Noise pollution, a longstanding menace, is often ignored. It has, however, been making headlines in recent years, thanks to the booming development of massive, boxy, windowless buildings filled with computer servers that process data and handle internet traffic. Those servers generate extreme amounts of heat, the removal of which requires powerful water-chilling equipment. That includes arrays of large fans that, in turn, generate a thunderous wall of noise. Such installations, known by the innocuous term “data centers,” are making growing numbers of people miserable.

Residents of Loudoun County, Virginia, the nation’s data-center epicenter, have filed dozens of complaints about an especially loud facility located in the town of Leesburg. People living as much as three miles from the center compared the noise from its giant cooling fans to the sounds of an airplane engine, a freight train, a huge leaf blower, or a helicopter hovering overhead, day and night.

Attorneys representing a group of Williston, North Dakota, homeowners argued last December that noise pollution from the nearby Atlas Power Data Center “is a continual invasion of their homes, their health, and their North Dakota way of life. They are now virtually shut-ins in the slice of North Dakota they once called their own.” In April, Gladys Anderson of Bono, Arkansas, told reporters that a nearby cryptocurrency-mining data center was “like torture, like a form of military-grade torture.” Her neighbor complained, “It’s caused problems for me with my hearing, my blood pressure, with the sweetheart where she gets migraine headaches.”

Chicago-based airline pilot Joshua Zhang — someone who (I’m betting) knows a thing or two about loud noise — told CBS News in 2021 that a new data center in his Printers’ Row neighborhood whined like a gigantic vacuum cleaner that never shuts off. “I try to fly as much as I can to stay away from here,” he said. “I can’t really sleep well… and I have to operate a flight.” In other words, the data center’s ear-splitting noise was so bad that it drove Mr. Zhang to seek refuge at… O’Hare Airport.

Noise Makes Us Sick and We’re Sick of Noise

The recent, rapid proliferation of data centers has been due, at least in part, to the similarly rapid growth of two types of enterprises: cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence (AI). Those voracious wasters of electricity were unasked-for inventions that filled largely nonexistent human needs. And they’re amplifying the very real problem of noise pollution.  

Crypto and AI illustrate a larger issue. An all-out effort to curb climate change will require deep reductions in the use of fossil fuels, which will, in turn, require more frugal use of all forms of energy. And if that happens (as it should), it will have profound repercussions throughout society. As one of the more welcome consequences, our now-cacophonous world is likely to become easier on the ears.

With every AI project abandoned, every bitcoin not mined, every pickup truck not sold, every jet fighter not flown, people somewhere will get relief. With every bicycle that replaces a motorcycle, every garden hose that supplants a power-washer, every rake that displaces a leaf blower, our world will both warm a little more slowly and become a little less noisy.

The severe impact of noise pollution on both mental and physical health is well documented. Hearing impairment is the most obvious malady it causes. The World Health Organization (WHO) finds that noise pollution severely disrupts our quality of life in other ways, too, raising the risk of heart disease, childhood cognitive impairment, sleep disturbance, and general annoyance. WHO notes that while

“. . . annoyance is not normally classified as a health effect, it certainly affects well-being and therefore is considered to fall within the WHO definition of health as being ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being.’ More importantly, however, it is the effect of noise that most lay people are aware of and concerned about.”

And annoyance can be a gateway to much worse, to “feelings of disturbance, aggravation, dissatisfaction, concern, bother, displeasure, harassment, irritation, nuisance, vexation, exasperation, discomfort, uneasiness, distress, hate, etc.” You might think I got that quote from a thesaurus, but, no, it’s from a study published in the journal Noise and Health. Any person living near a data center or other source of loud, continuous noise can, I expect, attest to having experienced most (or all) of those feelings. And it’s well known that such stresses can lead to physiological health problems.

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When it comes to making people miserable, keep in mind that not all noises are created equal. The roar from data centers, vehicle traffic, commercial lawn-care operations, and other notorious disturbers of the peace is rich in low-pitched audible frequencies that travel much further than others and can even pass through walls. Such low tones also irritate us more, even when they aren’t all that loud. Consequently, and unfortunately, people complaining about their exposure to noise from data centers or other sources of low-frequency noise are all too often dismissed as hypochondriacs. In a recent, comprehensive article on noise pollution in the Atlantic magazine, Bianca Bosker told a gripping tale of how people in Chandler, Arizona, suffered for years as their complaints about data center noise were casually dismissed by local authorities.

The Cruelty Is the Point

For those of us not living near a data center, road traffic may be the most pervasive, day-to-day source of unhealthful low-frequency noise. In the European Union, for example, 113 million people, or 20% percent of the population, live with noise pollution from road traffic that’s loud enough to raise risks of heart disease and heart failure. The risk of developing diabetes, obesity, anxiety, depression, and of course, sleep disturbance also increases as traffic noise gets louder.

Of course, we produce traffic noise collectively and most, but not all, of us hate it. In an April essay entitled “What is Noise?,” New Yorker music critic Alex Ross observed that “if you elect to hear something, it is not noise, even if most people might deem it unspeakably horrible. If you are forced to hear something, it is noise, even if most people might deem it ineffably gorgeous.” Extra-loud vehicles, particularly en masse, richly illustrate Ross’s observation.

In recent decades, American pickup trucks and SUVs have grown steadily larger and heavier, with towering front ends and armoring that create a road-ruling mystique. Increasingly, to further satisfy consumer demand for big, intimidating vehicles, automakers equip many of them with high-decibel engines, turbochargers, and thunderous exhaust systems. Drivers all too regularly dial the volume up several more notches with muffler modifications that are often illegal. The automakers’ economic motivation for offering big, loud vehicles is clear ($$$), but why exactly do their customers want them? The deafening din emanating from those trucks has distinct political undertones, but there may also be something deeper going on.

A 2023 study published in the journal Current Issues in Personality Psychology sheds some light on this. The researcher interviewed 529 people, split almost equally between the sexes, about their attitudes toward noisy vehicles. Then, using questionnaires, she evaluated the subjects for four “dark” personality traits: Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism. It turned out (surprise!) that men liked loud vehicles significantly more than women did. Across both sexes, those who expressed greater fondness for such vehicles also tended to score higher for two dark personality traits: psychopathy and sadism. The researcher drily observed that the results made perfect sense:

“Psychopathy reflects an up-close cruelty, whereas sadism includes viewing the harm to others from a distance… Modifying a muffler to make a car louder is disturbing to pedestrians, other drivers, and animals at a distance, meeting the sadism component, as well as startling when [the victim is] up close at intersections, meeting the psychopathy component.

The author of that study is not a medical professional (nor am I); still, it’s not exactly illogical to consider guys who alter their trucks to produce brain-rattling noise psychopaths. I’m not a lawyer either, but it still seems to me that labeling such practices a form of reckless indifference to human well-being is anything but unreasonable.  

Quietness Should Be a Right, Not a Privilege

For decades, the environmental justice movement has been fighting a longstanding American tradition of locating dirty, dangerous industries and activities in low-income, racialized communities. This is a problem that arises with every environmental issue, and noise is no exception. Alex Ross recognized that in his “What Is Noise?” essay when he observed, “Silence is a luxury of the rich… For the rest of society, noise is an index of struggle.”  

In neighborhoods with lower socioeconomic status and/or large Indigenous, Asian, Black, or Latino populations, residents endure greater exposure to noise pollution, especially in areas where informal racial segregation is more severe. Not surprisingly, a separate study found that the same demographic groups experience highly disproportionate levels of annoyance from noise caused by road traffic or aircraft.

Consider it a certain irony then that, despite being exposed to less noise pollution, white Americans are subject to significantly higher rates of hearing loss than Black Americans — and it’s unclear why. Andrew Van Dam of the Washington Post complicated matters further when he noted that there’s also a political disparity: the higher the share of Republicans in a state or county, the greater the rate of hearing loss. He couldn’t fully explain this as a result of populations in redder states being generally whiter and older. There had to be some other factor. When Van Dam looked further, he found one that made a big difference in the prevalence of hearing loss: politically redder areas have higher rates of recreational firearm ownership than bluer areas, with lots more hunting and gun-range target practice — another kind of noise pollution entirely.

