UK enjoyed 'greenest year for electricity ever' in 2017

02.01.18

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UK enjoyed ‘greenest year for electricity ever’ in 2017

Many publications have covered the news published last Thursday noting that the UK has achieved its “greenest year ever in terms of how the nation’s electricity is generated”, according to analysis of National Grid figures for 2017 by WWF-UK. BBC News says the “the rise of renewable energy helped break 13 clean energy records in 2017. In June, for the first time, wind, nuclear and solar power generated more UK power than gas and coal combined. Britain has halved carbon emissions in the electricity sector since 2012 to provide the fourth cleanest power system in Europe and seventh worldwide. In April, the UK had its first 24-hour period without using any coal power since the Industrial Revolution.” BBC News added: “Separate findings from power research group MyGridGB show that renewable energy sources provided more power than coal for 90% of 2017, figures up to 12 December show. British wind farms produced more electricity than coal plants on more than 75% of days this year. This changing landscape saw the cost of offshore wind power fall below the price of nuclear for the first time.” The Press Association, via the Guardian, adds that “overall, renewables provided more power than coal plants on 315 days in 2017, figures up to 12 December showed. Wind beat coal on 263 days, and solar outperformed the fossil fuel on 180 days”. The Daily Mail runs the Press Association article, but runs with the headline: “Subsidised wind farms have produced more electricity than coal plants for three quarters of this year.” MailOnline also runs a slightly differently version of the same story, which includes a quote from Gareth Redmond-King at WWF-UK: “Climate change is wreaking havoc on our nature and wildlife, but we are at last facing up to the challenge, turning our backs on polluting fossil fuels and embracing a new clean future.” The news prompted Theresa May, the UK prime minister, to tweet in support last Thursday. The Financial Times says that a significant milestone stands out for renewables in 2017: “Vattenfall, the Swedish energy group, and Norway’s Statoil were among the companies that took the market by surprise before Christmas when they bid in the world’s first exclusively subsidy-free offshore wind auction, held by the Dutch government.”

Trump’s call for some ‘good old global warming’ ridiculed by climate experts

The Guardian

There has been widespread reaction and condemnation over recent days of a tweet published by Donald Trump last Thursday in which he used a record cold spell over parts of the US to say that his people “could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against”. “Bundle up!” he added. The Guardian says: “The president was reheating two favourite tropes: the conflation of weather with climate to pour scepticism on global warming, and the supposed cost to the American taxpayer of the Paris climate accord, from which he has confirmed the US will withdraw. Climate scientists, however, have long warned against using individual weather events to ponder the existence or otherwise of global warming. Weather, they point out, refers to atmospheric conditions during a short period; climate relates to longer-term weather patterns. On Friday, Anthony Leiserowitz, director of Yale University’s project on climate change communication, said Trump’s tweet was ‘scientifically ridiculous and demonstrably false’.” Vox published a map which “proves him wrong”. The New York Times wearily said that “the climate may be changing, but some jokes stay the same”. PBS published a fact-check, which included the views of Prof Michael Oppenheimer, a US climate scientist: “This cold snap is weather. Weather is what you experience day to day. Climate is the long-term average of weather over periods of years, decades, centuries or even longer.” The Hill notes that the Weather Channel also was forced to explain the difference between weather and climate change.

Burning wood for power is ‘misguided’ say climate experts

The Observer

The Observer picks up on a Carbon Brief guest post published just before Christmas by Professor John Beddington, a former UK government chief scientific adviser, who said there was now a real risk that increasing wood-burning in order to help European countries, including the UK, reach renewable energy targets could turn out to be misguided. The Observer’s science editor writes: “Beddington, whose views are backed by several other eminent climate experts, said the burning of biomass – wood or other renewable organic materials – had the benefit of replacing fossil fuels, whose combustion raises carbon levels in the atmosphere, a process that is now warming the planet dangerously.”

