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Explaining climate change science & rebutting global warming misinformation

Global warming is real and human-caused. It is leading to large-scale climate change. Under the guise of climate "skepticism", the public is bombarded with misinformation that casts doubt on the reality of human-caused global warming. This website gets skeptical about global warming "skepticism".

Our mission is simple: debunk climate misinformation by presenting peer-reviewed science and explaining the techniques of science denial, discourses of climate delay, and climate solutions denial.

 


At a glance - Does CO2 always correlate with temperature?

Posted on 19 March 2024 by John Mason, BaerbelW

On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a "bump" for our ask. This week features "Does CO2 always correlate with temperature (and if not, why not)?". More will follow in the upcoming weeks. Please follow the Further Reading link at the bottom to read the full rebuttal and to join the discussion in the comment thread there.

Fact-Myth-Box

At a glance

If you happen to be reading something about climate change in the popular media, be sure to keep an eye out for certain words. The one in this case is 'deceitful'. Why? Because it's an emotive word. It's a good sign that the writer is not a scientist but someone with a political axe to grind.

The heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide, water vapour and other greenhouse gases were identified over 160 years ago. After that, climate research continued unhindered for many decades. However, by the second half of the 20th century the seriousness of the threat of climate change was well-understood. That led in due course to the involvement of bodies such as the United Nations. Treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 followed.

In response, the fossil fuels sector and their political and media associates, perceiving threats to profitability, turned climate science into a political football. With climate science thus politicised, the arena within which research and outreach were conducted had changed. This was no longer a quiet backwater.

That's the historical context. Now we can get to the meat of the myth. The quote above this piece dates from September 2009. Apart from anything else, it's 14 years out of date now. Globally, the ten warmest years since 1880 have all occurred since the statement was made. According to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the average global temperature has increased by 1.4° Celsius (2.5° Fahrenheit) since 1880.

However, global temperature does not correlate exactly with CO2 emissions on a year in, year out basis.There are other well-understood factors that can warm or cool the climate over such short-term periods. You may have heard of El Nino and La Nina. These phenomena involve above- or below-average sea surface temperatures respectively, in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. Their effects are global.

A strong El Nino can produce a massive global temperature-spike. Such very warm years once led to people making the claim of, "no warming since 1998". Briefly sounding plausible for a few years, it soon became self-evidently incorrect.

Instead, the correct way to look at temperature trends is to examine them over multiple decades - 30 years is standard in climate science. So to answer the question, "where are we now?", one would look at the temperature record from 1992-2022. Doing so takes out the noise, the ups and downs due to El Nino, La Nina and other factors. And the trend is most certainly upwards.

To the newcomer to climate science, it can be difficult to spot misinformation. However, opinion-pieces that accuse bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of intentions like deceit should instantly ring alarm-bells.

It is important to point out that the motive for such political misinformation is to spread confusion and doubt. The organisations behind it simply seek delaying any meaningful action. In kicking the can down the road, they try to deflect the pressure to get their own houses in order, and to hell with the consequences.

Please use this form to provide feedback about this new "At a glance" section. Read a more technical version below or dig deeper via the tabs above!


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The U.S. has never produced more energy than it does today

Posted on 18 March 2024 by Guest Author

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Karin Kirk

U.S. energy production is going gangbusters.

Despite persistent false claims that the Biden administration is waging an “unprecedented assault” on American energy, the U.S. is producing energy at a pace never seen before and from a broad mix of sources and locations throughout the country. In fact, the data illustrates that we’re experiencing an unprecedented renaissance of American energy production and innovation.

The chart below is interactive – hover over the lines to see the details.

This graph shows primary energy production data from the Energy Information Administration. For fossil fuels, "primary energy production" is the energy content in the coal, oil, or gas that’s extracted. For nuclear and renewables, it’s the amount of electricity generated. Note that this is not the same as energy consumed; it’s simply the energy produced.

The production of oil, methane gas (commonly called “natural” gas), and renewables is growing. Nuclear power is holding fairly steady, and the only source of energy that has declined significantly is coal.

The largest sources of energy production in the U.S. are oil and gas. Extraction of these fuels began to surge around 2007 when the development of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, gave rise to the shale oil boom. Oil and gas production continues to set records, even while U.S. consumption of oil is declining and methane gas consumption is not increasing at anywhere near the rate of production. The end result is that the U.S. is exporting more of these fuels than ever.

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2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #11

Posted on 17 March 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz

A listing of 35 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, March 10, 2024 thru Sat, March 16, 2024.

Story of the week

Image CW11This week we'll give you a little glimpse into how we collect links to share and eventually wrap them up into this weekly compilation. This all started as a manual process where members from our team - especially John Hartz - scoured the internet looking for worthwhile articles to share on our Facebook page. To share that load, we also created a Google form via which articles could be submitted for the publication queue. As the submissions end up in a Google sheet, it is easy enough to use some sheet functions to build the post content for Facebook and elsewhere. It is also possible to build the underlying HTML-code needed for bullet lists items.

Scouring the internet for articles and building this blog post was however still a more or less manual and somewhat time-consuming process. This is when Doug Bostrom had a few very good ideas:

  1. Make use of publications' RSS-feeds to help with identifying suitable articles to share
  2. Run a script once per hour to generate an updated list of articles also indicating the ones already queued
  3. Partially automate filling-out the Google form based on the RSS feed information
  4. Use a script to build the below bullet list grouped by publication dates of the articles

Each of these steps leverages some aspect of the Google sheet, making everything fall into place nicely so that we can more efficiently identify and share articles we deem interesting. Obviously, there's also still the option to manually add items missed by the already wide-ranging RSS feeds!

Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:

Before March 10

March 10

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Skeptical Science New Research for Week #11 2024

Posted on 14 March 2024 by Doug Bostrom, Marc Kodack

Open access notables

A Glimpse into the Future: The 2023 Ocean Temperature and Sea Ice Extremes in the Context of Longer-Term Climate Change, Kuhlbrodt et al., Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society:

In the year 2023, we have seen extraordinary extrema in high sea surface temperature (SST) in the North Atlantic and in low sea ice extent in the Southern Ocean, outside the 4σ envelope of the 1982–2011 daily time series. Earth’s net global energy imbalance (12 months up to September 2023) amounts to +1.9 W m−2 as part of a remarkably large upward trend, ensuring further heating of the ocean. However, the regional radiation budget over the North Atlantic does not show signs of a suggested significant step increase from less negative aerosol forcing since 2020. While the temperature in the top 100 m of the global ocean has been rising in all basins since about 1980, specifically the Atlantic basin has continued to further heat up since 2016, potentially contributing to the extreme SST. Similarly, salinity in the top 100 m of the ocean has increased in recent years specifically in the Atlantic basin, and in addition in about 2015 a substantial negative trend for sea ice extent in the Southern Ocean began. Analyzing climate and Earth system model simulations of the future, we find that the extreme SST in the North Atlantic and the extreme in Southern Ocean sea ice extent in 2023 lie at the fringe of the expected mean climate change for a global surface-air temperature warming level (GWL) of 1.5°C, and closer to the average at a 3.0°C GWL. Understanding the regional and global drivers of these extremes is indispensable for assessing frequency and impacts of similar events in the coming years.

