Month: December 2016

Your Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending December 23, 2016 follows.  Please forward it to anyone you think might be interested.

I wish each of you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.  The next Roundup will come out on January 7, 2017, covering the climate and energy news for the week ending January 6.

At the end of a year it is typical for news organizations to have retrospectives, and the same is true for those focusing on science and climate.  Brady Dennis provides an “exit interview” with outgoing EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy in The Washington Post.  Carbon Brieflooks back at 2016 through 16 numbers.  While some are specific to the EU or the UK, I think you’ll find it interesting.

Inside Climate News, which has devoted considerable effort in the past few years to investigating ExxonMobil’s position on climate change, examines Rex Tillerson’s record on climate change and climate science.  At Climate Unplugged, the blog of the conservative Niskanen Center, Dennis McConaghy argues that now is the time for the oil and gas industry to come forward with specific proposals for a carbon tax.  And, Charles Komanoff of the Carbon Tax Center examines just what might result from adoption of a carbon tax of the size proposed by ExxonMobil.

Climate

Last week there were several news items about the Arctic in response to the extreme warming it is experiencing and the Arctic Report Card from NOAA.  This week the World Weather Attribution project released a report about the extreme temperatures in the Arctic, and it triggered articles in Carbon Brief and The New York Times, as well as in others.  The report attributed the extreme warmth to human activities and stated that what had once been a 1 in 1000-year event, is now a 1 in 50-year event.  The temperature at a buoy 80 miles south of the North Pole climbed to 32°F on Thursday, putting it about 40°F above normal for this time of year.  In addition, some indicators suggest that unseasonable warmth at the pole is becoming more frequent due to global warming and melting sea ice.  The impacts of this warmth on weather in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere is still a matter of debate among climate scientists.

Studies from the Earth Institute at Columbia University published recently in the journal Nature suggest that Greenland was essentially ice free at least once in the past 1.4 million years.  This requires some of the basic assumptions about Greenland to be reevaluated and calls into question the assertion that Greenland’s glaciers are very stable.  Rather, it suggests that they may be subject to collapse.  Speaking of Greenland, Patrick Barkham had an interesting article in The Guardian about the changes being brought there by climate change and how Greenlanders are adapting to them.

The DC Court of Appeals has ruled that climate scientist Michael Mann can proceed with defamation claims against two writers who accused him of fraud and academic misconduct.  Mann brought the case against Rand Simberg, writing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Mark Steyn, writing for the National Review.  Climate scientist/astronaut Piers Sellers died this week at age 61.  Harrison Smith paid tribute to him in The Washington Post.

Climate change can cause a wide variety of damages to society, including natural disasters, harm to human health, reduced agricultural output, and lower economic productivity.  The combined cost of such damages associated with the emission of one ton of CO₂ is called the “social cost of carbon” and it is central to an assessment of the benefits associated with regulation of fossil fuel use.  The value assigned to the social cost of carbon is likely to be reviewed by the incoming Trump administration.

A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that U.S. attitudes towards climate change are influenced by local weather, with Americans living in places with recent record high temperatures more likely to believe in climate change and people living in areas with record low temperatures more likely to express skepticism.  The authors suggest that the public’s mistaken equating of weather with climate, as well as the idea that “global warming” simply means warmer temperatures, may be responsible for the results.  No matter what the general public thinks, Damian Carrington of The Guardian interviewed several climate scientists and learned that they think that the dramatic melting of Arctic ice is already driving extreme weather that affects hundreds of millions of people across North America, Europe and Asia.

Like their counterparts in Oregon, children in the state of Washington have been granted the right to have their day in court concerning the alleged failure of the state to adequately protect them from climate change.  King County Superior Court Judge Hollis Hill on Monday allowed the young petitioners to move ahead in their case against the state.

Two papers looked at events associated with El Niño episodes.  One, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the combination of climate change and a strong El Niño event created conditions for the recent outbreak of the Zika virus in South America.  Another finding from the paper was that the summer climates of the southeastern U.S., southern China, and some of Mediterranean Europe are warm enough for the Zika virus.  The other paper, in Nature Climate Change, found that small Pacific island nations could be hit by more tropical cyclones during El Niño events as a result of climate change.

