The end of oil

From The Conversation

US President Donald Trump is a longtime climate denier and oil industry ally, who sums up his own energy policy as “drill, baby, drill”. Yet he is doing more than almost anyone to speed up the global shift from fossil fuels to clean energy and electric vehicles (EVs).

After the US and Israel struck Iran in late February, Tehran closed the Strait of Hormuz and triggered the largest disruption of oil supply in history.

Ironically for Trump and his oil industry donors, this crisis may be an irreversible tipping point for clean energy. For years, fossil fuel advocates spruiked oil, gas and coal as “reliable” energy. That narrative has been reversed. Fossil fuels have become expensive and unreliable, while renewables are cheap, reliable and secure.

For the first time ever, more than 50 nations will gather next week in Colombia to hash out how to wind down and end their dependence on coal, oil and gas. The history-making conference was planned before the Iran war. But this year’s energy crisis has greatly raised the stakes.

The oil crisis is real

Iran’s closure of the narrow Strait of Hormuz stopped oil tankers reaching their destinations. But that wasn’t all. More than 60 gas and oil sites have been damaged in the conflict so far. Even if a durable ceasefire is reached, these impacts will reverberate for months and years to come.

Around 80% of the trapped crude oil was destined for the Asia-Pacific. Faced with dwindling supply, the region’s governments are implementing emergency measures such as sending workers home, banning government travel, rationing fuel and cutting school hours.

The problem is especially bad in the Pacific. Many island nations use diesel for power generation. In response, leaders declared a regional emergency.

Fuel import bills were already a major burden for Pacific nations, leading to efforts to switch to local renewables. Fuel bills could rise by A$933 million in Fiji (nearly three times the healthcare budget).

Scrambling for energy

When energy supplies are disrupted, leaders have three options: find alternate supplies, reduce use or switch to alternatives. In the very short term, countries aim to shore up supply, just as Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese did last week in Malaysia.

Countries have also moved to reduce use. This can have lasting effects. During the Middle East oil shocks of the 1970s, oil prices tripled and then doubled again. Authorities responded by improving energy productivity to do more with less. The world’s final oil demand per capita peaked in 1979 and has never recovered.

But the real difference from half a century ago is that fossil fuel alternatives are ready for prime time. Since the 1970s, the price of solar panels has fallen 99.9%, while the cost of wind has fallen 91% since 1984. Battery prices have fallen 99% since 1991.

This means it’s now viable for many nations to switch to these alternatives.

The European Union will accelerate electrification, after its fossil fuel bill increased more than $36 billion since February. France has doubled state aid to help households switch to EVs and electrify home heating. Import-dependent South Korea gets 70% of its crude oil through the Strait of Hormuz. It now plans to double renewables capacity within four years.

Electric vehicles at the tipping point?

This year’s oil shock shows signs of creating an unplanned social tipping point – a threshold for self-propelling change beyond which systems shift from one state to another. Climate scientists warn of climate tipping points which amplify feedback and accelerate warming. But social scientists also point to positive tipping points – collective action that rapidly accelerates climate action.

The rush to EVs is a case in point. In Australia, petrol prices surged almost 50% in March, and diesel more than 70%. It’s no surprise new EV sales are at an all-time high, while secondhand EV sales more than doubled last month.

Australia’s 1.3 million hybrid and battery electric vehicles avoid almost 15 million litres of petrol and diesel use every week.

The rush to electric transport is global. Most new Chinese cars are powered by batteries, not oil. Battery electric vehicles outsold petrol cars for the first time in Europe in January.

A conference to quit fossil fuels

The routine burning of coal, oil and gas is the primary driver of the climate crisis. The world’s highest court last year made clear nations have obligations to stop burning fossil fuels.

But fossil fuels have barely been mentioned in 30 years of global climate negotiations, due in part to blocking efforts by big fossil fuel exporters and lobbyists.

Frustrated by slow progress, a coalition of nations has bypassed global climate talks to discuss how to actually phase out fossil fuels.

The first of these summits will take place next week. More than 50 nations will gather in Santa Marta, Colombia, to discuss a potential standalone treaty to manage fossil-fuel phaseout while protecting workers and financial systems.

Colombian Environment Minister Irene Vélez Torres says it comes at the “best possible moment”, as the oil crisis focuses global attention on fossil fuel dependency.

If next week’s summit produces real momentum to wean off fossil fuels amid the energy crisis, we might look back at it as a social tipping point where early adopters move in earnest – and make it easier for the rest of the world to follow.

EU to cut emissions by 85%

 From Reuters

The European Union agreed on Wednesday to set a legally binding climate target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90% from 1990 levels by 2040, and buy foreign carbon credits to cover 5% of the emissions cuts, goals that fell short of its original plan.

