2014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #45B

The UK is on course to experience the warmest and one of the wettest years since records began more than a century ago, feeding fears that future droughts and flash floods could cost lives.

Figures from the Met Office show January to October has been the warmest since records began in 1910, and also the second-wettest. Unless November and December are extremely cold, 2014 will be the hottest year on record.

Experts say this the result of climate change, which they warn could place a burden on the NHS as Britons struggling to cope with future heatwaves end up in hospital.

Global warming could make your pollen allergies a lot worse

It's notoriously difficult to make people care about climate change. It's a big, slow moving, long term problem that can rarely compete with everyday concerns — and it certainly doesn't help matters that most people have a difficult time distinguishing between climate change and their everyday weather.

But according to a new study, global warming is something that a large minority of us should care about a great deal indeed — because a large minority of us have allergies. In particular, 20 percent of people are allergic to pollen from various types of grasses. And the new paper, just out in PLOS One, suggests for the first time that in a warmer world with higher atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, those particular kinds of allergies could get a heck of a lot worse.

How does the IPCC know climate change is happening?

Climate change is one of the few scientific theories that makes us examine the whole basis of modern society. It is a challenge that has politicians arguing, sets nations against each other, queries individual lifestyle choices, and ultimately asks questions about humanity’s relationship with the rest of the planet.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its synthesis report on November 2, a document that brings together the findings from the IPCC’s three main working groups. It reiterates that the evidence for climate change is unequivocal, with evidence for a significant rise in global temperatures and sea level over the last hundred years. It also stresses that we control the future and the magnitude of shifting weather patterns and more extreme climate events depends on how much greenhouse gas we emit.

This is not the end of the world as envisaged by many environmentalists in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but it will mean substantial, even catastrophic challenges for billions of people.

Meet the Senate's new Climate Denial Caucus

Well, folks, it wasn't such a great night on the climate action front. It looks like the millions of dollars that environmental philanthropist Tom Steyer invested in the midterms didn't buy much other than a fledgling political infrastructure to sock away for 2016. With Republicans now in control of the Senate, we're likely to see a bill to push through the Keystone XL pipeline coming down the pike soon. And Mitch McConnell, probably the coal industry's biggest booster, retained his seat.

In fact, McConnell and his climate-denying colleague James Inhofe of Oklahoma—the likely chair of the Senate's Environment and Public Works committee—won a lot of new friends on Capitol Hill last night. It probably won't surprise you to learn that most of the Senate's newly elected Republicans are big boosters of fossil fuels and don't agree with the mainstream scientific consensus on global warming. Here's an overview of their statements on climate change, ranging from a few who seem to at least partly accept to science to those who flat-out reject it.

Midterm elections, the Senate, and Republican science denial

Today is the midterm election for the United States, where many seats in the House and Senate will be determined. It seems pretty obvious that the House will remain in control of the Republicans. It seems likely the GOP will get a slight majority in the Senate today as well.

What does this mean? Well, in the short term and for many issues, not a lot. This previous Congress will go down in history as the least effective ever, since all it really did is block White House initiatives. They couldn’t even approve a surgeon general nomination! A GOP majority in the Senate will probably mean more of the same, since they’ll lack the supermajority needed to prevent Democratic filibustering of big items.

But this vast, gaping polarization of American politics is toxic, especially where it comes to the crucial issue of global warming. Here, a Senate GOP majority can have an extremely destructive effect. It will put a cohort of science-deniers into positions of authority over the very science they want to trample. This is extremely worrisome to me, and it should be to you as well.

Millions of Asians exposed to big climate disasters

Millions of people in Asia, the world's most disaster-prone region, face the threat of major climate-linked disasters and food crises because government policies fail to protect them, Oxfam warned on Thursday.

A year after Typhoon Haiyan wreaked havoc in the Philippines, the aid and development charity warned that governments needed to do more to prevent people losing their lives and homes to extreme weather.

Asia, with 4.3 billion people or 60 percent of the global population, has borne almost half the estimated economic cost of all disasters over the past 20 years, amounting to around $53 billion annually, Oxfam said.

"Without greater investment in climate and disaster-resilient development and more effective assistance for those at risk, super-typhoon Haiyan-scale disasters could fast become the norm, not the exception," Oxfam said in a report.

No quick fix for overpopulation — let’s focus on climate

The rise in population since 1900 has been so rapid that up to 14% of all humans that have ever lived are still alive today, according to recent research.

Other research shows that slowing population growth could provide between 16% and 29% of emissions reductions necessary by 2050 to avoid the effects of dangerous climate change, concluding “reduced population growth could make a significant contribution to global emissions reductions”.

In a previous article, we argued that a decision to have children or not could be a vital part of climate policy, perhaps through a market-based mechanism similar to emissions trading.

But a new paper casts doubt on our ability to make any meaningful dent in population growth.

Corey Bradshaw and Barry Brook at the University of Adelaide argue in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the even a global one-child policy, or the catastrophic death of billions of people, would not slow population growth enough to reduce carbon emissions and resource use.

