects
Regional differences in global glacier retreat from 1980 to 2015
Long tern trends (1958-2017) in snow cover duration and depth in the Pyrenees
Modeling & simulation of global warming & global warming effects
Climate change projections for the Australian monsoon from CMIP6 models
Benchmarking Simulated Precipitation in Earth System Models (open access)
A history of FLICC: the 5 techniques of science denial
Posted on 31 March 2020 by John Cook
In 2007, Mark Hoofnagle suggested on his Science Blog Denialism that denialists across a range of topics such as climate change, evolution, & HIV/AIDS all employed the same rhetorical tactics to sow confusion. The five general tactics were conspiracy, selectivity (cherry-picking), fake experts, impossible expectations (also known as moving goalposts), and general fallacies of logic.
Two years later, Pascal Diethelm and Martin McKee published an article in the scientific journal European Journal of Public Health titled Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond? They further fleshed out Hoofnagle’s five denialist tactics and argued that we should expose to public scrutiny the tactics of denial, identifying them for what they are. I took this advice to heart and began including the five denialist tactics in my own talks about climate misinformation.
In 2013, the Australian Youth Climate Coalition invited me to give a workshop about climate misinformation at their annual summit. As I prepared my presentation, I mused on whether the five denial techniques could be adapted into a sticky, easy-to-remember acronym. I vividly remember my first attempt: beginning with Fake Experts, Unrealistic Expectations, Cherry Picking… realizing I was going in a problematic direction for a workshop for young participants. I started over and settled on FLICC: Fake experts, Logical fallacies, Impossible expectations, Cherry picking, and Conspiracy theories.
When I led a 2015 collaboration between the University of Queensland and Skeptical Science to develop the free online course Denial101x: Making Sense of Climate Science Denial, we made FLICC the underlying framework of the entire course. An important component of our debunking of the most common myths about climate change was identifying the denial techniques in each myth. A common comment we received from students was how much they appreciated learning about FLICC.
Scientists share their grief, anger, and hope over climate change
Posted on 30 March 2020 by greenman3610
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections
This month’s original YCC “This Is Not Cool” video shows how several experienced climate scientists are handling the emotional and personal feelings that many feel in grasping the potential adverse effects of runaway climate change. In the current global context posed by the coronavirus pandemic, there are striking similarities between the COVID-19 disease and risks posed by climate change.
“Knowing what I know about the science and the projections, that puts me into a state of grief,” says climate scientist Jeff Kiehl, a veteran of the National Center for Atmospheric Research now associated with the University of California, Santa Cruz. With a first grandchild now 10 months old, Kiehl points to what he sees as “lost opportunities” to get a jump on climate change and says he fears “loss of a world that we as a species have known since our beginning.”
“I’ve been there, I’ve been depressed about these results many times,” says University of Wisconsin scientist Andrea Dutton. She says that in her presentations to the public, she feels it is important to help audiences fully discuss personal feelings with friends, family, and acquaintances.
“We almost need a team of psychiatrists and therapists to go into a community dealing with climate change to allow people to process all these emotions,” Dutton says. She adds that “we must allow people to emotionally respond to scientists’ information” and “accept reality.” Her prescription: “For me, it’s engaging in solutions. … The future is going to be different” and the public should “not fight that feeling anymore” but rather accept and ask how that future should best be shaped.
Anger is OK and can lead to constructive engagement
Asked by videographer Peter Sinclair if scientists should feel a “sense of anger,” Kiehl says well-channeled anger over climate change risks can be “a good source of energy” and can lead to “some very constructive action” and engagement on climate change issues.
2020 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #13
Posted on 29 March 2020 by John Hartz
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Story of the Week...
‘Misinformation kills’: The link between coronavirus conspiracies and climate denial
Grist / Rob Kim / Stringer / CSA Images
Scientific warnings are being ignored, misinformation is spreading, and prominent Republicans have said that addressing the problem is either too expensive or too difficult. No, this isn’t climate change: This is the new reality of the novel coronavirus, the deadly pandemic sweeping the planet.
Over the past several weeks, as global cases of COVID-19 have climbed to over 500,000, conspiracy theories and fake news have also been on the rise. On Monday a man died after ingesting chloroquine phosphate, an ingredient in an anti-malarial drug that President Trump had heralded as a coronavirus cure.
Meanwhile, the website Snopes has been forced to scale back its fact-checking work in response to the overwhelming number of fake stories around the pandemic. (Some disturbing highlights: claims that the coronavirus was released by world governments to distract from a planet-ending doomsday asteroid, or that breathing hot air from a hair dryer can kill the virus.)
‘Misinformation kills’: The link between coronavirus conspiracies and climate denial by Shannon Osaka, Grist, Mar 28, 2020
2020 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #13
Posted on 28 March 2020 by John Hartz
Editor's Choice
The Nature of Crisis
Photograph by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / Getty
Subscribers to The Climate Crisis newsletter received this piece in their in-boxes. Sign up to receive future installments.
