India will be among the worst hit countries and face a large number of deaths due to reduced crop productivity, according to a new study on climate change by the University of Oxford.
A modelling study estimates climate change could kill more than 500,000 adults worldwide in 2050. The study from the university’s Martin Future of Food programme was published on Thursday in the medical journal ‘The Lancet’.
The countries that would be worst affected by this crisis are low- income and middle-income countries, mainly those in the Western Pacific region (264,000 additional deaths), Southeast Asia (164,000), China (248,000) and India (136,000).
The research is considered the strongest evidence so far, that climate change could have horrendous consequences for food production and overall health worldwide, a university statement said.
The study led by Marco Springmann is the first of its kind to assess the impact of climate change on diet composition and body weight. It estimates the number of deaths that these two factors will cause in 2050 in 155 countries.
As far as El Niños go, the one we’re experiencing now is a doozy. In fact, it’s probably the strongest that’s ever been measured. In the simplest terms, that means one thing: Get ready for another year of wild weather.
Over the past month or two, the ocean temperature in the tropical Pacific has started to decline, but that doesn’t mean El Niño’s effects are waning. In fact, due to an atmospheric lag, extreme weather will likely keep getting worse for several more months. Though El Niño is typically the most powerful player among the world’s constantly feuding meteorological morphologies, it takes months for its burst of heat to filter around the globe from the tropical Pacific. Ocean temperatures in the El Niño regions of the Pacific usually peak in November or December, but globally-averaged temperatures don’t typically peak until between February and July of the following year.
Following the US/China climate agreement, I created this much under-viewed video, on why China is highly motivated to reduce Greenhouse gases sooner, rather than later. Not the first time, but turns out, might have been quite prescient.
In November 2014, President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping shook hands on a historic agreement to control greenhouse gas emissions in both countries. The United States pledged to bring national emissions at least 26 percent below their 2005 levels, while China vowed to put a peak on its growing carbon dioxide emissions by the year 2030. These pledges would go on to become part of each country’s national commitments for the 2015 Paris Agreement, which was adopted during the United Nations’s climate conference in December.
It seemed an ambitious set of targets at the time, particularly for China, which overtook the United States as the world’s biggest carbon dioxide emitter in 2007. Yet experts are now saying that achieving its goal is not only possible for China — the country may have already done so by the time the climate deal was made.
A new paper, released Sunday night by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, argues that a changing economic and energy landscape in China will help the nation’s emissions to peak by 2025 at the latest — if it didn’t already happen in 2014. The report, which will be published in the journal Climate Policy later this month, was released just two days after the Chinese government announced it would cap its annual energy consumption at 5 billion metric tons of standard coal equivalent by 2020 and reduce its carbon dioxide intensity by 18 percent between now and then.
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“We’re reaching a point in much of China where the cities have been built, the roads have been built, a lot of the demand for cement and steel is essentially slowing,” said Joanna Lewis, an associate professor of science, technology and international affairs at Georgetown University and an expert on China’s energy landscape, who was not involved with the new paper. “You can’t build indefinitely.”
Below, one of the new paper’s authors, Lord Nicholas Stern, in a 2013 interview, in San Francisco. Also Vox, on China’s war against coal.
UPDATE: Found a working link for the video, for now.
Just fyi, nsfw.
Pretty hard for the GOP to disavow nut jobs who talk about their penis size and claim climate science is a conspiracy, when that is exactly the position of their front running candidate.
It’s apalling, of course, and one hopes that moderate, sensible people in the GOP are as horrified as normal people – but my question is, if you’ve hung in for the last 15 years on this evolving horror show – do you really have capacity for independent thought and moral outrage?
Above – scientists discuss Abrupt Climate Change.
Key point – we are not necessarily talking about catastrophic methane burps or ice sheet collapses. Slow, gradual, incremental changes (fingers crossed) can still cause major disruptions when they cross a threshold that the human built environment cannot withstand – typically when an extreme event exceeds design specs.
West Texas roads are long and straight. So straight that, if you really wanted to, you could drive all the way from Lubbock to Plainview just looking in the rearview mirror. Almost all the way, that is. Because just before Plainview, there’s one giant curve in the road. If you are not looking forward, you will miss the curve, and boom! The car is off the road.
What does this have to do with climate? The same principle applies: The information we use to plan for our future is crucial. Basing our decisions on what’s happened before works well if we know the future will look the same as the past. If we’re relying on historical climate to define future risks, we’ll end up far from where we wanted to be, unprepared for the more intense flooding, record heat waves, or rising seas up ahead.
In a rapidly changing climate, using the rearview mirror to inform future planningdoesn’t work. And today, climate is changing at a pace we humans have never experienced before.
Yes, there have been warmer conditions and higher sea levels in the distant past. But there weren’t any people on the planet at that time, and there definitely weren’t any megacities within just a few feet of sea level; trillions of dollars of valuable infrastructure vulnerable to flooding; extensive agricultural systems that could be decimated by drought; or preexisting threats to water supply, disease, and even political instability, all of which are exacerbated by a changing climate.
My colleagues and I at the Texas Tech Climate Science Center spend a lot of our time figuring out how to look ahead, down the climate highway, to see what might be coming up. Lacking a crystal ball, we use the fundamental laws of physics, chemistry, and even biology to calculate how human choices may be affecting our planet today and in the future.
