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TODAY'S CLIMATE AND ENERGY HEADLINES

Briefing date 27.11.2018
Climate change: UK summers could be over 5C warmer by 2070

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News.

Climate change: UK summers could be over 5C warmer by 2070
BBC News Read Article

There is extensive coverage across the UK media of the Met Office’s new climate projections. BBC News says: “In its first major update on climate change in almost 10 years, the Met Office has warned of significant temperature rises in the decades ahead. The UK Climate Projections 2018 study is the most up-to-date assessment of how the UK may change over this century. It says that under the highest emissions scenario, summer temperatures could be 5.4C hotter by 2070. The chances of a summer as warm as 2018 are around 50% by 2050.” The Times runs with the headline: “Boiling summers normal in decades, Met Office warns”, adding: “Summer heatwaves as sweltering as this year’s could become the norm within 50 years…The most detailed forecast yet of the probable impact of global warming described boiling summers, falling crop yields and rising sea levels that the government said could force communities to ‘move out of harm’s way’. The Guardian leads with how “people may have to be moved away from high-risk areas as climate change makes flooding more likely and more severe in the UK”. The Mirror says “the Met Office anticipates farms could turn to marshland” and that “climate change and rising sea levels to threaten 1.5m homes”. The Daily Mail chooses to headline its print-edition coverage with the words “Riviera Britain”. The Daily Telegraph approaches the story from another angle: “Why the last Ice Age is protecting half of Britain from climate change.” It explains to its readers: “A new report setting out the expected impact for the UK as the climate warms, has found that areas squashed down by the huge ice sheets that covered northern regions until 11,700 years ago are now rebounding with sufficient vigour to protect them from sea level rise.” The Independenthighlights the speech made by environment secretary Michael Gove at the report’s launch: “In his first major speech on climate change, Mr Gove – who famously claimed the public has ‘had enough of experts’ in relation to Brexit – backed the scientists behind the projections.” BusinessGreen has published the full transcript of Gove’s speech. Reuters and the Daily Express are among the others covering the new report.

'I don't believe it': Trump dismisses grim government report on climate change
Politico Read Article

Many publications, particularly in the US, carry the comments made by Donald Trump yesterday in which he told reporters that he does not “believe” the latest federal national assessment on climate change, published last Friday. Politico says Trump dismissed the “grim” report, saying he did not believe the report’s prognosis of dire economic fallout: “I’ve seen it. I’ve read some of it, and it’s fine,” he said, adding when asked about the report’s economic projections: “I don’t believe it. No, no, I don’t believe it.” Bloomberg says that Trump also said: “Right now, we’re the cleanest we’ve ever been…If we’re clean, but every other place on earth is dirty, that’s not so good. So I want clean air, I want clean water – very important.” Meanwhile, the Guardian is publishing one “key finding” from the federal climate report every day this week. It began yesterday with “air pollution kills”. Brad Plumer in the New York Times has a feature looking at “five big ways the US will need to adapt to climate change”. Number one on his list is “rethink how we farm”. Elsewhere in the New York Times, climate reporters Lisa Friedman and Coral Davenport write that Trump’s comments “fit a pattern, and not just for their bluntness”. They add: “In his disregard for scientific evidence, Mr Trump has made the dismantling of policies to curb greenhouse pollution a centrepiece of his deregulatory agenda”. Their article then walks through all of Trump’s efforts to attack the Obama-era climate policies.

Separately, Politico carries an article about how the Finnish president Sauli Niinistö is “targeting” both Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin in an effort to “make progress on black carbon”. Climate Home News, meanwhile, has seen a draft communique from this week’s upcoming G20 summit in Argentina which “shows that the resolve to stand up for the Paris climate agreement against critical voices, such as the US, may be weakening”. CHN adds: “Unlike recent G20 statements, it declines to give full-throated support to the Paris Agreement, simply ‘acknowledging the different circumstances, including those of countries determined to implement the Paris Agreement.” Meanwhile, India’s Business Standard reports that “in a [forthcoming] UN report on climate finance, [the US] has forced the scrubbing of all explicit references to the responsibility of developed countries for providing funds and resources to the developing countries for tackling climate change”.

