Clean Energy Wire ) – The damaging effects of climate change are set to hit economic growth severely across most countries, said researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

With the climate change that is already locked-in through past and “plausible” future emissions, income will be 19 percent lower on average globally over the next 26 years than in a scenario without climate change, they said in an article in Nature.

This corresponds to global annual damages in 2049 of 38 trillion dollars (in 2005 dollars), said the researchers. They also compared these damages to the mitigation costs required to achieve the Paris Climate Agreement goals and said that climate damages are larger than the mitigation costs in 2050 by a factor of approximately six.

Maximilian Kotz et al. wrote,

“Using an empirical approach that provides a robust lower bound on the persistence of impacts on economic growth, we find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices (relative to a baseline without climate impacts, likely range of 11–29% accounting for physical climate and empirical uncertainty). These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2 °C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices. Committed damages arise predominantly through changes in average temperature, but accounting for further climatic components raises estimates by approximately 50% and leads to stronger regional heterogeneity.”

The red shows decreases in income, the blue increases, caused by climate change. H/t Nature

Climate advocates and policymakers often emphasise that the cost of inaction on climate change is set to be much larger than the cost of efforts to mitigate the worst effects by introducing ambitious climate policy.

German government representatives have also said that climate mitigation is of the highest priority, because the less intense the impacts of climate change are, the less money needs to be spent adapting to them.

Published under a “ Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)”. The text has been augmented by quotes from the original Nature article.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Last September witnessed what used to be a truly rare weather phenomenon: a Mediterranean hurricane, or “medicane.” Once upon a time, the Mediterranean Sea simply didn’t get hot enough to produce hurricanes more than every few hundred (yes, few hundred!) years. In this case, however, Storm Daniel assaulted Libya with a biblical-style deluge for four straight days. It was enough to overwhelm the al-Bilad and Abu Mansour dams near the city of Derna, built in the 1970s to old cool-earth specifications. The resulting flood destroyed nearly 1,000 buildings, washing thousands of people out to sea, and displaced tens of thousands more.

Saliha Abu Bakr, an attorney, told a harrowing tale of how the waters kept rising in her apartment building before almost reaching the roof and quite literally washing many of its residents away. She clung to a piece of wooden furniture for three hours in the water. “I can swim,” she told a reporter afterward, “but when I tried to save my family, I couldn’t do a thing.” Human-caused climate change, provoked by the way we spew 37 billion metric tons of dangerous carbon dioxide gas into our atmosphere every year, made the Libyan disaster 50 times more likely than it once might have been. And worse yet, for the Middle East, as well as the rest of the world, that nightmare is undoubtedly only the beginning of serial disasters to come (and come and come and come) that will undoubtedly render millions of people homeless or worse.

“Libya Flood,” Digital, Dream / Abstract v. 2, 2024.

Failing Grades

In the race to keep this planet from heating up more than 2.7° Fahrenheit (1.5° Centigrade) above the preindustrial average, the whole world is already getting abominable grades. Beyond that benchmark, scientists fear, the planet’s whole climate system could fall into chaos, severely challenging civilization itself. The Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI), which monitors the implementation of the Paris climate accords, presented its alarming conclusions in a late March report. The CCPI crew was so disheartened by its findings — no country is even close to meeting the goals set in that treaty – that it left the top three slots in its ranking system completely empty.

For the most part, the countries of the Middle East made a distinctly poor showing when it came to the greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels that are already heating the planet so radically. Admittedly, Morocco, with longstanding and ambitious green energy goals, came in ninth, and Egypt, which depends heavily on hydroelectric power and has some solar projects, ranked a modest 22nd. However, some Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates hit rock bottom in the CCPI’s chart. That matters since you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that the region produces perhaps 27% of the world’s petroleum annually and includes five of the 10 largest oil producers on the planet.

Ironically enough, the Middle East is at special risk from climate change. Scientists have found that it’s experiencing twice the rate of heating as the global average and, in the near future, they warn that it will suffer, as a recent study from the Carnegie Institute for International Peace put it, from “soaring heat waves, declining precipitation, extended droughts, more intense sandstorms and floods, and rising sea levels.” And yet some of the countries facing the biggest threat from the climate crisis seem all too intent on making it far worse.

Little Sparta

The CCPI index, issued by Germanwatch, the NewClimate Institute, and the Climate Action Network (CAN), ranks countries in their efforts to meet the goals set by the Paris Agreement according to four criteria: their emissions of greenhouse gases, their implementation of renewable energy, their consumption of fossil-fuel energy, and their government’s climate policies. The authors listed the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 65th place, calling it “one of the lowest-performing countries.” The report then slammed the government of President Mohammed Bin Zayed, saying: “The UAE‘s per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are among the highest in the world, as is its per capita wealth, while its national climate targets are inadequate. The UAE continues to develop and finance new oil and gas fields domestically and abroad.” On the southeast coast of the Arabian Peninsula, the UAE has a population of only about a million citizens (and about eight million guest workers). It is nonetheless a geopolitical energy and greenhouse gas giant of the first order.