An idea beloved of the technorati is that we are actually living not on the earth we seem to inhabit but in a simulation. Elon Musk has said that it’s “most likely” the case, and Neil deGrasse Tyson has set the odds at fifty-fifty. If so, we’ve clearly reached the point where whoever is supervising the action has handed the game over to a bored supervillain who is wildly pressing buttons: Pandemics! Locusts! Firestorms!
The name of this newsletter is The Climate Crisis, but for the moment the emphasis is going to be on the last of those words. We need to understand how crises work, and, since I’ve been thinking about them for many years, I have a few thoughts to offer. This week’s reflection has to do with time, which is a variable we seriously underappreciate. We’re used to political debates that go on forever—when I was a high-school debater, in 1978, our topic for the year was “That the federal government should establish a comprehensive program to regulate the health care system in the United States.” We imagine that, if we don’t solve a political problem now, we’ll get around to it eventually. Meanwhile, we’ll chip away at it—delaying a solution extends suffering along the way, but it doesn’t necessarily make a problem ultimately harder to solve. Certain kinds of problems don’t work that way, however. Physical problems—climate change and the coronavirus being the pertinent examples—are all about time. And what’s striking to me is how similar these two examples are.
The Nature of Crisis by Bill McKibben Annals of a Warming Planet, New Yorker Magazine, Mar 26, 2020
Aggressive action to address climate change could save the world $145 trillion
Posted on 26 March 2020 by dana1981
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections
A respected research group, Project Drawdown, finds that deploying solutions consistent with meeting the Paris climate targets would cost tens of trillions of dollars globally. But crucially, those outlays would also yield long-term savings many times larger than the up-front costs.
The new 2020 Drawdown Review includes economic estimates of the capital costs to deploy each solution, net lifetime operation costs, and lifetime profits from the sale of products produced by the agricultural solutions. The key conclusion is that while the upfront costs are substantial – around $25 trillion globally – the resulting savings and profits are five to six times larger.
Project Drawdown is a nonprofit organization that evaluates climate solutions nations could deploy to reach the point where greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere begin to decline (the threshold of carbon “drawdown”). Achieving drawdown will require phasing out the use of fossil fuels that add carbon and strengthening the natural sinks that absorb carbon. In 2017, the group published the New York Times bestselling book Drawdown, which described the 100 most substantive solutions to global warming based on a comprehensive scientific review by the project’s research team.
The new Drawdown Review considers two potential pathways. Scenario 1 envisions how climate solutions could be deployed to meet the Paris target of staying below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than pre-industrial temperatures, in which the point of carbon drawdown is reached in the mid-2060s. Scenario 2 is more ambitious, keeping global temperatures below the aspirational Paris target of 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) by achieving carbon drawdown in the mid-2040s. In the more aggressive Scenario 2, global economic savings are $145 trillion, with an additional $29 trillion in profits generated from the agricultural sector – the latter on its own offsetting the initial $28 trillion capital costs. Both the Scenario 1 and 2 savings estimates are calculated over the life times of the solutions.
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #12, 2020
Posted on 25 March 2020 by doug_bostrom
Tamper with The System?
Well, we already are.
But there's a difference between accidentally trickling sand into a precision gearbox versus formulating a plan to alter it on the fly with improvements in mind. One action is more or less innocently unscrupulous, the other amenable to earning an easy conscience. Low & Buck offer a critical analysis of "RRI" or "Responsible Research and Innovation" in connection with climate change in their paper The practice of responsible research and innovation in “climate engineering.” We've an amply bitter track record of hastily deployed technological products that swiftly became entrenched and very difficult to remove despite obvious problems. RRI seeks to draw from that history to help produce a more rational means of progress. Here it's in connection with avoiding multiplying our problems by thoughtlessly deploying technology while seeking to mitigate an earlier unplanned technological mess of our own creation. The abstract:
Sunlight reflection and carbon removal proposals for “climate engineering” (CE) confront governance challenges that many emerging technologies face: their futures are uncertain, and by the time one can discern their shape or impacts, vested interests may block regulation, and publics are often left out of decision‐making about them. In response to these challenges, “responsible research and innovation” (RRI) has emerged as a framework to critique and correct for technocratic governance of emerging technologies, and CE has emerged as a prime case of where it can be helpfully applied. However, a critical lens is rarely applied to RRI itself. In this review, we first survey how RRI thinking has already been applied to both carbon removal and sunlight reflection methods for climate intervention. We examine how RRI is employed in four types of activities: Assessment processes and reports, principles and protocols for research governance, critical mappings of research, and deliberative and futuring engagements. Drawing upon this review, we identify tensions in RRI practice, including whether RRI forms or informs choices, the positionalities of RRI practitioners, and ways in which RRI activities enable or disable particular climate interventions. Finally, we recommend that RRI should situate CE within the long arc of sociotechnical proposals for addressing climate change, more actively connect interrogations of the knowledge economy with reparative engagements, include local or actor‐specific contexts, design authoritative assessments grounded in RRI, and go beyond treating critique and engagement as “de facto” governance.
