Senate panel votes to fund UN climate agency & British companies reap almost half of UK’s renewables deals
News
Senate panel votes to fund UN climate agency
A US Senate committee voted yesterday to contribute $10m to the UNFCCC, the United Nations’ climate change agency. The Senate Appropriations Committee voted 16 to 14 to approve an amendment by Senator Jeff Merkley to restore funding for the UNFCCC in the State Department appropriations bill. The payments that the US had made annually since joining the convention in 1992 had been slated to be eliminated. Merkley said that the amendment “fits in with Secretary [Rex] Tillerson’s desire that we both continue to monitor the changes in the world’s climate and that we keep a seat at the table”. President Trump called for an end to all UN climate funding in his first budget proposal earlier this year. However, the Hill notes that the House’s version of the State funding bill does not fund the UNFCCC, so the two chambers will have to negotiate regarding the final outcome. Separately, Climate Home reports news from the IPCC’s annual gathering taking place presently in Montreal. It says the “EU and others to fill UN climate science funding gap left by Trump”. It adds: “The UN’s climate science panel is soliciting donations from member governments to fill a big funding shortfall at a meeting in Montreal, Canada. The financial situation reached crisis point after Donald Trump this year announced he would halt US contributions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The US has supplied nearly a third of the panel’s income since its inception and 45% of its funds in 2016…Sources at the meeting told Climate Home a number of governments had expressed a willingness to increase their contributions, after being updated on the situation on Wednesday. These included the European Commission, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Switzerland and the UK.”
British companies reap almost half of UK’s renewables deals
British companies are securing almost half of the billions of pounds spent each year on offshore wind farms in the UK, according to a report that aims to counter criticism that the vast majority goes overseas. The FT says: “About 48% of the money spent planning, building and operating the projects, which are supported through UK government subsidies, benefits British companies, research by the RenewableUK trade body found. This level is just shy of a 50% target the industry hopes to achieve by 2020, and compares with 43% in 2015 when the last comparable study of multiple projects was produced. Before that, reports suggested that as little as 10% of spending on some individual projects benefited UK companies because the biggest contracts went to turbine manufacturers based overseas.”
Germany set to miss 2020 climate goals by far: study
Germany is set to miss its goal to cut CO2 emissions by a far wider margin than previously thought, according to a new study. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government has already admitted it will miss a goal to lower emissions by 40% by 2020 from 1990 levels by about five percentage points. But the Agora Energiewende thinktank said on Thursday its new forecasts suggest Germany was only likely to manage a 30% cut due to strong economic growth and immigration. “Only 30% instead of 40% less CO2 is not a little bit off, but a huge miss of the climate goal for 2020,” said Agora director Patrick Graichen.
Australia urged to open doors to imperilled Pacific islanders
Australia and New Zealand should relax migration rules on workers from Pacific islands and consider providing open access to people from low-lying atoll nations most at risk from climate change, the World Bank has said. In a report on the economic opportunities and challenges facing Pacific island nations, the bank identifies the region’s principal challenge as climate change, and says it should be given an avenue to depopulate. “It would allow for gradual migration from the atoll nations and be less costly and preferable to a last-minute abandonment that would require a significant level of emergency assistance and be difficult to manage,” says the World Bank report, which has been presented to regional leaders meeting in Samoa at the Pacific Islands Forum.
Claims that climate change fueled Syria’s civil war questioned in new study
Climate change was not a major factor in Syria’s long-running civil war, contrary to previous claims that drought helped build tensions that grew violent, claims a news study. Severe drought pushed rural Syrians into cities where conflicts festered, but the lack of rainfall was not necessarily caused by human-induced climate change, said a rejoinder to an earlier study by European and US researchers published in the journal Political Geography. The earlier study had been criticised by other research hence why the journal has now published a rejoinder. “There is no sound evidence that global climate change was a factor in sparking the Syrian civil war,” said University of Sussex Professor Jan Selby, one of the study’s co-authors, in a statement. The Times also reports the authors’ claims. In late 2015, Carbon Brief published a factcheck when there was widespread media coverage of competing claims.
Comment
Big Oil must pay for climate change. Now we can calculate how much
Myles Allen & Peter C Frumhoff, The Guardian
The two climate scientists explain their new paper in a comment piece for the Guardian: “Today, we and several colleagues are publishing a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Climatic Change that shows it is possible for scientific evidence to help apportion responsibility for climate damages among fossil fuel producers. Using a simple, well-established climate model, our study for the first time quantifies the amount of sea level rise and increase in global surface temperatures that can be traced to the emissions from specific fossil fuel companies. Strikingly, nearly 30% of the rise in global sea level between 1880 and 2010 resulted from emissions traced to the 90 largest carbon producers…We have the data needed to link the emissions traced to products sold by a fossil fuel company to a specific share of changes in temperature and sea level rise. Determining who should pay what for climate damages is a social and political question. But this kind of scientific work can help inform public and policy debate over the issue and potentially offers an approach that can help juries and judges to monetize damages.”