Negotiators from EU countries and the European Parliament reached the deal in the early hours of Wednesday, they confirmed in separate statements.

In practice, the target will require an 85% emissions reduction from European industries, and payment to developing countries via carbon credits to cut emissions on Europe's behalf to make up the rest.

The goal goes beyond most other major economies' emissions-cutting pledges, including China's. Still, it fell short of that recommended by the EU's climate science advisers and was weaker than Brussels' original plan for the goal, reflecting disagreement between EU governments over the speed and cost of their green agenda.

"The target delivers on the need for climate action while safeguarding our competitiveness and security," said Danish climate minister Lars Aagaard, who negotiated the deal on behalf of EU governments.

The EU also agreed to consider the option in future to use international carbon credits to meet a further 5% of its 2040 emissions reductions - potentially further softening the domestic efforts required.

The target, which is designed to keep Europe on track for its pledge to have net-zero emissions by 2050, represented a political compromise after months of negotiations.

Countries including Poland, Slovakia and Hungary had opposed deeper CO2 cuts as too strenuous for industries struggling with high energy costs, cheaper Chinese imports and U.S. tariffs.

Other EU members, including the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden, cited worsening extreme weather events and the need to catch up with China in manufacturing green technology as reasons to set a high target.

To win over opponents, the EU also agreed to delay the launch of a politically sensitive carbon price for fuel by one year, to 2028.

The Parliament and EU countries must each approve the target for it to become law - usually a formality that waves through pre-agreed deals.

Europe's CO2 emissions peaked in 1990, and have fallen 40% since then.  Their emissions have fallen much more in percentage terms than other large countries, and other big polluters (China and India) are still going up.   An 85% cut in emissions from 1990 would reduce Europe's emissions to those seen in the year 1900.  Imagine if other countries were to do the same!

If every country committed to cutting emissions by just 3% a year, global emissions would halve by 2050 (still not zero, for sure, but better than the status quo) and fall by 90% by the year 2100.   And such a target is eminently achievable, if we switch electricity generation to renewables, switch our vehicle fleet to EVs, and replace gas and oil heating with heat pumps.

Source: Our World in Data

 

Japan and Korea have hottest summers ever

People with umbrellas walk in the scorching sun in Tokyo, Japan, on September 1, 2025 [Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP]

 From Al Jazeera

Japan and South Korea have sweated through their hottest summers since records began.

Japan’s average temperature this summer was 2.36 degrees Celsius (4.24 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 30-year average from 1991 to 2020, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said on Monday.

“This updated the record as the hottest summer since statistics began in 1898,” the JMA said.

Average summer temperatures broke records at 123 out of the 153 weather stations nationwide, the weather agency added, with the number of automated meteorological stations recording “extremely hot days” reaching a record 9,385.

Japan last month broke the record for the hottest day on record twice in one day when temperatures in the central city of Isesaki rose as high as 41.8C (107.24F).

In South Korea, the average summer temperature also set a new record, hitting 25.7C (78.26F), the highest since authorities began collecting data in 1973, the Korea Meteorological Administration said.

Both Japan and South Korea had previously reported 2024 as their hottest summer on record.

South Korea’s average summer temperature last year was 25.6C (78.08F), while Japan’s average temperature was 1.76C (3.17F) above the norm in both 2024 and 2023.

The latest record-setting temperatures in the East Asian countries come amid scientists’ warnings that human-driven climate change is creating more extreme weather.

Asia has been particularly susceptible to extreme heat, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

In its latest climate report released in June, the UN body said the region was warming nearly twice as fast as the global average.

The average temperature of Asia’s landmass last year was about 1.04C (1.87F) above the 1991-2020 trend, according to the WMO, making 2024 either the warmest or second warmest year on record, depending on the dataset used.

China's consumption of transport fuels falls 4%

 From a skeet by Lauri Myllyvirta

Quarterly results of China's and the world's largest oil refiner Sinopec: China's consumption of transport fuels (gasoline, diesel and kerosene) fell 4% year-on-year in Jan-Sep, due to the impact of "alternative energy" i.e. EVs, speeding up from 3.6% drop in H1.

Demand for main petrochemicals [however], measured in ethylene equivalent, grew 8% - surging plastics and chemical production continues, with lots of new capacity coming online at the end of the five-year plan. Import substitution plays a part but cannot account for most of the growth.

I've been puzzling over the reported growth in transport fuel production in recent months, which doesn't seem to be accounted for by domestic demand or net exports. The Sinopec data suggests that it's inventory buildup (or  under-reported exports?).

Source: paper.cnstock.com/html/2025-10...

