Preventing a climate calamity is still possible.

 This is an informative video from Climate Adam.  He uses an analogy I've used before: a bathtub.  Virtually every year since 1850, the CO2 we push out into the atmosphere has risen.  Because the outflow from the atmosphere (natural carbon sinks) is less than what we're pumping into the air, the level of CO2 has risen.  Emissions have flatlined over the last 10 years, but they're still more than the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere via carbon sinks.  Using the analogy, the level of water (CO2) in the tub (atmosphere) is continuing to rise, just more slowly.  And thus temperatures continue to rise.  But if we could cut emissions so that they are the same as outflows, the level of water (CO2) would stop rising, and so would temperatures.

Adam makes the point that carbon sinks (where CO2 gets sucked out of the atmosphere) take up around 50% of emissions.  This is only a temporary help, because the carbon sinks (the sea, forests and marshes) are taking less and less out of the atmosphere.  They're filling up.  But it does mean that if we could cut emissions by 50%, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, and therefore temperatures, would stop rising (or at least, rise more slowly), though we would still need to cut emissions over time to near zero.  It used to be thought that temperatures would go on rising for decades even after we achieved zero emissions, but this is no longer the scientific consensus.

Now, the good news is that together, emissions from electricity generation and land transport, on average across the world, are roughly 50% of total CO2 emissions.  If we could replace coal and gas in electricity generation, and convert the global car, lorry and bus fleets to electricity, we would have cut emissions by 50%.  In other words, stopping temperatures rising is achievable, and achievable over the next decade.  We would still have to achieve zero emissions, because with the oceans, the carbon sink reduction (the oceans offset and bury CO2) is offset by their thermal inertia — they will continue to release heat into the atmosphere as long as they are cooler than the atmosphere.   But switching to renewables and EVs would give us time to cut emissions from all the other more difficult sectors like cement, steel, air and sea transport and agriculture.

The other climate-warming gas Adam talks about is methane.  Methane comes from gas leaks, rubbish dumps, and cattle and sheep.  Methane has been rising fast, and shows no signs of peaking.  Over a ten-year time frame, methane is 80 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2.  But it quickly decays into CO2, so if we could cut methane emissions, the effects would be rapid.  One third of the rise in temperatures since pre-industrial times is from methane.  So, as we replace gas in electricity generation (and we will for now still need 5 - 10% gas generation to cover dunkelflaute events, because we don't have workable long-term storage), gas leaks will fall.  There are super emitters of methane from rubbish dumps.  And that's easy to stop: just cover your rubbish dumps with a thick layer of earth.  Finally, each of us can avoid beef, mutton and milk.  That's something we can directly do to cut emissions.  Turning vegetarian could be your single biggest step to cutting emissions!  (Buying an EV is another.)

The moral of all this is that we are far from helpless.  CO2 emissions have peaked.  Our task is to bend that curve down, until the level of CO2 in the atmosphere also peaks.  We have to turn the CO2 and methane taps off, and then we will actually be able to avoid a catastrophic climate future.

(One really scary factor driving increasing emissions is AI datacentres.  We need to stop their construction.  Now.)

Half the tree of life is going extinct

Light traps have long been used to monitor nocturnal insect numbers. In a photograph of one taken in 1978, about 3,000 species were identified. Photograph: Patrick Greenfield/The Guardian

This is one of the most depressing and dispiriting pieces I've seen in a long time.

From The Guardian.  Lightly edited] 

In front of him was a world seething with life. Every branch of every tree seemed to host its own small metropolis of creatures hunting, flying, crawling, eating. The research facility lay in a patchwork of protected rainforest, dry forest, cloud forest, mangroves and coastline covering an area the size of New York, and astonishingly rich in biodiverse life. Here, the bugs gorged, coating the leaf litter with a thick carpet of droppings.

But the real show was at night: for two hours each evening, the site got power and a 25-watt bulb flickered on above the porch. Out of the forest darkness, a tornado of insects would flock to its glow, spinning and dancing before the light. Lit up, the side of the house would be “absolutely plastered with moths – tens of thousands of them”, Janzen says.

Inspired, he decided to erect a sheet for a light trap with a camera – a common way to document flying insect numbers and diversity. In that first photograph, taken in 1978, the lit-up sheet is so thickly studded with moths that in places the fabric is barely visible, transformed into what looks like densely patterned, crawling wallpaper.

Scientists identified an astonishing 3,000 species from that light trap, and the trajectory of Janzen’s career was transformed, from the study of seeds to a lifetime specialising in the forest’s barely documented populations of caterpillars and moths.

Now 86, Janzen still works in the same research hut in the Guanacaste conservation area, alongside his longtime collaborator, spouse and fellow ecologist, Winnie Hallwachs. But in the forest that surrounds them, something has changed. Trees that once crawled with insects lie uncannily still.

The hum of wild bees has faded, and leaves that should be chewed to the stem hang whole and un-nibbled. It is these glossy, untouched leaves that most spook Janzen and Hallwachs. They are more like a pristine greenhouse than a living ecosystem: a wilderness that has been fumigated and left sterile. Not a forest, but a museum.

Over the decades, Janzen has repeated his light traps, hanging the sheet, watching for what comes. Today, some moths flutter to the glow, but their numbers are far fewer.

“It’s the same sheet, with the same lights, in the same place, looking over the same vegetation. Same time of year, same time of the moon cycle, everything about it is identical,” he says. “There’s just no moths on that sheet.” 

The declines witnessed by Janzen – and described by others around the world – are part of what some ecologists call a “new era” of ecological collapse, where rapid extinctions occur in regions that have little direct contact with people.

Reports of falling insect numbers around the world are not new. International reviews have estimated annual losses globally of between 1% and 2.5% of total biomass every year.

Widespread use of pesticides and fertilisers, light and chemical pollution, loss of habitat and the growth of industrial agriculture have all carved into their numbers. Often, these were deaths of proximity: insects are sensitive creatures, and any nearby source of pollution can send their populations crumbling.

But what Janzen and Hallwachs are witnessing is a part of a newer phenomenon: the catastrophic collapse of insect populations in supposedly protected regions of forest. “In the parts of Costa Rica that are heavily hit by pesticides, the insects are completely wiped out,” Hallwachs says.

 “But what we see here in the preserved areas – that as far as we can tell, are free of even these destructive insecticides and pesticides – even here, the insect numbers are going down horrifyingly dramatically,” she says.