Energy

On Tuesday President Obama used a little-known law called the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to withdraw hundreds of millions of acres of federally owned land in the Arctic and Atlantic Ocean from new offshore oil and gas drilling.  The action was coordinated with similar steps by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to protect large areas of that nation’s Arctic waters from drilling.  However, there is strong disappointment in the Carolinas and Georgia that the U.S. ban did not extend south of Norfolk, VA.

Rocky Mountain Institute has released the first of four posts examining how the future might unfold through the widespread adoption of renewable energy technologies.  Their thesis is optimistic in nature and is based on the premise that renewable energy systems are disruptive technologies that are in the accelerating phases of their adoption curves.  Their advantages almost ensure their wide-spread adoption.  RMI’s essays should make interesting reading.  In case you have been considering sustainable investing you might be interested in this post at the World Resources Institute website that debunks four myths about the subject.

A draft 10-year energy blueprint published this week by the Indian government predicts that 57% of the country’s total electricity capacitywill come from non-fossil fuel sources by 2027.  India’s Paris climate accord target was 40% by 2030.  The plan also indicates that no new coal-fired power plants are likely to be required to meet India’s energy needs until at least 2027.  This analysis is consistent with an article in Bloomberg Markets explaining why Indian electricity demand has undershot government forecasts.

A new paper in Nature Climate Change examined the climate policies of the signatories to the Paris Climate Accord in an effort to determine whether their programs to cut carbon emissions are equitable.  Because there is no single definition of “equitable”, the paper looked at different ways to define equity and how countries are measuring up to each of those definitions.  Although the paper is controversial, it concluded that the U.S. is working harder to reduce its emissions than China, while India is making more effort than both.

Arizona has been a battleground over net metering for the past couple of years.  That came to an end on Tuesday when the Arizona Corporation Commission voted to end net metering, whereby homeowners with solar panels get retail credits for power they send to the grid, and instead reduce the amount utilities pay homeowners for rooftop solar power.  Next door, in December 2015 the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada (PUCN) phased out retail-rate net metering, almost shutting down the rooftop solar industry overnight.  Now PUCN has voted to restore favorable rates for residential solar customers in NV Energy’s Sierra Pacific Power Company’s service territory.

Low carbon power accounted for 50% of electricity generation in the UK in the third quarter, up from 45.3% last year.  The rise was largely due to new windfarms and solar farms being connected to the grid, as well as to several major coal-fired power plants closing.  Low carbon power also accounted for two-thirds of the new capacity added to the U.S. grid in 2016.

Your Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending December 16, 2016 follows.  Please forward it to anyone you think might be interested.

With the selection of Rick Perry as Energy Secretary and Ryan Zinke as Interior Secretary, President-elect Donald Trump continues to nominate individuals for his cabinet who are skeptical of the role of fossil fuel combustion in driving climate change.  However, the nomination of ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State is more complicated, given the company’s endorsement of the Paris Climate Agreement and its support for a carbon tax.  Nevertheless, the next four years will be difficult for the fight against climate change, given the large role of the fossil fuel industry in the new administration.  Consequently, concern about the potential policies of the Trump administration is causing climate scientists to copy important data files from government agencies to private servers to ensure their availability during Trump’s term.  Still, climate economist Lord Nicholas Stern was more sanguine, although he did say “There’s no point wringing hands and weeping into whatever it is we weep into; at the same time, be alert, be very alert. These are difficult times.”

Officials from 24 Republican-led states want President-elect Trump to act on his first day in office against the Clean Power Plan (CPP).  The officials wrote to Trump on Thursday with a four-part plan to undo the CPP and ensure that a future president could not implement a similar policy.  Perhaps the governors of those states should listen to the voters.  According to a new survey from Yale and George Mason Universities, “70% of registered voters support setting strict carbon dioxide emission limits on existing coal-fired power plants to reduce global warming and improve public health, even if the cost of electricity to consumers and companies increased.”  In spite of actions by those seeking to dismantle the CPP, local leaders have vowed to continue their fight against climate change and its effects.  For example, the city council of Portland, OR, voted unanimously on Wednesday to adopt zoning code changes that ban the construction of new major fossil fuel terminals and the expansion of any existing ones.

