Ocean geo-engineering

Naturally, the ppl who brought you fossil fuels and the climate emergency, are in favour of geo-engineering, which will take the carbon dioxide they've put into the atmosphere out again.  Presumably, taxpayers will pay for geo-engineering while oil and coal companies pocket the profits made from fossil fuels.  The trouble is, geo-engineering risks being some airy-fairy pious notion which is really about fossil fuel companies trying to postpone zero- carbon.  The unproven geo-engineering techniques put forward may persuade some that the need to slash emissions is reduced, thus in fact slowing our transition to zero carbon.

In reality, though, we will surely need it, because the world is very unlikely to cut emissions enough to avoid a 1.7 degree rise in global temperatures, and we still run a very serious risk of 2 degrees.   Negative emissions will help undo any 'overshoot' which happens.  The question of who will pay for it remains.   You can depend on it: oil and coal companies and those who made money from pumping CO2 into the atmosphere will not be putting up their hands.

From The Guardian:

Tom Green has a plan to tackle climate change. The British biologist and director of the charity Project Vesta wants to turn a trillion tonnes of CO2 into rock, and sink it to the bottom of the sea.

Green admits the idea is “audacious”. It would involve locking away atmospheric carbon by dropping pea-coloured sand into the ocean. The sand is made of ground olivine – an abundant volcanic rock, known to jewellers as peridot – and, if Green’s calculations are correct, depositing it offshore on 2% of the world’s coastlines would capture 100% of total global annual carbon emissions.

The plan relies on a natural process called weathering. “Weathering has been working on the planet for billions of years,” says Green, a graduate of Harvard Business School who runs Project Vesta from San Francisco. “When rain falls on volcanic rocks, they dissolve a little in the water, causing a chemical reaction that uses carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The carbon ends up in the ocean, where it’s used by marine-calcifying organisms like corals and shell-making animals, whose skeletons and shells sink to the bottom of the ocean as sediment and eventually become limestone.”

Olivine weathers easily, and allowing ocean currents to churn it up, says Green, “will make it dissolve much more quickly, to happen on a human-relevant timescale”. It is not a rare mineral: there are beaches in the Galápagos Islands and in Hawaii that are green with olivine-rich sand.

The idea of using the sea to absorb excess carbon is not far-fetched, says Green. Ocean water can hold 150 times more CO2 than air, per unit of volume. “The ocean has already taken up about 30% of the excess carbon dioxide that we’ve emitted as a society,” he says. He and his colleagues are gearing up to test their process in two similar Caribbean coves, one acting as an untouched “control” in the experiment.

There remain many unknowns. Would such an intervention work? Who gets to decide if it should go ahead? Could there be side-effects? It is complex chemistry, and the natural process of weathering would be accelerated to an unnatural pace. Our understanding of the workings of the ocean is a mere drop in the proverbial. But with our race to mend the planet having taken on Sisyphean overtones, there is still hope that the vast, churning seas can be our lifeline.

Increasing carbon capture naturally on land – by planting trees, for example – will not remove enough CO2 to halt global heating. Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge University and author of A Farewell to Ice, says: “If you want to get rid of the industrial emissions from Europe, you’d have to turn Europe into one big primeval forest. It works, but it’s not good enough alone.”

There are many ingenious ideas being discussed. Coastlines could be rewilded with underwater forests of kelp or seagrass, surface water cooled by generating air bubbles to whoosh cold water up from the deep, and marine clouds sprayed with seawater to reflect more heat from the sun.

As the UK prepares to host the UN Climate Change Conference (Cop26) in November, dozens of these projects are being trialled. Most rely on the ocean’s many natural balance-restoring processes: enhancing them to help slow cooling, to lock away carbon, to protect Arctic ice or even to reduce the threat of hurricanes.

Gaurav Sant, director of the UCLA Institute for Carbon Management, [talks about]  another concept, which he is helping to develop just a few hundred miles down the coast from Green, where UCLA engineers have developed a machine that mimics how seashells form. Called a flow reactor, the machine sucks seawater in, and an electrical charge makes it alkaline, which triggers the CO2 to react with the seawater’s magnesium and calcium, producing limestone and magnesite (like forming shells). The water then flows out and, depleted of its captured CO2, is ready to take up more. A byproduct of this process – hydrogen – can be extracted for fuel.

It’s a similar concept to weathering olivine in the ocean, and Sant’s plan is for initial small studies before a gradual scaling up. The team aims to remove between 10 and 20 gigatonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere, starting in 2050.