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The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, or ADNOC, headquartered in that country’s capital and helmed by businessman Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber (who is also the country’s minister of industry and advanced technology), has some of the more ambitious plans for expanding petroleum production in the world. ADNOC is, in fact, seeking to increase its oil production from four million to five million barrels a day by 2027, while further developing its crucial al-Nouf oil field, next to which the UAE is building an artificial island to help with its expected future expansion. To be fair, the UAE is behaving little differently from the United States, which ranked only a few spots better at 57. Last October, in fact, American oil production, which continues to be heavily government-subsidized (as does that industry in Europe), actually hit an all-time high.

The UAE is a major proponent of the dubious technique of carbon capture and storage, which has not yet been found to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions significantly or to do so safely and affordably. The magazine Oil Change International points out that the country’s carbon capture efforts at the Emirates Steel Plant probably sequester no more than 17% of the CO2 produced there and that the stored carbon dioxide is then injected into older, non-producing oil fields to help retrieve the last drops of petroleum they hold.

The UAE, which the Pentagon adoringly refers to as “little Sparta” for its aggressive military interventions in places like Yemen and Sudan, brazenly flouts the international scientific consensus on climate action. As ADNOC’s al-Jaber had the cheek to claim last fall: “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C.”

Such outrageous denialism scales almost Trumpian heights in the faux grandeur of its mendacity. At the time, al-Jaber was also, ironically enough, the chairman of the yearly U.N. Conference of Parties (COP) climate summit. Last November 21st, he boldly posed this challenge: “Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.” (In the world he’s helping to create, of course, even the caves would sooner or later prove too hot to handle.) This year the International Energy Agency decisively answered his epic piece of trolling by reporting that the wealthier nations, particularly the European ones, actually grew their gross national products in 2023 even as they cut CO2 emissions by a stunning 4.5%. In other words, moving away from fossil fuels can make humanity more prosperous and safer from planetary catastrophe rather than turning us into so many beggars.

“Absolutely Not!”

What could be worse than the UAE’s unabashedly pro-fossil fuel energy policy? Well, Iran, heavily wedded to oil and gas, is, at 66, ranked one place lower than that country. Ironically, however, extensive American sanctions on Iran’s petroleum exports may, at long last, be turning that country’s ruling ayatollahs toward creating substantial wind and solar power projects.

But I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that dead last — with an emphasis on “dead” — comes that favorite of Donald (“drill, drill, drill“) Trump, Saudi Arabia, which, at 67, “scores very low in all four CCPI index categories: Energy Use, Climate Policy, Renewable Energy, and GHG Emissions.” Other observers have noted that, since 1990, the kingdom’s carbon dioxide emissions have increased by a compound yearly rate of roughly 4% and, in 2019, that relatively small country was the world’s 10th largest emitter of CO2.

Worse yet, though you wouldn’t know it from the way the leaders of both the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are acting, the Arabian Peninsula (already both arid and torrid) is anything but immune to the potential disasters produced by climate change. The year 2023 was, in fact, the third hottest on record in Saudi Arabia. (2021 took the all-time hottest mark so far.) The weather is already unbearable there in the summer. On July 18, 2023, the temperature in the kingdom’s Eastern Province, al-Ahsa, reached an almost inconceivable 122.9° F (50.5° C). If, in the future, such temperatures were to be accompanied by a humidity of 50%, some researchers are suggesting that they could prove fatal to humans. According to Professor Lewis Halsey of the University of Roehampton in England and his colleagues, that kind of heat can actually raise the temperature of an individual by 1.8° F. In other words, it would be as if they were running a fever and, worse yet, “people’s metabolic rates also rose by 56%, and their heart rates went up by 64%.”

While the Arabian Peninsula is relatively dry, cities on the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden can at times be humid and muggy, which means that significant increases in temperature could sooner or later render them uninhabitable. Such rising heat even threatens one of Islam’s “five pillars.” This past year the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, known as the Hajj, took place in June, when temperatures sometimes reached 118° F (48° C) in western Saudi Arabia. More than 2,000 pilgrims fell victim to heat stress, a problem guaranteed to worsen radically as the planet heats further.

Despite the threat that climate change poses to the welfare of that country’s inhabitants, the government of King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is doing less than nothing to address the growing problems. As the CCPI’s authors put it, “Saudi Arabia’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions are rising steadily. Its share of renewable energy in total primary energy supply (TPES) is close to zero.” Meanwhile, at the 2022 U.N. climate summit conference held in Egypt, “Saudi Arabia played a notably unconstructive role in the negotiations. Its delegation included many fossil fuel lobbyists. It also tried to water down the language used in the COP’s umbrella decision.”

