Group items tagged

The company, based in Virginia, did all the work and, on paper, the Marshall Islands became home to one of the world’s largest fleets. The government shared in the revenue — roughly $8 million a year as of recently, one official said.Things got thorny, however, when the foreign minister, Tony de Brum, traveled to the I.M.O. in 2015. His stories of his vanishing homeland had given urgency to the Paris talks and he expected a similar reception in London.

Industry officials and the maritime organization say such arrangements give a voice to the experts. “If you don’t involve the people who are actually going to have to deliver, then you’re going to get a poor outcome,” said Guy Platten, secretary general of the International Chamber of Shipping.

When delegates met last October — five years after Mr. de Brum’s speech — the organization had not taken any action. Proposals like speed limits had been debated and rejected.

German delegates were so upset that they threatened to oppose the deal, likely triggering a cascade of defections, according to three people involved in the talks. But European Union officials rallied countries behind the compromise, arguing that Europe could not be seen as standing in the way of even limited progress.

In the United States, the warming was most significant in the Northeast and Southwest.

With the 2020 results, the last seven years have been the warmest since the beginning of modern record-keeping nearly a century and a half ago, Dr. Schmidt said.

The planet has warmed more than 1 degree Celsius (about 2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s, when the spread of industrialization led to rising emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and the pace has accelerated in recent decades.

Dr. Schmidt said his team and others have been studying the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on 2020 temperatures. Lockdown orders and the economic slowdown reduced greenhouse gas emissions by about 10 percent in the United States alone, according to a recent report.

Dr. Schmidt said efforts were underway to quantify the effect over the past year. “The numbers aren’t large,” he said, but they may have played a role in making 2020 a record-tying year.

Climate scientists say vehicle electrification is one of the best ways to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

(Battery-electric engines have fewer moving parts that can break compared with gas-powered engines and they don’t require oil changes. Electric vehicles also use regenerative braking, which reduces wear and tear.)

The new data showed hybrid cars, which run on a combination of fuel and battery power, and can sometimes be plugged in, had more mixed results for both emissions and costs.

Gas prices are lower along the Gulf Coast and higher in California.

“With that trajectory, you can imagine that even immediately at the purchase price level, certain smaller sedans could reach purchase price parity in the next couple of years,” Dr. Gearhart said.

Now, as a new administration takes office and we look ahead to life after both Covid and Donald Trump, we need to face the fact that the world we live in is changing into something else, and that coping with the consequences of global warming demands immediate, widespread, radical action.

or decades, the country’s leading oil and gas companies have understood the science of climate change and the dangers posed by fossil fuels. Year after year, top executives heard it from their own scientists whose warnings were explicit and often dire.

In 1979, an Exxon study said that burning fossil fuels “will cause dramatic environmental effects” in the coming decades.“The potential problem is great and urgent,” it concluded.

o investigate the lengths of the oil and gas industry’s deceptions – and the disastrous consequences for communities across the country – the Guardian is launching a year-long series tracking the unprecedented efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry to account.

the legal reasoning behind foreign court judgments are unlikely to carry much weight in the US and domestic law is largely untested. In 2018, a federal court knocked back New York City’s initial attempt to force big oil to cover the costs of the climate crisis by saying that its global nature requires a political, not legal, remedy.

Among them is a 1988 Exxon memo laying out a strategy to push for a “balanced scientific approach”, which meant giving equal weight to hard evidence and climate change denialism. That move bore fruit in parts of the media into the 2000s as the oil industry repositioned global heating as theory, not fact, contributing to the most deep-rooted climate denialism in any developed country.

Other climate lawsuits, including one filed in Minnesota, allege the oil firms’ campaigns of deception and denial about the climate crisis amount to fraud. Minnesota is suing Exxon, Koch Industries and an industry trade group for breaches of state law for deceptive trade practices, false advertising and consumer fraud over what the lawsuit characterises as distortions and lies about climate science.

