The last five years have been the hottest five years on record. And 2020 has an excellent shot at once again grabbing the top slot.

But to understand why cities in Germany continue to experience record temperatures, why ice is melting increasingly rapidly on the poles and why forests are burning in California and Australia, it is necessary to turn our attention to Hawaii.

For more than 60 years, the volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is where scientists have gone to measure our planet's pulse. An atmospheric monitoring station on the northern slope of the Mauna Loa volcano, located at an altitude of 3,397 meters (11,145 feet) above sea level, has produced the longest uninterrupted data-stream on the concentration of CO₂ in our atmosphere. It was initiated by the U.S. climate researcher Charles Keeling.

Carbon dioxide is an extremely effective greenhouse gas. Just a couple of molecules of CO₂ among a million air particles is enough to heat up the atmosphere. For the emergence and development of life, this greenhouse effect is extremely important, ensuring as it does that our planet isn't just a giant ball of ice orbiting the sun. But by burning massive amounts of fossil fuels, we humans have thrown the atmosphere off kilter.

In 1959, Keeling measured 316 CO₂ molecules for every 1 million molecules in the air, a measurement known as "parts per million" and abbreviated as ppm. In May 2020, the Mauna Loa measurement came in at 417 ppm, almost a third more than the initial value measured.

But what does that number tell us? Scientists at the University of Southampton discovered that in the Pliocene, which stretched from 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago, the CO₂ content in the atmosphere was between 380 and 427 ppm.

In other words, if humanity's greenhouse gas emissions climb for just another five years, we will have attained the highest atmospheric concentration of CO₂ in over 3.3 million years. Back then, sea levels were around 20 meters higher than they are today. Giraffes lived in Europe, plants grew in Antarctica and Greenland was mostly free of ice.

If humanity was forced to deal with such massive shifts in climate, global upheavals would be the result: Vast areas of flooding, unprecedented numbers of refugees and massive food shortages.

Since the beginning of the industrial age, which got its start in Britain in the second half of the 18th century, humans have been burning an ever-increasing amount of fossil fuels to increase the production of food and goods and to improve mobility. We are responsible for the significant rise in temperature and it is up to us to fix the problem. It’s just that we haven't yet been able to make much headway.

Air on the Earth's surface has already increased by a global average of around 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in the last 150 years, which has resulted in a shifting of our planet's climate zones.

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https://www.spiegel.de/international/heat-stroke-a-36b3c1f0-ac39-4712-895c-099b21e39f16

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http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33287

With Joel Fitzgibbon Gone, the Australian Labor Party Must Stop Appeasing the Fossil Fuel Lobby

BY

JAMES CLARK

After waging war on behalf of coal billionaires, Labor Right MP Joel Fitzgibbon has resigned from the party front bench. If the Labor Left wants to undo the damage he did, they need to start fighting for jobs and the environment as tenaciously as Fitzgibbon did for the coal lobby.

For over a year, Australian Labor Party (ALP) MP Joel Fitzgibbon waged a guerrilla war against his party’s climate policy. Fighting on behalf of fossil fuel billionaires and the Liberal Party, and aided by the conservative Sky News channel, Fitzgibbon notched up a series of victories.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese’s strategy of appeasement is what made this possible. Early in 2020, Albanese backed the widely maligned Adani coal mine. Then, in September, the ALP abandoned its 2030 climate targets, leaving only a vague commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050, a target so far over the horizon that it’s functionally the same as climate denial. In late October, Labor capitulated yet again, agreeing to support new gas projects, effectively signing on to PM Scott Morrison’s “gas-fired recovery.”

This week, “Coal” Fitzgibbon’s campaign finally reached a dead end. Following condemnations by other Labor front bench MPs, the “Member for Coal” announced his resignation from the shadow cabinet. It’s good to see Fitzgibbon go, but it won’t end the Labor Right’s campaign of predatory delay on behalf of fossil fuel executives, or reverse the damage they inflicted on the party and its response to the climate crisis.

