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Warming could breach 1.5C within five years, says UK Met Office

01.02.18

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Warming could breach 1.5C within five years, says UK Met Office

Climate Home News

There is a small chance, of around 10%, that global temperatures could “flicker above 1.5C” of warming within the next five years, says Climate Home News, reporting on the latest decadal forecast from the UK’s Met Office. This would not breach the Paris Agreement aspiration to avoid 1.5C of warming, Met Office scientists said, since that limit refers to long-term average temperatures, not a yearly reading. The Met Office says global temperatures are “likely” to exceed 1C above pre-industrial temperatures over the next five years, it adds. The Guardian and Mashable also have the story. Carbon Brief published an article on interpreting the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C limit last autumn.

Technologies to remove carbon from the air are no silver bullet – scientists

Press Association via MailOnline

Capturing CO2 from the atmosphere using ‘negative emissions technologies’ has “limited realistic potential” to help avoid dangerous climate change, reports the Press Association, covering a new report from the European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC). Negative emissions options, including planting forests, sucking CO2 from the air, adding iron to oceans and capturing and storing CO2 from wood-fuelled power plants, will not be able to remove carbon from the atmosphere at the scale and rate required, PA adds. The EASAC report says more effort should be made to cut emissions, instead of relying on unproven negative emissions technologies, says Reuters. These technologies also carry high costs or potentially “huge” environmental risks, says the Guardian. The Independent, Thomson Reuters Foundation and Carbon Brief also cover the new report.

White House seeks 72 percent cut to clean energy research, underscoring administration’s preference for fossil fuels

Washington Post

The Trump administration is to ask Congress for deep cuts, of 72%, to the Energy Department’s clean energy research and development programmes, the Washington Post reports, citing “draft budget documents obtained by [the Post]”. The paper says the cuts are likely to be reversed by Congress and that the Energy Department had asked for “more modest spending reductions for…[its] renewable and [energy] efficiency programs”. Bloomberg also reports the news, citing “people familiar with the plans”. The cuts would be steeper than those requested by the White House, but so far rejected by Congress, for the current fiscal year, the Post notes. This current-year request had also included steep cuts, of around 75%, to research into carbon capture and storage, a former US Energy Department official noted on Twitter, saying “arguably no admin[istration] has done more to damage prospects for ‘clean coal'”.

Brussels urged to clarify ‘green’ investment guidelines

Financial Times

An influential panel of investment experts has called on the EU to clarify what qualifies as a “green” investment and strengthen risk reporting requirements, saying it has become an urgent and mainstream issue, reports the Financial Times. The High-Level Expert Group on Sustainable Finance, set up by the European Commission in 2016, published its final report and recommendations yesterday, on creating a financial system better able to fund projects delivering social and environmental benefits over the long term, reports Reuters. The panel proposes tweaks to the EU’s regulatory and financial policy rules to encourage sustainable finance, Reuters says. Other proposals include setting up a European Green Infrastructure Bank, reports BusinessGreen.

Official: UK low carbon sectors growing at almost treble the rate of the wider economy

BusinessGreen

The UK low-carbon and renewable energy economy grew by 5% in 2016, close to three times the 1.8% rate of the wider economy, reports BusinessGreen, based on a bulletin from the Office of National Statistics. Employment in the green economy also rose 3.3% to 208,000 full-time equivalents, around 1% of total UK non-financial employees. The current set of figures replaced previous government efforts to quantify the green economy under a much broader measure, that covered 460,000 employees, BusinessGreen notes.

Comment

Old King Coal is still a merry old soul, despite reports of his demise

Robin Pagnamenta, The Times

Coal seems to be making a comeback, writes Robin Pagnamenta in the Times. “The polluting black fuel may be about as fashionable as a pair of cargo pants or a holiday on the Costa Brava, but thermal coal prices jumped by 33% in 2017, making it one of the world’s top five high-performing commodities.” Pagnamenta adds: “For all the many problems it poses, coal plays a pivotal role in the world’s energy mix…Coal demand in China itself — easily the world’s biggest consumer, which is urgently seeking to improve air quality and to tackle climate change by increasing renewable energy production — is expected to fall modestly or to stagnate at or close to present levels in the next few years.” He concludes: “Of course, in the longer term the future for coal looks bleak as governments seek to accelerate a shift to cleaner fuels and the price of renewable alternatives, such as solar and wind energy, continue to fall. But the coal industry is proving tougher to destroy than many had hoped.” Meanwhile in the US, S&P Global’s Taylor Kuykendall reports that a top assistant to the US energy secretary has assured the US coal industry he is “here to help…I went to Washington DC for one purpose and that was to help create coal jobs in the United States”.

Science

Nature

Long-term warming, not cooling, defined the Holocene until around 2,000 years ago, a new study shows. The Holocene is the current geological period and began around 11,700 years ago. The new research analysed sub-fossil pollen from 642 sites across North America and Europe and found a long-term warming trend across the epoch. Their findings fit those of model simulations but go against lines of evidence derived from fossils, the researchers say. “Cooling during most of the past two millennia has been widely recognized and has been inferred to be the dominant global temperature trend of the past 11,700 years (the Holocene epoch). However, long-term cooling has been difficult to reconcile with global forcing, and climate models consistently simulate long-term warming,” they say. “Here we show that temperatures reconstructed from sub-fossil pollen from 642 sites across North America and Europe closely match simulations, and that long-term warming, not cooling, defined the Holocene until around 2,000 years ago.”

Climate impacts in Europe under 1.5C global warming

Earth’s Future

Global warming of 1.5C above pre-industrial limits could have far-reaching effects on “a wide range of sectors and regions” in Europe, a new analysis shows. For example, heatwaves could become twice as likely over southern Europe and the Mediterranean under 1.5C of warming, the research finds. However, the report also projects a small number of “positive impacts”, the researchers say: “Summer tourism in some parts of western Europe may be favoured by climate change; energy demand decreases outweigh increases over most of Europe. However, such positive findings should be interpreted carefully.”