Daily Briefing: Hurricane Lowell | Heathrow expansion ‘go ahead’ | Fast warming ‘clues’

09.09.26

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News

Hawaii’s western islands hit by fierce winds and heavy rain from Hurricane Lowell

The Associated Press

Hurricane Lowell brought heavy rain and wind to Hawaii’s western islands yesterday, “bringing the threat of floods, mudslides and tornadoes”, says the Associated Press. It reports: “The islands of Kauai and Niihau were under a hurricane warning early Tuesday, while Oahu, the state’s most populated island with close to 1 million residents, was under a tropical storm warning…Some wind gusts reached 80 mph (130 kph), according to the hurricane centre.” The Guardian reports that the hurricane “knock[ed] out power to thousands and ripp[ed] up stretches of beachside roads”. [El Niño is known to raise the risk of hurricanes in Hawaii.]

UK government has ‘given the go-ahead’ to Heathrow expansion, says chancellor

Rosie Shead, The Independent

The Independent reports that, at Treasury questions in the House of Commons yesterday, chancellor John Healey said that the UK government has “given the go-ahead” to Heathrow expansion. According to the outlet, he responded to an MP’s question about the project by saying: “Quite simply, after years of delay, years of indecision, years of often vexatious challenge, we have given the go-ahead to this project quite simply because the economic case stacks up and will help bring growth.” The newspaper notes that prime minister Andy Burnham has previously expressed concerns over the expansion. [See his comments about Heathrow and other climate matters.] It adds that a recent report found that building a third runway at the airport would “overshoot” the UK’s legally binding climate targets.

MORE ON UK

War in Iran and the effects of extreme weather “threaten to ignite a new burst of inflation” in the UK, the Bank of England governor has warned, according to the Financial Times.
Green party leader Zack Polanski “will challenge” the government to publish an “unredacted version” of its report into how biodiversity loss could threaten national security, says the Guardian.
The Guardian speaks to the family of an elderly woman who died during the record-breaking June heatwave.
The Daily Telegraph says Norway’s oil and gas production is set to plummet after 2030 and this could be a “threat to UK supplies”.
The National Farmers’ Union has warned that “extreme weather…and wars triggering soaring fuel and fertiliser costs” have contributed to a decline in the UK’s food self-sufficiency, reports the Times. The Daily Express also has the story.
The government has ruled out extending subsidies for power stations that burn poultry litter, according to documents obtained by the investigative platform Grilled.

Japanese helicopters to join Indonesia’s wildfires battle this weekend

Fransiska Nangoy, Reuters

Japan will deploy three helicopters and their 180 crew in Indonesia this weekend to help contain wildfires, Indonesian officials said yesterday, according to Reuters. It continues: “Indonesia has intensified efforts to tackle ‌wildfires that have been raging for months, focusing on six hardest-hit provinces on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo, where 76,933 hectares (190,106 acres) of land have been burned.” [El Niño is known to raise the risk of droughts and wildfires in south-east Asia.]

China’s car exports stay strong in August but domestic sales decline more

Qiaoyi Li, Zhang Yan and Ju-min Park, Reuters

China’s auto exports surged 77.5% from a year earlier to 894,000 units in August, with BYD and ‌other automakers exporting “record” numbers of vehicles, reports Reuters, in “sharp contrast to a sluggish domestic market where their sales fell for the 11th month in a row”. China’s exports of “mechanical and electrical products”, such as batteries, increased 21.9% from January-August, according to state news agency Xinhua. The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post says China’s rare earth exports fell by 18.3% by volume. China’s oil imports rose 6.2% in August from July, though they remain 23% below August last year, according to Bloomberg. Business outlet Jiemian says Chinese manufacturers are benefiting from the gas turbine boom as global new orders jumped 71% year on year in the second quarter.

MORE ON CHINA

Climate Home News: China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit.”
An opinion article in China Daily by reporter Hou Liqiang says that developed countries “must shoulder greater responsibility to help vulnerable developing countries build up their early-warning systems”.
A Global Times article under the byline “GT Voice” says “build[ing] consensus” on cleantech could “open up entirely new possibilities for BRICS cooperation”.
Reuters publishes a commentary by columnist Gavin Maguire saying that south-east Asian countries have “emerged as key drivers of China’s clean-energy export boom”, making record purchases.
Economic Daily carries an article saying that ecological compensation should rely on “market mechanisms”.
Dialogue Earth: “Offshore wind offers China much more than carbon cutting.”