Long-term data for insect populations – particularly less charismatic species – is still patchy, but Janzen and Hallwachs join a number of scientists that have recorded huge die-offs of insects in nature reserves around the world.

They include in Germany, where flying insects across 63 insect reserves dropped 75% in less than 30 years; the US, where beetle numbers dropped 83% in 45 years; and Puerto Rico, where insect biomass dropped up to 60-fold since the 1970s. These declines are occurring in ecosystems that are otherwise protected from direct human influence.

When David Wagner stepped out into the US’s southern wilderness this spring, he found landscapes emptied of life. The entomologist has devoted much of his career to documenting the vast diversity of US insect life, particularly rare caterpillars. He traverses the country to find specimens, often on long road trips searching for caterpillars by day and moths by night.

Now, he finds himself coming home empty-handed. “I just got back from Texas, and it was the most unsuccessful trip I’ve ever taken,” he says. “There just wasn’t any insect life to speak of.”

It was not only the insects missing, he says, it was everything. “Everything was crispy, fried; the lizard numbers were down to the lowest numbers I can ever remember. And then the things that eat lizards were not present – I didn’t see a single snake the entire time.”

Wagner recalls when a series of international reviews began hitting headlines in 2019, saying global insect biomass was declining at a rate of 1% a year (although some estimates put it as high as 2.5%).

“We [entomologists] were thinking conservatively,” he says, looking at the data that has emerged in the five years since then.

“I now think that that’s too low. Now I would say that 2% is happening in some areas, and we’re seeing some places threatened by climate change or urbanisation or agriculture get as high as 5% decline per year.” 

Those who doubt there is sufficient species data to prove the “insectageddon” can now track it by proxy, Wagner says: via the sharp declines in birds, lizards and other creatures that depend on them for food.

Scientists in the US, Brazil, Ecuador and Panama have now reported the catastrophic declines of birds in “untouched” regions – including reserves inside millions of hectares of pristine forest. In each case, the worst losses were among insectivorous birds.

At one research centre – falling within a 22,000-hectare (85 sq mile) stretch of intact forest in Panama – scientists comparing current bird numbers with the 1970s found 70% of species had declined, and 88% of these had lost more than half of their population.

In 2019, researchers found that almost a third of US birds – about 3 billion – had disappeared from the skies since the 1970s. The losses, however, were not evenly distributed: those birds that ate insects as their main food had declined by 2.9 billion. Those that didn’t depend on insects had actually gained, increasing by 26 million.

More recent research from the US found a decline in three-quarters of nearly 500 bird species studied – with the steepest downward trend in stronghold areas, where they once thrived.

In Puerto Rico’s Luquillo rainforest, scientists in 2018 mapped how the loss of insects set other dominoes falling: as bugs declined, so too did the populations of lizards, frogs and birds. Their disappearance, they wrote, had triggered “a bottom-up trophic cascade and consequent collapse of the forest food web”.

 In Costa Rica, Janzen described the fall in numbers of insectivorous birds in the reserve as “cratering”. A colony of about 20 nectar-eating bats have long nested in the dark nooks of Janzen and Hallwachs’ house, but Janzen has noticed the flowers they used to feed from are now failing to bloom.

Hallwachs began to find their small, emaciated bodies lying on the floor. “Over a period of five days, I found three of these bats dead,” she says. Researchers at another site 20 miles away told her they were witnessing the same thing.

 

 Behind the steepening declines, a clear culprit is beginning to emerge: global heating. A tropical forest ecosystem is “a finely tuned Swiss watch”, Hallwachs says – perfectly engineered to sustain a vastly biodiverse system of creatures.

Each element is delicately tuned and interlocks with the rest: the heat, the humidity, the rainfall, the unfolding of leaves, the length of the seasons, the start and stop of the life cycles of insects and animals.

With each incremental turn of one cog, the rest of the system responds. Insects and animals have evolved to time their hibernations and breeding times precisely to small signals from the system: a change in humidity, a lengthening of the light hours of the day, a small rise or fall in temperature.

But now, the system has one gear spinning wildly out of time: the climate.

“When I arrived here in 1963 the dry season was four months. Today, it is six months,” Janzen says. Insects that typically spend four months underground, waiting for the rains, are now forced to try to survive another two months of hot, dry weather. Many are not succeeding. 

Alongside the changing seasons are other shifts, such as in rainfall or humidity. “It’s just a general disruption of all the little cues and synchronies that would be out there,” Janzen says. Across the entire clock of the forest, plants and creatures are falling out of sync. In the background, the temperature is rising.

“The killer – the cause that’s pulling the trigger – is actually water,” says Wagner. For insects, staying hydrated is a unique physiological challenge: rather than lungs, their bodies are riddled with holes, called spiracles, that carry oxygen directly into the tissue.

“They’re all surface area,” says Wagner. “Insects can’t hold water.” Even a brief drought lasting just a few days can wipe out millions of humidity-dependent insects.

 [Read more here.]

Already, alternating droughts, floods and heatwaves are affecting the production of food.  But without insects, there will be no food.  Mankind is too stupid, too greedy, and too ignorant, to stop the processes that are leading to the destruction of the Earth and of ourselves.  We could stop emissions which cause global heating and catastrophic collapses in insect populations.  But we do not.  We could reduce or even stop using pesticides and insecticides.  We do not.  We could stop producing plastics in the quantities we do.  But we don't. 

Meanwhile, it's not just insects which are dying, but also the seas.  

Millionaires, billionaires and large corporations control our politics, and they stop our politicians taking action on global heating, insecticides, and plastics.  

If you think that is too pessimistic a view, consider that Australia's Labor Party has just won a landslide in an election, wiping out the right-wing, anti-climate L/NP coalition.  A key difference between Labor and the L/NP was, supposedly, their different attitudes to climate change.  Yet, as soon as the election was over, it approved a massive expansion in the life of a gas extraction and exporting facility in NW Australia.  The emissions from the extension of this project alone will produce another 6 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases.  Australia's total CO2 emissions in 2023 were 383 million tonnes.  I needn't even discuss the situation in the USA. And even in countries which purport to do something about climate change, fossil fuel subsidies continue.  We're encouraging people to destroy us and our civilisation.

I despair.

Is there any hope at all?

There are some extraordinary things happening in the renewables space.

1. Solar power is up a lot (it varies by country) almost everywhere.  The cost of solar continues to decline, and because the cost of storage is plunging, "firming" solar electricity is becoming easier and cheaper.

