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Negative Environmental news thread

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Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040
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.”

The report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders, describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.

The report “is quite a shock, and quite concerning,” said Bill Hare, an author of previous I.P.C.C. reports and a physicist with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit organization. “We were not aware of this just a few years ago.” The report was the first to be commissioned by world leaders under the Paris agreement, the 2015 pact by nations to fight global warming.

The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040, inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty. Previous work had focused on estimating the damage if average temperatures were to rise by a larger number, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), because that was the threshold scientists previously considered for the most severe effects of climate change.

The new report, however, shows that many of those effects will come much sooner, at the 2.7-degree mark.

Avoiding the most serious damage requires transforming the world economy within just a few years, said the authors, who estimate that the damage would come at a cost of $54 trillion. But while they conclude that it is technically possible to achieve the rapid changes required to avoid 2.7 degrees of warming, they concede that it may be politically unlikely.

For instance, the report says that heavy taxes or prices on carbon dioxide emissions — perhaps as high as $27,000 per ton by 2100 — would be required. But such a move would be almost politically impossible in the United States, the world’s largest economy and second-largest greenhouse gas emitter behind China. Lawmakers around the world, including in China, the European Union and California, have enacted carbon pricing programs.

President Trump, who has mocked the science of human-caused climate change, has vowed to increase the burning of coal and said he intends to withdraw from the Paris agreement. And on Sunday in Brazil, the world’s seventh-largest emitter of greenhouse gas, voters appeared on track to elect a new president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has said he also plans to withdraw from the accord.

The report was written and edited by 91 scientists from 40 countries who analyzed more than 6,000 scientific studies. The Paris agreement set out to prevent warming of more than 3.6 degrees above preindustrial levels — long considered a threshold for the most severe social and economic damage from climate change. But the heads of small island nations, fearful of rising sea levels, had also asked scientists to examine the effects of 2.7 degrees of warming.

Absent aggressive action, many effects once expected only several decades in the future will arrive by 2040, and at the lower temperature, the report shows. “It’s telling us we need to reverse emissions trends and turn the world economy on a dime,” said Myles Allen, an Oxford University climate scientist and an author of the report.

To prevent 2.7 degrees of warming, the report said, greenhouse pollution must be reduced by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and 100 percent by 2050. It also found that, by 2050, use of coal as an electricity source would have to drop from nearly 40 percent today to between 1 and 7 percent. Renewable energy such as wind and solar, which make up about 20 percent of the electricity mix today, would have to increase to as much as 67 percent.

“This report makes it clear: There is no way to mitigate climate change without getting rid of coal,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University and an author of the report.

The World Coal Association disputed the conclusion that stopping global warming calls for an end of coal use. In a statement, Katie Warrick, its interim chief executive, noted that forecasts from the International Energy Agency, a global analysis organization, “continue to see a role for coal for the foreseeable future.”

Ms. Warrick said her organization intends to campaign for governments to invest in carbon capture technology. Such technology, which is currently too expensive for commercial use, could allow coal to continue to be widely used.

Despite the controversial policy implications, the United States delegation joined more than 180 countries on Saturday in accepting the report’s summary for policymakers, while walking a delicate diplomatic line. A State Department statement said that “acceptance of this report by the panel does not imply endorsement by the United States of the specific findings or underlying contents of the report.”

The State Department delegation faced a conundrum. Refusing to approve the document would place the United States at odds with many nations and show it rejecting established academic science on the world stage. However, the delegation also represents a president who has rejected climate science and climate policy.

“We reiterate that the United States intends to withdraw from the Paris agreement at the earliest opportunity absent the identification of terms that are better for the American people,” the statement said.

The report attempts to put a price tag on the effects of climate change. The estimated $54 trillion in damage from 2.7 degrees of warming would grow to $69 trillion if the world continues to warm by 3.6 degrees and beyond, the report found, although it does not specify the length of time represented by those costs.

The report concludes that the world is already more than halfway to the 2.7-degree mark. Human activities have caused warming of about 1.8 degrees since about the 1850s, the beginning of large-scale industrial coal burning, the report found.

The United States is not alone in failing to reduce emissions enough to prevent the worst effects of climate change. The report concluded that the greenhouse gas reduction pledges put forth under the Paris agreement will not be enough to avoid 3.6 degrees of warming.

