Clean energy jobs grew more than twice the rate of the overall economy in 2023 – and every state has its own piece of the story to tell.

By the end of 2023, there were over half a million jobs in wind, solar, and energy storage in the United States, according to the Department of Energy’s 2024 U.S. Energy and Employment Jobs Report. Jobs within these sectors include design, manufacturing, trade, construction, and operation of energy systems.

Just two states hold one-third of the jobs in clean electricity generation: California and Texas. The rest of the jobs were distributed across the rest of the country in unequal and sometimes unexpected ways.

Get a high-level look at the latest clean energy jobs data in our interactive map below. Each state is ranked by the total number of jobs in solar, wind, and energy storage. Hover over or tap on any state to see the data broken down by sector as well as per capita.

Read on for key takeaways from the new data, including state standouts and lackluster performances.

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2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #43

Posted on 27 October 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz

Story of the week

As an experiment, we asked Google's Gemini for help categorizing the articles we shared during the week. The result is the bullet list below and we'd like to know how useful that kind of generated summary is for you, so please let us know in the comments!

Here are the main topics extracted from the articles, along with their publishing outlets:

Climate Change and its Impacts:

• Global warming and its effects on weather patterns, ecosystems, and human health (The Guardian, New York Times, Vox, Yale Climate Connections, MIT News, The Independent (UK), CNN)
• Extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires (The Guardian, New York Times, Vox, Yale Climate Connections, MIT News, The Independent (UK), CNN)
• Ocean acidification and marine ecosystem degradation (The Guardian, CNN)
• Impact on human activities, including agriculture, tourism, and infrastructure (The Guardian, MIT News)
  

Climate Policy and Politics:

• Climate change denial and misinformation (The Guardian, USA Today, Skeptical Science)
• International climate agreements and negotiations (Inside Climate News, The Guardian)
• Climate policies and regulations in different countries (Washington Post, Inside Climate News, Grist)
• The role of political leaders and public opinion in addressing climate change (The Guardian, Grist)
  

Climate Solutions and Adaptation:

• Renewable energy and clean technologies (Inside Climate News)
• Carbon capture and storage (Inside Climate News)
• Climate adaptation strategies (Yale Climate Connections)
• Public awareness and education (Yale Climate Connections, The Guardian)
• Individual actions to reduce carbon footprint (The Guardian)
  

Scientific Research and Reporting:

• Latest climate science findings and research (The Guardian, New York Times, Vox, Yale Climate Connections, MIT News, The Independent (UK), CNN, Skeptical Science)
• Climate modeling and projections (The Guardian, MIT News)
• Data analysis and visualization (Skeptical Science)
• Media coverage of climate change (The Guardian, USA Today, Vox, Yale Climate Connections, MIT News, The Independent (UK), CNN)

Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:

Before October 20

• Trump has vowed to gut climate rules. Oil lobbyists have a plan ready., Business, Washington Post, Evan Halper & Josh Dawsey. "As companies fall short on methane emission reductions, a top trade group has crafted a road map for dismantling key Biden administration rules."
• What happens to the world if forests stop absorbing carbon? Ask Finland, The Age of Extinction, Environment, The Guardian, Patrick Greenfield. "Natural sinks of forests and peat were key to Finland’s ambitious target to be carbon neutral by 2035. But now, the land has started emitting more greenhouse gases than it stores"
• Election Throws Uncertainty Onto Biden’s Signature Climate Law, Clean Energy, Inside Climate News, Nicholas Kusnetz. "The Inflation Reduction Act was enacted in a hyper-partisan environment, but it has gained support among Republicans. Will its emissions-cutting programs endure?"
• Kamala Harris urged to flesh out climate plan amid warnings about Trump, US News, The Guardian, Dharna Noor & Oliver Milman. "Democratic presidential nominee has raised alarm about Trump’s plans but has not said much about her own"
• Overwhelming majority of young Americans worry about climate crisis, Environment, The Guardian, Jessica Glenza. "Survey of young people aged 16-25 from all US states shows concerns across political spectrum"
• Trump's campaign leans on climate change denial: Six misleading claims debunked, USA Today, Kate S. Petersen.
• An Alarming Glimpse Into a Future of Historic Droughts, World, New York Times, Julie Turkewitz, Ana Ionova & José María León Cabrera. "Record dry conditions in South America have led to wildfires, power cuts and water rationing. The world’s largest river system, the Amazon, which sustains some 30 million people across eight countries, is drying up."
• Is climate change really making hurricanes worse?, Climate, Vox, Umair Irfan. "What we know — and don’t know — about how global warming influences tropical storms."
• Atmospheric Scientist Tackles Climate Change Misinformation On LinkedIn, ATM News, Grant Hawkins. Dr. Gunnar Schade and students in his class collaborated with misinformation researchers at Ripple Research for a deep dive into climate change misinformation circulating on LinkedIn, a realm where the extent and impact of misinformation, which is surprisingly thriving, is largely unexplored.