2. CATL has introduced improved sodium-ion batteries. Sodium is roughly 1/5th as costly as lithium, so sodium-ion batteries will be much cheaper than lithium-ion. They also have a much longer life, theoretically allowing cars to travel 3 million miles before the batteries wear out. These new batteries will have 10,000 cycles, which will mean that even if they are charged and discharged 100% every day, they will still last 27 years.  Fantastic for stationary (grid) storage.  

3. EVs continue to make up an ever larger proportion of total car sales. In China, 1/3rd of the world's car market, they are +-50%, heading straight towards 100%. EVs (from China) now have the same sticker price as petrol cars. For example, here in Oz, the cheapest BYD Dolphin costs the same as the cheapest petrol Toyota Corolla. As battery prices plunge, EVs are only going to become ever more attractive.


Emissions from land transport and electricity generation are just under 50% of total global emissions. It seems plausible that these will have nearly ended by 2040, putting us halfway down the road to zero emissions. We need to do more (stop eating red meat, replace gas/oil heating with heat pumps/electrical heating, fix cement, steel and air travel, stop land clearing) to bend that curve towards a better outcome, but for the first time in years, I feel optimistic that we at last have a chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change.  

What can you do to help?  You can cut your personal emissions, by as much as 20-30%, by becoming vegetarian, or at least, stopping eating beef and mutton, and not using milk.   If mankind did that, we would cut emissions by +-70%, adding together the decline in emissions from agriculture and transport and electricity generation.  The more we cut emissions, the sooner temperatures will stop rising.

It has been possible to argue that anything we do is pointless, because China's emissions have just kept on rising.  But this year, or next, China's emissions, as the country installs more and more solar, and EV sales continue to explode, will peak and start falling, and that particular excuse for inaction will disappear.

Let's do this.  

‘Minimal progress’ made this year on curbing global heating

Source: NOAA

From The Guardian

World leaders have promised to try to stop the planet heating by more than 1.5C (2.7F) [since pre-industrial times, which in practice is defined as 1850-1900]. But current policies put the temperature rise on track for 2.7C, a report has found.

The expected level of global heating by the end of the century has not changed since 2021, with “minimal progress” made this year, according to the Climate Action Tracker project. The consortium’s estimate has not shifted since the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow three years ago.

“We have clearly failed to bend the curve,” said the lead author of the analysis, Sofia Gonzales-Zuñiga, from Climate Analytics.

The expected level of warming is slightly lower when considering government pledges and targets, at 2.1C, but has also not changed since 2021. Warming in the most optimistic scenario rose slightly from 1.8C last year to 1.9C this year, the report found.

Changes in average global temperatures that sound small can lead to massive human suffering. Last month, a study found half of the 68,000 heat deaths in Europe in 2022 were the result of the 1.3C of global heating the world has seen so far. At the higher temperatures that are projected for the end of the century, the risk of irreversible and catastrophic extremes is also set to soar.

The findings were released as climate negotiators converge on the Cop29 summit in Azerbaijan for fraught negotiations over greenhouse gas pollution and the money needed to deal with it. The flatlining of progress comes despite the world seeing breakneck change in the rollout of clean technologies that can replace coal, oil and gas.

The report found fossil fuel subsidies have also hit all-time highs, and funding for such projects quadrupled between 2021 and 2022.

Prof Niklas Höhne, a climate scientist at the NewClimate Institute in Germany, said it was “not a paradox” to see rising emissions while renewables boomed. “In recent years, fossil fuels have won the race against renewables, leading to increasing emissions,” he said.

Still, he added, “renewables surprise us each year” with faster growth than expected. He said they would soon crowd out fossil fuels. “It allows a much faster decline in emissions than we thought only three years ago.”  [I've been optimistic for years, believing that because of the obvious need, and the raoid cost declines in renewables, emissions would peak soon.  And they still haven't. ]

Climate scientists say every fraction of a degree matters for the health of people and the planet.

The researchers warned their median warming estimate of 2.7C by 2100 had a wide enough margin of error that it could translate into far hotter temperatures than scientists were expecting.

“There is a 33% chance of our projection being 3C or higher, and a 10% chance of being 3.6C or higher,” said Gonzales-Zuniga. The latter would be “absolutely catastrophic”, she added.

A handful of world leaders at Cop29 expressed frustration at the slow pace of progress after 28 UN climate summits.

“What on earth are we doing in this gathering?” the Albanian prime minister, Edi Rama, asked his fellow heads of state on Wednesday. “What does it mean for the future of the world if the biggest polluters continue as usual?”

Others pointed to progress made despite the shortcomings.

“Meetings like these are often perceived as talking shops,” said the Belgium prime minister, Alexander De Croo. “And yes, these strenuous negotiations are far from perfect. But if you compare climate policy now to a decade ago, we are in a different world.” [Really?  Where is the progress?  Forgive my cynicism.  COP29 will be just another gabfest, where promises are made for far-future virtue, while no action is taken now, and in fact the USA, the world's second-largest emitter, wants to stop any reduction in emissions and reverse the steps it's already taken.]

The politics of cultural despair

I have been saying this for a long time. It's obvious that neo-liberalism has siphoned up income and wealth to the richest 10%, the richest 1% and the richest 0.1%. The bottom half of the population has had to endure the horrors of modern capitalism without any gains.  In the Anglophone countries, both sides of politics are supporters of neo-liberalism, are in hock to billionaires and corporations.  That leaves voters nowhere to go to get change.  No wonder that start believing in charlatans and demagogues.

 

The Mourning After, by Mr Fish

From The Chris Hedges Report

In the end, the election was about despair. Despair over futures that evaporated with deindustrialization. Despair over the loss of 30 million jobs in mass layoffs. Despair over austerity programs and the funneling of wealth upwards into the hands of rapacious oligarchs. Despair over a liberal class that refuses to acknowledge the suffering it orchestrated under neoliberalism or embrace New Deal type programs that will ameliorate this suffering. Despair over the futile, endless wars, as well as the genocide in Gaza, where generals and politicians are never held accountable. Despair over a democratic system that has been seized by corporate and oligarchic power.

This despair has been played out on the bodies of the disenfranchised through opioid and alcoholism addictions, gambling, mass shootings, suicides — especially among middle-aged white males — morbid obesity and the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the Oprah-like belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires. These are the pathologies of a deeply diseased culture, what Friedrich Nietzsche calls an aggressive despiritualized nihilism.

Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay. He expresses a childish yearning to be an omnipotent god. This yearning resonates with Americans who feel they have been treated like human refuse. But the impossibility of being a god, as Ernest Becker writes, leads to its dark alternative -- destroying like a god. This self-immolation is what comes next.

Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system. Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumpeted her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base - 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.

Oswald Spengler in “The Decline of the West” predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.

The American dream has become an American nightmare.

The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered. The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realization that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness and humiliation. It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger and a sense of worthlessness.

“When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding ourselves of it … ,” Émile Durkheim writes. “There is a collective mood, as there is an individual mood, that inclines nations to sadness. … For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected. Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs.”

Decayed societies, where a population is stripped of political, social and economic power, instinctively reach out for cult leaders. I watched this during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The cult leader promises a return to a mythical golden age and vows, as Trump does, to crush the forces embodied in demonized groups and individuals that are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous cult leaders become, the more cult leaders flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders seek total power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the desperate hope that the cult leaders will save them.

All cults are personality cults. Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious fawning and total obedience. They prize loyalty above competence. They wield absolute control. They do not tolerate criticism. They are deeply insecure, a trait they attempt to cover up with bombastic grandiosity. They are amoral and emotionally and physically abusive. They see those around them as objects to be manipulated for their own empowerment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment. All those outside the cult are branded as forces of evil, prompting an epic battle whose natural expression is violence.

We will not convince those who have surrendered their agency to a cult leader and embraced magical thinking through rational argument. We will not coerce them into submission. We will not find salvation for them or ourselves by supporting the Democratic Party. Whole segments of American society are now bent on self-immolation. They despise this world and what it has done to them. Their personal and political behavior is willfully suicidal. They seek to destroy, even if destruction leads to violence and death. They are no longer sustained by the comforting illusion of human progress, losing the only antidote to nihilism.

Pope John Paul II in 1981 issued an encyclical titled “Laborem exercens,” or “Through Work.” He attacked the idea, fundamental to capitalism, that work was merely an exchange of money for labor. Work, he wrote, should not be reduced to the commodification of human beings through wages. Workers were not impersonal instruments to be manipulated like inanimate objects to increase profit. Work was essential to human dignity and self-fulfillment. It gave us a sense of empowerment and identity. It allowed us to build a relationship with society in which we could feel we contributed to social harmony and social cohesion, a relationship in which we had purpose.

The pope castigated unemployment, underemployment, inadequate wages, automation and a lack of job security as violations of human dignity. These conditions, he wrote, were forces that negated self-esteem, personal satisfaction, responsibility and creativity. The exaltation of the machine, he warned, reduced human beings to the status of slaves. He called for full employment, a minimum wage large enough to support a family, the right of a parent to stay home with children, and jobs and a living wage for the disabled. He advocated, in order to sustain strong families, universal health insurance, pensions, accident insurance and work schedules that permitted free time and vacations. He wrote that all workers should have the right to form unions with the ability to strike.

We must invest our energy into organizing mass movements to overthrow the corporate state through sustained acts of mass civil disobedience. This includes the most powerful weapon we possess – the strike. By turning our ire on the corporate state, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims or Blacks. We give people an alternative to a corporate-indentured Democratic Party that cannot be rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society, one that serves the common good rather than corporate profit. We must demand nothing less than full employment, guaranteed minimum incomes, universal health insurance, free education at all levels, robust protection of the natural world and an end to militarism and imperialism. We must create the possibility for a life of dignity, purpose and self-esteem. If we do not, it will ensure a Christianized fascism and ultimately, with the accelerating ecocide, our obliteration.

See also:

Shit-life syndrome    The basic income   Playing the race/Muslim/terrorist card

Most political unrest caused by soaring inequality

Why aren't we panicking?

 I ended this post by asking why we weren't panicking.

There is clear evidence that the rate at which global temperatures have been rising is speeding up.    This massively reduces the time we have left to slash emissions before we are hit by catastrophic changes in the climate.   Already average temperatures have risen 1.5 degrees since pre-industrial times, defined as 1850-1900.   In the Paris Climate Accord, signed in December 2015, the world agreed to try to limit the rise in temperatures to 1.5 degrees.  We are already there.  Yes, I know, it's an El Niño year, and will be followed by La Niña years.  So temperatures will cool, somewhat.   But the trend, excluding the effects of El Niño/ La Niña oscillation (ENSO), volcanos, and the sunspot cycle, shows that temperatures are clearly accelerating: 

Source: Open Mind

It is possible that China's carbon emissions have peaked, given the extraordinary rapidity of its roll-out of renewables and the rapid expansion of EV sales.  China emits 25% of the world's CO2, and while the USA's and Europe's emissions have been falling for decades (the EU's peaked in 1979, and the USA's in 2005), China's have nearly tripled over the last 20 years.  If China's emissions have passed a structural peak, that will be very significant, and will mean that global emissions will have also peaked.  

The problem is, however, that it's not enough for emissions to start falling for temperatures to stop rising.  The rise in temperatures is proportional to the level of emissions.  In other words, to stop temperatures rising, we will have to cut emissions to zero, or as near as dammit.  (Note that "net-zero" involves using dodgy offsets to "remove" CO2 from the atmosphere.   Even if it worked, it's not going to happen on the scale we need to avoid temperatures rising.)  If we halved emissions over the next decade, yes, temperatures would rise more slowly.  Perhaps we might cut the rise in temperatures by half, to 0.15 degrees C per decade.  But they would still rise.  And halving the level of emissions over the next decade would require a 7% per annum compound cut in emissions.   That's not going to happen unless we go all out.

The public seems to be resigned to this catastrophe.  Where is the fear?  Where is the anger?  Why aren't we nagging the soulcase out of our elected representatives to enact measures which will slash emissions?  Why aren't we voting climate denialists out of office?  My theory is that people are in despair.  We know that disaster awaits, we feel powerless to help it, and it's too depressing to consider just how ghastly the world will be.  So we avoid the topic.  We get angry or irritable if others bring it up.  We prefer to look at pictures of kittens or obsess about Taylor Swift rather than face up to the facts. 

Suppose we did panic, and decided to take real action?  What would we do?

