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Climate Change Blog 10

By Carl Howard posted 02-21-2018 12:28 PM

  
Climate Change Blog 10

Washington

I’m leading, and ending, this Blog with news from Washington. A notable alarm was sounded in the Worldwide Threat Assessment from the U.S. Intelligence Community. The document, issued by Daniel R. Coats, the director of national intelligence, addressed climate change and other environmental problems, stating that the impacts of the long-term trends toward a warming climate, more air pollution, biodiversity loss, and water scarcity are likely to fuel economic and social discontent and upheaval.

We are seeing much of this already. As described below, Cape Town, the second-largest city in South Africa, is so low on water after an extended drought that it may be forced to shut off the taps in July. Water scarcity is a factor in the violent conflicts in Syria and Yemen, and in both countries, control of water supplies is being used as a weapon of war.

The past 115 years have been the warmest period in the history of modern civilization, and the past few years have been the warmest years on record. Extreme weather events in a warmer world have the potential for greater impacts and can compound with other drivers to raise the risk of, among other things, humanitarian disasters, refugees, conflict, water and food shortages, population migration, labor shortfalls, price shocks, rioting, and power outages. Research has not identified indicators of tipping points in climate-linked Earth systems, but the possibility of abrupt climate change is real, leading to additional social unrest and upheaval.

The scientific consensus is that over the next few decades, at least, the likely prospect is a gradual worsening of the kinds of climate-related problems the world is currently experiencing. But beyond a few decades, the possibility of catastrophes like the assured melting of polar sea ice, could potentially cause profound climatic disruption and thereby whole-sale disruption to human civilization.

Worsening air pollution from forest burning, agricultural waste incineration, urbanization, and rapid industrialization, with increasing public awareness, likely will continue to drive protests against authorities, such as those recently in China, India, and Iran. Indeed, such protests likely have pushed China to commit to large- scale investments in solar power and electric vehicles.

The Assessment does not explicitly mention the burning of fossil fuels, but that is a main cause of the poor air quality the plagues many cities in the developing world, and has even caused deteriorating air quality in places like London. Burning coal and oil not only causes climate change, it emits particles into the air that cause asthma, heart attacks and other health problems. The World Health Organization estimates that three million people die prematurely every year because of outdoor air pollution, and over four million more because of indoor exposure to dirty fuels used for heating and cooking.

The Assessment notes that accelerating biodiversity and species loss, driven by pollution, warming, unsustainable fishing, and acidifying oceans, will jeopardize vital ecosystems that support human health and a functional environment. Recent estimates suggest that the current extinction rate is 100 to 1,000 times the natural extinction rate.

The document implies that the rate of extinction has accelerated due to human activities. Some scientists fear that we have entered the sixth mass extinction of organisms in Earth’s history.

Water scarcity, compounded by gaps in cooperative management agreements for nearly half of the world’s international river basins, and new unilateral dam development are likely to heighten tension between countries. Water evaporates more rapidly in a warmer world, and many areas of the world currently receive less water than previously due to changes in climatic conditions. Such conditions are predicted to worsen in terms of adequate water supply.

With regard to global climate disruption, scientists have ruled out any natural explanation, concluding that the human release of greenhouse gases explains the warming that has occurred since the 19th century. The emissions from burning fossil fuels and the chopping down of forests precisely correlates with the increase in atmospheric carbon levels and global warming and climate disruption. The Assessment is yet another in a long string of wake-up calls that could not be more clear. That it was issued by the director of national intelligence should give it added weight. Climate change is a clear and present danger to our security.

Fire and Rain

Eleven point eight ($11.8) billion dollars. That is the record-breaking amount of insurance claims filed so far in the recent wildfires in California alone. Those fires followed years of drought which made conditions so ripe for fire. In the aftermath of the fires, torrential rains caused historic mudslides. And now CA is enduring an unusually warm winter which means its snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, the source of about one-third of California’s water, at 21% of normal in mid-February is a threat to its agricultural (irrigation) and drinking water needs.

Elsewhere, Paris has experienced record flooding while South Africa is suffering from record drought. Cape Town’s water supply may soon run out and be shut off entirely (“Day Zero” forecast for this July) for residential and business uses. The government cautioned that the Day Zero threat will surpass anything a major city has faced since World War II or the Sept. 11 attacks. Talks are underway with South Africa’s police because normal policing will be entirely inadequate for the chaos that will ensue should the taps run dry. Imagine 4 million residents lining up for water rations at 200 collection points (that’s lines of 20,000 people per point). The army will be called in to try to keep order.

The area has been through a three-year drought, the worst in over a century. Cape Town may become one of the few major cities in the world to lose piped water to homes and most businesses.

