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Daily Briefing |

TODAY'S CLIMATE AND ENERGY HEADLINES

Briefing date 31.07.2017
Electric cars will not be a drain on the national grid, Poll finds more Scots want stronger action on climate change, & more

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News.

Electric cars will not be a drain on the national grid
Press Association via The Times Read Article

The Saturday edition of the Times covered the results of new analysis by consultants Cambridge Econometric (first reported by Carbon Brief last Thursday) suggesting that annual electricity consumption in the UK would rise by less than 10% by 2050 as a result of a switch to electric cars and vans. This is far less than some commentators were trying to argue last week when the government confirmed it would be banning the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2040. Meanwhile, today’s Times says that “oil investors are getting worried”, adding: “Electric cars have accelerated on to the front pages. Sales are surging, carmakers are unveiling plans for all-electric models and this week Britain vowed to ban sales of petrol and diesel cars by 2040. Yet if Big Oil believes that death is about to pull up in a Tesla, it’s doing a good job of hiding it…That’s partly because the world needs oil for much more than just cars.” The Daily Telegraph reports that the “tipping point” for electric cars has now surely come and the “electric jolt” has “roused Big Oil”. With a nod to the story broken by Bloomberg last week that Ben van Beurden, the Royal Dutch Shell boss, said his next car will be electric, the Telegraph remarks that “when one of the world’s most powerful oil bosses says he is in the market for an electric car, there can be little doubt”. Meanwhile, the Sunday Telegraph, the climate sceptic columnist Christopher Booker claims that the UK would require “100GW of capacity” just for these new electric cars, if wind and nuclear power were used to charge their batteries. That is starkly different to what most experts think.

Poll finds more Scots want stronger action on climate change
The Scotsman Read Article

A growing number of people in Scotland want to see stronger action on climate change, according to a poll. Results from a survey by WWF Scotland show an increase in the percentage of those calling for more investment, renewable energy sources and a reduction in emissions. The data comes as a new Scottish Climate Change Bill is out for public consultation. Around 1,000 Scots were surveyed in May and June for the WWF study. More than three-quarters, 76%, of respondents said the Scottish government should reduce climate change emissions by “investing more in improving the energy efficiency of homes across Scotland”, up from 67% in 2016, and 71% thought electricity should be generated from Scotland’s renewable resources, up from 61% in 2016. Separately, the Scotsman reports that Scotland’s canal network is feeling the strain of extra water: “Major work on weirs, piers and locks are required as the 200-year-old system is battered by the effects of climate change.”

Wildfires in Provence: locals blame climate change and arson
The Observer Read Article

The Observer reports from the Provence where huge fires have been raging over recent days. The newspaper quotes a local mayor who says there’s a feeling among locals that the traditional weather patterns have been altering: “It has been changing. It’s almost as if we have just two seasons – winter and summer. One week you can be in your coat but the next you can be in a light shirt,” he says. The Observer goes on: “At the same time, a cornucopia of other reasons and suspected culprits have been cited – many have even been viewing the fires through the prism of France’s recent terrorist traumas.” Some locals are blaming the wolves which have reappeared in the region after crossing over from Italy: “They now number in the hundreds and have been blamed for driving farmers and their sheep off pastures that then become fire-prone shrubland.”

Comment.

The Climate Lab That Sits Empty
Hillary Rosner, New York Times Read Article

Rosner writes about the “$2 million, 12-ton machine that is vital to addressing global warming” which is currently sitting unused at a University of Colorado science laboratory due to federal funding cuts: “The machine, a high-precision accelerator mass spectrometer, uses nuclear physics to detect the presence of a rare, heavy isotope of carbon. It enables scientists to distinguish fossil fuel emissions from all other sources of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, information crucial to monitoring and reducing those emissions. There are only a handful of labs in the United States and elsewhere with the equipment to reliably make these measurements at the high precision required for atmospheric research. None has the capacity the Boulder lab would have to run the necessary number of measurements — about 5,000 per year. And the Boulder lab, unlike others with similar equipment, would be fully dedicated to monitoring global greenhouse gas emissions…The greenhouse gas monitoring network costs about $7 million a year. Defunding it would be a huge mistake.”

'Issue for the left': how climate change can shake this tag
Leo Barasi, Climate Home Read Article

How can the left/right polarisation on climate change be ended, asks Barasi: “We should change the subject. The question of how the world could deal with climate change is full of controversial possibilities, yet most of these controversies are ignored. Among these ignored debates are:…whether the government has a duty to protect all communities from rising sea levels. What these many controversies have in common is that they provide conflict about climate change without depending on disagreements about whether global warming is real or on only using voices from the left. The debates would show that people from across the political spectrum consider climate change a serious threat, while being contentious enough to interest non-specialists.”