[Already. Bold ours]

Mapping of sea ice concentration using the NASA NIMBUS 5 Electrically Scanning Microwave Radiometer data from 1972–1977, Kolbe et al., Earth System Science Data:

We find that our sea ice extent in the Arctic and Antarctic in the 1970s is generally higher than those available from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC), which were derived from the same ESMR dataset, with mean differences of 240 000 and 590 000 km2, respectively. When comparing monthly sea ice extents, the largest differences reach up to 2 million km2. Such large differences cannot be explained by the different grids and land masks of the datasets alone and must therefore also result from the differences in data filtering and algorithms, such as the dynamical tie points and atmospheric correction.

[Combined with the non-stationary nature of the "baseline" ice extent used to compute anomalies: where do we actually stand?]

How far can low emission retrofit of terraced housing in Northern Ireland go?, James et al., Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability:

This paper investigates the potential of retrofit to reduce and limit lifecycle GHG emissions resulting from an existing house, typical of one of the predominant housing typologies in Northern Ireland. Through the use of lifecycle assessment a range of retrofit scenarios are considered for an early 20th century, solid wall, terraced house, to understand the impacts of retrofit on lifecycle emissions. A range of retrofit scenarios were modelled and simulated, considering both embodied and operational emissions over the building's lifetime, to understand how net emissions can be reduced. The results show that although fabric and some technological measures can reduce emissions by over 60% when applied in isolation, a holistic approach is required to achieve the greatest reductions. Although operation remains the largest single source of emissions, the results also show the importance of taking a holistic approach to the assessment of retrofit with varying lifecycle stages responsible for considerable emissions. It is seen that emissions reductions of up to 99% may be possible when taking a holistic approach to retrofit and its assessment, considering whole-life emissions.

Living in the ‘Blue Zone’ of a sea-level rise inundation map: Community perceptions of coastal flooding in King Salmon, California, Richmond & Kunkel Kunkel, Climate Risk Management:

This paper uses the example of King Salmon, CA – a rural, low-income residential area projected to be one of the most at risk to SLR on the US West Coast – to examine how a community responds to external projections showing SLR risk to their homes and businesses. Through interviews with 17 King Salmon community members and observation of a county-hosted ‘communities at risk’ workshop, we examined the community’s social context, their past experiences with flooding, and their reaction to SLR projection maps including what next steps they would like to see taken. Residents expressed a strong connection to the place, noting that it is one of the few affordable places to live on the coast in California. We found that residents already live with regular flooding during larger tides of the year and have taken steps to adapt. We observed a strong generational component in responses to projection maps with many older respondents believing or hoping that they would die before the biggest impacts from SLR arrived. Residents expressed a lack of faith in government to address flooding concerns both at present and into the future, noting that general maintenance issues have gone unaddressed for decades. Many residents interviewed and observed seemed open or at least resigned to the possibility of relocation at a future undetermined time.

From this week's government/NGO section: 

Climate change opinion and recent presidential electionsBurgess et al., Center for Social and Environmental Futures, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder:

The authors review patterns of climate change opinion and polarization and estimate the effect of climate change opinion on recent U.S. presidential elections. They found that climate change opinion has had a significant and growing effect on voting that favors the Democrats and is large enough to be pivotal to the outcomes of close elections. They project that climate change opinion probably cost Republicans the 2020 presidential election, all else being equal.

The AI Threats to Climate ChangeClimate Action Against Disinformation, Check My Adds, Friends of the Earth, Global Action Plan, Greenpeace, and Kairos:

Silicon Valley and Wall Street love to hype artificial intelligence (AI). The more it’s used, they say, the more diseases we’ll cure, the fewer errors we’ll make—and the lower emissions will go. But there are two significant and immediate dangers posed by AI that are much less discussed: 1) the vast increase in energy and water consumption required by AI systems like ChatGPT; and 2) the threat of AI turbocharging disinformation—on a topic already rife with anti-science lies and funded by fossil fuel companies and their networks.

128 articles in 62 journals by 767 contributing authors

Physical science of climate change, effects

Albedo-Induced Global Warming Potential Following Disturbances in Global Temperate and Boreal Forests, Zhu et al., 10.2139/ssrn.4435283

The role of interdecadal climate oscillations in driving Arctic atmospheric river trends, Ma et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-024-45159-5

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Cartoons: ‘At least I didn’t make things awkward’

Posted on 13 March 2024 by Guest Author

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Tom Toro

Tom Toro is a cartoonist and author. He has published over 200 cartoons in The New Yorker since 2010. His cartoons appear in Playboy, the Paris Review, the New York Times, American Bystander, and elsewhere.

A cartoon with a left and a right panel. The left panel is people walking in the woods. One is thinking, "i really want to talk about cliamte change but it feels uncomfortable." In the right panel, the same people are crawling through a burning forest and the person is thinking "Well, at least I didn't make things awkward."

Related: What 10 EV lovers from around the world say about their cars

Related: How to speak with your family and friends about environmental issues

Related: Does recycling actually help the climate?

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At a glance - The albedo effect and global warming

Posted on 12 March 2024 by John Mason, BaerbelW

On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a "bump" for our ask. This week features "The albedo effect and global warming". More will follow in the upcoming weeks. Please follow the Further Reading link at the bottom to read the full rebuttal and to join the discussion in the comment thread there.

Fact-Myth-Box

At a glance

What is albedo? It is an expression of how much sunshine is reflected by a surface. The word stems from the Latin for 'whiteness'. Albedo is expressed on a scale from 0 to 1, zero being a surface that absorbs everything and 1 being a surface that reflects everything. Most everyday surfaces lie somewhere in between.

An easy way to think about albedo is the difference between wearing a white or a black shirt on a cloudless summer's day. The white shirt makes you feel more comfortable, whereas in the black one you'll cook. That difference is because paler surfaces reflect more sunshine whereas darker ones absorb a lot of it, heating you up.

Solar energy reaching the top of our atmosphere hardly varies at all. How that energy interacts with the planet, though, does vary. This is because the reflectivity of surfaces can change.