Climate

A task force composed of executives from major companies, banks, and insurance companies (formed by the Financial Stability Board, an arm of the G-20 industrialized nations) has released its recommendations for improving the ways in which markets can respond to the uncertainties associated with climate change.  Mark Carney and Michael Bloomberg had an opinion piece in The Guardian on Wednesday about the report.

At the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU’s) Fall Meeting in San Francisco this week, scientists reported on last winter’s Norwegian research expedition to study the sea ice near the north pole.  Mats Granskog, chief scientist on the expedition, said “This thinner and younger ice in the Arctic today works very differently than the ice we knew.  It moves much faster.  It breaks up more easily.  It’s way more vulnerable to storms and winds.”  Also, at the AGU meeting, NOAA released its Arctic Report Card for 2016, noting that the Arctic is warming at an “astonishing” rate.

A new paper in Nature Geoscience reports on the retreat of mountain glaciers around the world.  The study’s purpose was to determine whether the retreat has accelerated and whether it can be attributed to climate change.  For 36 of the 37 glaciers studied there is a more than 90% chance that the retreat accelerated because of climate change and for 21 there is a greater than 99% chance.  Meanwhile, warming temperatures in the Arctic are expected to cause polar bear and reindeer populations to decline, according to papers at the AGU meeting.

Two studies have provided a better understanding of the melting of Antarctic glaciers.  In West Antarctica, five glaciers terminate in the Amundsen Sea and contribute more than 10% of current sea level rise.  A team of scientists from the UK’s Centre for Polar Observation and Monitoring has combined almost 25 years of altimetry observations from five different satellites operated by the European and American space agencies to determine how the thickness of the glaciers has changed.  Their results show that all the glaciers are thinning, but each in a unique way.  In East Antarctica, the Totten glacier is the largest and carries more ice toward the sea than any other glacier in that ice sheet.  The second study confirmed that, just like in West Antarctica, the Totten glacier is melting from below because of the flow of “warm” ocean water under its ice shelf.  In addition, a new paper in Nature Climate Change concludes that a large lake on the Roi Baudouin ice shelf in East Antarctica was formed because strong winds blew away reflective snow, exposing the dark ice to the sun’s rays.  There were also buried lakes, calling the stability of the ice shelf into question.  Better understanding of Antarctic glaciers has caused two prominent glaciologists to state that research priorities should be coupled to policy needs to allow appropriate policy decisions for coping with sea level rise likely to exceed 6 ft this century.  (The link is to the abstract.  A subscription to Science or access through a library is required to view the full article.)

Each year members of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) assess extreme weather events worldwide to ascertain whether their occurrence was influenced by human-caused climate change and the results of the assessment are released as a special edition of the Bulletin of the AMS.  The report for 2015, which was just released, found that global warming influenced 24 of the 30 events studied.  The Conversation has an infographic that summarizes the report’s findings.

Energy

According to a new report from Arabella Advisors, the value of investment funds committed to divesting from fossil fuels has doubled in just over a year.  The report states: “···the value of assets represented by institutions and individuals committing to some sort of divestment from fossil fuel companies has reached $5 trillion.  To date, 688 institutions and 58,399 individuals across 76 countries have committed to divest from fossil fuel companies···.”  Furthermore, the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, formed last year by Bill Gates and other billionaire investors, announced on Monday that it is investing $1 billion in the Breakthrough Energy Ventures Fund to spur clean energy technology.

According to the 4^th Quarter 2016 U.S. Solar Market Insight report from GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), over 4,100 megawatts of solar PV were installed in the U.S. during the 3^rd quarter of 2016.

There are 58 “Climatescope” countries and all are regarded as developing nations in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East.  According to a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, PV solar is now on a par with wind energy and will soon become the cheapest form of energy in those countries.  They also installed more renewables this year than the OECD countries, with 69.8GW deployed versus 59.2GW.

Beginning January 15, 2017 land-based wind farms will be granted 30-year U.S. government permits that allow for the accidental deaths of bald and golden eagles.  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that the population of golden eagles in the U.S. could withstand a loss of about 2,000 birds annually, whereas bald eagles could sustain as many as 4,200 fatalities a year.  On Monday, the first off-shore wind farm in the U.S. began sending electricity to the grid.

