Month: July 2017

The Weekly Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending July 28, 2017 follows.  Please forward the URL to anyone you think might be interested.  I’ll be taking most of August off, so the next Roundup will be for the week ending Sept. 1.

A week ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a report about the sidelining of science by the Trump administration.  This week, CAAV member Dave Pruett wrote about the report on Huffington Post.  Perhaps illustrating the point, two prominent skeptics published commentaries this week.  Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the House Science Committee, in an article in the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal, argued that the benefits of climate change “are often ignored and under-researched.”  He then listed a variety of “benefits.”  Zahra Hirji at Buzz Feed News had some thoughts on Smith’s ideas.  Justin Haskins, executive editor and research fellow at The Heartland Institute published a commentary in The Blaze giving six reasons he is a climate change skeptic.  Writing in Forbes, Ethan Siegel argued that Haskins’ reasons are “demonstrable falsehoods”.  President Trump is expected to nominate a coal lobbyist and an energy industry attorney for a pair of key posts at the EPA.  Stanford University researcher Benjamin Franta traced the history of the movement to obstruct action on climate change.  Meanwhile, John Holdren, chief science adviser to former president Barack Obama, weighed in on the “red-team/blue-team” idea proposed by EPA head Scott Pruitt.  He called it a “kangaroo court.”

Richard Heinberg, of the Post Carbon Institute, often writes thought-provoking but scary essays, which is what he has done in this post.  The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has temporarily halted the children’s climate change lawsuit against the Trump administration, following the administration’s petition for a rare review of the district court’s decision to allow the case to move forward.  On Tuesday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed the state’s new cap and trade legislation into law.  Brad Plumer provided an analysis in The New York Times of what exactly the new law entails.  The U.S. Senate will soon be considering legislation to modernize the nation’s energy policy.  The big question is, how will that square with what the House just passed.  Climate scientist Michael Mann reviewed Al Gore’s new film, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.  Another climate scientist, Kevin Trenberth, recently received the Roger Revelle medal from the American Geophysical Union.

Climate

Some time back I mentioned a new book entitled Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, edited by environmentalist, author, and entrepreneur Paul Hawken.  Yale Environment 360 has an interview with him that explores why he and his team undertook Project Drawdown.  He said they took on the project because with global warming, we have been “focusing too much on the problem instead of the solution.”  Drawdown presents solutions.  Continuing on a positive note, Yale Climate Connections has an interesting article about the many roles the arts play in getting the message out about climate change.

Greenland has been getting a lot of snow this summer.  Andrea Thompson has an interesting piece on Climate Central that explains what is happening there.  Despite that new snow, scientists are still concerned about the darkening of the glaciers by algal growth and thus are studying it.  Arctic sea ice has about 50 days to go before it reaches its minimum extent for the year, but it already has declined sufficiently to cover less area than the average minimum extent in the 1980s.  On the other side of Earth, scientists have discovered one of the events contributing to the melting of Antarctica’s ice shelves.  Apparently, changes in winds along the East Antarctic coast cause sea levels to drop near the coastline, which sets off large-scale waves that travel along the coastline. When these waves hit the steep topography off the western coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, they pull warm water toward the coast and under the ice shelves.  And speaking of Antarctica, NASA has just released a thermal infrared image of iceberg A68, which recently broke free of the Larsen C ice shelf.  As part of its “Long Read” program, The Guardian has published a piece by Avi Steinberg about NASA’s ten-year old aerial program to document changes in the ice caps on both poles.

The Paris climate agreement set a target of keeping global warming below 2°C compared to preindustrial temperatures.  It did not, however, define “preindustrial.”  Now, a new study published in Nature Climate Change has found that the definition is very important.  If it is defined as late 18^th century, rather than late 19^th century, that would significantly decrease the budget for future CO₂ emissions.  In case you’ve been wondering about summer temperatures during the 21^st century, they have indeed been getting warmer, as illustrated by some interesting graphics from the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

A new study, published in Nature Climate Change, suggests that “extreme” El Niño events, like the one experienced in 2015/16, could become more frequent as global temperatures rise.  Even if global warming is limited to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, extreme El Niño events could happen twice as often, occurring on average every 10 years.

Most of you are aware of the need to limit nutrient runoff into our streams as a way to minimize algal blooms and their associated dead zones in lakes and coastal regions.  According to a new study published in the journal Science, accomplishing that will become harder as global temperatures increase.  The culprit?  The more extreme rainfall events expected as the world warms.  They will cause greater discharge of nutrients into streams and rivers.

