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Climate Change
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MELBOURNE, Australia — One of the world’s largest coal companies, acknowledging the growing momentum toward addressing climate change, said it planned to pull out of a major industry group over its environmental stances.
B.H.P. Billiton, the British-Australian mining company, said in a reportTuesday that it planned to withdraw from the World Coal Association, an international lobbying group, because of differences in climate and energy policies. The report also noted that B.H.P. would review its relationship with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in light of the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord.
The move highlights the delicate considerations huge mining companies must contend with as they seek to balance profit with social and environmental awareness.
It represents the latest example of a business that is largely built around traditional fossil fuels responding to investor and government concern over climate change. Last week, the oil and gas giant BP said it would spend $200 million to acquire a large stake in a solar power developer, while Norway’s Statoil and France’s Total have also made investments in renewables.
Though carefully worded, B.H.P.’s report also takes issue with the Trump administration’s unilateral exit from the Paris agreement.
“While we won’t always agree with our industry associations, we will continue to call out material differences where they exist and we will take action where necessary, as we have done today,” Geoff Healy, the company’s chief external affairs officer, said in a statement.
OldmanRob
Member
Global warming is a hoax
What the science struggles with is the world is still organized around the same linear resource exploitation model optimized for growth. This is not an analytical problem; it is cultural and requires cultural change.
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There may be no notion more dangerous than the false belief that we can "reverse" climate change in any real way, on any meaningful human timescale.
We can end emissions. We can try to cool some warming by drawing down CO2.
We cannot undo the destruction we've set in motion.
Scientists just presented a sweeping new estimate of how much humans have transformed the planet
Scientists just presented a sweeping new estimate of how much humans have transformed the planet
Erb K-H, Kastner T, Plutzar C, et al. Unexpectedly large impact of forest management and grazing on global vegetation biomass. Nature 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature25138
Carbon stocks in vegetation have a key role in the climate system. However, the magnitude, patterns and uncertainties of carbon stocks and the effect of land use on the stocks remain poorly quantified. Here we show, using state-of-the-art datasets, that vegetation currently stores around 450 petagrams of carbon. In the hypothetical absence of land use, potential vegetation would store around 916 petagrams of carbon, under current climate conditions.
This difference highlights the massive effect of land use on biomass stocks. Deforestation and other land-cover changes are responsible for 53–58% of the difference between current and potential biomass stocks. Land management effects (the biomass stock changes induced by land use within the same land cover) contribute 42–47%, but have been underestimated in the literature. Therefore, avoiding deforestation is necessary but not sufficient for mitigation of climate change.
Our results imply that trade-offs exist between conserving carbon stocks on managed land and raising the contribution of biomass to raw material and energy supply for the mitigation of climate change. Efforts to raise biomass stocks are currently verifiable only in temperate forests, where their potential is limited. By contrast, large uncertainties hinder verification in the tropical forest, where the largest potential is located, pointing to challenges for the upcoming stocktaking exercises under the Paris agreement.
We can end emissions. We can try to cool some warming by drawing down CO2.
We cannot undo the destruction we've set in motion.
Scientists just presented a sweeping new estimate of how much humans have transformed the planet
Scientists just presented a sweeping new estimate of how much humans have transformed the planet
Erb K-H, Kastner T, Plutzar C, et al. Unexpectedly large impact of forest management and grazing on global vegetation biomass. Nature 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature25138
Carbon stocks in vegetation have a key role in the climate system. However, the magnitude, patterns and uncertainties of carbon stocks and the effect of land use on the stocks remain poorly quantified. Here we show, using state-of-the-art datasets, that vegetation currently stores around 450 petagrams of carbon. In the hypothetical absence of land use, potential vegetation would store around 916 petagrams of carbon, under current climate conditions.
This difference highlights the massive effect of land use on biomass stocks. Deforestation and other land-cover changes are responsible for 53–58% of the difference between current and potential biomass stocks. Land management effects (the biomass stock changes induced by land use within the same land cover) contribute 42–47%, but have been underestimated in the literature. Therefore, avoiding deforestation is necessary but not sufficient for mitigation of climate change.