According to a new paper in Environmental Research Letters, in 2014 atmospheric methane concentrations rose 12.5 parts per billion (ppb) and in 2015, 9.9 ppb, compared to an annual increase of about 0.5 ppb a decade ago.  The major source of the increase was agriculture, especially in the tropics.  This finding was consistent with a study published in April in the journal Science.  Meanwhile, the U.S. EPA removed language claiming that hydraulic fracturing has no “widespread systemic impacts” on drinking water from its final reporton the subject.

According to an analysis by the Carbon Tax Center, 38% of the electricity sector’s carbon reduction in the U.S. since 2005 is due to energy efficiency and 20% is due to solar and wind; only 42% is due to substitution of natural gas for coal.  According to a new report from the Brookings Institution, 33 states have decreased their carbon emissions since 2000 while simultaneously growing their economies.  Carbon Brief has prepared an interactive graphic illustrating how each state performed.  Finally a new analysis from the University of Texas Energy Institute provides a county-by-county map showing the cheapest energy source for electricity production in the U.S.

A new report by the MIT Energy Initiative, in collaboration with the Institute for Research in Technology at Comillas Pontifical University in Madrid, Spain, offers a roadmap for the redesign of the electrical grid.  According to David Unger at Midwest Energy News “the report’s recommendations fall under two broad headings: 1) Charge consumers for electricity in a way that takes into account when and where it is produced and used, and 2) Reform regulations and policies to level the playing field between traditional, centralized power producers and emergent, distributed ones.”

According to The Guardian: “The Canadian government has agreed [to] a deal with eight of the country’s 10 provinces to introduce its first national carbon price, Justin Trudeau has told reporters.  The prime minister said the move would help Canada meet its international climate change obligations.”  The price would start at C$10 (US$7.60) a tonne in 2018, rising by C$10 a year until it reaches C$50 in 2022.

Your Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending December 9, 2016 follows.  Please forward it to anyone you think might be interested

In a week of important political news, the big item related to climate was the nomination of Scott Pruitt, the Attorney General of Oklahoma, as Administrator of the EPA.  He has been a leader of the legal fights against the Clean Power Plan, regulation of methane emissions from the oil and gas industry, and the EPA Waters of the United States rule.  The Washington Post called the nomination “a move signaling an assault on President Obama’s climate change and environmental legacy” and The New York Times said it signals “Mr. Trump’s determination to dismantle President Obama’s efforts to counter climate change – and much of the EPA itself.”  On the other hand, organizations such as the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity were buoyed by the nomination, even though energy experts say the energy market has already shifted away from coal and is unlikely to move back.  Joe Romm has summarized the partisan divide on this nomination.  A particularly disturbing item in the news this week was a memorandum from the Trump transition team to DOE asking for, among other things, the names of all employees who had worked on clean energy and climate issues.

Climate

Two papers published in the December 7 issue of Nature appear to paint different pictures of the stability of the Greenland ice sheet over the past 2.8 million years.  However, one climate scientist invoked the old story of blind men feeling and describing an elephant to suggest that the findings don’t necessarily contradict each other.  Rather, at times, nearly all of Greenland’s ice could have melted (as seen by one team) while a frozen cap remained in the eastern highlands (as seen by the other team).  Taken together, the papers suggest that Greenland’s ice may be less stable than previously believed, raising concern for its long-term future.  At the other pole, another ice shelf has developed a large rift.  Last week I wrote about the Pine Island ice shelf, but this week it is Larsen C.  NASA released a new phototaken by researchers flying above the ice shelf showing that the rift is getting longer, deeper, and wider. Scientists say it will eventually cause a large section of the shelf to break off, releasing an iceberg the size of Delaware.

Sea ice was also in the news this week, with record low levels being reached in both area and volume in the Arctic.  In addition, the decline in the Antarctic was particularly startling.

On Monday, Indonesian President Joko Widodo announced a moratorium on all activities that could damage the nation’s peat-filled wetlands.  This could help prevent wildfires and the emission of billions of tons of CO₂ over the next few decades.