At the next meeting in Dubai last fall, COP28, the final document called only for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.” Avoided was the far more relevant phrase “phase down” or “phase out” when it came to fossil fuels and even the far milder “transitioning away” was only included over the strenuous objections of Riyadh, whose energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman, said “absolutely not” to any such language. He added, “And I assure you not a single person — I’m talking about governments — believes in that.” His assertion was, of course, nonsense. In fact, some leaders, like those of Pacific Island nations, consider an immediate abolition of fossil fuels essential to the very survival of their countries.

Abandoning the Logic of Small Steps

Although Saudi Arabia’s leaders sometimes engage in greenwashing, including making periodic announcements about future plans to develop green energy, they have done virtually nothing in that regard, despite the Kingdom’s enormous potential for solar and wind power. Ironically, the biggest Saudi green energy achievement has been abroad, thanks to the ACWA Power firm, a public-private joint venture in the Kingdom. The Moroccan government, the only one in the Middle East to make significant strides in combatting climate change, brought in ACWA as part of a consortium to build its epochal Noor concentrated solar energy complex near the ancient city of Ouarzazate at the edge of the Sahara desert. It has set a goal of getting 52% of its electricity from renewables by 2030. Though critics pointed out that it missed its goal of 42% by 2020, government boosters responded that, by the end of 2022, 37% of Morocco’s electricity already came from renewables and, just in the past year, it jumped to 40%, with a total renewables production of 4.6 gigawatts of energy.

Moreover, Morocco has a plethora of green energy projects in the pipeline, including 20 more hydroelectric installations, 19 wind farms, and 16 solar farms. The solar plants alone are expected to generate 13.5 gigawatts within a few years, tripling the country’s current total green energy output. Two huge wind farms, one retooled with a new generation of large turbines, have already come online in the first quarter of this year. The country’s expansion of green electricity production since it launched its visionary plans in 2009 has not only helped it make major strides toward decarbonization but contributed to the electrification of its countryside, where access to power is now universal. Just in the past two and a half decades, the government has provided 2.1 million households with electricity access. Morocco has few hydrocarbons of its own and local green energy helps the state avoid an enormous drain on its budget.

In contrast to the pernicious nonsense often spewed by Saudi and Emirati officials, the Moroccan king, Mohammed VI, is in no doubt about the severe challenges his poverty-ridden country faces. He told the U.N. COP28 climate conference in early December, “Just as climate change is inexorably increasing, the COPs must, from here on, emerge from the logic of ‘small steps,’ which has characterized them for too long.”

Large steps toward a Middle East (and a world) of low-carbon energy would, of course, be a big improvement. Unfortunately, on a planet they are helping to overheat in a remarkable fashion, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and Saudi Arabia have largely taken steps — huge ones, in fact — toward ever more carbon dioxide emissions. Worse yet, they’re located in a part of the world where such retrograde policies are tantamount to playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun.

Copyright Juan Cole 2024

Via Tomdispatch.com

Soon after the elected, unindicted felons passed their dirty bill, Texas was hit with an unprecedented string of 100° F. days amid one of the state’s worst and longest heat waves, accompanied by severe drought. The state also faces sea level rise along the coasts, storm surges, more powerful hurricanes, flooding, and severe winters caused by the polar vortex exacerbated by climate change. Not to mention that it experienced just last month among the worst and largest wildfires in U.S. history.

While government is powerful and economic incentives can affect economic activities, this pitiful effort to prop up the dying fossil fuel industries appears to resemble most the frenetic to and fro of a chicken that has been beheaded. A lot of energy expended just before a certain demise.

Exhibit A is a new report by the Energy Information Agency that shows how rapidly solar power is overtaking fossil gas in the state.

Wind farms produce the most renewable energy in Texas, but solar is making rapid strides, alongside vastly increased battery storage. Solar power generation in the Lone Star state has already overtaken that in California, which is saying something.

From the winter of ’22-’23 to the past winter, ’23-’24, solar power generation in Texas increased by a whopping 35%. This increased solar power generation allowed the state to use less fossil gas in the middle of the day. Yes, solar is coming on so strong in Texas that it is already displacing fossil gas.

“Solar Hero v. Gas Monster,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/ Dark Fantasy/ IbisPaint, 2024.

Utility-scale solar now generates about a third as much power (32k GWh) as wind (108k GWh) in Texas. For the moment, wind is holding steady and only growing slowly as a power source.

Solar, in contrast, is set to grow by leaps and bounds over the next two years. Texas now has 16 gigawatts of solar power, but in ’24 and ’25 there are plans to add 24 gigawatts of solar net summer capacity to the grid.

Texas ended 2023 with 5.6 gigawatts of battery storage, but there are plans to add 13 gigwatts of battery storage to the electricity grid in the next couple of years.

Julian Spector at Canary Media explains that Texas’ ERCOT incentivizes entrepreneurial renewables:

“Unlike California, Texas does not award specific contracts to ensure sufficient grid capacity; instead, the price spikes from moments of scarce supply are meant to incentivize private developers to build power plants and make money. Developers have found that acquiring land, obtaining permits and connecting to the grid is easier in Texas than in California’s regulatory regime. The payoffs can be huge, both for developers and residents. For developers, rapidly responding batteries are well suited to making money off the sudden swings in ERCOT’s increasingly renewables-inflected markets.”

