I am starting this Blog with a summary of the recent meeting of more than 90 heads of state and 35,000 delegates from 190 countries in Sharm El Sheik, Egypt, at the 27th Convention of the Parties (COP27) to address climate change. For the first time, the parties were able to agree on language establishing “the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment” which had been dropped from an earlier version and which references a UN resolution approved in July. The agreement also establishes a fund for “loss and damage” to assist poor countries in recovering from extreme weather events caused largely by the greenhouse gas emissions from wealthy nations. But, for the 27th time, the countries failed to agree on concrete measures that will limit global warming to 1.5C, the limit agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Given what the countries have committed to, the planet likely will continue heating beyond the 1.1C it has already warmed above pre-industrial levels, to a projected 2.1C – 2.9C which likely will have catastrophic impacts affecting billions of people this century.
The loss and damage fund had long been blocked by the US and other wealthy countries for fear that they could face unlimited liability for the GHG emissions that are driving climate change. The agreement makes clear that payments are not an admission of liability and calls for a committee with representatives from 24 countries to work over the next year to determine what form the fund should take, which countries and financial institutions should contribute, and where the money should go.
“The announcement offers hope to vulnerable communities all over the world who are fighting for their survival from climate stress,” said Sherry Rehman, the climate minister of Pakistan, which suffered catastrophic flooding this summer that left one-third of the country underwater and caused $30 billion in damages. Scientists determined that global warming had intensified the deluges.
“The loss and damage deal agreed is a positive step, but it risks becoming a ‘fund for the end of the world’ if countries don’t move faster to slash emissions,” said Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who presided over the UN summit in 2014 and is now the climate lead for the World Wide Fund for Nature. “We cannot afford to have another climate summit like this one.”
The European Union supports the L&D fund which might include a wide variety of options such as new insurance programs in addition to direct payments. The US, which emitted far more GHG than any nation in history, was the last big holdout.
But there is no guarantee that wealthy countries will pay. A decade ago, the US, the EU and other wealthy emitters pledged $100 billion per year by 2020 to help poorer countries shift to clean energy and pay for adaptation measures. The realization of this pledge is falling short by tens of billions of dollars annually. Last year, the Biden administration requested $2.5 billion in climate finance but secured just $1 billion, and that was with Democrats controlling both chambers. With Republicans in the majority in the House in January, the chances of Congress approving more funds for L&D are remote.
Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) said, “sending U.S. taxpayer dollars to a U.N. sponsored green slush fund is completely misguided.” “The Biden administration should focus on lowering spending at home, not shipping money to the U.N. for new climate deals. Innovation, not reparations, is key to fighting climate change.”
The L&D fund would be in addition to a 2015 agreement forged by the UN in which wealthy nations agreed to provide $100 billion a year from public and private sources to developing countries to help them mitigate climate change and shift away from fossil fuels.
Many of the European countries agreeing to the fund have colonial ties to developing nations seeking funds, a relationship that bolsters the argument for reparations. “The practice of colonialism transferred the rich resources of Asia and Africa to Europe to industrialize their countries, which is also the root cause of climate change — the consequences of which we, the poor countries, are forced to suffer,” President Ranil Wickremesinghe of Sri Lanka said. “Adding insult to injury, damages caused by extreme weather conditions are increasing and their impact is exceedingly costly.”
Paul Bledsoe, a climate adviser under President Bill Clinton and now a lecturer at American University, said the idea of paying climate reparations to distant nations would be “an absolute political domestic disaster.” He said it would “cripple” Biden’s 2024 re-election chances. “America is culturally incapable of meaningful reparations,” Mr. Bledsoe said. “Having not made them to Native Americans or African Americans, there is little to no chance they will be seriously considered regarding climate impacts to foreign nations. It’s a complete non-starter in our domestic politics.”
Developing nations have been calling for industrialized countries to provide compensation for the costs of devastating storms and droughts caused by climate change for 30 years. Such efforts have been resisted, until last year. At the UN climate summit in Glasgow, a tiny trickle began. Scotland, the host country, committed $2.2 million for L&D. Ireland pledged $10 million; Austria pledged 50 million euros (around $50 million); Belgium promised $2.5 million in L&D to Mozambique; Denmark pledged at least $13 million; Germany pledged $170 million to a new program offering vulnerable nations a form of insurance for climate emergencies.
“I support governments paying money for loss and damage and adaptation, but let’s be very clear that that’s a matter of billions or tens of billions,” former VP Al Gore said.
President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela gave an impassioned speech denouncing capitalism and the extraction of natural resources as the causes of climate change, but omitted mention of his own country’s history as an oil producer.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan, detailed the continuing recovery following extraordinary floods this summer that killed an estimated 1,700 people. “This all happened despite our very low carbon footprint,” he said. “Loss and damage needs to be part of the core agenda of COP27.”
The US and the EU secured language in the deal that could sweep in additional donors including major emerging economies like China and Saudi Arabia. The UN currently classifies China as a developing country which exempts it from having to provide climate aid, even though it is currently the world’s biggest emitter of GHG as well as the second-largest economy. The new deal may lead to future conflict since China fiercely resists being treated as a developed nation in global climate talks.
According to a UN report, titled “Too Little, Too Slow,” developing nations need approximately $200 billion a year, on average, during this decade. The cost of climate adaptation in developing nations will reach $160 billion to $340 billion by 2030 and rise to $315 billion to $565 billion by 2050. For wealthy countries, failing to spend more money on climate adaptation around the world will only make the problem worse.
Rising global temperatures intensified recent deadly floods in Pakistan and Nigeria and produced record heat across Europe and Asia. In the Horn of Africa, a third year of severe drought threatens millions of people with famine. With global CO2 emissions reaching a record high this year, some negotiators fear that regardless of what is agreed to on paper, the 1.5C goal could soon be out of reach.
