Daily Briefing |
TODAY'S CLIMATE AND ENERGY HEADLINES
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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.
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Today's climate and energy headlines:
- World 'losing battle against deforestation'
- Heathrow drone protest: Five arrested over planned disruption
- US takes major step toward oil drilling in Alaska wildlife refuge
- Army could phase out fossil fuels to attract ecofriendly recruits, senior general says
- IEA warns Opec it faces huge oil surplus in 2020
- Extreme weather displaced a record seven million in first half of 2019
- Why this climate change economist rocked my world
- Significant increases in extreme precipitation and the associations with global warming over the global land monsoon regions
- Hot Summers in the Northern Hemisphere
News.
An assessment of a global agreement to slow deforestation says it has failed to deliver on key pledges, report BBC News and others. Launched at the 2014 UN climate summit, the New York Declaration on Forests (NYDF) aimed to halve deforestation by 2020 and halt it by 2030, BBC News says, adding: “The critique, compiled by the NYDF Assessment Partners (a coalition of 25 organisations), painted a bleak picture of how the world’s forests continue to be felled”. “While the greatest losses of forests by area in the years 2014-18 occurred in tropical Latin America, the greatest rate of increase was in Africa,” the Guardian says, with deforestation rates rising “from less than 2m hectares a year on average from 2001 to 2013, to more than 4m a year from 2014 to 2018”. “An area of forest the size of the UK is being lost every year around the world, a second Guardian piece notes, with the rate of loss “having grown rapidly in the past five years despite pledges made by governments in 2014 to reverse deforestation and restore trees”. The report says it is likely to be “impossible” to meet the target to halve the rate of deforestation by next year, says the Times.
Elsewhere, the Daily Mirror has a frontpage “exclusive” on the Amazon, describing the “crime gangs whose fires are destroying the world’s ‘lungs’ and putting us all at risk”. The story, a double-page spread on pages four and five, notes that “fires are believed to have been started by armed crime gangs intent on clearing the forest to illegally sell the land to cattle ranchers”. An accompanying editorial warns that “preserving the rainforest is vital if we are to prevent a further rise in global warming that will lead to higher sea levels, mass migration and severe weather patterns”.
And finally, EurActiv reports that the protection of forests is likely to “become one of the priorities of the European Parliament in the coming months”.
Five environmental activists were arrested yesterday over plans to fly drones near Heathrow Airport today, reports BBC News. Heathrow Pause – a splinter group of climate change activists Extinction Rebellion (XR) – was aiming to use drones within the no-fly zone as part of efforts to halt the airport’s planned expansion, the article notes. The Metropolitan Police arrested three men and two women, aged between their 20s and 50s, on suspicion of conspiracy to commit a public nuisance, reports the Press Association. One of those arrested was XR co-founder Roger Hallam. In a statement, Heathrow Pause said “the action will carry on exactly as planned, peacefully and non-violently, regardless of today’s events – we have contingency measures in place”, adds Reuters. Earlier in the day, the Met had warned protesters they could be handed life sentences if they are found to be endangering the lives of passengers, reports Sky News. In the early hours of this morning, Heathrow Pause shared a live stream on its Twitter account of two people struggling to get a drone off the ground, says the Guardian. Another Sky News story, published within the last half hour, reports that the activists “claim they have been blocked by ‘signal jamming’” from flying their drones. The Press Association and Reuters report that two men were arrested within Heathrow’s perimeter in the early hours of this morning. The Times, Evening Standard, Independent and Daily Telegraph all have the story.
Elsewhere, the Press Association reports that youth climate strikers are “urging people to join them in the streets for demonstrations as part of what is expected to be the largest global climate strike” on 20 September.
The Trump administration yesterday “took a major step toward opening Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil drilling”, reports Reuters. The Department of the Interior (DOI) issued the final environmental study for its plan to open up drilling, says the newswire, putting the government on track to sell oil and gas leases later this year. In the environmental impact statement, the DOI says it will seek to open up the entire 1.56m-acre coastal plain of the ANWR to oil and gas exploration, says the Washington Post, “picking the most aggressive development option for an area long closed to drilling”. It continues: “The administration said its preferred plan would call for the construction of as many as four places for airstrips and well pads, 175 miles of roads, vertical supports for pipelines, a seawater treatment plant and a barge landing and storage site.” Adam Kolton, executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League, tells InsideClimate News that “to no one’s surprise, the administration chose the most aggressive leasing alternative, not even pretending that this is about restraint or meaningful protection”. The announcement comes the same day that the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives voted to ban drilling in ANWR, says the Hill, adding that the legislation is not expected to pass the Republican-controlled Senate. The Wall Street Journal also covers the news.