China's emissions have either peaked already, or will soon do so.  In which case, world emissions will also peak.  The decline initially will be small, but it will accelerate because of cheap EVs, solar and batteries.   Our task now is to steepen that curve and to accelerate the replacement of fossil fuels.

Source: Our world in data

 

Outsized climate cost

If you wanted to know how climate change is costing us .....

This graphic comes from a report by the Insurance Council of Australia.  It shows the average annual per capita cost, adjusted for inflation, of climate disasters in 6 developed countries.

Over the last 40 years, the cost per person has risen in Australia from $60 to $193, in the US from $56 to $451. 

And it's nowhere near over.  Even if emissions have peaked, temperatures won't stop rising until emissions have fallen by ~90%.  In the meantime, the cost of climate catastrophes will continue to grow exponentially.

Just stop burning fossil fuels!

 Honestly, it's quite simple. We have to stop burning fossil fuels to stop global temperatures rising.

Simple in concept, but not in execution.  We have to replace a couple of thousand coal power stations with wind, solar, and nuclear power.   And we have to transition our whole car and light truck fleet to EVs.  1.6 billion of them!   And find ways to power air travel with renewable fuels.  Electric planes aren't quite there yet.  Oh, and then there's cement and steel, where the manufacturing processes emit CO2, quite apart from the energy used.   But, essentially, if we can halve emissions, we will also halve the decade-by-decade rise in global temperatures from +-0.2 degrees to +-0.1 degrees.  Which will give us more time to reduce emissions from those harder sectors.

Together, land transport and electricity generation contribute roughly 50% of emissions, globally.  And the good news is that in these sectors, the clean energy alternatives are cheaper than fossil fuels.

For example, in Australia, BYD now sells an electric car (EV) which costs the same as a Toyota Corolla. Since EVs are 4 times as efficient as petrol cars (most of the fuel burnt in a conventional petrol engine is wasted as heat, and isn't used to drive the car forward) they are already much cheaper to run than petrol cars. Now, they're cheaper to buy as well. What's more, when the regulations are promulgated (why so slow, Federal Government?) you will be able to run your house on the electricity in your car. The BYD will have roughly 45 kWh of stored electricity in its battery. Average daily household use in Australia is 15 kWh. So you'll be able to charge your EV when power is cheap (midday, and again after 10 pm) and use it when power is expensive (4 pm to 9 pm). So for the same price as a petrol car, you'll get a giant household battery, cheaper car fuel bills, and much-reduced electricity bills.

This has been made possible by the collapse in battery costs. And that deep, and continuing, plunge has been parallelled by the fall in solar panel costs. While high latitudes will never be able to run on solar alone, in low and mid-latitudes, such as Australia, we will be able to run our grid on 100% solar electricity, combining it with 6 or 8 hours of storage. And EVs will be part of that revolution, as every household and every business gets them.

All these trends are being driven by market forces. Extremely competitive Chinese manufacturers are driving down prices. BYD spends as much on research as its total profit. CATL, the world's largest battery manufacturer, has introduced a sodium-ion battery. Sodium is a lot cheaper than lithium, and is also much safer. The same vigorous competition is driving down solar panel costs.

That's not to say we're out of the woods. There are powerful regressive forces which want to delay the transition, and useful idiots yelling loudly about how unfair it all is. Bring back steam trains!

Plus there are methane emissions from cattle and sheep, and CO2 from cement and steel. Methane is 80 times as potent a greenhouse gas, over a 10 year horizon (after which it decays into CO2) There's air transport, and sea transport, and home heating (bring on heat pumps!).

However, we must move faster.  The seas are dying, and half the tree of life is going extinct.  We should attempt to halve emissions by 2035, and halve them again by 2045.  With costs of solar and batteries plunging, that's achievable.

Thank you

I started this blog in July 2010.  I felt I had something to say about economies and economics, about politics, and about the environment, and not enough people to say it to.  When I first started, you had to use HTML to write the blog (you still have to use it now, sometimes, to fix mistakes), I had no idea how to post graphs to the blog, and I didn't even have a Twitter account to promote the blog.  I've learnt a lot since then.

In the first month, I got 3 views.  In August, 1.  In September, 17.   Talk about exponential growth!  By July 2012, this had grown to 247.  Last month, May, nearly 15 years later, there were 39,950 visits!  I wonder how many of them are from AI scrapers, though.  Am I too cynical?

So I wanted to say thank you, to all of you who read my ramblings.  My interests are my own, and I'm sure many people aren't interested in the things I am.  I find the world fascinating.  It's interesting to see connections, to understand how things work, to consider how public policy should shift to make the world a better place.  I'm more interested in good policy and good government than in any left or right view of the world, though I incline leftish.  It's just so happened that most of the damaging policies and laws have come from the Right and oligarchs since I started this blog.

