President Trump's Paris U-turn: I'd love to rejoin climate change accord
News
President Trump’s Paris U-turn: I’d love to rejoin climate change accord
Many publications report the comments made by Donald Trump during an interview undertaken in Davos last week with his friend Piers Morgan for ITV News. Trump repeated a line he’s already made on a few occasions about being happy to recommit the US to the Paris Agreement on climate change if there was a “good deal”. Trump also made continued falsehoods about climate science when asked if he believed in climate change: “There is a cooling and there’s a heating. I mean, look, it used to not be climate change, it used to be global warming. That wasn’t working too well because it was getting too cold all over the place. ‘The icecaps were going to melt, there were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records, OK? They’re at a record level. I’ll tell you what I believe in. I believe in clean air. I believe in crystal-clear, beautiful water. I believe in just having good cleanliness in all.” The falsehood have been quickly rebutted. Associated Press issued a “fact check”, which includes responses from a number of climate scientists, including Carbon Brief’s US analyst Zeke Hausfather, who told AP: “The world has been warming steadily over the past 50 years, with 17 of the past 18 years being the warmest since records began in the 1850s. It is not accurate to say that the climate has been ‘cooling as well as warming.” Ahead of the interview airing on ITV last night, Carbon Brief had published an article by Hausfather showing how ocean temperatures in 2017 were the highest ever recorded. Desmog has published an article pointing out that Trump’s misrepresentations of climate science are the same “tired myths” perpetrated “by the groups funded by one of the president’s key benefactors — the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer”. It adds: “As DeSmog has reported, Mercer and his daughter Rebecca have been spending millions on climate science denial groups in recent years.” The Guardian’s political diarist John Crace says the interview was about entertainment, not news: “Piers would sometimes ask what purported to be a serious question and then let the Donald off the hook when he failed to answer it…Piers would have got more sensible answers from most 10-year-olds. And Graham Norton would have asked more probing questions.”
Brexit risks energy shortages and bigger bills, peers warn
Brexit could leave the UK more vulnerable to energy supply shortages and drive up electricity and gas bills by making energy trading less efficient, a House of Lords committee has warned. Leaving the EU will diminish Britain’s influence on energy rules and cast uncertainty over future European investment in UK energy infrastructure, the peers sy in a new report published today. Lord Teverson, the chair of the EU, energy and environment subcommittee, said the impact on energy prices could be significant. Reuters says: “The report said Britain’s energy trading outside of Europe’s Internal Energy Market will likely be less efficient than the current arrangements.” It adds that the government should carry out a full assessment on the impact of leaving Europe’s energy market and set out plans on how it expects to manage any severe supply shortages. Meanwhile, the Sunday Telegraph reports that the government will “undertake a fresh review of the UK’s gas supplies after major disruptions late last year ripped through the market, driving prices to multi-year highs”.
Here’s How Much Money The Mercer Family Donated To Climate Misinformation Groups In 2016
Buzzfeed has examined the most recent US tax filings of the the Mercer family, which is among President Trump’s most powerful donors. “In 2016 they gave nearly $4 million to groups that challenge the scientific consensus on man-made climate change,” says Buzzfeed. “The Mercer Family Foundation, funded by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and directed by his daughter Rebekah, gave $150,000 to CO2 Coalition in 2016, making the foundation the top donor of this small, Virginia-based nonprofit that promotes the benefits of climate pollution. The Mercers also gave $125,000 to the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, a group that questions the link between rising greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and global warming.” The Mercers have been known to fund organisations that question climate science. “These grants show a distinct interest in climate for the first time,” said Kert Davies, founder and director of the Climate Investigations Center (CIC), a watchdog group that obtained the tax filings and shared them with BuzzFeed News. The Guardianreports that the American Museum of Natural History in New York is under pressure to sever its ties to Rebekah Mercer, one of Donald Trump’s top donors who has used her family’s fortune to fund groups that seek to undermine scientists’ work on climate change. “More than 200 scientists have put their names to a letter that urges the museum to “end ties to anti-science propagandists and funders of climate science misinformation” and axe Mercer from its board of trustees, a position she has held since 2013.” The New York Times also covers the story.
China to develop Arctic shipping routes opened by global warming
China has announced plans to develop shipping lanes through the Arctic to become a “Polar Silk Route”. Beijing said global warming meant viable shipping routes through the Arctic would become increasingly important for international trade. It said China would work with Russia and other Arctic countries to develop the polar route. It is part of an ambitious bigger scheme to transform China’s land and sea connections to Europe and beyond. Reuters says that China’s first official Arctic policy white paper shows that China will encourage enterprises to build infrastructure and conduct commercial trial voyages: “China, despite being a non-Arctic state, is increasingly active in the polar region and became an observer member of the Arctic Council in 2013.”
‘Shocking’: Anger after climate change sceptic becomes EU environment chief
The new president of the EU’s environment council, Neno Dimov, has faced criticism for his apparently sceptical position on climate change, reports the Independent. When Dimov, the Bulgarian environment minister, appeared before the European Parliament last week, MEPs questioned his past statements on climate change. Dimov refused to discuss his opinion on climate change, saying there was a “political consensus” within the EU when it came to climate change and that he would “keep this consensus alive”. However, he also said there was always room for “challenges and doubts”. In an online video released in 2015, he described global warming as a “fraud…used to scare the people”.