Arctic warming linked to wet summers and snowy winters in the UK, scientists warn

The Independent

Record wet summers and severe snowy weather in winter seen in recent years in the UK could be linked to Arctic warming, say scientists in a study published in Weather, the magazine of the Royal Meteorological Society. The Independent explains: “Researchers compared data of recent UK extremes with the position of the North Atlantic polar atmospheric ‘jet stream’ – a giant current of air – using a measure called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index which indicates shifts north and south. The exceptional wet summers, snowy cold snaps and mild stormy winters all corresponded with pronounced negative or positive spikes in readings of the index, showing more extreme north and southward movements of the jet stream. The researchers also linked the jet stream’s altered path – its increasing ‘waviness’ – with a rise in summer months of areas of high pressure remaining largely stationary over Greenland, distorting the path of storms across the North Atlantic…The strength and path of the North Atlantic jet stream and the high pressure in Greenland appear to be influenced by increasing temperatures in the Arctic, which has been warming much faster than the global average in the past two decades.” The Times also reports the findings. Separately, a number of publications have reported the now-annual claims of a scientist called Valentina Zharkova, a professor of mathematics at Northumbria University, who says the world could be on the verge of an “mini ice age”. The Daily Mail, Sky News and the Sunday Times are among those repeating the claims, which have been debunked as long ago as 2015 in this article for the Conversation.

New study warns of drier world in wake of continued global warming

Xinhua

More than 25% of the world’s land could dry up more significantly if global warming reaches 2C, according to a new study published in Nature Climate Change. The authots examined projections from 27 global climate models to identify the areas of the world where aridity substantially changes from previous year-to-year variations when global warming hits 1.5C and 2C above pre-industrial levels. They found that t two-thirds of the affected regions under 2C of warming could avoid significant aridity if global temperature change is limited to 1.5C. MailOnline is among the other publications covering the story.

Comment

Donald Trump’s comments on climate change would be funny if his actions weren’t so serious

Editorial, The Independent

An editorial in the Independent responds to Donald Trump’s tweet using a cold spell in the US to undermine action on climate change: “We shouldn’t be surprised, but we should be worried. Some of his followers, and not just on Twitter, will believe his ludicrous remarks, and they could plant a seed of doubt among others…Using a spell of winter weather to try to rebut the overwhelming evidence about our changing climate might be funny if the issue were not so serious. A good new year’s resolution for political leaders around the world would be to do everything in their power in 2018 to save the planet for future generations by reducing the use of fossil fuels, boosting clean, green energy and halting rainforest destruction. And trying to talk some common sense into the most powerful one in their ranks.”

UK frackers are running out of time

Damian Carrington, The Guardian

“The UK’s shale gas industry is in a race against time to establish itself before climate change regulations shut it down,” wrote the Guardian’s head of environment in a Boxing Day article. “As its stands, the frackers are off the pace.” Carrington adds: “With no wells yet tested for gas flow, the industry does not yet know if large-scale production is possible or what the cost of the gas will be, and it won’t know until 2020 at best. Protests and planning problems have delayed exploration, but the real difficulty is the UK’s legally binding carbon targets. These essentially rule out gas burning both in power stations and home heating by 2030, unless large-scale carbon capture and storage technology (CCS) is up and running to bury the emissions. Given the lack of progress on CCS to date, that seems a long shot.”

The key energy questions for 2018

Nick Butler, Financial Times

At the global level, writes Nick Butler, there are four key questions, and each of which answers is highly uncertain: “The first question is whether Saudi Arabia is stable…The second question is how rapidly production of oil from shale rock will grow in the US…The third question concerns China. For the last three years the country has managed to deliver economic growth with only minimal increases in energy consumption…The fourth question is, if anything, the most important. How fast can renewables grow?…The problem is that the industry remains fragmented. Most renewable companies are small and local, and in many cases undercapitalised; some are built to collect subsidies. A radical change will be necessary to make the industry global and capable of competing on the scale necessary to displace coal and natural gas.”