Peatlands store a lot of carbon, preventing it from being released to the atmosphere as CO₂.  Surprisingly, relatively little is known about how many peatlands exist on Earth, where exactly they are, and how they function.  Luckily, the scientific community is learning more about them.

Energy

Author, columnist, and commentator Michael Lewis wrote about the Department of Energy and its transition to the Trump administration in a comprehensive piece in Vanity Fair.  You might follow Joe Romm’s frequent advice and put your “head vise” on before reading this article.

Nuclear fusion has the promise of providing the world with limitless electricity, but is so complex that so far it has proven to be impossible to achieve.  This has not kept several organizations from trying, though.  A significant step was recently achieved by Google and Tri Alpha Energy when they developed a new computer algorithm that has significantly speeded up experiments on plasmas.  Of course, today’s nuclear power plants use nuclear fission.  Rocky Mountain Institute’s Amory Lovins provided 14 reasons while those power plants should not be subsidized.

A study, released on Tuesday by the Energy and Policy Institute, revealed that forty years ago electric utility officials told Congress that the looming problem of climate change might require the world to back away from coal-fired power plants.  Renewable electricity generation will have to increase by 50% by 2030 to meet state requirements for wind, solar and other sources of renewable power, according to a new report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  So how will electric utilities continue to make money in an age of renewable energy?  Well, if the plans of American Electric Power Co. are any indication, it will be by owning the wind and solar farms, as well as the transmission lines, thereby folding them into their rate bases.

Jason Mathers had an interesting blog post about electric vehicles on EDF’s Climate 411.  Getting an independent electric car company up and going is an incredibly difficult task, suggesting few are likely to succeed.  One that apparently is succeeding is Proterra, Inc., an electric bus company that opened its second factory on Wednesday in Los Angeles.  Its first is in Greenville, SC.  And on the subject of automobiles, all sales of new gasoline and diesel cars will cease in the UK by 2040.

In previous Roundups I have provided links to articles about floating wind turbines.  BBC had an update Sunday on the installation of the turbines off the coast of Scotland, which will serve as a test bed for the technology.  Carbon Brief examined the technology in detail.  Speaking of wind turbines, a new engineering analysis has shown that onshore windfarms could be built in the UK for the same cost as new gas-fired power plants and would be nearly half as expensive as nuclear power plants.  In addition, Europe added 6.1GW of new wind power capacity during the first half of the year.  Getting wind farms approved in the U.S. is a bit more difficult than in Europe, it appears.  Ocean City, MD city officials are concerned about the visual effects of a proposed wind farm, even though it will be 17 miles from land.

Aquion Energy, maker of energy storage batteries based on a novel electrolyte with a chemical composition similar to seawater, is back in business following its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing earlier this year.

A consortium of Japanese companies plans to launch the world’s first hydrogen supply chain demonstration project, part of the country’s goal of becoming a “hydrogen society”.  Toyota is one of the companies invested in hydrogen fuel cell technology for their vehicles.  At the same time, however, they are also investigating solid-state battery technology for EVs, which would allow them to charge in minutes.

The Weekly Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending July 21, 2017 follows.  Please forward the URL to anyone you think might be interested.

As might be expected, the article by David Wallace-Wells in New York Magazine that I linked to last week caused quite a stir; it was the most-read article in the history of the magazine.  One commentator was Farhad Manjoo, a The New York Times columnist, who argued that we can learn a lot about how to mobilize to fight climate change by studying our response to Y2K, in which the worst-case outcome was emphasized.  On Tuesday, New York Times reporter Coral Davenport had a TimesTalks conversation with Al Gore about what went through his mind when President Trump made his announcement about withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord.  Although not about climate change per se, Justin Gillis and Jonathan Corum have an interesting article in The New York Times about infrastructure problems at the National Science Foundation’s research facility in Antarctica.  You might also be interested in Corum’s fantastic photo essay about what he and Gillis saw while in Antarctica, or in John Sutter’s reflections on iceberg A68, which recently broke off of the Larsen C ice shelf.  In response to French President Macron’s offer of employment for climate scientists, France’s basic research agency has been flooded with applicants, many from the U.S.