The report emphasizes the potential role of a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. “A price on carbon is central to prompt mitigation,” the report concludes. It estimates that to be effective, such a price would have to range from $135 to $5,500 per ton of carbon dioxide pollution in 2030, and from $690 to $27,000 per ton by 2100.

By comparison, under the Obama administration, government economists estimated that an appropriate price on carbon would be in the range of $50 per ton. Under the Trump administration, that figure was lowered to about $7 per ton.

Americans for Prosperity, the political advocacy group funded by the libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch, has made a point of campaigning against politicians who support a carbon tax.

“Carbon taxes are political poison because they increase gas prices and electric rates,” said Myron Ebell, who heads the energy program at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an industry-funded Washington research organization, and who led the Trump administration’s transition at the Environmental Protection Agency.

The report details the economic damage expected should governments fail to enact policies to reduce emissions. The United States, it said, could lose roughly 1.2 percent of gross domestic product for every 1.8 degrees of warming.

In addition, it said, the United States along with Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam are home to 50 million people who will be exposed to the effects of increased coastal flooding by 2040, if 2.7 degrees of warming occur.

At 3.6 degrees of warming, the report predicts a “disproportionately rapid evacuation” of people from the tropics. “In some parts of the world, national borders will become irrelevant,” said Aromar Revi, director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements and an author of the report. “You can set up a wall to try to contain 10,000 and 20,000 and one million people, but not 10 million.”

The report also finds that, in the likelihood that governments fail to avert 2.7 degrees of warming, another scenario is possible: The world could overshoot that target, heat up by more than 3.6 degrees, and then through a combination of lowering emissions and deploying carbon capture technology, bring the temperature back down below the 2.7-degree threshold.

In that scenario, some damage would be irreversible, the report found. All coral reefs would die. However, the sea ice that would disappear in the hotter scenario would return once temperatures had cooled off.

“For governments, the idea of overshooting the target but then coming back to it is attractive because then they don’t have to make such rapid changes,” Dr. Shindell said. “But it has a lot of disadvantages.”
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Few countries are meeting the Paris climate goals. Here are the ones that are.
This week, a top scientific body studying climate change released a terrifying report. The world has just a decade to take “unprecedented” action to cut carbon emissions and hold global warming to a moderate — but still dangerous and disruptive — level. That would require a “rapid and far-reaching” transformation of the world’s economy, one of such scale and magnitude that it has no historical equivalent.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that nearly every country will need to significantly scale up the commitments made under the 2015 Paris climate accord if humans hope to avoid disaster. Under that agreement, 195 countries pledged to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions to try to keep global warming under two degrees Celsius.

But it’s hard to imagine that will happen, as almost no country is doing a good job meeting the relatively modest goals in place. (The United States was a signatory of the 2015 Paris agreement, but last year President Trump announced that Washington was pulling out of the pact.)

The Climate Action Tracker, a project run by a group of three climate-research organizations, has been monitoring the progress of 32 countries in meeting the Paris accord goals. Taken together, those 32 countries account for 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The tracker’s goal is to provide an “up-to-date assessment of countries' individual reduction targets and with an overview of their combined effects.” It looks at how much greenhouse gas each country emits right now; what it has committed to change on paper; and how well it’s following through on those promises.

As the graphic below shows, the group found that most major polluters are making few, if any, efforts to meet their goals. By Climate Action’s calculations, “critically insufficient countries” failed to even commit to cutting emissions significantly on paper. Only seven countries have made commitments or efforts that would achieve the goal of the Paris accord.

But there are bright spots:

Morocco

The North African nation is one of only two countries with a plan to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions far enough to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, an important threshold for staving off some of the worst effects of climate change. Morocco has promised to halt its growth of greenhouse gas emissions by commissioning large-scale renewable energy projects. The country has commissioned the largest concentrated solar power plant in the world, scaled up its natural-gas imports and cut back fossil-fuel subsidies. Morocco is on track to get 42 percent of its energy needs from renewable sources by 2020.

