Globally, 80% want more climate action

It's tempting to rail against ordinary people when it comes to climate action. To blame mankind as a whole for its stupidity and greed. After all, we know that temperatures are rising, that heatwaves, droughts and floods are becoming much worse and more common.  So why is there not enough action? But ordinary people do want action. It is the politicians, the rich, the owners of oil companies, directors of companies who, while pretending to want action, do their best to stop it.


From Al Jazeera

Four in five people want their countries to ramp up efforts in the fight against climate change, according to a United Nations survey billed as the largest yet on the issue.

The UN Development Programme (UNDP) published the poll on Thursday, finding that a majority of people in 62 of the 77 countries surveyed said they supported a quick transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy.

These included the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters, with 80 percent in China and 54 percent in the United States supporting the move, though respondents in Russia were notably less keen, with only 16 percent approving.

“As world leaders decide on the next round of pledges under the Paris Agreement by 2025, these results are undeniable evidence that people everywhere support bold climate action,” said Cassie Flynn, UNDP global climate director.

Conducted in collaboration with Oxford University and GeoPoll, the survey posed 15 questions by randomised telephone calls to 75,000 people in 77 countries, the populations of which represent 87 percent of the world’s total – making it the biggest poll of its kind.

Overall, 80 percent of those polled wanted to see stronger commitments to addressing the problem, the clamour for action rising to 89 percent in poorer countries feeling the brunt of climate change.

Climate anxiety was higher in poorer countries like Fiji, where 80 percent are more worried about the problem compared to a year ago, followed by Afghanistan (78 percent) and Turkey (77 percent). Saudi Arabia saw the lowest increase in climate fears, with 25 percent more concerned.

Overall, the survey found 56 percent of respondents said they think about climate change at least once a week. Over half of those surveyed said they were more worried about climate change than last year, compared with 15 percent who said they were less worried.

Climate change is also changing people’s lives, with 69 percent of respondents saying that global warming had impacted major decisions, such as where to live or work and what to buy.

But Achim Steiner, head of the UNDP, said these concerns do not necessarily translate into electoral and consumer decisions.

He pointed to what he called a “perception gap” when it comes to climate action, summing up people’s typical reaction as: “I would do more. But the others won’t. So I will not do anything."

There are things you can do.  

You could eat less meat, especially beef and mutton, and drink less cow's milk.  The less, the better.

You could buy an EV or a plug-in hybrid (PHEV).  Yes, that can be expensive in the USA, because it’s just placed a penal tariff on imports of Chinese EVs and Chinese EV batteries, which are the cheapest in the world.   But in the rest of the world, EVs are plummetting in price.  As are electric 3-wheelers.   An EV will soon cost the same as a petrol car, outside the USA, anyway.   Make your next car an EV.

You can put solar panels on your roof (if you own your own property.)   If you don't, and can't, buy your electricity from a green supplier.   If we all insist of buying renewables from a green electricity utility, they will be forced to build more solar and wind farms.  Don't buy from a so-called green electricity supplier which claims its green credentials because it buys carbon offsets.  These are (mostly) a furphy, a scam. 

You could switch your heating from gas/oil to electric.  There's been some opposition to heat pumps because they supposedly don't work.  That's piffle; they do.  They cost more up front than gas or oil boilers/heaters, but they're cheaper to run.  Some polities provide subsidies to encourage the switch.

Together, all these steps will cut your personal emissions by 80%.  

And, most important, you can vote.  Don't be distracted by other policy issues.  Vote for the Party which is going to do most to cut emissions.  Even if in other ways they are imperfect.

It's up to us, and most of us want to do something.  You can make a difference.  Start today.

Visualizing EV growth

From Al Jazeera. There are some nice charts, but I'll just share one.  By the way, Al Jazeera's chart showing the growth in EV sales since 2010 is actually 4 charts, or 4 pages, anyway.

Electric vehicle (EV) sales have tripled over the past three years, from nearly three million new electric cars sold worldwide in 2020 to 10 million last year.

To put that figure into perspective, for every 20 new cars sold around the world in 2022, three were electric.

Government policies and stricter emissions standards have helped accelerate the adoption of electric cars. By the end of 2023, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that some 14 million electric cars will be sold this year – a 35 percent increase from 2022.

China accounts for more than half (58 percent) of all new electric cars sold worldwide.

According to the IEA, over the course of 2022, 5.9 million new electric vehicles were sold across the country – a more than 80 percent increase compared with 2021. China’s Association of Automobile Manufacturers put sales figures even higher at seven million vehicles.