Arctic sea-ice provides an example of albedo-change. A late spring snowstorm covers the ice with a sparkly carpet of new snow. That pristine snow can reflect up to 90% of inbound sunshine. But during the summer it warms up and the new snow melts away. The remaining sea-ice has a tired, mucky look to it and can only reflect some 50% of incoming sunshine. It absorbs the rest and that absorbed energy helps the sea-ice to melt even more. If it melts totally, you are left with the dark surface of the ocean. That can only reflect around 6% of the incoming sunshine.

That example shows that albedo-change is not a forcing. That's the first big mistake in this myth. Instead it is a very good example of a climate feedback process. It is occurring in response to an external climate forcing - the increased greenhouse effect caused by our carbon emissions. Due to that forcing, the Arctic is warming quickly and snow/ice coverage shows a long-term decrease. Less reflective surfaces become uncovered, leading to more absorption of sunshine and more energy goes into the system. It's a self-reinforcing process.

If you look at satellite images of the planet, you will notice the clouds in weather-systems appear bright. Cloud-tops have a high albedo but it varies depending on the type of cloud. Wispy high clouds do not reflect as much incoming sunshine as do dense low-level cloud-decks.

Since the early 2000s we have been able to measure the amount of energy reflected back to space through sophisticated instruments aboard satellites. Recently published data (2021) indicate planetary albedo, although highly variable, is showing an overall slow decrease. The main cause is thought to be warming of parts of the Pacific Ocean leading to less coverage of those reflective low-level cloud-decks, but it's early days yet.

Albedo is an important cog in the climate gearbox. It appears to be in a long-term slow decline but varies a lot over shorter periods. That 'noise' makes it unscientific to cite shorter observation-periods. Conclusive climatological trend-statements are generally based on at least 30 years of observations, not the last half-decade.

Please use this form to provide feedback about this new "At a glance" section. Read a more technical version below or dig deeper via the tabs above!


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Trump election win could add 4bn tonnes to US emissions by 2030

Posted on 11 March 2024 by Guest Author

This is a re-post from Carbon Brief

A victory for Donald Trump in November’s presidential election could lead to an additional 4bn tonnes of US emissions by 2030 compared with Joe Biden’s plans, Carbon Brief analysis reveals.

This extra 4bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) by 2030 would cause global climate damages worth more than $900bn, based on the latest US government valuations.

For context, 4GtCO2e is equivalent to the combined annual emissions of the EU and Japan, or the combined annual total of the world’s 140 lowest-emitting countries.

Put another way, the extra 4GtCO2e from a second Trump term would negate – twice over – all of the savings from deploying wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years.

If Trump secures a second term, the US would also very likely miss its global climate pledge by a wide margin, with emissions only falling to 28% below 2005 levels by 2030. The US’s current target under the Paris Agreement is to achieve a 50-52% reduction by 2030.

Carbon Brief’s analysis is based on an aggregation of modelling by various US research groups. It highlights the significant impact of the Biden administration’s climate policies. This includes the Inflation Reduction Act – which Trump has pledged to reverse – along with several other policies.

The findings are subject to uncertainty around economic growth, fuel and technology prices, the market response to incentives and the extent to which Trump is able to roll back Biden’s policies.

The analysis might overstate the impact Trump could have on US emissions, if some of Biden’s policies prove hard to unpick – or if subnational climate action accelerates.

Equally, it might understate Trump’s impact. For example, his pledge to “drill, baby, drill” is not included within the analysis and would likely raise US and global emissions further through the increased extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal.

Also not included are the potential for Biden to add new climate policies if he wins a second term, nor the risk that some of his policies will be weakened, delayed or hit by legal challenges.

Regardless of the precise impact, a second Trump term that successfully dismantles Biden’s climate legacy would likely end any global hopes of keeping global warming below 1.5C.

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2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #10

Posted on 10 March 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom

A listing of 35 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, March 3, 2024 thru Sat, March 9, 2024.

Story(s) of the week

Two stories on one topic inexorably lead to a third story.

Fury after Exxon chief says public to blame for climate failures in The Guardian provides straight journalistic coverage of Exxon CEO Darren Woods' remarkable implication that consumers are too stupid to understand or want sustainable energy supplies, and that anyway permanent, modernized energy is not profitable enough for Exxon or its shareholders. Backlash ensued. Bill McKibben's The most epic (and literal) gaslighting of all time is exemplary of critical analysis catalyzed by the Exxon top dog's clumsy speecha surgical dissection of Woods' anachronistic and strikingly antisocial thinking and expression. 

Where's this fracas going to end? Ultimately the whole travesty of industry procrastination, deceit and naked unheeding self-interest is headed to courts of law, of course— as always happens in cases of reckless endangerment. A tidal wave of accountability for fossil fuel industry intransigence is beginning to pile up in the shoaling waters of our and the fossil fuel industry's immediate future, as described in Grist and Big Oil faces a flood of climate lawsuits - and they`re moving closer to trial. Meanwhile, Darren Woods seems to be helping set the mood in the room when it comes to judgment of a track record of industry alienation from broader human society and its interests. It's a puzzling posture. 

Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:

Before March 3

March 3

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Skeptical Science New Research for Week #10 2024

Posted on 7 March 2024 by Doug Bostrom, Marc Kodack

Open acccess notables

Projections of an ice-free Arctic Ocean, Jahn et al., Nature Reviews Earth & Environment:

Observed Arctic sea ice losses are a sentinel of anthropogenic climate change. These reductions are projected to continue with ongoing warming, ultimately leading to an ice-free Arctic (sea ice area 2). In this Review, we synthesize understanding of the timing and regional variability of such an ice-free Arctic. In the September monthly mean, the earliest ice-free conditions (the first single occurrence of an ice-free Arctic) could occur in 2020–2030s under all emission trajectories and are likely to occur by 2050. However, daily September ice-free conditions are expected approximately 4 years earlier on average, with the possibility of preceding monthly metrics by 10 years. Consistently ice-free September conditions (frequent occurrences of an ice-free Arctic) are anticipated by mid-century (by 2035–2067), with emission trajectories determining how often and for how long the Arctic could be ice free. 

Sustained growth of sulfur hexafluoride emissions in China inferred from atmospheric observations, An et al., Nature Communications:

Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is a potent greenhouse gas. Here we use long-term atmospheric observations to determine SF6 emissions from China between 2011 and 2021, which are used to evaluate the Chinese national SF6 emission inventory and to better understand the global SF6 budget. SF6 emissions in China substantially increased from 2.6 (2.3-2.7, 68% uncertainty) Gg yr−1 in 2011 to 5.1 (4.8-5.4) Gg yr−1 in 2021. The increase from China is larger than the global total emissions rise, implying that it has offset falling emissions from other countries.