No Peace, No Quiet

The U.S. military also has lots of guns, as well as an enormous climate footprint. A dramatic downsizing of our war-making capacity (and the staggering Pentagon budgets that go with it) — badly needed for both humanitarian and ecological reasons — would have the salutary side-effect of shrinking one of our major sources of noise pollution and hearing loss.

It should come as no surprise that researchers in a wide range of countries have found that hearing loss is more common among military personnel than in the general population. Among American service members, almost 15% suffer hearing impairment. Hearing loss is one of the most common health problems of veterans, especially those who served in special forces units (where it’s twice as prevalent as elsewhere in the armed forces). The exposure of those in such units to large-caliber weapon fire, urban combat training, and the like clearly has a lot to do with that.

In military operations, jet aircraft are the most intense source of both greenhouse-gas emissions and noise pollution. Jets account for almost 80% of the military’s fuel consumption. Their noise output is not as precisely quantified, but recent research in a study on civilian impacts around Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington State found that, in the county where the base is located, two-thirds of the resident population were exposed to noise levels that could have negative health effects. One-fifth suffered high levels of annoyance and 9% were “highly sleep disturbed.” Worse yet, according to that study, “the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community of the Swinomish Reservation [located northeast of the airfield] was extremely vulnerable to health risks, with nearly 85 percent of residents being exposed.”

In Salina, Kansas, where Priti Gulati Cox and I live, we have less frequent but highly immersive experiences with military noise pollution every time the curiously named “Jaded Thunder joint exercise” comes to town. In part of that “exercise,” pilots from the Air Force, Army, Marines, and Navy take off from a nearby airfield in fighter jets and fly low over our city of 50,000. The noise hits you suddenly, like a roundhouse punch. It’s like nothing I’ve heard or felt elsewhere.  My own reaction to such overwhelming noise levels is similar to those found in survey responses from several residents of Madison, Wisconsin, who hear fighter jet noise much more routinely than we Salinans do. As one of them put it: “Everything I’m doing comes to a halt… my entire body tenses up and my heart starts racing… utterly jarring… impossible to make out dialogue… impossible to just continue any activity… reminds me of every innocent soul killed in a bombing by my home country.” Finally, there was simply this: “Annoyed.”

Cooler Means Quieter

America was getting louder before the rise of data centers, but now it’s getting louder faster. Unfortunately, the research on that is sparse, but it’s still a reasonable conclusion to draw. In her article, Bianca Bosker pointed out another intriguing indicator of our rising noise problem. Fire-engine sirens today are designed to be more than twice as loud as those of the 1970s, just so they’ll be audible above the rising din of our cities and suburbs. And keep in mind that they’re eight times as loud as the sirens of 1912.

Climate mitigation is also noise mitigation. To avoid baking the Earth, governments must quickly phase out the use of oil, gas, and coal. With a slimmed-down energy supply, economies will need to direct fuels and electricity toward uses that meet more essential needs. Crypto and AI are not among such uses, nor can we afford to keep streets and highways crammed with gas- and diesel-guzzling private vehicles. For those and many other reasons, count on one thing: strong efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will also have striking beneficial side effects, including more peace and quiet. And that should be music to our ears. 

Copyright 2024 Stan Cox

via Tomdispatch.com

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – Azerbaijan is making the most of its hosting of the UN climate summit (COP29) in November this year. Its president, Ilham Aliyev, has been on a whirlwind tour of the world to court major nations for a climate finance pact that will feature Baku’s initiative on a New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), which originally was a pledge to provide $100 billion annually for climate action in developing countries. He also enlisted the support of his neighbor, Russia.

On August 18-19, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a two-day state visit to Azerbaijan. Aliyev invited him to attend COP29. Putin hasn’t been fond of climate summits, but this one will be hard for him to skip. If he attends, he will, for the first time since the invasion of Ukraine, sit next to leaders of P5, G-7, BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), G-20, and the 38-member OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) countries. Except for G-7, Russia is a key member of all these groupings.

Putin will be tempted to support the NCQG, since it would give him an opportunity to name and shame those who have been historically the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases (GHG). But there is an irony involved here. The Russian economy is awash in resource extraction, especially the extraction of oil and natural gas. Russia is world’s fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, after China, the United States, and India. Should Russia call out rich nations for their historical contribution to GHG emissions, it will be the pot calling the kettle black.

Besides their shared past as former Soviet republics, Azerbaijan and Russia are fellow littoral states that share the long, transnational Caspian coastline. With a surface area of 143,000 square miles, the Caspian is the world’s largest inland body of water. It is “inland” because it doesn’t feed into any larger waterway, such as the ocean. Its year-round cumulative moisture makes coastal economies hum.

As one of the five littoral states—the others being Kazakhstan, Russia, Iran, and Turkmenistan—Azerbaijan is the most dependent upon the Caspian. One-fourth of Baku’s oil reserves are located offshore in the Caspian. Azerbaijan could live without this oil, but it cannot live without the food, water, and ecological treasures that the Caspian lavishes upon it. Sturgeon is the queen fish of the Caspian, which yields the world delicacy of caviar. Up to 90 percent of the world’s caviar is sourced from the Caspian. Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan and host to COP29, is built on the shore of the Caspian. The lake is the city’s water tower and its food pantry.

But the Caspian is fast drying up. With climate-induced soaring temperatures, the lake is rapidly evaporating, leaving behind sprawling patches of dry land. On average, the Caspian has been receding by 20 centimeters per year. It is projected to drop by 18 meters by the end of the century, while the northern Caspian is already only 5-6 meters deep. It has now passed below the level at which it can support the marine ecosystem.

Aliyev showed Putin rocks that were peeking out of the lake’s fast developing shallows. The Azeri leader fears that this process will eventually turn the lake into an island, just as it did to the Aral Sea. The latter’s seabed is now land surface with miles upon miles of dirt trails. The Kazakh port city of Aqtau has already dried up, leaving the vibrant urban center and its economy in ruin.

Photo by MohammadReza Jelveh on Unsplash

At slightly over a million square miles, Kazakhstan is comparable in size to Western Europe and thus can absorb the loss of a city. Azerbaijan is, however, far more compact with a land area of just 33,436 square miles. Its surface and subsurface territorial waters in the Caspian are twice as large as its landmass. Losing so much of the country to climate change would be unthinkable for any Azeri.

Putin has promised Aliyev to save the lake. Despite his promise, there is little Putin can do. Putin’s Russia is an upstream country on the Caspian. The other four coastal nations, including Azerbaijan, want Moscow to cease impounding and diverting tributaries to the Caspian. One such tributary is the Volga River, which is the longest and the largest (in volume) body of water on the European continent. The Volga’s headwaters are located northwest of Moscow. Caspian nations argue that the Volga makes up 80 percent of the inflow to the lake. The remainder (20 per cent) comes from two downstream river systems: the Kurra and the Aras. The Volga’s uninterrupted flow is, therefore, critical to the life of the Caspian.

But Russia has built 40 dams and diversions on the Volga, and 18 more are in various stages of development, all of which have slashed flow to the Caspian to a trickle. Dams and diversions do diminish inflows, but climate change too is having an impact. If the Caspian itself is evaporating from hotter and drier conditions, the Volga is no exception to this phenomenon either. Reduced precipitation is contributing to the problem. A case in point is the transboundary Helmand River that drains both Afghanistan and Iran. Lack of rainfall has reduced the Helmand’s flow so much that it seldom makes it to Iran, inflaming tensions between Kabul and Tehran.

Ironically, all five Caspian economies – Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan — are heavily dependent on fossil fuel production, which is at the heart of climate breakdown. Despite platitudes about reaching net zero, the global capitalist economy is also hooked on fossil fuels.  As a result, carbon emissions are on the rise, and atmospheric temperatures are smashing records. Since the Paris Climate Pact in 2015, the world has gone backward on climate change.

Unless hydrocarbon resources are kept in the ground, there is little hope of saving world monuments such as the Caspian. COP 29 is a great occasion to showcase what the Caspian means to the region and the rest of the world. Azerbaijan’s initiative on climate finance couldn’t be more urgent to help preserve the Caspian and similar natural wonders. The United States will better serve the cause of climate stability by taking the lead in supporting the NCQG. President Joe Biden could further burnish his climate legacy by giving his vision at COP 29 of the “Great Transition” to a global green economy. Biden and others need to go well beyond the business as usual of climate adaptation to strike at the root of the problem: fossil capitalism.