Sant says it will be a huge challenge to build a system large enough – and then to build thousands more. “Anyone saying ‘we’re going to do this in five years’, is greatly underestimating the challenge,” he says. “We’re talking about an enormous enterprise, the size and scale of which humanity has not seen before.”

Volcanic olivine, which Project Vesta is trialling as a way to capture carbon absorbed in oceans.

Steep rises in CO₂

From The Guardian:

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by the second highest annual rise in the past six decades, according to new data.

Atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas were 414.8 parts per million in May, which was 3.5ppm higher than the same time last year, according to readings from the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, where carbon dioxide has been monitored continuously since 1958.

Scientists have warned for more than a decade that concentrations of more than 450ppm risk triggering extreme weather events and temperature rises as high as 2C, beyond which the effects of global heating are likely to become catastrophic and irreversible.

May is the most significant month for global carbon dioxide concentrations because it is the peak value for the year, before the growth of vegetation in the northern hemisphere starts to absorb the gas from the air. The seasonal peak and fall can be seen in the Keeling curve, named after Charles Keeling, who started the observations on Mauna Loa because of its isolation in the Pacific Ocean.

This is the seventh consecutive year in which steep increases in ppm have been recorded, well above the previous average, and the fifth year since the 400ppm threshold was breached in 2014. In 2016, the highest annual jump in the series so far was recorded, from 404.1 in 2015 to 407.66 in 2016.

As recently as the 1990s, the average annual growth rate was about 1.5ppm, but in the past decade that has accelerated to 2.2ppm, and is now even higher. This brings the threshold of 450ppm closer sooner than had been anticipated. Concentrations of the gas have increased every year, reflecting our burning of fossil fuels.

[Read more here]

It's kinda obvious what we should be doing, isn't it? 

Global warming *has* accelerated

 From Open Mind (Tamino)

I won't repeat the whole article.  Read it in full here.

My paper with Stefan Rahmstorf showing that global warming has accelerated was published in Geophysical Research Letters today. The main result is that global warming is NOT proceeding at the same old rate it has been since 1975. It’s going faster.

In this data set [from Berkeley Earth], 2025 turned out to be the 3rd-warmest year on record (as in the other data sets except NASA, where it came in 2nd). When I adjust the data to remove the estimated impact of el Niño, volcanic eruptions, and solar variation, I get this:

The trend is unaffected, but the noise level is much reduced, which enables us to estimate warming rates with less uncertainty. I’ve added a red line to this graph which is a modified LOWESS smooth of the adjusted data.

To test for acceleration we isolated the data since 1975, and the simplest way to test for it is to fit a parabola to the data; if the quadratic term is statistically significant, we can reject the null hypothesis, that the signal is just a straight line. Of course we must correct for autocorrelation of the noise, but still the quadratic term turns out to be strongly significant. We can safely reject the null hypothesis: there has been acceleration.

According to this model, the warming rate right now is the slope at the endpoint of the parabola, which is 0.28 ± 0.05 °C per decade (i.e. between 0.23 and 0.33 °C per decade, 95% CI). I will emphasize that this is the “best estimate” and those are the correct uncertainty levels IF (and this is a BIG IF) the data actually follow a parabola plus stationary noise. If not (which is the overwhelmingly likely case), we can consider the estimate good but not best, and the uncertainty levels are a lower bound on the actual uncertainty.

Another test for acceleration is to find the best fit of a continuous piecewise-linear function which is allowed to change slope at a time chosen by changepoint analysis. This is a challenge to evaluate statistically because we have to allow for autocorrelation and account for the extra degree of freedom to choose the changepoint time. But it can be done, and the best-fit model again turns out to be strongly statistically significant.

Both those models serve excellently to demonstrate the presence of acceleration. But I doubt they are best to estimate what the warming rate is right now, and what it will be in the near future. For that, I offer yet another model, which I will apply to the data since 1880, a continuous piece-wise linear fit (PLF) which is allowed to change its slope every 15 years from 1905 through 2010. I call this model “PLF15”

The PLF15 model not only estimates the signal value, it conveniently gives us an estimate of the average warming rate over each segment between the knots. I can plot the warming rate itself (which for this model is constant during each segment) along with light blue shading to show the uncertainty range.

All these graphs plot the warming rate in °C per year, but when quoting numbers I have followed the custom these days to talk about the rate in °C per decade. According to this analysis, the current estimated rate is 0.31 ± 0.07 °C/decade.