The rise, fall and rebirth of ocean carbon sequestration as a climate 'solution', De Pryck & Boettcher, Global Environmental Change:

Using an innovative quali-quantitative methodology which combines scientometrics with document analysis, observational fieldwork, and interviews, we outline three historical phases in the history of ocean carbon sequestration that follow recurring cycles of hype, controversy and disappointment. We argue that the most recent hype around ocean carbon sequestration was not triggered by a technological breakthrough or a reduction in scientific uncertainty, but by new socio-technical configurations and coalitions. We conclude by showing that how climate change solutions are put on the agenda and become legitimised is both a scientific and political process, linked to how science frames the climate crisis, and ultimately, its governance.

“In the end, the story of climate change was one of hope and redemption”: ChatGPT’s narrative on global warming, Sommer & von Querfurth, Ambio:

This paper examines the narrative of ChatGPT's stories on climate change. Our explorative analysis reveals that ChatGPT’s stories on climate change show a relatively uniform structure and similar content. Generally, the narrative is in line with scientific knowledge on climate change; the stories convey no significant misinformation. However, specific topics in current debates on global warming are conspicuously missing. According to the ChatGPT narrative, humans as a species are responsible for climate change and specific economic activities or actors associated with carbon emissions play no role. Analogously, the social structuration of vulnerability to climate impacts and issues of climate justice are hardly addressed. ChatGPT’s narrative consists of de-politicized stories that are highly optimistic about technological progress.

Increasing Flood Hazard Posed by Tropical Cyclone Rapid Intensification in a Changing Climate, Lockwood et al., Geophysical Research Letters:

Tropical cyclones (TCs) that rapidly intensify (RI) before hitting land are typically hard to predict and cause immense destruction. We used synthetic TCs downscaled from global climate models and physics-based hazard models to examine the dangers posed by these RI storms in historical and future climates. The TC simulation shows that, as the climate warms, the number of TCs undergoing rapid intensification could rise substantially in the North Atlantic region. Additionally, the likelihood of rapid intensification within 24 hr of landfall significantly increases. These TCs are much riskier, particularly in terms of heavy rainfall, even when compared to equally strong TCs that did not rapidly intensify. Consequently, 100-year rainfall and storm tide levels will greatly increase under climate change, largely due to the increase of RI events in the future.

Past and Projected Future Droughts in the Upper Colorado River Basin, McCabe et al., Geophysical Research Letters:

A long and severe drought has affected much of the western United States since about the year 2000 CE, including the Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB). Comparing this drought to past UCRB droughts (during 1 CE through 2021 CE), we find that the 2000–2021 drought is not the most severe UCRB drought. The results also suggest that natural variability combined with projected climate warming could result in UCRB drought events that are more severe than any drought since 1 CE.

From this week's government/NGO section: 

Many newly labeled USDA climate-smart conservation practices lack climate benefitsAnne Schechinger, Environmental Working Group:

Newly designated U.S Department of Agriculture's climate-smart conservation practices likely do not reduce agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. Only practices that reduce emissions are eligible for $19.5 billion in 2022 Inflation Reduction Act funds. The new designations make it look, erroneously, like a lot of money is going to climate-smart agriculture. Against the backdrop of the deepening climate crisis, the Department of Agriculture recently added 15 Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP, practices to its climate-smart conservation list – but many likely do little or nothing to help in the climate fight.

Rooftop solar on the rise. Small solar projects are delivering 10 times as much power as a decade agoDutzik et al, Environment America Research & Policy Center and Frontier Group:

Small-scale solar energy – of which rooftop solar is the largest component – is growing rapidly in the U.S., producing 10 times as much power in 2022 as a decade earlier. Small-scale solar generated enough electricity in 2022 to power 5.7 million typical American homes – more than all the homes in the state of Pennsylvania. The U.S. has only scratched the surface of rooftop solar’s potential. Rooftop solar has the technical potential to generate electricity equivalent to about 45% of all electricity sales in the U.S. at 2022 demand levels. In 2022, the U.S. only generated about 1.5% of all the electricity it used from rooftop solar.

150 articles in 74 journals by 907 contributing authors

Physical science of climate change, effects

Decoding low-frequency climate variations: A case study on ENSO and ocean surface warming, Kallummal, Dynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans 10.1016/j.dynatmoce.2024.101453

Robust Polar Amplification in Ice-Free Climates Relies on Ocean Heat Transport and Cloud Radiative Effects, England & Feldl, Journal of Climate Open Access pdf 10.1175/jcli-d-23-0151.1

Spatiotemporal heterogeneity in global urban surface warming, Ge et al., Remote Sensing of Environment 10.1016/j.rse.2024.114081

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All this climate data is wild

Posted on 6 March 2024 by Guest Author

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Kristen Pope

An elephant seal dives deeper than 1,000 meters below Antarctic waters with a tiny tag affixed to its fur, helping scientists collect valuable data about climate change. In Mongolia, pigeons fly around the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, with sensors on their bodies that help gauge air pollution.

A recent Nature Climate Change article notes that more than 1,000 animal species have worn sensors to gather data in places where measurement has always been difficult. In this way, elephants, wildebeests, caribou, pigeons, seals, and other animals have helped fill gaps in knowledge of our changing climate.

Millions of observations have been collected using these methods, according to the paper by Diego Ellis-Soto, Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, and his co-authors. It’s a much-needed supplement to data collected from sensors connected to objects such as ocean buoys, Earth-orbiting satellites, and terrestrial weather stations. These sensors provide valuable data but there are too few of them to gather sufficient data points to reflect microclimates and short-term patterns associated with climate change. Meanwhile, satellites have limited resolution and can be thwarted by clouds.

“Animals overall can go to places that are very hard to reach, such as polar regions on the ocean, tropical rainforests, tops of mountains, remote Pacific islands,” Ellis-Soto says. “So they can fill important gaps in our meteorological weather forecasting system. For example, there are few weather stations at elevations above 2,000 meters, but mountains are some of the most complex regions for predicting weather and are experiencing rapid changes under climate change.”

Animals have collected millions of observations about everything from air and water temperature to wind speed and direction to sea salinity. They have helped scientists learn about turbulence, air pollution, species movement and locations, and more. Animals can also be present for extreme events like heat waves, which Ellis-Soto notes are difficult to design experiments around.

photo of a long-necked bird in flightA white stork (Ciconia ciconia) fitted with a transmitter carrying piece of plastic. (Photo credit: Charles J. Sharp / CC BY-NC 4.0Credit: Charles J Sharp.+44 7917562756.+

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At a glance - Human activity is driving retreat of arctic sea ice

Posted on 5 March 2024 by John Mason, BaerbelW

On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a "bump" for our ask. This week features "Human activity is driving retreat of Arctic sea ice". More will follow in the upcoming weeks. Please follow the Further Reading link at the bottom to read the full rebuttal and to join the discussion in the comment thread there.

