Evangelicals and death rates

 From James Gundlach

Here is a scatter plot of the percent Evangelical in 2004 and the state's population aged 45-64 death rate from 2001 thru 2010. The scatter plot and regression statistics summarized in the title show that Evangelicalism substantially increases death rates in the United States.

The US is a nice test bed for analysis and policy, because it has 50 States, which have significant powers, so can follow different policies, plus 50 is a big enough number for the results of any analysis to be statistically significant.

In this case, I'm not sure whether there is correlation with a third variable. Possibly, poverty is strongly correlated with the level of fundamentalist Christianity. Poorer States will most likely have higher mortality rates, and (inexplicably to someone from outside the US) also be adherents of extreme religion. In other countries, the poor support socialist parties and policies (free health; fair wages; social housing; trade unions). In the US, religion and the hope of Heaven take their place. The poorest States in America are almost without exception "Red" States and the only ones which aren't poor are oil States. Even the use of Red as the colour for the Republican Party is odd. In the rest of the world, Red = socialist/progressive, and Blue = right-wing/conservative/regressive.

Whatever the reason behind the relationship, its existence is remarkable.

Global sea ice plunging to record lows

 From a post by Peter Dynes

Global Sea Ice taking a nose dive to record lows. We are losing over 25,000 tonnes of Ice from the Arctic per second. That’s a lot of Ice. Earth's heating rate will accelerate the more sea ice we lose. The general public is totally unaware of this danger.

World likely to breach 1.5 degrees by 2027

From The Guardian

The world is almost certain to experience new record temperatures in the next five years, and temperatures are likely to rise by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, scientists have warned.

The breaching of the crucial 1.5C threshold, which scientists have warned could have dire consequences, should be only temporary, according to research from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).

However, it would represent a marked acceleration of human impacts on the global climate system, and send the world into “uncharted territory”, the UN agency warned.

Countries have pledged, under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, to try to hold global temperatures to no higher than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, after scientific advice that heating beyond that level would unleash a cascade of increasingly catastrophic and potentially irreversible impacts.

Prof Petteri Taalas, the secretary general of the WMO, said: “This report does not mean that we will permanently exceed the 1.5C specified in the Paris agreement, which refers to long-term warming over many years. However, WMO is sounding the alarm that we will breach the 1.5C level on a temporary basis with increasing frequency.”

Global average surface temperatures have never before breached the 1.5C threshold. The highest average in previous years was 1.28C above pre-industrial levels.

The report, published on Wednesday, found there was a 66% likelihood of exceeding the 1.5C threshold in at least one year between 2023 and 2027.

New record temperatures have been set in many areas around the world in the heatwaves of the past year, but those highs may only be the beginning, according to the report, as climate breakdown and the impact of a developing El Niño weather system combine to create heatwaves across the globe.

El Niño is part of an oscillating weather system that develops in the Pacific. For the past three years, the world has been in the opposing phase, known as La Niña, which has had a dampening effect on temperature increases around the world.

As La Niña ends and a new El Niño develops, there is a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years will be the hottest on record, the scientists found.

Taalas warned of the effects. “A warming El Niño is expected to develop in the coming months and this will combine with human-induced climate change to push global temperatures into uncharted territory. This will have far-reaching repercussions for health, food security, water management and the environment,” he said. “We need to be prepared.”

The Arctic is heating much faster than the rest of the world, and this appears to be having an impact on global weather systems, including the jet stream, which has disrupted weather across the northern hemisphere in recent years.

There is likely to be less rainfall this year in the Amazon, Central America, Australia and Indonesia, the report found. This is particularly bad news for the Amazon, where scientists have grown increasingly concerned that a vicious cycle of heating and deforestation could tip the region from rainforest into savannah-like conditions.

That could have calamitous consequences for the planet, which relies on rainforests as massive carbon sinks.