Comment

The trail of clues that our planet might be heating faster than we realised

Justin Rowlatt, BBC News

For BBC News, climate editor Justin Rowlatt has a feature on how the cooling effect of air pollution has masked the true extent of global warming. He writes: “Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice shared a Telegraph article [on Twitter] headlined: ‘Heatwaves caused by fall in pollution.’ He said cleaner air, rather than carbon dioxide, was behind higher temperatures and claimed the public had been ‘gaslit’. He was wrong to suggest that carbon dioxide is not the primary driver of global warming. But the science he was distorting is real – and much more interesting than his original claim. The fossil fuels that we’ve been burning for more than a century produce two very different kinds of pollution. As is well known, CO2 warms the Earth. But less well-known is sulphur pollution, which forms vast numbers of tiny particles in the air and reflects sunlight back into space, partly counteracting the warming effect of carbon.” [Carbon Brief factchecked the Daily Telegraph’s article at the time.]

MORE COMMENT

Politico has a special read on data centres titled: “The climate problem COP31 won’t address.”
Al Jazeera interviews Tom Rivett-Carnac, who helped shape the architecture of the Paris Agreement as a political strategist, on the implications of the UN’s recent overshoot report.
A Financial Times column by energy editor Malcolm Moore says BP and Shell’s decision to ditch renewables and invest more in oil and gas may have been a “miscalculation”.
The Financial Times “Energy Source” newsletter covers new data showing that the “rate of new nuclear reactor construction would need to increase fivefold during the next decade if 2050 targets for the technology are to be met”.
John Marshall, the CEO of not-for-profit the Potential Energy Coalition, writes in Reuters: “After a summer of extremes, Americans are talking about climate change. Why aren’t their leaders?”
A column by climate-sceptic “energy consultant” Kathryn Porter in the Daily Telegraph says: “We need cheap energy but net-zero can’t deliver.”

How floods triggered Nepal’s demand for compensation

Manjeev Singh Puri, The Indian Express

Writing in the Indian Express, India’s former ambassador to Nepal looks at how the recent Himalayan floods “triggered Nepal’s demand for compensation”. After Nepal’s foreign minister, Shishir Khanal, initially “named India” among the emitters from which it was seeking climate compensation, Puri says, Khanal “walked back” his stance, later saying the issue was not about “shifting the blame to one or the other country”, but about “working together”. Puri continues that the “enormity of the rehabilitation task makes it imperative for Nepal to access international funding”. He adds: “An approach of eschewing ‘aid’, the go-to of previous times, and instead seeking international solidarity fits in with the new Nepal with a young and globally aware government.” Elsewhere, in an interview with Drilled, Nepal’s climate negotiator Raju Pandit Chhetri says that applications by developing countries to access the UN loss-and-damage fund “have been overwhelming”, but “until now, no money has actually been provided for programme-related work”. He adds that the fund “is supposed to have rapid disbursement as its response” and that the board of the fund “will have to call a special meeting so that it can decide how to respond to the call” from Nepal.

MORE SOUTH ASIA COMMENT

A Scroll.in investigation claims that international development banks “knew of the flood risks” to Nepal’s hydropower projects, but “made no cumulative disaster plan” for the region. The banks have not responded to requests for comment, the article notes.
In Down to Earth, leading academics and climate experts pay tribute to atmospheric scientist Prof Krishna AchutaRao who passed away last Friday, remembering his “intellectual courage” and his “immense” contributions to climate attribution.
A Kathmandu Post long read speaks to the Indigenous communities “paying the price” for Nepal’s “hydropower boom”.

Research

Neglecting to account for fragmentation and other “edge effects” in mangrove forests has led to an overestimation of protected-area carbon stocks by more than 2m tonnes | Earth’s Future
Nearly one-third of the Canadian province of Alberta will be “unsuitable for new powerlines” due to wildfire risk by the end of the century | Geophysical Research Letters
Wealth-redistribution policies could avert millions of deaths by partially offsetting the recent reductions in funding from official development assistance | The Lancet