[TheClimate.Vote] November 15, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest.

[Richard Pauli]

/*November 15, 2020*/

[Climate change intensifies weather]
*Scientists link record-breaking hurricane season to climate crisis*
Evidence is not so much in the number of tropical storms the Atlantic 
has seen, but in their strength, intensity and rainfall...
- -
The Atlantic hurricane season is expected to last until December this 
year, meaning that Iota might not be the last.

"When a season like 2020 keeps on cranking these things out, it's going 
to keep on doing that," said Masters.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/15/scientists-link-record-breaking-hurricane-season-to-climate-crisis



[Opinion]
*When Will Electricity Companies Finally Quit Natural Gas?*
Wind and solar are better bets for investors and the planet.
By Justin Gillis and Michael O'Boyle
Mr. Gillis is a contributing opinion writer. Mr. O'Boyle is director of 
electricity policy for the research firm Energy Innovation.
Nov. 12, 2020
- -
Now, it is true that gas plants play a critical role on the electrical 
grid at the moment because they provide nearly 40 percent the country's 
electricity. But a major new report from the University of California, 
Berkeley, shows that the United States already has enough gas plants to 
support a transition to a far cleaner grid. To the extent new power is 
needed, wind and solar plants, coupled with large batteries, are 
generally cheaper options.

By contrast, if the companies go forward with $100 billion worth of new 
plants, those plants may need to be shut down within 10 to 15 years to 
meet national, state or utility goals for emissions reductions -- a 
foolhardy investment.

At least 26 of the proposed plants are already under construction, and 
it may be too late to stop them. Fortunately, many of the ones that are 
not as far along could well be killed by market forces...
- -
Alas, the situation is quite different in monopoly markets, where 
utilities face little or no competition. They recover their costs 
through rates set by state regulators, not by operation of a market. The 
Southeast is one section of the country that is especially problematic. 
There, big utility holding companies like Duke Energy and Southern 
Company jealously guard their monopoly fiefs.

Duke just released a plan suggesting it wants to build at least 10 new 
gas plants in the Carolinas. Southern Company -- which owns utilities in 
Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi -- also wants to build large new gas 
plants, though it has yet to reveal the exact number. The Tennessee 
Valley Authority, a federally owned corporation that is also a de facto 
monopoly and supplies power to seven Southern states, plans to build up 
to 11 gas plants.

At risk here is not investor money, but the wallets of people who live 
in the Southern states. Once these plants get built, customers will be 
forced to pay for them even if they shut down early...
- -
We admire the nation's power companies. They are adroit at the hard job 
of keeping the lights on. And they are starting to see that global 
warming is serious. Emissions from electricity generation have fallen 
more than a quarter since 2005.

But we also think the companies lack a sense of urgency about the 
climate crisis, a problem compounded by their poverty of imagination. 
Technologies are available now that would allow them to go much faster 
on energy transition, yet they are stuck in an antiquated mind-set: The 
best way to make electricity is to burn something.

That era will end. The sooner the companies come to grips with that, the 
sooner they can build the clean, affordable power grid the American 
people need.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/12/opinion/solar-wind-natural-gas-climate-change.html



[go Joe]
*Biden Wants to Be the Climate President. He'll Need Some Help From Xi 
Jinping.*
The U.S.-China relationship is at its lowest point in a half century, 
but there are also converging interests on global warming...
- -
If Joseph R. Biden Jr. wants to be known as the first climate president 
of the United States, he will have to engage his biggest rival on the 
world stage: President Xi Jinping of China.

Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi, though, are locked in a very difficult 
relationship that makes climate cooperation a bit like a couple in 
divorce court trying to plan their child's wedding. And, unfortunately 
for the American president-elect, he won't be starting from a position 
of strength...
- -
An analysis by two research organizations, the Asia Society Policy 
Institute and Climate Analytics, to be issued next week but reviewed by 
The New York Times, concludes that China would have to peak its carbon 
emissions by 2025, five years earlier than the country has promised, and 
phase out coal by 2040 in order to keep global temperatures close to the 
upper limits laid out in the Paris Agreement.

The test of Mr. Xi's climate ambitions rests in large part on China's 
next five-year plan, an economic road map for the country that is due in 
the spring. It remains to be seen how that plan will handle China's 
addiction to coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, which supplies the bulk of 
the country's electricity despite its expansion of solar and wind power.

China is the world's biggest coal consumer. It accounts for the world's 
largest fleet of new coal-fired power plants, according to the research 
and advocacy group Urgewald. Four of the world's top coal-plant builders 
are Chinese.

China's five-year plan will come out shortly after Mr. Biden comes into 
office and issues his own road map to re-engineer the American economy 
for the era of climate change. That, several diplomats and analysts 
said, could spur a virtuous competition.

"There would be a race to the top of a low-carbon world," said Byford 
Tsang, a China specialist at E3G, a London-based research group.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/13/climate/biden-climate-china.html



[never too late]
*Are We Really Past the Point of No Return on Climate? Scientists 
Respond To Controversial New Study*
  Olivia RosaneNov. 13, 2020
Are We Really Past the Point of No Return on Climate? Scientists Respond 
To Controversial New Study
A flooded house south of Dhaka, Bangladesh. A new climate study has 
found we could be locked in for nearly 10 feet of sea level rise by 2500 
even if we stop emissions today. Yann Arthus-Bertrand / Getty Images Plus
A controversial new climate study has found that, even if greenhouse gas 
emissions were halted tomorrow, it might not be enough to stop 
temperatures from continuing to rise.