For each year from 2023 to 2027, the global near-surface temperature is predicted to be between 1.1C and 1.8C above the pre-industrial average, taken from the years 1850 to 1900.

The world has warmed considerably in recent years. In 2015, when the Paris agreement was signed, requiring countries to hold global temperature increases to no more than 2C above pre-industrial levels while “pursuing efforts” to hold them to 1.5C, it was forecast that the chance of temporarily exceeding the 1.5C threshold within the following five years was zero.

This November, governments will meet for the Cop28 UN climate summit, where they will assess progress towards meeting the goals of the Paris agreement. Known as the “global stocktake”, this assessment is likely to show that the world is far off track to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the 43% this decade that is required to have a good chance of limiting [longer-term] temperature rises to 1.5C.

The November meeting will be just another blah-blah-blah gabfest.  

Too little is being done.  We are heading for climate catastrophe.  We need to cut global emissions by 5% per annum, minimum.  Despite the optimistic signs, emissions are still rising.  Fossil fuel subsidies continue.  And China is still building coal power stations at a hectic pace.

Dangerous methane feedback loop

From The Guardian

Methane is four times more sensitive to global warming than previously thought, a new study shows. The result helps to explain the rapid growth in methane in recent years and suggests that, if left unchecked, methane related warming will escalate in the decades to come.

The growth of this greenhouse gas – which over a 20 year timespan is more than 80 times as potent than carbon dioxide – had been slowing since the turn of the millennium but since 2007 has undergone a rapid rise, with measurements from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recording it passing 1,900 parts a billion last year, nearly triple pre-industrial levels.

“What has been particularly puzzling has been the fact that methane emissions have been increasing at even greater rates in the last two years, despite the global pandemic, when anthropogenic sources were assumed to be less significant,” said Simon Redfern, an earth scientist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

About 40% of methane emissions come from natural sources such as wetlands, while 60% come from anthropogenic sources such as cattle farming, fossil fuel extraction and landfill sites. Possible explanations for the rise in methane emissions range from expanding exploration of oil and natural gas, rising emissions from agriculture and landfill, and rising natural emissions as tropical wetlands warm and Arctic tundra melts.

But another explanation could be a slowdown of the chemical reaction that removes methane from the atmosphere. The predominant way in which methane is “mopped up” is via reaction with hydroxyl radicals (OH) in the atmosphere.

“The hydroxyl radical has been termed the ‘detergent’ of the atmosphere because it works to cleanse the atmosphere of harmful trace gases,” said Redfern. But hydroxyl radicals also react with carbon monoxide, and an increase in wildfires may have pumped more carbon monoxide into the atmosphere and altered the chemical balance. “On average, a carbon monoxide molecule remains in the atmosphere for about three months before it’s attacked by a hydroxyl radical, while methane persists for about a decade. So wildfires have a swift impact on using up the hydroxyl ‘detergent’ and reduce the methane removal,” said Redfern.

To understand what was driving the methane acceleration, Redfern and his colleague Chin-Hsien Cheng used four decades of methane measurements and analysed changes in the climate to identify how the availability of hydroxyl radicals might have changed and what impact the changing climate might have had on methane sources.
Their findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, suggest global heating is four times more influential in accelerating methane emissions than previously estimated, with rising temperatures helping to produce more methane (by speeding up microbe activity in wetlands for example), while at the same time slowing down the removal of methane from the atmosphere (with increasing numbers of wildfires reducing the availability of hydroxyl radicals in the upper atmosphere). “It was a really shocking result, and highlights that the effects of climate change can be even more extreme and dangerous than we thought,” said Redfern.

“If the oxidative capacity of the air is also in trouble, as these results suggest, then we have a double-edged sword,” said Euan Nisbet, an earth scientist at Royal Holloway, University of London, who led the UK’s Global Methane Budget project and was not involved in the study. “That’s a real worry because methane acceleration is perhaps the largest factor challenging our Paris agreement goals.”