(The Conversation) – Amitav Ghosh is an internationally celebrated author of 20 historical fiction and non-fiction books. The Indian thinker and writer has written extensively on the legacies of colonialism, violence and extractivism. His most famous works explore migration, globalisation and commercial violence and conquest during the colonial period, against the backdrop of the opium trade in the 1800s.

Caroline Southey, from The Conversation Africa, asked economics professor Imraan Valodia and climate and inequality researcher Julia Taylor about the significance of his work.

What has Ghosh contributed to our understanding about the root causes of climate change?

Julia Taylor: In Ghosh’s recent non-fiction book, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, he used his storytelling prowess to outline the roots of climate change within two systems of power and oppression: imperialism and capitalism.

Imperialism is the expansion of influence over other countries through military force and colonisation. It usually entails the destruction of the environment to support imperial interests.

Capitalism is the dominant economic system where ownership of the means of production (industry) is private. Private actors are driven by profit and growth, which has relied on combustion of fossil fuels.

What Ghosh makes clear is that violence and destruction of the environment are key to capitalism, as they were to colonialism.

Imraan Valodia: Ghosh challenges us to think more deeply about the role of conquest and violence in shaping the planetary crisis we’re facing. And the need to reshape our economic and social relations to address climate change. He does this with remarkable acumen and clarity in another of his works of non-fiction, The Great Derangement. In the book he seeks to explain our failure to address the urgency of climate change. He asks very powerfully whether the current generation is deranged by our inability to grasp the scale, violence and urgency of climate change.

He uses the history of nutmeg to illustrate some of his main points. What does he draw from this history?

Julia Taylor: The story of the nutmeg is one among many of conquest of both people and land during colonisation which led to the industrial revolution and the explosion of greenhouse gas emissions.

In the present day these conquests take different forms. But they continue, particularly in the context of mining and extractivism.

Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. The University of Chicago Press. Click here to Buy.

Imraan Valodia: Ghosh traces the history of the household spice – nutmeg – all the way to its origins in the Banda Islands of Indonesia. He uses the analogy of the nutmeg to explain how colonisation of land and people has led to the climate disaster.

The nutmeg was harvested from trees in the Banda Islands and traded by the Bandanese for centuries. With the growth in value of spices, various European countries sought to claim exclusive rights to the nutmeg trade in the Banda Islands. The local population resisted. However, in 1621, representatives of the Dutch East India Company chose to destroy the settlements of the Bandanese population and massacre or enslave anyone who could not escape, to gain control over the nutmeg trade.

Ghosh explains these horrifying events in the context of Anglo-Dutch tensions and the trend of empire in Europe, sanctioned by religious beliefs of racial superiority.

A major theme of his work is the link between imperialism and the planetary crisis. What’s his main line of argument?

Julia Taylor: Ghosh argues in The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis that

the discussion of climate change, as of every aspect of the planetary crisis, tends to be dominated by the question of capitalism and other economic issues; geopolitics, empire, and questions of power figure in it far less. (p116)

However, he highlights that

the era of Western military conquests predates the emergence of capitalism by centuries. Indeed, it was these conquests, and the imperial systems that arose in their wake, that fostered and made possible the rise to dominance of what we now call capitalism … colonialism, genocide and structures of organised violence were the foundations on which industrial modernity was built. (p116)

Imraan Valodia: This argument forces us to grapple with both capitalism and the dominance of the west in our understanding of climate change. It highlights the power dynamics and violence which enabled the destruction of many lands in the form of deforestation, industrial agriculture, mining and more.

To respond to climate change, we need to rethink these dominant systems and relationships with land and the environment. This can be linked to the need to address inequality and power dynamics if we are to have any hope of addressing climate change.

Professor Valodia will be hosting Amitav Ghosh for a series of events at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa from 10 to 12 September 2024. The university has partnered with the Presidential Climate Commission, the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) and the University of Pretoria to host the sessions.

Julia Taylor, Researcher: Climate and Inequality, University of the Witwatersrand and Imraan Valodia, Pro Vice-Chancellor: Climate, Sustainability and Inequality and Director: Southern Centre for Inequality Studies., University of the Witwatersrand

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

I hate to get wonky in the midst of this feel-good moment, but elections are about policy. Here I want to examine a specific policy, green energy and climate. Although Walz was not thought particularly good on green energy when he was in Congress, his record as governor of Minnesota has shown real successes in these regards. I went through Uni Nexis and distilled these items from Targeted New Service on his record, which seems to me impressive.

On September 16, 2019, Gov. Tim Walz announced clean car standards in Minnesota, according to Targeted News Service. He instructed his Administration to enforce a pair of clean vehicle regulations aimed at cutting down automobile emissions in the state. The low-emission vehicle (LEV) regulation mandated that car manufacturers offer passenger cars, trucks, and SUVs with reduced greenhouse gas emissions for the Minnesota market. Meanwhile, the zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) regulation compelled automakers to provide a greater number of vehicles with minimal or no tailpipe emissions for sale in the state, such as electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrids. Initial forecasts suggested that together, these two initiatives likely will have decreased yearly greenhouse gas emissions by two million tons by 2030. Walz remarked in this connection, slamming the pro-carbon then-President Trump “Climate change threatens the very things that make Minnesota a great place to live, from our magnificent 10,000 lakes to our farmable land and clean air. If Washington won’t lead on climate, Minnesota will. That is why we are taking bold action to reduce carbon emissions in a way that increases car options, protects public health, creates jobs, and saves Minnesotans money at the pump.”

On January 22, 2021, when Joe Biden had just come into the White House, Governor Tim Walz and Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan unveiled a series of policy proposals aimed at achieving 100 percent clean electricity in Minnesota by 2040. These proposals expanded on Minnesota’s previous accomplishments in lowering reliance on fossil fuels and greater use of renewable energy to supply the state’s power needs. Walz said, “The time to fight climate change is now. Not only is clean energy the right and responsible choice for future generations, clean energy maximizes job creation and grows our economy, which is especially important as we work to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. I am proud to announce a set of policy proposals that will lead Minnesota to 100% clean energy in the state’s electricity sector by 2040. Minnesotans have the ingenuity and innovation needed to power this future, and we are ready to pioneer the green energy economy.” (-Targeted News Service).

Note that 2040 is ten years before the Paris Climate Treaty’s deadline of 2050, so this was an ambitious climate plan.

On Jul 28, 2021 Targeted News Service reported that Walz and Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan ceremonially affixed their signatures to the historic Energy Conservation and Optimization Act of 2021 (ECO Act). This legislation enhanced Minnesota’s energy-savings, diminished greenhouse gas emissions, and generated employment throughout the state. These jobs involved projects related to electricity, heating and cooling, ventilation, and insulation in residences and commercial establishments in Minnesota. Walz praised the bill for keeping Minnesota in the forefront of energy policy. The Act helped families improve the energy efficiency of their homes and expanded eligibility of low-income families for such aid. It created jobs in housing insulation, electrical wiring, ventilation and heating and cooling.

On Aug 12, 2021, a study was released by E2 (Environmental Entrepreneurs) and nonprofits Clean Energy Trust and Clean Energy Economy MN (CEEM) showing that in excess of 55,300 Minnesotans worked in “energy efficiency and clean energy” by the end of 2020. Walz observed of the bipartisan report, “By supporting the growth of clean energy jobs, we are not only boosting our economy, but also protecting our environment and Minnesota’s future. This report proves that we can have a clean future while creating jobs at the same time. Minnesota workers have the ingenuity and dedication needed to pioneer the green energy economy and bring us into the future.” (Targeted News Service.)

On August 18, 2022, Walz and Flanagan hailed the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, which is actually green energy and climate legislation. Walz called it a “big win for Minnesota.” (Targeted News Service).

As of 2024, a third of Minnesota’s electricity now comes from wind, water, solar and biomass. The state added 600 megawatts of wind and solar this year.

Another 21% came from nuclear power, which is low-carbon, so 54%, a majority, of Minnesota’s electricity is now low-carbon. Coal-fired electricity has fallen dramatically to only 19%, with somewhat cleaner natural gas at 27%.