The study, published in Scientific Reports Thursday, was conducted by 
two researchers at the BI Norwegian Business School. They used the 
ESCIMO climate model to determine that, even if emissions ceased 
tomorrow, the permafrost would continue to thaw for hundreds of years.

"According to our models, humanity is beyond the point-of-no-return when 
it comes to halting the melting of permafrost using greenhouse gas cuts 
as the single tool," lead author and professor emeritus of climate 
strategy Jorgen Randers told AFP. "If we want to stop this melting 
process we must do something in addition – for example, suck CO2 out of 
the atmosphere and store it underground, and make Earth's surface brighter."

However, other scientists have pointed to the simplicity of the model 
Randers and his colleague Ulrich Goluke used and cautioned against 
misinterpreting their findings as a reason to give up on climate action.

"This paper clearly may be cited in support of a misleading message that 
it is now 'too late' to avoid catastrophic climate change, which would 
have the potential to cause unnecessary despair," University of Exeter 
climate scientist professor Richard Betts said in response. "However, 
the study is nowhere near strong enough to make such a frightening 
message credible."

So what exactly does the study say? The researchers used their model to 
see what would happen by 2500 if emissions stopped today and if they 
slowly declined to zero by 2100, as AFP explained. In the first 
scenario, temperatures would still rise to around 2.3 degrees Celsius 
above pre-industrial levels within the next 50 years, taper off, then 
rise again starting in 2150. By 2500, the world would be around three 
degrees Celsius warmer and sea levels would rise by around three meters 
(approximately 9.8 feet). In the second, temperature and sea level rise 
would end up in the same place, but the temperature increase would be 
much faster.

The reason for the persistent increase comes from three feedback loops, 
the model found.

The melting of sea ice, which means that the sun's heat is absorbed into 
the darker ocean instead of reflected back by the bright ice.
The thawing of permafrost, which releases more greenhouse gases into the 
atmosphere.
Increased moisture in the atmosphere, which in turn raises temperatures.
The only way to have prevented runaway climate change would have been to 
have stopped burning fossil fuels between 1960 and 1970, the model 
found, as USA TODAY reported. In order to stop temperatures and sea 
levels from rising now, we would have to remove at least 33 gigatons of 
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year starting this one.

The study authors were the first to admit their findings were limited to 
one model.

"We encourage other model builders to explore our discovery in their 
(bigger) models, and report on their findings," they wrote.

However, Betts noted that their model was not the model used by the 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and did not 
realistically simulate how the climate works.

Penn State University meteorologist Michael Mann agreed. He told USA 
TODAY that it was not very complex and did not accurately reproduce 
atmospheric and ocean circulation systems.

"While such models can be useful for conceptual inferences, their 
predictions have to be taken with great skepticism. Far more realistic 
climate models that do resolve the large-scale dynamics of the ocean, 
atmosphere and carbon cycle, do NOT produce the dramatic changes these 
authors argue for based on their very simplified model," he said. "It 
must be taken not just with a grain of salt, but a whole salt-shaker 
worth of salt."

That said, even the models used by the IPCC show that we will need to 
draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to reach the Paris 
agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above 
pre-industrial levels, even if we achieve zero emissions by 2050.

"What the study does draw attention to is that reducing global carbon 
emissions to zero by 2050 is just the start of our actions to deal with 
climate change," University College London climate professor Mark Maslin 
said in response.
https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-study-greenhouse-gas-emissions-2648886531.html



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - November 15, 1999 *

Speaking at the London Institute of Petroleum, former Defense Secretary 
Dick Cheney declares:

    "From the standpoint of the oil industry obviously and I'll talk a
    little later on about gas, but obviously for over a hundred years we
    as an industry have had to deal with the pesky problem that once you
    find oil and pump it out of the ground you've got to turn around and
    find more or go out of business. Producing oil is obviously a
    self-depleting activity. Every year you've got to find and develop
    reserves equal to your output just to stand still, just to stay
    even. This is true for companies as well in the broader economic
    sense as it is for the world. A new merged company like Exxon-Mobil
    will have to secure over a billion and a half barrels of new oil
    equivalent reserves every year just to replace existing production.
    It's like making one hundred per cent interest discovery in another
    major field of some five hundred million barrels equivalent every
    four months or finding two Hibernias a year.

    "For the world as a whole, oil companies are expected to keep
    finding and developing enough oil to offset our seventy one million
    plus barrel a day of oil depletion, but also to meet new demand. By
    some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual
    growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with
    conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from
    existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of
    an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going
    to come from?

    "Governments and the national oil companies are obviously
    controlling about ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains
    fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world
    offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of
    the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize
    ultimately lies, even though companies are anxious for greater
    access there, progress continues to be slow."

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2004-06-08/full-text-dick-cheneys-speech-institute-petroleum-autumn-lunch-1999

/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

/Archive of Daily Global Warming News 
<https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/2017-October/date.html> 
/
https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote

/To receive daily mailings - click to Subscribe 
<mailto:subscribe at theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request> 
to news digest./

*** Privacy and Security:*This mailing is text-only.  It does not carry 
images or attachments which may originate from remote servers.  A 
text-only message can provide greater privacy to the receiver and sender.
By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain must be used for democratic 
and election purposes and cannot be used for commercial purposes. 
Messages have no tracking software.
To subscribe, email: contact at theclimate.vote 
<mailto:contact at theclimate.vote> with subject subscribe, To Unsubscribe, 
subject: unsubscribe
Also you may subscribe/unsubscribe at 
https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote
Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Pauli for 
http://TheClimate.Vote <http://TheClimate.Vote/> delivering succinct 
information for citizens and responsible governments of all levels. List 
membership is confidential and records are scrupulously restricted to 
this mailing list.