Producing drinkable water from air

Hydropack, produce drinkable water by pulling moisture from the air. (Image courtesy of Aquaria.)

From Triple Pundit

(This story originally appeared in Reasons to be Cheerful.)

Blistering suns, endless dunes and almost no water. This is the imagined world on the planet Tatooine in Star Wars. Here, survival depends upon towering vaporators that loom over the sand, drawing in air and condensing its moisture into life-giving water.

But this technology isn’t just limited to the world of science fiction. “That reality is here. We’re already making that happen,” says Brian Sheng, co-founder of Aquaria Technologies, whose mission is to transform atmospheric vapor into safe, drinkable water.

There is no doubt that the world needs more water. On a planet that’s covered in approximately 70 percent water, only a sliver, around 2.5 percent, is fresh and safe for humans to drink, crops to grow and industrial use. And that tiny proportion is shrinking as the world becomes warmer and heat waves exacerbate drought conditions.

This isn’t just a problem of the future. A World Health Organization study estimates that 1.4 million deaths could be prevented each year with improved access to safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene services.

Sheng’s solution, to generate potable water from air, is based upon a natural phenomenon as old as the Earth itself. As water evaporates off oceans, lakes and other bodies of water, it turns into an invisible vapor that drifts through the atmosphere until cooler temperatures condense it into water droplets. To tap into that, Aquaria has invented a twenty-first century version of the vaporator — an atmospheric water generator (AWG).

Aquaria’s AWG units are designed for home use. They suck in air and cool it so that it condenses into water droplets, then purify it to meet health standards. Small enough to be placed in a backyard and connected to a home’s existing plumbing system, large units can produce up to 200 gallons of water daily. To put this into context, while estimates vary significantly, the EPA suggests each American uses an average of 82 gallons of water a day for activities including bathing, drinking and cooking.

Condensing water at scale, however, comes at a cost. Aquaria’s Hydropixel, for example, which produces up to 10 gallons of water a day, costs approximately $3,800. To make clean water more accessible, Aquaria offers flexible payment plans to help ease the initial cost of its systems. And to reduce the expense of running the units on conventional grid electricity, the units can be connected to existing home solar systems.

In Australia, Aqua Ubique, realizing that cost can be prohibitive — especially for First Nations communities — has structured its company as a social enterprise. Through its Drop 4 Drop program, for every five Aqua Ubique AWG water cooler units leased to offices or business, one can be installed in a community that lacks clean drinking water. The units look like and function the same as a regular water cooler, except they are pulling in water from the surrounding air and converting it to drinking water.

It all started when Shannon Lemanski was serving with the Australian army in Papua New Guinea (PNG). There he witnessed first hand how supposedly single-use plastic bottles were being used to capture rainwater so that locals wouldn’t have to drink from a contaminated creek. “Returning to Australia, I discovered that the issue wasn’t restricted to PNG,” he says. “Over two million people in Australia don’t have access to safe drinking water.” In 2023, he co-founded Aqua Ubique.

While some experts argue that the focus should be on preserving the freshwater resources already available to us, communities such as Cherbourg in Queensland, Australia, highlight the need for a more immediate solution. Here, water issues have been systemic, including a nine month boil water alert in 2024 due to E. coli contamination.

“Because of deep distrust in the town’s tap water, it’s not uncommon to see babies drinking Coke from bottles rather than formula, as soft drink is cheaper than bottled water at the only store,” Lemanski says.

In May 2025, Aqua Ubique installed two MG10 AWG water cooler units in Cherbourg, one at a daycare and the other at an elders village. As a result, dozens of children and seniors who didn’t before have access to safe drinking water now do.

Getting clean, healthy water to where it is needed most is also the mission of the Moses West Foundation, based in Illinois. “At our core,” says Colin Hultz, chief business officer and head of partnerships, “we are just trying to get as much water to as many people as possible.”

The organization’s founder, Moses West, a former U.S. army ranger captain, had — similarly to Lemanski — been deployed to areas where clean water was scarce and had seen the impacts. This inspired him to use his background in engineering to design and build patented AWG units able to produce water for thousands.

When Hurricane Maria then struck in 2017, its 170 mph winds ripped apart infrastructure and homes in Puerto Rico. “Moses was out there with our largest AWG 5000 unit for about six months and he gave 15,000 families access to unlimited free drinking water,” Hultz says. And it’s not just the free water, it’s the cost savings that come with it. “When we were in Puerto Rico, we saved the Island about $300 million in the cost of having to ship in plastic water bottles,” he says.

Similar to Aquaria’s home-scale AWGs, Moses West’s AWG800 system, which is capable of producing more than 200 gallons of water per day, can be directly connected to solar panel systems. Roughly the size of a small Fiat, the unit can be deployed quickly and begin generating water even in locations with no connection to the main grid.

As great as it all sounds, Lemanski says context is key to take into consideration when considering the deployment of AWGs. In warmer, more humid climates they will deliver higher yields, while in dry and cold environments production is lower, meaning that expectations must be managed. He sees their current best-case use as one that integrates an AWG system with other water collection and purification systems such as rainwater tanks, greywater recycling and desalination plants. When used together, he says, AWGs can become part of a complete off-grid water system. “This hybrid approach is where AWGs really shine: Safe drinking water, complemented by other sources for washing, irrigation and bulk use,” he says.

