30 October 2015, Carbon Brief, UN report: Climate pledges fall short of cheapest route to 2C limit. Low ambition in countries’ climate pledges means avoiding dangerous warming will be harder and more costly than it could have been, according to new UN analysis. Today’s synthesis report, from the UN’s climate body (UNFCCC), aggregates the 146Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) that had been received by 1 October. It says emissions in 2030 would exceed a cost-effective path to 2C, the internationally agreed safety limit. UNFCCC executive secretary Christiana Figueres said the pledges, if implemented, would reduce expected warming of 4-5C to around 2.7C. While the ambition is too low to avoid 2C, she added that current pledges are a “foundation on which even higher ambition can be built”. Carbon Brief looks at the numbers behind the UN’s INDC report and what they mean for 2C. Pile of pledges The UNFCCC has aggregated the impact of 146 INDCs, which together cover all developed nations, three quarters of developing nations and 86% of global greenhouse gas emissions. After the 1 October cut-off for the report, the pledge count has risen to 156, covering 92% of emissions. Of the 146 pledges assessed, 127 offer quantified targets to tackle emissions. Some 59 of these targets are set relative to business as usual emissions, while 31 set absolute goals. Another eight pledge to reduce emissions intensity and three offer peak emissions years. The pile of pledges to limit emissions has therefore more than doubled in size, the UNFCCC says, compared to the 61 parties that had previously made commitments for the years up to 2020. More than half of the INDCs say they will use, or are considering using market based mechanisms. The UNFCCC also breaks down parties’ priorities, as they appear in the INDCs (chart below). Read More here
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30 October 2015, Daily Science, Mass gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet greater than losses. A new study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers. A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers. The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice. According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008. “We’re essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica,” said Jay Zwally, a glaciologist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study, which was published on Oct. 30 in the Journal of Glaciology. “Our main disagreement is for East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica — there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas.” Zwally added that his team “measured small height changes over large areas, as well as the large changes observed over smaller areas.” Read More here
30 October 2015, Renew Economy, With latest fires crisis, Indonesia surpasses Russia as world’s fourth-largest emitter. New analysis reveals even more troubling news about Indonesia’s fires crisis. Emissions from this year’s fires have reached 1.62 billion metric tons of CO2—bumping Indonesia from the sixth-largest emitter in the world up to the fourth-largest in just six weeks. The analysis from Guido van der Werf with the Global Fire Emissions Database also reveals that:
- Emissions from Indonesia’s fires alone are approaching the total annual emissions of Brazil.
- Indonesia’s current total emissions hover around 760 Mt CO2 (excluding land-use change), meaning the fires alone have tripled Indonesia’s entire annual emissions.
- Indonesian fires during 38 of the past 56 days (as of October 26) have released more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire U.S. economy on those days.
While the country may finally be getting some relief as heavy rainfall interruptsmonths of record-breaking fires and toxic smog in South Sumatra and Kalimantan, the damage to human health, the economy and the global climate has already been done. Read More here
29 October 2015, Yale Connections, Long-Term Drought Impacts on Trees. Scientists find that droughts harm trees for longer than previously understood. ANDEREGG: “We’ve known for decades that drought has harmful effects on trees. That during drought they grow slower and they have a higher chance of death.” That’s William Anderegg, a biologist at the University of Utah. He says until recently, researchers were not clear about what happened to the trees after a drought ended. So his team looked at the growth of trees after severe drought in more than a thousand forests across North America, Europe, and Asia. They found that even four years after a drought, trees continued to grow more slowly than normal. ANDEREGG: “Trees take up about a quarter of human emissions of CO2 each year, and that’s a very big slowing effect on climate change. So if droughts cause forests to take up less carbon, that could very much speed up the pace and the severity of climate change.” Anderegg says it is too early to know what the long-term implications will be. ANDEREGG: “Some of our best models suggest that forests could be relatively resilient and others suggest they could really die off en masse and lose a lot of their carbon to the atmosphere. And we don’t know which of those is more likely.” But Anderegg says that the future of the world’s forests is still in our hands. ANDEREGG: “I always like to emphasize that a lot of that future does depend on human decisions and what we do about climate change.” Read More here