Which estimate is best? I don’t know, but I do know that even 0.24 °C per decade will take us past 2 °C right around the year 2050. The whole point of the Paris agreement is: DON’T GO THERE. My advice: fasten your seat belt, things are going to get ugly.

We need to redouble efforts to cut emissions, or things will get very ugly.  What can we do?

• Set a renewable energy target in every country.  The percentage of renewables+nuclear needs to rise by 6-8% a year, at least.  This will cut emissions by 27% (emissions from electricity generation are +-30% of total global emissions) within a decade.  We may not yet be able to go above 90 or 95% renewables in the grid, because we don't have long-term storage to offset periods of dunkelflaute, but we will have cut most emissions from electricity generation.  
• We must tax imports from countries which do not have an R.E.T. or a price on carbon.  (See my posts on a carbon border tax)
• We need to accelerate the replacement of petrol/diesel vehicles (ICEVs) with EVs.  This is a problem, because even when we reach 100% of sales being EVs, it will take 10-20 years for all ICEVs on the roads to be replaced.  This is too long.  Most countries are nowhere near 100% EV sales.   We could, for example, ban the import of new or second-hand ICEVs, or slap 100% taxes on them.   Ethiopia has already done this.  This policy should apply to two and three-wheeled vehicles, too.  Countries which do this deserve reduced carbon border taxes.
• In rich countries, we need to replace oil- or gas-based household and industrial heating with heat pumps.  Because they have high up-front costs, they will require government subsidy to start the revolution rolling.

All of these combined will cut emissions by 50 to 60%.  If we also switch to low-emission steel and cement, the emissions cuts could reach 70%.

That will leave (mostly) agriculture.  Put that in the too-hard basket for now--people love their meat too much to give it up.  But it won't go away.  When we've cut emissions by 70%, agriculture will dominate what's left over.  And action will no longer be postponable.

Hottest January since 1940

 From Prof Eliot Jacobson

And still we do nothing to slash emissions.  And we've elected a climate-denying cretin to the White House.

A humungous El Niño is on the way

From Zack Labe

Sea surface temperatures are already surging to record high levels for this time of year in key El Niño monitoring areas.

This will prolly push global temperatures towards 1.7 degrees above pre-industrial (1850-1900) levels. This is releasing heat into the atmosphere already accumulated in the sea, so it doesn't change the underlying trajectory — though it may move some world climate systems past tipping points — but it will still deliver terrible heatwaves, droughts, bushfires and floods. And meanwhile the underlying temperature is continuing to rise, and its increase appears to have been accelerating.

Insane temperature increase next year

 From Zeke Hausfather

I'm not sure folks have realized just how crazy the second half of 2026 and 2027 will be for global temperatures – on the back of a record-smashing El Niño event. Here is my latest estimate of where both years will end up compared to global temperatures since 1850.

We're racing towards 2 degrees increase in temperatures since the 19th century.  And look how bad things already are.  The rate of increase is accelerating. 

Yet our politicians and CEOs lie to us, pretend to care, but take no action to slash emissions.  

Accelerated warming

 From Prof Eliot Jacobson

Below is the latest monthly global surface temperature anomaly graphic, with a quadratic trendline (in other words, assuming accelerating warming). What's new? This updated trendline shows us passing 1.5°C later this year and 2.0°C in 2036.

Global warming accelerates to 0.3 degrees per decade

 From Open Mind (Tamino)

July 2023 was the hottest month in history, maybe even the hottest in the last 120,000 years. The months that followed broke monthly records by surprisingly large margins. It’s no wonder that 2023 has turned out to be the hottest year we’ve seen, and not just by a little.

Here are yearly average temperature anomalies for the whole planet, from 1950 through 2023, according to HadCRU, the Hadley Centre/Climate Research Unit in the U.K. (they haven’t yet reported their value for December 2023, so that year’s value is the January-through-November year-to-date average):

Each dot shows a year’s average, with the solid red line a smoothed version. The smooth shows is a good estimate of the background value, and reveals how climate has changed (temperature-wise), while the actual yearly values (black dots) fluctuate about that background value.