EU progress on renewable energy, efficiency targets slows – EEA
Reuters Read Article

Reuters reports that the European Environment Agency (EEA) has said the European Union’s progress towards increasing the use of renewable energy and improving energy efficiency is slowing, putting its ability to meet its 2020 and 2030 targets at risk. Reuters adds: “Rising energy consumption, particularly in transport, is to blame for the slowdown, the EEA said in an annual report on EU efforts on its renewables and energy efficiency targets.” Meanwhile, Reuters also reports “sources” saying that in Germany “finance minister Olaf Scholz has shown little sympathy to pay compensation for operators of brown-coal-fired power plants that could be forced to shut down earlier, in an effort to meet ambitious climate goals by 2030”. It adds: “Scholz is also sceptical of other measures to help companies cope with the effects of the planned brown coal exit, such as lowering energy tax, two people familiar with the talks said.” Separately, Reuters reports that “Germany is pushing back against European Union countries that want more ambitious emission limits for trucks, saying CO2 cuts should not go beyond 15% by 2025 and 30% by 2030”.

GM to slash jobs and production, drawing Trump's ire
Reuters Read Article

Reuters reports that General Motors, the largest US carmaker, has said it will cut production of slow-selling models and slash its North American workforce because of a declining market for traditional gas-powered sedans. Instead, it says it is shifting more investment to electric and autonomous vehicles. Reuters adds: “GM last year promised to launch a fleet of 20 new battery electric vehicles in North America by 2023, along with at least 10 new electric vehicles in China by 2020.” Meanwhile, Bloomberg notes that Shell has said that “demand for electric cars will continue to surge irrespective of oil prices as consumers buy into a technology aimed at making driving fun while being environmentally friendly”.

Rio Tinto warns climate inaction poses 'greatest long-term threat'
Sydney Morning Herald Read Article

Simon Thompson, the new chairman of global mining firm Rio Tinto, has described climate inaction as “perhaps the greatest long-term threat” facing his business and promises to be part of the solution. The Sydney Morning Herald reports his comments made at an investor meeting in which he said that society – particularly millennials – were demanding higher standards from companies and that he would continue to reshape Rio Tinto’s portfolio for the transition to a “low-carbon economy”. The paper adds: “Rio Tinto is among a number of major mining and resources companies to escalate warnings against political inaction on global warming and calling for a price on carbon.”

Comment.

The Climate Change Act at 10: Baroness Bryony Worthington on the best thing she ever did
Madeleine Cuff, BusinessGreen Read Article

A number of publications have marked the 10 year anniversary of the UK’s Climate Change Act being passed into law with interviews and op-eds. BusinessGreen speaks to Bryony Worthington, one of the key architects of the act. She says it is the proudest achievement of her career to date, but she still has some regrets: “My slight regret was that the first three carbon budgets were set…too low…You only get one shot at it. So for the first 15 years, arguably, the structure hasn’t been particularly tight, and we’ve actually been over complying with the budgets…I can’t deny there has been lots of little setbacks along the way and certainly the [lack of action on] aviation is absolutely ridiculous.” Elsewhere in BusinessGreen, editor James Murray writes: “The good news is the Climate Change Act and the decarbonisation process it has driven starts its second decade in remarkably good health, as a top of the class pupil with huge potential to go further and faster…Meanwhile, the way in which many of the fiercest critics of the Climate Change Act have morphed into the most vocal cheerleaders for the hardest of Brexits only serves to highlight their era-defining absence of self-awareness.” BusinessGreen also carries a range of voices reacting to the anniversary. Writing in the Times’s Thunderer column, the model Lily Cole uses the anniversary to say: “I’m encouraged that the government has asked the Committee on Climate Change to set out a pathway to net-zero emissions, and I wholeheartedly support all the parliamentarians calling for a new legally binding target of net-zero emissions in the UK, to be achieved before 2050.” The Independent carries an article by Oliver Hayes of Friends of the Earth who says that 10 years on from the NGO’s “Big Ask” campaign, which directly led to the act being signed, the UK government is still not doing enough on climate change: “The unpalatable truth is our government is failing us – by relentlessly pursuing fracking, granting airport expansion, slashing insulation programmes, and faltering in support for renewable energy.”