Fact Myth Box

At a glance

The Northwest Passage is the sea route around the waters off northern Canada and Alaska. Its discovery and eventual navigation involves a fascinating tale of endeavour, adventure and tragedy, too, for some expeditions ended in disaster.

Of the many mishaps, by far the worst was that which befell Sir John Franklin and the 128-strong crews of his two ships: they were last heard of in 1845. It took many expeditions and almost ten years before their fate was finally pieced together. One thing became clear by then: the Northwest Passage does not take prisoners. Yet at the same time, those searches for Franklin and his crew generated lots of new chart cover of the waters between the islands making up the Canadian Archipelago.

Complete navigation of the Northwest Passage was finally accomplished by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen between 1903 and 1906. Amundsen's boat was relatively small at 47 tons and 70 feet long but usefully it had a very shallow draft. That meant it was able to pass through areas where a bigger boat would have fouled the bottom, thus offering a wider choice of courses to take. Amundsen's route was criticised in some circles because of that factor - what was the point of making the crossing if bigger freight ships could not? But Amundsen was motivated not by money but by science.

With his experienced crew of six, they spent two winters off the eastern side of King William Island, about halfway through the archipelago, collecting data on Earth's magnetic pole and local meteorology, traded with the Inuit and developed hunting and fishing skills. Leaving there in August 1905, they reached Nome, Alaska twelve months later. The ice had pinned them in for a third winter. There was not to be a single-season crossing for another 38 years, when Sergeant Henry Larsen of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police managed it in a schooner.

So yes, while the Northwest Passage was successfully navigated before 2007, the current state of the sea ice means that the picture is now quite different. Part of the reason for that is down to the age of much of the Arctic sea ice today. Sea ice that has yet to experience a summer melting season is known as first-year ice. It's relatively thin, fragile and more vulnerable to melting compared to the ice that has withstood one or more melting-seasons, known as multiyear ice. Multiyear ice can even give a good ice-breaker a run for its money. But now there's a lot less of it.

During many recent summers the Northwest Passage has become open: freight ships and even cruise liners have steamed through. That doesn't mean it's risk-free of course - there are still icebergs to watch out for. Nevertheless, it's getting to the point where there are various concerns being voiced about the number of ships passing through the area, on both ecological and political grounds. For the Northwest Passage, global warming really is a mixed blessing.

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Great Lakes ice coverage hits a record low

Posted on 4 March 2024 by Guest Author

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeff Masters

Ice extent on the Great Lakes hit a record low February 8 and has remained at record low levels as of February 16 as a result of the warmest winter on record over much of the region. For the U.S. portion of the Great Lakes region, the November 30-February 14 period was mostly between the first- and third-warmest on record (Figure 1). The Canadian portion of the Great Lakes was also record-warm to near record-warm. In Chicago, 87% of the days from December 1-February 14 had average- to above-average temperatures.

map of the Midwest U.S. showing temperatures well above average in the states surrounding the Great LakesFigure 1. Ranking of Midwest U.S. average temperatures for November 30, 2023-February 14, 2024, for the period beginning in 1893. The region surrounding the Great Lakes was mostly between the first- and third-warmest on record. (Image credit: Iowa Environmental Mesonet)

A 10-day cold snap in mid-January in the region was not intense enough to allow much ice to grow on the Great Lakes, and January ice extent was just 6% of the lake surface, compared to the 50-year average of 18%. This was the ninth-lowest January ice level on record. If the peak ice coverage of 18% on January 22 winds up being the winter maximum, 2024 will end up with the fourth-lowest maximum extent on record, behind 2002 (12%), 2012 (13%), and 1998 (14%).

As of February 15, the Great Lakes Ice Tracker reported that ice coverage on the lakes was just 4% — about 10 times lower than average. The barest ice cupboard was being kept in Lake Erie, which had zero ice cover, compared to the average of over 65% expected for the date. With the forecast for the remainder of February calling for mostly above-average temperatures, ice cover on the Great Lakes is likely to be at record- to near-record low levels for the rest of the ice season.

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2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #09

Posted on 3 March 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom

A listing of 34 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, Feb 25, 2024 thru Sat, March 2, 2024.

Story of the week

This week's big news is close to home for Skeptical Science and comes via UNICEF: Seriously Cranky: the uncle we all have helps build the skills we all need to resist misinformation (pdf). It's a story spanning an arc of progress beginning with fundamental research by Skeptical Science founder John Cook and ending with operational application of findings from that investigation-- now in multiple arenas including and beyond Skeptical Science's core mission of promoting accurate understanding of the science of climate change.

We're speaking of Cranky Uncle, a game built on scientifically tested and verified methods of improving critical thinking skills, first deployed to help people avoid being mentally infected with climate bunk transmitted by a veritable zoo of grifters attached to the fossil fuel industry. The same techniques and delivery framework for boosting cognitive competency have now successfully been adopted and adapted for combating vaccination hesitancy and reluctance, by UNICEF and with the assistance of John Cook and Skeptical Science.

Conceptualization, exploration and funding for creating Cranky Uncle came thanks to and via Skeptical Science's own internal and external contributors. Without Skeptical Science in the picture UNICEF's successful project to help save lives wouldn't have been possible. All who assisted may share pleasure plus at least a little pride in this outcome. Our ripples of progress travel far. It's a great true story!

Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:

Before February 25

February 25

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Skeptical Science New Research for Week #9 2024

Posted on 29 February 2024 by Doug Bostrom, Marc Kodack

Open access notables

Rockfall from an increasingly unstable mountain slope driven by climate warming, Stoffel et al., Nature Geoscience:

Rockfall in high-mountain regions is thought to be changing due to accelerating climate warming and permafrost degradation, possibly resulting in enhanced activity and larger volumes involved in individual falls. Yet the systematic lack of long-term observations of rockfall largely hampers an in-depth assessment of how activity may have been altered by a warming climate. Here we compile a continuous time series from 1920 to 2020 of periglacial rockfall activity using growth-ring records from 375 trees damaged by past rockfall at Täschgufer (Swiss Alps). We show that the ongoing warming favours the release of rockfall and that changes in activity correlate significantly with summer air temperatures at interannual and decadal timescales. An initial increase in rockfall occurred in the late 1940s to early 1950s following early twentieth century warming. From the mid-1980s, activity reached new and hitherto unprecedented levels. 