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Fact brief - Do volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans?

Posted on 26 October 2024 by Guest Author

Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. This fact brief was written by Sue Bin Park from the Gigafact team in collaboration with members from our team. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline.

Do volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans?

Volcanoes release CO₂, but the amount is minimal compared to human-caused emissions.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, volcanoes emit around 180-440 million tons of CO₂ annually. In contrast, human activities, primarily burning fossil fuels, emitted 41.5 billion tons of CO₂ in 2022—over 100 times more.

Volcanoes are part of the Earth’s slow carbon cycle, where carbon is gradually recycled between the Earth’s mantle and atmosphere over millions of years. Volcanic CO₂ is eventually reabsorbed by the weathering of rocks and ocean absorption, keeping the carbon cycle in balance over long timeframes.

Human activity, however, is releasing carbon at a rate far beyond what the natural carbon cycle can handle, overwhelming the Earth’s ability to balance CO₂ levels. While volcanic CO₂ emissions have been stable for millions of years, human-caused emissions have rapidly accelerated since the Industrial Revolution, making human activity the dominant driver of rising atmospheric CO₂.

Go to full rebuttal on Skeptical Science or to the fact brief on Gigafact

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This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

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Sources

USGS Volcanic gases can be harmful to health, vegetation and infrastructure

Our World in Data CO2 emissions

NASA The Carbon Cycle

USGS Volcano Watch — Which produces more CO2, volcanic or human activity?

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Skeptical Science New Research for Week #43 2024

Posted on 24 October 2024 by Doug Bostrom, Marc Kodack

Open access notables

The rate of global sea level rise doubled during the past three decades, Hamlington et al., Communications Earth & Environment:

The rise in globally averaged sea level—or global mean sea level—is one of the most unambiguous indicators of climate change. Over the past three decades, satellites have provided continuous, accurate measurements of sea level on near-global scales. Here, we show that since satellites began observing sea surface heights in 1993 until the end of 2023, global mean sea level has risen by 111 mm. In addition, the rate of global mean sea level rise over those three decades has increased from ~2.1 mm/year in 1993 to ~4.5 mm/year in 2023. If this trajectory of sea level rise continues over the next three decades, sea levels will increase by an additional 169 mm globally, comparable to mid-range sea level projections from the IPCC AR6.

Climate emotions, thoughts, and plans among US adolescents and young adults: a cross-sectional descriptive survey and analysis by political party identification and self-reported exposure to severe weather events, Lewandowski et al., The Lancet Planetary Health:

We evaluated survey responses from 15 793 individuals (weighted proportions: 80·5% aged 18–25 years and 19·5% aged 16–17 years; 48·8% female and 51·2% male). Overall, 85·0% of respondents endorsed being at least moderately worried, and 57·9% very or extremely worried, about climate change and its impacts on people and the planet. 42·8% indicated an impact of climate change on self-reported mental health, and 38·3% indicated that their feelings about climate change negatively affect their daily life. Respondents reported negative thoughts about the future due to climate change and actions planned in response, including being likely to vote for political candidates who support aggressive climate policy (72·8%). In regression models, self-reported exposure to more types of severe weather events was significantly associated with stronger endorsement of climate-related distress and desire and plans for action. Political party identification as Democrat or as Independent or Other (vs Republican) was also significantly associated with stronger endorsement of distress and desire and plans for action, although a majority of self-identified Republicans reported at least moderate distress. 

