Posts Tagged ‘global warming’
“It always seems impossible until it is done”*…
Adam Tooze unpacks a recent report from the clean energy think tank Ember— one that heralded a profoundly important historical turning point…
Electrification is key to the new energy system that is being built around the world. Electricity generation is one process we do know how to decarbonize. With concerted action, net neutrality is within reach in electric power generation for OECD countries by the 2030s and for the whole world by 2045. Furthermore, as Ember points out, electrification will replace “fossil fuel burning that currently takes place in car and bus engines, boilers, furnaces and other applications.”
Green electrification is the key to the future. And in 2023, according to Ember’s report, almost the entirety of new power demand was covered by growth in renewables, above all solar. Though there was growth in demand for electricity around the world, fossil fuel generation barely increased. Growth in solar and wind alone were sufficient to cover 82 percent of new electricity demand.
This is not new in rich countries. In the OECD demand growth for electricity is not strong or is even negative and renewable investment has been ongoing for two decades. The sensation is that this is now happening at the global level where the growth in demand for electric power is relentless.
In 2024 Ember expects the trend to be even more pronounced. This year, for the first time there will be substantial growth in global demand for electricity, whilst fossil fuel generation will likely fall…
… There is an obfuscation involved in talking about “the global” when, in fact, there is one country that dominates the entire dynamic of the energy transition: China.
As Ember’s data show: “China remained the main engine of global electricity demand growth. China’s rapid growth (+606 TWh, +6.9%) was just 21 TWh lower than the net global increase. India’s growth (+99 TWh, +5.4%) was the next largest contributor.”
Until the 2010s China fed its voracious demand for new power with coal-fired power stations. The energy transition in the advanced economies was never going to be sufficient to offset this. Of course, the renewable energy transition in the West was also painfully slow. But even if the USA and the EU had taken more drastic action, China’s growth was simply too large and too dirty. The fact that we are now reaching a turning point in the balance between fossil and clean power generation is due to a turning point in China: a huge surge in renewable energy investment.
In 2023 China alone accounted for more than half of the new global additions in wind and solar…
Measured in terms of power consumed China’s electrification of road transport is 3.5 times larger than that of the entire rest of the world. That is the EV revolution that the West is so worried about….
It is also the largest heat pump market in the world with more installations per year than any other country. Electrolysers, used mostly in demonstration plants by chemical and petrochemical companies, have also grown faster in China than the rest of the world. As a result, China accounted for 50% of global electrolyser capacity in 2023…
But as Ember notes, this process of applying electricity to new uses, is only at the beginning.
“Even in China, electrification is still in its infancy. Only a fifth of China’s electricity demand growth in 2023 (124 TWh of 606 TWh) was from the three electrification technologies, but this share will rise in time. These technologies added 1.4% to China’s electricity demand in 2023, up from 1.1% in 2022. Meanwhile in the rest of the world, electrification added 0.25% to electricity demand in 2022 and 0.28% in 2023. As China further accelerates the deployment of key electrification technologies and the world continues to catch up, the contribution of electrification will expand even further.“
At COP28 in 2023 many countries around the world committed to tripling global renewable electricity capacity by 2030. This has the potential to almost halve power sector emissions by 2030, as coal-fired power generation will be replaced first. Furthermore, it will provide enough new electricity to replace drive forward the electrification of transport, home and industrial heating with a 32 percent increase in electricity demand.
Having shattered all previous experience of renewable power rollout, China’s huge surge in solar now actually puts us within striking distance of achieving a net zero path, driven by green electric power…
What we are witnessing is the most rapid take-up of a significant energy technology in history.
The response of Western politicians? Protectionism. Of course there are complex motives. They need to build coalitions to sustain the energy transition. They are worried about the CCP regime in China. They want to escape extreme dependence on imported sources of energy (though of course in the renewable space it is capital equipment not energy they are importing). But the more basic question is simply this. Are Western government and societies willing to prioritize the energy transition if it is not their drama, not their success story? Or, if the PV panels and the electric vehicles are from China, do other interests take priority?
In the European case one can see a compromise based on a balance between domestic and Chinese-sourced energy transition solutions. As Martin Sandbu has remarked there is at least the possibility of a grand bargain. In the case of the United States it seems increasingly clear that the energy transition as such is a second order concern, and geopolitical confrontation and the struggle to form domestic coalitions take precedence. That is depressing. And it matters. But, as Ember’s data make clear, it is far from being a decisive obstacle. The global energy transition will go on anyway…
“The beginning of a new era: How the ‘global’ energy transition is happening in China,” from @adam_tooze and @EmberClimate. Eminently worth reading in full (both Tooze’s summary and the Ember report).
Apposite (and divergent, though not opposite, from Tooze): “The climate case for Biden’s new China tariffs,” from @timmcdonnell in @semafor.
And this: “We might be closer to changing course on climate change than we realized,” from @voxdotcom.