Chinese car manufacturers, including BYD (Build Your Dreams) and SAIC-GM-Wuling, have dedicated themselves to producing affordable and efficient electric cars and are now major automobile producers and exporters.

Extreme hotspot: what 60 C means for the Middle East

 From Al Jazeera

Food production is expected to be severely affected as a result of climate change with about one-third of arable land in MENA hit by extreme heat [Saudi Desert  Photo by Ahmed Jadallah/Reuters]

The Middle East and North Africa is already the hottest and driest region on the planet but climate change could make some areas uninhabitable in the coming decades with temperatures potentially reaching 60 degrees Celsius or higher.

The repercussions throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region would be devastating including chronic water shortages, the inability to grow food because of extreme weather and resulting drought, and a surge in heat-related deaths and health problems.

By 2100 about 600 million inhabitants, or 50 percent of the population of the region, may be exposed to “super-extreme” weather events if current greenhouse gas projections hold, one recent study in the journal Nature noted.

Lasting weeks or even months, the scorching heat would be “potentially life-threatening for humans”, it said.

“We anticipate that the maximum temperature during … heatwaves in some urban centres and megacities in the MENA could reach or even exceed 60 °C, which would be tremendously disruptive for society,” the scientists wrote.

George Zittis, lead author of the study, told Al Jazeera higher humidity from increased evaporation of the surrounding seas will increase the danger.

“Heat stress during summers will reach or exceed the thresholds of human survivability, at least in some parts of the region and for the warmest months,” said Zittis.

Major urban centres around the Gulf, Arabian Sea, and Red Sea – such as Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Dhahran, and Bandar Abbas – would all see severe temperatures on a more frequent basis.

“Cities will feel an increasing heat island effect and most capital cities in the Middle East could face four months of exceedingly hot days every year,” according to the World Bank.

About 70 percent of the world’s most water-stressed countries are in MENA. As the climate warms further, the social and economic fallout will be intense.

More than 12 million people in Syria and Iraq are losing access to water, food and electricity because of rising temperatures, record low levels of rainfall, and drought, which are depriving people across the region of drinking and agricultural water.

Syria is currently facing its worst drought in 70 years. Aid groups described the situation as an “unprecedented catastrophe”.

“The potential intensification of heatwaves in the already harsh, hot and arid MENA environment is expected to have direct negative impacts on human health, agriculture, the water and energy nexus, and many other socioeconomic sectors,” said Paola Mercogliano, CMCC Foundation’s director of hydrogeological impacts.

Increasing water shortages have already been blamed for igniting regional conflicts, and some researchers fear that fighting over scarce resources will intensify throughout the Middle East and North Africa as the world heats up further.

“Societal impacts may be relatively large …  Moreover, the human population of the MENA region is projected to peak around the year 2065,” Mercogliano told Al Jazeera. “Therefore, the threat to water supplies in the region with temperatures rising is very much serious.”

Water scarcity will also be a financial burden with estimates suggesting MENA will suffer the most of any region around the world, costing governments 7-14 percent of their gross domestic product by 2050.

The agricultural sector, which provides the most jobs in the Middle East and North Africa, could be devastated with water availability declining by as much as 45 percent.

Food production is expected to suffer severely as a result with about one-third of the arable land scorched by extreme heat.

With the warming of Earth already well under way, costly adaption measures will be necessary.

“Adaptation is essential for the survival of future generations under changing climate,” Mercogliano said.

Lebanon is developing hill lakes to conserve and store water for irrigation. In Egypt, efforts are under way to build wave breakers to preserve wetlands and coastal installations from seawater intrusion. In Jordan, treated wastewater is now used to irrigate agricultural areas, she noted.

“A project in Morocco is empowering women to harvest water from fog, while in Jordan another aims to empower rural women to help tackle agriculture in the context of climate change,” said Mercogliano.

The climate change panic button is coming

 Record floods, record droughts, record heat, record bushfires.  Sometimes in the same place a couple of weeks apart.   It's crystal clear that global heating and climate change aren't something happening in some far distant future.  They're happening now.  And it's going to get worse, because emissions prolly haven't yet peaked, despite the slump caused by the Covid crash.  So how long before there's panic?

A general view of flood-affected area following heavy rainfalls in Schuld, Germany [Reuters].
Source: Al Jazeera

From The New Daily

This week it’s floods in Germany, 170 dead and terrible devastation.

A few weeks ago people were dying from the heat in Canada, which reached about 49 degrees Celsius in Lytton, British Columbia.