Al Gore: 'The rich have subverted all reason'
Carole Cadwalladr, The Observer Read Article

The Observer interviews Al Gore as he continues the promotion of his new sequel to his 2007 hit, The Inconvenient Truth. Cadwalladr writes: “Al Gore is to climate change… well, what Donald Trump is to climate change denial.” She hears from Gore: “Those with access to large amounts of money and raw power have been able to subvert all reason and fact in collective decision making. The Koch brothers are the largest funders of climate change denial. And ExxonMobil claims it has stopped, but it really hasn’t. It has given a quarter of a billion dollars in donations to climate denial groups. It’s clear they are trying to cripple our ability to respond to this existential threat…If you see these levels of climate denial, you can be pretty sure it didn’t just spread itself. The large carbon polluters have spent between $1bn and $2bn spreading false doubt.” Is it, as some people describe, an information war, ask Cadwalladr? “Absolutely,” says Gore. “There’s no question about it.” Meanwhile, the reviews of the film continue to be published. The New Yorker notes: “A long segment of the film is devoted to Gore’s behind-the-scenes negotiations with the Indian delegation at the Paris conference—which, while procedurally interesting, is hardly the sort of thing that most viewers can try at home.” The New York Times says it “delves deeper into the arcane details of compromise than its predecessor”. Meanwhile, the Financial Times says “several of this year’s most thoughtful movies aim to play a vital role in the war on climate change”.

Britain’s energy policy keeps picking losers
Matt Ridley, The Times Read Article

The hereditary Conservative peer and adviser to the climate sceptic lobby group, Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), uses his Times column to attack the UK’s energy policy: “Hinkley is but the worst example of a nationalised energy policy of picking losers. The diesel fiasco is another. The wind industry, with its hefty subsidies paid from the poor to the rich to produce unreliable power, is a third. The biomass mess (high carbon, high cost and environmental damage) is a fourth…All three parties share the blame. Labour’s Climate Change Act of 2008 made Britain the only country with mandatory decarbonisation targets, a crony-capitalist’s dream.” Ridley, who’s estate earns an undeclared amount of money each earn from coal mining on its land, says that Hinkley should be scrapped and instead the UK should pursue shale gas. “The shale revolution is gathering pace all the time. Britain has very promising shales and could prosper and cut emissions if it joins in.” Ridley, who omits to mention his GWPF role, doesn’t say that the UK has already largely moved off coal, which is where the coal-to-gas switch would reduce emissions.

Science.

Relative roles of surface temperature and climate forcing patterns in the inconstancy of radiative feedbacks
Geophysical Research Letters Read Article

Radiative feedbacks to changing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are an important part of determining how much warming occurs as a result of emissions. These feedbacks vary over time in simulations of the Earth’s climate. Published studies offer two explanations: (i) evolving patterns of ocean heat uptake or radiative forcing give rise to ocean heat uptake or forcing “efficacies” and (ii) evolving patterns of surface temperature change. Using an idealized model, a new paper suggests that the perspective that feedbacks are influenced by efficacies of forcing and ocean heat update is equivalent to the perspective that feedbacks are dependent on the temperature patterns induced by those forcings. Prescribed surface temperature simulations are thus valuable for studying the temporal evolution of radiative feedbacks.

How skilful are the multi-annual forecasts of Atlantic hurricane activity?
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Read Article

Hurricane prediction has long been a challenging area for accurate prediction. In recent years, state of the art Earth system models initialized with current conditions and run up to 10 years into the future has emerged as a promising method for hurricane forecasting in the North Atlantic. A new study evaluates three different approaches using these models, and finds that all have a significant level of skill in predicting observed hurricane activity, and can represent an improvement on simple climatological and persistence forecast models used today.

Multiple perspectives on the attribution of the extreme European summer of 2012 to climate change
Climate Dynamics Read Article

The summer of 2012 was very wet in northern Europe, and unusually dry and hot in southern Europe. A new attribution study uses multiple different methods to determine what role human emissions of greenhouse gases had in the summer of 2012. They find that all approaches showed a strong role for human influences in southern European heat in 2012. While most showed a slight drying, none of those results were statistically significant. Similarly, there was no evidence found of human influences in the unusually wet northern European summer, though it was made more likely by the observed atmospheric circulation pattern in 2012.

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