The chief of the general staff of the British Army says it could phase out petrol and diesel vehicles in a bid to attract recruits, the Daily Telegraph reports in a story featured on its frontpage. The paper quotes General Sir Mark Carleton-Smith speaking at a defence and security event in London, saying today’s military equipment would probably be the last to be “dependent on fossil fuel engines”, and that a move towards clean energy would be beneficial logistically and put the military “on the right side of the environmental argument”. The general also noted that establishing an eco-friendly reputation was essential to future recruitment, as younger people “increasingly make career decisions based on a prospective employer’s environmental credentials”, reports the Times. The Independent and the Sun also have the story.
Forecasts from the International Energy Agency (IEA) suggest a growing surplus in the oil market next year will push prices lower, reports the Financial Times. In its monthly oil market report, the IEA warns that if the Opec cartel of oil-producing countries maintained current production levels in early 2020 they would pump out 1.4m barrels per day more than the market needed, the FT says. “The report signals the ongoing difficulty Opec faces influencing the market,” notes Axios. This is “despite the three-year-old alliance with Russia” – known collectively as “Opec+”. The IEA also noted that “booming shale production has allowed the US to close in on, and briefly overtake [in June], Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil exporter”, says Reuters. Oil prices fell 2% as the Opec meeting failed to produce a decision on supply cuts and a report cast doubt on the possibility of an interim US-China trade deal, says another Reuters piece.
In other oil-related news, Reuters also reports that the US Coastguard closed part of the Houston Ship Channel yesterday after 11 Greenpeace protesters suspended themselves by cables over the key oil export waterway. The Hill, Financial Times and DeSmogBlog also have the story. And finally, Bloomberg reports that the chief executive of BP is planning “to sell some oil projects and curb the development of others to align its business with the Paris accord”.
Extreme weather events displaced a record seven million people from their homes across the world during the first six months of this year, the New York Times reports. The numbers come from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center – which compiles data from governments, UN agencies and media reports, the NY Times notes. “In today’s changing climate, mass displacement triggered by extreme weather events is becoming the norm,” the report says, adding that the numbers represent “the highest mid-year figure ever reported for displacements associated with disasters”. The centre has been publishing annual data since 2003.
Comment.
In a piece for the Financial Times, the “Undercover Economist” Tim Harford discusses the work of economist Prof Martin Weitzman on climate change. Weitzman, who died last month, wrote a commentary in 2007 that “gently” pulled apart Lord Nicholas Stern’s Review on the Economics of Climate Change, says Harford. Describing it as “right for the wrong reasons”, Weitzman disputed Stern’s idea that the “case for action depended on arguing that our super-rich descendants living in the far future should weigh very heavily in our calculations”, writes Harford. Instead, Weitzman “asked us to contemplate the risk of runaway effects”, or “tail risks” that lie well outside the most likely scenarios, such as permafrost thaw, explains Harford. “Central estimates can lead us astray,” says Harford, and “it is only when we ponder the tail risk that we realise how dangerous climate change might be”. “The truly eye-opening contribution – for me, at least – was Weitzman’s explanation that the worst-case scenarios should rightly loom large in rational calculations,” says Harford. He concludes: “The message of Weitzman’s recent work has influenced the policy debates on climate change: the extreme scenarios matter. What we don’t know about climate change is more important, and more dangerous, than what we do.”
Science.
Nearly two-thirds of the world’s population lives in regions with monsoonal climates. Whether extreme precipitation has changed significantly due to global warming has previously been unclear. This study investigates trends in extreme precipitation associated with global warming over the past century in monsoon regions using more than 5,000 long-running and high-quality observation locations. The authors found significant increases in the annual maximum daily precipitation associated with global warming, with extreme rainfall increasing by around 10% per degree C warming. The results are significant and robust across different time periods, record lengths of stations and datasets used, the researchers say.
Previous studies suggest that surface air temperature variations in the Northern Hemisphere are affected by greenhouse effect, El Niño‐Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and so on. However, the past two summers of 2017 and 2018 in the Northern Hemisphere were still very hot even without significant contributions from ENSO and the NAO, a new study says. Th research identifies seven atmospheric circulation patterns by using atmospheric teleconnection method, and find that a combination of these patterns and global warming explains summer surface air temperature variations in the Northern Hemisphere. Their results also suggest that accurate forecast of the atmospheric circulation patterns can help to predict the summer surface air temperature in the Northern Hemisphere.