On Tuesday, NASA announced its first new earth science mission since the 2016 election: the Geostationary Carbon Cycle Observatory, or GeoCARB. The observatory will monitor vegetation stress in the Americas from about 22,000 miles up. It also will observe how greenhouse gases – CO₂, CO, and CH₄ – are processed in those environments.  Also set to launch is the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS), which will use 8 microsatellites to improve hurricane wind speed forecasts and study how certain clouds and storm systems take shape.  Although this is an experimental system with short-lived satellites, if successful it will likely lead to a more permanent system.  Meanwhile, in response to information suggesting that the Trump administration planned to defund NASA’s earth science programs, scientists around the world were tweeting their appreciation to NASA for the many ways those programs had helped them understand Earth.

A new paper by a team of communications experts, published in the Bulletin of the World Meteorological Organization, seeks to assist scientists in communicating linkages between extreme events and climate change.

An international team, led by NOAA scientists, has published a paper in the on-line journal Scientific Reports in which they project that by 2050 more than 98% of coral reefs around the world will be afflicted by “bleaching-level thermal stress” each year.  “The likelihood of the reef being able to survive through that is extremely low,” one of the report’s co-authors, Scott Heron of NOAA, told Guardian Australia.

The results of a meta-study published in the journal PLOS Biology on Thursday show that climate-related local extinctions have already occurred in hundreds of species, including 47% of the 976 species surveyed.  The frequency of local extinctions was broadly similar across climatic zones and habitats but was significantly higher in tropical species than in temperate species (55% versus 39%).  In addition, new research published in the journal Biology Letters expects melting ice in the Arctic to cause polar bear numbers to collapse by a third in as little as 35 years.

A new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change has found that storms in the U.S. that now occur about once a season could happen five times a season by the end of the century and bring up to 70% more rain.  Such massive amounts of rain occurring more often could put significant strain on infrastructure that already struggles to deal with heavy rainfall.

As will be reported next week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, paleoclimatologist Kim Cobb and her team from Georgia Tech have reconstructed Pacific Ocean temperatures for much of the last 7000 years.  Although many things were going on in the climate over that time, there was no discernable effect on El Niño events until the 20^th century, when they became more extreme and intense, presumably because of global warming.  Speaking of El Niño, the recent event is over and has now been replaced with a weak La Niña, which typically causes temperatures to drop.  Satellite measurements have detected such a drop over land, which resulted in some misleading press and tweets, as explained by Chris Mooney of The Washington Post.  Also, The Weather Channel pushed back against one misleading article because one of their videos was featured prominently in it.  In addition, Bob Henson and Jeff Masters of Weather Underground posted an excellent blog on the subject.  If you only want to read one of these articles, read the one by Henson and Masters.

Energy

If you have been contemplating adding solar panels to your roof as your contribution to fighting climate change, then you may have been concerned about the energy payback period – i.e., the point at which the solar industry has produced more energy than was required to get it up and running.  Well, a new paper in Nature Communications has examined that question and determined that, in general, 2011 was the break-even year.  Consequently, you can relax and be assured that adding solar panels will indeed reduce your carbon footprint.  Chris Goodall had a conversation with the authors and has reported it on his blog, Carbon Commentary.

Anrica Deb, writing for The Guardian, explores the question of just how clean electric vehicles are, once we consider the source of the electricity and the manufacture of the batteries.  Another aspect of electric vehicles to consider is a decrease in driving range as the batteries age.  For example, the owner’s manual for the new Chevy Bolt warns drivers that they can expect to lose 10% to 40% of the battery capacity over the 8 year warranty period for the battery.  Meanwhile, a study from the research firm IHS Markit finds that electric vehicles could make up one third of the world’s car sales by 2040.  On the topic of electric vehicles, John Deere has unveiled a prototype all-electric farm tractor.