15 years ago, I had become convinced that neo-liberalism was wrong, and that it would lead to greater and greater inequality and division, and I was right.  

I was wrong about action on climate change.  I kept on hoping that, given the inescapable logic of the impending climate catastrophe, we would (collectively) act to slash emissions.  But there was organised and cynical opposition and lies from powerful and wealthy interests; there was hypocrisy and greenwashing from politicians and elites; and too many ordinary people felt helpless in the face of the fossil fuel juggernaut.  But I am not giving up.  We must keep fighting.  Every 0.1 degree of heating avoided is absolutely worth it.  If I have played some small part in galvanising ordinary citizens into action,  I'm glad.

What will the next 15 years bring?  

Well, I think neo-liberalism is in its death throes.  Covid showed conclusively that governments can do some things better than the private sector.   And China's success in creating new renewables industries from scratch shows that government-driven industrial policy can work.  The triumph of Trump and MAGA in America shows the perils of ever rising inequality, and may yet galvanise the Democratic Party to become a real workers' party.  Will they ever support a rising minimum wage?  A wealth tax?  High taxes on billionaires?  Taxing companies like we used to in the 50s and 60s?  We'll see.

Will we make it to Mars?  It would be an extraordinary achievement.  I know the Left thinks it's a waste of money, and that we should fix up Earth first.  But as I have argued on these pages, I am convinced that setting up even just a scientific outpost on Mars will engender a technological revolution which will improve our lives right here on Earth.  Will it be Elon who gets us there?  Doesn't look like it right now, as he visibly disintegrates.  Yet, until his lurch into far-right lunacy, he had transformed EVs and Space.   Maybe he's the only one driven enough and rich enough to make it happen.  The Trump administration is too corrupt and inept.   He made EVs cool.   And others followed his lead.  Will others follow the path he's created to cut the costs of space?  

Will we cut emissions by 90% by 2050?  Probably yes.  Battery and EV and solar costs will just keep on falling, despite fossil fuel companies and half-witted and corrupt politicians.  And big majorities everywhere now accept the reality of climate change and its likely catastrophic consequences.   So as costs fall, and awareness rises, we'll get action.  Hopium?  Again, we'll see.

I'll keep working on my sword and sorcery fantasy novels and short stories, which I don't normally talk about here.  Eight novels and counting!  I'll keep on learning languages or refreshing those I already know.  This year it's French and Italian, and I'm relearning Ancient Greek.  I'll get back into music--I play the clarinet and the saxophone, but need to practise more. 

And big news (I think so!) is that I'll be starting a linked YouTube Volewica channel soon.   And you can follow the blog on Bluesky or on Mastodon.

Anyway, I hope I'm spared for another 15 years.  The odds are low, but I'll keep going as long as I can, convinced that my informed 99% vegan diet has extended and will continue to extend my life.

Thank you all, again. 

The ecological disaster unfolding on Australia's coast

From Australia's public broadcaster, the ABC.

"This is potentially the start of the decay of the oceans, which is the start of the decay of mankind.  This could be the beginning of the end."

The kettle

By Tjeerd Royaards 

Millennial voting shift bad news for the right

 

From The Guardian

Millennials are not behaving as expected. But what else is new? This time it’s their voting patterns and it spells very bad news for the Coalition [The right-wing coalition of the "Liberal" and the National/Country Party].

In Australia, the previous three generations – the silent generation, the baby boomers and generation X – all voted left when they were young, on average. Now the silent generation and the boomers, on average, vote right and gen X voting habits don’t appear to have changed much over their lifetime.

As they age, however, millennials appear to be going in entirely the opposite direction. Moving more to the left.

The trend where previous generations have moved right as they age, while millennials have moved left, is being seen across the English-speaking world. This is a big problem for the parties of the right as millennials make up an increasingly larger proportion of voters and it had an impact on the last federal election.

According to data from the Australian Electoral Commission there are now four electorates where those under 40 make up more than 45% of the voters in the seat: Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Griffith. Griffith is an inner-city seat in Brisbane. Both Brisbane and Griffith switched to the Greens, which means the Greens now hold three of the top four.

The Coalition lost 18 seats and government, with almost all the lost seats in the major cities. The one bright spot for the Coalition was that they lost no rural seats. Rural seats are older. The 10 electorates with the smallest proportion of people under 40 are all rural seats (with the National party holding five of them). These are the seats that will see the slowest impact from millennials.

But even here the demographics are against the Coalition. Cities are growing rapidly, which means the proportion of city electorates is increasing, while rural seats are dwindling.