We know some of the things that contribute to those fluctuations. Volcanic eruptions, for instance, can fill the atmosphere with reflective aerosols which take years to settle out of the air, all the while cooling the planet. The el Niño southern oscillation (ENSO) tracks changes in how the ocean and atmosphere exchange heat; in its el Niño phase the surface gets noticeably warmer, but in its opposite la Niña phase the world tends to be cooler. The sun, of course, is the ultimate source of heat for our climate, and when it shines hotter, Earth heats up, but when the sun cools (relative to itself, of course) the Earth follows. These factors can be accounted for, at least approximately, and removed from the temperature data to define adjusted data, which will (we hope) give us a clearer picture of the changes which are due to other things — like greenhouse gas emissions.

Such has been done in peer-reviewed scientific research, and I’ve updated the procedure to include more recent data as well as alternative methods. In my latest version, the estimated contribution of each factor to the HadCRU temperature series looks like this:

The influence of volcanic eruptions, in brown, shows the cooling from the three large volcanic eruptions during this time, especially the massive explosion of Mt. Pinatubo in the 1990s. Solar variations, in red, have had only a small influence on Earth’s temperature because the solar variations themselves are small. The ENSO, in blue, has sometimes warmed (the el Niño phase) and sometimes cooled (the la Niña phase).

Add them all together, we have an estimate of the total influence of these factors on global temperature:

 

We can use this to estimate what global temperature would have been without these factors; just subtract this estimate from the observed data to yield adjusted data. When I do so, then compute yearly averages to yeild adjusted yearly average temperature anomalies for the whole planet from 1950 through 2023 according to HadCRU, I get this:

 

Each dot shows a year’s average, with the solid red line showing a smoothed version.

I’m mainly interested in the rate at which temperature is rising, so I took the original (un-adjusted) data and analyzed it with my modified lowess smooth, which is what I used to generate the solid red lines (smoothed values) in the above graphs. I’ve custom-designed it for this kind of analysis, so it reports, for each moment of time, not only the estimated value and its uncertainty, but the estimated rate of change (just what I’m looking for) and its uncertainty.

When I apply it to the HadCRU data, and choose the “time scale” (a free parameter in the analysis) so it will mimic rates of change on a 20-year time scale, it yields this:

The solid blue line shows the estimated rate of warming, the light blue shading shows its uncertainty range (±2σ). There is an obvious change in the rate around the year 1970; before that the rate was near zero (within the uncertainty range), but afterward is assuredly positive. This agrees with what we see in the first graph, that the smoothed value changes very little (zero rate from 1950 to 1970), then rises steadily until the present (rate about +0.02 °C/yr until now).

There is also a rise in the main estimate (solid blue line) starting around 2010, which suggests that the rate of warming may have increased lately (i.e. recent acceleration), but the uncertainty range is wide enough that it still includes the value +0.02°C/yr which had been observed already for decades.

Conclusion: since 1950, the data show at least two different warming rates: near zero from 1950 until about 1970, then about +0.02 °C/yr until now. There is evidence of a recent increase, but the evidence is inconclusive.

What about the trend in the adjusted data, i.e. apart from the factors that make those incessant fluctuations? I can apply the same analysis and get this:

 

Much is essentially the same as with the original, raw data: there is undoubtedly a change in rate around 1970, and there is evidence of another change around 2010. But this time the uncertainty range is narrower, the uncertainties are a lot smaller, and the evidence for recent change is now conclusive.

Conclusion: since 1950 the adjusted data show at least three different warming rates: near zero from 1950 until about 1970, then about +0.02 °C/yr until around 2010, and about +0.027 °C/yr since. Not just the above analysis, but other statistical tests confirm that although the uncertainty in the current rate is considerable, we conclude with confidence that it’s faster than it was during the preceding decades. Global warming picks up speed.

That’s using the data from HadCRU, and the story is the same when using data from NASA (the GISTemp data from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies), from NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), from the Berkeley Earth surface temperature project, or the ERA5 data from Europe’s Copernicus Climate Service.

James Hansen and others published a new paper recently, claiming that not only will global warming, in the very near future, proceed faster than expected, it is already doing so — that the pace of global warming had accelerated. Temperature increase after 2010, it suggests, will be at 0.027°C/yr, 50% faster than the lazy 0.018°C/yr it had been rising for decades before that. As a result, we have less than a decade until we cross the much-discussed threshold of 1.5°C above pre-industrial, so any idea of keeping global warming below that limit is “deader than a doornail.”

 

[Read more here; Tamino lists some of the caveats of his analysis.]

