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TODAY'S CLIMATE AND ENERGY HEADLINES

Briefing date 05.01.2018
Coral reefs head for ‘knock-out punch’ & Oceans suffocating

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News.

Coral reefs head for 'knock-out punch'
BBC News Read Article

Repeat bouts of warmer seawater are posing a significant challenge to the world’s tropical corals, writes the BBC, covering new research published in the journal Science on Thursday. The study of 100 reefs shows the interval between bleaching events in recent decades has shortened dramatically, from once every 25-30 years in the early 1980s to an average of just once every six years today. Only six of the 100 sites had escaped bleaching, the Guardian reports. “Our analysis indicates that we are already approaching a scenario in which every hot summer, with or without an El Niño event, has the potential to cause bleaching and mortality at a regional scale,” the paper said. The researchers added that climate change will “inevitably” make underwater heat waves and bleachings more frequent, reports Reuters. “Tropical reef systems are transitioning to a new era in which the interval between recurrent bouts of coral bleaching is too short for a full recovery” of mature corals that can require 10-15 years,” they wrote in the paper. The research was also covered by Bloomberg, the Washington Post, the New York Times and USA TodayCarbon Brief also covered the story.

Oceans suffocating as huge dead zones quadruple since 1950, scientists warn
The Guardian Read Article

Ocean dead zones with zero oxygen have quadrupled in size since 1950, scientists have warned. The large-scale deoxygenation is the result of climate change caused by fossil fuel burning, as warmer waters hold less oxygen, the research said. The number of very low oxygen sites near coasts have also multiplied tenfold since 1950, the result of fertiliser and sewage running off the land and into the seas. “Major extinction events in Earth’s history have been associated with warm climates and oxygen-deficient oceans.” Denise Breitburg, from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in the US, who led the analysis, said: “Under the current trajectory that is where we would be headed. But the consequences to humans of staying on that trajectory are so dire that it is hard to imagine we would go quite that far down that path.” The authors warn that the world must rein in climate change to halt the decline, reports the Mail Online. The Independent also has the story.

Court challenge to Arctic oil drilling in Norway defeated
Financial Times Read Article

Norway has defeated a lawsuit brought by environmental groups trying to block drilling for oil in the Arctic on the grounds the exploration was unconstitutional, reports the Financial Times. Judges rejected the argument by Greenpeace and Nature and Youth that expanding oil production is incompatible with the country’s climate change obligations, writes Climate Home News.

2017 was second hottest year on record, after sizzling 2016
Reuters Read Article

Last year was the second hottest worldwide on record, just behind a sweltering 2016, with signs of climate change ranging from wildfires to a thaw of Arctic ice, the Copernicus Climate Change Service said on Thursday. The European Union monitoring centre is the first major international weather agency to report on conditions in 2017. Last year was slightly “cooler than the warmest year on record, 2016, and warmer than the previous second warmest year, 2015”, it said. Meanwhile, insurers are set to pay out a record $135bn to cover losses from natural disasters in 2017, according to the world’s largest reinsurer, the New York Times reports. Munich Re of Germany said overall losses came to $330bn, when uninsured damage is included, second only to 2011. Meanwhile, insured losses were at their highest ever at $135bn, the reinsurer said, Reuters reports. “Although individual events could not be linked directly to climate change, global warming is playing a role. Munich Re said it expected more frequent extreme events in the future.”

Trump administration proposes opening most US federal waters to oil drilling
Financial Times Read Article

The Trump administration is proposing to open a huge swath of federal waters to oil and gas drilling, the Financial Times reports. On Thursday the US interior department responded to an executive order issued by President Donald Trump last April by unveiling plans to make around 90% of federal waters available for drilling. The move would overturn a long-standing tenet of US energy policy, and would be a welcome decision for oil companies that is likely to spark a drawn-out battle, the Financial Times adds. Weeks before leaving office, former President Barack Obama had banned new oil and gas drilling in federal waters in the Atlantic and Arctic oceans, but Trump last April ordered the Interior Department to overhaul the existing offshore drilling plan, writes Reuters. Lawmakers from both parties, environmental groups, and local business leaders along the Atlantic coast have said they are opposed to any effort to open up their coastlines to drilling rigs. The Hill, the Washington PostThink Progress and the Guardian also have the story. Meanwhile two Florida lawmakers are teaming up to oppose the Trump administration’s proposed plan to expand offshore drilling around the state, citing the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, reports another article in The Hill.