Side Effects of Sulfur-Based Geoengineering Due To Absorptivity of Sulfate Aerosols, Wunderlin et al., Geophysical Research Letters:

Sulfur-based stratospheric aerosol intervention (SAI) can cool the climate, but also heats the tropical lower stratosphere if done with injections at low latitudes. We explore the role of this heating in the climate response to SAI, by using mechanistic experiments that remove the effects of longwave absorption of sulfate aerosols above the tropopause. If longwave absorption by stratospheric aerosols is disabled, the heating of the tropical tropopause and most of the related side effects are strongly alleviated and the cooling per Tg-S injected is 40% bigger. Such side-effects include the poleward expansion of eddy-driven jets, acceleration of the stratospheric residual circulation, and delay of Antarctic ozone recovery. Our results add to other recent findings on SAI side effects and demonstrate that SAI scenarios with low-latitude injections of absorptive materials may result in atmospheric effects and regional climate changes that are comparable to those produced by the CO2 warming signal.

Academic capture in the Anthropocene: a framework to assess climate action in higher education, Lachapelle et al., Climatic Change:

Higher education institutions have a mandate to serve the public good, yet in many cases fail to adequately respond to the global climate crisis. The inability of academic institutions to commit to purposeful climate action through targeted research, education, outreach, and policy is due in large part to “capture” by special interests. Capture involves powerful minority interests that exert influence and derive benefits at the expense of a larger group or purpose. This paper makes a conceptual contribution to advance a framework of “academic capture” applied to the climate crisis in higher education institutions. Academic capture is the result of the three contributing factors of increasing financialization issues, influence of the fossil fuel industry, and reticence of university employees to challenge the status quo.

The animal agriculture industry, US universities, and the obstruction of climate understanding and policy, Morris & Jacquet, Climatic Change:

In the USA, one of the largest consumers and producers of meat and dairy products, livestock greenhouse gas emissions remain effectively unregulated. What might explain this? Similar to fossil fuel companies, US animal agriculture companies responded to evidence that their products cause climate change by minimizing their role in the climate crisis and shaping policymaking in their favor. Here, we show that the industry has done so with the help of university experts. The beef industry awarded funding to Dr. Frank Mitloehner from the University of California, Davis, to assess “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” and his work was used to claim that cows should not be blamed for climate change. The animal agriculture industry is now involved in multiple multi-million-dollar efforts with universities to obstruct unfavorable policies as well as influence climate change policy and discourse. Here, we traced how these efforts have downplayed the livestock sector’s contributions to the climate crisis, minimized the need for emission regulations and other policies aimed at internalizing the costs of the industry’s emissions, and promoted industry-led climate “solutions” that maintain production. 

Biochar carbon markets:A mitigation deterrence threat, Price et al., Environmental Science & Policy:

We draw from original data collected in 2022 from 33 semi-structured interviews with mostly UK based experts who have an interest or potential interest in biochar, supplemented with a document analysis. Conceptual approaches from the social studies of finance have guided the analysis, an approach that enables systematic investigation of experts’ understandings of the biochar carbon market landscape in the UK. Although biochar proponents forwarded narratives – or fictional expectations – about how the future trading of carbon credits in carbon markets could lower the cost of producing biochar on a large scale, other experts doubted the credibility of these narratives. Whilst the construction and sustainable functioning of a UK-based biochar carbon market remains a speculative, rather than credible proposition, it nevertheless constitutes a threat of mitigation deterrence because of the assumption that a UK biochar carbon market will become a reality. There is the promise of future removals even if this is only imagined.

Insurance retreat in residential properties from future sea level rise in Aotearoa New Zealand, Storey et al., Climatic Change:

How will the increased frequency of coastal inundation events induced by sea level rise impact residential insurance premiums, and when would insurance contracts be withdrawn? We model the contribution of localised sea level rise to the increased frequency of coastal inundation events. Examining four Aotearoa New Zealand cities, we combine historical tide-gauge extremes with geo-located property data to estimate the annual expected loss from this hazard, for each property, in order to establish when insurance retreat is likely to occur. We find that as sea level rise changes the frequency of inundation events, 99% of properties currently within 1% AEP coastal inundation zones can expect at least partial insurance retreat within a decade (with less than 10 cm of sea level rise). Our modelling predicts that full insurance retreat is likely within 20–25 years, with timing dependent on the property’s elevation and distance from the coast, and less intuitively, on the tidal range in each location.

A bibliometric and topic analysis of climate justice: Mapping trends, voices, and the way forward, Parsons et al., Climate Risk Management:

Our results show that the field of climate justice has grown exponentially from less than 5 papers annually between 1997 and 2005, to around 200 papers annually in recent years. This growth has seen a diversification of research themes with an increase in papers around the topics of health, vulnerability and adaptation, and policy and activism. There has been a consistent backdrop of publications around the topics of sustainable development and policy, and international relations and carbon emissions. Other prominent topics in the literature include education and food security, and human rights and Indigenous people. The field has moved from theoretical research to examining actual examples of climate injustices, with an increased diversification of topics.

From this week's government/NGO section: 

The next frontier for climate change science. Insights from the authors of the IPCC 6th assessment report on knowledge gaps and priorities for researchBednar-Friedl et al., Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (European Commission) (pdf)

As climate change impacts intensify globally in both frequency and magnitude and with scientific consensus on what is yet to come if the world fails to act, the imperative to step up our collective response has never been more pressing. By providing the knowledge necessary to formulate effective mitigation and adaptation strategies, climate science serves as a critical enabler of climate action and a vital input to evidence-based policymaking. Bridging the knowledge gaps in climate change research is crucial for guiding the transition toward a low-carbon climate-resilient future, fostering consensus and alliances, empowering global cooperation, and mobilizing stakeholders across society. The authors draw attention to where additional research is required to effectively and adequately address climate change, aiming to inform future calls under the EU Horizon Europe R&I Programme and beyond.

Climate Transition Mismatch. Thought Leadership, Greenwashing, Transparency & TraceabilityIon Visinovschi and John Willis, Planet Tracker (pdf)

Company membership in trade associations has emerged as a critical area of concern, particularly when corporate management teams claim to be supportive of lowering their carbon footprint but are members of associations that appear to be at odds with the goals set out in the Paris Agreement. The authors urge corporations to reassess their affiliations with industry associations that diverge from their stated environmental objectives.

153 articles in 72 journals by 955 contributing authors

Physical science of climate change, effects

Contrasting Responses of Land Surface Temperature and Soil Temperature to Forest Expansion During the Dormant Season on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, Qu et al., Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 10.1029/2023jd039595

European Summer Wet-Bulb Temperature: Spatiotemporal Variations and Potential Drivers, Ma et al., Journal of Climate 10.1175/jcli-d-23-0420.1

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Why Biden’s pause on new LNG export terminals is a BFD

Posted on 28 February 2024 by Guest Author

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Osha Davidson

Natural gas has long been touted as a “bridge fuel” to a clean energy future that gets all its power from renewable sources like wind, solar, and geothermal power. That’s because natural gas produces about half as much carbon dioxide as coal when burned to generate electricity. But researchers have warned for years that natural gas — whose main ingredient is climate-warming methane — is not the trouble-free substitute for coal that the oil and gas industry claims.