Farber said cases rooted in claims that the petroleum industry lied have the most promising chance of success.“To the extent the plaintiffs can point to misconduct, like telling everybody there’s no such thing as climate change when your scientists have told you the opposite, that might give the courts a greater feeling of comfort that they’re not trying to take over the US energy system,” he said.

The public nuisance claim, also pursued by Honolulu, San Francisco and Rhode Island, follows a legal strategy with a record of success in other types of litigation. In 2019, Oklahoma’s attorney general won compensation of nearly half a billion dollars against the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson over its false marketing of powerful prescription painkillers on the grounds it created a public nuisance by contributing to the opioid epidemic in the state.

Exxon set up equipment on a supertanker, the Esso Atlantic, to monitor carbon dioxide in seawater and the air. In 1982, the company’s scientists drew up a graph accurately plotting an increase in the globe’s temperature to date.

“The 1980s revealed an established consensus among scientists,” the Minnesota lawsuit against Exxon says. “A 1982 internal Exxon document … explicitly declares that the science was ‘unanimous’ and that climate change would ‘bring about significant changes in the earth’s climate’.”Then the monitoring on the Esso Atlantic was suddenly called off and other research downgraded.

Year after year, Exxon scientists recorded the evidence about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. In 1978, its science adviser, James Black, warned that there was a “window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategy might become critical”.

newspapers to sow doubt. One in the New York Times in 2000, under the headline “Unsettled Science”, compared climate data to changing weather forecasts. It claimed scientists were divided, when an overwhelming consensus already backed the evidence of a growing climate crisis, and said that the supposed doubts meant it was too soon to act.

Exxon’s chairman and chief executive, Lee Raymond, told industry executives in 1996 that “scientific evidence remains inconclusive as to whether human activities affect global climate”.“It’s a long and dangerous leap to conclude that we should, therefore, cut fossil fuel use,” he said.Documents show that his company’s scientists were telling Exxon’s management that the real danger lay in the failure to do exactly that.

In 2019, Martin Hoffert, a professor of physics at New York University, told a congressional hearing that as a consultant to Exxon on climate modelling in the 1980s, he worked on eight scientific papers for the company that showed fossil fuel burning was “increasingly having a perceptible influence on Earth’s climate”.

Exxon worked alongside Chevron, Shell, BP and smaller oil firms to shift attention away from the growing climate crisis. They funded the industry’s trade body, API, as it drew up a multimillion-dollar plan to ensure that “climate change becomes a non- issue” through disinformation. The plan said “victory will be achieved” when “recognition of uncertainties become part of the ‘conventional wisdom’”.

The fossil fuel industry also used its considerable resources to pour billions of dollars into political lobbying to block unfavourable laws and to fund front organisations with neutral and scientific-sounding names, such as the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). In 2001, the US state department told the GCC that President George W Bush rejected the Kyoto protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions “in part, based on input from you”.

“Big oil was engaged in exactly the same type of behaviour that the tobacco companies engaged in and were found liable for fraud on a massive scale,” said Eubanks. “The cover-up, the denial of the problem, the funding of scientists to question the science. The same pattern. And some of the same lawyers represent both tobacco and big oil.”

consider the proposed changes to energy-efficiency building codes, which get updated every three years. This round, the homebuilders have opposed changes that include requiring better insulation in attics and air ducts, as well as a proposal requiring new houses to be equipped with the circuitry required to install a plug for an electric vehicle — potentially making it easier for homeowners to switch to electric cars in the future.

The homebuilding industry says it opposes proposals that would make houses more expensive, pricing people out of the market.

Advocates for tougher building codes say the effects of decisions like these will be felt for generations as global warming leads to more powerful storms and higher risk of damage to property.

Conversations about climate change have broken into everyday life, to the top of the headlines and to center stage in the presidential campaign.

The questions are profound and urgent. Can this be reversed? What can be done to minimize the looming dangers for the decades ahead? Will the destruction of recent weeks become a moment of reckoning, or just a blip in the news cycle?

“It’s as if we’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for decades” and the world is now feeling the effects

But, she said, “we’re not dead yet.”

