MENU

Social Channels

SEARCH ARCHIVE

Daily Briefing |

TODAY'S CLIMATE AND ENERGY HEADLINES

Briefing date 01.08.2018
Study sees dramatic rise in heatwave deaths by 2080

Expert analysis direct to your inbox.

Every weekday morning, in time for your morning coffee, Carbon Brief sends out a free email known as the “Daily Briefing” to thousands of subscribers around the world. The email is a digest of the past 24 hours of media coverage related to climate change and energy, as well as our pick of the key studies published in peer-reviewed journals.

Sign up here.

News.

Study sees dramatic rise in heatwave deaths by 2080
Reuters Read Article

Deaths from heatwaves are likely to rise sharply in some regions by 2080 if politicians fail to make changes to climate change and health policies, Reuters reports. Heatwave deaths in the UK are expected to quadruple to 2,160 per year in the period 2031-2080, if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, new research suggests. If global warming is limited to 2C above pre-industrial levels, heatwave deaths are “still expected to double” from the rate observed between 1971-2020, the Evening Standard reports. Yet other areas of the world are “likely to fare worse than the UK”, the Times writes. Under a high emissions scenario the Philippines will experience 12 times the current number of deaths, while the US and Australia will experience five times as many. The study, published in the journal PLOS Medicine, is the first study to predict future heatwave-related deaths around the world. Dr Antonio Gasparrini, a co-author of the study, remarked: “This research…suggests that climate change could dramatically increase heatwave-related mortality, especially in highly-populated tropical and sub-tropical countries.” However, “evidence about the impacts on mortality at a global scale is limited”, he adds. The Mail Online also carries the story.

One tenth of UK climate aid spent through western consultants
Climate Home News Read Article

An investigation by Climate Home News has found that more than 10% of UK foreign aid for climate change projects has been channelled through 79 private consultancies – more than £875m – since 2011. It says: “Analysis of Department for International Development (Dfid) data by Climate Home News found 77% of that went to just five large British or Dutch firms – Adam Smith International (ASI), KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), IMC Worldwide and Crown Agents. The majority of the UK’s £9.67bn international climate finance programme between April 2011 and June 2018 was administered by Dfid. The department spent £8.4bn on 251 projects in that time.” Last month, the International Development Committee in the Commons launched an inquiry into the effectiveness of UK aid in combating climate change. Climate Home News began its investigation using information about Dfid’s projects first revealed by a Carbon Brief investigation last year.

Large area of China could soon be virtually uninhabitable as deadly heatwaves become more intense, scientists warn
The Independent Read Article

The north China plain is to become the “hottest spot for deadly heatwaves” in the future, according to new research from a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The region is densely populated and plays a “vital” role in feeding China’s 1.4 billion inhabitants, the Independent reports. But unless significant efforts are made to reduce carbon emissions, humid heatwaves that kill even healthy people within hours will strike the area repeatedly towards the end of the century as the planet warms, the Guardian explains. Humidity exacerbates the effects of heatwaves as it prevents people from being able to remove excess heat from their bodies by sweating. Professor Elfatih Eltahir, the study’s lead author, told the paper: “China is currently the largest contributor to the emissions of greenhouse gases, with potentially serious implications to its own population…Continuation of current global emissions may limit the habitability of the most populous region of the most populous country on Earth.” Reuters also has the story.

Scientists warn intensity of Australian storms has more than doubled and could get worse
news.com.au Read Article

Quick and heavy rain storms in Australia are intensifying more rapidly than expected, according to new research from scientists at Newcastle University and the University of Adelaide. After analysing intense rain storms in Australia over the past 50 years, they discovered that the amount of water falling in thunderstorms is increasing at a rate 2-3 times higher than anticipated under climate change, with the most extreme events showing the biggest increases. The Mail Online also has the story.

Moves to cut emissions could cause more hunger than climate change: study
Reuters Read Article

Reuters covers new research from Nature Climate Change with the headline: “Moves to cut emissions could cause more hunger than climate change: study.” It says that “the most stringent measures needed to curb climate change” could “cause hunger levels to rise by three times as much as global warming itself”. However, the Reuters write-up does not make it clear that the new research only looks at one avenue for emissions reductions – which is a global tax on greenhouse gas emissions, otherwise known as a “global carbon tax”. As Carbon Brief reported on Monday, the study suggests that – without other complementary policies – a blanket carbon tax on agriculture and other sectors could “exacerbate food insecurity”. However, this finding “critically hinges” on the assumption that a carbon tax would be implemented indiscriminately and without other “safety net” policies, another scientist told Carbon Brief. “The paper, unfortunately, misses the opportunity of making it clear that a range of options exist to reduce and even revert these consequences – as a multitude of policy design options towards mitigation exist,” he said.