Leaders of low-lying island nations say vast swaths of their territories could wash away if global average temperatures were to surpass 1.5 degrees. “This is indeed a matter of survival for all vulnerable countries,” Kwaku Afriyie, Ghana’s environment minister, said.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February disrupted global energy markets and complicated efforts to reduce the use of fossil fuels. As natural gas prices soared, countries in Europe and elsewhere switched to burning coal and invested in new natural gas pipelines and terminals that could operate for decades. Despite western sanctions, Russian fuel exports have continued to alternate trading partners.
The International Energy Agency predicted that the energy crisis incited by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will spur more nations to invest in lower-emissions technologies this decade to improve energy security. Global investment in clean energy may rise from $1.3 trillion this year to more than $2 trillion annually by 2030, which is half of what is needed to hold warming to 1.5C.
In the US, Republicans continue work to expand oil and gas production and exploration. Fossil fuel companies even made gas deals with nations at COP27. Thus, limiting global warming to 1.5C degrees may now be impossible, Al Gore, said in a speech on the opening day of the summit. “The world’s leading scientists and energy experts have told us that any new fossil fuel development is incompatible with 1.5 degrees as the limit to the temperature increase,” he said.
Every fraction of a degree of additional warming could mean tens of millions more people worldwide exposed to life-threatening heat waves, water shortages and coastal flooding, scientists have found. A 1.5-degree warmer world might still have coral reefs and Arctic sea ice, while a world 2-degrees warmer probably won’t.
Limiting warming to 1.5C requires immediate, costly, drastic steps that are politically difficult and disruptive, and requires leaders of nearly all countries to act in concert. All countries need to reduce their collective fossil fuel emissions roughly in half by 2030, and then stop CO2 emissions by 2050, scientists have calculated. This necessitates a complete overhaul of all electricity and transportation systems at an unprecedented pace. And with every year of inaction, the task gets harder.
“There is this skepticism about the US’ ability to fulfill its promise,” Li Shuo, a policy adviser for Greenpeace based in Beijing, said. “The U.S. could just walk away, citing congressional resistance, and on the other side, the Chinese will be held more accountable.” The US withdrew from the Paris agreement under Trump.
India, the world’s third-largest emitter, has been wary of the 1.5-degree target. To meet that goal, Indian officials have said, richer countries have to cut their emissions much more rapidly than they are doing and provide more financial aid to poor nations, potentially on the order of trillions of dollars, to help them shift to clean energy. But wealthy governments are not doing any of this.
Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados is working to reform the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to unlock more money to help developing economies switch from fossil fuels. She said that it wasn’t enough to chant “1.5 to Stay Alive” in hopes that it would bring about change.
Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, America’s first major climate legislation, which could direct $370 billion into low-carbon technologies like wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear power plants, hydrogen fuels, electric vehicles and electric heat pumps, is projected to help the US reduce its emissions by 40% below 2005 levels by 2030. At the climate summit, Biden said, “If we’re going to win this fight, every major emitter nation needs align with the 1.5 degrees.” “We can no longer plead ignorance to the consequences of our actions or continue to repeat our mistakes.”
Biden was the only leader of a major polluting country to attend COP27. President Xi Jinping of China, President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India were no-shows.
Two of the Republican delegates — Representative John Curtis (UT) and Representative Gregory Murphy (NC) — recognized the urgency of climate change but oppose efforts by Democrats to abandon fossil fuels, imperiling American growth and disadvantaging the US vis a vis China. “Fossil fuels built the world. And we’ll bankrupt the world and starve the world if we make a transition that is too fast,” Mr. Murphy said. “China was given an out in the Paris accord allowing it to increase polluting till 2035, which honestly baffles me. Why is our biggest competitor given an out to compete against us — how does that make any sense whatsoever?”
They both also rejected the notion that the US owed any compensation to developing countries that have contributed a relatively tiny proportion to the crisis. “As human beings if we tried to compensate every wrong that happened in the world, we’re lost,” Mr. Curtis said. “I think about American Indians, the slave issues in the United States. There is no path to right every wrong, financially.”
If 1.5 is still attainable, preservation of the world’s largest forests is essential. Fortunately, in Brazil, President Jail Bolsonara was defeated by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a committed environmentalist. Mr. Lula, has pledged to protect the Amazon rainforest. Mr. Bolsonaro cut environmental programs and encouraged development and deforestation. “There is an opportunity to protect the Amazon rainforest, which is critical for protecting our global climate,” said Leila Salazar-Lopez, the executive director of Amazon Watch, a nonprofit organization. “If the Brazilian election would have gone the other way, then I think we would definitely be beyond a tipping point and we would not have a chance for 1.5.”
In fact, the three countries that are home to more than half of the world’s tropical rainforests — Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo — have pledged to work together to establish a “funding mechanism” that could help preserve the forests, which help regulate the Earth’s climate. The plan has no financial backing of its own and was more of a call to action than a strategy for how to achieve its goals.
While reducing fossil fuel emissions (mitigation) is the most important part of addressing climate change, forests are a critical part of a sustainable biosphere upon which all life depends. Trees absorb planet-warming CO2 through photosynthesis, storing it in their trunks, branches and roots. When trees burn or rot, they release the CO2. Thus, standing trees temper climate change, while deforestation worsens it.
The Amazon rainforest alone lost over 13,000 square miles of tree cover between 2019 and 2021, according to the National Institute of Space Research in Brazil.