Coordinating the energy transition: Electrifying transportation in California and Germany, Goedeking & Meckling, Energy Policy:

California and Germany share ambitious emission reduction targets. Yet California is ahead of Germany in electrifying transportation by several metrics, including the number of public charging stations. We show that variation in the politics of coordination in California and Germany explains the different outcomes. Transforming energy systems requires coordination across various complementary technologies and infrastructures—here between the supply of electric vehicles and the buildout of charging stations. In California, a strong electrification coalition emerged across automakers selling electric vehicles as well as utilities and third-party firms providing charging infrastructure. Power market rules made capital investments for charging infrastructure instantly profitable for California monopoly utilities. By contrast, in Germany's liberalized power market, investing in capital-intensive charging infrastructure was not profitable for electric utilities. As a result, utilities did not emerge as a political force in the electrification coalition. Instead, utilities and automakers were in gridlock, failing to coordinate electric vehicle rollout and public charging station buildout. Our findings highlight the limits of business-led coordination, raising the question which institutions help address coordination failures in clean energy transitions.

Over-reliance on land for carbon dioxide removal in net-zero climate pledges, Dooley et al., Nature Communications:

Achieving net-zero climate targets requires some level of carbon dioxide removal. Current assessments focus on tonnes of CO2 removed, without specifying what form these removals will take. Here, we show that countries’ climate pledges require approximately 1 (0.9–1.1) billion ha of land for removals. For over 40% of this area, the pledges envisage the conversion of existing land uses to forests, while the remaining area restores existing ecosystems and land uses. We analyse how this demand for land is distributed geographically and over time. The results are concerning, both in terms of the aggregate area of land, but also the rate and extent of land use change. Our findings demonstrate a gap between governments’ expected reliance on land and the role that land can realistically play in climate mitigation. This adds another layer to the observed shortcomings of national climate pledges and indicates a need for more transparency around the role of land in national climate mitigation plans.

Wildfire Emissions Offset More Permafrost Ecosystem Carbon Sink in the 21st Century, Zhu et al., Earth's Future:

Permafrost ecosystems in high-latitudes stock a large amount of carbon and are vulnerable to wildfires under climate warming. However, major knowledge gap remains in the effects of direct carbon loss from increasing wildfire biomass burning on permafrost ecosystem carbon sink. In this study, we used observation-derived data sets and Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) simulations to investigate how carbon emissions from wildfire biomass burning offset permafrost ecosystem carbon sink under climate warming in the 21st century. We show that the fraction of permafrost ecosystem carbon sink offset by wildfire emissions was 14%–25% during the past two decades. The fraction is projected to be 28%–45% at the end of this century under different warming scenarios. The weakening carbon sink is caused by greater increase in wildfire emissions than net ecosystem production in permafrost regions under climate warming. The increased fraction of ecosystem carbon sink offset by wildfire carbon loss is especially pronounced in continuous permafrost region during the past two decades. 

Feedbacks From Young Permafrost Carbon Remobilization to the Deglacial Methane Rise, Sabino et al., Global Biogeochemical Cycles:

Here, we investigate the large-scale permafrost remobilization at the Younger Dryas-Preboreal transition (ca. 11.6 ka BP) using the sedimentary record deposited at the Lena River paleo-outlet (Arctic Ocean) to reflect permafrost destabilization in this vast drainage basin. Terrestrial OC was isolated from sediments and characterized geochemically measuring δ13C, Δ14C, and lignin phenol molecular fossils. Results indicate massive remobilization of relatively young (about 2,600 years) permafrost OC from inland Siberia after abrupt warming triggered severe active layer deepening. Methane emissions from this young fraction of permafrost OC contributed to the deglacial CH4 rise. This study stresses that underestimating permafrost complexities may affect our comprehension of the deglacial permafrost OC-climate feedback and helps understand how modern permafrost systems may react to rapid warming events, including enhanced CH4 emissions that would amplify anthropogenic climate change.

From this week's government/NGO section:

Ukraine’s Energy and Climate Challenges, Special Editors, Susanne Nies and Olha Bondarenko, Ukraine Analytical Journal

This issue of the Ukraine Analytical Journal is devoted to Ukraine’s energy and climate challenges. How can the country deal with the paramount heat and power deficit expected for the coming winter? What solutions are at hand? And how can these short-term solutions be consistent with the needs of a more mid- and long-term clean energy transition?