The long-simmering issue became a top news story in January when President Joe Biden announced he was hitting the pause button on permitting new liquid natural gas, or LNG, export terminals, controversial megaprojects costing billions of dollars along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

“We will take a hard look at the impacts of LNG exports on energy costs, America’s energy security, and our environment,” Biden said in a statement. “This pause on new LNG approvals sees the climate crisis for what it is: the existential threat of our time.”

Why do we care about methane, the main ingredient in natural gas?

The footprint of LNG export terminals on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Purple pins mark operational LNG export terminals, red pins mark terminals that are under construction, yellow pins mark terminals that have been approved but are not yet under construction, and blue pins mark proposed locations for new terminals. (Source: FERC. Interactive map: Samantha Harrington)

While natural gas produces less carbon dioxide than other fossil fuels when burned, methane is a hundred times more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. So why is carbon dioxide the evil poster child of climate change?

As MIT’s Jessika Trancik documented in a landmark 2014 paper published in Nature Climate Change, the answer is time. Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere trapping heat for up to 1,000 years, whereas methane lasts for about a decade. When both time and heat-trapping capacity are factored in, Trancik documented that methane is 80 times worse than carbon dioxide over 20 years and nearly 30 times worse over the course of a century.

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At a glance - Is Greenland gaining or losing ice?

Posted on 27 February 2024 by John Mason, BaerbelW

On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a "bump" for our ask. This week features "Is Greenland gaining or losing ice". More will follow in the upcoming weeks. Please follow the Further Reading link at the bottom to read the full rebuttal and to join the discussion in the comment thread there.

fact myth box

At a glance

The interior of Greenland features a huge ice sheet that covers some 80% of that large island. Up to three kilometres thick, the sheet contains a whopping 2.9 million cubic kilometres of ice. If that all melted, global sea level would go up by around seven and a half metres. So it would obviously be good if that didn't happen.

Read any science about ice-sheets and you will soon run into a term that will become familiar: 'mass balance'. Mass balance is an expression of the health of any ice-sheet. Ice-sheets gain mass by snowfall and lose mass by 'ablation', a term covering sublimation, evaporation melt, and meltwater runoff, plus solid ice discharge by the glaciers that drain them. If the value for mass balance of an ice sheet is a positive number, the sheet is growing. But a negative value means the sheet is dwindling.

Since 1991, satellites have obtained continuous data on the Greenland ice-sheet, using radar, lasers and sensitive instruments that can detect changes in local gravity. Such methods allow mass balance to be calculated.

With over 30 years of satellite data now at our disposal, we can step back and look at the big picture. The Greenland ice sheet was close to a neutral state of balance in the 1990s. Since then however, annual losses have risen. One recent paper calculates that Greenland lost almost 4,000 billion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2018, adding almost eleven millimetres to global sea levels.

Reduction of ice mass balance has occurred for two key reasons. Firstly there is increased meltwater run-off. Have you seen imagery of bright blue pools connected to rivers, flowing across the surface of the ice-sheet, to disappear down into it in spectacular cascades? That's the run-off. Secondly, there is glacier instability - whereby glaciers speed up in their discharge of ice, ultimately to the ocean, with those videos of spectacular calving events many of you will have seen. In Greenland, it's thought that these two processes account for about half of ice-sheet loss each.

Of course, the rate of ice loss varies from year to year. It depends on weather patterns. A cooler year with a lot of snowfall will provide a considerable counter-weight to the loss processes. Then again, in June 2023 the temperature rose to 0.4oC at the Summit Station, a research facility situated 3,216 metres above sea level and near the high-point of the ice-sheet. That has only happened five times in the 34 years since the station was established. Like anywhere else, the year to year pattern is pretty varied: however it's the multidecadal trend that matters and that is very definitely downwards.

It never pays to pick short time-spans when discussing matters of long-term climate trends. Statements like the one by Christopher Monckton in the myth-box above, made in 2009, have simply been made invalid by the march of time.

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Climate Adam: Are food influencers wrong about climate change?

Posted on 26 February 2024 by Guest Author

This video includes conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Adam Levy. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any).

The food industry is one of the biggest drivers of climate change. So how are our diets causing disaster? Some people argue that protecting the planet means we have to go vegan and zero waste and only eat local and organic. But is this really what's key to halting climate change? And what should you prioritise if you want to make what you munch kinder to the climate?!

Support ClimateAdam on patreon: https://patreon.com/climateadam

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2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #08

Posted on 25 February 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom

A listing of 31 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, Feb 18, 2024 thru Sat, Feb 24, 2024.

Story of the week

“In the tropical eastern Atlantic, it’s four months ahead of pace—it’s looking like it’s already June out there,” says Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami. “It’s really getting to be strange that we’re just seeing the records break by this much, and for this long.”

Scientists are misunderstood and criticized for speaking in jealously measured tones. So when a scientist says "really strange," that's shouting. Lots of people were captivated by this latest update on a phenomenon as unexpected as it is sudden, and so our story of the week is Peter Sinclair's review and synthesis of articles titled Scientists: Ocean Heat Waves Stunning, Persistent, and Worrying. The unprecedented bulge of observable ocean heat beginning in 2023 has been in the news for a while now. Familiarity may breed complacency if not contempt,  but this pattern persists and continues to baffle our experts. Sinclair's collection of articles from different outlets commemorates that observations of this kind are of serious concern; at the scale of our own lives it's akin to our family physician being unable to explain a fever. In this case it's not an unexpected pathogen causing the problem but expected, predictable physical outcomes.  Even so, it seems we're unprepared for how this may emerge as details, as made explicit in the articles highilighted in Sinclair's compilation. 

Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:

Before February 18

February 19

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Skeptical Science New Research for Week #8 2024

Posted on 22 February 2024 by Doug Bostrom, Marc Kodack

Open access notables

Transition from positive to negative indirect CO2 effects on the vegetation carbon uptake, Chen et al., Nature Communications:

Here we investigate how the impacts of eCO2-driven climate change on growing-season gross primary production have changed globally during 1982–2014, using satellite observations and Earth system models, and evaluate their evolution until the year 2100. We show that the initial positive effect of eCO2-induced climate change on vegetation carbon uptake has declined recently, shifting to negative in the early 21st century. Such emerging pattern appears prominent in high latitudes and occurs in combination with a decrease of direct CO2 physiological effect, ultimately resulting in a sharp reduction of the current growth benefits induced by climate warming and CO2 fertilization. Such weakening of the indirect CO2 effect can be partially attributed to the widespread land drying, and it is expected to be further exacerbated under global warming.