The Climate Crisis Has a Deadline

Instead of seeing the ecological crisis as the “great moral challenge of our time,” the Labor Right has continually downplayed the issue as a “climate grievance,” localized to a small subsection of the electorate.

This view is both morally reprehensible and politically indefensible. Decisions made today will have more impact than decisions made a year from now, and are far more important than decisions made in a decade.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the leading institution for climate science, has reported that even 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming will be hugely destructive, threatening the stability of human civilization. Research conducted by Oil Change International has found that the world’s presently operating coal mines and gas and oil fields contain enough carbon to take us beyond even 2 degrees Celsius of warming. Even if you exclude coal, operational oil and gas fields alone have the potential to drive temperatures up by 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Opening up new coal, gas, or oil developments will lock in decades of new emissions and warming, ensuring disaster. In short, it will be a death sentence for millions.

This is why Labor’s support for new gas projects — as well as new coal mines and other forms of fossil fuel expansion — is morally and scientifically bankrupt. Try as they might, they won’t be able to push the climate crisis over the political horizon. The smoke that covered our cities last summer, the dying Great Barrier Reef, and the water shortages for communities across western NSW are enough to show that this crisis is not years away — it’s already here. Labor can’t triangulate its way out of a dead planet.

Read more:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/11/joel-fitzgibbon-australian-labor-party-fossil-fuel-lobby

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Joel Fitzgibbon has been a thorn in the Labor Party's backside basically since he "joined"...

Anthony Albanese’s sudden change of heart, swapping out Labor’s climate spokesman Mark Butler in favour of the more conservative Chris Bowen, can be read in two ways.

First, as a shrewd chess move: one that sharpens the economic arguments in favour of green jobs, boxes in Bowen’s Right faction behind existing climate ambition, and perhaps constrains Bowen as a potential leadership aspirant.

Alternatively, critics could view Albanese’s decision as more self-serving — the manoeuvring of an opposition leader desperate to shore up his defences.

The NSW Right’s outspoken convener Joel Fitzgibbon had made unusually public attacks on the Left-aligned Butler. Albanese will have a job of convincing people he has not blinked under pressure, throwing an ally under a bus.

Read more:

https://theconversation.com/albanese-throws-a-bone-to-labors-right-but-joel-fitzgibbon-remains-off-the-leash-154179

Now you know about the dog in the cartoon...

How anthropogenically driven climate change is affecting heat waves and drought is one of the most important environmental issues facing societies around the globe. Zhang et al.present a 260-year-long record of temperature and soil moisture over inner East Asia that reveals an abrupt shift to hotter and drier conditions (see the Perspective by Zhang and Fang). Extreme episodes of hotter and drier climate over the past 20 years, which are unprecedented in the earlier records, are caused by a positive feedback loop between soil moisture deficits and surface warming and potentially represent the start of an irreversible trend.

Unprecedented heatwave-drought concurrences in the past two decades have been reported over inner East Asia. Tree-ring–based reconstructions of heatwaves and soil moisture for the past 260 years reveal an abrupt shift to hotter and drier climate over this region. Enhanced land-atmosphere coupling, associated with persistent soil moisture deficit, appears to intensify surface warming and anticyclonic circulation anomalies, fueling heatwaves that exacerbate soil drying. Our analysis demonstrates that the magnitude of the warm and dry anomalies compounding in the recent two decades is unprecedented over the quarter of a millennium, and this trend clearly exceeds the natural variability range. The “hockey stick”–like change warns that the warming and drying concurrence is potentially irreversible beyond a tipping point in the East Asian climate system.

Read more:

Science  27 Nov 2020:

Vol. 370, Issue 6520, pp. 1095-1099

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China needs to invest more than 100 trillion yuan ($15.56 trillion)－almost the country's entire GDP last year－to remove carbon from its energy supply in the coming three decades as it strives to reduce emissions, a senior expert said.