As older generations die out, millennials will increasingly come to dominate a larger number of electorates. If they continue to vote left, this will be catastrophic for the Coalition.

But why are millennials continuing to vote left as they age? There are probably three main reasons, and they are all linked to their economic wellbeing.

Insecure work

The first is the rise of insecure work. Whether it’s casual jobs, sham contracting, or labour hire, the number of insecure jobs is rising and younger workers are those most impacted. Millennials took the advice of their parents. They studied hard, with record numbers of them getting university degrees. But the secure well-paid jobs that were promised for those who worked hard have not appeared. In 2021 one in four unemployed people had a university degree.

While unemployment might be at historic lows, if the jobs are not secure then people are not able to plan a future. Wages growth has also been almost non-existent for a decade. Real wages, your wages after adjusting for increasing prices, have gone backwards over the last 11 years.

The economic deal of secure, stable and well-paid employment that was offered to previous generations has not been offered to millennials.

The Coalition is openly hostile to any changes in industrial relations laws that would make work more secure and give more bargaining power to workers. It was completely opposed to the recent modest changes to IR laws put forward by the Labor party. Further changes to try to reduce insecure work are expected to be brought forward this year. Millennials will likely be the biggest winners from these changes.

 Housing affordability

The second reason is housing. Housing gives families stability and security. Robert Menzies, Australia’s longest-serving prime minister and the founder of the Liberal party, understood this. His government had a specific policy of increasing home ownership rates. Menzies believed that people were more likely to settle down and support their community if they owned a part of it.

Modern Liberals have a completely different view of housing. They see it as an investment, a way for people to make money. They have opposed policies that would make housing more affordable. Policies like scrapping tax concessions to property investors or large expansions to public housing.

Perhaps the Coalition hopes that as the boomers die off, they will pass down their expanded property portfolios to millennials, giving them economic security and hopefully switching them to vote conservative. But with average life expectancy now in the 80s and continuing to rise, many millennials will be into their 60s or older before they inherit.

Climate change

For previous generations, the existential threat was from nuclear annihilation and the cold war. The Coalition was successful in convincing many people that it was the party best placed to provide protection from this.

Today’s existential threat is from climate change and the Coalition is either ambivalent or in some cases openly hostile to action to prevent it. The impacts of climate change are now clear, and they are only going to get worse. Younger people will disproportionately bear the costs of inaction on climate change, so it is not hard to see why they are reluctant to vote for parties that are unwilling to act.

These three issues – insecure work, housing affordability and climate change – mean that millennials are sharing in less of the benefits of the economy and are less secure than previous generations.

The Coalition doesn’t have to do anything about this. But parties that ignore the concerns of important cohorts of voters are usually rewarded with extended time in opposition.

Sea temperatures literally off the scale

 From a toot by 'Anne Ominous'.

After sustained record sea surface temperatures, Climate Reanalyzer has again adjusted the scale of their Y axis on the SST graph to a maximum of 21.5ºC (it was recently a max of 21.2ºC)

Average SST is now at an all-time record high - on March 9, 2024 = 21.2ºC

(this is also happening even as El Niño is getting weaker)

Solid black line = this year's temperatures
Orange line  = last year's
Dotted line = 1982 2011 average
Dashed line  = = or minus 2 sigma

Yet still we dither and phaff. WE ARE NOT DOING ENOUGH TO SLASH EMISSIONS.

How many more warnings must we get before we act decisively?

Global warming warning --- 85 years ago

 [From a toot by Ed Hawkins]

85 years ago.

In April 1938, Guy Callendar published his seminal paper showing that Earth’s land areas had warmed over the previous 50 years.

He also suggested that man-made CO₂ emissions had caused around half of the observed warming.

85 years ago.

https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/

The theory that increasing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere would cause warming was developed earlier by Fourier, Foote, Tyndall, Arrhenius & others.

Their work enabled Callendar to join the pieces together and demonstrate a human-caused increase in both CO2 & global land temperatures and, importantly, link these together.

The work of Plass, Keeling, Revelle, Manabe & others would subsequently solidify these ideas.

Climate science has a long history we should use to communicate more.

 

Well he wasn't the first:  a woman called Eunice Foote proved in 1856 that CO2 trapped more heat than air, and maintained it longer.   Then there was Fourier, a French polymath genius.  And Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist.  Science has been clear about global warming for 170 years.

And still we do too little to avert catastrophe.  Politicians, owned by fossil fuel companies.  Other companies pretending to care, but just greenwashing.  Right-wing idiots, too stupid to realise they've been had.  And hoi polloi, hoping that somebody else will solve the problem.

Record number of days above 1.5 degrees

 Racing towards catastrophe.  And still we do nothing.

