Climate Change

[Michael Scally MD]

Xu Y, Ramanathan V. Well below 2°C: Mitigation strategies for avoiding dangerous to catastrophic climate changes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2017;114(39):10315-23. http://www.pnas.org/content/114/39/10315.full

The historic Paris Agreement calls for limiting global temperature rise to “well below 2 °C.” Because of uncertainties in emission scenarios, climate, and carbon cycle feedback, we interpret the Paris Agreement in terms of three climate risk categories and bring in considerations of low-probability (5%) high-impact (LPHI) warming in addition to the central (∼50% probability) value.

The current risk category of dangerous warming is extended to more categories, which are defined by us here as follows: >1.5 °C as dangerous; >3 °C as catastrophic; and >5 °C as unknown, implying beyond catastrophic, including existential threats.

With unchecked emissions, the central warming can reach the dangerous level within three decades, with the LPHI warming becoming catastrophic by 2050.

We outline a three-lever strategy to limit the central warming below the dangerous level and the LPHI below the catastrophic level, both in the near term (<2050) and in the long term (2100): the carbon neutral (CN) lever to achieve zero net emissions of CO2, the super pollutant (SP) lever to mitigate short-lived climate pollutants, and the carbon extraction and sequestration (CES) lever to thin the atmospheric CO2 blanket. Pulling on both CN and SP levers and bending the emissions curve by 2020 can keep the central warming below dangerous levels.

To limit the LPHI warming below dangerous levels, the CES lever must be pulled as well to extract as much as 1 trillion tons of CO2 before 2100 to both limit the preindustrial to 2100 cumulative net CO2 emissions to 2.2 trillion tons and bend the warming curve to a cooling trend.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

The seven megatrends that could beat global warming: 'There is reason for hope'
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/08/seven-megatrends-that-could-beat-global-warming-climate-change

No one is saying the battle to avert catastrophic climate change – floods, droughts, famine, mass migrations – has been won. But these megatrends show the battle has not yet been lost, and that the tide is turning in the right direction. “The important thing is to reach a healthy balance where we recognise that we are seriously challenged, because we really have only three years left to reach the tipping point,” says Figueres. “But at the same time, the fact is we are already seeing many, many positive trends.”

THE TRENDS

1. Methane: getting to the meat - Carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is the main greenhouse gas, but methane and nitrous oxide are more potent and, unlike CO2, still rising. The major source is livestock farming, in particular belching cattle and their manure.

The world’s appetite for meat and dairy foods is rising as people’s incomes rise, but the simple arithmetic is that unless this is radically curbed, there is no way to beat global warming. The task looks daunting – people hate being told what to eat. However, just in the last year, a potential solution has burst on to the market: plant-based meat, which has a tiny environmental footprint.

What sounds like an oxymoron – food that looks and tastes just as good as meat or dairy products but is made from plants – has attracted heavy investment. The buzz is particularly loud in the US, where Bill Gates has backed two plant-based burger companies and Eric Schmidt, formerly CEO of Google, believes plant-based foods can make a “meaningful dent” in tackling climate change.

Perhaps even more telling is that major meat and dairy companies are now piling in with investments and acquisitions, such as the US’s biggest meat processor, Tyson, and multinational giants Danone and Nestlé. The Chinese government has just put $300m (£228m) into Israeli companies producing lab-grown meat, which could also cut emissions.

New plant-based products, from chicken to fish to cheese, are coming out every month. “We are in the nascent stage,” says Alison Rabschnuk at the US nonprofit group the Good Food Institute. “But there’s a lot of money moving into this area.”

Plant-based meat and dairy produce is not only environmentally friendly, but also healthier and avoids animal welfare concerns, but these benefits will not make them mass-market, she says: “We don’t believe that is what is going to make people eat plant-based food. We believe the products themselves need to be competitive on taste, price and convenience – the three attributes people use when choosing what to eat.”


Plant-based milks – soya, almond, oat and more – have led the way and are now about 10% of the market and a billion-dollar business in the US. But in the past year, sales of other meat and dairy substitutes have climbed 8%, with some specific lines, such as yoghurt, shooting up 55%. “I think the writing’s on the wall,” says Rabschnuk. Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson agrees. “I believe that in 30 years or so we will no longer need to kill any animals and that all meat will either be [lab] or plant-based, taste the same and also be much healthier for everyone.”

…

2. Renewable energy: time to shine

3. King coal: dead or dying

4. Electric cars: in the fast lane

5. Batteries: lots in store

6. Efficiency: negawatts over megawatts

7. Forests: seeing the wood

 

[CdnGuy]

Al Gore: 'I tried my best' but Trump can't be educated on climate change

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[CdnGuy]

Coal vs. climate change: Canada on collision course with U.S. at annual talks

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Coal vs. climate change: Canada on collision course with U.S. at annual talks

 

[CdnGuy]

We might go to war on this Doc lol

 

[Michael Scally MD]

The prospect of a dangerously warming planet inspires us to cling more tightly to our tribe. That is the discouraging finding of two newly published studies.

