The Weekly Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending October 12, 2018 follows. Please forward the URL to anyone you think might be interested.
Because of the importance of the IPCC Special Report on holding global warming to 1.5°C, rather than the normal Roundup this week, I have compiled some of the articles about it.
Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich said in The New York Times: “Holding warming to 1.5 degrees, the report said, would entail a staggering transformation of the global energy system beyond what world leaders are contemplating today.”
Also in The New York Times, Coral Davenport said: “A landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has ‘no documented historic precedent.’”
At The Washington Post, Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis wrote “The world stands on the brink of failure when it comes to holding global warming to moderate levels, and nations will need to take ‘unprecedented’ actions to cut their carbon emissions over the next decade, according to a landmark report by the top scientific body studying climate change.”
Also at the Post, Margaret Sullivan took the media to task for not giving enough coverage to climate change and the impacts it is having and will have.
Carbon Brief published a Q&A about the report.
The new IPCC report expanded the “carbon budget” for 1.5°C – a simplified way to measure the additional emissions that can enter the atmosphere to stay below 1.5°C. This report expands the budget for a 66% chance of avoiding 1.5°C to the equivalent of 10 years of current emissions. This compares to the IPCC’s fifth assessment report (AR5), which put the time to exhaustion of the budget at around three years. Zeke Hausfather at Carbon Brief looked into the details of the new, larger carbon budget and explored the reasons behind the shift.
At The Guardian, Jonathan Watts provided a synopsis of the report, while he and Matthew Taylor wrote of the moral obligation of world leaders to act on climate change.
Inside Climate News had a detailed look at what it will take to avoid 1.5°C of warming.
At Vox, David Roberts wrote about “What genuine, no-bullshit ambition on climate change would look like”, while Eliza Barclay and Umair Irfan discussed “10 ways to accelerate progress against climate change.”