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President François Hollande calls on other European countries to follow France’s lead by the end of the year
President François Hollande on Wednesday finalised ratification of the Paris climate accord reached in December 2015, making France the first industrialised country to do so.
“Signing is good, ratifying is better,” Hollande quipped at the Élysée Palace ceremony, flanked by environment minister Ségolène Royal, foreign minister Jean-Marc Ayrault and other top officials.
Continue reading...New sediment data suggests the dinosaurs were rapidly done in, strengthening asteroid impact theory
Boring is beautiful when you’re studying a calamity, especially one as spectacular as the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs. That’s because exciting sediments, full of variations and gaps, make it hard to disentangle the extinction signal from the noise of natural variability.
So you could say that James Witts, of the University of Leeds in the UK, lucked-out with an especially boring batch of sediments in Seymour Island on the Antarctic Peninsula (the part on the map that points up to South America). His study, recently published in the journal Nature Communications, catches the extinction of marine life in one of the most detailed records ever published for the end-Cretaceous. As Witts describes it:
The sedimentology is consistently, remarkably boring. More than 1,000 meters of sandy silt and silty sand!
It doesn’t look like the environmental setting over the extinction itself changed significantly, so we can discount any rapid changes in water depth having an effect on the pattern of extinction we see from the fossil record.
The anoxia story was a surprise to us. In such a shallow setting it appears unusual. I imagine a scenario like parts of the Gulf of Mexico today, with input of material from rivers driving changes in ocean oxygen on a rapid (maybe seasonal?) scale.
Ultimately, one of the problems with studies on the end-Cretaceous extinction is that we are pushing the limits of the resolution of many fossil records, as well as the proxies for environmental change.
The fact that the fossil disappearances occur directly below the interval containing the iridium anomaly suggests the link between impact and extinction is still the key to understanding the pattern we see in the fossil record. I would also argue that we still simply don’t know enough about whether the eruptions could have produced environmental change significant enough to cause the extinction.
Continue reading...Parliament approves radical proposal of accelerated emissions cuts and carbon offsetting to achieve climate goal 20 years earlier than planned
Norway’s parliament has approved a radical goal of achieving climate neutrality by 2030, two decades earlier than planned.
On Tuesday night MPs voted for an accelerated programme of CO2 cuts and carbon trading to offset emissions from sectors such as Norway’s oil and gas industries, which are unlikely to be phased out in the near future.
Continue reading...Energy minister Lily D’Ambrosio reveals renewable energy targets, saying investors have ‘lost faith’ in national target
The Victorian government has revealed renewable energy targets that would see 25% of the state’s electricity generated by renewable energy by 2020, saying investors have “lost faith” in the national target.
Ernst and Young and the Climate Council released a report on Wednesday that said 50% renewable electricity by 2030 would boost employment by almost 50% more than the current trajectory towards 34% renewables by 2030.
Related: Boost renewable energy target to 50% and get 28,000 extra jobs, says report
Related: Climate change: Victoria pledges zero net carbon emissions by 2050
Continue reading...BP’s call for a ‘meaningful carbon price’ is the latest example of wrongly trying to apply economic theories and tools to the environment
BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy is a standard industry reference document. It’s a useful indicator of trends, if occasionally the victim of politics.
Continue reading...Scientists warn that global warming target will be overshot within two decades, as annual concentrations of CO2 set to pass 400 parts per million in 2016
Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 will shatter the symbolic barrier of 400 parts per million (ppm) this year and will not fall below it our in our lifetimes, according to a new Met Office study.
Carbon dioxide measurements at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii are forecast to soar by a record 3.1ppm this year – up from an annual average of 2.1ppm – due in large part to the cyclical El Niño weather event in the Pacific, the paper says.
Related: CO2 turned into stone in Iceland in climate change breakthrough
Continue reading...Lobbying from the petroleum industry may have convinced Republicans to denounce a carbon tax
On Friday, the US House of Representatives voted on a Resolution condemning a carbon tax. As The Hill reported:
Lawmakers passed, by a 237-163 vote, a GOP-backed resolution listing pitfalls from a tax on carbon dioxide emissions and concluding that such a policy “would be detrimental to American families and businesses, and is not in the best interest of the United States.”
Six Democrats voted with the GOP for the resolution. No Republicans dissented.
And it’s not just a matter of lobbying by Big Oil and the Koch operation on how Republicans ought to vote; given their control over the Republican Party, it is very likely that the vote itself was brought up at their behest.
It is worrying to me that the House would consider legislation to oppose a common-sense approach to addressing climate change. Instead of relying on dozens of federal and state regulations that themselves are costly, a carbon tax would be transparent and cost-effective.
The first Scalise Carbon tax amendment passed the House on Aug 2, 2013. It had 155 co-sponsors. Today’s Scalise amendment had only 82 co-sponsors, and rumor has it that the leadership was strongly going after its membership to vote with the party. The fact that the vote took place two days after originally scheduled may support that. So what I see is a recycled idea with less support and on which the party leadership is having to work harder to enforce the party line ....
The language of Scalise, by completely ignoring the case of a revenue-neutral carbon fee, is easily countered by existing statements from conservative economists. In short, while annoying, I don’t see this vote as a problem we didn’t already have, nor do I see it as remotely insurmountable.
Continue reading...Analysis of Peabody Energy court documents show company backed trade groups, lobbyists and thinktanks dubbed ‘heart and soul of climate denial’
Peabody Energy, America’s biggest coalmining company, has funded at least two dozen groups that cast doubt on manmade climate change and oppose environment regulations, analysis by the Guardian reveals.
The funding spanned trade associations, corporate lobby groups, and industry front groups as well as conservative thinktanks and was exposed in court filings last month.
Related: The truth behind Peabody's campaign to rebrand coal as a poverty cure
Continue reading...Our security and prosperity depend on a successful response to climate change, the most urgent challenge of our time. So does any prospect of a transition to a way of living together that is just and sustainable. And if we fail on climate, we lose the very capacity to shape our destiny that makes sovereignty worth having.
Related: David Cameron on the prospect of Brexit: ‘Leave want to take the country backwards’
We can win our democracy back. But to win it we must work with democratic forces across Europe
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