Such dire conditions have long been predicted by climate change models. Long, persistent draughts likely will continue throughout much of Africa. Cape Town’s problems are a potent warning to other governments, few of which have this city’s resources and have done little to adapt.

In 2014, dams were full after years of good rain. The following year, C40, a collection of cities focused on climate change worldwide, awarded Cape Town its “adaptation implementation” prize for its management of water. The city’s reservoirs currently are at just 24% of capacity, and falling. We all would be wise to heed the predictions of the world’s leading climatologists and conserve, adapt and mitigate, rapidly.

Cities elsewhere have faced serious water shortages. Millions of Brazilians have endured rationing because of prolonged droughts. Brasília, the capital, declared a state of emergency a year ago. Experts say the water shortages in Brazil, which have affected more than 800 municipalities across the country, stem from climate change, the rapid expansion of agriculture, bad infrastructure and poor planning.

Last year, Cape Town limited residents to using 87 liters of water, about 23 gallons, per person, per day, for all uses including bathing, drinking, cooking, cleaning and toilet flushing. On Feb. 1, it lowered that limit to 50 liters, and it is fining violators.

Though consumption is down sharply, most residents have not met the 50-liter restriction, a point of tension in a city that encompasses both luxurious homes with pools and gardens, and shanty towns with communal taps.

The provincial premier urged people to shower no more than twice a week, calling oily hair a badge of honor, and suggested reusing “gray water” from cleaning to flush toilets.

For anyone accustomed to plenty, the picture is grim: Taking a two-minute shower, flushing a toilet once, washing a load of dishes, and doing ordinary drinking, cooking, cleaning and tooth-brushing is enough to reach the limit.

Cutting back is a difficult message to convey in one of the world’s most unequal societies, where access to water reflects Cape Town’s deep divisions. In squatter camps, people share communal taps and carry water in buckets to their shacks. In other parts of the city, millionaires live in mansions with glistening pools.

In poor areas, residents without cars wonder how they will carry water containers home from a collection point. In wealthy areas, some residents are installing water tanks in their yards and attempting to tap into deep, largely depleted underground aquifers.

In France the question is whether they must simply get used to flooding. Recently the Seine River overflowed its banks in Paris and several nearby cities, less than two years after reaching its highest level since 1982. Thirteen of France’s 96 administrative departments had flood alerts in January 2018, in what the monitoring body Météo-France says was the country’s wettest winter since 1959.

Some experts suggest climate change is likely to make such events more frequent. And an international body chose this week to publish a study arguing that Paris and the rest of the Seine basin needed greater protection against the risk of a catastrophic flood.

In the January flooding, 400 people had been evacuated from homes in the Paris region, and a thousand faced power cuts. Rivers have swelled across the country, forcing evacuations and the closing of roads and infrastructure. The Seine rose 18 feet above normal (and was expected to rise to 19.6 feet), river traffic was interrupted and roads and train lines along the river banks were closed. In the floods of June 2016, which killed four people in France, it peaked at 20 feet.

 “Because of climate change, we can expect floods in the Seine basin to be at least as frequent as they are right now,” said Florence Habets, a senior researcher at the C.N.R.S., France’s national center for scientific research. “No matter what we say, the more we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, the more we reduce our impact on droughts and floods.”

The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, a left-wing politician who has been at the forefront of the fight against climate change, was also quick to mention long-term challenges.

 “Beyond the emergency, this flooding phenomenon, which is more and more recurrent in Paris, reminds us how important it is for our city to adapt to climate change,” she said in a tweet.

Paris has experienced major floods in the past. In 1910, the Seine rose above 28 feet. The expectation is that now the flooding will occur more frequently, and it may be more severe, damaging, dangerous and disruptive.

Although local officials said they were now prepared to face similar conditions, experts from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimated that such a catastrophe could affect five million people and cost up to 30 billion euros, or about $37 billion.

In a recent study, they noted that although Paris had implemented further flood prevention policies since 2014, the authorities’ efforts remained limited compared to the risks the city faced.

One of the most affected areas was the town of Villeneuve-St.-Georges, 10 miles south of Paris, where the military had to help residents evacuate their homes and propel themselves on dinghies through streets flooded with brownish water and waste.

“For some people, this is the second time in 18 months that they have been victims of floods,” Alexandre Boyer, a local councilman, said. “It’s beginning to get a little too much.”