Comment.

Was this the scorcher that finally ended climate denial?
Michael McCarthy, The Guardian Read Article

The blazing summer of 2018 has led to a shift in tone from some rightwing sceptics who can no longer deny the obvious – at least in the UK, argues the journalist Michael McCarthy. McCarthy, who is the former environment editor of the Independent, writes: “What we are witnessing now is a historic shift in the way that the threat of climate change is perceived by the world, from prediction to observation”. He continues: “Seeing things happening around you cannot be gainsaid like predictions can, and in this remarkable summer of 2018, events in the real world have been starting to catch up with the climate models’ forecasts of an overheating globe”. While the Daily Mail strenuously avoided the term ‘climate change’, the Sun– a paper that has previously dismissed climate change as “alarmist nonsense” – reported that heat-related deaths are predicted to treble by 2050. McCarthy is “fascinated” by the Sun’s reaction: “I think it marks the moment when someone on a rightwing populist newspaper – someone clearly possessed of sharp news antennae – recognises that the time has come when people are finally realising beyond doubt that something abnormal is happening to the global climate”.

Carr fire: California wildfires will only get worse in the future because of climate change, experts say
Emily Shugerman, The Independent Read Article

Massive wildfires have become “the new normal” for California, says a feature in the Independent, which brings together the opinions of a number of experts on the state’s recent wildfires. Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor of earth system science at Stanford, told the paper: “What we’re seeing over the last few years in terms of the wildfire season in California … [is] very consistent with the historical trends in terms of increasing temperatures, increasing dryness, and increasing wildfire risk”. Yet some of California’s politicians still question the wildfires’ links to climate change, the Guardian writes. Elsewhere, an article in National Geographic asks: “Are Europe’s Historic Fires Caused By Climate Change?”. It explains: “These fires across the continent have something in common: they were more likely to happen, and to burn more destructively, because of human-caused climate change.”

Why Are There No Decent Blockbusters About Climate Change?
Tom Nicholson, Esquire Read Article

Given that Hollywood tends to revel in “world-ending melodrama”, it’s a bit odd that it has “studiously ignored the biggest actual existential threat to humanity there is”, says Tom Nicholson in Esquire. “This hot summer is killing and injuring people, and climate change means a summer like this one is twice as likely to happen in the future”, he writes, “yet nobody’s even tried to reimagine climate change as a monster which smashes up a city, in the long cinematic tradition of turning anxieties into crowd-pleasing, lizard-shaped spectacles.” Nicholson offers a number of possible explanations, concluding that: “People in general do not like being told that they’ve nearly irrevocably ruined the planet they live on, and a climate change thriller would have to say that extremely loudly and repeatedly”.

My dad, who retires today, changed how we think about climate change
Mat Hope, Climate Home Read Article

Mat Hope, the editor of DeSmog UK, and a former writer at Carbon Brief, muses on the achievements his father Dr Chris Hope on the eve of his retirement from climate science, and “finally” gets a chance to “talk to him properly about his storied career”. Dr Chris Hope, a modeller at Cambridge University, has worked on climate policy since its earliest years, and has advised both the UK and US governments on how to cut greenhouse gas emissions. “If you look at what is actually happening with emissions of greenhouse gases around the world then they’ve barely been dented by any of these international agreements”, Hope tells his son. “So we still have this desperate need to translate these good intentions and this good rhetoric into really good climate policy, which for me is a strong climate change tax.” The pair also discuss Hope’s innovative ‘Page’ model, which has “become the basis for informing political decisions on climate around the world”.

Science.

A billion tons of unaccounted for carbon in the Southeastern United States
Geophysical Research Letters Read Article

Scientists have discovered a previously unaccounted for soil carbon sink in the southeastern US Coastal Plain that could hold up to 1.1bn tonnes of carbon. The researchers used regional geomorphic and soil databases to find out more about the new soil carbon sink, which they refer to as “deep podzolized carbon”. “We not only redefine soil carbon storage in the region, we introduce the Earth Sciences to a massive organic carbon pool that interacts with landscape evolution and hydrology, has essentially never been studied, and is ripe for interdisciplinary research,” the researchers say.

Expert analysis direct to your inbox.

Get a round-up of all the important articles and papers selected by Carbon Brief by email. Find out more about our newsletters here.