We are still not doing enough to slash emissions.  Remember, even if emissions peak this year, the rise in temperatures is proportional to the level of emissions.  For temperatures to stop rising, we need to cut emissions to zero.   On top of which, even if CO2 emissions have peaked,  methane emissions have accelerated.  Methane is 82 times as potent a greenhouse gas (over 10 years) as CO2.  

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.”

Global sea temperatures accelerating

 From Prof Eliot Jacobson

In case you had any doubt, the near perfect fit of the quadratic trendline makes it clear: global sea surface temperatures are accelerating.

The current rate of warming is about 0.32°C/decade, which comes out to somewhere around 275 million Hiroshima bombs worth of ocean heating in 2025.

 

 What can governments do to reverse this trend?

1.  Ban the sale of new pure petrol/diesel/gasoline cars immediately.   There are plenty of hybrids and EVs in production right now.  For example, in Oz, Toyota has already stopped selling the petrol-only Corolla.
2. Give electricity utilities 5 years to get to a minimum of 60% renewables and 10 to get to 90%.  
3. Remove all oil subsidies
4. Tax carbon emissions, and return the tax via a monthly cheque to all residents.

What can you do?

1. Give up meat.  This will cut your personal emissions by 1/3.
2. Buy your electricity from a 100% green supplier (In Australia) or Green Power Options (in the US)
3. If you can afford it, put solar panels on your roof.  
4. If you can, replace gas or oil heating with heat pumps.  The newest heat pumps work even in sub-zero temperatures.
5. Replace your car with an EV when your current car gives up the ghost.  Failing that, a plug-in hybrid (PHEV).  Use public transport as much as you can; fly as little as you can.

This will cut your personal emissions by 60 to 80%.

We face catastrophe.  We must act now, individually and collectively.  Before it is too late.

Record global sea temperatures

 From Prof Eliot Jacobson

Since March 13, 2023, global sea surface temperatures have been setting daily records compared to the pre-2023 record high for each day, with the exception of 5 days in late December, 2024. Thanks to @leonsimons.bsky.social for the idea to graph this.

Oz's summer from hell

It's summer in the southern hemisphere.  Officially, Oz's summer lasts from the beginning of December to the end of February, but we've having been having record heat across the continent.  Last summer (December 2018 to February 2019) was a record, by a long way.    The statistical probability is that this year will not be another record; a zag tends to follow a zig.  But in fact it's been so incredibly hot this year so far that it is entirely possible that there will be another record this year.  Either way, the key variable to watch is the steadily rising trend. 

Meanwhile one of the many cretins on the rabid right wing of the ruling denialist coalition government wants an official enquiry into whether the Bureau of Meteorology is making the figures up, despite our lived experience.  We know it is hotter than ever, we know that there is a record drought, we know that our rivers are dying, and we know that this is the earliest massive bushfires have ever occurred.

The chart comes from Open Mind (Tamino):

Source: Open Mind
The observation with the black ring around it is the Dec 2018-Feb 2019 summer.

Massive methane leaks from rubbish dumps

From The Guardian

There have been more than 1,000 huge leaks of the potent greenhouse gas methane from landfill waste dumps since 2019, the Guardian can reveal.

Analysis of global satellite data from around the world shows the populous nations of south Asia are a hotspot for these super-emitter events, as well as Argentina and Spain, developed countries where proper waste management should prevent leaks.

Landfills emit methane when organic waste such as food scraps, wood, card, paper and garden waste decompose in the absence of oxygen. Methane, also called natural gas, traps 86 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over 20 years, making it a critical target for climate action. Scientists have said emissions from unmanaged landfills could double by 2050 as urban populations grow, blowing the chance of avoiding climate catastrophe.

A total of 1,256 methane super-emitter events occurred between January 2019 and June 2023, according to the new data. Pakistan, India and Bangladesh lead the list of nations with the most large leaks, followed by Argentina, Uzbekistan and Spain.

Landfill emissions can be reduced by creating less organic waste in the first place, diverting it away from landfill, or at least capturing some of the methane that is being released from the landfills. Action to stem methane leaks slows global heating faster than almost any other measure and is often low-cost, with some measures even paying for themselves when the captured gas is sold as fuel.

Methane emissions have accelerated since 2007 and cause a third of the global heating driving the climate crisis today. The acceleration has alarmed scientists, who fear it is the biggest threat to keeping below 1.5C of global heating and could trigger catastrophic climate tipping points. The rapid rise appears to be due to global heating driving more methane production in wetlands – a potential vicious circle that makes cuts of human-caused methane emissions even more urgent.