In just the past year, Minnesota’s emissions fell 10%. EV registrations, still limited, grew by 55% since last year.

These numbers are across the board better than those of the United States as a whole, which speaks well of Gov. Walz. It is to be hoped that he can bring his climate and green energy commitments to the national stage as vice president.

Notional, slightly inexact effort to depict the likely components of Minnesota electricity in summer 2024.

The Conversation – Record breaking fossil fuel production, all time high greenhouse gas emissions and extreme temperatures. Like the proverbial frog in the heating pan of water, we refuse to respond to the climate and ecological crisis with any sense of urgency. Under such circumstances, claims from some that global warming can still be limited to no more than 1.5°C take on a surreal quality.

For example, at the start of 2023’s international climate negotiations in Dubai, conference president, Sultan Al Jaber, boldly stated that 1.5°C was his goal and that his presidency would be guided by a “deep sense of urgency” to limit global temperatures to 1.5°C. He made such lofty promises while planning a massive increase in oil and gas production as CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.

We should not be surprised to see such behaviour from the head of a fossil fuel company. But Al Jaber is not an outlier. Scratch at the surface of almost any net zero pledge or policy that claims to be aligned with the 1.5°C goal of the landmark 2015 Paris agreement and you will reveal the same sort of reasoning: we can avoid dangerous climate change without actually doing what this demands – which is to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from industry, transport, energy (70% of total) and food systems (30% of total), while ramping up energy efficiency.

A particularly instructive example is Amazon. In 2019 the company established a 2040 net zero target which was then verified by the UN Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) which has been leading the charge in getting companies to establish climate targets compatible with the Paris agreement. But over the next four years Amazon’s emissions went up by 40%. Given this dismal performance, the SBTi was forced to act and removed Amazon and over 200 companies from its Corporate Net Zero Standard.

This is also not surprising given that net zero and even the Paris agreement have been built around the perceived need to keep burning fossil fuels, at least in the short term. Not do so would threaten economic growth, given that fossil fuels still supply over 80% of total global energy. The trillions of dollars of fossil fuel assets at risk with rapid decarbonisation have also served as powerful brakes on climate action.

Overshoot

The way to understand this doublethink: that we can avoid dangerous climate change while continuing to burn fossil fuels – is that it relies on the concept of overshoot. The promise is that we can overshoot past any amount of warming, with the deployment of planetary-scale carbon dioxide removal dragging temperatures back down by the end of the century.

This not only cripples any attempt to limit warming to 1.5°C, but risks catastrophic levels of climate change as it locks us in to energy and material-intensive solutions which for the most part exist only on paper.

To argue that we can safely overshoot 1.5°C, or any amount of warming, is saying the quiet bit out loud: we simply don’t care about the increasing amount of suffering and deaths that will be caused while the recovery is worked on.

A key element of overshoot is carbon dioxide removal. This is essentially a time machine – we are told we can turn back the clock of decades of delay by sucking carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere. We don’t need rapid decarbonisation now, because in the future we will be able to take back those carbon emissions. If or when that doesn’t work, we are led to believe that even more outlandish geoengineering approaches such as spraying sulphurous compounds into the high atmosphere in an attempt to block out sunlight – which amounts to planetary refrigeration – will save us.

The 2015 Paris agreement was an astonishing accomplishment. The establishment of 1.5°C as being the internationally agreed ceiling for warming was a success for those people and nations most exposed to climate change hazards. We know that every fraction of a degree matters. But at the time, believing warming could really be limited to well below 2°C required a leap of faith when it came to nations and companies putting their shoulder to the wheel of decarbonisation. What has happened instead is that the net zero approach of Paris is becoming detached from reality as it is increasingly relying on science fiction levels of speculative technology.

There is arguably an even bigger problem with the Paris agreement. By framing climate change in terms of temperature, it focuses on the symptoms, not the cause. 1.5°C or any amount of warming is the result of humans changing the energy balance of the climate by increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This traps more heat. Changes in the global average temperature is the established way of measuring this increase in heat, but no one experiences this average.

Climate change is dangerous because of weather that affects particular places at particular times. Simply put, this extra heat is making weather more unstable. Unfortunately, having temperature targets makes solar geoengineering seem like a sensible approach because it may lower temperatures. But it does this by not reducing, but increasing our interference in the climate system. Trying to block out the sun in response to increasing carbon emissions is like turning on the air conditioning in response to a house fire.

In 2021 we argued that net zero was a dangerous trap. Three years on and we can see the jaws of this trap beginning to close, with climate policy being increasingly framed in terms of overshoot. The resulting impacts on food and water security, poverty, human health, the destruction of biodiversity and ecosystems will produce intolerable suffering.

The situation demands honesty, and a change of course. If this does not materialise then things are likely to deteriorate, potentially rapidly and in ways that may be impossible to control.

Au revoir Paris

The time has come to accept that climate policy has failed, and that the 2015 landmark Paris agreement is dead. We let it die by pretending that we could both continue to burn fossil fuels and avoid dangerous climate change at the same time. Rather than demand the immediate phase out of fossil fuels, the Paris agreement proposed 22nd-century temperature targets which could be met by balancing the sources and sinks of carbon. Within that ambiguity net zero flourished. And yet apart from the COVID economic shock in 2020, emissions have increased every year since 2015, reaching an all time high in 2023.

Despite there being abundant evidence that climate action makes good economic sense (the cost of inaction vastly exceeds the cost of action), no country strengthened their pledges at the last three COPs (the annual UN international meetings) even though it was clear that the world was on course to sail past 2°C, let alone 1.5°C. The Paris agreement should be producing a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, but current policies mean that they are on track to be higher than they are today.

We do not deny that significant progress has been made with renewable technologies. Rates of deployment of wind and solar have increased each year for the past 22 years and carbon emissions are going down in some of the richest nations, including the UK and the US. But this is not happening fast enough. A central element of the Paris agreement is that richer nations need to lead decarbonisation efforts to give lower income nations more time to transition away from fossil fuels. Despite some claims to the contrary, the global energy transition is not in full swing. In fact, it hasn’t actually begun because the transition demands a reduction in fossil fuel use. Instead it continues to increase year-on-year.

And so policymakers are turning to overshoot in an attempt to claim that they have a plan to avoid dangerous climate change. A central plank of this approach is that the climate system in the future will continue to function as it does today. This is a reckless assumption.

2023’s warning signs

At the start of 2023, Berkeley Earth, NASA, the UK Met Office, and Carbon Brief predicted that 2023 would be slightly warmer than the previous year but unlikely to set any records. Twelve months later and all four organisations concluded that 2023 was by some distance the warmest year ever recorded. In fact, between February 2023 and February 2024 the global average temperature warming exceeded the Paris target of 1.5°C.

The extreme weather events of 2023 give us a glimpse of the suffering that further global warming will produce. A 2024 report from the World Economic Forum concluded that by 2050 climate change may have caused over 14 million deaths and US$12.5 trillion in loss and damages.

Currently we cannot fully explain why global temperatures have been so high for the past 18 months. Changes in dust, soot and other aerosols are important, and there are natural processes such as El Niño that will be having an effect.

But it appears that there is still something missing in our current understanding of how the climate is responding to human impacts. This includes changes in the Earth’s vital natural carbon cycle.

Around half of all the carbon dioxide humans have put into the atmosphere over the whole of human history has gone into “carbon sinks” on land and the oceans. We get this carbon removal “for free”, and without it, warming would be much higher. Carbon dioxide from the air dissolves in the oceans (making them more acidic which threatens marine ecosystems). At the same time, increasing carbon dioxide promotes the growth of plants and trees which locks up carbon in their leaves, roots, trunks.

All climate policies and scenarios assume that these natural carbon sinks will continue to remove tens of billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year. There is evidence that land-based carbon sinks, such as forests, removed significantly less carbon in 2023. If natural sinks begin to fail – something they may well do in a warmer world – then the task of lowering global temperatures becomes even harder. The only credible way of limiting warming to any amount, is to stop putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere in the first place.