Source: NOAA

Feedbacks and tipping points

 From  ....and Then There's Physics

There’s been some discussion on Twitter about feedbacks, runaways, and tipping points. The issue is that some seem to confuse these and sometimes imply that we could cross thresholds where we’ll undergo a runaway. I thought I would briefly try to explain these terms.

In the context of climate change, external factors that can lead to warming are typically called forcings. This would be things like changes to the solar flux, volcanic eruptions, and our release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Feedbacks are then responses to this externally driven warming that either act to amplify, or suppress, the warming. Some of these are fast, such as water vapour and clouds, while others are slower, such as changes to vegetation or ice sheets. Some are also negative and quite strong (such as the Planck response). This means that even though the overall effect of these feedbacks is to amplify the externally-driven warming, it is limited (the negative feedbacks eventually balance the the effect of the change in forcing and the resulting positive feedbacks). For example, if we were to double atmospheric CO2, we’d expect to eventually warm by about 3oC.

A runaway, on the other hand, typically refers to what happened on Venus. Essentially, virtually all of the CO2 was released into the atmosphere, the warming was so substantial that any liquid water evaporated and was eventually lost to space, most atmospheric molecules lighter than CO2 were also lost to space, and the surface warmed by many 100s of oC. On the Earth, such a runaway is simply not possible, because most of the carbon, that can then form CO2, is locked up in the lithosphere. We can’t emit enough CO2, either through anthropogenic influences or naturally, to undergo a runaway.

Finally, a tipping point refers to us crossing some threshold where the climate system changes (tips), irreversibly, into a new state. There is the possibility of a global tipping point, but this is seen as very unlikely. However, it is possible that we could cross thresholds where some parts of the system undergo essentially irreversible changes. Examples would be melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the Greenland Ice Sheet, Amazon rain forest die-off, release of carbon from the permafrost, and the disappearance of summer Arctic sea ice.

If we were to cross any of these tipping threshold, then the changes would further amplify the warming (through either releasing additional CO2, or methane, or changing the albedo) and – in the case of the ice sheets – would lead to substantial sea level rise. There are a few things to bear in mind, though. The timescales are typically long; if we cross a tipping threshold it will still take a long time (centuries) for the full effect to manifest. Also, we don’t have a particularly good idea of where these thresholds might lie; we could already have crossed some, or might not do so unless we were to warm substantially. Additionally, there is still debate as to whether or not some of these are truly irreversible; if we could artificially draw down atmospheric CO2 would some, like Arctic summer sea ice, then reverse?

So, one does have to be slightly careful as to what one implies about tipping points and their significance. On that note, I was going to highlight a recent paper by James Annan that might initiate an interesting discussion about using tipping points in the public narrative. However, this has got long enough, so I will leave that to another post.

Update: Something I meant to stress, is that even though crossing some tipping point might lead to irreversible changes that would amplify our warming, it is still limited. There is only so much that these effects can change the albedo, and there is a limit to how much CO2, or methane, that they could release.

Update 2: If you want to read a more detailed description of the runaway greenhouse effect there is a very good Skeptical Science post by Chris Colose. There is a formal aspect to a runaway that I hadn’t appreciated, but was made aware of by MarkR’s comment. It involves a condensable greenhouse gas (such as water vapour) in equilibrium with a surface reservoir, accumulating in the atmosphere so that it eventually limits the outgoing longwavelength flux. If the incoming flux exceeds this, then energy will accumulate without there being any way to balance this. The surface will then undergo runaway warming until the entire surface reservoir of the condensable greenhouse gas has been depleted.

For water vapour, this longwavelength limit would occur at about 310W/m^2, which – given our albedo of 0.3 – is currently greater than the flux we’re receiving from the Sun. This essentially means that water vapour in the atmosphere is in a regime where it condenses, rather than accumulates. We, therefore, can’t undergo such a runaway in our current state, and no level of CO2 emissions will trigger it.