Perhaps the biggest drawback to AWGs, argue Lemanski and Hultz, is the lack of public awareness.

“It’s frustrating sitting there with a real solution people still haven’t picked up on,” Hultz says. “Water scarcity is increasing. There are areas in Texas running out of groundwater in stage four drought conditions. The best time to have started to use AWGs was yesterday — the second-best time today.”

Extreme heatwaves are now normal in Spain

 ... but politicians are doing nothing.

I was too depressed to show yet another image of environmental catastrophe.
Instead, here is a picture of Madrid and its beautiful architecture.

From The Guardian

Growing up in Madrid, intense summer heat was nothing unusual. I quickly learned always to cross the street in search of shade, and never to be caught out in the sun at 3pm. But as a child in the early 1980s, I never felt dizzy after spending more than a few minutes outdoors, nor did I struggle to study or sleep at home because of the heat. Back then, air conditioning was a rarity, something only Americans had. But we were fine: the stuttering fan in my mother’s Ford Fiesta was enough to keep us comfortable on holiday escapes from the capital.

What is happening in Spain now goes far beyond discomfort. More than 1,500 deaths have already been linked to heatwaves this summer alone. Public-sector workers are collapsing from heatstroke on our city streets. Entire communities in the Madrid suburbs have been devastated by wildfires. On Monday, 198 weather stations recorded temperatures of 40C or higher. Following a record-breaking July, the first 20 days of August will probably be the warmest on record. Alongside housing, the climate crisis is Spain’s most visible and most persistent problem: every summer reminds us of this. You can’t ignore it, or escape it; so why are Spain’s politicians still so reluctant to tackle the climate emergency?

Fighting global heating is a worldwide challenge, but protecting populations against the consequences – with an awareness that Europe is heating faster than other continents – must also be a national and a local priority. Within Spain, the climate crisis too often becomes an excuse for superficial, party-political feuds. In the population at large, there has been years of broad popular consensus, but contrast that with Spain’s politicians, for whom the issue has become increasingly partisan, with the right and the left fighting over totemic policies about cars and bikes.

Even Spain’s centre-left coalition government, led by Pedro Sánchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE), has taken only modest steps to reduce emissions from industry and transport. And as they do on other issues, the socialists rush to point the finger at regional and local governments run by the conservative People’s party (PP), supported in some cases by the far-right Vox, which has pushed falsehoods and conspiracy theories about the climate crisis.

It is true that Spain’s regional and local governments, powerful and well funded, also bear great responsibility: for protecting the most vulnerable from extreme heat, adapting public spaces, planting trees and ensuring there is sufficient shade and water fountains. One urgent necessity is the creation of “cool banks”, especially for people in overcrowded and overheated homes, those with health vulnerabilities, the very young and the very old. Valencia has a network of these climate shelters, while Barcelona has mapped out hundreds of public spaces where people can escape the heat, from libraries to museums.

But too many local governments are still failing to provide respite. Madrid is among the worst offenders. Public cooling centres are almost nonexistent, and shopping centres remain the most common refuge. The capital’s conservative regional and local governments have been passive or even hostile towards public demands to reduce dangerous heat levels in neighbourhoods, with too few green spaces and too many cars. When Madrid’s city hall does spend money, it often misses the point: the most absurd example is Puerta del Sol, the central square that after months of renovation work still feels like a concrete frying pan all summer. Only after protests did the city council finally install a few flimsy shades, at a cost of €1.5m.

For those Madrileños who have the option, the traditional way to make August bearable has been to escape the city for the coast. My childhood memories of cooler summers visiting grandparents in northern Spain feel very distant now. The north still enjoys bearable nights and some rain in the summer, but heatwaves have become more frequent there too. The change is fast and visible, even in daily life.

This year in the Basque country, beach bathing has been repeatedly banned because of the portuguese man o’war, a creature resembling a jellyfish, but one that is much more toxic and dangerous. Once confined to warmer Atlantic waters, it has only begun appearing here in recent years. On a recent walk along San Sebastián’s beach, I spotted dozens, fortunately tiny, each circled in the sand to warn passersby. More medical resources and surveillance are now being devoted to this new threat – another example of the small everyday adaptations we are having to make.

The most dramatic consequences of the climate crisis make headlines around the world: the tragic deaths of workers in vulnerable jobs, picking fruit or cleaning streets, and wildfires killing people, destroying homes and even a Roman-era mining site – now a burned-out Unesco world heritage site. But across Spain, the signs are everywhere: crops ruined by hail, high-speed trains disrupted, and neighbourhoods baking in the heat.

This is the new reality we are living with. It has become a regular fixture in our calendars. A journalist colleague of mine observed earlier this year that the most important annual climate event for the media is not COP, it’s the summer. It was February in the northern hemisphere, and he was already preparing their annual heatwave coverage. My newsroom in Madrid does the same, with ever more sophisticated data and analysis.