Science fiction solutions

It’s clear that the commitments countries have made to date as part of the Paris agreement will not keep humanity safe while carbon emissions and temperatures continue to break records. Indeed, proposing to spend trillions of dollars over this century to suck carbon dioxide out of the air, or the myriad other ways to hack the climate is an acknowledgement that the world’s largest polluters are not going to curb the burning of fossil fuels.

Direct Air Capture (DAC), Bio Energy Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), enhanced ocean alkalinity, biochar, sulphate aerosol injection, cirrus cloud thinning – the entire wacky races of carbon dioxide removal and geoengineering only makes sense in a world of failed climate policy.

Over the following years we are going to see climate impacts increase. Lethal heatwaves are going to become more common. Storms and floods are going to become increasingly destructive. More people are going to be displaced from their homes. National and regional harvests will fail. Vast sums of money will need to be spent on efforts to adapt to climate change, and perhaps even more compensating those who are most affected. We are expected to believe that while all this and more unfolds, new technologies that will directly modify the Earth’s atmosphere and energy balance will be successfully deployed.

What’s more, some of these technologies may need to operate for three hundred years in order for the consequences of overshoot to be avoided. Rather than quickly slow down carbon polluting activities and increasing the chances that the Earth system will recover, we are instead going all in on net zero and overshoot in an increasingly desperate hope that untested science fiction solutions will save us from climate breakdown.

We can see the cliff edge rapidly approaching. Rather than slam on the brakes, some people are instead pushing their foot down harder on the accelerator. Their justification for this insanity is that we need to go faster in order to be able to make the jump and land safely on the other side.

We believe that many who advocate for carbon dioxide removal and geoengineering do so in good faith. But they include proposals to refreeze the Arctic by pumping up sea water onto ice sheets to form new layers of ice and snow. These are interesting ideas to research, but there is very little evidence this will have any effect on the Arctic let alone global climate. These are the sorts of knots that people tie themselves up in when they acknowledge the failure of climate policy, but refuse to challenge the fundamental forces behind such failure. They are unwittingly slowing down the only effective action of rapidly phasing out fossil fuels.

That’s because proposals to remove carbon dioxide from the air or geoengineer the climate promise a recovery from overshoot, a recovery that will be delivered by innovation, driven by growth. That this growth is powered by the same fossil fuels that are causing the problem in the first place doesn’t feature in their analysis.

The bottom line here is that the climate system is utterly indifferent to our pledges and promises. It doesn’t care about economic growth. And if we carry on burning fossil fuels then it will not stop changing until the energy balance is restored. By which time millions of people could be dead, with many more facing intolerable suffering.

Major climate tipping points

Even if we assume that carbon removal and even geoengineering technologies can be deployed in time, there is a very large problem with the plan to overshoot 1.5°C and then lower temperatures later: tipping points.

The science of tipping points is rapidly advancing. Late last year one of us (James Dyke) along with over 200 academics from around the world was involved in the production of the Global Tipping Points Report. This was a review of the latest science about where tipping points in the climate system may be, as well as exploring how social systems can undertake rapid change (in the direction that we want) thereby producing positive tipping points. Within the report’s 350 pages is abundant evidence that the overshoot approach is an extraordinarily dangerous gamble with the future of humanity. Some tipping points have the potential to cause global havoc.

The melt of permafrost could release billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and supercharge human-caused climate change. Fortunately, this seems unlikely under the current warming. Unfortunately, the chance that ocean currents in the North Atlantic could collapse may be much higher than previously thought. If that were to materialise, weather systems across the world, but in particular in Europe and North America, would be thrown into chaos. Beyond 1.5°C, warm water coral reefs are heading towards annihilation. The latest science concludes that by 2°C global reefs would be reduced by 99%. The devastating bleaching event unfolding across the Great Barrier Reef follows multiple mass mortality events. To say we are witnessing one of the world’s greatest biological wonders die is insufficient. We are knowingly killing it.

We may have even already passed some major climate tipping points. The Earth has two great ice sheets, Antarctica, and Greenland. Both are disappearing as a consequence of climate change. Between 2016 and 2020, the Greenland ice sheet lost on average 372 billion tons of ice a year. The current best assessment of when a tipping point could be reached for the Greenland ice sheet is around 1.5°C.

This does not mean that the Greenland ice sheet will suddenly collapse if warming exceeds that level. There is so much ice (some 2,800 trillion tons) that it would take centuries for all of it to melt over which time sea levels would rise seven metres. If global temperatures could be brought back down after a tipping point, then maybe the ice sheet could be stabilised. We just cannot say with any certainty that such a recovery would be possible. While we struggle with the science, 30 million tons of ice is melting across Greenland every hour on average.

The take home message from research on these and other tipping points is that further warming accelerates us towards catastrophe. Important science, but is anyone listening?

It’s five minutes to midnight…again

We know we must urgently act on climate change because we are repeatedly told that time is running out. In 2015, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the UN special adviser and director of The Earth Institute, declared:

The time has finally arrived – we’ve been talking about these six months for many years but we’re now here. This is certainly our generation’s best chance to get on track.

In 2019 (then) Prince Charles gave a speech in which he said: “I am firmly of the view that the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival.”

“We have six months to save the planet,” exhorted International Energy Agency head Fatih Birol – one year later in 2020. In April 2024, Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change said the next two years are “essential in saving our planet”.

Either the climate crisis has a very fortunate feature that allows the countdown to catastrophe to be continually reset, or we are deluding ourselves with endless declarations that time has not quite run out. If you can repeatedly hit snooze on your alarm clock and roll over back to sleep, then your alarm clock is not working.

Or there is another possibility. Stressing that we have very little time to act is intended to focus attention on climate negotiations. It’s part of a wider attempt to not just wake people up to the impending crisis, but generate effective action. This is sometimes used to explain how the 1.5°C threshold of warming came to be agreed. Rather than a specific target, it should be understood as a stretch goal. We may very well fail, but in reaching for it we move much faster than we would have done with a higher target, such as 2°C. For example, consider this statement made in 2018:

Stretching the goal to 1.5 degrees celsius isn’t simply about speeding up. Rather, something else must happen and society needs to find another lever to pull on a global scale.

What could this lever be? New thinking about economics that goes beyond GDP? Serious consideration of how rich industrialised nations could financially and materially help poorer nations to leapfrog fossil fuel infrastructure? Participatory democracy approaches that could help birth the radical new politics needed for the restructuring of our fossil fuel powered societies? None of these.

The lever in question is Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) because the above quote comes from an article written by Shell in 2018. In this advertorial Shell argues that we will need fossil fuels for many decades to come. CCS allows the promise that we can continue to burn fossil fuels and avoid carbon dioxide pollution by trapping the gas before it leaves the chimney. Back in 2018, Shell was promoting its carbon removal and offsets heavy Sky Scenario, an approach described as “a dangerous fantasy” by leading climate change academics as it assumed massive carbon emissions could be offset by tree planting.

Since then Shell has further funded carbon removal research within UK universities presumably in efforts to burnish its arguments that it must be able to continue to extract vast amounts of oil and gas.

Shell is far from alone in waving carbon capture magic wands. Exxon is making great claims for CCS as a way to produce net zero hydrogen from fossil gas – claims that have been subject to pointed criticism from academics with recent reporting exposing industry wide greenwashing around CCS.

But the rot goes much deeper. All climate policy scenarios that propose to limit warming to near 1.5°C rely on the largely unproven technologies of CCS and BECCS. BECCS sounds like a good idea in theory. Rather than burn coal in a power station, burn biomass such as wood chips. This would initially be a carbon neutral way of generating electricity if you grew as many trees as you cut down and burnt. If you then add scrubbers to the power station chimneys to capture the carbon dioxide, and then bury that carbon deep underground, then you would be able to generate power at the same time as reducing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, there is now clear evidence that in practice, large-scale BECCS would have very adverse effects on biodiversity, and food and water security given the large amounts of land that would be given over to fast growing monoculture tree plantations. The burning of biomass may even be increasing carbon dioxide emissions. Drax, the UK’s largest biomass power station now produces four times as much carbon dioxide as the UK’s largest coal-fired power station.

Five minutes to midnight messages may be motivated to try to galvanise action, to stress the urgency of the situation and that we still (just) have time. But time for what? Climate policy only ever offers gradual change, certainly nothing that would threaten economic growth, or the redistribution of wealth and resources.