Comment.

Principles to guide investment towards a stable climate
Richard Millar et al, Nature Climate Change Read Article

Investors will play a major role, whether active or passive, in climate change mitigation, write researchers Richard Millar, Cameron Hepburn, John Beddington & Myles Allen in a comment piece for the journal Nature Climate Change. They propose three “physically based engagement principles” that could be used to assess whether an investment is consistent with a long-term climate goal: commitment to net-zero emissions; plans for a profitable net-zero business; and quantitative mid-term targets directly relevant to achieving a net-zero business model. The authors write: “Given the increasing interest in forward-looking climate-change-related disclosures, the time is now right for the long-term constraints implied by science to be employed by the financial community in examining investments. In particular, our hope is that funds, institutional investors and endowments under pressure to divest from fossil fuels choose to act – whether for moral or financial reasons – with sound science behind them.” Meanwhile, a separate article by Ivan Diaz-Rainey, associate professor of finance at the University of Otago in New Zealand, in Climate Homediscusses the lack of mention of climate change and climate risk on the agenda of the American Finance Association (AFA) Conference, a major academic finance conference. “This is all the more surprising since climate finance has become a defining topic in policy and practice,” he writes. “…It is striking that finance research is so behind the climate curve. This is all the more surprising since all the “core” areas of finance research – assert pricing, corporate finance and investments – are relevant to climate change.”

Solar panels have gotten thinner than a human hair. Soon they’ll be everywhere.
David Roberts, Vox Read Article

“One of the reasons I think solar photovoltaic power is going to take over the world is that it is scalable in a way no other power source can be,” writes David Roberts in Vox. “It can be used to build multi-hundred-megawatt power plants, or it can be scaled down. Way down.” In fact it can be scaled down less than the width of a human hair, he says citing South Korean scientists who have created solar PV cells just 1 micrometer thick. “With cells this thin, solar PV can be integrated in all sorts of “wearables” — clothes, glasses, hats, or backpacks with solar cells integrated, continuously feeding power to our portable electronics. More to the point, PV could be integrated into just about anything.” Meanwhile, in 2016 MIT researchers made solar cells so small and light they could sit atop a soap bubble without popping it, he adds. He acknowledges that these are both just “lab breakthroughs”. and plenty could go wrong ion the road to a commercial product. “But the trends in solar innovation are clear. Cells are getting smaller and smaller, and more and more flexible, using new fabrication techniques that are less and less resource-intensive.” Meanwhile Ed Crooks in the Financial Times takes a look at how the US solar industry “faces a clouded future”, with tax reform, electricity regulation and potential new duties on imported panels all looming. “Already, installations have slowed for the first time in more than a decade, dropping about 22% to 11.8GW last year, according to estimates for the Solar Energy Industries Association,” he writes. “This year is expected to be weaker again.”

Science.

Decline in Antarctic Ozone Depletion and Lower Stratospheric Chlorine Determined From Aura Microwave Limb Sounder Observations
Geophysical Research Letters Read Article

The Antarctic ozone hole is healing slowly because levels of the man-made chemicals causing the hole have long lifetimes. New satellite data uses measurements of ozone at the beginning and end of winter to calculate ozone depletion. During this period, nearly all O3 change is due to depletion. They find that there is less ozone-depleting chlorine in the atmosphere now than 9 years ago, and that the rate of ozone depletion is lower. All of this is evidence that the Montreal Protocol is working, that chlorine is decreasing in the Antarctic stratosphere and the ozone destruction is decreasing along with it.

Declining oxygen in the global ocean and coastal waters
Science Read Article

Oxygen is fundamental to life, both for the survival of individual animals and the regulation of global cycles of major nutrients and carbon. The oxygen content of the open ocean and coastal waters has been declining for at least the past half-century, largely because of human activities that have increased global temperatures and nutrients discharged to coastal waters. These changes have accelerated consumption of oxygen by microbial respiration, reduced solubility of oxygen in water, and reduced the rate of oxygen resupply from the atmosphere to the ocean interior, with a wide range of biological and ecological consequences. Further research is needed to understand and predict long-term, global- and regional-scale oxygen changes and their effects on marine and estuarine fisheries and ecosystem

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