Environment – This is Not Cool

As Winter Sets in, European Emissions Keep Dropping as Renewables Soar

European wind energy production, January 2, 2024

German emissions were at their lowest point in around 70 years, as Europe’s largest economy managed to reduce its dependence on coal faster than expected, a study published Thursday showed.

Europe’s biggest economy emitted 673 million tonnes of the greenhouse gases last year, 73 million tonnes fewer than in 2022, according to the energy think tank Agora Energiewende.

The figure was at its lowest point “since the 1950s”, Agora said in a statement, while warning that Germany had work to do to further reduce its emissions.

The drop was “largely attributable to a strong decrease in coal power generation”, Agora said.

Germany resorted to the fuel in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when Moscow cut off gas supplies to the European giant. But since then, Berlin has managed to pare back its use significantly.

Electricity generation from renewable sources was over 50 percent of the total in 2023 for the first time, while coal’s share dropped to 26 percent from 34 percent, according to figures published by the federal network agency on Wednesday.

The cut in coal use accounted for a reduction of 46 million tonnes in CO₂ emissions, the think tank estimated.

The renewables record brought Germany closer to its target to produce 80 percent of its electricity from wind and solar by 2030, Agora chief Simon Mueller said.

“When it comes to the generation of electricity, we are on a very good path,” Economy Minister Robert Habeck said in a statement.

Bloomberg:

Strong wind generation and low demand during the holiday period sent electricity prices below zero in Germany, while wholesale markets turned negative for some hours in France, Denmark and Britain.

US Real Estate May be Overvalued due to Climate Risk

A Staten Island neighborhood, pre and post Hurricane Sandy. First Street Foundation photo

I posted recently about newly identifed “Climate Abandonment” areas, neighborhoods identified in a new peer reviewed study, where residents have moved out due to increasing local climate risk.
The most common risk factor is flooding, and typically, these residents don’t move very far – they want to hold on to family structures, jobs, community – but it means that within some areas, even relatively prosperous areas, there are pockets of at-risk housing that could be, or already has been, devalued – and those residents left behind will find their holdings reduced in value.
A separate study from Environmental Defense Fund, published earlier this year in Nature Climate Change, showed that significant blocks of real estate may be overvalued due to as yet unpriced climate risks.

Environmental Defense Fund:

A new study published in the journal Nature Climate Changeexamines the potential cost of unrealized flood risk in the American real estate market, finding that flood zone property prices are overvalued by US$121–US$237 billion. Authored by researchers from Environmental Defense Fund, First Street Foundation, Resources for the Future, the Federal Reserve, and several academic institutions, the study also examined how unpriced flood risk throughout the country could impact communities and local governments, finding low-income households particularly vulnerable to home value deflation.

“Increasing flood risk under climate change is creating a bubble that threatens the stability of the US housing market. As we’ve seen in California in the last few weeks, these aren’t hypotheticals and the risk is more extensive than expected—and that risk carries an enormous cost,” said Dr. Jesse Gourevitch, a postdoctoral fellow at Environmental Defense Fund and lead author of the study. “These risks are largely unaccounted for in property transactions, encouraging development in flood-prone areas. Accurately pricing the costs of flooding in home values can support adaptation to flood risk, but may leave many worse off.”

Currently, more than 14.6 million properties in the United States face at least a 1% annual probability of flooding, with expected annual damages to residential properties exceeding US$32 billion. Increasing frequency and severity of flooding under climate change is predicted to increase the number of properties exposed to flooding by 11% and average annual losses by at least 26% by 2050. The increasing cost of flooding under climate change has led to growing concerns that housing markets are mispricing these risks, thus causing a real estate bubble to develop.

New Research – US Already has 3 Million Climate Migrants

Bloomberg:

Over the last two decades, as San Antonio and surrounding Bexar County, Texas, grew by more than 600,000 people, some 17% of the city’s blocks experienced a decrease in population.

That delta is largely due to flood risk that climate change exacerbates, according to a new report by the First Street Foundation, a data nonprofit with the mission of communicating climate hazards.

Bexar — sitting in a swath of Texas known as Flash Flood Alley — is part of a national trend of hyper-local migration to avoid flooding, which is hollowing out blocks within cities, the report finds. The research is based on a model, published Monday in the journal Nature Communications, that looks at population changes using granular US Census Bureau data and controls for factors besides flooding, such as nearby job opportunities and school quality.

In all, First Street finds, 3.2 million Americans moved away from high-flood-risk areas between 2000 and 2020. The full extent of the migration has been hidden, however, since most people didn’t move far.

“There appear to be clear winners and losers in regard to the impact of flood risk on neighborhood-level population change,” Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications research at First Street, said in a statement. “The downstream implications of this are massive and impact property values, neighborhood composition and commercial viability, both positively and negatively.”