How delicious that the market and technological innovation are allowing renewables companies to outflank the corporate welfare socialism of Texas’ conservative legislators. Watch the top of the below graph moving left to right. It is showing the future:

Source: US Energy Information Administration

The combination of solar and batteries is important because after midday, solar generation begins declining. Consumers get home from work and put a big strain on the grid from 6 pm to 8 pm, when solar goes offline. Some of this shortfall is taken up by wind farms, since the winds pick up in the evening. But much of it is covered by fossil gas peaker plants, which come online to substitute for the fading solar generation.

But if excess solar power has been stored in batteries, then you can release it back into the grid as the sun sets, instead of turning to the fossil gas peaker plants. Since the latter emit a great deal of carbon dioxide as they come online, the batteries save a lot of CO2.

There are also plans for a further 3 gigawatts of wind generation by the end of 2025.

The long and the short of it is that solar growth is already so great that it is cutting down on the need for fossil gas in the Texas grid during some hours of the day and during the summer. Doubling solar capacity and combining it with a tripling of battery storage will make even greater inroads into fossil gas.

There is no point in getting a 3% loan or a bonus from the state government to build a fossil gas plant if you will nevertheless go bankrupt. Hence there are only plans to add 3 gigawatts of fossil gas capacity to the Texas grid over the next two years, only a fifth of what is planned for solar and only a fourth of what is planned for battery storage. Somebody is being left in the dust.

( Clean Energy Wire ) The year 2023 was the windiest in Germany in more than 15 years, providing excellent conditions for wind electricity generation, said Germany’s National Meteorological Service (DWD).

In 2023, the average wind speed across Germany at a height of 100 metres [yards] – a typical hub height for wind turbines in this country – was just under 6 metres [yards] per second (m/s), DWD said. Wind speeds were significantly higher than the long-term average, particularly in the winter months of January, November and December and reached the highest level since 2007.

Will renewables stop the climate crisis? | DW Documentary Video

Last year was also a good one for solar PV, but not a record year like 2022, DWD added. “From a meteorological perspective, 2023 was a successful year for the use of renewable energies in Germany,” DWD vice president Renate Hagedorn commented.

The expansion of onshore wind power in Germany is picking up again and it appears that a “politically caused” dent in newly installed capacity between 2019 and 2021 has been overcome, industry lobby group BWE said earlier this month.

Preliminary data by energy market research group AG Energiebilanzen (AGEB) showed that onshore wind turbines produced a record 114.2 terawatt hours (TWh) in Germany in 2023, while solar PV produced a record 61.1 TWh.

In January, the DWD had said that 2023 also marked Germany’s hottest year since records began in 1881, warning that the country had to “take intensive action to protect the climate and adapt to the damage caused by extreme weather events.”

Via Clean Energy Wire

Published under a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)” .

I’ve lived my whole life in an imperial power. Once, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was even “the lone superpower,” the last great power on planet Earth, or so its leaders believed. I then watched how, in a world without great-power dangers, it continued to invest ever more of our tax dollars in our military. A “peace dividend“? Who needed that? And yet, in the decades that followed, by far the most expensive military on planet Earth couldn’t manage to win a single war, no less its Global War on Terror. In fact, in this century, while fighting vain or losing conflicts across significant parts of the planet, it slowly but all too obviously began to go down the tubes, or perhaps I mean (if you don’t mind a few mixed metaphors) come apart at the seams?

And it never seems to end, does it? Imagine that 32 years after the U.S. became the last superpower on Planet Earth, in a devastating kind of political chaos, this country might indeed reelect a man who imagines himself running a future American “dictatorship” — his very word for it! — even if, publicly at least, just for a single day.

And yes, in 2024, as chaos blooms on the American political scene, the world itself continues to be remarkably at war — think of “war,” in fact, as humanity’s middle name — in both Ukraine and Gaza (with offshoots in Lebanon and Yemen). Meanwhile, this country’s now 22-year-old war on terror straggles on in its own devastating fashion, with threats of worse to come in plain sight.

After all, 88 years after two atomic bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, nukes seem to be making a comeback (not that they were ever truly gone, of course). Thank you, Kim and Vlad! I’m thinking of how North Korean leader Kim Jong-un implicitly threatened to nuke his nonnuclear southern neighbor recently. But also, far more significantly how, in his own version of a State of the Union address to his people, Russian President Vladimir Putin very publicly threatened to employ nukes from his country’s vast arsenal (assumedly “tactical” ones, some of which are more powerful than the atomic bombs that ended World War II), should any European countries — think France — send their troops into Ukraine.

And don’t forget that, amid all of this, my own country’s military, eternally hiking its “defense” budget, continues to prepare in a big-time fashion for a future war with — yes — China! Of course, that country is, in turn, rushing to upgrade its own nuclear arsenal and the rest of its military machine as well. Only recently, for instance, the U.S. and Japan held joint military maneuvers that, as they openly indicated for the first time, were aimed at preparing for just such a future conflict with China and you can’t get much more obvious than that.