Impact of Climate Change on Health and Drug Demand, Abir et al., RAND

The authors of this report estimated how the anticipated effects of climate change on the prevalence of a sample of four chronic conditions — cardiovascular disease (CVD), asthma, end-stage renal disease (ESRD), and Alzheimer's disease — will affect demand for the drugs needed to treat them (metoprolol, albuterol, heparin, and donepezil, respectively). To generate these estimates, the authors conducted an environmental scan of the peer-reviewed and gray literature and developed a medical condition–specific systems dynamics model. The model can help inform policies for ensuring drug supply under various climate scenarios.

Climate Change & Crime, Peter Schwartzstein, The Center for Climate and Security

Crime has received relatively little attention to date in the climate security literature. This brief paper is an attempt to begin redressing that shortfall. While crime, as a form of insecurity, might seem low stakes in comparison to terrorism and inter-state conflict, its sheer breadth ensures that many more people have likely suffered from it compared with more ‘macro’ forms of climate-related violence. From petty theft to not-so-petty assaults, climate change is leaving its mark on almost every category of crime.

122 articles in 57 journals by 816 contributing authors

Physical science of climate change, effects

A Dynamical Adjustment Approach to Estimating Forced and Internal Variability in the North Atlantic, Nedza & DelSole, Journal of Climate Open Access pdf 10.1175/jcli-d-23-0651.1

A Dynamical Interpretation of the Intensification of the Winter North Atlantic Jet Stream in Reanalysis, Hermoso et al., Journal of Climate Open Access pdf 10.1175/jcli-d-23-0757.1

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Why widening highways doesn’t reduce traffic congestion

Posted on 23 October 2024 by Guest Author

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Sarah Wesseler

California prides itself on its climate leadership. And the state’s work on transportation – its largest source of emissions – is no exception; its electric vehicle policies have been adopted by other states across the country. Sacramento lawmakers have also taken ambitious steps to reduce car use altogether, developing regulations aimed at reshaping communities to encourage walking, biking, and taking public transportation.

But on-the-ground reality often doesn’t live up to this vision. In particular, communities throughout the state continue to invest heavily in highway expansion projects that undermine efforts to change how people get around. Because of a phenomenon known as induced travel, these projects lead Californians to spend more time, not less, behind the wheel.

Amy Lee, a postdoctoral scholar at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, has spent years studying induced travel and the politics of highway expansions in California. Yale Climate Connections spoke with her to learn more.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Yale Climate Connections: Can you give me a high-level overview of induced travel? How does it work?

Amy Lee: So the biggest factor that people consider when deciding how to get around is cost. That’s a matter of dollars, but also time – time is a really, really important factor in how we travel. When a particular roadway is congested, traveling on it can take a long time, or an unpredictable amount of time, which discourages people from using it.

Highway widening is kind of like putting travel on sale. It attempts to reduce congestion by expanding the amount of roadway supply, reducing the time cost of travel for travelers using it. So let’s say traffic kept me from going to a restaurant I really like that’s 20 miles away, but after the highway is widened, I can go there more frequently. Or I might choose a doctor in the next town over as opposed to the one in my neighborhood.

We rearrange our travel patterns because of highway expansions, and the new driving that results is what we call induced travel. And research has shown that because of induced travel, congestion returns to previous levels about five to 10 years after the highway is widened.

YCC: Is this something that’s been discovered recently, or have we known about it for a while?

Lee: We’ve measured this for a really long time. It’s been observed for at least 100 years, and it’s been measured with increasingly advanced statistical methods since the ’70s and ’80s.

YCC: So highway expansion clearly seems problematic from a transportation planning perspective. Can you say more about how it affects climate change?

Lee: There are several ways. One is that the materials involved in physically making highways and roadways – concrete, aggregate, asphalt – are incredibly carbon-intensive. Highway expansions emit a lot of carbon in their production.

Then, once highways have been built, we develop our communities around them, building further out along these highway corridors, which generates auto use, which leads to more emissions. Right now, automobiles run mostly on fossil fuels, and this seems like it will be the case for a long time.

