By 2080, global warming will make New York City feel like Arkansas

13.02.19

News

By 2080, global warming will make New York City feel like Arkansas

Many publications cover a new study in Nature Communications that looks at how the climate of US and Canadian cities could change by 2080. USA Today reports that the findings show that “folks who live in New York City will see a climate similar to that of northern Arkansas today and people in Minneapolis will live in a climate that’s equivalent to that of southern Kansas today”. “In 2080, North Carolina’s capital, Raleigh, could feel more like Florida’s capital, Tallahassee, while the nation’s capital will have a climate more akin to just north of the Mississippi Delta, if the globe stays on its current carbon pollution trend,” reports Associated Press. The researchers looked at 12 different variables for 540 US and Canadian cities under two climate change scenarios, AP reports. The results have also added a website that “allows people to check how their nearest city could feel”, AP says. Vox offers a detailed look at the study’s findings and more information on how climate change could impact the US. The Atlantic, Wired, CBS San Francisco and the Daily Beast also cover the study.

Labour to set out plans to decarbonise UK and fulfil green jobs pledge

The Guardian

The Guardian reports that the Labour party is to set out plans showing how the UK can rapidly decarbonise the economy and meet “its promise to create hundreds of thousands of high-skilled, unionised green jobs”. The proposal, due to be unveiled today by Rebecca Long-Bailey, the shadow business secretary, will “involve a national call for evidence and a series of regional events to build a detailed action plan” for decarbonisation, the article says. Long-Bailey tells the Guardian: “We believe that together, we can transform the UK through a green jobs revolution, tackling the environmental crisis in a way that brings hope and prosperity back to parts of the UK that have been held back for too long.”

Saudi Arabia goes on the hunt for global oil and gas

Financial Times

A frontpage story in the Financial Times details how Saudi Arabia plans to develop an international energy exploration and production business for the first time. Khalid al Falih, Saudi Arabia’s energy minister and chairman of state oil company Saudi Aramco, tells the FT that overseas expansion “would be a critical part of the company’s future”. He says: “We are no longer going to be inward-looking and focused only on monetising the kingdom’s resources. Going forward the world is going to be Saudi Aramco’s playground.” The FT adds: “While Saudi Aramco is the world’s largest oil producing company, it has never meaningfully ventured overseas to extract resources, relying instead on its vast domestic reserves.”

Fracking firm Cuadrilla loses planning appeal for second UK site

The Guardian

The UK government has rejected a planning appeal by shale gas firm Cuadrilla to frack at a second site in Lancashire, the Guardian reports. James Brokenshire, the communities secretary, told press he was turning down the appeal for planning permission “because of traffic concerns”, the Guardian says. BBC News North West’s environment correspondent Judy Hobson describes the decision as “another blow for Cuadrilla”. “The company has already expressed concerns about the future of the shale gas industry due to the fact they must stop drilling every time an earth tremor of 0.5 is registered,” she says. Meanwhile, DeSmog UK reports that opposition to fracking has reached “near-record levels”.

McConnell to set up vote on Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘green new deal’

The Hill

The Hill reports that the senate will hold a vote on the “green new deal”, an environmental and energy plan spearhead by progressive democrats, according to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. After a meeting of the Senate Republican caucus on Tuesday, McConnell told reporters that he has “great interest” in the plan. “We’ll give everybody an opportunity to go on record and see how they feel about the green new deal,” he tells the Hill. McConnell did not say when the vote would happen, the Hill reports. Vox offers analysis under the headline: “Why Mitch McConnell is holding a vote on the green new deal.” “It’s not because he thinks the green new deal is a good idea,” the article says.

Comment

Humanity faces an existential crisis – Labour must join the fightback

Owen Jones, The Guardian

Guardian columnist and author Owen Jones writes that “amid the threat of social and environmental catastrophe, our politicians could learn from the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” – the US politician behind plans for a “green new deal”. “The magic of the green new deal is it argues that confronting the environmental crises cannot be separated from social and economic justice: its other proposals include guaranteeing every American a job with decent wages and conditions, as well as high-quality healthcare, affordable housing and economic security,” Jones says. “This is critical. Climate change, to many, seems important in the abstract, but too technical, and seemingly in competition with what seem, superficially, to be more immediate concerns.”

The tiny Swiss company that thinks it can help stop climate change

Jon Gertner, New York Times

The New York Times’s weekend magazine (published online early) has a detailed feature on Climeworks – a Swiss firm hoping to develop technology to such CO2 from air, (a process known as “direct air capture”). “Climeworks’s rooftop plant represents something new in the world: the first direct-air-capture venture in history seeking to sell CO2 by the tonne,” the article reads. Carbon Brief visited Climeworks when it opened in 2017.

Science

Contemporary climatic analogues for 540 North American urban areas in the late 21st century

Nature Communications

New research maps “climate analogues” for urban areas in North America under different levels of warming. A climate analogue is a location that has the same climate now as a particular place is projected to have in the future. The study identifies and maps analogues for 540 urban areas, based on temperature and rainfall for the 2080s under scenarios RCP4.5 and RCP8.5. Accompanying the paper is an interactive website where users can search and view the analogues for their area of interest. The package provides “an intuitive means of raising public awareness of the implications of climate change for 250 million urban residents”, the authors conclude.

Climate-driven variation in mosquito density predicts the spatiotemporal dynamics of dengue

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

The close relationship between weather conditions and local abundance of mosquitoes could allow outbreaks of the infectious disease dengue fever to be predicted in China, a new study suggests. Using mosquito surveillance data from 2005 to 2015 in China, the researchers find that dengue outbreaks “are predictable from the local vector [mosquito] dynamics, which in turn, can be predicted by climate conditions”. The study provides a “framework that can be extended to predict outbreak risk of other mosquito-borne diseases as well as project dengue risk maps for future climate scenarios”, the authors conclude.

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