2 August 2015, Climate News Network, Global temperatures have risen by 1°C in the past 150 years, and one scientist says doubling that level could unleash catastrophic sea level rise this century. The world is now halfway towards the internationally-agreed safety limit of a maximum 2°C rise in global average temperatures, researchers say. That limit seeks to prevent the global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels exceeding 2°C above the pre-industrial global temperature. The UN’s Paris climate summit later this year aims to ensure that it is not breached. It appears that the human race has taken roughly 250 years to stoke global warming by 1°C. On present trends, we look likely to add the next 1°C far more quickly – across much of the world, many climate scientists believe, by the middle of this century. The research is published in the journal New Scientist, which commissioned it. As so often with climate projections, it needs qualifying and teasing apart. Some scientists, for example, warn that there’s uncertainty about just what the pre-industrial global temperature was. The New Scientist research is careful to be specific: it says global surface temperature is now passing 1°C of warming “relative to the second half of the 19th century”. Farewell, hiatus. And one of the four main trackers of temperature thinks that milestone will be passed only if there is a strong El Niño, the cyclic Pacific weather phenomenon that periodically brings widespread chaos in its wake. However, the research looks likely finally to lay to rest the argument that global warming is slowing and stuttering to a virtual halt, the so-called hiatus theory. Kevin Trenberth, of the USNational Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, told New Scientist: “There’s a good chance the hiatus is over.” Read More here
Yearly Archives: 2015
2 August, The Guardian, The truth about the people and numbers in loud and furious migration debate. David Cameron referred to a ‘swarm’ from Calais. But migration is happening across the globe, and the motives are more complex than stereotypes suggest. ‘You have got a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean seeking a better life, wanting to come to Britain because Britain has got jobs,” David Cameron said last week. Leaving the language aside, there is some truth in this. But it also misses out a lot. This is not a British problem. It is a European problem and a North African one and a Middle Eastern one. It is not going to be solved by a few miles of barbed-wire fencing or, as the prime minister emerged from Friday’s “emergency meeting” to say, “more dogs”. Why do all the people coming across the Mediterranean want to come to Britain? Read More here
1 August 2015, Climate Network News, Wildfire threat spreads across warming world. As climate change warms the world vegetation dries, rainfall patterns waver and the threat of wildfire spreads. Wildfire – nature’s way of turning fallen vegetation into the next season’s nutrients – is a growing hazard. In the last 35 years, the wildfire season has grown longer by a fifth, and wildfire is now a threat to one fourth of all the plant-covered land on the planet. US researchers report in Nature Communications that since 1970 the number of days without rain has increased by well over one day every decade. William Jolly of the US Forest Service in Missoula, Montana and colleagues say they examined the fire season worldwide for the study period, taking into consideration all the factors that are used to calculate fire hazard: wind, humidity and temperature, as well as rainfall levels. They found that the combined changes in the surface weather have meant that the fire season has increased so far by 18.7%. Worldwide, wildfires sear, scorch or incinerate about 350 million hectares of ground cover every year. Changes in the rainfall patterns were a factor, with the number of rain-free days increasing by 1.31 days per decade. The season of smoke and cinders and smouldering stumps had been extended almost everywhere. Read More here
31 July 2015, Renew Economy, Investors have lost their shirts on Peabody; now taxpayers are in the line of fire: The U.S. coal sector is in financial distress, a fact that’s been apparent for some time now and is made more evident with this week’s second-quarter earnings report from Peabody Energy. Peabody continues to tank for the main reasons many other major coal producers continue to tank: It made too many top-of-the-cycle, multibillion-dollar debt-funded acquisitions and its executives have continued to pretend that they can’t see the oversupply in a seaborne coal market that is in structural decline. Meanwhile, Alpha Natural Resources has been delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, Arch Coal is fighting to stay in play, and Walter Energy filed for bankruptcy this month. Some key detail from the latest numbers on Peabody, the biggest non-government-owned coal producer in the world: Read More here