The frustrating question is why our politicians are still shrugging off this reality, as though it were just an inconvenience. How many broken records and how many heatwave deaths will it take to change this?

Climate change is not something disastrous 20 years away.  It's happening now.  And it will only get worse, until we stop burning fossil fuels. 

Second hottest May ever

 From The Guardian

It has been an exceptionally dry spring in north-western Europe and the second warmest May ever globally, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).

Countries across Europe, including the UK, have been hit by drought conditions in recent months, with water shortages feared unless significant rain comes this summer, and crop failures beginning to be reported by farmers.

The new Copernicus data shows that May 2025 was the second-warmest May globally, with an average surface air temperature of 15.79C, 0.53C above the 1991-2020 average for May. The month was 1.4C above the estimated 1850-1900 average used to define the pre-industrial level. This interrupts a period of 21 months out of 22 where the global average temperature was more than 1.5C above the pre-industrial level.

Carlo Buontempo, director of C3S at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), said: “May 2025 breaks an unprecedentedly long sequence of months over 1.5C above pre-industrial. Whilst this may offer a brief respite for the planet, we do expect the 1.5C threshold to be exceeded again in the near future due to the continued warming of the climate system.”

The 1.5 degrees is the climate target agreed by the 2015 Paris agreement. The target of 1.5C is measured over a decade or two, so a single year above that level does not mean the target has been missed, but does show the climate emergency continues to intensify. Every year in the past decade has been one of the 10 hottest, in records that go back to 1850.

Dry weather has persisted in many parts of the world. In May 2025, much of northern and central Europe as well as southern regions of Russia, Ukraine, and Türkiye were drier than average. Parts of north-western Europe experienced the lowest precipitation and soil moisture levels since at least 1979.

In May 2025, it was drier than average in much of north America, in the Horn of Africa and across central Asia, as well as in southern Australia, and much of both southern Africa and South America.

May also saw abnormally high sea surface temperatures in the north-eastern Atlantic, reaching the highest ever recorded, according to Copernicus.

The Woodhead Reservoir in Derbyshire. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Amazon's record drought driven by climate change

From The BBC

One of our planet's most vital defences against global warming is itself being ravaged by climate change.

It was the main driver of the Amazon rainforest's worst drought in at least half a century, according to a new study.

Often described as the "lungs of the planet", the Amazon plays a key role in removing warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

But rapid deforestation has left it more vulnerable to weather extremes.

While droughts in the Amazon are not uncommon, last year's event was "exceptional", the researchers say.

In October, the Rio Negro - one of the world's largest rivers - reached its lowest recorded level near Manaus in Brazil, surpassing marks going back over 100 years.

As well as being a buffer against climate change, the Amazon is a rich source of biodiversity, containing around 10% of the world's species - with many more yet to be discovered.

The drought has disrupted ecosystems and has directly impacted millions of people who rely on rivers for transport, food and income, with the most vulnerable hit hardest.

One trigger for these dry conditions is El Niño - a natural weather system where sea surface temperatures increase in the East Pacific Ocean. This affects global rainfall patterns, particularly in South America.

But human-caused climate change was the main driver of the extreme drought, according to the World Weather Attribution group, reducing the amount of water in the soil in two main ways.

Firstly, the Amazon is typically receiving less rainfall than it used to between June and November - the drier part of the year - as the climate warms.

Secondly, hotter temperatures mean there's more evaporation from the plants and soils, so they lose more water.

The researchers used weather data and computer simulations to compare drought conditions in two scenarios: one with human-caused warming, and one without.

In a world where humans hadn't heated up the planet by around 1.2C, such an intense 'agricultural drought' - where a lack of rainfall and high evaporation dry out the soils - may only have happened around once every 1,500 years, the study suggests.

Climate change has made a drought of this severity around 30 times more likely, according to the researchers, and one is now expected to happen every 50 years under current conditions.

"This really is something quite exceptional," says Dr Ben Clarke, a researcher with the World Weather Attribution group.

And if warming continues, such extreme droughts could become even more common.  "If we continue burning oil, gas and coal, very soon, we'll reach 2C of warming and we'll see similar Amazon droughts about once every 13 years," says Dr Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London.

More frequent and intense droughts test the Amazon's resilience. That has already been stretched by deforestation - around one-fifth of the rainforest has been lost over the last 50 years.

Trees help the area retain and release moisture, fuelling their own clouds, and they also help to cool temperatures.

While the effect of deforestation was not directly tested in this latest study, previous research has shown it increases the vulnerability of the rainforest to drought.

The world's largest rainforest is seen as crucial in the battle to limit global warming.

"The Amazon could make or break our fight against climate change," says Regina Rodrigues, a professor of physical oceanography and climate at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil.

In a healthy state, it takes up more carbon dioxide (CO2) than it releases.

This limits CO2 increases in the atmosphere from human activities, keeping a lid on temperatures.

But there is evidence that this may be changing, as trees die back due to drought, wildfires and deliberate clearance to make room for agriculture.

There is concern that if climate change and deforestation continue at their current pace, the Amazon could soon reach a "tipping point".