Despite the mounting evidence that globalised, industrialised capitalism is propelling humanity towards disaster, five minutes to midnight does not allow time and space to seriously consider alternatives. Instead, the solutions on offer are techno fixes that prop up the status quo and insists that fossil fuel companies such as Shell must be part of the solution.

That is not to say there are no good faith arguments for 1.5°C. But being well motivated does not alter reality. And the reality is that warming will soon pass 1.5°C, and that the Paris agreement has failed. In the light of that, repeatedly asking people to not give up hope, that we can avoid a now unavoidable outcome risks becoming counterproductive. Because if you insist on the impossible (burning fossil fuels and avoiding dangerous climate change), then you must invoke miracles. And there is an entire fossil fuel industry quite desperate to sell such miracles in the form of CCS.

Four suggestions

Humanity has enough problems right now, what we need are solutions. This is the response we sometimes get when we argue that there are fundamental problems with the net zero concept and the Paris agreement. It can be summed up with the simple question: so what’s your suggestion? Below we offer four.

1. Leave fossil fuels in the ground

The unavoidable reality is that we need to rapidly stop burning fossil fuels. The only way we can be sure of that is by leaving them in the ground. We have to stop exploring for new fossil fuel reserves and the exploitation of existing ones. That could be done by stopping fossil fuel financing.

At the same time we must transform the food system, especially the livestock sector, given that it is responsible for nearly two thirds of agricultural emissions. Start there and then work out how best the goods and services of economies can be distributed. Let’s have arguments about that based on reality not wishful thinking.

2. Ditch net zero crystal ball gazing targets

The entire framing of mid and end-century net zero targets should be binned. We are already in the danger zone. The situation demands immediate action, not promises of balancing carbon budgets decades into the future. The SBTi should focus on near-term emissions reductions. By 2030, global emissions need to be half of what they are today for any chance of limiting warming to no more than 2°C.

It is the responsibility of those who hold most power – politicians and business leaders – to act now. To that end we must demand twin targets – all net zero plans should include a separate target for actual reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. We must stop hiding inaction behind promises of future removals. It’s our children and future generations that will need to pay back the overshoot debt.

3. Base policy on credible science and engineering

All climate policies must be based on what can be done in the real world now, or in the very near future. If it is established that a credible amount of carbon can be removed by a proposed approach – which includes capture and its safe permanent storage – then and only then can this be included in net zero plans. The same applies to solar geoengineering.

Speculative technologies must be removed from all policies, pledges and scenarios until we are sure of how they will work, how they will be monitored, reported and validated, and what they will do to not just the climate but the Earth system as a whole. This would probably require a very large increase in research. As academics we like doing research. But academics need to be wary that concluding “needs more research” is not interpreted as “with a bit more funding this could work”.

4. Get real

Finally, around the world there are thousands of groups, projects, initiatives, and collectives that are working towards climate justice. But while there is a Climate Majority Project, and a Climate Reality Project, there is no Climate Honesty Project (although People Get Real does come close). In 2018 Extinction Rebellion was formed and demanded that governments tell the truth about the climate crisis and act accordingly. We can now see that when politicians were making their net zero promises they were also crossing their fingers behind their backs.

We need to acknowledge that net zero and now overshoot are becoming used to argue that nothing fundamental needs to change in our energy intensive societies. We must be honest about our current situation, and where we are heading. Difficult truths need to be told. This includes highlighting the vast inequalities of wealth, carbon emissions, and vulnerability to climate change.

The time for action is now

We rightly blame politicians for failing to act. But in some respects we get the politicians we deserve. Most people, even those that care about climate change, continue to demand cheap energy and food, and a constant supply of consumer products. Reducing demand by just making things more expensive risks plunging people into food and energy poverty and so policies to reduce emissions from consumption need to go beyond market-based approaches. The cost of living crisis is not separate from the climate and ecological crisis. They demand that we radically rethink how our economies and societies function, and whose interests they serve.

To return to the boiling frog predicament at the start, it’s high time for us to jump out of the pot. You have to wonder why we did not start decades ago. It’s here that the analogy offers valuable insights into net zero and the Paris agreement. Because the boiling frog story as typically told misses out a crucial fact. Regular frogs are not stupid. While they will happily sit in slowly warming water, they will attempt to escape once it becomes uncomfortable. The parable as told today is based on experiments at the end of the 19th century that involved frogs that had been “pithed” – a metal rod had been inserted into their skulls that destroyed their higher brain functioning. These radically lobotomised frogs would indeed float inert in water that was cooking them alive.

Promises of net zero and recovery from overshoot are keeping us from struggling to safety. They assure us nothing too drastic needs to happen just yet. Be patient, relax. Meanwhile the planet burns and we see any sort of sustainable future go up in smoke.

Owning up to the failures of climate change policy doesn’t mean giving up. It means accepting the consequences of getting things wrong, and not making the same mistakes. We must plan routes to safe and just futures from where we are, rather where we would wish to be. The time has come to leap.

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James Dyke, Associate Professor in Earth System Science, University of Exeter; Robert Watson, Emeritus Professor in Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, and Wolfgang Knorr, Senior Research Scientist, Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University

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

Feature image: Pixabay.

Scientists are trained to be cautious and to base anything they assert on firm empirical evidence and close analytical reasoning. They want to see a long term, consistent movement in the data before they will rule out random chance as an explanation.

Some 83% of respondents said that they worried about climate change “a great deal” or “quite a bit” and another 14% worried “a moderate amount.” In scientist terms, their hair is on fire. Only 3% are lackadaisical, and 3% of any human group are screw-ups.

There’s more. Two-thirds of them felt very strongly that fundamental changes to society, politics and economics are required to deal with the crisis. Another 25% strongly agreed (without the “very”),

Being practical people, these scientists did not expect the mere everyday working of technology or individual “lifestyle changes” to solve the crisis. There has to be big, systemic change — getting rid of gasoline-driven cars and increasing the energy efficiency of homes and buildings. They gave away their conclusion in the very second question they answered. Do we need big “fundamental changes to society, politics and economics?” They said resoundingly, “Yes! Yes we do.” And here’s the thing. Only governments operate at the scale and with the resources and nation-wide impact to effect such an enormous alteration.

That’s why they largely believe that environmental activist groups can make an impact, implicitly by lobbying legislators and politicians. That’s why they speak out on climate change. But I think we can conclude that most of them know that the carbon economy has to be extirpated root and branch, and fast.

The US government had outlays of $6.1 trillion in 2023. That is a gargantuan lever. As Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $369 billion to clean energy and fighting climate change. That sum is bigger than the GDPs of numerous countries in the world, including Egypt, Pakistan, Chile, Greece, etc.

In Europe, the European Union’s installation of wind, water, solar and batteries and the turn in some countries to electric vehicles — along with greater energy efficiency — meant that total CO2 emissions from burning fuel in the European Union declined by almost 9% in 2023, even as the economy grew.

This is the kind of thing we need a lot more of. We only have 26 years to get the world to carbon zero. If we stop burning fossil fuels (gasoline, fossil gas, coal) by 2050, then the world will immediately cease heating up. And all the hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide we have put into the atmosphere since 1750 will be absorbed by the oceans. Some 65% to 80% of CO2 goes into the ocean over 20 to 200 years.

But if we go on putting billions of metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere past 2050, we will outrun the absorptive capacity of the oceans and everything, 100% of what we burn after that year, will stay in the atmosphere for centuries. The average increase in the temperature of the earth’s surface over 1750 could exceed 5.4º F. (3º C.), which scientists are afraid could throw our climate system into chaos.

The changes in the earth’s climate that we are already seeing, including massive wildfires, extreme heat waves, ocean temperatures over 100º F. (37.7º C.), massive hurricanes, and biblical floods, are unexpectedly severe for this stage of climate change. These surprises indicate that in the near future climate could get very, very nasty if we don’t change our ways. What if all the electricity lines get blown down? Civilization doesn’t work without electricity. What if all buildings have to be rebuilt to stand 160 mile an hour winds? What if we are driven underground by unbearable temperatures on the surface?

“Medicane,” Digital, Dream / Dreamworld v. 3, 2024.