Our results imply that trade-offs exist between conserving carbon stocks on managed land and raising the contribution of biomass to raw material and energy supply for the mitigation of climate change. Efforts to raise biomass stocks are currently verifiable only in temperate forests, where their potential is limited. By contrast, large uncertainties hinder verification in the tropical forest, where the largest potential is located, pointing to challenges for the upcoming stocktaking exercises under the Paris agreement.
New research shows that scientists are manipulating sea level data to inflate predictions of future sea level rise.
RATING
FALSE
Climate change is absolutely normal and so are huge climate swings. When Yellowstone finally erupts humanity will most likely be wiped out do to a volcanic winter of EPIC SCALE!!! We're talking -20 in tropical countries for a hundred years at least lol.
Humanity can do it's absolute worst to planet Earth, but as soon as we are all gone the Earth will rebound and be back to normal like we never even existed. A couple hundred thousand years to this planet is like seconds in a day to us humans.
Humanity can do it's absolute worst to planet Earth, but as soon as we are all gone the Earth will rebound and be back to normal like we never even existed. A couple hundred thousand years to this planet is like seconds in a day to us humans.
To address the twin threats of climate change and ocean acidification, nearly every nation has promised to reduce fossil fuel burning.
But so far, humanity keeps burning ever more. Last year we did it again, burning an all-time record amount.
That's according to data compiled from the latest "BP Statistical Review of World Energy." This annual report is one of the most widely used and referenced around the world. It's big and comprehensive with fifty pages, thirty-three spreadsheets and forty charts. The report highlights most of the important trends in global energy. Most. But one critical trend was nowhere to be found....
Conspicuously absent was the basic statistic on fossil fuels that I, as a climate reporter, was looking for: how much fuel is the world burning each year? Such a simple question, and the answer tells one of the most important stories in the world: are we finally turning the corner on our fossil fuel dependency?
NO
DNV GL has added a new addition to the energy outlook literature, one that builds a forecast of the ‘most likely’ future leading to around 2.5°C in 2100.
Park C-E, Jeong S-J, Joshi M, et al. Keeping global warming within 1.5 °C constrains emergence of aridification. Nature Climate Change 2018;8:70-4. Keeping global warming within 1.5 °C constrains emergence of aridification
Aridity—the ratio of atmospheric water supply (precipitation; P) to demand (potential evapotranspiration; PET)—is projected to decrease (that is, areas will become drier) as a consequence of anthropogenic climate change, exacerbating land degradation and desertification.
However, the timing of significant aridification relative to natural variability—defined here as the time of emergence for aridification (ToEA)—is unknown, despite its importance in designing and implementing mitigation policies. Here we estimate ToEA from projections of 27 global climate models (GCMs) under representative concentration pathways (RCPs) RCP4.5 and RCP8.5, and in doing so, identify where emergence occurs before global mean warming reaches 1.5 °C and 2 °C above the pre-industrial level.
On the basis of the ensemble median ToEA for each grid cell, aridification emerges over 32% (RCP4.5) and 24% (RCP8.5) of the total land surface before the ensemble median of global mean temperature change reaches 2 °C in each scenario. Moreover, ToEA is avoided in about two-thirds of the above regions if the maximum global warming level is limited to 1.5 °C. 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.
Aridity—the ratio of atmospheric water supply (precipitation; P) to demand (potential evapotranspiration; PET)—is projected to decrease (that is, areas will become drier) as a consequence of anthropogenic climate change, exacerbating land degradation and desertification.
However, the timing of significant aridification relative to natural variability—defined here as the time of emergence for aridification (ToEA)—is unknown, despite its importance in designing and implementing mitigation policies. Here we estimate ToEA from projections of 27 global climate models (GCMs) under representative concentration pathways (RCPs) RCP4.5 and RCP8.5, and in doing so, identify where emergence occurs before global mean warming reaches 1.5 °C and 2 °C above the pre-industrial level.
On the basis of the ensemble median ToEA for each grid cell, aridification emerges over 32% (RCP4.5) and 24% (RCP8.5) of the total land surface before the ensemble median of global mean temperature change reaches 2 °C in each scenario. Moreover, ToEA is avoided in about two-thirds of the above regions if the maximum global warming level is limited to 1.5 °C. 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.
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