If crossed, this could lead to the rapid and irreversible dieback of the whole rainforest - potentially leading to the region becoming a significant source of CO2 emissions.

It's not known exactly where such a threshold might sit.

"I don't think that [tipping point] is what we are seeing [yet], at least in all but the driest part of the Amazon forest," says Yadvinder Malhi, a professor of ecosystem science at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the latest study.

This - alongside urgent action to slash the greenhouse gas emissions that are fuelling global warming - can still help to protect what's left of the Amazon, researchers say.

"The loss of the Amazon forest is far from inevitable in the short-term," as long as fire and deforestation can be controlled, Prof Malhi told BBC News.

"But we do need to get to grips with stabilising global climate, as the risk increases with every fraction of a degree the planet warms."

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.”

China's emissions set for structural decline

From The Guardian

China’s carbon emissions could peak this year before falling into a structural decline for the first time from next year after a record surge in clean energy investments, according to research.

Emissions from the world’s most polluting country have rebounded this year after the Chinese government dropped its Covid restrictions in January, according to analysis undertaken for Carbon Brief.

However, this rebound in fossil fuel demand emerged alongside a historic expansion of the country’s low-carbon energy sources, which was far in excess of policymakers’ targets and expectations.

Beijing’s solar and wind installation targets for the year were met by September, according to the report, and the market share of electric vehicles is already well ahead of the government’s 20% target for 2025. [Update in January 2025: EVs and PHEVs now make up >50% of total car sales in China]

“These record additions are all but guaranteed to push fossil-fuel electricity generation and CO2 emissions into decline in 2024,” Lauri Myllyvirta, a lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and the author of the report.

The most striking growth has been in solar power, according to Myllyvirta. Solar installations increased by 210 gigawatts (GW) this year alone, which is twice the total solar capacity of the US and four times what China added in 2020.

The analysis, which is based on official figures and commercial data, found that China installed 70GW of wind power this year – more than the entire power generation capacity of the UK. It is also expected to add 7GW of hydro power and 3GW of nuclear power capacity this year, said the report.

Myllyvirta said the boom in clean energy generation could trigger a decline in China’s emissions from next year despite a wave of new coal plants across the country.

“This is because – for the first time – the rate of low-carbon energy expansion is now sufficient to not only meet, but exceed the average annual increase in China’s demand for electricity overall,” he said.

“If this pace is maintained, or accelerated, it would mean that China’s electricity generation from fossil fuels would enter a period of structural decline – which would also be a first. Moreover, this structural decline could come about despite the new wave of coal plant permitting and construction in the country,” Myllyvirta added.

China had 136GW of coal power capacity already under construction at the end of June, with a further 99GW with planning permits. Another 25GW has been permitted since then, according to the research, which would breach a policy pledge made by the country’s president, Xi Jinping, to “strictly control new coal-fired power generation projects”.

China has forecast that its coal power capacity will peak at 1,370GW in 2030, which would require either an immediate end to new coal power permits, or an accelerated shutdown of existing and planned coal plants, said Myllyvirta.

So, first off, how can Carbon Brief be so confident, given the surge in new coal power stations?  

During the 2022 extreme drought in China (ironically worsened by climate change) there were power shortages as hydro generation collapsed and demand for air-conditioning zoomed.  The Chinese authorities responded by unfreezing coal power station planning requests.  But these new coal power stations were to be back-ups for nuclear, hydro, wind and solar.  Capacity utilisation in coal generation in China is already below 50% (the norm is 70-90%) and the majority of coal power stations are loss-making.  But that doesn't matter in China's system.  Unlike power stations and the grid in other countries, China's power stations don't have to make a profit.  They're seen as a public service.  And widespread, lasting power failures are seen as unacceptable, more unacceptable than loss-making power stations.   For example, you could run the grid using solar during the day and coal at night (which, if you think about it, would halve emissions).  Of course, this makes coal power even more expensive, because the plants are only being used for half the day.  In Australia, that dynamic is pushing coal power stations towards bankruptcy; in China, it doesn't really matter.

Second, if China's emissions have peaked, that would mean that global emissions have peaked too.

Look at the chart below.   This includes all emissions except land use change (i.e., clearing forests for food.)  Europe's emissions peaked in 1990 and are back where they were in 1965.  US emissions peaked in 2006, and are back where they were in 1988.  But China's and India's emissions, by contrast, have exploded.  This is because they are rapidly growing economies, and until recently coal was the cheapest source of electricity.  Most of the rise in emissions over the last few decades has been because of China.  So, even if China's emissions only fall slowly, global emissions will have peaked.  (It would help if India's emissions also peaked, but that seems unlikely just yet.)  And if China's emissions start to fall, the excuse offered up by denialists that 'why should we do anything when China isn't?' will be invalidated.

This isn't unmitigated good news.  The rise in global temperatures is proportional to the level of global emissions.  To halve the decadal rise in emissions (currently 0.2 degrees, but showing ominous signs of having increased to 0.28 degrees) we need to halve emissions.  