On Wednesday, the former top climate policy official at the Department of Interior filed a complaint and a whistleblower disclosure form, alleging that the Trump administration is threatening public health and safety by trying to silence scientists like him.  Also, the Department canceled plans for a climate change expert from the USGS to join Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during his visit to Montana’s Glacier National Park last weekend.  On Wednesday, President Trump nominated former economics professor and climate change skeptic Sam Clovis to the top scientific post at USDA, while the House passed two bills streamlining the federal permitting process for oil and gas pipelines.  On the other hand, dozens of House Republicans joined Democrats to vote down an anti-climate amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act and sent a strong message that the military should prepare for and fight climate change.  Former New Hampshire Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte will join the center-right Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions (CRES) as a senior adviser.  California lawmakers voted Monday night to extend the state’s cap-and-trade program for cutting greenhouse gas emissions until 2030.  The bill was complex so Citizens’ Climate Lobby summarized some of its merits and drawbacks.

Climate

This week the journal Earth Systems Dynamics published an article written by climate scientist James Hansen and 14 coauthors.  They argue that it will be necessary to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere to reduce the concentration to no more than 350 ppm (we are currently above 400 ppm).  Consequently, as we continue to put more and more CO₂ in the atmosphere, we burden today’s youth with greater expenses to remove it, in addition to greater risks of living with the impacts of that CO₂.  Ensia presented a summary of techniques for removing CO₂ from the atmosphere and Science published an editorial about governance of geoengineering, of which CO₂ removal is a part.

A new paper in Nature Scientific Reports has found that 17% of methane emissions in the Mackenzie Delta of Canada comes from only 1% of the land surface, locations where thawing permafrost allows methane to seep out of buried oil and gas formations which had previously been sealed off by permafrost.

NOAA announced that the first half of 2017 was the planet’s second warmest on record, trailing only 2016.  Carbon Brief summarized temperature and sea ice extent so far this year.  Using Philadelphia as a case study, researchers at the Earth Institute at Columbia University and Battelle Memorial Institute developed techniques for identifying heat islands in cities so at-risk citizens can be helped.  In 2003 Europe was hit with an extreme heat wave.  Now, scientists from France and Australia have asked how high temperatures might get in France in 2100 under a similar heat wave, but with CO₂ concentrations that would exist if we continue with business-as-usual emissions.  The answer: 50°C (122°F).

Two coastal counties and one coastal city in California are suing a group of major fossil fuel companies for damages that they will incur due to rising sea level.  Although many legal experts consider the suit to be a long-shot, if successful it is likely to spur other similar litigation.  On the other side of the U.S., the city of Miami is considering surrendering some developed land to nature, to accommodate the rising seas.  The city government would buy out property owners in notoriously flood-prone areas and convert the land into parks and retention basins.

Images from the European Space Agency showed that the iceberg released from the Larsen C ice shelf is already beginning to break up.  In addition, a new rift has been detected in the ice shelf.  Meanwhile, a new paper in Nature Climate Change has provided additional information about the factors causing weakening of the ice shelves in West Antarctica.

So far in 2017, the U.S. has endured 49 separate weather, climate, and flood disasters, according to data from Munich Re, a global reinsurance firm.  That’s tied with 2009 as the second-highest January-June number on record.  Only 2012, with 59 events, had more.  Many of the people impacted by floods are insured by the National Flood Insurance Program.  Unfortunately the program is heavily in debt and badly in need of an overhaul.

Newly published research has shown that extreme weather events could devastate food production if they occurred in several key areas at the same time.  The researchers found there is a 6% chance every decade that a simultaneous failure in corn production could occur in China and the U.S., which would result in widespread misery, particularly in Africa and south Asia, where corn is consumed directly as food.

Energy

Bloomberg had an interesting piece summarizing where the world stands on electric cars right now.  It seems there is more news about them than there are actual cars.  Also, Mark Harris at The Guardian argued that the broad acceptance of electric vehicles will be limited until there is big improvement in batteries.  Conversely, OPEC and others are revising their estimates of EV sales upward.

A new study in Nature Climate Change has pointed out that as production declines at large oil fields, more energy is required to extract the oil, making the net energy extraction lower.  The study provided tools for examining this reality and considering it when estimating the climate impacts of oil production.  The big oil companies have been planning on becoming big gas companies as oil demand drops.  Now, however, reports from Bloomberg New Energy Finance and BP question whether those plans are realistic.  Also, speaking of gas, NPR had a very comprehensive piece about FERC and the gas pipelines awaiting approval.