1.  We would set a target for 80% of electricity generation to be produced from renewables by 2030.   Why not 100%?  Because we're still not certain whether we can produce all the electricity we need from 100% renewables.  We may, for example, need peaking gas to back up a wind and solar grid for a few weeks a year.  Countries in high latitudes might need nuclear.  When we get to 80% then we can reassess.  This will cut emissions by 24%.
2. We would immediately ban the sale of new petrol-only cars and trucks.  Hybrids use 40% less petrol than petrol-only cars in urban driving.  Plug-in hybrids use 80% less.  And obviously, EVs produce no direct tailpipe emissions.  Second-hand petrol-only cars will still be sellable, but as they age they'll be scrapped, and the average emissions of the car/truck fleet would fall.  After 5 years, we'd ban hybrids, leaving just plug-ins for sale.  This will cut emissions over 20 years by 20%.
3. We would dramatically improve public transport.   Instead of giant diesel buses coming every hour, we'd have small electric mini-buses coming every 5 or 10 minutes.  It'll take a long time to build out new electric long distance high-speed and short-distance commuter lines, but we'd start now, and move as fast as we can.
4. All air travel below a certain distance would be banned---unless the planes were electric.  Yes, flying from Sydney to Melbourne would involve three "legs" instead of a single jet-flight, but, hey, we've been here before.  And we could ban long-distance air travel too.  When I was a lightie, we didn't travel long distance by air, but by sea or train.  To spare climate catastrophe, we may have to go there again.
5. All steel will have to be produced without coal, using green hydrogen or methane.  (Cut emissions by 8%) 
6. We will have to ration red meat.  ~30% of emissions come from agriculture (including land clearing and methane from cows' burps and farts), and most of that comes from beef and mutton.
7. We would impose taxes on imports from countries who aren't also being serious about cutting emissions. 

Of course, none of this will happen.   People will go on thinking that all they need to do is to recycle their rubbish.  Give up beef?  Are you out of your mind?  Stop selling petrol cars?  Communism!  Give up my annual holiday in the Seychelles?  Good grief, is a person to have no fun at all?

So we will sleepwalk our way to catastrophe, because we are too fecking stupid to take the necessary steps to avoid it.  It's not that we don't have the technology to slash emissions.  It's that we don't have the will.  We are too comatose, too dumb, too feeble to take meaningful action.  

I have of late, (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition; that this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Record number of days above 1.5 degrees

 Racing towards catastrophe.  And still we do nothing.

China's GDP & climate goals clash

From The Guardian

China’s energy policies are fast creating a type of “emissions ambiguity”, as the twin goals of boosting GDP growth and reducing carbon emissions come into conflict.

The uncertainty is whether and when the world’s biggest carbon emitter will start to curb greenhouse gas pollution. The release of the country’s annual statistics communique on Tuesday did not clear things up.

As Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst at Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, noted this month, China’s carbon emissions may have risen 1% or fallen by that amount in 2022.

A crude conversion of the 3% GDP growth reported by China and its 0.8% reduction in the carbon intensity of economic activity – as stated in the communique – indicates emissions may have risen 2.2% last year.

The calculations matter as China emits more than a quarter of global emissions, roughly twice as much as the next largest, the US.

In November 2021, China told the UN it would reach carbon neutrality “before 2060”, and President Xi Jinping has also promised to reduce coal consumption by the 2026-30 period, but has not said when China will stop building new power plants.

Pollution growth should also have been subdued in 2022, a year when economic activity was slowed by rolling Covid curbs. Excluding 2020, which included the worst of the pandemic disruptions, GDP growth last year was the weakest since the 1970s.

Local officials often use big infrastructure projects, such as power plants, to boost economic activity in their areas. There will be even more pressure to stimulate growth after the GDP target for 2023 is announced at the National People’s Congress, which starts on 5 March. The national target is expected to be about 5%.

As Myllyvirta’s centre reported on Monday, China was busy granting permits for an average of two power plants a week in 2022, or six times more capacity than the rest of the world combined. One executive boasted of securing approval to build a 4,000-megawatt coal-fired plant in just 63 days after taking ownership of the project.

“China has not seen such a wave of new permits for new coal-fired power plants since the permitting frenzy of 2015, when provincial governments were given the authority to approve new projects,” the report says.

Should a large proportion of the 106GW of new coal projects permitted – more than four times 2021’s 23GW tally – begin operation, global efforts to keep climate heating to the Paris accord temperature limit of 1.5C are, frankly, cooked.

“One of the clear upshots is that China is now very significantly behind its energy and carbon intensity targets for 2025”, Myllyvirta said.

But here is where the ambiguity lies. Permitting does not equate to construction, and since many of the proposed plants are in regions already oversupplied with power, it is not clear new capacity will necessarily equate to extra coal combustion.

And, as Myllyvirta highlights, numbers in the communique stating that coal consumption rose 4.3% in 2022 and total energy use rising 2.9% “appear to contradict weak or falling industrial output”.

The 3.1% drop in oil consumption and a 1.2% fall in gas use – the first fall in at least 20 years – also point to suspiciously weak demand in the economy.

Of course, while China is pouring money into building new coal plants, it is also leading spending on renewable energy and low-carbon products such as electric vehicles – even if the US Inflation Reduction Act looks to challenge that primacy. The IRA pledges, among other things, to result in 950m new solar panels and 120,000 new wind turbines in the US by 2030.

China added a record 125GW solar and wind capacity in 2022, with about two-thirds of that solar, the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air says.

According to the official communique, clean energy consumption – which includes nuclear and hydropower – rose 0.4 percentage points last year to 25.9%. That’s still less than half coal’s share at 56.2%.

China’s output of solar panels totalled 340m kilowatts of capacity, up almost half on 2021’s level. Production of so-called new energy vehicles, most of which were plug-in electric, soared 90.5% to just exceed 7m units, the communique says.

Why those solar panels and zero-emissions cars might come in handy was hinted at in another statistic that China’s policymakers must keep in mind when considering the urgency of tackling pollution.

“Of the monitored 339 cities at prefecture level and above, 62.8% reached the air quality standard and 37.2% failed,” the communique says.

Very depressing news.   China produces 25% of annual CO2 emissions.  It is by far the largest emitter.  

My last post had the good news of a probable 20% decline in European emissions for electricity generation this year.   This fall is completely offset by the rise in Chinese emissions.  And, it's not as if China isn't perfectly aware of the impact of global warming on the country: desertification in the west; more and worse floods in the east and south; and rising sea levels (64 million people are at risk of sea level rise, and 1/3rd of GDP would be impacted)   The most optimistic take on this is that China will only use these new power stations when supply from other sources is low.  Who knows?  