* Nelson Mandela
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As we find solace where we can, we might spare a thought for Joseph Wood Krutch; he died on this date in 1970. An author, critic, and naturalist, he began his career in New York City, where he was a professor at Columbia and theater critic for The Nation, and where he wrote The Modern Temper (challenging the then-fashionable notions of scientific progress and optimism), biographies of Samuel Johnson and Henry David Thoreau, and (inspired by Thoreau) The Twelve Seasons, Krutch’s first nature book.
In 1952, on doctor’s orders, Krutch left the East for Tucson and the Sonoran Desert, where he began writing about ecology, the southwestern desert environment, and the natural history of the Grand Canyon. He won renown as a naturalist, nature writer, and an early conservationist for works like The Voice of the Desert and The Desert Year, arguing that human beings must move beyond purely human centered conceptions of “conservation” and learn to value nature for its own sake.
“I’m having a magenta day. Not just red, but magenta!”*…
Your correspondent is still on the road; regular service resumes on or around May 6. Meantime, a colorful update…
Forget about red hot. A new color-coded heat warning system relies on magenta to alert Americans to the most dangerous conditions they may see this summer.
The National Weather Service and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday — Earth Day — presented a new online heat risk system that combines meteorological and medical risk factors with a seven-day forecast that’s simplified and color-coded for a warming world of worsening heat waves.
“For the first time we’ll be able to know how hot is too hot for health and not just for today but for coming weeks,” Dr. Ari Bernstein, director of the National Center for Environmental Health, said at a joint news conference by government health and weather agencies.
Magenta is the worst and deadliest of five heat threat categories, hitting everybody with what the agencies are calling “rare and/or long-duration extreme heat with little to no overnight relief.” It’s a step higher than red, considered a major risk, which hurts anyone without adequate cooling and hydration and has impacts reverberating through the health care system and some industries. Red is used when a day falls within the top 5% hottest in a particular location for a particular date; when other factors come into play, the alert level may bump even higher to magenta, weather service officials said.
On the other hand, pale green is little to no risk. Yellow is minor risk, mostly to the very young, old, sick and pregnant. Orange is moderate risk, mostly hurting people who are sensitive to heat, especially those without cooling, such as the homeless.
“When red-hot isn’t enough: New government heat risk tool sets magenta as most dangerous level,” from @AP.
* Stephen King, Needful Things
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As we reassess risk, we might recall that it was on this date in 1986 that Russia announced the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, two days after it happened.
“You may delay, but time will not”*…
It turns out that our feeling that things are speeding up has some basis in science…
Earth’s changing spin is threatening to toy with our sense of time, clocks and computerized society in an unprecedented way — but only for a second.
For the first time in history, world timekeepers may have to consider subtracting a second from our clocks in a few years because the planet is rotating a tad faster than it used to. Clocks may have to skip a second — called a “negative leap second” — around 2029, a study in the journal Nature said Wednesday.
“This is an unprecedented situation and a big deal,” said study lead author Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. “It’s not a huge change in the Earth’s rotation that’s going to lead to some catastrophe or anything, but it is something notable. It’s yet another indication that we’re in a very unusual time.”
Ice melting at both of Earth’s poles has been counteracting the planet’s burst of speed and is likely to have delayed this global second of reckoning by about three years, Agnew said.
“We are headed toward a negative leap second,” said Dennis McCarthy, retired director of time for the U.S. Naval Observatory who wasn’t part of the study. “It’s a matter of when.”…
The full story: “A faster spinning Earth may cause timekeepers to subtract a second from world clocks,” from @AP.
For (even) more on leap seconds on their history, see “Will We Have a Negative Leap Second?“, by Demetrios Matsakis (also a retired director of time for the U.S. Naval Observatory).
See also: “Climate change is altering Earth’s rotation enough to mess with our clocks” (gift article): “in that one second, the Earth rotated about four football fields”
* Benjamin Franklin
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As we muse on measurement, we might send carefully-observed birthday greetings to Sir Harold Spencer Jones; he was born on this date in 1890. An astronomer (indeed, for 23 years the tenth Astronomer Royal), he specialized in positional astronomy, particularly the motion and orientation of the Earth in space… a focus that helped him contribute to knowledge of the Earth’s rotation and improved timekeeping– efforts that led to Spencer Jones’ election (in 1947) as the first President of the Royal Institute of Navigation (which, In 1951, named its highest award, the Gold Medal, in his honor).
“One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken”*…
The estimable Jonathan Watts on the (painfully) pivotal year just ended…
As historically high temperatures continued to be registered in many parts of the world in late December, the former Nasa scientist James Hansen told the Guardian that 2023 would be remembered as the moment when failures became apparent.
“When our children and grandchildren look back at the history of human-made climate change, this year and next will be seen as the turning point at which the futility of governments in dealing with climate change was finally exposed,” he said.
“Not only did governments fail to stem global warming, the rate of global warming actually accelerated.”…
The bright side of this clear dichotomy is that young people may realise that they must take charge of their future. The turbulent status of today’s politics may provide opportunity,” he said.