Another World War?

Oh, and when it comes to war, I haven’t even mentioned, for instance, the devastating civil war in Sudan that has nothing to do with any of the major powers. Yes, we humans just can’t seem to stop making war while, to the tune of untold trillions of dollars globally, preparing for ever more of it. And the truly strange thing is this: it seems to matter not at all that the very world on which humanity has done so forever and a day is now itself being unsettled in a devastating way that no military of any sort, armed in any fashion, will ever be able to deal with.

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Let’s admit it: we humans have always had a deep urge to make war. Of course, logically speaking, we shouldn’t continue to do so, and not just for all the obvious reasons but because we’re on a planet that can’t take it anymore. (Yes, making war or simply preparing for it means putting staggering amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and so, quite literally, making war on the planet itself.) But — as both history and the present moment seem to indicate all too decisively — we just can’t stop ourselves.

In the process, while hardly noticing, it seems as if we’ve become ever more intent on conducting a global war on this planet itself. Our weapons in that war — and in their own long-term fashion, they’re likely to prove no less devastating than nuclear arms — have been fossil fuels. I’m thinking, of course, of coal, oil, and natural gas and the greenhouse gases that drilling for them and the use of them emit in staggering quantities even in what passes for peacetime.

In the previous century, of course, there were two devastating “world” wars, World War I and World War II. They were global events that, in total, killed more than a hundred million of us and devastated parts of the planet. But here’s the truly strange thing: while local and regional wars continue in this century in a striking fashion, few consider the way we’re loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and methane while, in the process, heating this planet disastrously as a new kind of world war. Think of climate change, in fact, as a kind of slow-motion World War III. After all, it couldn’t be more global or, in the end, more destructive than a world war of the worst sort.

And unlike the present wars in Gaza and Ukraine, which, even thousands of miles away, continue to be headline-making events, the war on this planet normally gets surprisingly little attention in much of the media. In fact, in 2023, a year that set striking global heat records month by month from June to December and was also the hottest year ever recorded, the major TV news programs of ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox actually cut their coverage of global warming significantly, according to Media Matters for America.

“If I Don’t Get Elected, It’s Going to Be a Blood Bath”

I live in New York City which, like much of the rest of the planet, set a heat record for 2023. In addition, the winter we just passed through was a record one for warmth. And I began writing this piece on a set of days in early March when the temperature in my city also hit records in the mid-60s, and when, on March 14th (not April 14th, May 14th, or even June 14th), it clocked 70-plus degrees. I was walking outside that afternoon with my shirtsleeves rolled up, my sweater in my backpack, and my spring jacket tied around my waist, feeling uncomfortably hot in my blue jeans even on the shadier side of the street.

And yes, if, as my wife and I did recently, you were to walk down to the park near where we live, you’d see that the daffodils are already blooming wildly as are other flowers, while the first trees are budding, including a fantastic all-purple one that’s burst out fully, all of this in a fashion that might once have seemed normal sometime in April. And yes, some of what I’m describing is certainly quite beautiful in the short run, but under it lies an increasingly grim reality when it comes to extreme (and extremely hot) weather.

While I was working on this piece, the largest Texas fires ever (yes, ever!), continued to burn, evidently barely contained, with far more than a million acres of that state’s panhandle already fried to a crisp. Oh, and those record-setting Canadian forest fires that scorched tens of millions of acres of that country, while turning distant U.S. cities like New York into smoke hells last June have, it turns out, festered underground all winter as “zombie fires.” And they may burst out again in an even more devastating fashion this spring or summer. In fact, in 2023, from Hawaii to Chile to Europe, there were record wildfires of all sorts on our increasingly over-heated planet. And far worse is yet to come, something you could undoubtedly say as well about more intense flooding, more violent storms, and so on.

We are, in other words, increasingly on a different planet, though you would hardly know it amid the madness of our moment. I mean, imagine this: Russia, whose leader, Vladimir Putin, clearly doesn’t consider climate change a significant issue, is on pace to achieve an oil-drilling record for the second year in a row. China, despite installing far more green power than any other country, has also been using more coal than all other nations combined, and set global records for building new coal-fired power plants.

Meanwhile, the third “great” power on this planet, despite having a president dedicated to doing something about climate change, is still the largest exporter of natural gas around and continues to produce oil at a distinctly record pace.

And don’t forget the five giant fossil-fuel companies, BP, Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies, which in 2023 produced oil, made profits, and rewarded shareholders at — yes, you guessed it! — a record pace, while the major petrostates of our world are still, according to the Guardian, “planning expansions that would blow the planet’s carbon budget twice over.”