Wildfires are now breaking out across North America.

This is from the global warming that has already occurred, which is about 1.2 degrees above the pre-industrial age.

The world is now trying to stop it going above 1.5 degrees by getting emissions down to net zero by 2050.

Even if we succeed in that, which is far from guaranteed, the extreme weather events will be significantly worse and more frequent than they are now.

But at what point will governments hit the real panic button?

Because net zero by 2050 is not it. [We have to halve emissions by 2030, then halve them again between 2030 and 2040, and again by 2050.  This implies that emissions have to fall by 7% per annum]

The reason many are still negotiating, prevaricating and putting it off is that governments and businesses are not looking at global warming in terms of risk, but are using scenario analysis instead.

For example, the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority issued a draft prudential practice guide on climate change in April, which included 4 degrees of warming as one of its two “scenarios” for banks to use in their future planning.

A 4 degree rise in the average global temperature would make large parts of the planet uninhabitable and lead to the total collapse of the banking system. No need for any planning.

The other APRA scenario was for 2 degrees of warming or less, consistent with the Paris Agreement, which should happen if all countries meet their Paris pledges, which so far they’re not.

And even under that scenario, the banking system barely survives.

There was nothing especially wrong with APRA’s guidance note – it was just a typical example of the arse-covering required by bureaucrats and corporate executives to cover their environmental, social and governance (ESG) obligations, with a paper trail to prove they did it.

But it highlights the problem with using scenarios instead of risk analysis.

Since most countries are now committed to net-zero emissions by 2050, even though the policies to achieve that have not been implemented, everyone can assume that the scenario of 1.5 degrees is locked in – a likelihood of 100 per cent. But that’s not correct.

Even then there would still be a two-thirds risk of it being 2 degrees instead of 1.5, because of feedback loops caused by more carbon dioxide being released by the warming that has occurred.

Current policies, unchanged, would result in 2.4 degrees of warming, which would be terrible, but there would be a high risk (about 67 per cent) of 3 degrees, which would be catastrophic.

Precise risk analysis of global warming is difficult because feedback loop tipping points are unknown and unpredictable.

It’s known that with 1.5 to 2 degrees of warming, the combination of permafrost melt in Siberia, wildfires in the world’s forests and warming of the ocean will release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which means a feedback loop could take the temperature to 2.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures – and perhaps beyond – no matter what we do.

I was reminded of the power of risk analysis by the recent reaction to the risk of blood clots and death from the AstraZeneca vaccine.

It appears to be something like one in 88,000, or 0.0011 per cent to get a clot.

If that happens, the chance of then dying is 4 per cent, which boils down to a 0.00044 per cent chance of dying from having the AstraZeneca vaccine.

On the strength of that risk, the UK discontinued AstraZeneca for under-40s and the Australian medical authorities have warned against it, and people are shunning it in droves and waiting for Pfizer.

The risk of catastrophe and even extinction as a result of global warming is a lot higher than 0.00044 per cent and yet most of us are still driving petrol cars and eating steaks and hamburgers, and governments are still talking about targets 30 years away (or not, in Australia’s case).

Whatever the temperature gets to – whether it be 1.5, 2, 3 or 4 degrees of warming – it would be a global average, uneven across the planet.

Anything much more than 1.5 degrees and heatwaves in some parts of the world would make them too hot to survive for some of the year, so humans couldn’t live there at all.

Daily life everywhere else would be an unbearable succession of extreme weather events, as we are seeing in Germany at the moment.

Sea level would rise by 1.5 to 2 metres, making many coastal and low-lying areas uninhabitable.

As a result, millions, possibly billions, of people would be displaced making a mess of global borders.

Banking and insurance would become impossible. The financial system would collapse.

What’s the risk of that? 10 per cent? 1 per cent?

Even if it was 1 per cent, that would be like two or three planes a day crashing after take-off in Australia – which would lead to zero take-offs until it was fixed.

At some point well before 2050, governments will be forced to switch to risk analysis for climate change, and to publish the result.

Unless scientists say the risk is zero – which they won’t – then whatever they come up with, political leaders will be forced to hit the panic button by alarmed voters.

What does the panic button look like?

I’m not sure, but here are some thoughts: Fossil fuels would be suddenly and totally banned, or made prohibitively expensive, and oil, gas and coal would instantly go bust; physical tourism would be banned and air travel confined to essentials and rich elites so the airline industry would collapse; the lithium battery and hydrogen would suddenly boom.

And so on.

Life would change more completely than it has during the pandemic.

In short, it would look like war