One reports that confronting people with climate-change warnings provoked higher levels of ethnocentrism among residents of a central European nation—and decreased their intentions of acting in Earth-friendly ways. The other finds the threat of global warming increases group conformity, leading people to more tightly endorse the truisms their circle subscribe to.

The results aren't surprising, if you consider the long line of research that finds threat of any kind tends to foster this sort of solidarity. It's just that this problem will require a globally coordinated response—not the insular, defensive crouch it apparently induces.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice

Twenty-five years ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists and more than 1700 independent scientists, including the majority of living Nobel laureates in the sciences, penned the 1992 “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity.” On the twenty-fifth anniversary of their call, we look back at their warning and evaluate the human response by exploring available time-series data.

Since 1992, with the exception of stabilizing the stratospheric ozone layer, humanity has failed to make sufficient progress in generally solving these foreseen environmental challenges, and alarmingly, most of them are getting far worse. Especially troubling is the current trajectory of potentially catastrophic climate change due to rising GHGs from burning fossil fuels, deforestation, and agricultural production—particularly from farming ruminants for meat consumption.

Moreover, we have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century.

Humanity is now being given a second notice, as illustrated by these alarming trends. We are jeopardizing our future by not reining in our intense but geographically and demographically uneven material consumption and by not perceiving continued rapid population growth as a primary driver behind many ecological and even societal threats.

By failing to adequately limit population growth, reassess the role of an economy rooted in growth, reduce greenhouse gases, incentivize renewable energy, protect habitat, restore ecosystems, curb pollution, halt defaunation, and constrain invasive alien species, humanity is not taking the urgent steps needed to safeguard our imperilled biosphere.

Ripple WJ, Wolf C, Newsome TM, et al. [15,364 scientist signatories from 184 countries] World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice. BioScience. World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice | BioScience | Oxford Academic

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Can Carbon-Dioxide Removal Save the World?
Can Carbon-Dioxide Removal Save the World?

…

A compelling reason for putting carbon removal on “the agenda” is that we are already counting on it. Negative emissions are built into the I.P.C.C. scenarios and the climate agreements that rest on them.

But everyone I spoke with, including the most fervent advocates for carbon removal, stressed the huge challenges of the work, some of them technological, others political and economic. Done on a scale significant enough to make a difference, direct air capture of the sort pursued by Carbon Engineering, in British Columbia, would require an enormous infrastructure, as well as huge supplies of power. (Because CO2 is more dilute in the air than it is in the exhaust of a power plant, direct air capture demands even more energy than C.C.S.) The power would have to be generated emissions-free, or the whole enterprise wouldn’t make much sense.

“You might say it’s against my self-interest to say it, but I think that, in the near term, talking about carbon removal is silly,” David Keith, the founder of Carbon Engineering, who teaches energy and public policy at Harvard, told me. “Because it almost certainly is cheaper to cut emissions now than to do large-scale carbon removal.”

beccs doesn’t make big energy demands; instead, it requires vast tracts of arable land. Much of this land would, presumably, have to be diverted from food production, and at a time when the global population—and therefore global food demand—is projected to be growing. (It’s estimated that to do beccs on the scale envisioned by some below-two-degrees scenarios would require an area larger than India.) Two researchers in Britain, Naomi Vaughan and Clair Gough, who recently conducted a workshop on beccs, concluded that “assumptions regarding the extent of bioenergy deployment that is possible” are generally “unrealistic.”

For these reasons, many experts argue that even talking (or writing articles) about negative emissions is dangerous. Such talk fosters the impression that it’s possible to put off action and still avoid a crisis, when it is far more likely that continued inaction will just produce a larger crisis. In “The Trouble with Negative Emissions,” an essay that ran last year in Science, Kevin Anderson, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, in England, and Glen Peters, of the climate-research center in Oslo, described negative-emissions technologies as a “high-stakes gamble” and relying on them as a “moral hazard par excellence.”

We should, they wrote, “proceed on the premise that they will not work at scale.” …

One of the peculiarities of climate discussions is that the strongest argument for any given strategy is usually based on the hopelessness of the alternatives: this approach must work, because clearly the others aren’t going to. This sort of reasoning rests on a fragile premise—what might be called solution bias. There has to be an answer out there somewhere, since the contrary is too horrible to contemplate.

Early last month, the Trump Administration announced its intention to repeal the Clean Power Plan, a set of rules aimed at cutting power plants’ emissions. The plan, which had been approved by the Obama Administration, was eminently achievable. Still, according to the current Administration, the cuts were too onerous. The repeal of the plan is likely to result in hundreds of millions of tons of additional emissions.

