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Clouds don’t act as a climate thermostat, and they’re not going to save us from global warming
Climate deniers have come up with a lot of arguments about why we shouldn’t worry about global warming – about 200 of them – but most are quite poor, contradictory, and easily debunked by consulting the peer-reviewed scientific literature. The cleverest climate contrarians settle on the least implausible argument – that equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS – how much a doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will increase Earth’s surface temperature) is low, meaning that the planet will warm relatively slowly in response to human carbon pollution.
But they have to explain how that can be the case, because there are a lot of factors that amplify global warming. For example, a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, which is itself a greenhouse gas, adding further warming. Warming also melts ice, leaving Earth’s surface less reflective, absorbing more sunlight. There are a number of these amplifying ‘feedbacks,’ but few that would act to significantly slow global warming.
Out now in @Nature: @KenCaldeira and I show that Earth’s recent energy budget suggests greater future global warming than raw climate model projections indicate.https://t.co/yLHlwAZt5C pic.twitter.com/CsdRMKHLWH
This leads to one of the biggest “skeptical” talking points: “Observational estimates of ECS are much lower than models” or “Models are too sensitive to CO2”. In the session today, it’s clear that the scientific community has beaten the shit out of this problem. 2/
In a year or so, “Observational estimates of ECS are much lower than models” will be sitting next to “global warming stopped in 1998” or “the surface temperature record can’t be trusted” in the junk yard of discredited skeptical ideas. 5/
Continue reading...Exclusive: pension schemes will be free to dump fossil fuel investments after government drops ‘best returns’ legal rules
The government is to allow Britain’s £2tn workplace pension schemes to dump their shares in oil, gas and coal companies more easily, empowering them to take investment decisions to fight climate change.
Until now, pension schemes have been hamstrung by “fiduciary duties” that effectively require schemes to seek the best returns irrespective of the threat of climate change. Many have rebuffed calls by members for fossil fuel divestment, citing legal obligations.
Related: Global coal consumption forecast to slow
Continue reading...For many countries impacted by the negative impacts of climate change, much more money is leaving in debt payments than they receive in grants to cope with climate impacts (Theresa May: It’s Britain’s duty to help nations hit by climate change, 12 December).
Even before this autumn’s devastating hurricanes, Caribbean countries were suffering under unsustainable debts caused by the legacy of colonialism, unjust trade rules, harsh austerity measures imposed in return for bailouts, and past disasters. Now countries such as Antigua and Barbuda, and Dominica, are expected to keep paying debts while struggling to rebuild.
Continue reading...The climate is warming and the water is rising. In his new book, Jeff Goodell argues that sea-level rise will reshape our world in ways we can only begin to imagine
After the hurricane hit Miami in 2037, a foot of sand covered the famous bow-tie floor in the lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. A dead manatee floated in the pool where Elvis had once swum. Most of the damage came not from the hurricane’s 175-mile-an-hour winds, but from the twenty-foot storm surge that overwhelmed the low-lying city.
In South Beach, historic Art Deco buildings were swept off their foundations. Mansions on Star Island were flooded up to their cut-glass doorknobs. A seventeen-mile stretch of Highway A1A that ran along the famous beaches up to Fort Lauderdale disappeared into the Atlantic. The storm knocked out the wastewater-treatment plant on Virginia Key, forcing the city to dump hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage into Biscayne Bay.
Even if we ban coal, gas, and oil tomorrow, we’re not going to be able to turn down the earth’s thermostat immediately
Related: Arctic permafrost thawing faster than ever, US climate study finds
Continue reading...In an era of environmental deregulation, groups like the American Petroleum Institute are focusing resources on the courts – and ‘time is on industry’s side’
In early October, 22 state and federal judges hailing from Honolulu to Albany got a crash course in scientific literacy and economics. The three-day symposium was billed as a way to help the judges better scrutinize evidence used to defend government regulations.
But the all-expenses-paid event hosted by George Mason University’s Law & Economics Center in Arlington, Virginia, served another purpose: it was the first of several seminars designed to promote “skepticism” of scientific evidence among likely candidates for the 140-plus federal judgeships Donald Trump will fill over the next four years.
(June 14, 1911) Standard Oil broken up
Continue reading...A flaw in Europe’s clean energy plan allows fuel from felled trees to qualify as renewable energy when in fact this would accelerate climate change and devastate forests
The European Union is moving to enact a directive to double Europe’s current renewable energy by 2030. This is admirable, but a critical flaw in the present version would accelerate climate change, allowing countries, power plants and factories to claim that cutting down trees and burning them for energy fully qualifies as renewable energy.
Even a small part of Europe’s energy requires a large quantity of trees and to avoid profound harm to the climate and forests worldwide the European council and parliament must fix this flaw.
Related: Protected forests in Europe felled to meet EU renewable targets – report
Continue reading...But it’s political corruption, not public opinion that’s blocking American climate policy
There’s a debate between social scientists about whether climate change facts can change peoples’ minds or just polarize them further. For example, conservatives who are more scientifically literate are less worried about global warming. In essence, education arms them with the tools to more easily reject evidence and information that conflicts with their ideological beliefs. This has been called the “smart idiot” effect and it isn’t limited to climate change; it’s also something we’re seeing with the Republican tax plan.
However, other research has shown that conservatives with higher climate-specific knowledge are more likely to accept climate change – a result that holds in many different countries. For example, when people understand how the greenhouse effect works, across the political spectrum they’re more likely to accept human-caused global warming.
in this paper, author doesn't report impact of %-scienist msg on perceptions of climate change 5/5
Individual opinions influence political outcomes through aggregation. Even a modest amount of variation in opinion across individuals will profoundly influence collective deliberations
Public awareness of scientific consensus has risen alongside and plausibly influenced public acceptance of anthropogenic climate change itself. https://t.co/J7fNaZjS0m pic.twitter.com/BdU1gtaOeZ
Continue reading...This year the Caribbean experienced its most destructive hurricane season in decades. While large countries dominated the headlines, the small island nation of Dominica suffered the worst devastation it has ever seen. Josh Toussaint-Strauss visits his family in the country and asks, with next year forecast to be worse, how Dominicans see their future
Continue reading...A technique has been devised that allows electricity to flow directly from solar panels to electrified train tracks to the trains themselves making solar powered trains more feasible than ever before
Last week, my 10:10 colleague Leo Murray co-authored a new report on solar-powered trains with Nathaniel Bottrell, an electrical engineer at Imperial College.
It’s exciting stuff. We think solar could power 20% of the Merseyrail network in Liverpool, as well as 15% of commuter routes in Kent, Sussex and Wessex. There’s scope for solar trams in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Nottingham, London and Manchester too, and there’s no reason it should just be a British thing either. We’re especially excited about possibilities in San Francisco, Mexico City, India and Spain, but trains and trams all over the world could be running on sun in a few years time.
Continue reading...The unprecedented downpour and severe flooding was also 15% more intense due to climate change, which is making weather more violent around the world
Hurricane Harvey’s unprecedented deluge, which caused catastrophic flooding in Houston in August, was made three times more likely by climate change, new research has found.
Such a downpour was a very rare event, scientists said, but global warming meant it was 15% more intense. The storm left 80 people dead and 800,000 in need of assistance.
Related: Climate change made Lucifer heatwave far more likely, scientists find
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