Climate change is more a slope than a cliff, experts agreed. We’re still far from any sort of “game over” moment where it’s too late to act. There remains much that can be done to limit the damage to come, to brace against the coming megafires and superstorms and save lives and hold onto a thriving civilization.

The effects of climate change evident today are the results of choices that countries made decades ago to keep pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates despite warnings from scientists about the price to be paid.

Nations, including the United States, have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.

Things are on track to get “twice as bad” as they are now, he said, “if not worse.”

it may be time to flip that chronological framing, and consider today the new starting point.

“Don’t think of it as the warmest month of August in California in the last century,” he wrote. “Think of it as one of the coolest months of August in California in the next century.”

Their most sobering message was that the world still hasn’t seen the worst of it. Gone is the climate of yesteryear, and there’s no going back.

“It’s not that it’s out of our control. The whole thing is in our control.”

Managing climate change, experts said, will require rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life

how and where homes are built, how power grids are designed, how people plan for the future with the collective good in mind.

It will require an epochal shift in politics in a country that has, on the whole, ignored climate change

The fires, along with others in places including Colorado, Oregon and Washington, destroyed entire towns and sent smoke tens of thousands of feet high. San Francisco, Portland and Seattle have suffered some of the unhealthiest air quality on the planet, beating cities such as Beijing and New Delhi for the title. Smoke spread all the way across the continent, with particles coloring sunsets on the East Coast.

Evidence of global warming — which, scientists said, helps drive a rise in wildfire activity by creating hotter and drier conditions — was hanging visibly in the air.

For a long time, “there was so much focus on how climate change would affect the most vulnerable, like low-lying island nations or coral reefs — things that don’t dramatically affect the economic powerhouses of the world,”

“There’s often been this arrogant assumption that wealth provides protection.”

“we’re all in this together.”

Again and again, climate scientists have shown that our choices now range from merely awful to incomprehensibly horrible.

every coal plant in China, every steel mill in Europe, every car and truck in the United States.

It’s a staggering task. It means reorienting a global economy that depends on fossil fuels

Even if we start radically slashing emissions today, it could be decades before those changes start to appreciably slow the rate at which Earth is warming. In the meantime, we’ll have to deal with effects that continue to worsen.

“Seriously, it is not reversible.”

First, experts broadly agreed, if we want to stop the planet from relentlessly heating up forever, humanity will quickly need to eliminate its emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

Whether Americans can adopt that mentality remains an open question.“We’ve often heard the argument that it will be too expensive to cut emissions and it will just be easier to adapt,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. But we’ve now had decades of warnings, he said, “and we’re not even adapted to the present climate.”

Failure to do so doubles or triples that number.

If we act now, sea levels could rise another 1 to 2 feet this century.

If we don’t, Antarctica’s ice sheets could destabilize irreversibly and ocean levels could keep rising at an inexorable pace for centuries, making coastal civilization all but unmanageable.

The best hope is to slow the pace of warming enough to maintain some control for humanity.

“In our research, we’ve found that most systems can cope with a 1.5-degree or 2-degree world, although it will be very costly and extremely difficult to adapt

“But in a 4-degree world, in many cases, the system just doesn’t work anymore.”

So, even as nations cut emissions, they will need to accelerate efforts to adapt to the climate change they can no longer avoid.

“The human capacity for adaptation is extraordinary — not unlimited, but extraordinary,”

“I’m much more concerned for the future of the nonhuman than I am for the future of humans, precisely because we’re just very, very good at adaptation.”

adaptation is usually a reactive measure, not a preventive one

Adapting to climate change means envisioning bigger disasters to come — again, flipping the framing away from history and into the future.

“Humans have difficulty imagining things that we haven’t experienced yet,”

It’s hard to visualize the entire West Coast aflame until you actually see it. And if we can’t see it, we tend to discount the risk.”

And there’s the moral hazard problem, which is when people are shielded from the costs of their decisions and thus make bad ones.

Cascading Disasters

Adaptation can quickly become bogged down in a tangle of competing motivations and unintended consequences.