2023 hottest year by a huge margin

 From The Guardian

2023 “smashed” the record for the hottest year by a huge margin, providing “dramatic testimony” of how much warmer and more dangerous today’s climate is from the cooler one in which human civilisation developed.

The planet was 1.48C hotter in 2023 compared with the period before the mass burning of fossil fuels ignited the climate crisis. The figure is very close to the 1.5C temperature target set by countries in Paris in 2015, although the global temperature would need to be consistently above 1.5C for the target to be considered broken.

Scientists at the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS) said it was likely the 1.5C mark will be passed for the first time in the next 12 months. The average temperature in 2023 was 0.17C higher than in 2016, the previous record year, marking a very large increase in climate terms. The primary cause of this increased global heating was continued record emissions of carbon dioxide, assisted by the return of the natural climate phenomenon El Niño.

The high temperatures drove heatwaves, floods and wildfires, damaging lives and livelihoods across the world. Analysis showed some extreme weather, such as heatwaves in Europe and the US, would have been virtually impossible without human-caused global heating.

The CCCS data also showed that 2023 was the first year on record when every day was at least 1C warmer than the 1850-1900 pre-industrial record. Almost half the days were 1.5C hotter and, for the first time, two days were more than 2C hotter. The higher temperatures increased from June, with September’s heat so far above previous averages that one scientist called it “gobsmackingly bananas”.

Samantha Burgess, the CCCS deputy director, said: “2023 was an exceptional year, with climate records tumbling like dominoes. Temperatures during 2023 likely exceed those of any period in at least the last 100,000 years.”

Prof Bill Collins, at the University of Reading, UK, said: “It is a shock that 2023 unarguably smashed the global temperature record. More global warming is expected to cause even wetter winters in the UK and yet more flooding.”

Hundreds of scientific studies have shown the climate crisis is causing more extreme and more frequent extreme weather. While 2023 was perceived by many as a year in which global heating accelerated, scientists said the higher temperatures were in line with the predicted result of increased carbon emissions. However, the speed and intensity of severe weather impacts alarmed many experts.

A separate analysis by Japan’s Meteorological Agency produced very similar results as Copernicus, with 2023 a record 1.43C above pre-industrial levels and beating the previous record by 0.14C.

Prof Andrew Dessler, at Texas A&M University in the US, said the record set in 2023 was not surprising: “Every year for the rest of your life will be one of the hottest [on] record. This in turn means that 2023 will end up being one of the coldest years of this century. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

Governments looked at the climate crisis – and decided to persecute the activists

Source: Our World In Data
This year the global temperature anomaly will be 1 degree above
the 1961-1990 average, and 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial average.

 From Owen Jones, at The Guardian

Injustice is easy to oppose after it has receded into the past, and there is no cost to imagining yourself as a hero long after the event. Everyone celebrates the suffragettes now, but at the time they were vilified as hateful spinsters and terrorists. McCarthyism is a pejorative political label on right and left alike now, but at his peak, more Americans approved of Senator Joseph McCarthy than frowned on his witch-hunt. Most people would like to believe they’d have stood up against the homophobia of 1980s Britain – yet, by 1987, only 11% of the British public believed same-sex relations to be “not wrong at all”.

Which takes us to climate activism. This year has seen a global onslaught against people agitating for more action to mitigate the worst effects of the climate crisis. Courts can issue stern judgments, but so can history, and you have to wonder its future verdict on how the persecution and silencing of those raising the alarm only escalated when the scientific evidence had become so cast-iron, and when extreme weather events hammered home the imminent danger facing the human species. Here in Britain, a government which is reneging on its climate commitments – not least by expanding oil and gas licences – is simultaneously introducing repressive legislation to silence those holding them to account.

After punitive sentences were handed down to climate activists, the UN’s rapporteur for climate change and human rights suggested in November that the sentences potentially breached international law. Indeed, earlier this month, the 57-year old climate activist Stephen Gingell was sentenced to six months in prison. His crime? Participating in a peaceful slow march in protest against new oil and gas licences – something that is now prohibited by the Public Order Act 2023. In the space of a month, at least 470 peaceful protesters were arrested with the aid of the raft of authoritarian measures driven through by Tory rule.

Like the climate emergency itself, the persecution of those fighting it is a global phenomenon. At the recent Cop28 summit in Dubai, protesters suffered restrictions on what they and their signs could say and where they could walk. The French government outlawed the climate activist group Earth Uprising under the dubious pretext that it fomented violence; this was rightly labelled by human rights activists as appearing “wholly disproportionate in violation of France’s obligations under international law”.