Our kids need to learn about climate chang

The conclusions published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) this week provide a wake-up call about the importance of teaching kids about sustainability. The IPCC’s dire warnings are based on new evidence just releasedon the impact of climate change.

The report warns that greenhouse gas levels are at their highest in 800,000 years. It concludes that recent increases are mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels. It recommends ending reliance on fossil fuels and instead fast-tracking development of renewable and alternative forms of energy such as solar and wind power.

The IPCC says time is running out to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius. Current trends in carbon emissions herald disaster.

‘Remarkable opportunity' for global economy in upcoming climate talks

An estimated $90 trillion will be invested in infrastructure over the next 15 years: the crucial question is whether this will go into the old brown economy of the past or a new, resource-efficient, low-carbon economy of the future.

Even if climate change were a chimera, there are multiple challenges that require a sustainable development path.

These range from addressing declining natural resources, losses of biodiversity, eradicating poverty and generating decent jobs to improving public health and arresting pollution to our air, land and seas.

The fact that climate change is real, with the risk assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change painting ever more sobering pictures of the costs of inaction, adds further urgency to how we invest now and into the future.

Science in a Republican Senate: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The Republican Party is widely predicted to win control of the Senate as a result of today’s midterm elections. In broadstrokes, that outcome portends a green light for the Keystone XL Pipeline, a blow to the Affordable Care Act and a push for corporate tax reform.

When it comes to science (and, more importantly, funding) individual senators are perhaps less important than the committees that they run. There are 20 committees in the U.S. Senate, with responsibilities ranging from homeland security to urban development. The chairperson of each committee, appointed by the majority party, holds inordinate sway over how his or her committee votes.

If Republicans take control of the Senate, we can expect a major shakeup within the ranks of these powerful committees. But, despite the conventional wisdom, conservatives aren’t always bad for science. Here are three of the senate committees that hold the most sway over science and scientific research—and what might happen to them if Republicans win the day.

Seven myths about disasters

A year ago today, Typhoon Haiyan began its course to devastate the central Philippines. Since then, there has been a seemingly never-ending flow of stories about disasters from around the world and weird weather on our doorsteps. Do we really have a good grip on the true scale of disaster threats?

New research from the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and its partners assesses the issues of global disaster threats with some surprising results. Here we debunk some common disaster myths.

The worst climate pollution is carbon dioxide

Soot from car exhaust and cookstoves, sulfates from coal-fired power plants, methane leaked during oil and gas production, and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) from air conditioning are all greenhouse gases that trap heat within the Earth's atmosphere for a short while before decaying into less virulent chemicals.

Cutting emissions of such "short-lived climate pollutants," or SLCPs, will not have much impact on long-term climate change, finds a new study published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences.

The study reaffirms strongly that, as far as climate change goes, the gas that truly matters is carbon dioxide. Unlike its shorter-lived cousins, CO2 sticks around in the atmosphere for decades to centuries, wreaking climate havoc.

There should be no more international reports on climate science

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Scientists are in the news, warning about the dangers of escalating fossil fuel emissions:

“Emissions resulting from human activities are substantially increasing.”
“These increases will enhance the greenhouse effect, resulting on average in an additional warming of the Earth’s surface.”
“Continued emissions of these gases at present rates would commit us to increased concentrations for centuries ahead.”
“The longer emissions continue to increase at present day rates, the greater reductions would have to be for concentrations to stabilise at a given level.”
“The long-lived gases [like carbon dioxide] would require immediate reductions in emissions from human activities of over 60% to stabilise their concentrations at today’s levels.”

Only thing is, the above statements were written in 1990.

UN to investigate claims that UK spies infiltrated climate talks

The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, says he will launch an investigation into reports that Britain spied on other governments at two successive global climate summits, snooping on other delegations’ kit, passes and membership lists.

A government document released by Edward Snowden showed that an officer from GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping agency, had been embedded in the official British delegation to the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009 and at Cancun in Mexico.

Speaking to Danish television, Ban said the matter was a UN issue because Copenhagen was a UN conference. “All diplomatic information is inviolable. If there has been any breach … they should be investigated. UN information should be protected in its entire confidentiality,” he said.

Why two crucial pages were left out of the latest U.N. climate report

On Sunday, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world's leading authority on the science of global warming, released its latest "Synthesis Report." And it painted a pretty dire picture.

Significant global warming, the report said, is already "irreversible" — and if policymakers don't act, a dangerous 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warming threshold will be breached.

That's a strong message — but it might have been even stronger. You see, one of the report's more powerful sections wound up being left out during last minute negotiations over the text in Copenhagen. And it was a section that, among other matters, tried to specify other measures that would indicate whether we are entering a danger zone of profound climate impact, and just how dramatic emissions cuts will have to be in order to avoid crossing that threshold.

This outcome — and the divergent national views underlying it — is a prelude to the political tensions we can expect at next month's mega climate change meeting in Lima, Peru, and then especially in Paris at the end of 2015, when governments will gather to try to negotiate a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.