To fulfill the goal of carbon neutrality, from 2020 to 2050, new investment of 100 trillion to 138 trillion yuan－or 2 to 2.5 percent of annual GDP every year over the period－will be required, said He Jiankun, vice-chairman of the National Committee of Experts on Climate Change.

He made the remark after the annual Central Economic Work Conference in December released a statement vowing to ramp up efforts to enhance new energy development. China will also accelerate the optimization of the country's industrial structure and energy mix and promote a peak in coal consumption as soon as possible.

The country is also aiming to improve the system that caps both national carbon intensity－carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP－and energy consumption, as it strives to reach a peak in carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.

The targets were announced by President Xi Jinping while addressing the general debate of the 75th session of the United Nations General Assembly via video link in September.

Tackling climate change has been a key concern of China. At several recent international events, the nation has repeated its resolve to follow low-carbon development.

"Meeting these targets will require tremendously hard work from China," Xi said via video link at the World Economic Forum Virtual Event of the Davos Agenda last Monday.

"Yet we believe that when the interests of the entirety of humanity are at stake, China must step forward, take action, and get the job done."

He, who is also chairman of the academic committee of the Institute of Climate Change and Sustainable Development at Tsinghua University, said the key to realizing the targets is decarbonizing the nation's energy supplies, which will also provide impetus for economic development.

The country's annual greenhouse gas emissions are equivalent to 14 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. Of them, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions constitute about 73 percent, He said.

The Central Economic Work Conference also pledged to roll out a large-scale afforestation program to increase the country's carbon-sink capacity, which helps the ecosystem absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

He said the country envisions increasing the carbon-sink by 800 million tons to 1 billion tons a year. That capacity, however, will decline as the potential for further expanding forests diminishes due to dwindling land supplies.

"By the middle of the century, it will be hard to maintain the capacity increase above the current level," He said. "So, the country needs to mainly depend on emissions reduction to realize its long-term goal of carbon neutrality, especially the net-zero carbon dioxide emissions in its energy system."

He said the transition to low carbon will create job opportunities. For every unit of production capacity, renewable energy can create one and a half to three jobs for every job that would be created by the traditional energy industry.

"Despite a rise in the preliminary stage, the general cost of the energy supply is expected to show a downward trend in the long term with the development of a low-carbon energy system," he said.

The ratio of total energy supply cost in China's GDP will steadily go down over the long run, especially after 2035, when the country's economic growth no longer is expected to have a direct correlation with the growth of its energy consumption. "The efficiency and economic effectiveness of energy consumption will keep going up," He said.

However, despite the benefits, China needs to make greater efforts than developed countries to realize carbon neutrality, he said.

Most countries in the European Union saw their carbon emissions peak around 1980. For the United States and Japan, the peak occurred around 2005. With targets set to realize carbon neutrality by 2050, these nations have had 45 to 70 years to realize an unhurried transition to low carbon. However, China has to rush to achieve the goal in just 30 years, he said.

He said China will be in the middle and later periods of its industrialization and urbanization process when its carbon emissions peak. In developed nations, the peaks all happened at a time when they had already completed industrialization. China is in a development stage that makes it more challenging for it to hit an emissions peak.

Many of the coal-fired power plants in the US, which have been in operation for more than 40 years, are near the end of their service lives.

On average, however, many of China's large coal-burning plants have only been in operation for about 10 years. This means that many of the plants in China will have to be phased out early.

He said China's carbon neutrality target shows the country is acting responsibly at a time when its national strength is on the rise. "While making efforts to realize rejuvenation, China is contributing to the safety of the planet's ecosystem and the common endeavor of mankind," He said. "It's forging ahead with building a beautiful China and a beautiful Earth in a coordinated manner."

Read more:

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202102/01/WS60173bf6a31024ad0baa649c.html

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See also: and china...