Let's say global emissions fall by 3% a year.  This will reduce emissions by just 25% over the next 10 years, 45% over 20 years.  Not enough to prevent 2 degrees of warming.  5% a year would reduce emissions by 40% over 10 years, and 80% over 30 years.  That's a lot better, but still far from ideal.  The prospective decline in emissions, though very welcome, just isn't fast enough.  Yet. (To reduce emissions by 90% by 2050, they would have to fall by ~8% per annum.)

Source:  Our World in Data

Summer of 2023 hottest ever recorded

From The Guardian  (Of course, they're referring to the Northern Hemisphere summer--the Southern Hemisphere summer, which begins in November, will likely also be much hotter than normal.)

The summer of 2023 was the hottest ever recorded, as the climate crisis and emerging El Niño pushed up temperatures and drove extreme weather across the world.

In June, July and August – the northern hemisphere summer – the global average temperature reached 16.77C, which was 0.66C above the 1991 to 2020 average. The new high is 0.29C above the previous record set in 2019, a big jump in climate terms.

The data, from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), showed that August was about 1.5C warmer than the preindustrial average for 1850 to 1900, although the goal of the world’s nations to keep global heating below 1.5C will be considered broken only when this temperature is sustained over months and years.

Heatwaves, fires and floods have destroyed lives and livelihoods across the globe, from North and South America, to Europe, India, Japan and China.

“Our planet has just endured a season of simmering – the hottest summer on record. Climate breakdown has begun,” said the UN secretary general, António Guterres. “Scientists have long warned what our fossil fuel addiction will unleash. Our climate is imploding faster than we can cope with, with extreme weather events hitting every corner of the planet.”

The oceans have been especially hot in recent months. The C3S data showed that for every day in August, global average sea surface temperatures beat the previous record set in March 2016, which was also an El Niño year. North Atlantic Ocean temperatures reached a new record of 25.19C on 31 August. Antarctic sea ice extent has also been extremely low for the time of year.

Samantha Burgess, at C3S, said: “Global temperature records continue to tumble in 2023, with the warmest August following on from the warmest July and June, leading to the warmest boreal summer in our data record going back to 1940.” The findings are based on computer analysis of billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations around the world.

Dr Friederike Otto, at Imperial College London, said: “Breaking heat records has become the norm in 2023. Global warming continues because we have not stopped burning fossil fuels. It is that simple.skip past newsletter promotion

“Studies by World Weather Attribution have shown that climate change has dramatically intensified some of the most devastating weather disasters in the summer of 2023. The hot, dry and windy conditions that fuelled the wildfires in Quebec Canada were made at least twice as likely because of climate change. The extreme heatwaves that impacted Europe and North America were made 2.0-2.5C hotter because of climate change.”

The human-caused climate crisis was undeniably to blame for the deadly heatwaves that struck Europe and the US in July. Both would have been virtually impossible without the global heating driven by burning fossil fuels, scientists found.

In August, the Guardian interviewed 45 of the world’s leading climate scientists, who said that the increased heating seen in 2023 was completely in line with the predictions they had been making for decades. They said the effects were more severe than expected due to communities being more vulnerable than anticipated, making efforts to protect people more urgent than ever.

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

 

World inflation has peaked, but .....

Well, at last I have updated all my databases.  Almost all!

This chart shows the CPI inflation rate for the Big 8 economies (US, UK, Europe, China, Japan, India, Brazil, Russia) weighted by GDP, alongside the percentage of 43 world economies where the CPI inflation rate is above 6%.  The moral of the story is that inflation is falling in the Big 8, and also in the world as a whole.  

Inflation is falling because the impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine is fading (in the sense that it's not making inflation worse, so year-on-year rates are falling); because commodity prices are declining; because growth is slowing; and because China's inflation rate has gone negative (one sign of just how weak China's economy really is).  It'll prolly take another year, perhaps longer, for Big 8 inflation to get back to 2%. 

I think it quite likely that the longer-term underlying inflation rate has risen, because the key reason it got so low is offshoring and just-in-time manufacturing.  Goods were efficiently assembled from parts in different countries.  The progress of offshoring has stopped and reversed.   The war has shown that relying on other countries for key parts of your own country's manufacturing could be problematic, even disastrous.  Even in the absence of war, the lockdowns in China showed just how dependent manufacturing in developed countries was on the free flow of parts.  Tesla, which produces all its own chips, was unaffected by supply-chain breakdowns.  There is a lesson there for other CEOs.

We will never get back to the two decades of low inflation we have come to regard as the norm.  Whereas central banks struggled to raise inflation over these two decades, it is likely that they will now struggle to keep inflation at 2%.  Central to this is the realisation by the West that relying on China could be as strategically perilous as our naïve belief that Russia could be trusted and that we could rely on her for all our gas and oil.   I remember when Stephen Roach in 1989 (or thereabouts), when he was at Morgan Stanley, pointed out that the fall of the Iron Curtain, and the opening of Eastern Europe and China to world trade would drive the long-term rate of inflation down, and it did.   What we are seeing now is the partial reversal of this trend.  We no longer trust that politics will not impede trade. Globalisation is no longer fashionable.