In Indonesia, forest loss declined by a quarter last year from 2020, according to the World Resources Institute. It was the fifth year in a row of falling totals. But deforestation continued to rise in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which lost 1.2 million acres last year, largely due to land clearings for small-scale agriculture and charcoal production.
Tasso Azevedo, who helped create the Amazon Fund, one of the most successful financial mechanisms to preserve the rainforest, was unimpressed with the text of the agreement announced in Egypt. “There is not one paragraph about action,” he said. “And it’s signed only by ministers, very little impact.”
Facts on the Ground:
A historic lake-effect snowstorm buried western NY, including the Buffalo metro area, with over 80 inches of snow in four days before Thanksgiving, killing four. Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a state of emergency for the Buffalo and Watertown areas and Erie County. Southern portions of Buffalo were placed under a travel ban. President Biden and FEMA approved Hochul's request for a federal Emergency Declaration for 11 counties in western and northern New York. Hochul said the Emergency Declaration would provide immediate federal funding to the impacted counties to support ongoing response and rescue operations. All commercial traffic was banned along a 132-mile stretch of the NY State Thruway (Interstate 90) from Rochester, New York, to the Pennsylvania border. The Niagara Thruway (Interstate 190) was also closed as were several school districts.
Contributing to the unusually heavy snowfall, was the fact that Lake Ontario's temperature was at its warmest value for mid-November in at least 27 years of recordkeeping, according to NOAA's Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory. Lake Erie's temperature was at its second-warmest value for mid-November over the same period. Lake-effect snow develops when cold, dry air, often originating from Canada, flows across the relatively warm waters of the Great Lakes. As that cold air passes over the lakes, warmth and moisture from the water are picked up and transferred into the lowest portion of the Earth's atmosphere. This rising air condenses into clouds, which can form narrow bands capable of producing snowfall rates as high as 2 to 3 inches per hour or more, according to the NWS.
Hurricane Ian was a large and destructive Category 4 Atlantic hurricane that was the deadliest hurricane to strike the state of Florida since 1935. Ian caused widespread damage across western Cuba and the southeast US, especially Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. It was the ninth named storm, fourth hurricane, and second major hurricane of the 2022 Atlantic hurricane season.
On September 25, Ian became a high-end Category 3 hurricane making landfall in western Cuba with winds of about 125 mph. Heavy rainfall caused widespread flooding across Cuba and heavy wind caused a nationwide power outage. It became a high-end Category 4 hurricane on September 28, 2022, as it approached the west coast of Florida, making landfall on Cayo Costa Island. Ian caused immense damage before moving back offshore into the Atlantic. It again made landfall as a hurricane in South Carolina. Ian caused 5 deaths in Cuba, 146 in Florida, 5 in North Carolina, and 1 in Virginia. It dissipated over southern Virginia on October 2 but produced rain over much of the eastern US.
Ian caused US losses estimated at over $50 billion. Much of the damage was from flooding brought about by a storm surge of 10–15 feet. The cities of Fort Myers Beach and Naples were largely destroyed along with Sanibel Island and Pine Island. Millions were left without power including more than 2.5 million in FL, 143,000 in PR, 33,000 in NC and 10,000 in VA and many communities in Florida lacked potable water.
President Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, traveled to Puerto Rico to survey the damage left by a previous Hurricane, Fiona, and then they visited Florida to assess recovery efforts from Hurricane Ian. Several island communities were completely cut off, complicating rescue efforts. President Biden declared Hurricane Ian a major disaster in Florida, ordering federal aid to help with recovery.
Ian dumped as much as a foot of rain on some cities as it swept across the Florida Peninsula. Governor DeSantis said that the storm’s impacts were “historic.” Restoring power to Lee and Charlotte counties would require rebuilding infrastructure, not just “connecting a power line back to a pole." “Lee and Charlotte are basically off the grid at this point,” he said. Deanne Criswell, the FEMA administrator, said that the water supply to nine hospitals in Lee County had been disrupted. A portion of the Sanibel Causeway, the only road that connects Sanibel Island to mainland Florida, was destroyed by Hurricane Ian.
Excess water from Hurricane Ian had caused at least a dozen wastewater treatment facilities in Florida to release either raw or partially treated waste, which can contain bacteria or other disease-causing organisms as well as high levels of nitrogen and phosphates, according to the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. Scientists have stated that storms like Ian are being made more powerful and more unpredictable by climate change.
Hurricane Fiona, however, was the most damaging for Puerto Rico, shutting down its energy grid with the prospect of an extended blackout. Fiona had a maximum sustained wind of 130 mph. Fiona pummeled the Turks and Caicos causing power outages and displacing at least 163 people, officials said.
The authorities in Puerto Rico said 1.4 million people had lost power and that two-thirds of the island’s water and sewer customers, more than 760,000, were without service due to a lack of power to pumps or turbid water at filtration plants.
Hurricane Fiona battered the Dominican Republic’s popular eastern provinces, causing at least two deaths and displacing nearly 13,000 people. The eastern provinces, home to one of the largest tourism industries in the Caribbean, took the brunt of the storm. Fiona brought 90 mph winds and heavy rain that set off mudslides, shuttered resorts and damaged highways, officials said.
Gov. Pedro R. Pierluisi of Puerto Rico said the rain in parts of central, southern and southeastern Puerto Rico had been “catastrophic.” Most of the island was inaccessible to rescuers, and more than 2,000 people were in shelters. Puerto Rico will have a difficult recovery process after as much as 30 inches of rain fell in some places.
A rare November hurricane, Nicole, made landfall south of Vero Beach, FL, and caused widespread power outages, destructive flooding and coastal erosion. Over 30 million people received storm warnings and around 300,000 people lost electricity, mostly in Brevard, Indian River and Volusia Counties.