Highway expansions can also make it more difficult to get around urban neighborhoods. I live in a city with the classic set of highways that were built right through downtown to bring suburban commuters into the metropolitan core, severing neighborhoods like mine from the city center. To get downtown from where I live, you have to cross under the highway two times. Researchers have been doing really cool work about how that impedes walking and biking. As roads are expanded, not only do your shopping mall or your doctor’s office go further down the highway, but it also becomes a lot harder to get around your own neighborhood without driving, even if you’re just going a short distance.

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Climate Risk

Posted on 22 October 2024 by Ken Rice

This is a re-post from And Then There's Physics

I realise that I haven’t written anything for a while and am unlikely to become particularly prolific again anytime soon. However, there’s something I’ve been thinking about and thought that I would write a post. It relates to something Alex Trembath has written in an article about Climate Risk. Alex is the Deputy Director of the Breakthrough Institute or, as some call it, the Bad Take Institute.

Alex’s article is highlighting how people often get statistical relationships wrong, and he’s probably right. Properly interpreting statistics is difficult and it’s certainly not something I’d claim to never get wrong. The basic point he is making is that a small shift in a distribution can have a large effect on the extremes. For example, if we consider one side of a Guassian distribution, then events more extreme than 1σ, 2σ and 3σ happen 16%, 2%, and 0.1% of the time, respectively. If we then shift the distribution by 1σ, the same events will now happen 50%, 16%, and 2% of the time. Essentially, what was a 3σ event has now become about 20 times more likely.

The example Alex uses is people misunderstanding the wild swings in Nate Silver’s US election predictions. These don’t mean Silver’s model is horribly wrong. They’re happening because small shifts in the probability distribution can have a large effect on the expected outcome.

However, when it comes to extreme climate events, Alex seems to reverse the argument. For a particular event, climate change is assessed to have made that event 30 times more likely. However, the analysis also indicates that the same event would have been only a little bit less intense in a pre-industrial climate, which is what Alex seems to think is important. His point is that “[w]ith climate change, they instead tend to emphasize the statistical swings, and ignore the modesty of the shifts in the actual climate.”

I realise that how we interpret this information is somewhat subjective, so am not suggesting that Alex is wrong to highlight this. However, in my view there are some other factors to consider.

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Welcome to the world of personal air conditioning

Posted on 21 October 2024 by Guest Author

This is a re-post from the Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler. This is part two of his series on air conditioning. Part one can be found here.

Let’s look at Houston’s summertime temperatures:

 

Wow, Houston has warmed a lot in the summer. In the 1970s, summers were about 3C (5F) cooler than they are today, enough to turn a 97F day into a 102F day, which is a huge difference.

I grew up in Houston in the 1970s and I can personally confirm that summertime Houston was always hot, but you were not a prisoner of air conditioning like you are now.

Given this warming, it was probably inevitable that personal cooling devices, designed to cool you and only you, would become more popular. Let’s go over some of this new technology.

For example, here are neck fans:

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2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #42

Posted on 20 October 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz

Story of the week

Here's another week of stories describing how our species has become a force of nature by creating a mighty industry now spewing unintended consequences, spanning from the upper atmosphere down to the rotational behavior of our entire planet Earth. In the middle: us and our fellow creatures, buffeted by violent weather, pestilence, starvation, dehydration and various other horrors, all made more dire by our big accident of changing our climate.

We've accidentally taken on god-like powers. But we're more like Greek gods; our efforts seemingly end in hubristic folly as much as they do acts of virtue. The Greeks wrote fables of gods as commentary on human nature and we remain obedient to this plot device— but at scale and type now uncomfortably close to the literal as opposed to metaphorical text of these ancient stories. Our human nature is now a seemingly inexorable force of nature; we don't seem to know how to control what we've become, what we've created. 

If human nature rather than technological prowess is the root cause of our problem, it seems reasonable that better understanding of human nature rather than yet more engineering is key to threading our way out of our climate problem. This isn't a novel idea; social scientists have been working intensively on the psychological underpinnings of our climate problem for decades and we're beginning to get a solid grip on the common, basic fallibilities that lead us to commit and sustain titanic blunders such as randomly changing our planet's geophysics for the worse.

