25 March 2016, Climate News Network, Past emissions cause mounting climate havoc. Despite signs that the world will cut its future fossil fuel use, greenhouse gases already emitted are still driving accelerating climate change.Climate change has reached the point where it may outstrip the quickening efforts to slow it by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, scientists say. They say humans are now releasing CO2 into the atmosphere 10 times faster than natural processes have ever done in the last 66 million years, before the extinction of the dinosaurs. The disclosure comes in the World Meteorological Organisation’s State of the Climate report, published in the journal Nature Geoscience. The lead author, Professor Richard Zeebe of the University of Hawaii, said: “Our carbon release rate is unprecedented over such a long time period [and] means that we have effectively entered a ‘no-analogue’ state. “The present and future rate of climate change and ocean acidification is too fast for many species to adapt, which is likely to result in widespread future extinctions.” “The window of opportunity for limiting global temperature rise to well below 2°C . . . is narrow and rapidly shrinking. The effects of a warming planet will be felt by all” The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, said: “Climate change is accelerating at an alarming rate. The window of opportunity for limiting global temperature rise to well below 2°C – the threshold agreed by world governments in Paris in December last year – is narrow and rapidly shrinking. The effects of a warming planet will be felt by all.” The WMO secretary-general, Petteri Taalas, said the present “alarming” rate of climate change as a result of greenhouse gas emissions was “unprecedented in modern records”. “The future is now”, he said. Yet less than a week ago the International Energy Agency announced that global energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide had shown no increase for the second year in a row. The announcement was widely hailed as significant good news, with the IEA’s executive director, Fatih Birol, describing it as “yet another boost to the global fight against climate change”.Read More here
Tag Archives: consumption
25 March 2016, BIEN, Universal basic income: a search for alternative models. With the expressed commitment of the Prime minister Juha Sipilä’s centre-to-right Government to conduct an experiment to evaluate the effects of a basic income system, the idea of a universal basic income has come to the forefront of the Finnish political discourse. Discussions centring on the idea of a universally guaranteed basic income have a long and varied history in the Finnish political arena, and several initiatives and practical models have been made public since the 1980s. A recent working paper published by the Finnish Social Insurance Institution (Kela) charts the history of the basic income debate and outlines solutions put forward for a true basic income system or one that bears some features of a universal basic income. The working paper will be used as background to analysis preparing the ground for the planned basic income experiment. An idea with a long history The working paper begins by presenting the history of ideas behind the discussion on a universal basic income or citizen’s wage, the latter being a term which is often used alongside ’basic income’ in the Finnish debate. Read More here
24 March 2016, Climate News Network, Humans tilt climate books out of balance. Greenhouse gases from cattle, fertilisers, manure and agriculture mean that human activities have turned the land and soil into part of the global warming machine. In the great book-keeping of climate change, scientists have just discovered a big mistake. They have been wrong, they now think, to count on the mountains, the plains, the forests and the grasslands as an agency that slows climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide. It does absorb carbon dioxide. But the chilling news is that the soil itself may be making the world warmer. That is because humans have changed the way the landscape and its living things works, and now – thanks to those other greenhouse gases, methane and nitrous oxides, from cattle, fertilisers, manure and agriculture – the terrestrial biosphere is actually accelerating climate change. Twenty-three scientists from 16 laboratories and institutions report in Nature journal that they re-examined the sums on which climate forecasts depend. They concluded: “We find that the cumulative warming capacity of concurrent biogenic methane and nitrous oxide emissions is a factor of about two larger than the cooling effect resulting from the global land carbon dioxide uptake from 2001 to 2010.” Read More here
23 March 2016, Energy Post, Dispelling the nuclear baseload myth: nothing renewables can’t do better. The main claim used to justify nuclear is that it’s the only low carbon power source that can supply ‘reliable, base load electricity. But not only can renewables supply baseload power, they can do something far more valuable: supply power flexibly according to demand, writes Mark Diesendorf, Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies at UNSW Australia. That, says Diesendorf, makes nuclear power really redundant. We have all heard the claim. We need nuclear power because, along with big hydropower, it’s the only low carbon generation technology that can supply ‘reliable baseload power’ on a large scale. For example, the UK Energy Secretary Amber Rudd, attempted to justify the decision to build the proposed Hinkley Point C nuclear power station on the grounds that “we have to secure baseload electricity.” Similarly, former Australian Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane recently claimed at a uranium industry conference: “Baseload, zero emission, the only way it can be produced is by hydro and nuclear.” Underlying this claim are three key assumptions. First, that baseload power is actually a good and necessary thing. In fact, what it really means is too much power when you don’t want it, and not enough when you do. What we need is flexible power (and flexible demand too) so that supply and demand can be matched instant by instant. Read More here