Moreover, global warming has pushed up food inflation.  Who would have thought that alternating droughts and floods would push up food prices?  Amazing.  Well, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.  It will only get worse.

In other words, the fall in world inflation may be slower than in the cycles of the last 30 years, even if we have a deep recession, and underlying inflation will remain stubbornly high.  This has important implications for bond yields and PE ratios.  The major bull markets in asset prices were driven by a secular downtrend in inflation.  If that trend is over, valuation rates for all asset classes will rise, and that will keep their prices from rising.

Extreme China heatwave

It's obvious.  We don't have to wait until 2030 to see the effects of the climate emergency.  They're happening right now.

From the New Zealand Herald

Cars. Batteries. Solar panels. Food. Global shortages and soaring prices are almost certain as China's seemingly never-ending heatwave sears on.

It's the most extreme heat event ever recorded in world history. For more than 70 days, the intense heat has blasted China's population, factories and fields. Lakes and rivers have dried up. Crops have been killed. Factories have been closed.

More than 900 million people across 17 Chinese provinces are subjected to record-breaking conditions. From Sichuan in the southwest to Shanghai in the east, temperatures have been topping 40C.

In the Sichuan city of Dazhou, an air raid shelter has been converted into a heat refuge. In Chongqing, subway stations are opening to offer subterranean recovery stops.

But the extreme heat and dry weather are having far-reaching effects.

Energy, water, and food supplies are being hit across the country. Rivers are drying up. Dams are emptying. Hydroelectric plants are shutting down.

That means factories are being closed to divert available electricity towards residential use.

In the fields, crops and animals are wilting – as are their human tenders. Hundreds of thousands of acres have already been seared, with serious worldwide repercussions expected on food supplies and prices – especially vegetables and grains.

Signs of things to come

The Sichuan megacity of Chongqing, home to some 30 million people, reached a top of 45C on August 18. On August 20, the city's overnight minimum bottomed out at 34.9C.

These are the highest temperatures China has recorded outside the occupied desert province of Xinjiang.

"There is nothing in world climatic history which is even minimally comparable to what is happening in China," weather historian Maximiliano Herrera told New Scientist. "This combines the most extreme intensity with the most extreme length with an incredibly huge area all at the same time."

Electricity demand for cooling has spiked at the same time production has plummeted.


Not enough water is flowing through hydroelectric power turbines. Nuclear power plants are struggling to keep their reactors cool.

Chinese sources state some 66 rivers have dried up completely. And parts of the critical Yangtze river systems are at a third of their normal levels – the lowest since records began 150 years ago.

This has been a particular problem in Sichuan province. It gets some 80 per cent of its electricity from hydropower. Now thousands of factories have been ordered to close. Offices and shopping centres have been instructed to cut lighting and set airconditioning temperatures higher.

But the effect of low water levels extends far beyond this.

Shipping cargo routes are blocked. Long-lost Buddhist statues are being exposed among the drying mud. And drinking water is being rationed.

Supply chains broken

Among the global corporate players affected by the Sichuan shutdown are car manufacturers Toyota, Volkswagen and Tesla. It's home to major Intel and Apple assembly plants, as well as the world's largest battery maker, Amperex Technology. The region is also a significant producer of the globally critical mineral lithium and polysilicon solar panels.


Toyota has reportedly resumed some production by acquiring a large-scale diesel generator. But, in Shanghai, Tesla has been forced to appeal to local authorities to be exempted from power restrictions to maintain its supply of electric vehicle components.

The trickle-down effects will extend globally.

Lithium prices are soaring: China has long cornered the market.

And many of the technologies needed to combat the climate crisis exacerbating China's woes will now likely become much more expensive and harder to find.

But the most immediate problem will be food.

Parched crops on the bank of the Yangtze River, which is approaching record-low water levels during the drought in Chongqing. Photo: Reuters

The River Loire almost dries out

 This river, normally wide and full, is virtually empty because of the extreme drought in France.

View from space, one year apart

 From Dan Holley

SW drought may end hydro power

 From ClimateCrocks

Meanwhile, in western North America, drought continues, along with record heat, and hydro resources are stressed.

Colorado Public Radio:

By early 2024, projections show water levels in Lake Powell could drop too low for hydropower turbines to operate and generate electricity.

Tanya Trujillo, the assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Interior for water and science, joined the conference virtually to talk about the Colorado River crisis and the demand for states to conserve more water.

“We are facing the growing reality that water supplies for agriculture, fisheries, ecosystems, industry and cities are no longer stable due to climate change,” Trujillo said.

Trujillo said the agency’s order for water cuts includes Colorado and other states in the upper part of the river system, even though they don’t rely on water supplies collected in Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

“We need to be taking action in all states, in all sectors, in all available ways,” Trujillo said. “We need to be thinking as one basin.”

Trujillo said it’s up to states to decide how to make the water cuts and said the agency didn’t have a formula for appropriate conservation measures. She said the states have been charged with creating lists of potential ways this water can be saved and that the federal government wants to support those ideas with funding and resources. Trujillo said some of the federal support for states’ efforts would come from the bipartisan infrastructure law enacted in January, which set aside billions of dollars for Western water projects.