Perhaps more importantly, researchers are working specifically on why we'd continue to behave in ways that we know are causing ourselves harm. One such avenue leads to the concept of "energy transition justice," a term including workers in the fossil fuel industry.

Workers in the fossil fuel industry facing energy transition are a subject of intensive academic investigation, with a cursory check revealing over 13,000 publications for 2024 alone. Interest in this group includes not only matters of fairness and equity but also the possibility that as a matter of policy needing to be bracketed by operational politics, a large group of workers threatened with economic disenfranchisement can be a showstopper for for climate mitigation policy implementation. Again as a matter of human nature, people being governed by fear don't make good decisions, so understanding and discovering how to take away the cause for fright makes entirely good sense.

But it's rarely or never the case that people embedded in the fossil fuel industry are visited by researchers with a Margaret Mead level of commitment to sharing how these lives are lived, identifying connections of empathy to help provide us with the insight we need to ease fear and thus foster cooperation for the greater good. 

To help us better understand people who have grown up in a multigenerational dependency on the economic feature called the fossil fuel industry and are quite naturally responding with fear, loathing and resistance to the end of their accustomed lifestyle— due to circumstances beyond their direct control— we could benefit from some embedded cultural anthropology. Thanks to Citizens Climate Lobby, we have news about what is essentially just such an effort, even if it's not flying the cultural anthropologist flag. Connecting about climate change with the most skeptical people in the USA is our Story of the Week, written by CCL intern author Kate Derbas and delving into Ben Stillerman's residence in Utah's coal-dependent Emery County. Stillerman lived in Emery County while filming interviews and conversations with people thoughtlessly included in the term "dirty energy." 

Of course folks in Emery County are not dirty. They're not top industry executives engaged in concerted lying campaigns. But as a matter of human nature they're responding to being characterized in that way quite poorly. This in combination with what they see as an existential threat and what will certainly be a large upheaval in their lived experience combine to produce anger and fear, and neither of those emotions is conducive to cooperation or clear thinking.

Consider: if anybody has a good reason to believe the lies we're told about climate change by the fossil fuel industry, it's hands-on workers in the fossil fuel industry— with mortgages and hungry children— depending on sincere belief that one is living a good life, being good. This is a magnet for motivated reasoning, for naturally uncritical acceptance of comforting beliefs. They're victims, same as the rest of us.

It doesn't take an Einstein to understand that even if one doesn't give a toss about fairness, as a matter of pure pragmatism we need to treat these people well, treat them as we'd prefer for ourselves. Emery County is multiplied across the United States, and across the entire globe. This collective locus of hurt feelings and economic fright is already a drag on sorting out our climate problem. Left unaddressed, it will only become worse. 

It's better— easier and more productive— to pay attention to fairness, to empathize. Stillerman's entire documentary series on Emery County titled True False Hot Cold is available on Youtube. 

Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:

Before October 13

• Hurricanes Amplify Insurance Crisis in Riskiest Areas, Business, New York Times, Emily Fitter. "After Helene and Milton, some small Florida companies risk bankruptcy. Larger ones will be in the hot seat with lawmakers and consumer groups."
• Atmospheric rivers are shifting poleward, reshaping global weather patterns, Environment & Energy, The Conversation US, Zhe Li.
• Hurricane Milton's downpour around Tampa Bay was a 1-in-1,000-year rain event St. Petersburg had 18.31 inches of rain — or more than 1.5 feet — in 24 hours., Science, NBC News, Denise Chow. "St. Petersburg had 18.31 inches of rain — or more than 1.5 feet — in 24 hours."
• Climate Change Made Hurricane Milton Stronger, With Heavier Rain, Scientists Conclude, Inside Climate News, Sean Sublette. A rapid analysis of rainfall trends and Gulf of Mexico temperatures shows many similarities to Hurricane Helene less than two weeks earlier.
• Why Disasters Like Hurricanes Milton and Helene Unleash So Much Misinformation, Scientific American, Ben Guarino. "Falsehoods spread when uncertainties—and emotions—are high after hurricanes"
• Hurricanes do little to move Republicans on climate, Climatewire, E&E News, Emma Dumain. "Recent storms have devastated numerous conservative districts. That doesn’t mean their lawmakers will change course."