Decomposing waste is responsible for about 20% of human-caused methane emissions. Fossil fuel operations cause 40% of emissions, and the Guardian revealed there were more than 1,000 super-emitter events from oil, gas and coal sites in 2022 alone, many of which could be easily fixed. Cattle and paddy fields cause the other 40% of emissions.

Prof Euan Nisbet, a methane expert at Royal Holloway University of London, said: “Big landfills make a great deal of methane but it doesn’t cost much to bulldoze soil over a stinking, burning landfill. It’s not rocket science.”

Microbes in the soil convert methane into CO2. “Then it’s lost 97% of its greenhouse impact,” Nisbet said.

Carlos Silva Filho, president of the International Solid Waste Association, said the global methane pledge made by 150 countries to cut 30% of methane emissions by 2030 could not be achieved without tackling emissions from the waste industry. “Cutting methane is the only solution to meet the global 1.5C temperature target,” he said. “If we really focus on reducing methane emissions from the waste sector, it is a gamechanger.” About 40% of the world’s waste still goes to unmanaged dumps.

Antoine Halff, a co-founder of the company Kayrros, which provided the satellite image analysis to the Guardian, said: “Waste is a big source [of methane] and in countries like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh it’s not only a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions but it’s also a lost opportunity to tap a fuel resource that could help meet the country’s energy needs.”

The satellite that Kayrros uses orbits the planet 14 times a day and provides global coverage, giving the location of a leak to within about six miles. Higher-resolution satellites that orbit less frequently can pinpoint the waste facilities responsible.

[Read more here]

 

It's so infuriating.  The techniques we have to reduce emissions are cheap and effective.  They just require competence and determination to make them happen.  Wind & solar are now the cheapest source of bulk electricity almost everywhere.   I know that the transition will take time --- after all, we are making the greatest energy transition in the fastest time, ever.  Yet it still seems too slow to me.   If we subsidised EVs more heavily, they would quickly reach 100% of new cars sales, and a few years after that, close to 100% of the total car fleet.   We can massively reduce methane emissions, relatively cheaply.  Yet we don't. 

It seems simple: the costs of the climate catastrophe are already exceeding the costs of going green. Yet still we dither and phaff.  It's all doable, it's all technically feasible, and it's all relatively cheap.  The obstacles are not technological or economic.  They're administrative and political.  And that is shocking and disgraceful.

Biggest climate election law

From Energy Monitor

Three major changes to EU climate legislation have become law following their final adoption by the EU Council on 25 April, heralding some big changes for businesses and citizens in the coming years. The trio is the key component of the ‘Fit for 55‘ package proposed in the summer of 2021 – to put the EU on a path to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030, relative to 1990 levels – and implements European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s flagship EU Green Deal.

German MEP Peter Liese, who represented the centre-right European Peoples Party in the negotiations, called the now-adopted ‘Fit for 55’ package “the biggest climate protection law of all time”, dwarfing the US’s Inflation Reduction Act in terms of regulatory change.

CBAM: the world’s first carbon border tax

The move that will get the most international attention is the adoption of the world’s first carbon border tax, called the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). Goods imported into the EU from countries with less-stringent climate legislation will have an import duty levied on them to avoid the phenomenon of “carbon leakage” where European companies could move production out of the EU to avoid a carbon price or face unfair global competition if they do not. The EU has given it an unwieldy name because calling it a tax or tariff would have required a unanimous vote in the Council, which would have seen a veto, and also would have been more easily challenged at the World Trade Organization.

Under the political deal reached between the European Parliament and EU Council (national governments) in December 2022, the levy will begin in 2026 and initially apply to imports of steel, cement, aluminium, fertilisers, electricity and hydrogen, which was not in the Commission’s initial proposal but was added by the Parliament. During negotiations, the Parliament also insisted on adding provisions for CBAM’s future application to processed products such as cars, screws and bolts. There is a provision too for applying the levy to indirect emissions from activities like land use change “under certain circumstances” – to be defined, it was a major sticking point in the negotiations and opposed by several national governments including Germany.

Free allowances in the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) for the industries affected by CBAM will be phased out, the reasoning being that the new regime will protect them in future and the free allowances will no longer be necessary. However, the final phase-out schedule is less generous to industry than the Commission’s initial proposal. Under the deal, free allowances will be cut in half by 2030 and entirely phased out by 2034. The Commission originally envisioned a more gradual phase-out until 2035. Eurofer, the steel sector association, has warned the accelerated timeline “risks wiping out a large part of EU steel exports worth €45 billion [$49.7bn]”.