Despite praising the work of scientists at a “clean coal” lab in West Virginia during a recent visit, Energy Secretary Rick Perry has proposed significant cuts to the Energy Department’s Office of Fossil Energy, which funds the lab.  Nevertheless, U.S. coal exports for the first quarter of 2017 were 58% higher than in the same quarter last year, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported.  Still, in the long run, will the U.S. go the way of the UK?  Only five years ago, coal was generating more than 40% of the UK’s electricity, but a new analysis by Imperial College London revealed that coal supplied just 2% of power in the first half of 2017.

Minnesota tripled its solar energy capacity through the first quarter of this year and has increased solar output 12-fold since 2015.  Much of this has happened because it has embraced community solar.  In addition, a new report by the University of Minnesota’s Energy Transition Lab concluded that solar-plus-storage may be a more cost effective way to meet peak electricity demand than building new gas-fired peaking plants.

With President Trump considering opening the Atlantic coastline to oil exploration, he might consider a cautionary tale from 2010.  A new study by Louisiana State University scientists indicates that crude oil from the BP oil spill has become lodged in wetland soils, where it remains almost as toxic as the day it was deposited.

Wind and solar power don’t pose a significant threat to the reliability of the U.S. power grid, Department of Energy (DOE) staff members said in a draft report, contradicting statements by DOE Secretary Rick Perry.  A DOE spokeswoman cautioned that the draft is “constantly evolving.”  That evolution may well be the result of differences between political and professional staff at DOE.

The Weekly Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending July 14, 2017 follows.  Please forward the Roundup to anyone you think might be interested.  For an archive of prior posts visit the CAAV website.  It also contains news of events in the Central Shenandoah Valley as well as activities in which CAAV is involved.

I would like to start this week with an article that has gotten a lot of attention in the media, both print and on-line.  I am referring to David Wallace-Wells article “The Uninhabitable Earth” that appeared in New York Magazine on July 9.  Its doomsday nature caused climate scientist Michael Mann to respond in The Washington Post.  In addition, the climate scientists at Climate Feedback, who fact-check the scientific accuracy of climate-related articles in the popular press, rated its scientific credibility as low, with a score of -0.7.  A number of non-scientist commentators also wrote about Wallace-Wells’ article, but I’ll refer you only to blogger Robert Scribbler as a thoughtful example.  In response to the criticisms, Wallace-Wells published an annotated version on Friday.  During the week, he also published interviews with scientists Wallace Smith Broecker, Peter Ward, Michael Mann, James Hansen, and Michael Oppenheimer.  You might also want to look at ideas about personal actions against climate change, such as this those in this article from The Guardian, which reported on a study published in Environmental Research Letters.  Finally, to end on a positive note, Drew Jones, co-founder of Climate Interactive, shared with members of Citizens’ Climate Lobby ten reasons to be hopeful about climate progress.

With respect to the Paris Climate Agreement, the communique released at the end of the G20 summit in Hamburg reads: “We take note of the decision of the United States of America to withdraw from the Paris agreement,” adding “The leaders of the other G20 members state that the Paris agreement is irreversible” and “we reaffirm our strong commitment to the Paris agreement”.  John Cushman of Inside Climate News analyzed the differences between the U.S. and other G20 nations on climate change.  However, during his joint news conference with French President Macron on Thursday in Paris, President Trump said, “Something could happen with respect to the Paris accords, let’s see what happens.  If it happens, that will be wonderful, and if it doesn’t, that’ll be OK too.”  A recent paper by scholars at Stanford University and the University of Michigan reported that American politicians perceive their constituents’ positions as more conservative than they actually are on a wide range of issues.  Although not covered in the paper, this applies to climate change, according to Dana Nuccitelli.  Climate scientists are perplexed by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s plans to use a “red team, blue team” approach to debate climate science, in part because they see it as a trap with no escape.

Climate

An important event this week, which may or may not be related to climate change, was the calving of the huge iceberg from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica.  Both The New York Times and The Washington Post had good articles, each from a different perspective.  Both had interesting graphics.

If you love coral reefs, prepare to have your heart broken by a new film from the director of Chasing Ice.  Premiering Friday (July 14) on Netflix, Chasing Coral is a crash course on how climate change is devastating our underwater ecosystems.  The trailer can be seen here.  Unfortunately, coral isn’t the only creature being impacted by humans.  A new study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found growing evidence that a sixth mass extinction is unfolding, linked in part to climate change.

A new study, published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, found that warmer-than-usual springtime temperatures in the Arctic Ocean are followed by colder-than-usual temperatures across much of North America, as well as less precipitation in some parts of the southern U.S.  This observation challenges the idea that global warming will enhance agriculture around the globe.  NASA has reported that May 2017 was the second warmest May on record, after May 2016.