Environmental issues may be the glue we need to fix UK’s Brexit divides

Haakon Overli, Sunday Telegraph

“All of us should resolve to do better in 2018”, writes Overli. “To achieve that goal, we will need to mend the broken fences between disparate Brexit tribes with entrenched views. In particular, we will have to find a mechanism to reconnect young and old: the fact that three quarters of under-25s and a clear majority of 25-49 year-olds voted Remain while older voters backed Leave in droves has heightened pre-existing inter-generational tensions.” The answer? “Climate change action could be the olive branch that gets the peace process going. Societal-attitudes research suggests Britons of all ages are increasingly concerned about environmental issues, but also that millennials and Generation Y are especially anxious. Withdrawal from the EU gives the UK an opportunity to set its own course on environmental policy: if we are brave, the UK can be a global agent for positive change, setting an example to the world while providing young and old on either side of the Brexit fury with some common ground on which to reconcile.”

How Climate Change Deniers Rise to the Top in Google Searches

Hiroko Tabuchi, New York Times

The New York Times examines how “Google’s search page has become an especially contentious battleground between those who seek to educate the public on the established climate science and those who reject it”. It investigates in particular an ad by an entity called “DefyCCC”: “The climate denialist ads are an example of how contrarian groups can use the internet’s largest automated advertising systems to their advantage, gaming the system to find a mass platform for false or misleading claims…DefyCCC, the site that recently bought the “climate change” search term on Google, devotes an entire section of its site to content from WattsUpWithThat, a well-known climate denial site by the blogger Anthony Watts. Mr. Watts has received funding from the Heartland Institute, backed by the billionaire Koch brothers. Beyond that, little is known about DefyCCC. Its domain was registered through DomainsByProxy, a service that allows owners to keep their personal information secret.”

Camille Parmesan: ‘Trump’s extremism on climate change has brought people together’

John Vidal, The Observer

The Observer interviews Prof Camille Parmesan, “one of the world’s most influential climate change scientists” who is “one of 18 US scientists moving to France to take up President Macron’s invitation of refuge after Donald Trump’s decision to cut science funding and withdraw the US from the 2015 Paris agreement”. (Prof Parmesan is also one of Carbon Brief’s contributing editors.) She says: “The impact of Trump on climate science has been far greater than what the public believe it has. He has not only slashed funding, but he’s gone on the attack in any way he can with his powers as the president. University researchers are buffered from this, but scientists working at government agencies have really felt the blow.”

The Top 7 Climate Findings of 2017

Chelsea Harvey, E&E News via Scientific American

2017 saw major breakthroughs and advancements in climate research, says E&E. And it lists some of the biggest “findings reported by scientists in 2017”, including the disasters that “could not have occurred without warming”: “Every year, a special annual edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society publishes a roundup of studies investigating the influence of climate change on certain extreme weather events, like heat waves and floods… But this year marks the first time some of the papers concluded that an event could not have occurred – like, at all – in a world where global warming did not exist…the research does suggest that we’re now crossing another threshold by entering a world in which climate change is not only influencing the events that shape the planet, but is an essential component for some of them.”

Science

Keeping global warming within 1.5 °C constrains emergence of aridification

Nature Climate Change

Limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C above industrial levels could help to prevent much of the world’s surface from becoming drier and more desert-like, new research finds. Using global climate models, the study suggests that between a quarter and two thirds of the world’s surface could be affected by aridification if the world warms by 2C in the coming decades. However, if warming is limited to 1.5C, two-thirds of this aridification could be avoided. “Early action for accomplishing the 1.5 °C temperature goal can therefore markedly reduce the likelihood that large regions will face substantial aridification and related impacts,” the researchers say.

Elevated increases in human-perceived temperature under climate warming

Nature Climate Change

The average temperature felt by humans has risen at a faster rate than the global average temperature in the last few decades, a new study finds. Human-perceived temperature is affected by factors including air temperature, humidity and wind speed. The research finds that the global average human-perceived temperature increased at 0.04 C per decade faster than the average temperature before 2005. This trend is projected to increase to 0.06C per decade under an average emissions scenario and 0.17C per decade under a high emissions scenario by 2100.

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