'Fit for 55' package: a new ETS for buildings and transport

The second law coming onto the books is the launch of a new carbon market covering emissions from fuels used in cars and buildings from 2027. This new ETS will exist alongside the current EU ETS. Under the deal reached in December, the price of carbon from home heating and transport fuels will be capped at €45 per tonne (/t), to avoid the risk of an escalating price making fuel unaffordable for vulnerable parts of society and prompting a 'yellow-vests'-style backlash. The plan is expected to add €0.10 per litre to the price of petrol and diesel. The negotiators also added a provision stating that if energy prices are exceptionally high, the new scheme will be delayed by a year to 2028.

Separately, the main EU ETS has seen its requirements tightened for the current trading period of 2021 to 2030, requiring industrial sectors covered by the system to cut their emissions 62% below 2005 levels by 2030 – a big step up from the existing 43% target. That move is expected to bring the price of carbon back up to €100/t over the coming years, up from current levels of €80–85.

A Social Climate Fund for a 'just' transition

The third 'Fit for 55' element to be enacted this week is an €86.7bn Social Climate Fund to protect vulnerable households and avoid a backlash to the EU's energy and climate agenda. That was increased during negotiations from the €72.2bn originally proposed by the Commission. EU countries will have to submit 'Social Climate Plans' after consulting with local and regional authorities, businesses, unions and civil society.

The Fund will finance temporary direct income support to tackle the increase in road transport and heating fuel prices from the new ETS – with a limit of up to 37.5% of the total estimated price tag of each national plan. It will also cover long-lasting structural investments, including into buildings renovation, the integration of renewable energy, infrastructure for zero and low-emission vehicles, and public transport. The Fund will start in 2026, one year before the carbon price on road and heating fuel kicks in. It will initially be financed via the revenues obtained from auctioning 50 million EU ETS allowances, estimated at around €4bn. Once the new ETS starts up, the fund will be financed from the sales of allowances to cover road and building emissions, up to an estimated €65bn, with an additional 25% contributed from national budgets.

Europe's adoption of a carbon border tax will encourage other countries to introduce carbon taxes and their own carbon border taxes.  Why not pay taxes to yourself instead of the EU?   For example, the UK could easily avoid a CBAM by introducing its own carbon price, and applying it to imports from non-EU countries, while raising revenue from its own carbon tax.  The same calculus applies to other countries, too.  It's a major step forward.  

Extending a carbon price to cars and buildings is also essential.

The truth is that regulations aren't always effective.  But if everybody pays a price on carbon, it's a powerful incentive to minimise carbon emissions.

Click to see clearer image

See also the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism explainer from the EU.

Unparallelled over 2000 years

Note that chart only goes up to 2000.  Since then global warming has accelerated to 2 degrees C per century.
Source: ZME Science

From ZME Science:

The climate warming we are causing is unparalleled in the past 2,000 years.

Not only is the climate warming faster than at any point in at least 2,000 years, but in contrast to pre-industrial climate fluctuations, climate change is now occurring across the entire planet at the same time.

When it comes to global warming, the general situation is essentially a settled issue. We know that the planet is heating up, and we know that this is happening as a result of our emissions of greenhouse gases (particularly carbon dioxide). However, some details and particularities of this process are not as well understood.

For instance, climate variability over the past 2,000 years has been subject to great debate. As climate change deniers are quick to point out, our planet’s climate has changed before in the past — although this is missing the true scope of the issue. For instance, some might point out that the Earth has been hotter than it is now in its geological past while ignoring the fact that these events happened tens of millions of years ago, due to natural causes, over long periods of time, and the effects were still devastating for life on Earth. The more you look at today’s context, the more you understand that this situation has no precedent.

In a recent study, researchers analyzed the past two millennia, assessing the factors that caused climate variability in the past and the extent of the climatic changes.

In one paper, Raphael Neukom and colleagues from Bern University compiled data from around 700 proxy records of temperature changes. They specifically looked at unusual warming and cooling events. But wherever they looked, they found the same thing: nothing is even close to the current scale of events.

Take an event commonly called the Little Ice Age, a significant cooling event that started in the 1300s and lasted centuries. The period is well-represented in art, with numerous painters covering it through the centuries. This produced an important misunderstanding, researchers say, because it propagated the idea that the entire planet was cooling at the same time.