Real-world time-travel experiment shows ecosystem collapse due to anthropogenic climate change, Li et al., Nature Communications

Predicting climate impacts is challenging and has to date relied on indirect methods, notably modeling. Here we examine coastal ecosystem change during 13 years of unusually rapid, albeit likely temporary, sea-level rise ( > 10 mm yr−1) in the Gulf of Mexico. Such rates, which may become a persistent feature in the future due to anthropogenic climate change, drove rising water levels of similar magnitude in Louisiana’s coastal wetlands. Measurements of surface-elevation change at 253 monitoring sites show that 87% of these sites are unable to keep up with rising water levels. We find no evidence for enhanced wetland elevation gain through ecogeomorphic feedbacks, where more frequent inundation would lead to enhanced biomass accumulation that could counterbalance rising water levels. We attribute this to the exceptionally rapid sea-level rise during this time period. Under the current climate trajectory (SSP2-4.5), drowning of ~75% of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands is a plausible outcome by 2070.

The importance of crowdsourced observations for urban climate services, Mitchell & Fry, International Journal of Climatology:

Crowdsourced observation networks are typically much more dense than those maintained by National Meteorological Services, and sample a much wider range of local climates. This offers an opportunity to build observed climatologies that are more representative of lived experience, particularly in cities. This study provides a worked example to show their potential for improving operational climate services, and to identify the challenges to realizing that potential. To demonstrate the concept, data from personal weather stations, obtained through citizen science, are used to build an observed record of daily maximum temperatures in 2020 in Manchester (UK). This record is compared to the standard baseline used in a current climate service, showing a substantial increase in the estimated heat hazard. If such potential benefits are to be realized in a climate service, it will be necessary to first build an alternative observed baseline of decadal length and at national or international scale. 

Widespread and increasing near-bottom hypoxia in the coastal ocean off the United States Pacific Northwest, Barth et al., Scientific Reports:

During summer 2021, an unprecedented number of ship- and underwater glider-based measurements of dissolved oxygen were made in this region. Near-bottom hypoxia, that is dissolved oxygen less than 61 µmol kg−1 and harmful to marine animals, was observed over nearly half of the continental shelf inshore of the 200-m isobath, covering 15,500 square kilometers. A mid-shelf ribbon with near-bottom, dissolved oxygen less than 50 µmol kg−1 extended for 450 km off north-central Oregon and Washington. Spatial patterns in near-bottom oxygen are related to the continental shelf width and other features of the region. Maps of near-bottom oxygen since 1950 show a consistent trend toward lower oxygen levels over time. The fraction of near-bottom water inshore of the 200-m isobath that is hypoxic on average during the summer upwelling season increases over time from nearly absent (2%) in 1950–1980, to 24% in 2009–2018, compared with 56% during the anomalously strong upwelling conditions in 2021. Widespread and increasing near-bottom hypoxia is consistent with increased upwelling-favorable wind forcing under climate change.

Offshoring emissions through used vehicle exports, Newman et al., Nature Climate Change:

Policies to reduce transport emissions often overlook the international flow of used vehicles. We quantify the rate at which used vehicles generated CO2 and pollution for all used vehicles exported from Great Britain—a globally leading used vehicle exporter—across 2005–2021. Destined for low–middle-income countries, exported vehicles fail roadworthiness standards and, even under extremely optimistic ‘functioning-as-new’ assumptions, generate at least 13–53% more emissions than scrapped or on-road vehicles.

Translating climate risk assessments into more effective adaptation decision-making: The importance of social and political aspects of place-based climate risk, Kythreotis et al., Environmental Science & Policy:

Climate risk continues to be framed ostensibly in terms of physical, socio-economic and/or ecological risks, as evidenced in the 2012 and 2017 UK Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA) evidence reports. This article argues that framing climate risk in this way remains problematic for the science-policy process, particularly in ensuring adequate climate risk assessment information translates into more effective adaptation decision-making. We argue how climate risk assessments need to further consider the social and political aspects of place-based climate risk to ensure more effective adaptation policy outcomes. 

From this week's government/NGO section:

Carbon Clean 200®: Investing In a Clean Energy Future 2024 Performance UpdateHeaps et al., As You Sow:

The Clean200 lists the 200 major corporate players from 35 countries around the world that are at the forefront of this [energy] transition. These are the companies that are leading the way by putting sustainability at the heart of their products, services, business models, and investments, helping to move the world onto a more sustainable trajectory. 

Agenda for a Progressive Political Economy of Carbon RemovalNawaz et al., Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal, American University:

Large amounts of carbon dioxide will need to be removed and durably stored to meet climate targets. Even the lowest estimates suggest that large new industries will need to be created to produce these removals. As both private and public investments begin to fill this gap, the foundations of an emerging carbon removal industry are now being laid via policy decisions that will shape the field to come. The authors examine the possible versions of a future with carbon removal, imagining its best forms, its worst forms, and its most likely forms.

135 articles in 66 journals by 766 contributing authors

Physical science of climate change, effects

Underlying physical mechanisms of winter precipitation extremes over India's high mountain region, Nischal et al., Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 10.1002/qj.4661

Observations of climate change, effects

Unprecedented wildfires in Korea: Historical evidence of increasing wildfire activity due to climate change, Chang et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 10.1016/j.agrformet.2024.109920

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How oil sands undermine Canada’s climate goals

Posted on 21 February 2024 by dana1981

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections

Now in his ninth year as prime minister, Justin Trudeau has sought to position Canada as a global climate leader, touting one of the world’s highest taxes on carbon pollution, clean fuel regulations, and clean technology tax credits. Yet Canada’s per-person climate pollution remains stubbornly near the top of the list of developed countries — alongside the United States and Australia, whose governments have been less consistently supportive of climate solutions over the past decade.

Climate Action Tracker, an independent project that monitors whether governments’ actions measure up to the goals outlined in the Paris climate agreement, rates Canada’s climate policies as “highly insufficient.” The project noted, “If all countries were to follow Canada’s approach, warming could reach over 3°C and up to 4°C” — a potentially catastrophic level of global warming. The Trudeau government has pledged to cut emissions by at least 40-45% below 2005 levels by 2030 but is not on track to meet that goal.

This raises the question: What’s holding back Canada’s climate ambitions? Although there are numerous contributing factors, Climate Action Tracker points to one primary culprit, arguing that “Canada seems incapable of kicking its oil and gas addiction.” Canada is the fourth-largest producer of oil and the fifth-largest producer of methane gas, commonly called natural gas, in the world. Nearly 80% of Canadian oil is exported to the United States, and fossil fuels account for over one-fifth of the country’s exports, worth over $100 billion per year.

So the country exemplifies the challenge of solving the climate crisis even when relatively climate-aware governments are in power.

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