A few weeks later, the United Nations Environment Programme released its annual Emissions Gap Report. The report labelled the difference between the emissions reductions needed to avoid dangerous climate change and those which countries have pledged to achieve as “alarmingly high.” For the first time, this year’s report contains a chapter on negative emissions. “In order to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement,” it notes, “carbon dioxide removal is likely a necessary step.”

As a technology of last resort, carbon removal is, almost by its nature, paradoxical. It has become vital without necessarily being viable. It may be impossible to manage and it may also be impossible to manage without.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Policy relevance

Since the Paris meeting, there is increased awareness that most policy ‘solutions’ commensurate with 2°C include widespread deployment of negative emissions technologies (NETs).

Yet much less is understood about that option’s feasibility, compared with near-term efforts to curb energy demand. Moreover, the many different ways in which key information is synthesized for policy makers, clouds the ability of policy makers to make informed decisions.

This article presents an alternative approach to consider what the Paris Agreement implies, if NETs are unable to deliver more carbon sinks than sources. It illustrates the scale of the climate challenge for policy makers, particularly if the Agreement’s aim to address ‘equity’ is accounted for.

Here it is argued that much more attention needs to be paid to what CO2 reductions can be achieved in the short-term, rather than taking a risk that could render the Paris Agreement’s policy goals unachievable.

Larkin A, Kuriakose J, Sharmina M, Anderson K. What if negative emission technologies fail at scale? Implications of the Paris Agreement for big emitting nations. Climate Policy. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14693062.2017.1346498

A cumulative emissions approach is increasingly used to inform mitigation policy. However, there are different interpretations of what ‘2°C’ implies. Here it is argued that cost-optimization models, commonly used to inform policy, typically underplay the urgency of 2°C mitigation. The alignment within many scenarios of optimistic assumptions on negative emissions technologies (NETs), with implausibly early peak emission dates and incremental short-term mitigation, delivers outcomes commensurate with 2°C commitments.

In contrast, considering equity and socio-technical barriers to change, suggests a more challenging short-term agenda. To understand these different interpretations, short-term CO2 trends of the largest CO2 emitters, are assessed in relation to a constrained CO2 budget, coupled with a ‘what if’ assumption that negative emissions technologies fail at scale. The outcomes raise profound questions around high-level framings of mitigation policy.

The article concludes that applying even weak equity criteria, challenges the feasibility of maintaining a 50% chance of avoiding 2°C without urgent mitigation efforts in the short-term. This highlights a need for greater engagement with: (1) the equity dimension of the Paris Agreement, (2) the sensitivity of constrained carbon budgets to short-term trends and (3) the climate risks for society posed by an almost ubiquitous inclusion of NETs within 2°C scenarios.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

"Two Degrees: The Point of No Return"

As the Earth's average temperature rises each year, experts warn that we are nearing a fatal tipping point, 2 degrees Celsius above the norm, that will set into motion a cascade...

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x61h5hv

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x61h5ii

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Clear & important paper; well worth reading. Just remember it relates to the UK Govt's targets & that these are far weaker than what the UK would need to deliver to meet its Paris-based commitments.

McGlade C, Pye S, Ekins P, Bradshaw M, Watson J. The future role of natural gas in the UK: A bridge to nowhere? Energy Policy 2017;113:454-65. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421517307693

Highlights
· Gas unlikely to act as a cost-effective ‘bridge’ to a decarbonised UK energy system.
· Decarbonisation goals mean a limited role for unabated gas generation after 2030.
· Without CCS, gas use in 2050 would fall to 10% of 2010 levels.
· With large-scale CCS deployment, gas use in 2050 could be at 50% of 2010 levels.
· A robust gas strategy is needed to avoid lock-in and reflect the criticality of CCS.

The UK has ambitious, statutory long-term climate targets that will require deep decarbonisation of its energy system. One key question facing policymakers is the role of natural gas both during the transition towards, and in the achievement of, a future low-carbon energy system. Here we assess a range of possible futures for the UK, and find that gas is unlikely to act as a cost-effective ‘bridge’ to a decarbonised UK energy system. There is also limited scope for gas in power generation after 2030 if the UK is to meet its emission reduction targets, in the absence of carbon capture and storage (CCS). Without CCS, a ‘second dash for gas’ while providing short-term gains in reducing emissions, is unlikely to be the most cost-effective way to reduce emissions, and could result in stranded assets and compromise the UK's decarbonisation ambitions. In such a case, gas use in 2050 is estimated at only 10% of its 2010 level. However, with significant CCS deployment by 2050, natural gas could remain at 50–60% of the 2010 level, primarily in the industrial (including hydrogen production) and power generation sectors.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]