Speaking on a conference panel, Anne Castle, a senior fellow at the Getches-Wilkinson Center at CU Boulder and a former assistant secretary for water and science at the U.S. Department of the Interior, wondered what the federal government’s demand might mean for Colorado if junior water rights holders are cut off from using the Colorado River.

“What do our ski areas look like if we don’t have snowmaking anymore? Those are junior water rights,” Castle said. “What does it look like if part of our West Slope agriculture doesn’t exist anymore? What does that do to food security, what does it do to those communities? Those are the things that we’ve got to be thinking pretty hard about.”

If only we had a way to generate electricity using very little water. Oh, wait…

 

Extreme hotspot: what 60 C means for the Middle East

 From Al Jazeera

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lake mead drops to record low

 Via Ty Buchanan

From EarthObservatory

But, guys, hey ..... there's no such thing as climate change!  

Siberian bushfire could become largest in history

The republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Russia’s largest and coldest region, has been devastated by unprecedented wildfires this summer.
Ivan Nikiforov / TASS

From The Moscow Times

A wildfire raging in northeastern Siberia could become the largest in recorded history, experts from Greenpeace Russia told The Moscow Times on Wednesday.

The republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Russia’s largest and coldest region, has been devastated by unprecedented wildfires that are now larger than the rest of the world's blazes combined. Residents have been under a state of emergency for weeks as thick, acrid smoke blankets settlements and reaches cities thousands of kilometers away, while thousands of volunteers have been recruited to fight the fires.

The largest of these fires has exceeded 1.5 million hectares in size, the Greenpeace environmental group's forestry head Alexey Yaroshenko told The Moscow Times.

“This fire has to grow by about 400,000 hectares to become the biggest in documented history,” Yaroshenko said. “It is impossible to contain this fire through human efforts. ... Firefighters would have to put out a line of fire 2,000 kilometers long.”

Only rain could stop or significantly slow down this fire, Yaroshenko said, but current rainfall is too weak to do so. 

“In the best-case scenario we could save settlements and infrastructure that lies in the fire’s path,” he said.

Yaroshenko’s comments come days after a landmark United Nations climate report rang the alarm on global warming and called for more ambitious measures to prevent the climate from spiraling out of control.

Experts say Sakha’s fast-warming climate — the region has seen its annual average temperature rise by 3 degrees Celsius since the beginning of the 20th century — combined with a 150-year record drought and high winds has turned its vast taiga forest into a tinderbox.

Harmful forestry practices are a key factor behind the fires’ unprecedented spread, Greenpeace expert Yulia Davydova told The Moscow Times, as regional authorities aren’t required to extinguish fires in so-called “control zones” – areas far from human settlements. Logging, both illegal and legal, is another common cause, according to new data acquired by Greenpeace.

With weeks left to go in the wildfire season, the European Union’s Copernicus satellite monitoring service said that the Siberian forest fires have already emitted a record 505 megatons of carbon dioxide.

And satellite observations by NASA’s Earth-monitoring tool MODIS showed that smoke from the wildfires reached the North Pole for what is believed to be the first time in known history last week.

Nationwide, over 13.4 million hectares of land have been burned by wildfires — an area roughly the size of Greece — so far in 2021, Greenpeace says, citing official data.

Worst July on record for wildfires

 From The Guardian

Last month was the world’s worst July for wildfires since at least 2003 when satellite records began, scientists have said, as swaths of North America, Siberia, Africa and southern Europe continue to burn.

Driven by extreme heat and prolonged drought, the ignition of forests and grasslands released 343 megatonnes of carbon, about a fifth higher than the previous global peak for July, which was set in 2014.

“This stands out by a clear margin,” said Mark Parrington, a senior scientist in the EU’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, which estimates the carbon releases. “The July global total this year is the highest since our records began in 2003.”

The unprecedented mid-summer burn is the latest in a series of unwelcome recent records that underscore the destructive impacts of human-driven global heating.

More than half of the carbon came from two regions – North America and Siberia – that have experienced unusually hot and dry weather. In western Canada and the US, forest fires have followed protracted and intense heatwaves. In Siberia, much of the taiga in the Sakha Republic has been engulfed in flames and clouds of toxic smoke that have drifted as far as the north pole.

The global conflagration is widening to the eastern and central Mediterranean, where many nations are encountering an unusually fierce start to the fire season.

Last week, the heat intensity from fires in Turkey was four times higher than the previous daily national record. So far this year, 128,000 hectares (316,000 acres) have burned – eight times higher than the average, according to the European Forest Fire Information System.

What will it take for our politicians to stop pocketing bribes from fossil fuels companies to do something about slashing emissions?

Colorado sues to recover cost of climate crisis

 From The Guardian

More than a decade after the Fourmile Canyon blaze drove even the firefighters out of Gold Hill, blackened hillsides and scorched trees attest to the Colorado mountain town’s close shave with destruction.

“Because of the wind and the dryness, it took off,” said Chris Finn, who volunteers as the town’s fire chief when he’s not running the local inn. “That day in 2010, I felt that my business and my house might not be here any more.”