…
His comments are a reflection of the dismay among experts at the enormous gulf between scientific warnings and political action. It has taken almost 30 years for world leaders to acknowledge that fossil fuels are to blame for the climate crisis, yet this year’s United Nations Cop28 summit in Dubai ended with a limp and vague call for a “transition away” from them, even as evidence grows that the world is already heating to dangerous levels…
Veteran climate watchers have been horrified at the pace of change. “The climate year 2023 is nothing but shocking, in terms of the strength of climate occurrences, from heatwaves, droughts, floods and fires, to rate of ice melt and temperature anomalies particularly in the ocean,” Prof Johan Rockström, the joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said.
…
Aquino [Francisco Eliseu Aquino, a professor of climatology and oceanography at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and the deputy director of Brazil’s polar and climatic centre] said human influence – through the burning of fossil fuels – had also created “frightening” dynamics between the poles and the tropics. Cold wet fronts from the Antarctic had interacted with record heat and drought in the Amazon to create unprecedented storms in between. Floods in southern Brazil killed 51 people in early September and then returned with similarly devastating force in mid-November.
Aquino said this “record record” was a taste of what was to come as the world entered dangerous levels of warming. “From this year onwards, we will understand concretely what it means to flirt with 1.5C [of heating] in the global average temperature and new records for disasters,” he said.
This is already happening. This year’s deadliest climate disaster was the flood in Libya that killed more than 11,300 people in the coastal city of Derna. In a single day, Storm Daniel unleashed 200 times as much rain as usually falls on the city in the entire month of September. Human-induced climate change made this up to 50 times more likely.
Forest fires burned a record area in Canada and Europe, and killed about 100 people in Lahaina on Maui island, the deadliest wildfire in recent US history, which happened in August. For those who prefer to calculate catastrophe in economic terms, the US broke its annual record of billion-dollar disasters by August, by which time there had already been 23.
…
…as science has proved beyond any doubt, global temperatures would continue to rise as long as humanity continues to burn fossil fuels and forests.
In the years ahead, the heat “anomaly” and catastrophes of 2023 would first become the new norm, and then be looked back on as one of the cooler, more stable years in people’s lives. As Hansen warned, unless there is radical and rapid change, failure will be built into the climate system…
Bracing, but critically important– eminently worth reading in full: “World will look back at 2023 as year humanity exposed its inability to tackle climate crisis, scientists say,” from @jonathanwatts in @guardian.
* Leo Tolstoy
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As we face facts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1870 that Congress authorized the formation of the U.S. weather service (later named the Weather Bureau; later still, the National Weather Service), and placed it under the direction of the Army Signal Corps. Cleveland Abbe, who had started the first private weather reporting and warning service (in Cincinnati) and had been issuing weather reports or bulletins since 1869, was the only person in the country at the time who was experienced in drawing weather maps from telegraphic reports and forecasting from them. He became the weather service’s inaugural chief scientist– effectively its founding head– in January, 1871. The first U.S. meteorologist, he is known as the “father of the U.S. Weather Bureau,” where he systemized observation, trained personnel, and established scientific methods. He went on to become one of the 33 founders of the National Geographic Society.
“Leaves of Three, Leave Them Be”*…
Gabrielle Emanuel on the one of climate change’s winners– the hiker’s scourge, poison ivy…
Over a decade ago, when Peter Barron started removing poison ivy for a living, he decided to document his work.
“Every year I always take pictures of the poison ivy as it’s blooming,” said Barron, who is better known as Pesky Pete, of Pesky Pete’s Poison Ivy Removal.
He still remembers the photos he took of the very first tiny, red, shiny poison ivy leaves popping out in Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire.“
When I first started, it was May 10 or May 11,” he remembered. “I was so excited. I was like, ‘Wow, the season is here’.”
Now, if he lines up all his photos from 14 years, the first sighting comes almost a month earlier. In 2023, his first glimpse was on April 18.
Barron may have unwittingly documented an effect of climate change.
Poison ivy is poised to be one of the big winners in this global, human-caused phenomenon. Scientists expect the dreaded three-leafed vine will take full advantage of warmer temperatures and rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to grow faster and bigger — and become even more toxic.
Experts who have studied this plant for decades warn there are likely to be implications for human health. They say hikers, gardeners, landscapers and others may want to take extra precautions — and get better at identifying this plant — to avoid an itchy, blistering rash…
Ugh: “Bigger, earlier and itchier: Why poison ivy loves climate change,” from @gabrieman and @WBUR.
* Adage
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As we cache cortisone cream, we might send carefully-calibrated birthday greetings to Guillaume Amontons; he was born on this date in 1663. A physicist and scientific instrument inventor, he developed the air thermometer – which relies on increase in volume of a gas (rather than a liquid) to measure temperature – and used it (in 1702) to measure change in temperature in terms of a proportional change in pressure. This observation led to the concept of absolute zero in the19th century.
Deaf from childhood, Amontons worked on inventions for the hearing impaired, among them the first telegraph, which relied on a telescope, light, and several stations to transmit information over large distances. And Amontons’ laws of friction, relied upon by engineers for 300 years, state that the frictional force on a body sliding over a surface is proportional to the load that presses them together and is independent of the areas of the surfaces.
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