On the face of it, deeply depressing news.  

Explosion of fossil fuel lobbyist numbers at COP27

From The Guardian

There are more than 600 fossil fuel lobbyists at the Cop27 climate conference, a rise of more than 25% from last year and outnumbering any one frontline community affected by the climate crisis.

There are 636 lobbyists from the oil and gas industries registered to attend the UN event in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. At Glasgow, the figure was 503, which outnumbered the delegation of any single country. This year the only country with a larger delegation is the United Arab Emirates, hosts of Cop28 next year, which has 1,070 registered delegates, up from 176 last year.

At Cop27, “the influence of fossil fuel lobbyists is greater than frontline countries and communities. Delegations from African countries and Indigenous communities are dwarfed by representatives of corporate interests”, said the group Kick Big Polluters out, which campaigns against the influence of fossil fuel lobbyists at the climate negotiations.

The data on lobbyists, compiled by the organisations Corporate Accountability, Global Witness and Corporate Europe Observatory, shows the growing influence of oil and gas interests at the climate talks. While many environmental groups hoping to encourage the transition away from fossil fuels say it can be beneficial to bring private interests to the negotiating table, these benefits risk being outweighed by the sheer size of the delegations and suspicions that lobbyists attend the talks to slow progress rather than discuss limiting their own industries.

Civil society groups fear that the increasing presence of fossil fuel lobbyists risks stymieing negotiations at an essential time, amid efforts to keep global temperature rises within the 1.5C of warming scientists agree is needed to prevent catastrophic climate change.

“The explosion in the number of industry delegates attending the negotiations reinforces the conviction of the climate justice community that the industry views the Cop as a carnival of sorts, and not a space to address the ongoing and imminent climate crisis,” said Kwami Kpondzo from Friends of the Earth Togo.

In a recent submission to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – the body that oversees Cop – to discuss the role of private business at the talks, a coalition of civil society groups said climate action would “continue to fail to meaningfully address the climate crisis as long as polluting interests are granted unmitigated access to policymaking processes and are allowed to unduly influence and weaken the critical work of the UNFCCC”.

De-carbonisation via carbon capture is a mirage

From The Conversation.

Collectively we three authors of this article must have spent more than 80 years thinking about climate change. Why has it taken us so long to speak out about the obvious dangers of the concept of net zero? In our defence, the premise of net zero is deceptively simple – and we admit that it deceived us.

The threats of climate change are the direct result of there being too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So it follows that we must stop emitting more and even remove some of it. This idea is central to the world’s current plan to avoid catastrophe. In fact, there are many suggestions as to how to actually do this, from mass tree planting, to high tech direct air capture devices that suck out carbon dioxide from the air.

The current consensus is that if we deploy these and other so-called “carbon dioxide removal” techniques at the same time as reducing our burning of fossil fuels, we can more rapidly halt global warming. Hopefully around the middle of this century we will achieve “net zero”. This is the point at which any residual emissions of greenhouse gases are balanced by technologies removing them from the atmosphere.

This is a great idea, in principle. Unfortunately, in practice it helps perpetuate a belief in technological salvation and diminishes the sense of urgency surrounding the need to curb emissions now.

We have arrived at the painful realisation that the idea of net zero has licensed a recklessly cavalier “burn now, pay later” approach which has seen carbon emissions continue to soar. It has also hastened the destruction of the natural world by increasing deforestation today, and greatly increases the risk of further devastation in the future.

 

To understand how this has happened, how humanity has gambled its civilisation on no more than promises of future solutions, we must return to the late 1980s, when climate change broke out onto the international stage.

On June 22 1988, James Hansen was the administrator of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a prestigious appointment but someone largely unknown outside of academia.

By the afternoon of the 23rd he was well on the way to becoming the world’s most famous climate scientist. This was as a direct result of his testimony to the US congress, when he forensically presented the evidence that the Earth’s climate was warming and that humans were the primary cause: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

If we had acted on Hansen’s testimony at the time, we would have been able to decarbonise our societies at a rate of around 2% a year in order to give us about a two-in-three chance of limiting warming to no more than 1.5°C. It would have been a huge challenge, but the main task at that time would have been to simply stop the accelerating use of fossil fuels while fairly sharing out future emissions.

Four years later, there were glimmers of hope that this would be possible. During the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, all nations agreed to stabilise concentrations of greenhouse gases to ensure that they did not produce dangerous interference with the climate. The 1997 Kyoto Summit attempted to start to put that goal into practice. But as the years passed, the initial task of keeping us safe became increasingly harder given the continual increase in fossil fuel use.

It was around that time that the first computer models linking greenhouse gas emissions to impacts on different sectors of the economy were developed. These hybrid climate-economic models are known as Integrated Assessment Models. They allowed modellers to link economic activity to the climate by, for example, exploring how changes in investments and technology could lead to changes in greenhouse gas emissions.

They seemed like a miracle: you could try out policies on a computer screen before implementing them, saving humanity costly experimentation. They rapidly emerged to become key guidance for climate policy. A primacy they maintain to this day.

Unfortunately, they also removed the need for deep critical thinking. Such models represent society as a web of idealised, emotionless buyers and sellers and thus ignore complex social and political realities, or even the impacts of climate change itself. Their implicit promise is that market-based approaches will always work. This meant that discussions about policies were limited to those most convenient to politicians: incremental changes to legislation and taxes.

Around the time they were first developed, efforts were being made to secure US action on the climate by allowing it to count carbon sinks of the country’s forests. The US argued that if it managed its forests well, it would be able to store a large amount of carbon in trees and soil which should be subtracted from its obligations to limit the burning of coal, oil and gas. In the end, the US largely got its way. Ironically, the concessions were all in vain, since the US senate never ratified the agreement.


Postulating a future with more trees could in effect offset the burning of coal, oil and gas now. As models could easily churn out numbers that saw atmospheric carbon dioxide go as low as one wanted, ever more sophisticated scenarios could be explored which reduced the perceived urgency to reduce fossil fuel use. By including carbon sinks in climate-economic models, a Pandora’s box had been opened.

It’s here we find the genesis of today’s net zero policies.

That said, most attention in the mid-1990s was focused on increasing energy efficiency and energy switching (such as the UK’s move from coal to gas) and the potential of nuclear energy to deliver large amounts of carbon-free electricity. The hope was that such innovations would quickly reverse increases in fossil fuel emissions.