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Skeptical Science New Research for Week #42 2024

Posted on 17 October 2024 by Doug Bostrom, Marc Kodack

Open access notables

The influence of partisan news on climate mitigation support: An investigation into the mediating role of perceived risk and efficacy, Choi & Hart, Risk Analysis:

Perceptions of efficacy play a central role in motivating people to engage in climate actions. However, there has been little investigation into how different climate efficacy beliefs are formed and how they may be associated with support for climate mitigation policies. This study, based on the motivated control framework, examines how risk perceptions may differentially be associated with four types of efficacy constructs (self-efficacy, personal outcome expectancy, collective efficacy, and collective outcome efficacy). It also places the motivated control framework in the context of the partisan information sphere and examines how exposure to partisan news may influence mitigation policy support through the mediators of risk perceptions and the efficacy constructs. Results suggest that liberal- and conservative-leaning news exposure, respectively, associate with higher and lower supports for policies. Overall, risk perception was a significant mediator, and the mediating function of efficacy varied depending on the specific construct being examined. For liberal news use, increased risk perceptions had a positive association with policy support through self-efficacy and collective outcome expectancy but also had an unexpected negative association with policy support through personal outcome expectancy and collective efficacy. For conservative news use, decreased risk perceptions resulted in further decreased beliefs of self-efficacy and collective outcome expectancy, resulting in lower levels of support for climate policies. We also find that political ideology is a significant moderator for the mediation model. Implications for climate change communication are discussed.

Gains in soil carbon storage under anthropogenic nitrogen deposition are rapidly lost following its cessation, Propson et al., Ecology:

In the Northern Hemisphere, anthropogenic nitrogen (N) deposition contributed to the enhancement of the global terrestrial carbon (C) sink, partially offsetting CO2 emissions. Across several long-term field experiments, this ecosystem-level response was determined to be driven, in part, by the suppression of microbial activity associated with the breakdown of soil organic matter. However, since the implementation of emission abatement policies in the 1970s, atmospheric N deposition has declined globally, and the consequences of this decline are unknown. Here, we assessed the response of soil C storage and associated microbial activities, in a long-term field study that experimentally increased N deposition for 24 years. We measured soil C and N, microbial activity, and compared effect sizes of soil C in response to, and in recovery from, the N deposition treatment across the history of our experiment (1994–2022). Our results demonstrate that the accumulated C in the organic horizon has been lost and exhibits additional deficits 5 years post-termination of the N deposition treatment. These findings, in part, arise from mechanistic changes in microbial activity. Soil C in the mineral soil was less responsive thus far in recovery. If these organic horizon C dynamics are similar in other temperate forests, the Northern Hemisphere C sink will be reduced and climate warming will be enhanced.

Vulnerability of Arctic-Boreal methane emissions to climate change, Parmentier et al., Frontiers in Environmental Science:

In this review, we assess the various sources and sinks of methane from northern high latitudes, in particular those that may be enhanced by permafrost thaw. The largest terrestrial sources of the Arctic-Boreal region are its numerous wetlands, lakes, rivers and streams. However, fires, geological seeps and glacial margins can be locally strong emitters. In addition, dry upland soils are an important sink of atmospheric methane. We estimate that the net emission of all these landforms and point sources may be as much as 48.7 [13.3–86.9] Tg CH₄ yr⁻¹. The Arctic Ocean is also a net source of methane to the atmosphere, in particular its shallow shelves, but we assess that the marine environment emits a fraction of what is released from the terrestrial domain: 4.9 [0.4–19.4] Tg CH₄ yr⁻¹. While it appears unlikely that emissions from the ocean surface to the atmosphere are increasing, now or in the foreseeable future, evidence points towards a modest increase from terrestrial sources over the past decades, in particular wetlands and possibly lakes. The influence of permafrost thaw on future methane emissions may be strongest through associated changes in the hydrology of the landscape rather than the availability of previously frozen carbon. Although high latitude methane sources are not yet acting as a strong climate feedback, they might play an increasingly important role in the net greenhouse gas balance of the Arctic-Boreal region with continued climate change.