Our climate reality will catch up to us, no matter how hard Trump tries to bury the evidence
Editorial, Washington Post Read Article
The Washington Post criticises Donald Trump for trying – and failing – to bury the latest federal report on climate change by releasing it over the Thanksgiving break: “The White House responded to the report by misrepresenting scientists’ work and promising ‘fuller information’ in the next analysis. Cooking the next report will not change the facts. Mr Trump and the Republican Party have been negligent stewards of the country’s irreplaceable resources. Future Americans will not forgive or forget what these ‘leaders’ did to them. Playing games with report release schedules won’t change that.” Elsewhere, Max Boot, one of the paper’s columnists, asks why other conservatives like him cannot change their minds on climate change: “I admit it. I used to be a climate-change skeptic. I was one of those conservatives who thought that the science was inconclusive, that fears of global warming were as overblown as fears of a new ice age in the 1970s, that climate change was natural and cyclical, and that there was no need to incur any economic costs to deal with this speculative threat. I no longer think any of that, because the scientific consensus is so clear and convincing.”
Meanwhile, an editorial in the New York Times is thankful that at least one of Obama’s climate policies seems to be safe from Trump: “It is the 2016 Kigali amendment to the 1987 Montreal Protocol…The Obama administration signed it 2016, but the Trump White House has not sent it to the Senate for ratification. The question is how best to engage Mr. Trump’s interest. Selling it to him as a climate measure could be a serious problem, since he is copiously on record as dismissing global warming as a problem. Presenting it to him as a jobs and trade measure would be much smarter, since he talks about both all the time.”
The depravity of climate-change denial
Paul Krugman, The New York Times Read Article

Krugman, a Nobel prize-winning economist, writes in his New York Times column: “There are almost no good-faith climate-change deniers. And denying science for profit, political advantage or ego satisfaction is not OK; when failure to act on the science may have terrible consequences, denial is, as I said, depraved…Let’s be clear: While Donald Trump is a prime example of the depravity of climate denial, this is an issue on which his whole party went over to the dark side years ago. Republicans don’t just have bad ideas; at this point, they are, necessarily, bad people.”

Science.

Strong impact of wildfires on the abundance and ageing of black carbon in the lowermost stratosphere
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Read Article
Smoke from wildfires can have a “powerful impact” on levels of black carbon – a potent short-term climate pollutant – up to 12km high in the stratosphere, a study finds. Researchers attached a particulate monitor to a commercial aeroplane travelling between Germany and the United States. “Our results demonstrate that wildfires can dramatically increase BC [black carbon] mass concentration in the LMS [lower most stratosphere], substantially enhance regional climate forcing, and are a challenge for model simulations,” the authors say.
Costs and consequences of wind turbine wake effects arising from uncoordinated wind energy development
Nature Energy Read Article
Wind farms could slow down the winds in their wake, potentially negatively affecting the electricity production capacity of other farms downwind, a study suggests. The researchers point to an example of two wind farms in West Texas – where the building of a new farm upwind of an existing one caused energy production losses of around $2m a year. “However, our investigation of the legal literature shows no legal guidance for protecting existing wind farms from such significant impacts,” the authors say.
Global predation pressure redistribution under future climate change
Nature Climate Change Read Article
Global warming could cause predators to reduce their activities in some world regions, including the Amazon and parts of central Africa, a study finds. To study the possible impact of climate change on predator behaviour, the researchers observed how frequently caterpillars are attacked by birds and mammals under different temperatures and elevations. They found that warmer temperatures could boost predator activity but increasing levels of climate instability could lower predator activity.

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