What can stop the worst of this mounting catastrophe from striking us, our children and grandchildren? Governments.

The 2024 American election is the most consequential in world history. Trump and his Project 2025 have made absolutely clear that they will gut all the climate progress and legislation of the Biden administration. They will put in even more incentives to burn coal, fossil gas and petroleum. They will vastly increase the US carbon dioxide emissions (4.8 billion metric tons in 2023, down from 4.9 bn. in 2022), taking us back to 2007 when we put out 6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide.

The whole world puts out 36.8 metric tons of CO2 annually. The US, with 4.23% of the people in the world, produces 13% of all the CO2. Moreover, the US is a world opinion leader, for better or for worse, and has enormous political and economic levers to move other countries in a green direction.

In contrast, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have in recent years become activists against climate change and will build on and expand on Biden’s green turn.

You have to rank issues in a two-party system. Maybe we can open up the two-party system over time (states can do this, as Maine has), but for the moment it is what we are stuck with. One party literally wants to destroy the earth for the present-day grubby profits of a few. The other party is at least somewhat committed to fighting climate change, and is susceptible of being pushed even harder in that direction.

Nothing else matters as much. The war in Ukraine does not matter as much. The US-China confrontation in the South China Sea is not as pressing. The Israeli total war on Gaza civilians, horrific as it is, and Hamas terrorism against civilians, as horrific as that is, does not matter as much as the fate of the globe. It matters a great deal to me. It gives me nightmares. I’ve gone blue in the face arguing that this military campaign must cease immediately. But in fact both Israel and Gaza are destined to see significant loss of coastline to sea level rise over the next century (and even as early as 2050), with the potential for massive displacement of populations. Huge Medicanes or Mediterranean typhoons of the sort that washed Libya’s Derna into the sea last year will strike their towns. Unbearable heat waves will kill the elderly and children. The region is heating up at twice the global average. The Israelis and Palestinians will not survive if they do not put away their weapons and cooperate to adapt to these changes. In my view, the main onus for this about-face lies on Israel, which is currently gripped by a far right wing ethno-nationalist expansionism, since it is by far the stronger party. Israeli technology and Palestinian familiarity with traditional methods of making the land flourish will be crucial. But we are speaking about a few million people.

There could be 1.2 billion climate refugees in the world by 2050.

Nothing else is as important. Vote Democratic. Tell your friends. Whip up enthusiasm. Once the Dems are in, if you don’t like their policies, argue with them and pressure them and change them. Trump and MAGA are not susceptible to grassroots pressures. They are in the grip of a handful of selfish billionaires and they want to dig your grave and then charge you to be buried in it.

(The Conversation) – Extreme heat is a silent killer.

From time to time, we hear about shocking cases of football players and other athletes who die suddenly while exerting themselves on hot days. Those deaths are certainly tragic, but statistically they are very rare.

Most deaths from extreme heat are in older people, who frequently die alone inside their homes. They often die slowly, as the heat creeps up to and sometimes past body temperature, especially when heat domes park themselves over cities and keep the temperature high all day and all night. When such deaths happen, they rarely make the news.

Of all the climate change disasters our world is already experiencing, heat is the top killer, as the World Meteorological Organization reported. The planet was more than 1.5 C above the pre-industrial baseline for 12 consecutive months from July 2023 to June 2024. In July this year, we saw the hottest three days ever on record, prompting a special statement from United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

Image by 🌸♡💙♡🌸 Julita 🌸♡💙♡🌸 from Pixabay

Health risks and heat

Our bodies are made to dump excess heat when we are too warm, but that process goes into reverse when the air is warmer than our core temperature. Our other main defence, sweating, doesn’t help when humidity saturates the air, making it impossible for our own moisture to evaporate.

For the frail and elderly, who are more likely to be labouring with heart troubles, COPD or other challenges, simply sitting still in a heat wave requires an effort equivalent to walking on a treadmill. The effort is not great, but it is steady and relentless. It exhausts the body, sometimes to the point of no return.

Tracking heat-related deaths is challenging, and it’s changing as authorities become more aware of heat as a contributing or underlying factor to deaths by other causes. A paper published by the American Journal of Public Health points out that the 1995 heat wave in Chicago likely contributed to hundreds more deaths than had first been attributed to heat itself.

Who is at risk?

Many people lack air conditioning or a way to get to a place that has it, such as a library, recreation centre or shopping mall. As a result, too many people in cities are forced to endure long waves of heat — waves that are occurring more frequently, lasting longer, and reaching higher temperatures — in a trend that appears set to continue getting worse.

Air conditioning, once a luxury that drew people to summertime movie theatres on hot nights, has become a necessity. Increasingly, it is also a legal requirement, as cities pass bylaws requiring landlords not to allow the temperature in their tenants’ quarters to rise above a certain level. Toronto has such a bylaw for rental units that have air conditioning available, capping indoor temps at 26 C between June 2 and Sept. 14.

“Global Heating 2200,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream / Dreamworld v. 3, 2024.

Such laws recognize the vulnerability of tenants who lack control over the temperature in their rental units, making heat death an especially urban tragedy, as confirmed in a recent Statistics Canada study between 2000 and 2020. Deaths from extreme heat were more likely in cities with a higher percentage of renter households.

During a single week-long heat wave in June 2021 — the year after the period captured in the Statistics Canada study — B.C.’s chief coroner found that 570 people died from heat-related causes — 79 per cent of them were seniors.

Taking action at the community level

From this Global North perspective, the community members who are most likely to die from extreme heat included:

• Those over 65
• Those with more than one chronic condition (including hypertension, mental health, diabetes, heart disease, lung disease)
• Socially disadvantaged populations in our communities
• Those with mobility issues
• Those experiencing social isolation (living alone)
• Tenants with lack of air conditioning
• Those living in an urban heat island

This problem is not going away.

Some of the actions we can take to protect our most vulnerable community members include:

• Increase awareness that excessive heat is not merely uncomfortable, but dangerous.
• Make sure people are warned about impending heat waves.
• Advocate for everyone to have access to air conditioning.
• Check on and support people who live alone, especially those with no air conditioning.
• Invite people over if you have air conditioning, or help them get to community cooling stations.
• Help vulnerable people who do not have air conditioning to improvise, by freezing wet cloths, for example, to take out and hang around their necks. Doing this, especially with a fan blowing, can be surprisingly effective.
• Learn and share the warning signs of heat-related illness.
• Make sure they drink plenty of water and other replenishing fluids.

While we must do our best to limit climate change to keep our planet from getting ever hotter, we must also make every effort to protect the vulnerable from the impacts of the heat that is already here.

Myles David Sergeant, Assistant Clinical Professor, Department of Family Medicine, McMaster University

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

(The Conversation) – Australia is one of the world’s largest exporters of fossil fuels. While this coal and gas is burned beyond our borders, the climate-warming carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions affect us all.

My colleagues and I at global research and policy institute Climate Analytics were commissioned to find out just how big Australia’s carbon footprint really is. Our detailed analysis of the nation’s fossil fuel exports and associated emissions is the most comprehensive to date. The report, released today, clearly shows Australia plays a major role in climate change.

We found Australia is the world’s third-largest fossil fuel exporter, after Russia and the United States. But it gets worse when the fuel is used. Australia exports so much coal that our nation is the second-largest exporter of fossil fuel CO₂ emissions.

Unfortunately, just when we need to be cutting emissions, Australia is doubling down on fossil gas extraction mainly for LNG production and export. Federal government policies enabling and/or promoting continued high fossil fuel exports threaten to sabotage international efforts to limit global warming.

Australia’s fossil fuel carbon footprint

Australia’s contribution to global warming can only be understood by considering its fossil fuel exports alongside its domestic emissions.

Our research found Australia’s coal and gas exports were responsible for 1.15 billion tonnes of CO₂ emissions in 2023. An additional 46 million tonnes of CO₂ were emitted domestically in the process of extracting, processing and distributing those fossil fuels purely for export. That takes the total to 1.2 billion tonnes of CO₂ attributable to fossil fuel exports.

In other words, Australia’s global fossil fuel carbon footprint is three times larger than its domestic footprint. Around 80% of the damage is done overseas.