The juggling act of addressing risks and hazards while pursuing important, compelling benefits is nicely illustrated by the beguiling article Halving warming with stratospheric aerosol geoengineering moderates policy-relevant climate hazards, by Irvine & Keith. From the abstract:
Emissions: Coronavirus & Climate Change
Posted on 24 March 2020 by Guest Author
Stopping coronavirus means lowering our impact on the natural world. But being forced to mitigate climate change because of a devastating virus is no cause for celebration. Combatting climate change means the same as combatting coronavirus: compassion.
Support ClimateAdam on patreon: http://patreon.com/climateadam
The pros and cons of planting trees to address global warming
Posted on 23 March 2020 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Bruce Lieberman
It seems like such a simple, straightforward, empowering idea: plant trees – a lot of trees – all over the world, and watch the planet’s temperature fall.
Who doesn’t love a tree or two, even far more – the right tree in the right place?
Along with the refreshing shade they provide on hot days, trees of course also store carbon, and they’ll suck it right out of our fragile atmosphere as they grow. Who could argue with more trees, more forests – more shade! – in a warming world? Nary a soul, one suspects, whether of conventional “tree hugger” category or rabid climate science detractor.
Earlier this year, the one-trillion tree campaign was big news at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Salesforce founder Businessman Marc Benioff announced at the meeting that his company will “support and mobilize the conservation and restoration of 100 million trees over the next decade.”
Back in Washington, D.C., President Trump and Republican lawmakers said they too support the international campaign – although Arkansas Republican Rep. Bruce Westerman came under fire for proposing a “Trillion Trees Act” that would pair a commitment to planting trees with a plan to increase logging on public lands. Numerous other Republican representatives are endorsing the trees effort.
Cautions against just randomly digging and planting
Over the past few weeks, chatter has picked up that planting trees is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to combating climate change. Trees are a good thing, but:
2020 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #12
Posted on 22 March 2020 by John Hartz
Story of the Week... Toon of the Week... Climate Feedback Article Review... Coming Soon on SkS... Climate Feedback Claim Reviews... SkS Week in Review... Poster of the Week...
Story of the Week...
In Just 10 Years, Warming Has Increased the Odds of Disasters
The likelihood of extreme events today is being underestimated, new research suggests
A motorcyclist tries to cross a waterlogged stretch amid slow moving traffic near AIIMS, on March 14, 2020 in New Delhi, India. Credit: Biplov Bhuyan Getty Images
Small levels of global warming can increase the likelihood of extreme events, new research warns. That’s prompting scientists to question how accurately disasters in the recent past can be used to predict extreme events today.
A study published Wednesday in Science Advances suggests that some research attributing climate change to individual disasters has underestimated the probability of certain extremes in the last decade. That’s especially true of unprecedented hot and wet events.
That’s because researchers were basing their analyses on a historical study period extending only up to the year 2005, said author Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. As it turns out, the warming that’s occurred since then has had a big impact on global extreme events.
In Just 10 Years, Warming Has Increased the Odds of Disasters by Chelsea Harvey, E&E News/Scientific American, Mar 20, 2020
2020 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #12
Posted on 21 March 2020 by John Hartz
Editor's Pick
Now Isn’t the Time to Forget About Our Climate Change Efforts
Tasha Tilberg, Lindsey Wixson, and Liu Wen photographed for Vogue’s September 2019 issue at the Eagle Street Rooftop Garden in Brooklyn.Photographed by Tierney Gearon, Vogue, September 2019
The absentminded Instagram scroll looks a lot different these days. Vacation pics and shameless selfies have been replaced with glimpses of how we’re living through the coronavirus outbreak and its necessary quarantines: Health care officials are sharing their tips and expertise; fitness instructors are posting living-room workouts; chefs are sharing easy home-cooked meals; and others are posting about how we can all help those who are most at risk.
It’s a reminder of how social media keeps us connected and informed no matter where we are in the world, a fact we take for granted with every double tap. But it’s mostly a testament to the power of coming together around a crisis and taking collective action for the greater global good. In theory, practicing social distancing, washing our hands more thoroughly, and working from home can slow down this disease and eventually, hopefully, eliminate it. We’re all doing our small, if sometimes inconvenient, part, and already we’re beginning to see how our individual actions contribute to something much, much bigger than us.