Weaponization of climate and environment crises: Risks, realities, and consequences, Vuong et al., Environmental Science & Policy:

The importance of addressing the existential threat to humanity, climate change, has grown remarkedly in recent years while conflicting views and interests in societies exist. Therefore, climate change agendas have been weaponized to varying degrees, ranging from the international level between countries to the domestic level among political parties. In such contexts, climate change agendas are predominantly driven by political or economic ambitions, sometimes unconnected to concerns for environmental sustainability. Consequently, it can result in an environment that fosters antagonism and disputes over power and position and increases the risk of prolonged confrontations, hindering the collective global efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Through the current discourse, we aim to provide a preliminary definition of the weaponization of climate change and environmental sustainability and examine its risks and consequences on international relations, political dynamics, public perception, and the comprehensive integrity of climate action. We also recommend embracing a globally coordinated, scientifically substantiated approach to circumvent climate change by building an eco-surplus cultural value system.

From this week's government/NGO section 

Florida Climate Survey - September 2024, Polsky et al., Florida Atlantic University

Most Floridians are more likely to support candidates who fight climate change: 52% agree with the statement: “A candidate's political record reducing the impacts of climate change would make me more likely to vote for that candidate.” There were differences based on the political parties of the respondents on the above question – 74% of Democrats agree with the statement, as compared to 35% of Republicans and 39% of respondents reporting no party affiliation. A large majority of Floridians support using more renewable energy in the state: 75% agree with the statement, “Florida should diversify its energy sources to include more electricity produced by renewable sources.” There was strong support across party lines with the above statement: 87% of Democrats agree, 68% of Republicans, and 66% of respondents reporting no party affiliation. Most Floridians are worried about the impact of climate change on insurance: 58% agree with the statement, “Climate change has me concerned about being able to afford and maintain my homeowner's insurance in Florida.”

Private Equity Climate Risks, Duong et al., Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, Global Energy Monitor, and Private Equity Stakeholder Project

Private equity continues to transform the financial markets and the daily lives of communities around the globe. With over a trillion dollars in energy investments generating high greenhouse gas emissions and minimal public visibility, private equity firms play an outsized role in accelerating the climate crisis. New research for this edition of the scorecard reveals just how high the industry’s fossil fuel emissions are. The private equity energy portfolios covered in this report are responsible for an estimated, combined total of 1.17 gigatons of annual emissions. This figure equals 1.17 billion metric tons CO2 equivalent (CO2e) and is limited to the three categories covered in the scope of this research: upstream, liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals, and coal plants, and does not represent the firms’ entire emissions footprint from energy investments. In the US alone, there were 28 weather and climate disasters in 2023, resulting in at least $92.9 billion in disaster damages, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. The need for transparency, accountability, and a just transition to a clean energy economy has never been more urgent.

The security blind spot: Cascading climate impacts and tipping points threaten national security, Laybourn et al., Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, The Global Systems Institute, the Institute for Public Policy Research, and The Strategic Climate Risks Initiative

The new UK government has initiated a Strategic Defence Review and is undertaking a review of national resilience. Security threats resulting from climate change should be at the core of the government’s approach. These threats have been consistently and significantly underestimated and now pose major security risks. Recent governments have not considered climate change a priority national security issue. Climate-security threats are non-linear and are escalating, posing profound challenges to national and international security. 

104 articles in 50 journals by 610 contributing authors

Physical science of climate change, effects

Arctic climate response to European radiative forcing: a deep learning study on circulation pattern changes, Mehrdad et al., Weather and Climate Dynamics Open Access 10.5194/wcd-5-1223-2024

Gulf Stream mesoscale variabilities drive bottom marine heatwaves in Northwest Atlantic continental margin methane seeps, Wu & He, Communications Earth & Environment Open Access 10.1038/s43247-024-01742-8

Present-day methane shortwave absorption mutes surface warming relative to preindustrial conditions, Allen et al., Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Open Access 10.5194/acp-24-11207-2024

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Wanted: Better housing to help people stay cool on a hotter planet

Posted on 16 October 2024 by Guest Author

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Peter Graham and Mili Majumdar

Apartments on the outskirts of New Delhi, India. (Photo credit: Adam Cohn / CC BY-NC 2.0)