The International Energy Agency has clearly said there should be no new fossil fuel development if the world is to limit warming to 1.5°C – the Paris Agreement’s temperature goal. Yet Australia continues to approve new fossil fuel exploration and production.

Overall, exports of Australian fossil fuels – and hence fossil fuel CO₂ emissions – are expected to continue at close to current levels through to 2035, under current government policies.

Thermal coal exports, which are burned mainly for electricity production, are expected to slightly decline by 2035 from their all-time high in 2023. But exports of metallurgical coal, used in steel-making, and LNG are expected to stay about the same in 2035 as they are today.

Blowing the carbon budget

Between 2023 and 2035, Australia’s fossil fuel exports alone would consume around 7.5% of the world’s estimated remaining global carbon budget of about 200 billion tonnes of CO₂. This is the amount of CO₂ that could still be emitted from 2024 onwards if we are to limit peak warming to 1.5°C with 50% probability.

But rather than decreasing, CO₂ emissions from Australia’s fossil fuel exports are set to increase under current government policies. In other words, in the next 11 years, by 2035, exported fossil fuel CO₂ emissions will exceed by 50% that of the entire 63 year period from 1961 to 2023.

If we include domestic CO₂ emissions from current policies, this means by 2035 Australia, with 0.3% of the world’s population, would consume 9% of the total remaining carbon budget.

Undermining the Paris Agreement

In December, at the COP28 international climate conference in Dubai, governments including Australia agreed on the first “global stocktake” of greenhouse gas emissions. It called 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.

The stocktake also called on all countries to align their nationally determined contributions with the 1.5°C limit.

Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s response at the time was to call for Australia to be a “renewable energy superpower”. But his government appears to believe this includes embracing a gas export strategy.

Current government policy is not aligned with Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit. Our new report shows the government’s focus on maintaining high levels of fossil fuel exports is completely inconsistent with reducing global CO2 emissions to levels compatible with the 1.5°C goal.

Australia mainly exports fossil fuels to Japan, China, South Korea and India. These countries, which accounted for about 43% of fossil fuel CO₂ emissions in 2022, are also signatories to the Paris Agreement. So they have set 2030 emissions reduction targets and net-zero goals of their own. Continuing to import fossil fuels is incompatible with their own commitments.

Japan’s LNG imports fell 8% in 2023 to their lowest levels since 2009 and are expected to drop by a further 25% by 2030. Given the current energy security and LNG debate, it should be noted Japanese companies on-sold more LNG in 2020–22 than they purchased from Australia.

Thwarting national emissions reduction efforts

Australia’s planned expansion of fossil fuels, notably its gas exports, will add to the country’s domestic emissions and make it harder for it to meet even its own domestic target. That’s because a sizeable chunk of domestic fossil fuel CO₂ emissions (7.5%) comes from processing gas for export.

Our analysis also shows Australia’s plans are completely inconsistent with the global stocktake’s call for a transition away from fossil fuels. The government and gas industry’s arguments that more fossil gas is needed to get to net zero are also at odds with the science.

Time for a fossil fuel phase-out

Australia has a massive interest in the world as a whole decarbonising fast enough to limit warming to 1.5°C.

For example, children born in Australia today face much more extreme heat, floods and other disasters during their lifetimes than previous generations. This exposure can be very substantially reduced by limiting warming to 1.5°C. The choices Australia, as a major fossil fuel exporter, makes now in this critical decade will determine what happens to them.

By failing to initiate an orderly phase-out of fossil fuel exports, Australia also risks undermining its own stated ambition of becoming a renewable energy superpower.

It is in our nation’s interests to develop and implement an orderly exit – just as we are doing for our domestic emissions – working cooperatively with affected communities and overseas buyers. Doing anything less will only hurt us in the end.

Bill Hare, Adjunct Professor of Energy, Murdoch University

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

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Australian Broadcast Corp Video: “Owners of NSW’s biggest coal mine have applied to extend the life of the site by 25 years”

A 13-month streak of record-breaking global warmth has ended.

From June 2023 until June 2024, air and ocean surface water temperatures averaged a quarter of a degree Celsius higher than records set only a few years previously. Air temperatures in July 2024 were slightly cooler than the previous July (0.04°C, the narrowest of margins) according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

July 2023 was in turn 0.28°C warmer than the previous record-hot July in 2019, so the remarkable jump in temperature during the past year has yet to ease off completely. The warmest global air temperature recorded was in December 2023, at 1.78°C above the pre-industrial average temperature for December – and 0.31°C warmer than the previous record.

Global warming has consistently toppled records for warm global average temperatures in recent decades, but breaking them by as much as a quarter of a degree for several months is not common. The end of this streak does not diminish the mounting threat of climate change.

So what caused these record temperatures? Several factors came together, but the biggest and most important is climate change, largely caused by burning fossil fuels.

What caused the heat streak

Temperatures typical of Earth 150 years ago are used for comparison to measure modern global warming. The reference period, 1850–1900, was before most greenhouse gases associated with global industrialisation – which increase the heat present in Earth’s ocean and atmosphere – had been emitted.

July 2024 was 1.48°C warmer than a typical pre-industrial July, of which about 1.3°C is attributable to the general trend of global warming over the intervening decades. This trend will continue to raise temperatures until humanity stabilises the climate by keeping fossil fuels in the ground where they belong.

But global warming doesn’t happen in a smooth progression. Like UK house prices, the general trend is up, but there are ups and downs along the way.

Behind much of the ups and downs is the El Niño phenomenon. An El Niño event is a reorganisation of the water across the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean. El Niño is so important to the workings of worldwide weather as it increases the temperature of the air on average across all of Earth’s surface, not only over the Pacific. Between El Niño events, conditions may be neutral or in an opposite state called La Niña that tends to cool global temperatures. The oscillation between these extremes is irregular, and El Niño conditions tend to recur after three to seven years.

The warm El Niño phase of this cycle began to kick in a year ago, reached its peak around the end of 2023 and is now trending neutral, which is why the record-breaking streak has ended.

The 2023/2024 El Niño was strong, but it wasn’t super-strong. It doesn’t fully explain the remarkable degree to which the past year broke temperature records. The exact influence of other factors has yet to be fully untangled.

We know there is a small positive contribution from the Sun, which is in a phase of its 11-year sunspot cycle in which it radiates fractionally more energy to the Earth.

Methane (also a byproduct of the fossil fuel industry, alongside cattle and wetlands) is another important greenhouse gas and its concentration in the air has risen more rapidly in the past decade than over the previous decade.

Scientists are also assessing how much measures to clean up air pollution might be adding to warming, since certain particulate air pollutants can reflect sunlight and influence the formation of clouds.

A temperature ratchet

Across the global ocean, 2023 was a devastating summer for coral reefs and surrounding ecosystems in the Caribbean and beyond. This was followed by heavy bleaching across the Great Barrier Reef off Australia during the southern hemisphere summer. While it is El Niño years that tend to see mass mortality events on reefs around the world, it is the underlying climate change trend that is the long-term threat, as corals are struggling to adapt to rising temperature extremes.

As the Pacific Ocean is now likely to revert towards La Niña conditions, global temperatures will continue to ease back, but probably not to the levels seen prior to 2023/24.

El Niño acts a bit like a ratchet on global warming. A big El Niño event breaks new records and establishes a new, higher norm for global temperatures. That new normal reflects the underlying global warming trend.

A plausible scenario is that global temperatures will fluctuate near the 1.4°C level for several years, until the next big El Niño event pushes the world above 1.5°C of warming, perhaps in the early 2030s.

The Paris agreement on climate change committed the world to make every effort to limit global warming to 1.5°C, because the impacts of climate change are expected to accelerate beyond that level.

The good news is that the shift away from fossil fuels has started in sectors such as electricity generation, where renewable energy meets a growing share of rising demand. But the transition is not happening fast enough, by a large margin. Meeting climate targets is not compatible with fully exploiting existing fossil-fuel infrastructure, yet new investment in oil rigs and gas fields continues.

Headlines about record breaking global temperatures will probably return. But they need not do so forever. There are many options for accelerating the transition to a decarbonised economy, and it is increasingly urgent that these are pursued.

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Christopher Merchant, Professor of Ocean and Earth Observation, University of Reading

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

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

PBS News Weekly: Climate change and raging wildfires