Gold Hill’s few hundred residents fled as the fire moved along the ridge above a town that began life as a mining camp during the 1859 gold rush. The firefighters followed when they could not stop the flames swallowing scores of homes.

By the time it was extinguished, the Fourmile blaze had destroyed 169 houses, the most by any wildfire in Colorado history. But that record was broken less than two years later, and then again within days, as the pace of fires picked up.

Gold Hill was once again surrounded by flames last year, which saw a record number of wildfires in Colorado. Now, Finn is bracing for another season of record-breaking fires.

“I’ve lived up here my whole life. You can see the change in the weather,” said Finn.

The 65-year-old fire chief paused in the garden of his modest wooden house.

“I hope that my grandson can be sitting here when he’s my age,” he said.

Finn’s nagging fear that Gold Hill is living on borrowed time is replicated across western states ravaged by some of the most intense wildfires in modern American history. But angst about the immediate threat is accompanied by increasingly urgent questions for communities on the frontline of the climate crisis about the long-term financial cost of survival – who should foot the bill?

Gold Hill has received a state grant to thin out the forest around the town in the hope of slowing if not stopping future fires. But that is a fraction of the cost that the surrounding county says it will take to deal with the impact of global heating.

Boulder county estimates it will cost taxpayers $100m over the next three decades just to adapt transport and drainage systems to the climate crisis, and reduce the risk from wildfires.

The county government says the bill should be paid by those who drove the crisis – the oil companies that spent decades covering up and misrepresenting the warnings from climate scientists. It is suing the US’s largest oil firm, ExxonMobil, and Suncor, a Canadian company with its US headquarters in Colorado, to require that they “use their vast profits to pay their fair share of what it will cost a community to deal with the problem the companies created”.

Boulder county, alongside similar lawsuits by the city of Boulder and San Miguel county in the south-west of the state, accuse the companies of deceptive trade practices and consumer fraud because their own scientists warned them of the dangers of burning of fossil fuels but the firms suppressed evidence of a growing climate crisis. The lawsuits also claim that as the climate emergency escalated, companies funded front groups to question the science in order to keep selling oil.

“It is far more difficult to change it now than it would have been if the companies had been honest about what they knew 30 or 50 years ago,” said Marco Simons, general counsel for Earth Rights International, which is handling the lawsuit for the county. “That is probably the biggest tragedy here. Communities in this country and around the world were essentially robbed of their options.”

Boulder county’s lawsuit contends that annual temperatures in Colorado will rise between 3.5F and 6.5F by 2050 and imperil the state’s economy, including farming and the ski industry.

Extremes of weather are already melting the mountain snowpack, causing increased evaporation and a shortfall in the amount of water flowing down the region’s most important river, the Colorado, which supplies drinking water to the state’s largest cities and irrigation all the way to California and Arizona.

Micah Parkin, founder of an environmental coalition, 350 Colorado, moved to Boulder from New Orleans after it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

“We decided to move to higher ground knowing hurricanes are getting more intense, sea levels are rising,” she said.

That criticism stings in climate-conscious Boulder and other high-income communities that are susceptible to charges of hypocrisy in part because areas of Colorado have some of the highest carbon footprints in the country from heating and cooling larger than average homes.

Max Boykoff, a professor in the environmental studies department at the University of Colorado Boulder, acknowledged the problem, alongside the popularity of high fuel consumption vehicles. But he said that should not be used by the oil companies to absolve themselves of responsibility for a crisis they have played a leading part in creating.

“These lawsuits are one of the tools to hold both these companies accountable,” he said.

Finn said there was no doubt that people moving into the mountains have contributed to the damage from wildfires in part by stopping the natural processes of thinning out the forest.

But the Gold Hill fire chief said the climate crisis was “a big part” of the surging heat and number of fires, and that corporate campaigns to deny the warnings from scientists played an important role.

“The science has been there for years. The problem is that you have half the population who don’t want to believe in science because it means they couldn’t make as much money,” he said.

This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story.

Burned buses at the Colorado Mountain Ranch in the historic town of Gold Hill in the Fourmile Canyon fire area in Boulder, Colorado, attest to the effects of a devastating wildfire, Photograph: Craig F Walker/Denver Post/Getty Images

Aside from moral reasons, it would be extremely unwise to invest in or lend to oil/coal businesses (mines, power stations, refineries, oil wells .... ), because

• They are going to be sued for the lies they told about climate change, how they funded climate-denialist "think tanks".
• They have lost the social licence to operate.  No one is going to care that they disappear.  No one is going to feel sorry for them.
• Renewables are far cheaper than coal, and in gas-importing countries, than gas too.  This will inexorably and inevitably shrink the market for fossil fuels.
• EV sales are doubling and tripling every year.  As EVs increase in world vehicle fleets, oil demand is going to plummet.
• EVs will provide so much storage that they will stabilise the grid, reducing the demand for peaking gas.
• Even air travel is starting to shift, with electric aeroplanes enter the mainstream and green jetfuel just around the corner.

They will go bankrupt.  Good.