More than 500 homes in Port Orange, Fla., were at risk of flooding after a critical dam was swept away in the storm. Mayor Don Burnette said the seawall protecting the Cambridge Canal system, which drains water out of the neighboring community, had been breached. Water levels are 8 feet higher than normal in the area, he said.
For climate scientists, the most alarming weather event of the summer may have been the simultaneous heat and drought across most of China. The country experienced extreme heat for almost three months, affecting more than 900 million people. As many as 66 rivers in a single municipal area, around Chongqing, have “dried up,” according to the state broadcaster CCTV. Weather historian Maximiliano Herrera said, “there is nothing in world climatic history which is even minimally comparable.”
The heatwave worsened a drought that has harmed food and factory production, reduced hydropower and river transport over an expansive area. The Yangtze River Basin, which runs from coastal Shanghai to Sichuan province in China’s southwest and includes Asia’s longest river, was considered the worst-affected area, affecting hundreds of millions of people.
The heatwave ravaged much of China for over 70 consecutive days with temperatures consistently over 40C (104F) in at least 17 provinces, from southwestern Sichuan to coastal Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces in the east. In Sichuan province, temperatures reached 43C and in Beibei, 45C.
The record heat waves and droughts threaten China’s food, energy and economic security, experts said. Due to water shortages, the Chinese Communist Party had to choose between supplying water for agriculture or power-generation, according to Gopal Reddy, founder of the group Ready for Climate.
Some 267 weather stations across China reported record temperatures in August, and the long dry spell across the Yangtze river basin has reduced hydropower output and crop growth ahead of this season’s harvest in Jiangxi. Ten reservoirs in neighboring Anhui province have fallen below the “dead pool” level, meaning they are unable to discharge water downstream, the local water bureau said.
Across Pakistan, a deluge of floodwater swept away mountainsides, pushed buildings off their foundations and turned whole districts into inland seas. Over a million homes were damaged or destroyed. After nearly three months of incessant rain, much of Pakistan’s farmland is now underwater, raising the specter of food shortages in what is likely to be the most damaging monsoon season in the country’s recent history.
Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s climate change minister, called the flooding a “climate-induced humanitarian disaster” of “epic proportions” and appealed for international aid. Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority said 162 bridges had so far been damaged by the floods and that more than 2,000 miles of roads were destroyed.
Scientists expect more of these seasonal rains to come down in dangerous, unpredictable bursts as the planet continues to heat up because warmer air holds more moisture. When the right atmospheric factors come together to generate heavy precipitation, there is more water available to fall from the clouds than there had been before GHG emissions began warming the planet, said Noah S. Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University who has studied the South Asian monsoon.
Due to Pakistan’s record floods, villages are now desperate, isolated, islands. More than 33 million people have been displaced, vast areas have been submerged and homes and crops decimated. The flooding is the worst to hit the country in recent history, according to Pakistani officials. The floods were caused by heavier-than-usual monsoon rains and glacial melt.
In Dadu District, one of the worst hit areas in Sindh Province in southern Pakistan, the floodwater completely submerged roughly 300 villages and about 40,000 square miles of land, roughly the size of the state of Virginia.
Tens of thousands of people are now homeless and displaced to nearby towns and cities where they seek refuge in schools, public buildings, and along the roadside and canal embankments. Malaria, dengue fever and waterborne diseases are rampant and the government shut down electricity to prevent electrocutions. “We are abandoned, we have to survive on our own,” said Ali Nawaz, 59, a cotton farmer.
Previously, US wildfire season was mostly over by October, but in mid-October at least 50 notable fires burned across the Western US. The bulk of the large outbreaks were in Idaho, Montana and the Pacific Northwest. At least six fires had grown larger than 25,000 acres. Across the country, fires to date have burned a half million more acres compared with this time last year, federal statistics show.
A wildfire in Washington State grew to 2,000 acres from 150 acres within hours, forcing thousands of people to evacuate. The Nakia Creek fire burned in the Yacolt Burn State Forest near Camas, Wash., about 20 miles northeast of Portland, Ore. The fire, which began on Oct. 9, was about 20% contained earlier but escalated, driven by a combination of strong winds, high temperatures and low humidity. About 3,000 homes were subject to mandatory evacuation orders in Clark County. Another 33,780 were under a voluntary evacuation notice.
The wind, with gusts up to 30 mph, grounded air response crews for their safety, the Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency said. County officials said this season “has been a long one for fire crews.” “They have been putting in long days for several months now.”
The region has experienced unseasonably high temperatures. In Seattle, temperatures peaked at 88F, the second warmest day in October in almost 130 years, the Weather Service said.
The Mosquito fire in the Sierra Nevada foothills, became California’s largest blaze of the year. The fire has been advancing east through dry, hilly terrain northeast of Sacramento, the state capital. It had grown to more than 63,000 acres.
Smoke from wildfires has worsened over the past decade, potentially reversing decades of improvements in Western air quality made under the Clean Air Act, according to research from Stanford University. Researchers noted a 27-fold increase over the past decade in the number of people experiencing an “extreme smoke day,” which is air quality deemed unhealthy for all age groups. In 2020 alone, nearly 25 million people across the contiguous US were affected by dangerous smoke.
“People may be less likely to notice days with a modest increase in fine particulate matter from smoke, but those days can still have an impact on people’s health,” said Marissa Childs, who led the research. She noted that extreme smoke days were rare between 2006 to 2010, but from 2016 to 2020 more than 1.5 million people, particularly in the Western US, were routinely exposed to levels posing immediate risks.
