Arguments
New research, December 4-10, 2017
Posted on 15 December 2017 by Ari Jokimäki
A selection of new climate related research articles is shown below.
The figure is from paper #26.
Climate change mitigation
1. The fiscal benefits of stringent climate change mitigation: an overview
"We find that national climate policy often aligns with other objectives, provided that climate policies and fiscal policies are integrated well. A first class of interactions concerns public revenue-raising: carbon pricing can replace distortionary taxes and alleviate international tax competition; climate policy also changes asset values, which impacts the base of non-climate taxes and boosts productive investment. Second, they concern public spending, which needs to be restructured as a part of climate policy, while carbon pricing revenues may be recycled for public investment. Third, distributional impacts of climate policies include changes to household expenditures, to asset values and to employment; balancing them often requires fiscal policies."
2. The 1.5°C target and coal sector transition: at the limits of societal feasibility
"A survey of major coal using countries shows that each is a long way from putting in place a long-term framework to transition the coal sector."
3. China’s future emission reduction challenge and implications for global climate policy
"Our results suggest that even achieving China’s highly optimistic renewable energy targets will be very far from sufficient to reduce China’s CO2 emissions from 9.1?Gt it emitted in 2015 to much below 3?Gt by 2050. Even reducing its emissions to 5?Gt will be challenging, yet this falls far short of what is needed if the world is to meet its ‘well below’ 2°C commitment."
4. Who owns the Brazilian carbon?
"Roughly 70% of the AGC stock in Brazil is estimated to be under legal protection, and an additional 20% is expected to be protected after areas in the Amazon with currently undesignated land undergo a tenure regularization. About 30% of the AGC stock is on private land, of which roughly two-thirds are protected."
5. Ten key short-term sectoral benchmarks to limit warming to 1.5°C
6. Underwriting 1.5°C: competitive approaches to financing accelerated climate change mitigation
7. The international climate finance accounting muddle: is there hope on the horizon?
10. The US News Media, Polarization on Climate Change, and Pathways to Effective Communication
11. “Stop Blaming the Cows!”: How Livestock Production is Legitimized in Everyday Discourse on Facebook
12. The influence of social movements on policies that constrain fossil fuel supply
13. Gridded estimates of CO2 emissions: uncertainty as a function of grid size
14. Nitrogen rate strategies for reducing yield-scaled nitrous oxide emissions in maize
15. Solar radiation management: a proposal for immediate polycentric governance
16. Evaluating the Effectiveness of Mitigation Options on Heat Stress for Sydney, Australia
Climate change
"We find that the variation in the interannual difference in the mean H2O measured by any two instruments is typically ∼ ?1%. Most of the datasets start in or after 2004 and show annual increases in H2O of 0–1?%?yr−1. In particular, MLS shows a trend of between 0.5?%?yr−1 and 0.7?%?yr−1 at the comparison sites. However, the two longest measurement datasets used here, with measurements back to 1996, show much smaller trends of +0.1?%?yr−1 (at Mauna Loa, Hawaii) and −0.1?%?yr−1 (at Lauder, New Zealand)."
"At Ryder Glacier, melt is strongly concentrated around regions where subglacier channels likely enter the fjord. At the 79 North Glacier, we find a large volume imbalance in which melting removes a greater quantity of ice than is replaced by inflow over the grounding line. This leads us to suggest that a reduction in the spatial extent of the ice tongue is possible over the coming decade."
21. Centuries of intense surface melt on Larsen C Ice Shelf
"Results show that, as well as recent surface melt, a period of strong melt occurred during the 18th century. Surface melt is thought to be a factor in causing recent ice-shelf break-up."