In Australia, new laws imposed steeper prison sentences and fines against climate protesters: all this, as Human Rights Watch notes, as the country faces “an onslaught of record-breaking temperatures, floods, and bushfires in recent years”. In New South Wales, meanwhile, punitive laws to crack down on climate protesters were last week ruled to be unconstitutional because they undermined “freedom of political communication”.

Meanwhile, climate activists suffer coordinated attempts to portray them as dangerous extremists. Take the Atlas Network, an influential global grouping of rightwing thinktanks: it has helped lead campaigns across the world to demonise climate activists as dangerous extremists. A report by the climate platform DeSmog argues that this has had real consequences: from the portrayal of the German climate movement Last Generation as de facto terrorists, which helped lay the foundation for police raids against its activists, to the British thinktank Policy Exchange, which is reportedly part of Atlas, publishing a report denouncing Extinction Rebellion as an “extremist organisation seeking the breakdown of liberal democracy and the rule of law”. Rishi Sunak later said that Policy Exchange’s work had helped the government in drafting its legislation to crack down on such protesters.

Again, what will our descendants think, not least as they inhabit a world battered by the consequences of today’s failures to address an existential emergency, knowing we were in full possession of the facts? Two months ago, an international team of scientists warned the Earth’s vital signs were in a worse state than in any time in human history, imperilling the future of life itself. From extreme weather events to drought, famine to forced population movements, a bleak future beckons unless the warnings of embattled climate activists are heeded.

What is happening is hardly subtle. There is a calculated attempt to claim that the real extremists are not those who imperil our world’s future by fighting policies that would limit carbon emissions, but those seeking to prevent impending calamity. The truth is these climate activists are being targeted not because they are protesting in the wrong way or because their methods are counterproductive, but because they have secured such a considerable platform to make the climate emergency a more salient and discussed issue. Understandably, vested interests profiteering at the expense of the planet have every motive to shut them up.

There are politicians with loud voices who acknowledge that the climate emergency is indeed real, but either say nothing when these climate activists face coordinated campaigns to silence them, or even render themselves complicit. In hindsight, it seems so obvious to accept the righteousness of those who fought for the rights of women to vote, or who stood against McCarthyite intimidation, or who fought for gay rights. But these were often lonely battles, and those vindicated by history paid heavy costs at the time. If the climate activists warning of the gravest threat humanity has yet faced are silenced into 2024, we all may find ourselves paying an intolerable price.

Source: Our World in Data

 

A catastrophic 2 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures

 This was never supposed to happen.  Yet here we are.  Yes, I know it was only for 2 days, so far.   Nevertheless ....

From Axios.

The planet likely briefly exceeded a key warming threshold on Friday and Saturday for the first time since at least the beginning of instrument records, new data shows.

The indication that Friday and Saturday were the first two days on record to have a global average surface temperature above 2°C when compared with preindustrial levels, emerged first from a dataset maintained by the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)."Our best estimate is that this was the first day when global temperature was more than 2°C above 1850-1900 (or pre-industrial) levels, at 2.06°C," Samantha Burgess, the deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service stated on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Sunday.

She also noted the Saturday record in a post on Monday, stating: "Now two Nov 2023 days where global temperature exceeded 2°C in ERA5."

When compared with the 1991-2020 average, Friday's global mean was a record-setting 1.17°C (2.1°F) above average.

In a post on X on Monday, the ECMWF found that Friday was a bit warmer, at 2.07°C above preindustrial levels, while Saturday reached an anomaly of 2.06°C.

A daily global average surface temperature climb to greater than 2°C above pre-industrial levels indicates just how quickly the planet is warming, including some of the extremes that are now possible.

Breaching the 2-degree threshold for two days does not mean that the Paris Agreement's target of holding global warming to "well below" such a mark has been exceeded. The agreement refers to the long-term average over two or more decades rather than one day, month or even year.

[However,] news of the record is in keeping with the record-shattering year so far.  This year is on track to be the hottest on record globally in all surface weather datasets and saw both the hottest month on record (September) but also the largest margin for any monthly record in history.

Each month since May has set monthly global temperature records, and heat waves have scorched large parts of the globe, from the Southern U.S. to Africa, South America, China and Japan.

Last summer, the global average surface temperature first rose into record territory and eclipsed the 1.5-degree Paris target. That caught some scientists off guard, and the failure of the planet to cool back down below all-time record territory has stood out.

November, too, is now likely to be the hottest such month on record.

How climate change impacts the Indian Ocean Dipole

 From Phys.Org

With a new analysis of long-term climate data, researchers say they now have a much better understanding of how climate change can impact and cause sea water temperatures on one side of the Indian Ocean to be so much warmer or cooler than the temperatures on the other—a phenomenon that can lead to sometimes deadly weather-related events like megadroughts in East Africa and severe flooding in Indonesia.