Comment
The curious persistence of climate scepticism in the Anglosphere news media
Al Jazeera’s Listening Post programme explores why climate scepticism is largely an Anglosphere phenomenon. The feature starts at 13:12 mins into video and includes an interview with Carbon Brief’s editor, Leo Hickman. “Climate scepticism is fringe and unscientific. So why is it that sceptics still manage, in certain countries, to get airtime denying the effects of global warming? Sceptics theories in the news media, such as carbon dioxide doesn’t cause a greenhouse effect, are largely confined to what is known as the Anglosphere: the likes of the US, the UK, Australia. Elsewhere, including the most populous, polluting countries like China and India, such scepticism is hard to find. The Listening Post investigates the curious existence and persistence of climate scepticism in the news media.”
In 2017, the oceans were by far the hottest ever recorded
“If you want to understand global warming,” writes Abraham, “you need to first understand ocean warming. New data – also covered by Carbon Brief – has found that the upper 2000 meters of ocean waters were far warmer in 2017 than the previous hottest year. Abrahams says it is “truly astonishing” that the last five years are the five hottest years ever recorded: “Further consequences of this heating include declining oxygen levels in the oceans, bleaching of coral reefs, and melting of both sea ice and ice shelves (the latter of which which will also raise sea levels). We are observing these effects. Arctic ice is undergoing a long-term decline, and it’s possible the Arctic will become ice-free. Massive coral bleaching events have been recorded, particularly in the waters off of Australia. The point is, the effects of global warming aren’t just academic; they are real.”
Cape Town’s water crisis should be a wake-up call
Cape Town is close to running out of water, notes the FT’s editorial: “This should be a wake-up call for city authorities and national governments around the world. It is hard to attribute any single storm or drought to climate change with certainty. But the evidence suggests weather patterns will become less predictable and extreme events more frequent. Many of the world’s largest cities are acutely vulnerable to the effects of climate change — longer droughts, heavier rainfall, rising sea levels, fiercer wildfires, worsening air pollution and searing heatwaves…Environmental change will place huge strains on many societies; and the risks of anarchy are real.”
Reckoning with climate change will demand ugly tradeoffs from environmentalists — and everyone else
Roberts says that “very few people have let the reality of the situation sink in deep enough that it reshapes their values and priorities”. He then looks at how some environmental groups, which want action on climate change, oppose nuclear plants in the US. He adds: “Not all environmentalists prioritize climate change and not everyone concerned about climate change would self-identify as environmentalist…Just about nobody is taking climate change completely seriously at present, because, let’s face it, doing so is traumatic. To absorb the full implications of climate change is to realize that even a level of action beyond what’s reasonable to hope for can at best avert the worst of the damage.”
Science
Global CO2 emissions from cement production
The global production of cement is the third largest source of human-driven CO2 emissions, a new paper finds. Using a range of datasets, including new estimates from China and India, the research finds that global cement production released 1.45bn tonnes of CO2 in 2016, which is the equivalent to about 4 % of the emissions from fossil fuels in the same year.
Governance matters: climate change, corruption, and livelihoods in Bangladesh
Corruption, extortion and bribery could be limiting the progress of climate mitigation plans in Bangladesh, a new study claims. Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries in the world and is “critically” threatened by sea level rise, desertification and biodiversity destruction as a result of climate change, the paper argues. “Governance is an important non-climatic stressor that has not received sufficient attention,” the paper reads. “This paper explores the impacts of bribery and extortion on livelihoods and adaptive capacity in the face of climate change and argues that corruption significantly reduces the ability to respond to climatic stressors.”
Other stories
- Mini nuclear reactors could heat homes (Sunday Times )
- UK publishes database of 4,300 low carbon projects (Energy Live News)
- ‘Burning to the ground’: The carbon bubble in gas turbines (Carbon Commentary)
- Chemical sunshade to slow warming may not be feasible: U.N. draft (Reuters)
- The importance of locally generated energy (BusinessGreen)
- Is Pollution Artificially Shielding Us From Climate Change? (Futurism)
- Killing the kilowatt: the race to cut carbon from heating (Daily Telegraph)
- First EPA chief: GOP climate change denial ‘a threat to the country’ (The Hill)
- German carmaker group sponsored emissions experiments on people: Stuttgarter Zeitung (Reuters)
- China coal futures hit record high as utilities warn of shortages (Reuters)
- China’s Hebei province to cut coal use by 5 million tonnes this year: Xinhua (Reuters)
- France rules out increasing CO2 as it closes nuclear reactors (Reuters)
- Paris flood 2018: River Seine threatens wine cellars and museums as it nears record high (The Independent)
- Heat wave leaves thousands of Australian homes without power (Reuters)
- ‘Call it atmosphere cancer’ – How the world’s best-known marketer would tackle global warming (Business Insider Nordic)