Over the last 10 years, I’ve worked with a broad range of cities, states, and other planning organizations, from state water agencies to transportation and port authorities. Throughout this work, I’ve seen how climate projections can help planners make more informed decisions, even when facing an uncertain future.
From year to year, plain old natural variability, or weather, remains the greatest source of uncertainty in both average conditions and the risk of extremes. Once we get a decade or two down the road, though, the influence of human-induced climate change starts to kick in, with associated scientific uncertainty. How sensitive is our planet to all the extra heat-trapping gases we’re pouring into the atmosphere? How do tropical clouds or Arctic sea ice respond to a warming climate? How are natural weather patterns being affected by climate change?
Last week, leading lights of the global fossil power industry gathered at a conference in Houston, Texas, for CERA, known in the sector as the “Davos of Energy”. They reportedly got the shock of their professional careers.
They had invited the most senior executives from the biggest network owner (Chine State Grid Corp) in the biggest energy market in the world (China). The organisers fully expected their Chinese guest to endorse the “all of the above” marketing pitch, which is underpinning the “keep coal” campaign.
No such luck. Despite prodding by leading oil industry commentator Daniel Yergin, the chairman of State Grid Liu Zhenya reportedly said the “fundamental solution was to accelerate clean energy, with the aim of replacing coal and oil.”
Gasp number one. And then to more stunned silence, he and State Grid’s R&D chief Huang Han dismissed coal’s claim to be an indispensable source of “base load” generation.
As the network operator builds out its clean power sources, they noted, coal-fired generators could only serve as “reserve power” to supplement renewables.
“The only hurdle to overcome is ‘mindset’,” Liu said. “There’s no technical challenge at all.”
Here, video from 2012. Amory Lovins of Rocky Mountain Institute states his perspective on the base load power myths, while another analyst argues a bearish case against solar/renewables. The last 3 years of history tend to support Lovins case.
The “base load” mindset, though, is a pretty big and powerful hurdle. Across the world it infests incumbent utilities, the coal and nuclear lobbies, conservative politicians, energy regulators, and many in mainstream media, who are clinging to the concept of “base load generation” as the last resort to try to ridicule wind, solar and other technologies.
In Australia, which has more coal generation as a percentage of its energy supply than any other developed country, this perpetuation of this idea has reached fever pitch, particularly with the imminent exit of the large coal-fired power station in South Australia.
But according to Tim Buckley, from the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, the idea of “base load” generation as an essential part of the energy mix is becoming redundant, and turning into a myth dreamed up by the fossil fuel industry to protect its interests.
“It’s as dangerous as the marketing term of “clean coal” and the idea that coal is “good for humanity”,” Buckley says.
This Headline recalled for me one of my favorite posts of any year, and the brilliant, moving video above..
A reminder of the paradigm shifting power that a larger view of our common home has on the minds of those privileged to behold Her from orbit.
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, who returned Wednesday from a record-setting 340-straight days on the International Space Station, said looking down on planet Earth for so long made him a far more committed environmentalist.
“The Earth is a beautiful planet. It’s practically everything to us. It’s very important to our survival, and the Space Station is a great vantage point to observe it, and to share our planet in pictures,” Kelly said during a press conference in Houston on Friday.
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NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, who returned Wednesday from a record-setting 340-straight days on the International Space Station, said looking down on planet Earth for so long made him a far more committed environmentalist.
“The Earth is a beautiful planet. It’s practically everything to us. It’s very important to our survival, and the Space Station is a great vantage point to observe it, and to share our planet in pictures,” Kelly said during a press conference in Houston on Friday.
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For now, though, Kelly has come back to his home planet with a keener eye for humanity’s collective impact on the land, sea and air.
“We’ve got to take care of the environment,” he said. “I do believe we have an impact on that [the health of the environment], and we do have the ability to change it if we make the decision to.”
In my previous life as a cartoonist, I chose this as a takeoff point for a character who was an ex-astronaut turned potato farmer.
Most important election in history (since the last MIEIH)
Yesterday’s primaries seem like good news – in that Trump, and now the if-anything-even-more-hated Cruz are emerging as climate denial standard bearers.
Another, even funnier piece here.
Trump has yet to say anything about climate change that is even remotely intelligible enough to knock down, but if you have not seen my two videos calling out Cruz’s climate nonsense, which scientists are calling “hilarious” – they are below.
Florida has emerged as a key battleground state in any national election, if not a “must win” for any Republican who hopes to win the White House. That’s why this news is interesting.
Mayors of 21 cities in Florida on Friday called on the moderators of next week’s presidential debates in Miami to ask candidates how they would deal with rising sea levels caused by climate change, a concern of the state’s coastal communities.
“It would be unconscionable for these issues of grave concern for the people of Florida to not be addressed in the upcoming debate you will be hosting in the state,” the mayors wrote in an letter to CNN, The Washington Post, Univision and the other media outlets hosting the Democratic and Republican debates on March 9 and March 10 in Miami.
The bipartisan group of mayors, who represent coastal cities and towns from Miami to Tampa, have complained that the issue of climate change has not been raised in the dozens of televised debates held to date.
Of the four remaining Republican candidates, none say they believe that anything should be done to address climate change and all have called for federal environmental rules to be scaled back.