In sum, then, this world of ours only grows more dangerous by the year. And I haven’t even mentioned artificial intelligence, have I? As Michael Klare has written in an analysis for the Arms Control Association, the dangers of AI and other emerging military technologies are likely to “expand into the nuclear realm by running up the escalation ladder or by blurring the distinction between a conventional and nuclear attack.”

In other words, human war-making could become both more inhuman and worse at the same time. Now, add just one more factor into the global equation. America’s European and Asian allies see U.S. leadership, dominant since 1945, experiencing a potentially epoch-ending, terminal failure, as the global Pax Americana (that had all too little to do with “peace”) is crumbling — or do I mean overheating?

What they see, in fact, is two elderly men locked in an ever more destructive, inward-looking electoral knife fight, with one of them warning ominously that “if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath… for the country.” And if he isn’t victorious, here’s his further prediction: “I don’t think you’re going to have another election, or certainly not an election that’s meaningful.” Of course, were he to be victorious the same could be true, especially since he’s promised from his first day in office to “drill, drill, drill,” which, at this point in our history, is, by definition, to declare war on this planet!

Unfortunately, Donald Trump isn’t alone. All too sadly, we humans clearly have trouble focusing on the world we actually inhabit. We’d prefer to fight wars instead. Consider that the definition not just of imperial decline, but of decline period in the age of climate change.

And yet, it’s barely news.

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com

(The Conversation) – African countries will suffer significant economic loss after 2050 if global warming is not limited to below 2°C, a new study by the Center for Global Development has found.

Environment and energy economist Philip Kofi Adom is the author of the report. He synchronised many years of research by climate change scientists and researchers and found that west and east Africa will fare worst. We asked him about his findings.

You found climate change will reduce Africa’s crop earnings by 30%. How will this affect people?

If climate change continues on its current trend, crop production in Africa will decline by 2.9% in 2030 and by 18% by 2050. About 200 million people risk suffering from extreme hunger by 2050. The crop revenue loss of approximately 30% will cause a rise in poverty of between 20% and 30% compared to a no-climate-change scenario.

How this will happen is that climate change will drive agricultural production down, so crop sales will suffer although scarcity will raise prices.

In Africa, 42.5% of the working class is employed in the agricultural sector. The incomes of those, mostly rural, workers will decline. Already, a higher share of people living in rural areas are poor and most impoverished people in Africa are concentrated in the rural areas. The decline of the agricultural sector is likely to push more people into severe poverty.

We will also face food security issues and those who work in the agricultural sector will face the risk of losing jobs. Rural farmers who rely only on rain and have no irrigation systems to grow their crops will suffer the most.

You project a long term Africa-wide gross domestic product (GDP) decline of 7.12%. What impact will this have?

When we speak of the long term, we are looking at 2050 and beyond. GDP tells us the wealth status of economies at any point in time. Through wealth creation, businesses emerge and jobs are created. Taxes collected pay for infrastructural investment, investment in social services and provision of social support like health insurance and unemployment insurance. With a 7.12% decline in GDP, these wealth creating potentials in the economy are going to be severely affected should climate change continue at the current pace.

“In East Africa climate change and increased food prices lead to extreme hunger” | Oxfam GB Video

Country-level projections have suggested much greater economic losses in GDP, ranging from 11.2% to 26.6% in the long term, in the most affected regions of Africa. When economies shrink in size, businesses could close down, certain jobs will be destroyed and new jobs will not be created.

For the people of Africa, this is very significant because it is predicted that in the coming years, the continent’s population will reach over 2 billion. The African population is the world’s most youthful. So if African economies shrink, where would those young people find their source of livelihood? That is a great concern.

50 million Africans are likely to be pushed into into water distress. What does this mean?

It means severe water shortages in homes and industries. For example, if you used to have access to water all day, you are going to have a much lower supply – a quantity so low that it does not meet your needs. This is a demand and supply issue. There will be higher demand for water resources but because of the short supply, water prices will shoot up. Going into the future, if nothing is done, water across Africa will be very expensive.

Can adaptation and mitigation help us avoid this disaster?

When we talk about climate change it is community or collective action. Obviously, governments are the big players. The government has to foster the change efforts that are required by supporting private initiatives in climate adaptation and mitigation – either directly or through incentive designs.

No attempts at adaptation and mitigation are too small. If these small efforts are coordinated, we can expect to see results. Individual households and individual businesses can do a lot. For example, people can cut down on the amount of meat and dairy eaten or change how transport is used – resorting to cycling, walking or public transport when possible. At home, energy saving practices can be adopted. And green spaces must be respected and protected.

People who use banks should ensure they conduct responsible investment. It is always important to know what kind of investment the bank is using money for. If it is not something that is climate friendly, customers and clients can speak about that.

Whatever the side effects will be, everyone will be at the receiving end. Everyone has a voice and it is important to use it on climate related issues.

What should African leaders be doing?

Climate change is an ongoing and impending environmental crisis. Luckily there is the chance to do something about it before the unthinkable happens. I urge African leaders to be very proactive in their climate change and mitigation efforts. The agricultural sector is the economic mainstay for most economies in Africa and climate change poses a grave danger to it. Climate change may create a state of perpetual economic distress if we fail to act now.