The analysis also extrapolates these trends 30 years into the future, predicting that vulnerable areas will continue to lose population.

In the US, the frequency of disasters causing at least $1 billion in damages has gone from roughly three a year during the 1980s to an annual average of 17.8 over the period 2018 to 2022, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Global warming has knock-on effects that exacerbate flooding in particular, including sea level rise, more ferocious hurricanes and more frequent and extended downpours.

Below, a Detroit area local news report about recent flooding in Southeast Michigan. No mention of the word “climate”, but neighbors talk about floods becoming more frequent, area disaster manager mentions “significant rainfall that we’re not used to seeing.”

That Time I Talked to Limbaugh about Climate Change

“Rush Limbaugh, more than any other individual, is responsible for shifting conservative opinion to deny the existence of global warming.”

-John K. Wilson, author of The Most Dangerous Man in America: Rush Limbaugh’s Assault on Reason.

Climate denier, and fatally, tobacco denier, Rush Limbaugh, died this week from lung cancer.
Yeah, made me think back to that time I talked to him.

Some time later in the nineties, maybe ’97?
I had been following climate science for 20 years, and Jim Hansen’s work since 1981, and I understood, in a rudimentary way, what the mainstream science was telling us.
Scientists, as of 1995, had detected a “discernible” human influence warming the planet.
Hansen’s model had accurately predicted the planetary response from the Mt Pinabubo eruption, a major validation of the (by today’s standards) primitive climate models Hansen relied upon. Still lots to discuss, but it looked like this mechanism was real, and the process was happening.
I knew, as someone that grew up outside, on snow and water, that things were certainly changing in my upper-midwest neck of the woods.

On that particular day, Friends of the Earth had published a full page ad about climate change in USAToday, with a speculative “weather map” for the 2020s. It depicted a heat wave with a shocking temperature of 124 F in California.
(This past summer the temperature hit 130 in the desert, and an insane 110 F in LA, near the ocean.

Ridiculing the ad, Limbaugh launched into a climate denial rant, listing the most popular nonsense memes that we are all familiar with. And anyway, he said, even the most extreme eco-nuts were only talking about a few degrees rise in global temps, so obviously this ad was just more over-the-top scare tactics, he fumed.
Taking a breath, he invited “any environmentalist out there who can defend or explain this, to call in. I want to talk to you.”

Hunched over my keyboard, and listening as I struggled to nudge along a barely-alive communication business – I took up the challenge, and – incredibly – got through.
A voice asked me if I was indeed, the environmentalist Rush was asking for – I assured him that was me.
“Hold on for Rush” the voice said.

A few minutes went by, while I took some deep breaths and stretched.
Suddenly, the familiar voice was on the line.
“Ok, we have Peter from Midland, Michigan. Are you a greenie? an enviro?”

“Well, I often wear sandals, I hug trees when I’m climbing them, but not, you know, in a weird way.
And I’ve been known to order the tofu in my veggie stir fry.”
That was good enough.
“Alright, so explain this ad to me. The claim is made here that in the 2020s, we’ll see temperatures of 124 degrees Fahrenheit – but even Al Gore says the planet is only warming by a degree or so. So this is more scare tactics, right?”

Meet the Anti Christ

It’s not Barack Obama – that’s so 2008.

Now, it’s you.

If you are concerned about global climate, global environment, or a liveable future for your children, you are the anti Christ. So says a fossil funded “Christian” group, the Cornwall Alliance. The existence of this group points out how fossil fueled PR firms have done due diligence in psychological profiling of potential targets for disinformation, and found a target rich environment in the wackjob fundamentalist community. Continue reading “Meet the Anti Christ”

Flogging the Scientists

As a nonscientist, it’s daunting for me to work thru the huge volume of information on global climate change. I’ve found that the most reliable scientific information comes from respected peer reviewed science journals .

But journals have lots of big words, and lots of small print, and very few illustrations to make it easy for me. You can see why climate deniers don’t like them. But that’s where the facts are.

How can you tell a good science journal?

Continue reading “Flogging the Scientists”

Climate Denial Crock of the Week/1998 Revisited

One of the enduring myths of climate denialism is that global warming stopped sometime in the last decade. I see it in the blaring headlines of pseudoscience websites, in comments on my videos, even some of our most “distinguished” journalists have been taken in.

Creepy at the EP(a)

In june of 2009, a story surfaced about the alleged suppression by the US EPA of information related to climate change. The source of the information was reported to be one Dr. Alan Carlin, who, although a real EPA analyst, was in fact, an economist, not a scientist.

Distortions of the story, from the usual sources, began almost immediately.