Proposals for stricter building codes or higher insurance premiums face opposition from builders and voters alike.

If we cut emissions rapidly, about one-seventh of the world’s population will suffer severe heat waves every few years.

as climate change intensifies, it increases the risk of “compound hazards,” when numerous disasters strike simultaneously, as well as the risk that one disaster cascades into another.

Experts also noted that climate change is an accelerant of inequality. Those most affected, globally and in the United States, tend to be the most vulnerable populations.

One concern is that adaptability will not be a collective effort. Wealthier people may find ways to protect themselves, while others are left fending for themselves

A Lifetime of Clues

For well over a century, science has provided us with powerful clues that this was coming.

As early as the 1850s, researchers realized that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide could trap heat on Earth. This came at the dawn of the Industrial Age,

“I feel like the climate scientists have kind of done our job,” said Dr. Kalmus, the Los Angeles-based scientist. “We’ve laid it out pretty clearly, but nobody’s doing anything. So now it’s kind of up to the social scientists.”

ne 2017 study found that people who experience extreme weather are more likely to support climate adaptation measures than before. But the effect diminished over time. It may be that people mentally adjust to unusual weather patterns, updating their perception of what they consider normal.

“There’s too much complexity and, frankly, too much that needs to be changed, that we’re flitting from one concern to another,”

“What’s beautiful about the human species is that we have the free will to decide our own fate,” said Ilona Otto, a climate scientist at the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change. “We have the agency to take courageous decisions and do what’s needed,” she said. “If we choose.”

Social media posts mocked renewable energy as “unreliables.”

“Our infrastructure cannot handle extreme weather events, which these fossil fuels are ironically causing.”

With a sweeping set of executive orders in his initial days in office, Mr. Biden rejoined the Paris Agreement among nations to fight climate change, canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and issued a moratorium on drilling for fossil fuels on federal land, among other things.

“Building resilient and sustainable infrastructure that can withstand extreme weather and a changing climate will play an integral role in creating millions of good paying, union jobs, creating a clean energy economy, and meeting the president’s goal of reaching a net zero emissions future by 2050,” said Vedant Patel, a White House assistant press secretary.

The bulk of the power loss in Texas came from natural gas suppliers, according to regulators, as pipelines froze, making it difficult for plants to get the fuel they needed. Production from coal and nuclear plants dropped as well. A similar phenomenon played out in Kansas and other states.

Ms. Boebert mentioned a photo shared repeatedly this week on social media of wind turbines she said were in Texas and apparently being de-iced by helicopter with a substance derived from fossil fuels.

In Kansas, one of few states that rely heavily on wind power, the blades on some turbines froze, too. However, just like in Texas, the bigger problem was that the state’s frigid temperatures stopped delivery of natural gas to fossil-fuel-burning power plants.

Mr. Johnson has yet to deliver on another challenge that would please Mr. Biden: a trade agreement with the European Union. Mr. Biden has already voiced concern to Mr. Johnson that if the negotiations go awry, it could jeopardize the Good Friday Accord, which ended decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

Mr. Johnson cast his initiatives as gestures of support to allies, even at a time when the pandemic has busted public finances.

“Britain must be true to our history, to stand alongside our allies, sharing the burden, and bringing our expertise to bear on the world’s toughest problems,” Mr. Johnson said in introducing the defense spending plan to the House of Commons.

the Biden team will look favorably on this announcement because Biden will be as sensitive as Trump was, and Obama was, to the willingness of allies to shoulder more of the burden.”

Mr. Biden has pledged to reinvigorate America’s climate policy by swiftly rejoining the Paris climate accord. Analysts said he would also try to heal strains in the NATO alliance, which has been under relentless attack by Mr. Trump, who has accused other members of not paying their fair share of its costs.

The defense budget, Mr. Johnson claimed, will be the largest expansion of military spending since the Cold War: an increase of 24.1 billion pounds ($31.9 billion) over the next four years. That is nearly triple the increases his Conservative Party promised in its policy manifesto during the 2019 election.