Irma and Harvey should kill any doubt that climate change is real
Michael E Mann & Susan J Hassol & Thomas C Peterson, Washington Post
With Hurricane Irma causing devastation across the Caribbean as it heads toward the US, there continues to be widespread coverage and comment in the media about the role climate change might be having on such extreme weather events. Three climate specialists writing in the Washington Post say: “The strongest hurricanes have gotten stronger because of global warming. Over the past two years, we have witnessed the most intense hurricanes on record for the globe, both hemispheres, the Pacific and now, with Irma, the Atlantic.” The Postalso carries a lengthy explainer by Chris Mooney on the “sudden end” to the US’s “strange hurricane drought”. The New York Times’ Brad Plumer explains that the potential scale of the damage in Florida could be far worse than previous storms in part because so much development has taken place in the state since the infamous Hurricane Andrew in 1992. In Bloomberg, Eric Roston examines Miami’s struggles to defend itself from rising seas levels and erosion caused by huge storms. Time magazine says that “7%” is the only number you need to understand whether climate change is making hurricanes worse: “Understanding the link really comes down to one figure: the air can hold 7% more water with every degree Celsius that the temperature rises. That figure comes from the Clausius–Clapeyron equation, a widely accepted physical law established centuries ago long before any politicized debate on climate change.” Writing in the Miami Herald, Andres Oppenheimer says: “As a Miami Beach resident who is writing this surrounded by sand bags in preparation for Hurricane Irma, only a week after Hurricane Harvey ravaged Texas, I have an urgent question for President Donald Trump and his fellow climate change deniers: how many natural disasters will it take for you to listen to the world’s most prestigious scientists?” Joe Romm in Think Progress has two pieces venting his frustration at both Trump and the US media. The first piece is headlined: “The Trump administration wants to ignore a major aspect of these hurricane disasters.” The second is headlined: “The false equivalence plaguing our discussions of climate change.” In the New Statesman, India Bourke follows a similar theme: “Don’t call Hurricane Irma a “perfect storm” – you’re playing into Donald Trump’s narrative.” Sky News has published its own explainer titled: “Climate change and hurricanes: Is Irma a sign of things to come?” The New Yorker has a feature showing why “Our Weather-Prediction Models Keep Getting Better, and Hurricane Irma Is the Proof”. Axios has published a interactive chart showing that last 30 years of Atlantic hurricanes and how they rate in terms of intensity and duration. BBC2’s Newsnight began its programme last night with a feature about climate change and hurricanes which featured interviews with two UK-based climate scientists, Dr Friederike Otto and Prof Joanna Haigh. The Irish edition of the Times carries an editorial under the sub-title: “As global warming creates ever more dangerous weather patterns, it is beyond time that Ireland does its bit to reduce emissions.” Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal gives space on its op-ed pages to Bjorn Lomborg, the prominent climate sceptic, who repeats his familiar argument: “To respond properly we need to stick to the facts and maintain a sense of perspective, avoiding tenuous connections and ineffective solutions that ultimately divert resources away from fixing the real problems.”
Big Oil bets on a dash for gas
In the FT’s “Big Read”, Andrew Ward, the paper’s energy editor, takes a close look at the oil industry’s “bet” on LNG, or liquified natural gas. “Producers are investing heavily in LNG projects to compete with wind and solar. But is too much capacity being added?” Ward continues: “Companies that once treated gas as the poor relation to “black gold” are now gambling that the colourless commodity can help secure their future in a decarbonising world…The gamble on gas rests in large part on the sector’s ability to squeeze coal out of the global energy system and compete with the rise of wind and solar power.” Ward identifies some of the challenges: “Demand for gas has been held back by two main factors. One is rapid growth in renewable power. In Europe, this has led to the mothballing of some gas-fired power stations as rising wind and solar generation pushes down wholesale electricity prices. The other is that coal remains cheaper to burn than gas in many parts of the world.”
Science
Climate change and the Syrian civil war revisited
A new study claims to find that there is “no clear and reliable evidence” that climate change may have played a role in sparking the Syria civil war in 2011. The paper addresses previous research published in 2015 that suggests a severe drought that began in 2006 acted as a catalyst for the conflict by sparking vast waves of migration, and that climate change has made such droughts in the region more than twice as likely. However, the new research finds that there is “no clear evidence” that human-driven climate change contributed to the 2006 drought. It is also finds that “economic liberalisation” may have played a larger role in driving migration than the 2006 drought. “This finding, to be clear, does not prove that climate change and northeast Syria’s drought were not factors in its civil war, only that the existing claims to this effect do not stand up to close scrutiny,” the researchers conclude. Carbon Brief previously published an in-depth explainer on the evidence around whether climate change contributed to the uprising that started the Syrian war.
Heat stress increase under climate change twice as large in cities as in rural areas
The increase in heat stress as a result of climate change could be twice as large in cities as in rural regions, new research finds. Cities typically feel the heat more keenly than rural areas and experience excessive death tolls as a result of heatwaves, the scientists report. This phenomenon is known as the ‘urban heat island’. The researchers find that, as global temperatures continue to climb, the increase in heat stress could be twice as large in urban areas by the mid 21st century. “The exacerbation is driven by the urban heat island itself, its concurrence with heat waves, and urban expansion,” the researchers say.
Other stories
- Irma: Tory minister says Caroline Lucas is ‘inhuman’ for mentioning climate change in relation to hurricane (The Independent )
- Power plant rule repeal announcement likely this fall: EPA (The Hill)
- Stop fossil fuel expansion to meet climate goals, urge environmental groups (Energy Live News)
- A Win for Climate Science: Judge Rules in Favor of NOAA Researchers (Climate Denial Crock of the Week )
- Britain has long struggled to build power plants – and inefficient project management is to blame (The Conversation)
- India needs to find allies to tap cheap funds for clean coal: trade body (Reuters )
- Record-low 2016 Antarctic sea ice due to ‘perfect storm’ (Mail Online)
- Australia: Record drop in electricity emissions cancelled out by rises in other sectors (The Guardian )
- How a Bird Charity’s Battle Against a Wind Farm Backfired (Bloomberg)
- James Lovelock on voting Brexit, ‘wicked’ renewables and why he changed his mind on climate change (The Spectator)