The Risky Business Project, founded by co-chairs Michael Bloomberg, Hank Paulson, and Tom Steyer, has shifted its focus from analyzing the risks of climate change to the opportunity that reducing those risks presents to the U.S. economy.  Its new report, From Risk to Return: Investing in a Clean Energy Economy, presents a convincing argument for the business case for a clean energy future.  However, the report states: “The private sector alone cannot solve the climate change problem. We know from our collective business and investment experience that the private sector will take action at the necessary speed and scale only if it is given a clear and consistent policy and regulatory framework. That framework must send a clear, consistent, and long-term market signal on the necessity of climate action, provide incentives for innovation and deployment of clean energy systems, and help society adapt to climate impacts that are inevitable due to past and current emissions.”  The change of administrations will make that difficult to achieve.

A new study by the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin seeks to capture the full cost of new electric power generation – including environmental and public health costs – on a county-by-county basis in the U.S.  When environmental and public health costs are considered, coal is not the least cost option in a single county and wind is the least cost option in the largest number of counties with natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) plants second.  When those external costs are excluded, coal is the least cost option in only 3% of the counties, with NGCC plants providing the least cost option in the most counties, with wind second.  Speaking of wind, the developers of a 119-turbine wind farm in Aroostook County, Maine, that would have been the largest in the state and one of the largest ever planned for New England, have withdrawn their application, citing interconnection problems.

In earlier Roundups I have linked to articles about perovskites and their potential for increasing the efficiency and decreasing the costs of solar cells.  Now Robert Service provides a summary of advances in perovskite development gleaned from a recent meeting of the Materials Research Society.  The bottom line: they are almost ready for the market.

Your Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending December 2, 2016 follows.  Please forward it to anyone you think might be interested.

Climate

Two new research papers raise concerns about the stability of the Pine Island glacier in West Antarctica.  One paper, published in the journal Nature suggests that the glacier started to melt in the mid-1940s as warm sea water flowed into a cavity under it.  That melting led ultimately to the rift that formed in 2013 and broke through in 2015, releasing a 225 square mile iceberg.  The other paper, published in Geophysical Research Letters, investigated rifts that started in the center of the glacier and propagated outward toward the margins.  Those rifts are also being caused by warm sea water under the glacier and are occurring further inland than previous rifts, raising concern about the vulnerability of the glacier to collapse.  Maria Gallucci, writing at Mashable, has further information about the papers.

Last week, while we were on Thanksgiving break, a paper appeared in the journal The Cryosphere examining the extent of Antarctic sea ice during the period of satellite records (1989-present) and comparing it to records from ships’ logs during the “Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration” (1897–1917).  The study found that the impact of natural variability on the extent of Antarctic sea ice was larger than previously thought, making it difficult to tease out the effects of climate change from the effects of that variability.  Nevertheless, it appears that there has been a decrease in sea ice extent of at most 14% over the past century.  Unfortunately, press coverage of the paper was confusing at best, causing one of the authors to issue a commentary and clarification via Carbon Brief.

Also, on Friday of last week the Arctic Council released its Arctic Resilience Report in which they documented four tipping points that may have already been triggered: growth in vegetation on tundra, which replaces reflective snow and ice with darker vegetation, thus absorbing more heat; higher releases of methane from the tundra as it warms; shifts in snow distribution that warm the ocean, resulting in altered climate patterns as far away as Asia, where the monsoon could be effected; and the collapse of some key Arctic fisheries, with effects on ocean ecosystems around the globe.  Meanwhile, the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard is likely to have an average annual temperature above freezing for the first time.  A number of factors associated with climate change, including the loss of sea ice have led to this situation.

Bolivia may serve as a case study of the impacts of drought and climate change on countries dependent of glaciers for part of their water supplies.  The country is in a prolonged drought that is having a major impact on the poorest regions of the country, leading to migration and social unrest.  On the subject of South America, illegal deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has increased 29% since 2015, bringing the rate to its highest level in eight years.  The finding has raised fears that the country could lose a decade’s worth of progress in forest protection.

A large study published in Nature combines data from 49 field experiments located across North America, Europe, and Asia to examine the impact of warming on the loss of soil carbon to the atmosphere.  The authors conclude that their data provide strong empirical support for the idea that rising temperatures will cause more carbon to be lost than is stored, leading to a positive feedback that will accelerate warming.  Although independent of this study and its dire implications, an editorial in Nature Geoscience calls for increased research in climate remediation, including even studies on managing incoming solar radiation, but particularly studies on enhanced weathering to return atmospheric carbon to the soil.