Solar

Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest exporter of oil, is moving in a new direction. The Saudi government wants not just to reshape its energy mix at home but also to emerge as a global force in clean power. Riyadh hired ACWA Power, a Saudi energy company, to build a solar farm that would generate enough electricity to power up to 200,000 homes. The project will cost $300 million and create hundreds of jobs. By the end of 2018, Saudi Arabia aims to invest up to $7 billion to develop seven new solar plants and a big wind farm. The country hopes that renewables, which now represent a negligible amount of the energy it uses, will be able to provide as much as 10% of its power generation by the end of 2023.

Saudi Arabia has talked a big game when it comes to renewables. It adopted ambitious targets for green power several years ago, but no major projects were carried out, and little changed.  But the Saudis have experimented with solar power projects and appear ready to make a major move. They have focused on conventional solar panels over another system, concentrated solar, in which mirrors focus sunlight to create heat.

Saudi Arabia, with its vast oil resources, would seem an unlikely champion for renewables. But the country’s location and climate mean it has plenty of promising sites for solar and wind farms.

The costs of installing and operating those two technologies have fallen drastically around the world in recent years. That means that even in a country where oil is plentiful, renewables beckon as a cheap, and clean, alternative to traditional fossil fuels.

For the proposed project, Riyadh received bids for the solar farm, which will be built in Sakaka, in northern Saudi Arabia, that rivaled the lowest ever submitted at auctions anywhere. At 2 to 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, a wholesale measure of electricity, solar power here would be below the cost of fossil fuel-generated electricity. A big push into wind and solar power would also have other benefits, notably allowing Saudi Arabia to sell more of its oil.

Saudis rely on air-conditioners for much of the year, and the scorching Arabian summer sends demand for power soaring. Much of that electricity today is generated at power plants fueled by oil. Last June, the facilities burned an average of 680,000 barrels of oil a day.

That figure — comparable to the output of a modest-size oil-producing country like Egypt — was down from nearly 900,000 barrels a day in 2015, but it still essentially represents wasted cash. Had it been sold overseas, that crude could have added $47 million a day to government revenue, at current prices.

Selling oil internationally is central to funding the Saudi budget. The terms of the Sakaka project’s auction required that developers pay the upfront cost of the solar farm, in return for payments for the power they supply to the grid. That would allow Saudi Arabia to continue focusing on producing and exporting oil while it makes the shift to cleaner power.

A major plank of the crown prince’s plan to transform the Saudi economy involves finding jobs for young people. Attracting investment into what is essentially a nonexistent sector in the kingdom means creating jobs, creating manufacturing.

The Saudi market’s sheer size, however, means it merits the attention of the world’s renewable energy companies. Paddy Padmanathan, the chief executive of ACWA Power, which also has other energy projects in the region, predicted in an interview last month that once the country’s energy authorities became comfortable with renewables, they would ramp up their goals for wind and solar power production.

Washington

As reported in Blog 5, Trump had nominated of Kathleen Hartnett White, a climate change skeptic, to lead the Council on Environmental Quality. She stumbled in her hearing before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Still, she was approved by the Committee on a party-line vote, but her nomination languished in the full Senate at the end of 2017.

President Trump in October appointed Ms. White, a former Texas environmental regulator who has said that carbon dioxide should be considered the “gas of life” rather than a pollutant, to be the White House senior environmental adviser.

When asked if she believes climate change is real, she said “I am uncertain.” She then corrected herself saying it was real but questioned the extent to which humans cause climate change. She was asked to estimate how much heat in Earth’s atmosphere is stored in the oceans. She replied that she didn’t have numbers like that and that there wasn’t one right answer.

The most up-to-date scientific assessment on climate change, released by the Trump administration in November, found that the world’s oceans have absorbed “about 93 percent of the excess heat caused by greenhouse gas warming since the mid-20th century, making them warmer and altering global and regional climate feedbacks.” The bigger question is how much more heat can the oceans absorb, if any, and what is the damage being done to this critical resource?

Democrats also assailed Ms. White’s writings in which she called renewable energy “unreliable and parasitic,” described global warming as “a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science,” and asserted that science does not dictate policy in democracies.

President Trump resubmitted Ms. White’s nomination to the Senate but does not appear to have the votes to have her approved.

On the rules roll-back front, methane is again being targeted. Methane is a green-house gas 20 times as potent as CO2 in the atmosphere. The Obama administration, as part of its larger strategy to combat climate change, approved two rules to minimize emissions of methane. This included EPA regulating emissions from new oil and gas wells and the Interior Department requiring oil and gas companies to control venting and flaring from existing wells on public lands. Pruitt’s EPA has attempted to delay both rules but such efforts have been thwarted by the courts. Now, two riders attached to appropriations bills (both approved in House floor votes) would kill both rules, at great cost to the climate and to clean air and without any public notice or comment.

-Carl Howard - The views expressed above are my own.



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