Philip Kofi Adom, Associate Professor, School of Economics and Finance, University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Cronkite News ) The current Western megadrought is unlike any other dry period the region has experienced over the past 500 years.

That’s according to a new study in which scientists looked at tree rings to track changing temperatures going back to 1553. Researchers found that human-fueled climate change is driving temperatures higher, which makes soil drier and droughts more frequent, intense and widespread.

King, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, gathers a core sample from a mountain hemlock tree at Lassen National Volcanic Park in northern California. King is the lead author on a study of tree rings that puts the 21st century Western megadrought into historical context. (Photo by Grant Harley/University Of Idaho)

Karen King, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and the study’s lead author, said it shows the role of temperature in shaping modern drought.

“We know that extreme heat has consequences,” King said. “We know that drought has consequences. So when they’re compounded together, we can expect that those vulnerabilities are only going to be magnified and the consequences are going to be more wide reaching.”

The study, which was published in the journal “Science Advances,” analyzed cross-sections of trees from a number of Western states, including Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming. The study’s authors concluded that the two-decade period from 2000 to 2020 was the warmest in half a millennium.

The consequences of dry conditions in the 21st century include significant strain on the Southwest’s most important water supply, the Colorado River, which supplies about 40 million people across seven states. It has been shrinking as a result of those higher temperatures, but demand for water has not.

Policymakers around the region have struggled to rein in demand for water, even as more than two decades of dry conditions have shrunk the nation’s two largest reservoirs – Lake Mead and Lake Powell, both on the Colorado River – to record lows.

Some scientists and water managers say the Southwest’s currently dry period extends beyond the normal definition of “drought,” arguing that it should be categorized instead as “aridification,” a permanent resetting of the baseline for how much water enters the region’s streams, rivers and reservoirs each year.

Eric Balken, executive director of Glen Canyon Institute, walks along a sandbar that had long been submerged under Lake Powell. But as the reservoir drops to record lows, as a result of more than 20 years of drought in the region, areas that were underwater for decades have begun to emerge. (Photo by Alex Hager/KUNC)

Experts say warm temperatures are, essentially, the first domino in a chain of changing conditions that impact water supply.

Since 2000, average temperatures in the upper Colorado River basin have been more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than in the previous century. That upper Colorado is the region where the river begins, mostly as snow in high-altitude portions of Colorado and Wyoming.

The new tree-ring study shows how high temperatures have made the region’s soil drier. Dry soil means less water in streams and rivers.

When rain falls or snow melts, it seeps into the dirt before entering streams and rivers. When that dirt is saturated, it can’t absorb additional water, and snowmelt flows directly into nearby waterways. But when the soil is dry, as it is now, it acts like a sponge, soaking up water before it has a chance to reach the places where humans collect it.

The data in this new tree-ring study, as well as findings from other similar research, spell trouble for decision-makers trying to share a shrinking resource across a region with growing populations and a multibillion-dollar agricultural economy.

“While the future of precipitation in the region remains uncertain, projections of increasing temperatures pose substantial risk for intensifying drought conditions and increasing water insecurity for these economically important, population-dense, and historically active megadrought regions,” the study’s authors wrote.

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.

-This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation.

Via Cronkite News

The average surface temperature of the US this past winter was 37.6°, which is 5.4° F. above the norm. A winter that is 5 degrees warmer than normal ought to be horrifying. This is not normal. And we are only at the beginning of this heating.

One way you could tell it was hot was that Wisconsin had its first February tornado on record. Wisconsin.

Another way you could tell that it was a hot, hot winter was that Texas experienced the largest and most destructive wildfires in the past 20 years, and likely in the state’s recorded history. The Smokehouse Creek Fire merged with another huge conflagration and burned 1,075,000 acres in Texas and Oklahoma, making it the second largest fire in US history. It is still only 75% contained. In the Texas Panhandle, at least 10,000 cattle have been killed or so badly injured they’ll have to be euthanized, while many grain production companies reported “total losses,” according to CBS News. Hundreds of homes have been destroyed, and two people killed.

Wildfires are common in Texas in the summer, and occur as early as March in the Panhandle, but to have so much of the state aflame in February is, let us say, unusual.

KFOR OKlahoma News 4 Video from Thursday: “Texas/ Oklahoma wildfires burn more than 1.3 million acres in a week”

But it isn’t just Texas. The United States of America was lit up like a Christmas tree in February, with unusually high temperatures. Consider this temperature map for February:

H/t NOAA

Then there were a series of atmospheric rivers that inundated California, causing widespread flooding and destruction. Phys.org notes, “At one point, weather agencies posted flood watches for nearly the entirety of California’s coast.” As we heat up the earth, we cause more water to evaporate from the oceans, making the atmosphere denser with moisture. Ribbons of moisture move from the equator up to the temperate zones and dump their water. Climate change increases the rainfall released and also changes the patterns of the atmospheric rivers.