For those involved in climate-change efforts, you might see a few through lines between our response to the coronavirus and our response (or lack thereof) to the effects of climate change. Climate scientists and activists have preached for decades that our individual choices and behaviors matter, whether you’re composting, ditching single-use plastic, buying secondhand clothes, or doing the precise opposite of all of those things—wasting food, relying on plastic water bottles and containers, shopping extravagantly.
Now Isn’t the Time to Forget About Our Climate Change Efforts by Emily Farra, Vogue Magazine, Mar 17, 2020
Click here to access the entire article.
Is becoming vegan the best thing people can do to reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions?
Posted on 19 March 2020 by Justine_Wickman
This is the new Advanced Rebuttal to the myth 'veganism is the best way to reduce carbon emissions' with the short URL sks.to/veganism
Animal agriculture and GHG emissions
It has been estimated that 11-15% of human caused greenhouse gas emissions are a result of animal agriculture and livestock globally (FAO 2013.; Climate watch 2018). These gases include methane from enteric fermentation of cattle, nitrous oxide mainly from manure and carbon dioxide. The levels of each that are contributed vary depending on geographical location and the source of meat. Animal agriculture also uses vast amounts of other resources like land, fertilizer, feed and water, for example 8% of global water usage is taken up by livestock (Schlink 2010).
Figure 1: Global human caused GHG emissions divided by sector as estimated by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions 2013
A film by Kip Anderson; ‘Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014)’ rallied for veganism as being the best way to reduce GHG emissions with claims that it is the ‘solution to climate change, to stop eating animals’ and ‘the only way to sustainably and ethically live on this planet with seven billion other people is to live an entirely plant-based vegan diet.’ This message was backed up by unreliable sources, for example quoting work by Goodland (2009) that animal agriculture is responsible for 51% of GHG emissions, when it has been estimated to be 11-15% (FAO 2013., Climate watch 2018). Although veganism does have the potential to reduce GHG emissions associated with diet, it is important to consider other sectors that are also part of the problem.
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #11, 2020
Posted on 18 March 2020 by doug_bostrom
46 Articles
Physical science of global warming & effects
Observations & observational methods of global warming & effects
Observed emergence of the climate change signal: from the familiar to the unknown
Analysis of climate extremes indices over northeast Brazil from 1961 to 2014
Analyzing precipitation and temperature trends of Kanha and Satpura Tiger Reserve, Central India
aModeling, simulation & analysis of global warming & global warming effects
The Role of Climate Sensitivity in Upper‐Tail Sea Level Rise Projections
Arctic sea ice loss as a potential trigger for Central Pacific El Niño events
Impact of the North Atlantic Warming Hole on Sensible Weather
Contribution of mean climate to hot temperature extremes for present and future climates
Sea level rise and estuarine tidal dynamics: A review
Climate change impact to Mackenzie river Basin projected by a regional climate model
UK’s CO2 emissions have fallen 29% over the past decade
Posted on 17 March 2020 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Carbon Brief by Simon Evans
The UK’s CO2 emissions fell by 2.9% in 2019, according to Carbon Brief analysis. This brings the total reduction to 29% over the past decade since 2010, even as the economy grew by a fifth.
Another 29% reduction in coal use last year was the driving force behind the decline in UK emissions in 2019, with oil and gas use largely unchanged. Carbon emissions from coal have fallen by 80% over the past decade, while those from gas are down 20% and oil by just 6%.
The 2.9% fall in 2019 marks a seventh consecutive year of carbon cuts for the UK, the longest series on record. It also means UK carbon emissions in 2019 fell to levels last seen in 1888.
The analysis comes as the UK – and the world – enter what needs to be a “decade of action” in the 2020s, if global goals to limit rising temperatures are to be met. Ahead of the COP26 UN climate summit this November, countries are expected to submit enhanced pledges to tackle emissions.
But UK government projections show the country will miss its legally binding carbon targets later this decade. To meet the UK’s carbon budgets, CO2 emissions would need to fall by another 31% by 2030, whereas government projections expect just a 10% cut, based on current policies.
The Committee on Climate Change (CCC), which is the UK government’s official climate advisory body, has also said the UK’s targets over the next decade are “likely” to be insufficient, given the increased goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.
Annual decline
Carbon Brief’s provisional estimates suggest that the UK’s CO2 emissions fell by another 2.9% in 2019, once again driven primarily by falling coal use, as shown in the table, below.
Annual change in UK CO2 emissions in 2019 and over the past decade
| Change in CO2 | Coal | Oil | Gas | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| In 2019 | -27.9% | -0.9% | -0.1% | -2.9% |
| Past decade | -79.8% | -6.0% | -20.0% | -29.0% |
The bulk of the reduction in coal use last year came from the power sector, which accounted for 93% of the overall fall in demand for the fuel in 2019. The remainder was from industry.