“We have been remarkably successful in cleaning up other sources of air pollution across the country, mainly due to regulation like the Clean Air Act,” said Marshall Burke, a co-author of the research and professor of earth system science at Stanford. “That success, especially in the West, has really stagnated. And in recent years this started to reverse” largely due to wildfires. Climate change intensifies fire risk across the country and smoke plumes travel thousands of miles from their source affecting millions of Americans coast to coast.
Particulate pollution causes both short-term irritation and has been linked to chronic heart and lung conditions as well other negative health effects like cognitive decline, depression and premature birth.
“There is no safe concentration,” said Tarik Benmarhnia, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of California, San Diego, who worked on an earlier study showing that smoke from wildfires can be 10 times more harmful than other sources of air pollution. The new research indicates that the health risk is increasing as the hot and dry conditions for wildfires worsen with climate change.
In late August, severe thunderstorms swept through southern Michigan and northwest Ohio, leaving more than 650,000 customers without power in the region and killing three people, including an 11-year-old boy who was swept into a drain as the storm system stretched into Arkansas. A line of storms, produced wind gusts of between 60 to 80 mph in parts of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio, prompting severe thunderstorm warnings.
Also in Michigan, a mid-October storm brought heavy snow, powerful winds and extremely high waves to the region. More than 13 inches of snow accumulated in the north-central part of the Upper Peninsula. Waves of 13 to 15 feet were recorded along eastern Lake Superior and may have reached 20 feet in the early afternoon and wind gusts of up to 60 mph swept the area around Grand Marais, Mich., on the southern shore of Lake Superior. For the Upper Midwest, the heaviness of the snowfall was “uncommon.”
The remnants of Typhoon Merbok caused widespread flooding in coastal areas of western Alaska, in mid-September. Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy issued a disaster declaration in response to what he called an “unprecedented storm.” The governor said extreme winds crashing waves and coastal sea surge had impacted several communities along 1,000 miles of the Alaska coastline.
The State Emergency Operation Center received multiple reports of flooded homes, roads and airports, along with power outages and infrastructure damage. Strong winds with gusts close to 70 mph caused a storm surge that flooded coastal communities, including Golovin where around 170 people evacuated their homes, and in Hooper Bay where 250 people evacuated.
“It’s a historic-level storm,” Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said of the system steaming toward Alaska. “In 10 years, people will be referring to the September 2022 storm as a benchmark storm.”
More than 800,000 people were evacuated in central Vietnam ahead of Typhoon Noru’s expected landfall after it hit the Philippines in late September. Noru, known in the Philippines as Typhoon Karding, made landfall in the Philippines, causing flooding and killing at least eight people, officials said. Noru produced maximum sustained winds of 92 mph in Vietnam making it the equivalent of a Category 1 storm on the wind scale that is used to describe tropical cyclones in the Atlantic. It blew roofs off houses and caused widespread blackouts. An additional 4,000 people were evacuated from north-eastern Thailand due to a risk of flash floods stemming from a combination of heavy rainfall and saturated soils following the persistent monsoon season.
Nigeria is suffering its worst flooding in a decade, with vast areas of farmland, infrastructure and 200,000 homes partly or wholly destroyed. At least 603 people have died, with more than 2,400 others injured and over 1.4 million displaced by the flooding. In some areas, water levels almost reached the roofs. Matthias Schmale, the UN humanitarian coordinator for the country, said “Climate change is real, as we are yet again discovering in Nigeria.” In 2012, when the country last experienced flooding on this scale, the damage was estimated at $17 billion.
The European drought combined with extreme heat this summer have dried rivers and reservoirs worrying experts. The two phenomena lead scientists to conclude the conditions are made more likely and more severe by anthropogenic climate change. “It’s hugely concerning,” said Yadvinder Malhi, a professor of ecosystem science at the University of Oxford. “It’s a sign that there are big shifts going on in the stability of the global climate and the regional weather that’s going to cause more and more stress on human systems and natural ecosystems.” Because humans have heated the planet about 1.1C (2F), there is much more variability in the climate than expected, Dr. Malhi said. He added that if warming reaches 2C degrees or more, humans can expect to see far greater impacts than initially feared. “As there is more energy in the atmosphere, we’re getting more and more extremes, whether it’s flooding extremes,” like in Pakistan, “or drought extremes like we’re seeing in Europe, China and part of North America.” These sorts of events were predicted for 2040, and to see them now strongly indicates that climate variability is occurring more rapidly than predicted.
At the start of the year, Spain was experiencing its driest January in 20 years, and by February, the Alto Lindoso reservoir had fallen to 15% of its capacity. “The degree of this drought is on the once-in-a-century or several-centuries-time-scale intensity,” Dr. Malhi said, adding that while extreme droughts do occur normally, it may be that now such droughts will occur more frequently.
“We have an awful lot still to learn,” Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, said. “I think it [Europe’s drying rivers and reservoirs] says that climate change, particularly in Europe, is always discussed as something happening in the future. It’s not in the future. It’s happening now.”
Nine people died and at least four others were missing after an overnight rainstorm in mid-September dumped more than a foot of rain on the coast of central Italy, turning streets into rivers, blocking bridges and highways, and leaving thousands without electricity or gas. The downpour occurred in the central Marche region, devastating several small towns. In a post on social media, firefighters said that they had rescued dozens of people from their roofs or in trees. A civil protection official, Luigi d’Angelo, said that about 16 inches of rain had fallen in two to three hours. “It was an extremely intense event,” he told the news agency ANSA.
Antonello Pasini, a scientist with the National Research Council of Italy, said that climate change was affecting the Mediterranean with drastic alternations between hot air intrusions from the south and cold fronts from the north. That, in turn, “is creating disasters that we unfortunately see increasingly frequently,” he said. He added that Italy’s particular geological configuration, with narrow valleys channeling torrential rivers, made it prone to landslides. In July, 11 people were killed by an avalanche while climbing a glacier in northern Italy, after record high temperatures in the area.