The climate package, which claims to do nothing less than ignite a “green industrial revolution,” sets a goal of making Britain a net zero emitter of carbon dioxide by 2050. It would change the way people heat their homes and invest in alternative energy sources, in addition to banning the sale of new fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2030.

The climate package lacked the levels of investment pledged by Germany and France to reach their emissions-reduction targets. The military budget contained no information on what the money would be spent on; that is to be decided by a review of foreign, defense, security and development policy that will concluded early next year.

Mr. Biden’s defeat of Mr. Trump has radically reshaped the landscape for Mr. Johnson, confronting him with an American leader who opposed Brexit and is unlikely to make an Anglo-American trade agreement a priority, as the pro-Brexit Mr. Trump did.

Britain’s emphasis on defense, Mr. Fraser said, plays up a competitive advantage over France and Germany. Both spend proportionately less on their militaries and are not as closely integrated in security matters with the United States.

Britain confirmed the creation of a National Cyber Force, a joint venture of the Defense Ministry and GCHQ, the electronic surveillance agency.

Still, as several experts noted, Mr. Johnson’s bid to be useful to Mr. Biden will mean far less if Britain fails to strike a trade deal with Brussels. A yearlong transition period is set to expire on Jan. 1, and economists warn that not having a new agreement to take its place would do serious harm.

Rainforests support a vastly greater range of species than savannah and play a much greater role in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Parts of the Amazon are receiving much less rain than they used to because of the changing climate.

This year’s fires in the Amazon are the worst in a decade, with a 60% increase in fire hotspots compared with last year.

We understand now that rainforests on all continents are very sensitive to global change and can rapidly lose their ability to adapt. Once gone, their recovery will take many decades to return to their original state. And given that rainforests host the majority of all global species, all this will be forever lost.”

Russia hopes to seize on the warming temperatures and longer growing seasons brought by climate change to refashion itself as one of the planet’s largest producers of food.

But for a few nations, climate change will present an unparalleled opportunity, as the planet’s coldest regions become more temperate.

And no country may be better positioned to capitalize on climate change than Russia. Russia has the largest land mass by far of any northern nation.

There is an optimum climate for human productivity — average annual temperatures between 52 and 59 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — and much of the planet’s far north is headed straight toward it.

And as the climate warms, Canada will move into the ecological sweet spot for civilization, benefiting from new Arctic transportation routes as well as an expanded capacity for farming.

As Vladimir Putin himself once glibly put it, a couple of degrees of warming might not be so bad: “We could spend less on fur coats, and the grain harvest would go up.”

The race for prosperity in a climate-changed world is about achieving domestic self-reliance and also expanding geopolitical influence.

but Tchebakova’s research suggests that if humans continue to emit carbon dioxide at high rates, roughly half of Siberia — more than two million square miles — could become available for farming by 2080, and its capacity to support potential climate migrants could jump ninefold in some places as a result.

The wait may not be especially long. This season, crops of winter wheat and canola seed outside Tchebakova’s own city of Krasnoyarsk in southern Siberia produced twice the yields as the year before.

This is why a group of Canadian business executives and academics have called on their government to turn the country’s immigration system into a magnet for the planet’s most talented people, hoping to nearly triple Canada’s population by 2100.

But agriculture offers the key to one of the greatest resources of the new climate era — food — and in recent years Russia has already shown a new understanding of how to leverage its increasingly strong hand in agricultural exports

Russia’s agricultural dominance, says Rod Schoonover, the former director of environment and natural resources at the National Intelligence Council and a former senior State Department analyst under the Obama and Trump administrations, is “an emergent national security issue” that is “underappreciated as a geopolitical threat.”

In 2010, in what was a rare and early official assessment of climate risk, the U.S. Department of Defense’s Quadrennial Defense Review warned that climate change “could have significant geopolitical impacts,” contributing to poverty, starvation, drought and the spread of disease

The current plan invites any Russians willing to relocate themselves in Siberia and the Far East, including in the Birobidzhan area of the Jewish Autonomous Region, to buy properties at 2 percent interest.