23. Blowing snow detection from ground-based ceilometers: application to East Antarctica
24. Direct evidence of meltwater flow within a firn aquifer in Southeast Greenland
25. Do Southern Ocean cloud feedbacks matter for 21st century warming?
27. Synoptic to large-scale drivers of minimum temperature variability in Australia – long-term changes
29. A potential predictor of multi-season droughts in Southwest China: soil moisture and its memory
31. Changes in temperature extremes over China under 1.5 °C and 2 °C global warming targets
32. The Imprint of Strong-Storm Tracks on Winter Weather in North America
34. Polar Mesoscale Cyclone Climatology for the Nordic Seas based on the ERA-Interim Reanalysis
35. Changing weather extremes call for early warning of potential for catastrophic fire
36. Possible impacts of a changing climate on intense Ligurian Sea rainfall events
39. Climate-related trends of actual evapotranspiration over the Tibetan Plateau (1961–2010)
41. Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation footprint on global high cloud cover
42. Volcano and ship tracks indicate excessive aerosol-induced cloud water increases in a climate model
43. Effects of carbon turnover time on terrestrial ecosystem carbon storage
44. Observation-based Trends of the Southern Ocean Carbon Sink
45. Impact of chlorophyll bias on the tropical Pacific mean climate in an earth system model
Climate change impacts
46. The impacts avoided with a 1.5 °C climate target: a global and regional assessment
"At the global scale, the median proportion of projected impacts avoided by the 1.5 °C target relative to a rise of 4 °C ranges between 62 and 95% across sectors: the greatest reduction is for heat wave impacts. The 1.5 °C target results in impacts that would be between 27 and 62% lower than with the 2 °C target."
47. Thermal anomalies detect critical global land surface changes
"Our findings show that entire biomes are experiencing shifts in their LSTmax distributions driven by extreme climatic events and large-scale land surface changes, such as melting of ice sheets, severe droughts, and with the incremental effects of forest loss in tropical forests. As climate warming and land cover changes continue, it is likely that the Earth’s maximum surface temperatures will experience greater and more frequent directional shifts, increasing the possibility that critical thresholds in the Earth’s ecosystems and climate system will be surpassed resulting in profound and irreversible changes."
48. Shifts in the thermal niche of almond under climate change
"By the mid-21st century, almond phenology in the Central Valley showed ~ 2-week delay in chill accumulation and ~ 1- and ~ 2.5-week advance in the timing of bloom and harvest, respectively."
49. Effects of diurnal temperature range on mortality in Hefei city, China
50. Weather conditions influence the number of psychiatric emergency room patients
52. The phenology of wilderness use: Backcountry recreation in a changing climate
53. Long-term recovery narratives following major disasters in Southeast Asia
54. Climate change and the water–energy–food nexus: insights from policy and practice in Tanzania
56. Climate contributes to the evolution of pesticide resistance
57. Mainstreaming climate change adaptation in small island developing states
60. Green and socioeconomic infrastructures in the Brazilian Amazon: implications for a changing climate
63. Urban climate modifies tree growth in Berlin
64. Dry and wet periods drive rapid shifts in community assembly in an estuarine ecosystem
68. Climate change leads to differential shifts in the timing of annual cycle stages in a migratory bird
70. Strengthening hydrological regulation of China's wetland greenness under a warmer climate
Other papers
72. Multi-century cool- and warm-season rainfall reconstructions for Australia's major climatic regions
74. Air quality and pollutant emissions in the Moscow megacity in 2005–2014
This is a mainstream, online article that's easy for non-scientists like me to digest. For the first time the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) has research stating that 3 global climate events would have been virtually impossible (not just highly probable) without man adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
Three Things That Wouldn't Have Happened in 2016 without Climate Change
The 3 events are record high global temperatures, the heat waves in Asia, and the warming of the North Pacific. The article links to the source document.
Explaining Extreme Events from a Climate Perspective
The paper evaluating the fiscal benefits of stringent mitigation is really encouraging. I see futher benefits, for example our lifestyles have become very materialistic, hedonistic and stressfull, so cutting back our consumption a little, and putting those resources into mitigating climate won't hurt and will have psychological benefits.
And endless pollution, economic growth and population growth on a finite planet is impossible. Humanity has to slow down and find some optimal, sustainable balance.