Gambia

The West African nation is the only other country on track to cut its carbon output in line with a 1.5 degree Celsius rise. According to Climate Action Tracker, it’s one of the only developing countries in the world to lay out a plan that would “bend its emissions in a downward trajectory.” A major part of that plan is a massive reforestation project it’s running to stop environmental erosion and degradation by planting trees.

India

One of the world’s biggest economies, with one of the fastest-growing renewable energy programs, India could meet its goal of generating 40 percent of its energy from non-fossil-fuel sources as early as the end of this year. It has done that by declining to open new coal-fired plants and promoting electric vehicles.

Britain

Like most industrialized nations, the United Kingdom is struggling to cut its emissions. But the nation deserves special mention as the only developed economy in the world to create a body to track how well the country is meeting its Paris agreement commitments and how the country could do better. Britain is also working toward an ambitious plan to reduce its emissions to “net zero” by 2050.
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‘Virtually impossible’ for Canada to cut emissions in half by 2030 to meet UN goals: experts
A new UN report on climate change tasks Canada with reducing its carbon emissions by almost half in 12 years in order to prevent environmental catastrophe.

The country is being asked to do the impossible, according to many scientists.

“I think the [targets are] aspirational, I think it’s a real challenge. Our economy is so focused on use of carbon, and carbon extraction, and things like the oilsands. It’s really, really hard for us to reduce our use of carbon,” said Kent Moore, a professor at the University of Toronto’s chemical and physical sciences.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated in the report that there will be irreversible, significant changes – including the entire loss of some ecosystems – if the world doesn’t take immediate action to cut greenhouse gas emissions far more quickly than is happening now.

That translates to limiting the increase in the average global ground temperature to 1.5 degrees C, rather than 2 C as specified in the 2015 Paris climate change accord.

At 2 C, everything from melting sea ice to droughts, famines and floods will be significantly worse than at 1.5 C, the report said.

However, Moore isn’t optimistic about achieving this goal, considering Canada’s record in maintaining climate change targets.

“We’ve tried before to cut our emissions, there was the Kyoto accord back in the 1990s and we were never able to meet those targets. We haven’t made much progress towards meeting the Paris targets.,” he explained.

“So, I’m extremely pessimistic about whether we can do that or not.”

The world will hit the 1.5 C threshold between 2030 and 2052 if governments and societies don’t act immediately, the report said.

In order to prevent this, the global community needs to cut the amount of emissions released each year leading up to 2030 so that they don’t exceed 55 per cent more than what they were in 2010, it added.

In Canada, this would mean reducing emissions to 385 million tonnes per year – almost half of what they were in 2016. Canada’s current goal is to cut emissions to about 512 million tonnes per year.

He went on to explain that Canadians have largely rejected the minor actions taken by provincial and federal governments to attempt to reduce the use or carbon.

Ontario’s Conservative government has already done away with the provincial carbon tax instituted by Kathleen Wynne, and the Trudeau government’s attempt to implement a federal carbon tax has drawn the ire of four provinces.

While ideally, governments would have the option of slowly increasing prices on fossil fuels, natural gas and other pollutants, the UN report made clear that time is not a luxury that the world currently possesses.U

“I don’t think we have the time, really, to have it ramp up slowly. It will require a huge wholesale change in our whole economy,” he said.

The kind of drastic economic overhaul that Moore described involves hiking the price of gas by “up to 100 per cent,” ceasing development of the oilsands, radically reducing the number of Canadians who drive every day, along with many other actions – and all within a period of 10 years.

“I don’t think people realize just how much our economy is built on that,” he said.

Furthermore, Kristen Zickfeld, an associate professor in the geography department at Simon Fraser University added that the the large-scale fossil fuel infrastructure currently being undertaken by the federal government makes these goals “virtually impossible” to achieve.

“These are completely at odds with what the report says is needed to meet 1.5. These projects will be built with a lifetime of 30-40 years, and for them to be economical they will need to be operational for that long. So, we’re going completely in the wrong direction,” she said.

She reiterated that everyone will need to make sacrifices in order for these targets to be met, and that those sacrifices will have to happen in every sector of the economy.

In addition to phasing out coal and dramatically reducing reliance on oil and natural gas, she noted that these changes will also involve electrifying transport, shifting our diets, heating our homes and businesses more efficiently and managing our forests better.
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