“It’s true that during the Little Ice Age it was generally colder across the whole world,” explains Raphael Neukom, “but not everywhere at the same time. The peak periods of pre-industrial warm and cold periods occurred at different times in different places.”

According to the study, the cooling events happened mostly in parts of Europe and North America. Because these areas were so influential culturally and artistically, it propagated the idea that the Earth cooled similarly in all parts of the world, which was not really the case — as shown by climate proxies from other parts of the world. For instance, the coldest temperatures occurred in central and eastern Pacific regions in the 15th century, in northwestern Europe and southeastern North America in the 17th century, and elsewhere during the 19th century. This lack of uniformity suggests that local influences, rather than planet-wide phenomena, were at play.
In contrast to that, all of the Earth’s major regions have seen their warmest temperatures in recent years, and the overall trend indicates a constant, planetary warming.

“We find that the warmest period of the past two millennia occurred during the 20th Century for more than 98% of the globe,” the study reads.

“This provides strong evidence that anthropogenic (human induced) global warming is not only unparalleled in terms of absolute temperatures but also unprecedented in spatial consistency within the context of the past 2,000 years.”

The study debunks another misconception: that volcanoes or solar activity are the main drivers of climate change. In pre-industrial times, random fluctuations within the climate systems themselves drove variations and change. External factors such as volcanic eruptions were not intense enough to cause major climate change for decades — let alone centuries.

[Read more here]

We've missed 1.5 degrees. Should we give up?

 No, of course not.  But maybe we should target growth in renewables infrastructure, setting targets for wind and solar and EVs and heat pumps.  These are direct targets, in order to achieve the indirect target of peaking and then reducing emissions, which will in turn lead to temperatures stopping rising.

From Just Have a Think.

Fooled by noise

I talked here about a post by Tamino who writes Open Mind, which discussed signal and noise, and how easy it was to get mislead by short-term random changes in the data of a time series.   Such considerations are why I often show extreme-adjusted or smoothed data, because these processes allow us to disentangle random fluctuations from the underlying trend.

He has written another post about this issue called Fooled by Noise.  I've summarised it below.


The chart below shows NASA's calculation of the global temperature anomaly. Observe how much the data fluctuate.  Hard to detect trends!  But some denialists maintain that global temperatures have started dropping again, over the last couple of years.  Of course, we can see similar downward spikes right through the last 140 years, only to be reversed later.  So how can we get a better handle on the data?

This chart shows the same data, except it's an annual average.  By taking a 12-month average, the random fluctuations are reduced.  Though the "spikiness" of the data has been reduced (i.e., the random fluctuations have been reduced) there are still some fluctuations, plus also some obvious longer waves or cycles.

The chart below shows even more smoothing.  It plots the 5 year averages of the monthly anomalies.  Note, now, how clear the trends are.  Global temperatures fell from circa 1880 to 1910, then rose steadily until the early 1940s, before levelling off until the late 70s.  The rise then resumed with a vengeance, and the most recent 5 year period shows a sharp jump.  The stabilisation of global temperatures from 1945 to 1975 despite rising levels of CO₂ is attributed to the equally rapid rise in the emissions of sulphur dioxide.  When acid rain was brought under control by scrubbing the smoke from factory and power stations flues of SO₂ in the late 70s, the underlying trend due to CO₂ was quickly revealed.  Note that you can't blame the most recent spike on El Niño.  The equally strong El Niño in 1998 barely tweaks the 5 year average.

The decadal averages are even clearer.  Once again El Niño is undetectable in the data.

You can apply the same analysis to the extent of Arctic sea ice.  Here is the annual chart, and below that is the chart of the decadal averages.

The moral of the story is that when denialists say "Arctic sea ice is recovering" or "global temperatures have stopped rising" what they are citing as evidence is unsmoothed data, still embodying random fluctuations.  We can only be sure global temperatures have peaked or the extent of Arctic sea ice has troughed when the decadal averages have turned, because these averages dramatically reduce random data errors, so we can see the true trends.  And they haven't: global temperatures are still rising and Arctic sea ice is still declining.  Nor would it be logical for them to do so,  except temporarily after a massive volcanic eruption, when sulphur dioxide is released into the atmosphere, lowering global temperatures. And as you can see from the decadal averages, previous eruptions cannot be seen in the data, though they do appear in the annual data, e.g., Mt Pinatubo in 1991.