Climate scientists generally agree that the Atlantic circulation will decline this century, but there’s no consensus on whether it will stall out before 2100.

the new findings were reason enough not to regard a shutdown as an abstract, far-off concern. “It’s now,” she said.

As humans warm the atmosphere, however, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is adding large amounts of fresh water to the North Atlantic, which could be disrupting the balance of heat and salinity that keeps the overturning moving. A patch of the Atlantic south of Greenland has cooled conspicuously in recent years, creating a “cold blob” that some scientists see as a sign that the system is slowing.

Abrupt thawing of the Arctic permafrost. Loss of the Amazon rain forest. Collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Once the world warms past a certain point, these and other events could be set into swift motion, scientists warn, though the exact thresholds at which this would occur are still highly uncertain.

In the Atlantic, researchers have been searching for harbingers of tipping-point-like change in a tangle of ocean currents that goes by an unlovely name: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC (pronounced “AY-mock”).

These currents carry warm waters from the tropics through the Gulf Stream, past the southeastern United States, before bending toward northern Europe. When this water releases its heat into the air farther north, it becomes colder and denser, causing it to sink to the deep ocean and move back toward the Equator. This sinking effect, or “overturning,” allows the currents to transfer enormous amounts of heat around the planet, making them hugely influential for the climate around the Atlantic and beyond.

adds to a growing body of scientific work that describes how humankind’s continued emissions of heat-trapping gases could set off climate “tipping points,” or rapid and hard-to-reverse changes in the environment.

Much of the Northern Hemisphere could cool. The coastlines of North America and Europe could see faster sea-level rise. Northern Europe could experience stormier winters, while the Sahel in Africa and the monsoon regions of Asia would most likely get less rain.

Were the circulation to tip into a much weaker state, the effects on the climate would be far-reaching, though scientists are still examining their potential magnitude.

scientists’ most advanced computer models of the global climate have produced a wide range of predictions for how the currents might behave in the coming decades, in part because the mix of factors that shape them is so complex.

Dr. Ditlevsen’s new analysis focused on a simple metric, based on sea-surface temperatures, that is similar to ones other scientists have used as proxies for the strength of the Atlantic circulation. She conducted the analysis with Peter Ditlevsen, her brother, who is a climate scientist at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute. They used data on their proxy measure from 1870 to 2020 to calculate statistical indicators that presage changes in the overturning.

“Not only do we see an increase in these indicators,” Peter Ditlevsen said, “but we see an increase which is consistent with this approaching a tipping point.”

They then used the mathematical properties of a tipping-point-like system to extrapolate from these trends. That led them to predict that the Atlantic circulation could collapse around midcentury, though it could potentially occur as soon as 2025 and as late as 2095.

Their analysis included no specific assumptions about how much greenhouse-gas emissions will rise in this century. It assumed only that the forces bringing about an AMOC collapse would continue at an unchanging pace — essentially, that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would keep rising as they have since the Industrial Revolution.

they voiced reservations about some of its methods, and said more work was still needed to nail down the timing with greater certainty.

Susan Lozier, a physical oceanographer at Georgia Tech, said sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic near Greenland weren’t necessarily influenced by changes in the overturning alone, making them a questionable proxy for inferring those changes. She pointed to a study published last year showing that much of the cold blob’s development could be explained by shifts in wind and atmospheric patterns.

Scientists are now using sensors slung across the Atlantic to directly measure the overturning. Dr. Lozier is involved in one of these measurement efforts. The aim is to better understand what’s driving the changes beneath the waves, and to improve projections of future changes.

Still, the new study sent an urgent message about the need to keep collecting data on the changing ocean currents,

Scientists’ uncertainty about the timing of an AMOC collapse shouldn’t be taken as an excuse for not reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to try to avoid it, said Hali Kilbourne, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

“It is very plausible that we’ve fallen off a cliff already and don’t know it,” Dr. Kilbourne said. “I fear, honestly, that by the time any of this is settled science, it’s way too late to act.”