In Lytton, British Columbia, nothing has been rebuilt since flames devoured the tiny village of Lytton last year, turning it into a national symbol of climate change. It was in Lytton, about 90 miles northeast of Vancouver, that temperatures set a national record of 49.6C (121.3 F) in Canada! — before the deadly fire erupted. The inferno killed 619 people in the province last year and caused tens of millions of dollars in damage.
Vancouver’s City Council has taken initial steps toward suing major oil companies seeking damages for the local costs of climate change. This would be the first lawsuit of its kind in the country against the fossil fuel industry.
Apart from the fire, a weather event known as an atmospheric river caused huge floods that isolated entire towns and thousands of people in a region east of Vancouver. A tornado, called a waterspout, brought winds of 68 mph to Vancouver. High winds and storm surge damaged Vancouver’s scenic sea walls in Stanley Park, which have become increasingly vulnerable to rising sea levels.
“We cannot make the types of dramatic shifts that society needs to deal with climate change while the global fossil fuel industry makes hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars, of profit from selling the same products that are causing the problem,” said Andrew Gage, a staff lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law, one of the environmental groups leading the campaign “Sue Big Oil” and urging local governments to file a class-action lawsuit against global oil companies.
The day after Lytton broke the national heat record, strong winds pushed flames through Lytton consuming it in less than two hours. The Mayor, Jan Polderman said, before the fire he believed that climate change was “the next generation’s problem.” “I don’t think that anymore.”
Failure to limit global warming to 1.5C will likely set off several climate “tipping points,” a team of scientists said, with irreversible effects including the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, abrupt thawing of Arctic permafrost and the death of coral reefs.
The researchers said that even at the current level of warming, some of these self-sustaining changes might have already begun. But if warming exceeded 1.5C, the changes become much more likely. And at the higher Paris target, 2Cs, even more tipping points would likely be set off, including the loss of mountain glaciers and the collapse of a system of deep mixing of water in the North Atlantic.
The changes would have significant, long-term effects on life on Earth and likely would trigger unstoppable positive feedback loops. The collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets could produce unrelenting sea level rise, measured in feet, not inches, over centuries. The thawing of permafrost could release more heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming beyond habitability. A shutdown of ocean mixing in the North Atlantic could affect global weather patterns and cause more extreme weather events beyond anything humans have evolved to endure.
Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and one of the researchers, said the team had “come to the very dire conclusion that 1.5C is a threshold” beyond which some of these effects would start, if they haven’t already. It is therefore imperative, he and others said, for nations to immediately slash CO2 emissions and other heat-trapping gases to curb global warming.
The research is consistent with recent assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of experts convened by the United Nations, that beyond 1.5C, the threats of climate change grow considerably.
David Armstrong McKay, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter in Britain, said limiting warming to 1.5C “doesn’t guarantee we don’t see tipping points,” “but it reduces the likelihood.”
And as with the UN panel’s assessments, exceeding 1.5C does not mean all is lost. “Every 10th of a degree counts,” Dr. Rockström said. “So, 1.6 is better than 1.7 and so on” in reducing the tipping-point risks.
Countries have not pledged to cut GHG emissions enough to meet either Paris target. Current policies put the world on pace for up to 2.9C of warming by the end of the century. At that level of warming, even more tipping points would be set off, the researchers said.
The new research specified 16 tipping points, including nine that would have global effects. The study “puts temperature thresholds on all the tipping elements,” Dr. Rockström said. “That has never been done before.”
One worrisome example of a tipping point is the rapid warming of the Arctic which has led to the extreme wildfire seasons experienced in Siberia in recent years which is expected to continue.
The researchers said that the Siberian Arctic, with its vast expanses of forest, tundra, peatlands and permafrost, was nearing a threshold beyond which even small temperature increases could produce sudden increases in the extent of fires. “Global warming is changing the fire regime above the Arctic Circle in Siberia,” said David L.A. Gaveau, one of the researchers. His company, TheTreeMap, monitors deforestation around the world.
Arctic wildfires can consume decayed organic matter in peat and thawed permafrost thereby releasing CO2. This GHG adds to global warming which makes the goal of reining in climate change more difficult if not impossible. Over the past four decades, the Arctic has been warming about four times faster than the global average. Recent summers in eastern Siberia have been marked by particularly extreme temperatures reaching 38C (100F).
The warmth has been accompanied by severe and extensive wildfires. “Observations indicated that the fire seasons were exceptional,” Dr. Gaveau said.
He and his colleagues analyzed satellite data to map the burned area each summer from 1982 to 2020. Over that time, a total of nearly 23 million acres burned. The researchers found that together, 2019 and 2020 accounted for nearly half of the total. “The burning was much, much higher than in the last 40 years,” Dr. Gaveau said. The study was published in the journal Science.
They then looked at factors that affect wildfire risk, including the length of the growing season (which results in more vegetation available to burn) and air and surface temperatures (warm conditions dry out the vegetation, making it easier to burn) and found that these have increased over the decades. Those and other factors “are causing what we’re seeing — an increase in areas of burning,” he said.
In 2019 and 2020, average summer temperatures in the Siberian Arctic had increased to above 10C (50F). Dr. Gaveau said that 10C could be a tipping point, or threshold, beyond which wildfire activity greatly increases with just a small increase in temperature. “It’s worrying because predictions essentially indicate that the fires of 2019, 2020 will become the norm by the end of the century,” he said.