In 2023, the US had twenty-eight disasters costing a billion dollars or more. During the past 40 years, the average number of billion-dollar climate disasters per annum was only 8.5. But in the past 5 years the average has been about 20 such very costly catastrophes. The rate of catastrophe is sky-rocketing.

This finding is yet another indication that global heating is proceeding at least as fast as climate scientists projected at the beginning of our century, and in many cases much faster. Climate risks becoming chaotic if we heat up the earth’s surface more than 2.7° F. (1.5° C.) above the preindustrial average. We’ve already heated it up to around 2.1° F. higher than that 18th century average, by spewing billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas, into the atmosphere. We’re wrecking the earth by burning coal for heat and electricity, or fossil gas, or by burning petroleum in automobiles and trucks. We still aren’t reducing the amount of CO2 we put into the atmosphere annually, though its increase has leveled off. We have to cut it out. Now.

As much of the Great Lakes region experiences its warmest winter on record, and more record high temperatures are expected in Michigan, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has reported record low levels of ice coverage on the Great Lakes, amid a steady, decades-long decrease in coverage.

While ice coverage on the Great Lakes usually peaks in the late February to early March, NOAA began reporting daily record-lows for Great Lakes ice coverage on Feb. 8, through Feb. 15. While there was a brief spike above historic lows after Feb. 15, those numbers quickly neared and tied low ice-coverage records, with historical lows recorded on Feb. 27 and 28, Jennifer Day, director of communications for NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory said in an email.

Ice coverage on the individual lakes has followed similar patterns, with Lake Superior, Lake Michigan and Lake Huron recording historic low coverage for the date on Feb. 28, while ice concentration for Lake Erie sat at 0% and concentration on Lake Ontario sat at less than half a percent.

NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory Ice Coverage Chart for Feb. 29, 2024. | National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Ice concentration on Lake Superior sat at 1.74% on Wednesday, while NOAA recorded 3.6% concentration in Lake Michigan and 7.84% concentration in Lake Huron.

The total peak for ice concentration across the five lakes was recorded on Jan. 22, with 16% coverage. However, Lake Superior has since recorded a new maximum for the year on Feb.19, exceeding its January peak.

Ayumi Fujisaki-Manome, an associate researcher at the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research told the Michigan Advance the lack of ice is the result of anomaly conditions overlaid on long term warming trends. Alongside El Niño conditions contributing to a warmer and wetter winter than normal, the North Atlantic Oscillation — which describes atmospheric pressure patterns — is in a positive phase, which prevents cold arctic air from coming down into the Great Lakes region.

Day noted that the strong El Niño coupled with a warm December and above average air and water temperatures throughout winter did not create the conditions needed for ice to develop.

Low ice was also recorded in 2020 and 2023, Day said, with the annual maximum coverage near 20%, compared to the long-term average of 53%.

However, NOAA has also recorded very high ice years in the previous decade, in 2014, 2015 and 2019.

“Even though there’s a decreasing trend in max ice (5%/decade), there is a great deal of year to year variability,” Day said.

Although there has been a long-term decline in Great Lakes Ice Coverage, predicting those fluctuations from year to year remains a big question for researchers, Fujisaki-Manome said.

While a lack of ice may bring disappointment for those looking to ice fish in the Great Lakes, or visit ice caves near the coast, the lack of ice coverage also carries concerns for shoreline conditions, lake effect weather, and for various animal species in and around the Great Lakes.

Ice coverage serves as a barrier, protecting coastlines from high winds, high waves and storm surges. Without that barrier there will be long-term impacts, such as shoreline erosion, Fujisaki-Manome said.

A lack of ice to protect from waves makes shorelines more susceptible to coastal flooding and creates a higher potential for storm damage to shoreline infrastructure, Day said.

Additionally, less ice and more open water is the perfect set up for a lake effect snowstorm or an ice storm, Fujisaki-Manome said.

During late fall and winter cold air flowing over the warm waters of the Great Lakes leads to the production of lake effect snow leading to increased snowfall in areas downwind from the lakes. This effect usually diminishes late into the winter season, as the formation of lake ice reduces the supply of warm and moist air in the atmosphere.

Thick, stable ice also protects fish eggs that are deposited nearshore in the fall and incubate over winter, Day said. Ice cover can help minimize the effect of waves that would dislodge or break apart eggs from species like lake whitefish or lake herring, she said.

Ice cover also affects winter fishery harvests, especially in bays, drowned river mouth lakes and nearshore areas, Day said. During cold winters when ice is thick and lasts three to four months, harvests for panfish, whitefish, bass, walleye and yellow perch are high, with low harvests when coverage is low and unstable.

It is unlikely that total ice coverage across the Great Lakes will exceed its January peak, Day said.

Significant ice growth is not expected over the coming weeks, and longer term temperature trend predictions indicate that ice levels across the Great Lakes will likely remain below average for the next several weeks, Day said.

Kyle Davidson