Note: none of the above suggests that we can just relax and not bother about cutting emissions.  Just because we won't have a Venusian runaway rise in temperatures does not mean we won't have steadily worsening climatic conditions as temperatures rise.  The ± 1 degree C we have had so far is already leading to record floods, droughts, hurricanes, heatwaves and bushfires.   2 degrees, which seems entirely possible given that most of the world is still not approaching the issue of global warming with enough urgency, will make all these climate extremes much worse.

Air conditioning feedback

Air conditioning in Mumbai. Source: The Age

From The Age:

The vast majority of Americans and many Australians have air conditioning, but in Germany almost nobody does. At least not yet.

So when temperatures in Berlin rose to an uncomfortable 37 Celsius this week – a record for the month of June – I was uncommonly delighted to go to the Bloomberg office, where it's artificially and blissfully cool.

By letting people in overheated climates concentrate on their work and get a good night's sleep, air conditioning has played a big part in driving global prosperity and happiness over the past few decades – and that revolution has still barely begun.

About half of Chinese households have this modern tool, but of the 1.6 billion people living in India and Indonesia, only 88 million have access to air conditioning at home, Bloomberg New Energy Finance noted in a recent report.

For many, relief is in sight. Because of the combination of population growth, rising incomes, falling equipment prices and urbanisation, the number of air-conditioning units installed globally is set to jump from about 1.6 billion today to 5.6 billion by the middle of the century, according to the International Energy Agency.

There's just one glaring problem: What will all this extra demand for electricity do to the climate?

Carbon dioxide emissions rose another 2 per cent in 2018, the fastest pace in seven years. That increase was alarming in its own right, given what we know about the unfolding climate emergency.

But the proximate cause was especially troubling: Extreme weather led to more demand for air conditioning and heating in 2018, BP explained in its annual review of energy sector.

It's not too hard to imagine a vicious cycle in which more hot weather begets ever more demand for air conditioning and thus even more need for power. That in turn means more emissions and even hotter temperatures.

That negative feedback loop exists at a local level too. Air-conditioning units funnel heat outside, exacerbating the so-called "urban heat island" effect, which makes cities warmer than the countryside.

BNEF expects electricity demand from residential and commercial air conditioning to increase by more than 140 per cent by 2050 – an increase that's comparable to adding the European Union's entire electricity consumption. Air conditioning will represent 12.7 per cent of electricity demand by the middle of the century, compared to almost 9 per cent now, it thinks.

Thankfully, much of that extra demand will be met by solar power (the need for cooling is highest during daylight hours). But because temperatures don't always return to comfortable levels when the sun goes down, there's a danger some will be supplied by fossil power.

Buildings have long been a blind spot in climate discussions even though they account for about one-fifth of global energy consumption. The inefficiency of air-conditioning systems or badly designed homes and offices simply aren't as eye-catching as electric cars and making people feel ashamed about flying.

There was a big step forward in January when the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol came into force. Though not well known, its aim is to phase out the use of potent greenhouse gases called hydrofluorocarbons, which are used widely in air conditioning systems. Unless substituted, these alone could cause 0.4C of additional warming by the end of the century.

Yet true to form, President Donald Trump's administration hasn't yet submitted Kigali to the Senate for ratification, even though American manufacturers would benefit from demand for the new technologies that it would spawn.

Trump knows all about the importance of good air con. He spends much of his time at his Palm Beach country club, a place that couldn't exist without it.

So he'd do well to remember this: You can air condition the clubhouse but not the golf course. And it's starting to get awfully hot outside.

[Read more here]

One obvious solution is to plant trees in cities.  This would reduce urban temperatures by 5 degrees C.  Another solution is installing solar panels, because their output comes during the day when temperatures are highest.  And to cover the need for air conditioning at night, add 12 hours of storage.  The problem right now is that batteries are supply-constrained, but that won't last forever.  And finally, regulations are needed to make all new buildings more energy efficient.