They estimated that the fires of 2019 and 2020, which burned large areas of peatland, resulted in the release of more than 400 million metric tons of CO2, which is greater than the total annual emissions of Australia. With more extreme fire years, Dr. Gaveau said, “there’s going to be much more carbon released into the atmosphere every year because of global warming in a region that would not normally burn as much.”
The fires are also thawing the permafrost, previously permanently frozen ground underlying much of the Siberian Arctic. The organic matter in the thawed ground decomposes and releases CO2 and methane, and it can also dry out and burn, resulting in even more emissions and warming, etc.
The study adds to the urgency of reducing emissions. These emissions from thawed permafrost and Arctic wildfires are not fully accounted for in global carbon budgets but should be so countries can adjust their emissions goals to limit global warming.
A separate study published in Science looked at factors that drove the extreme fire season of 2021. Rebecca C. Scholten of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and colleagues found that over the past half-century spring snowmelt in northeastern Siberia has started an average of 1.7 days earlier per decade. The earlier the snowmelt the longer soil and vegetation dry out, increasing the risk of burning.
The researchers also found that changes in the polar jet stream that circles the planet likely contributed to greater fire activity. During many weeks when extreme fires occurred, the jet stream was temporarily split in two, with northerly and southerly branches. Referred to as an Arctic front jet, it typically has a region of stationary lower-level air which allows heat to build up, increasing fire risk.
This split jet stream is the same phenomenon that scientists say likely contributes to increasing heat waves in Europe. Dr. Scholten said the research showed that the two factors worked together. “It’s a compound effect,” she said. “It’s only if we have early snowmelt, which we have more with climate warming, and then if we have an Arctic front jet, which we also have more frequently with climate warming, then we have like really extreme fire risk.”
To avert worsening climate disasters, all sectors of the economy must be transformed by midcentury. The most urgent task is the rapid phase-down of planet-warming emissions from coal-fired power plants in emerging economies. Burning coal for electricity is the single largest source of global GHG emissions. It accounts for about 10 billion tons of CO2 annually, more than 70% of global fossil fuel emissions from electricity generation.
The world’s leaders are failing badly in this regard. Since 1990, the world has doubled its emissions from coal-fired power. There are now more than 6,500 such plants with at least an additional 941 planned. According to the Rockefeller Foundation, combined, they could emit 273 billion tons of CO2 over their normal 40-year operational lifetime. Such emissions could cause humanitarian crises that can scarcely be imagined for the world’s most vulnerable peoples.
To keep global warming to below 2C (3.6F) above preindustrial levels, the global community must stop building coal plants immediately and cut coal emissions in roughly half by 2030. Coal plants must be replaced by carbon-free power, transportation must be decarbonized, as must buildings and industry. Innovative political and financial solutions are emerging, but will they be in place in time?
Emissions from coal plants in the 38 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have declined by an average of 6% annually since 2014. But emissions growth from emerging nations has far exceeded these reductions. Such growth accounts for 79% of the global total. China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia and South Africa are among the countries that have relied heavily on coal for economic development.
Coal is favored as political and business elites are often highly personally invested in it (including in the US, notably Senator Manchin (R-WV)). Coal also supports tens of millions of lives directly and indirectly.
Following the climate negotiations in Glasgow last year, France, Germany, Britain, the US and the EU agreed to mobilize $8.5 billion over the next 3-5 years to help South Africa and coal workers transition from coal. South Africa is the world’s 15th-largest emitter of GHG, and it generates 87% of its electricity by burning coal.
The Group of 7 backs such an approach. India, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan and others may follow if the countries underwriting South Africa’s transition follow through on their financial commitments. It has been a problem to actually mobilize billions in new capital financed at below-market rates to underwrite these deals.
Pursuant to a 2019 NY city law, most large buildings must drastically reduce their emissions starting in 2024. That will entail replacing boilers with heat pumps. It’s not going to be easy. Nationally, the Biden administration is trying to hasten such a shift with billions of dollars in tax rebates to electrify buildings and make them more energy efficient. In 2021, sales of heat pumps grew significantly in the US and several other major markets, according to research published in Nature.
Emissions from buildings, primarily for heat and hot water, account for more than a quarter of the nation’s emissions. In NYC it’s roughly 70%. “New York City, I would argue, is the most aggressive city in the country on energy efficiency and green buildings,” Mr. Donnel Baird, founder of Bloc Power, said. “We are so far behind, and we are underperforming.”
In NYC, many apartment building owners, including cooperatives, can’t readily afford to go all-electric. There aren’t enough workers trained to retrofit them. And often, even in new buildings, to say nothing of old buildings that were built decades before heat pumps existed, there isn’t enough space to accommodate all the equipment.
Ithaca, NY, and Berkeley, CA, have passed laws requiring all buildings, new and old, to stop using oil and gas in the coming years, whether for heating or cooking. Dozens of cities across the US have also passed laws that prohibit new gas hookups. A counteroffensive, funded by gas companies and local utilities, is fighting local laws to ban gas.
The Inflation Reduction Act offers up to $8,000 in tax rebates for property owners to purchase electric heat pumps and make energy efficiency improvements (e.g., insulation and better windows). Many buildings will need to upgrade their electric panels to fully electrify. There are rebates for that, too. The bill also allocates $200 million to train workers to install new electric appliances and insulation.
But as buildings electrify, along with cars and buses, utilities will need to produce much more electricity as demand grows. The city needs to install new transmission lines to meet the new demand.
NYC’s 24 power plants run mostly on methane gas and fuel oil, spewing GHG emissions into the atmosphere and polluting the air nearby. The city aspires to have what it calls a fully “clean energy” electricity grid by 2040.