But by around the turn of the new millennium it was clear that such hopes were unfounded. Given their core assumption of incremental change, it was becoming more and more difficult for economic-climate models to find viable pathways to avoid dangerous climate change. In response, the models began to include more and more examples of carbon capture and storage, a technology that could remove the carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations and then store the captured carbon deep underground indefinitely.

This had been shown to be possible in principle: compressed carbon dioxide had been separated from fossil gas and then injected underground in a number of projects since the 1970s. These Enhanced Oil Recovery schemes were designed to force gases into oil wells in order to push oil towards drilling rigs and so allow more to be recovered – oil that would later be burnt, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Carbon capture and storage offered the twist that instead of using the carbon dioxide to extract more oil, the gas would instead be left underground and removed from the atmosphere. This promised breakthrough technology would allow climate friendly coal and so the continued use of this fossil fuel. But long before the world would witness any such schemes, the hypothetical process had been included in climate-economic models. In the end, the mere prospect of carbon capture and storage gave policy makers a way out of making the much needed cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

When the international climate change community convened in Copenhagen in 2009 it was clear that carbon capture and storage was not going to be sufficient for two reasons.

First, it still did not exist. There were no carbon capture and storage facilities in operation on any coal fired power station and no prospect the technology was going to have any impact on rising emissions from increased coal use in the foreseeable future.

The biggest barrier to implementation was essentially cost. The motivation to burn vast amounts of coal is to generate relatively cheap electricity. Retrofitting carbon scrubbers on existing power stations, building the infrastructure to pipe captured carbon, and developing suitable geological storage sites required huge sums of money. Consequently the only application of carbon capture in actual operation then – and now – is to use the trapped gas in enhanced oil recovery schemes. Beyond a single demonstrator, there has never been any capture of carbon dioxide from a coal fired power station chimney with that captured carbon then being stored underground.

Just as important, by 2009 it was becoming increasingly clear that it would not be possible to make even the gradual reductions that policy makers demanded. That was the case even if carbon capture and storage was up and running. The amount of carbon dioxide that was being pumped into the air each year meant humanity was rapidly running out of time.

 

With hopes for a solution to the climate crisis fading again, another magic bullet was required. A technology was needed not only to slow down the increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but actually reverse it. In response, the climate-economic modelling community – already able to include plant-based carbon sinks and geological carbon storage in their models – increasingly adopted the “solution” of combining the two.

So it was that Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage, or BECCS, rapidly emerged as the new saviour technology. By burning “replaceable” biomass such as wood, crops, and agricultural waste instead of coal in power stations, and then capturing the carbon dioxide from the power station chimney and storing it underground, BECCS could produce electricity at the same time as removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s because as biomass such as trees grow, they suck in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. By planting trees and other bioenergy crops and storing carbon dioxide released when they are burnt, more carbon could be removed from the atmosphere.

With this new solution in hand the international community regrouped from repeated failures to mount another attempt at reining in our dangerous interference with the climate. The scene was set for the crucial 2015 climate conference in Paris.

As its general secretary brought the 21st United Nations conference on climate change to an end, a great roar issued from the crowd. People leaped to their feet, strangers embraced, tears welled up in eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep.

The emotions on display on December 13, 2015 were not just for the cameras. After weeks of gruelling high-level negotiations in Paris a breakthrough had finally been achieved. Against all expectations, after decades of false starts and failures, the international community had finally agreed to do what it took to limit global warming to well below 2°C, preferably to 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels.

The Paris Agreement was a stunning victory for those most at risk from climate change. Rich industrialised nations will be increasingly impacted as global temperatures rise. But it’s the low lying island states such as the Maldives and the Marshall Islands that are at imminent existential risk. As a later UN special report made clear, if the Paris Agreement was unable to limit global warming to 1.5°C, the number of lives lost to more intense storms, fires, heatwaves, famines and floods would significantly increase.

But dig a little deeper and you could find another emotion lurking within delegates on December 13. Doubt. We struggle to name any climate scientist who at that time thought the Paris Agreement was feasible. We have since been told by some scientists that the Paris Agreement was “of course important for climate justice but unworkable” and “a complete shock, no one thought limiting to 1.5°C was possible”. Rather than being able to limit warming to 1.5°C, a senior academic involved in the IPCC concluded we were heading beyond 3°C by the end of this century.

Instead of confront our doubts, we scientists decided to construct ever more elaborate fantasy worlds in which we would be safe. The price to pay for our cowardice: having to keep our mouths shut about the ever growing absurdity of the required planetary-scale carbon dioxide removal.

Taking centre stage was BECCS because at the time this was the only way climate-economic models could find scenarios that would be consistent with the Paris Agreement. Rather than stabilise, global emissions of carbon dioxide had increased some 60% since 1992.

Alas, BECCS, just like all the previous solutions, was too good to be true.

Across the scenarios produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with a 66% or better chance of limiting temperature increase to 1.5°C, BECCS would need to remove 12 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. BECCS at this scale would require massive planting schemes for trees and bioenergy crops.

The Earth certainly needs more trees. Humanity has cut down some three trillion since we first started farming some 13,000 years ago. But rather than allow ecosystems to recover from human impacts and forests to regrow, BECCS generally refers to dedicated industrial-scale plantations regularly harvested for bioenergy rather than carbon stored away in forest trunks, roots and soils.

Currently, the two most efficient biofuels are sugarcane for bioethanol and palm oil for biodiesel – both grown in the tropics. Endless rows of such fast growing monoculture trees or other bioenergy crops harvested at frequent intervals devastate biodiversity.

It has been estimated that BECCS would demand between 0.4 and 1.2 billion hectares of land. That’s 25% to 80% of all the land currently under cultivation. How will that be achieved at the same time as feeding 8-10 billion people around the middle of the century or without destroying native vegetation and biodiversity?


Growing billions of trees would consume vast amounts of water – in some places where people are already thirsty. Increasing forest cover in higher latitudes can have an overall warming effect because replacing grassland or fields with forests means the land surface becomes darker. This darker land absorbs more energy from the Sun and so temperatures rise. Focusing on developing vast plantations in poorer tropical nations comes with real risks of people being driven off their lands.

And it is often forgotten that trees and the land in general already soak up and store away vast amounts of carbon through what is called the natural terrestrial carbon sink. Interfering with it could both disrupt the sink and lead to double accounting.

As these impacts are becoming better understood, the sense of optimism around BECCS has diminished.