A new meta-analysis of 692 databases from 648 different locations in “all continental regions and major ocean basins” has reconstructed global temperatures over the past 2000 years.  The study was done by the PAGES2k Consortium, a group of almost 100 scientists from around the world, and was published Tuesday in the journal Scientific Data.  The results confirmed the “hockey stick” shape of the temperature graph and the fact that the current global temperature is the highest during the Common Era.

An article, published Wednesday in the journal Elementa, Science of the Anthropocene, examined how many U.S. coastal communities would face chronic, disruptive flooding (defined as 10% or more of a community’s usable land flooding 26 times a year) during this century, as well as when that might occur.  Currently, more than 90 communities suffer from such flooding and the number is expected to almost double in the next 20 years.  The authors also have provided an interactive map to allow communities to plan.  Bloomberg presented a preview of a few cities and The Washington Post focused on the shores of Maryland and Virginia.  Of course, flooding isn’t limited to the east coast, as shown in this article about California.  It is not just towns that are threatened, however.  A new paper in Nature Scientific Reports examined the danger of rising sea level to threatened species on Pacific islands.  The picture isn’t pretty; many face global extinction.

New research from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California found that improving efficiency in refrigeration and phasing out fluorinated gases used for cooling could avoid 1°C of warming by 2100.  NOAA’s Annual Greenhouse Gas Index for 2016, released this week, showed that greenhouse gas emissions increased more last year than they have in nearly 30 years.

A new study, conducted for the Asian Development Bank, has concluded that with unabated greenhouse gas emissions, Asia and the Pacific are at high risk of suffering deeper poverty and disaster.  This raises the question of when human society will be willing to consider geoengineering as a stop-gap measure to reduce the impacts of our continued emission of greenhouse gases until we can stop them.  To prepare for that time, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research are using computer modeling to try to understand the consequences of such actions.

Energy

In a report published on Thursday, the International Energy Agency forecast that within five years the U.S. would become the second biggest exporter of liquified natural gas, behind Australia, but ahead of Qatar.  According to the Carbon Majors Report, just 100 companies have been the source of more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988.

Energy storage received a boost this week when utility-scale zinc-iron flow battery maker VIZn Energy announced that it can deliver energy storage to pair with solar or wind at $0.04 per kilowatt-hour.

A report by Britain’s Royal Academy of Engineering has concluded that large improvements are needed in biofuels if they are to meet the required reductions in greenhouse gas emissions while meeting the needs of energy users requiring liquid fuels.

Carbon Brief has compiled seven charts that illustrate why the International Energy Agency has concluded that global investment in coal-fired power plants is set to decline dramatically.  In addition, Morgan Stanley has issued a report projecting that by 2020 “renewables will be the cheapest form of new-power generation across the globe.”  Royal Dutch Shell plans to spend as much as $1 billion a year by 2020 on its New Energies division as the transition toward renewable power and electric cars accelerates.

Concentrated solar power (CSP) uses an array of movable mirrors that focus the sun’s rays on a central tower to heat molten salt or another liquid to make steam to drive a generator for making electricity.  Its advantage is that it can store enough heat to operate at night.  Its disadvantage has been cost, but now a company has bid $0.0945/kWh to produce electricity in Dubai.  Some say this price is competitive with PV solar plus batteries, but others disagree.  Speaking of PV solar, growth in rooftop solar has dramatically slowed this year in the U.S., due in large part to lobbying by electric utilities.

Chinese president Xi Jinping endorsed a G20 plan calling on development banks to support poor countries to lower their emissions, just days after his own development bank had signed a $1.5bn loan deal to build a South African coal-fired power plant.

The Weekly Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending July 7, 2017 follows.  Please forward the Roundup to anyone you think might be interested.  For an archive of prior posts visit the CAAV website.  It also contains news of events in the Central Shenandoah Valley as well as activities in which CAAV is involved.

Climate scientist Ben Santer had a very moving and informative essay on Wednesday in The Washington Post.  British political scientist David Runciman, in an essay appearing as a “Long Read” piece in The Guardian, posited: “The politics of climate change poses a stark dilemma for anyone wanting to push back against the purveyors of post-truth.  Should they bide their time and trust that the facts will win out in the end?  Or do they use the evidence as weapons in the political fight, in which case they risk confirming the suspicion that they have gone beyond the facts?”  Much to think about there.  Justin Gillis, writing in The New York Times, has updated his short answers to 16 hard questions about climate change.