Tornado outbreaks are sequences of tornadoes that occur in close succession.  A new study in the journal Science has found that the number of tornadoes in the most extreme outbreaks has roughly doubled over the past 50 years, but the increase doesn’t seem to be related to climate change.  Meanwhile, on a separate but related topic, a new paper in the journal Scientific Reports argues that climate change is causing the track of hurricanes to shift northward in the Atlantic Ocean, although hurricane specialist Kevin Trenberth finds the data to be inconclusive.

In a previous Weekly Roundup I included links to the lawsuit against the federal government brought by 21 youths aged 9 to 20 who argue that the government isn’t doing enough to address the problem of climate change and protect the planet’s future.  Now Chelsea Harvey has interviewed several lawyers to assess the chances that the children will prevail.

The bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef that occurred in April as a result of record sea surface temperatures was the worst ever recordedand has resulted in 67% mortality in the north section.  The central and south sections fared better, with 6% and 1% mortality, respectively.  The scientists conducting the study have an article at The Conversation.

Yellow cedar trees, which are actually a form of cypress, are dying across 1,500 square miles between latitude 50 and latitude 60 north has a result of a warming climate.  The warming has been thinning the snow cover, exposing the roots to freezing conditions.

Energy

Using a new report by Ted Nordhaus and Jessica Lovering of the Breakthrough Institute as the basis, Eduardo Porter of The New York Times argues that as long as the new Trump administration keeps our nuclear power plants online, continues tax incentives for wind and solar, and doesn’t interfere with the shale energy revolution, “the U.S might outperform the commitments that the Obama administration made in Paris.”  On the other hand, analysts with Climate Interactive did some thought experiments with the help of computer simulation to see what might be the impact of a few scenarios and found that future warming depends on whether the Trump administration is a trend setter, both domestically and abroad.

Bloomberg Markets reports “Kinder Morgan Inc. and Enbridge Inc. won Canadian government approval for two pipeline projects — a long-awaited boost for the oil industry that could potentially expand exports, open new Asian markets and lift prices for locally produced barrels of crude.”  Prime Minister Trudeau was quoted as saying “The fact is oil sands production is going to increase in the coming years.  Because we are at capacity in terms of existing pipelines, that means more oil is going to be transported by rail in the coming years if we don’t build new pipelines.”  Meanwhile, in the U.S. gas pipelines are being re-engineered to allow bidirectional flow, meaning that by 2017 many older pipelines will be able to carry gas from the Marcellus and Utica shale fields in the northeast to the Gulf Coast for export.

According to The Hill, the Government Accountability Office released a pair of reports Monday on the federal ethanol blending mandate, concluding that advanced biofuels are not likely to reach the market penetration that the renewable fuel standard predicted, suggesting that greenhouse gas emissions are unlikely to fall as much as hoped.  Speaking of cars, on Wednesday EPA proposed ahead of schedule the mid-term review of the goal to require car manufacturers’ fleets to average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.  If successful, this would make it more difficult to roll back the new CAFE standards.  Finally, automobile manufacturers are losing a significant amount of money on each electric vehicle they sell in the U.S., but are willing to do so for a while because of mandates in California.

Although China has reiterated its plans to push forward on climate action, it is scrambling to mine and burn more coal, The New York Times reports.  Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, the EU will begin phasing out coal subsidies and cut its energy use by 30% by 2030, under a major clean energy package announced in Brussels on Wednesday. The 1,000-page plan also proposes measures to cut household electricity bills, integrate renewables into power markets, and limit use of unsustainable bioenergy.  The plan, which was widely criticized by environmental groups, must be approved by both the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament before becoming law.

India just unveiled a photovoltaic solar power facility with a capacity of 648 MW, making it the largest PV solar facility in the world.  As a result, India now has a solar capacity over 10 GW and is expected to become the world’s third-biggest solar market from next year onwards, after China and the US.

A new survey of 1,000 people conducted by the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies has found that 75% of Trump voters support “action to accelerate the deployment and use of clean energy” — including solar, wind, energy efficiency, and community renewable projects.  The survey also revealed lots of other interesting opinions concerning energy.