The switch is cumbersome. NYC has been slow in issuing the necessary permits. Plumbing lines and wires must be removed. The required machinery is enormous. Most high-rise buildings don’t have enough space for the equipment. Developers of new buildings, if they want to go all-electric, need to set aside expensive real estate to accommodate the equipment.
If home/building owners decide to switch out the old oil boilers for gas ones, it will prolong the building’s reliance on fossil fuels for another 40 years or so. But doing so involves less work, less up-front cost, and less of an education for shareholders/apartment owners. Many hurdles to clear.
Washington:
By a bipartisan Senate vote of 69 to 27 the United States joined the 2016 Kigali Amendment, along with 137 other nations that have agreed to sharply reduce the production and use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), industrial chemicals commonly found in refrigerators and air-conditioners. The chemicals are potent GHGs, warming the planet with 1,000 times the heat-trapping strength of CO2.
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, called the ratification “a historic step forward to combating global warming in a huge way.” He predicted that the vote may count as one of the most important bipartisan accomplishments during this Congress. Twenty-one Republicans joined all present members of the Democratic caucus to approve the treaty, including Senator McConnell (KY), the minority leader.
If the Kigali pact is successfully implemented, scientists estimate it would prevent up to 0.5C, (about 1F), of warming by the end of this century. At this stage in the planet’s rapid warming, every fraction of a degree makes a difference.
The vote was largely symbolic as the Congress and the Biden administration had enacted policies to reduce the production and importation of HFCs in the US by 85% over the next 15 years, and industry has turned to alternative chemicals.
About 15% of HFCs would still be permitted because they have critical uses for which alternatives do not yet exist. Under the Kigali Amendment, industrialized nations like the US and those in the EU will reduce production and consumption of HFCs to about 15% of 2012 levels by 2036. Much of the rest of the world, including China, Brazil and all of Africa, will freeze HFC use by 2024, reducing it to 20% of 2021 levels by 2045.
Americans for Prosperity, a political action committee founded by the billionaire Koch brothers, sent a letter to lawmakers saying that ratifying the Kigali Amendment would be an “abdication of U.S. sovereignty over environmental regulation” to the UN. The group also argued it would raise the price of air-conditioning, refrigeration and industrial cooling for American consumers.
But Francis Dietz, a spokesman for the Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute, an industry trade group, said the phase-down of HFCs was happening, no matter what the Senate did. “We’ve been preparing for this for more than a decade,” he said, adding, “If you’re a consumer, this isn’t going to make any difference to you whatsoever.”
The Biden administration intends to regulate methane, a potent GHG that spews from oil and natural gas operations (methane is the primary component of natural gas). Methane regularly leaks from wells, pipelines and other infrastructure, and is also deliberately released for maintenance or other reasons. It warms the atmosphere 80 times as fast as CO2 in the short term. The regulations will be enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency which will limit the methane coming from roughly one million existing oil and gas rigs across the US. Prior rules aimed at preventing methane leaks from oil and gas wells built since 2015 were rescinded by the Trump administration. The new regulations will restore and strengthen the prior regulations.
More than 100 nations attending COP27 promised to curb global emissions of methane 30% by 2030. That is the equivalent of eliminating emissions from every car, truck, airplane and ship, said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency.
Biden called the agreement a “game-changing commitment” and said the new efforts will create jobs to manufacture technologies for methane detection and employ pipefitters and welders to cap abandoned wells and plug leaking pipelines.
The US Department of Transportation also proposed a regulation to reduce methane leaks from natural gas pipelines, and the US Department of Agriculture announced it will work with farmers and ranchers on ways to reduce methane from livestock.
Methane is the second most abundant GHG after CO2 and it’s responsible for more than a quarter of the warming the planet is currently experiencing. It dissipates from the atmosphere faster than CO2 but is more powerful at heating the atmosphere in the short run. Methane is an odorless, colorless, flammable gas, produced by landfills, agriculture, livestock and oil and gas drilling. It is sometimes intentionally burned or vented into the atmosphere during gas production.
Based on EPA studies in the 1980s, it was believed that if the combustion was efficient, 98% of the methane would be destroyed and/or converted into CO2 which is less immediately harmful. But the new research found that flaring is far less effective, perhaps only 91% destructive.
Riley Duren, chief executive of Carbon Mapper, a nonprofit group that is launching satellites next year that will detect and monitor sources of GHG emissions, said the findings were expected by those who are familiar with emissions from oil and gas basins and know how much flaring that is done. Al Gore’s ClimateTrace initiative is also up and running and measuring and tracing methane emissions.
The International Energy Agency estimated that worldwide in 2021, more than 140 million cubic meters of methane was burned in this way, equal to the amount imported that year by Germany, France and the Netherlands.
In addition to reducing GHGs, regulating methane will protect public health, EPA officials said. When methane is released into the atmosphere, it is frequently accompanied by hazardous chemicals like benzene and hydrogen sulfide. Exposure to those pollutants has been linked to serious health problems including asthma and cancer.
Gas burners in the kitchen, even when off, emit methane and benzene which are GHGs (methane) and cancer causing (benzene). Recent research estimated that each year California gas appliances and infrastructure leak the same amount of benzene as is emitted by nearly 60,000 cars, but these leaks are unaccounted for in the state’s records. Benzene is a highly flammable chemical that can be colorless and odorless, and which increases the risk of blood disorders and certain cancers like leukemia with long-term exposure.
Homes and buildings are directly responsible for about 13% of the country’s GHG emissions, mostly from gas burned in stoves, ovens, hot water heaters and furnaces. The growing body of evidence of harmful levels of indoor air pollution is a “good reason to encourage electrification not just for the climate, but for health, too,” said Rob Jackson, an earth scientist at Stanford University.