Last week I included a link to an article about the setting of the trial date for the children’s lawsuit against the federal government over climate change.  This week Chelsea Harvey wrote in The Washington Post about how things are likely to proceed in the case.  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the EPA has overstepped its authority in attempting to suspend for two years the implementation of the rule restricting methane leaks from oil and gas wells.  Rather, the agency must follow a new rulemaking process to fully undo the regulations.  In an opinion piece on Project Syndicate, economist Joseph Stiglitz took President Trump to task for pulling the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement and made the case for a carbon tax.

Climate

A new paper published online in Science Advances sought to understand why estimates of equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) obtained from historical temperature data records are systematically lower than estimates obtained from the paleoclimate record.  The authors found that estimates of ECS from historical temperature data records do not account for the fact that different parts of Earth warm at different speeds.  This suggests that Earth is likely to warm up more than we had hoped.

As we think of rising seas and how to protect coastal cities and other infrastructure from them, there might well be lessons to be learned from the ancient Romans.  Whereas modern concrete has a lifetime of decades in the presence of sea water, Roman concrete has a lifetime of millennia.  Scientists and engineers are working to understand why.

The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication have issued a new report in which they found that 58% of Americans believe that climate change is mostly human caused.  That is the highest level reported since the survey began in 2008.  Unfortunately, only 13% knew that more than 90% of climate scientists agreed that climate change was happening and was caused by humans.

In a subjective appraisal based on analysis of numerous scientific models and his personal experience observing climate change in a variety of places, John Vidal, former environment editor of The Guardian, took a global look at where the impacts of climate change will be the greatest.  In an interview with Yale Environment 360, University of Hawaii geologist Chip Fletcher described the threats confronting Hawaii and other tropical islands and discussed potential adaptation strategies.  The Guardian presented pictures of life along the vanishing shorelines of the Solomon Islands.

Climate Central has prepared an interactive graphic showing how much selected cities around the world will warm by the end of the century under two different emissions scenarios.  The graphic has some peculiar characteristics, but can provide interesting results and is worth looking at.  Another interactive graphic has been prepared by Carbon Brief.  It summarizes the findings from the more than 140 extreme weather events that have been studied to ascertain whether they were influenced by climate change.

Richard Rood, Professor of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan, published an essay in The Conversation entitled “If we stopped emitting greenhouse gases right now, would we stop climate change?”.

Energy

A couple of weeks ago, while I was out of town, Bishop Dansby provided a link to an article in IEEE Spectrum about the “battle royal between competing visions for the future of energy” that had broken out on the pages of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Now, in order to shed additional light on where clean energy might be headed, the staff of Grist “talked to six of the smartest energy experts around” and asked for their opinions.  It is interesting reading.

The overall share of wind, hydroelectric, and solar power in Germany’s electricity mix climbed to a record 35% in the first half of 2017.

The G20 nations provide four times more public financing to fossil fuels than to renewable energy, according to a new report by a coalition of NGOs, including Oil Change International, Friends of the Earth U.S., the Sierra Club, and WWF Europe.

On Wednesday, Volvo Car Group said it plans to offer only hybrid or full-electric motors on every new model launched in 2019 or later.  As a consequence, when an existing model is due for a major revamp, it will no longer be offered with only an internal combustion engine.  In addition, on Thursday, the government of France announced that no new gasoline or diesel powered cars could be offered for sale in the country after 2040.  According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s (BNEF) Long-Term Electric Vehicle Outlook released on Thursday, Tesla will emerge as “the stand-out” electric vehicle manufacturer in terms of total cumulative deliveries through 2021.  BNEF also projected that electric vehicles will account for 54% of all new light-duty vehicle sales globally by 2040.  Seventeen states now charge fees for electric vehicles registered in the state.  Speaking of cars and their powertrains, hydrogen-powered, fuel cell cars seem to be stuck in “prototype stage”.

The overall share of wind, hydroelectric, and solar power in Germany’s electricity mix climbed to a record 35% in the first half of 2017.

EPA officials on Wednesday released their proposed 2018 biofuel requirements under the Renewable Fuel Standard.  The proposals for corn-based ethanol and biodiesel are essentially the same as for 2017, while the targets for cellulosic ethanol and advanced biofuels are lower.

Tesla has been awarded the contract to build a 100 MW grid-scale battery to serve as emergency back-up power for South Australia.