Given the dawning realisation of how difficult Paris would be in the light of ever rising emissions and limited potential of BECCS, a new buzzword emerged in policy circles: the “overshoot scenario”. Temperatures would be allowed to go beyond 1.5°C in the near term, but then be brought down with a range of carbon dioxide removal by the end of the century. This means that net zero actually means carbon negative. Within a few decades, we will need to transform our civilisation from one that currently pumps out 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, to one that produces a net removal of tens of billions.

[The article continues, here]

There is only one plausible way to cut CO2 and methane emissions.  And that's to actually cut them.  Offsets won't work.  Negative emissions won't work.  BECCS won't work.  It's no wonder emissions continue to rise.  We are heading towards a 3° C rise, not 1.5°.  And that will be catastrophic for our civilisation, the world's people and the environment.

Let's ignore the really important thing

 This cartoon, by Peter Schrank, is one of the best climate change cartoons I've seen.  It sums up the terror and anger and despair I feel.  Background:  there is a leadership struggle for the Conservative Party in the UK taking place now.

Renewables 72% of new gen capacity last year

From a report by IRENA.

As far as I can make out, these data are for net expansions in capacity.  The good news?  The percentage of renewables in new generation capacity is steadily rising, and is now nearly three-quarters of total new generation capacity.  At the rate at which this percentage is increasing, it wil reach 100% in 7 or 8 years.  The bad news?  The renewable share in total generation capacity rose from 33.3% in 2018 to 34.7% in 2019.  And at this measly rate of increase, it will take 46 years to reach 100%.  This is far, far too slow.  We need to get to a 100% renewable grid long before 2066. 

World recession deepens

We have at this stage only a few countries which have released March 2020 industrial production data.  The big falls started happening (outside China) in March.  So here's a chart of the year-on-year percentage change in the average of industrial production for China and the USA (which have released March data) compared with the the year-on-year percentage change in my calculation of world industrial production (only available to February).

Numerous indicators have shown that the world economy had started a new upturn, which the covid crash has aborted.  You can see this in the slight uptick in world IP in February.  The USA and China together make up 32.1% of the world economy, and you can see how close the correspondence between world and US/Chinese IP is.  We are clearly heading towards GFC lows.  Because the covid crash has been a rolling affair, by which I mean it's hit different countries at different times and scales, and because lockdown also has been imposed at different times, the recovery will lag.  That's also before we consider that international borders will remain closed affecting air travel, hotels, and restaurants.  The covid crash affected services first.  Now its impact will spread into industrial production.  It still seems likely to me that the low point of year-on-year change in IP and GDP could be as bad as or (probably) worse than during the GFC.

This is a very unusual recession.  But as always in economics, feed-back happens.  The supply shock of lockdowns is leading to a demand shock as businesses close and lay off or furlough workers which will in turn lead to financial shocks as over-extended companies go bankrupt, as workers default on mortgages, as developing countries default on their debt.  In "normal" recessions it is more usual for financial shocks to lead to demand shocks which feeds back into more financial crises.

I do not think it will be  a V-shaped recovery.  The USA is floundering, their management of the covid crisis has been abysmal, and fiscal stimulus has been too little, too late.  The Fed gets it; the administration doesn't.  Developing countries in which I include India, Russia and Brazil, as well as other less developed countries, make up more than 20% of the world economy.  Their health systems are too basic to deal with the coronavirus well; they are too poor to borrow vast sums to stimulate their economies; they have too many heavily indebted companies and governments which have borrowed in US$, debts which will not be repaid.  Europe is squabbling about a stimulus package.  Foolishness on the part of the German bloc, but alas all too reminiscent of the follies of the 2011 Euro crisis.  So the European recovery will be slow, the agony of developing countries is far from over, and the US will struggle to get off its knees.   And a big chunk of services will remain way below normal.  More than half the world economy will flounder along in the shallows.  Some of it will drown.

2019 very likely second hottest year ever

NOAA has released their estimates for the global temperature anomaly for November 2019.  Unlike other analysts, NOAA doesn't calculate that November 2019 was hotter than November 2016, an El Niño year, but it was the second hottest since 1880.  We now have 11 months of data for world temperatures, and it looks virtually inevitable that the global average temperature for 2019 will be exceeded only by 2016.  Global temperatures continue to climb.  Global CO₂ and methane emissions continue to climb.  And at Madrid, a depraved clique of denialists (Australia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil,  Russia and the USA) continue to thwart concerted global action on climate change.

Because of random fluctuations, it helps to look at a 5 year moving average of the data.  This moving average suggests that global temperatures are now rising  by 0.3 degrees C per decade, up from the post 1970 average of 0.2 degrees.  In other words, if nothing is done, and ignoring any positive feedbacks (such as methane release in the Arctic and Antarctic), global temperatures will be 3.3 degrees C above the 1970 level by 2100.  This will be catastrophic.

Source: NOAA

Trees bring rain

Land clearing in a paddock outside Moree NSW
Source: The Guardian

My mother used to say that, and I didn't believe her.  Arrogant pup!  Here's an excerpt from a deeply depressing Guardian article about land clearing in Australia which explains how the process works:

Prof Clive McAlpine from University of Queensland explains that not only does land clearing release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it also has an effect on climate, well beyond the emissions.

“It causes warming locally, regionally and even globally, and it changes rainfall by altering the circulation of heat and moisture,” he says.

“Trees evaporate more water than any other vegetation type – up to 10 times more than crops and pastures. This is because trees have root systems that can access moisture deep within the soil.”

The increased evaporation and rough surface of trees create moist, turbulent layers in the lower atmosphere, he says. “This reduces temperatures and contributes to cloud formation and increased rainfall. The increased rainfall then provides more moisture to soils and vegetation.

“The clearing of deep-rooted native vegetation for shallow-rooted crops and pastures diminishes this process, resulting in a warmer and drier climate.”

McAlpine argues that we should be replanting in the north-west of NSW and south-west Queensland to achieve a tree density of 40% to stabilise the local climate. Grazing would still be possible underneath the tree cover.

This is why the centre of continents at the equator have high precipitation.  At the coasts, the rain comes from moist air from the sea.  But it falls on rain forests, and the trees transpire water vapour into the air.  In the tropics, an acre of rain forest puts more water vapour into the air than an acre of sea.  This water vapour then falls on forests further inland and the process is repeated.  So even in the heart of the continent, there is rain and rain forest, and the two go together.  Which is why land clearing can create a desert. 

As a species, we seem bent on destroying our world.