The analysis, described in a new study in Science Advances by an international team of scientists led by researchers from Brown University, compares 10,000 years of past climate conditions reconstructed from different sets of geological records to simulations from an advanced climate model.

The findings show that about 18,000 to 15,000 years ago, as a result of melted freshwater from the massive glacier that once covered much of North America pouring into the North Atlantic, ocean currents that kept the Atlantic Ocean warm weakened, setting off a chain of events in response. The weakening of the system ultimately led to the strengthening of an atmospheric loop in the Indian Ocean that keeps warmer water on one side and cooler water on the other.

This extreme weather pattern, known as a dipole, prompts one side (either east or west) to have higher-than-average rainfall and the other to have widespread drought. The researchers saw examples of this pattern in both the historical data they studied and the model's simulation. They say the findings can help scientists not only better understand the mechanisms behind the east-west dipole in the Indian Ocean, but can one day help to produce more effective forecasts of drought and flood in the region.

"We know that in the present-day gradients in the temperature of the Indian Ocean are important to rainfall and drought patterns, especially in East Africa, but it's been challenging to show that those gradients change on long time-scales and to link them to long-term rainfall and drought patterns on both sides of the Indian Ocean," said James Russell, a study author and professor of Earth, environmental, and planetary sciences at Brown. "We now have a mechanistic basis to understand why some of the longer-term changes in rainfall patterns in the two regions have changed through time."

In the paper, the researchers explain the mechanisms behind how the Indian Ocean dipole they studied formed and the weather-related events it led to during the period they looked at, which covered the end of the last Ice Age and the start of the current geological epoch.

The researchers characterize the dipole as an east-west dipole where the water on the western side—which borders modern day East African countries like Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia—is cooler than the water on eastern side toward Indonesia. They saw that the warmer water conditions of the dipole brought greater rainfall to Indonesia, while the cooler water brought much drier weather to East Africa.

That fits into what is often seen in recent Indian Ocean dipole events. In October, for example, heavy rain led to floods and landslides in Indonesian islands of Java and Sulawesi, leaving four people dead and impacting over 30,000 people. On the opposite end, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia experienced intense droughts starting in 2020 that threatened to cause famine.

The changes the authors observed 17,000 years ago were even more extreme, including the complete drying of Lake Victoria—one of the largest lakes on Earth.

"Essentially, the dipole intensifies dry conditions and wet conditions that could result in extreme events like multi-year or decades-long dry events in East Africa and flooding events in South Indonesia," said Xiaojing Du, a Voss postdoctoral researcher in the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society and Brown's Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, and the study's lead author. "These are events that impact people's lives and also agriculture in those regions. Understanding the dipole can help us better predict and better prepare for future climate change."

The dipole the researchers studied formed from the interactions between the heat transport system of the Atlantic Ocean and an atmospheric loop, called a Walker Circulation, in the tropical Indian Ocean. The lower part of the atmospheric loop flows east to west across much of the region at low altitudes near the ocean surface, and the upper part flows west to east at higher altitudes. The higher air and lower air connect in one big loop.

Interruption and weakening of the Atlantic Ocean heat transport, which works like a conveyor belt made of ocean and wind currents, was brought on by massive melting of the Laurentide ice sheet that once covered most of Canada and the northern U.S. The melting cooled the Atlantic and consequent wind anomalies triggered the atmospheric loop over the tropical Indian Ocean to become more active and extreme. That then led to increased precipitation in the east side of the Indian Ocean (where Indonesia sits) and reduced precipitation in the west side, where East Africa sits.

The researchers also show that during the period they studied, this effect was amplified by a lower sea level and the exposure of nearby continental shelves.

The scientists say more research is needed to figure out exactly what effect the exposed continental shelf and lower sea level has on the Indian Ocean's east-west dipole, but they're already planning to expand the work to investigate the question. While this line of the work on lower sea levels won't play into modeling future conditions, the work they've done investigating how the melting of ancient glaciers impacts the Indian Ocean dipole and the heat transport system of the Atlantic Ocean may provide key insights into future changes as climate change brings about more melting.

"Greenland is currently melting so fast that it's discharging a lot of freshwater into the North Atlantic Ocean in ways that are impacting the ocean circulation," Russell said. "The work done here has provided a new understanding of how changes in the Atlantic Ocean circulation can impact Indian Ocean climate and through that rainfall in Africa and Indonesia."

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

 

20 years of ute design in one photo

 

8 charts showing climate change

 From a toot by Phil Baker

#Climatechange in eight graphs 

Plus a graph for incoming sunlight

https://www.climate.gov/

[charts at Climate.gov are each clickable]

 

Hands on bodies, hands off guns

 By Mike Luckovich