by P. Homewood, March 6, 2021 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
China has set out an economic blueprint for the next five years that could lead to a strong rise in greenhouse gas emissions if further action is not taken to meet the country’s long-term goals.
The 14th five-year plan, published in Beijing on Friday, gave few details on how the world’s biggest emitter would meet its target of reaching net zero emissions by 2060, set out by President Xi Jinping last year, and of ensuring that carbon dioxide output peaks before 2030.
China will reduce its “emissions intensity” – the amount of CO2 produced per unit of GDP – by 18% over the period 2021 to 2025, but this target is in line with previous trends, and could lead to emissions continuing to increase by 1% a year or more. Non-fossil fuel energy is targeted to make up 20% of China’s energy mix, leaving plenty of room for further expansion of the country’s coal industry.
Swithin Lui, of the Climate Action Tracker and NewClimate Institute, said: “[This is] underwhelming and shows little sign of a concerted switch away from a future coal lock-in. There is little sign of the change needed [to meet net zero].”
Zhang Shuwei, chief economist at Draworld Environment Research Centre, said: “As the first five-year plan after China committed to reach carbon neutrality by 2060, the 14th five-year plan was expected to demonstrate strong climate ambition. However, the draft plan presented does not seem to meet the expectations. The international community expected China’s climate policy to ‘jump’, but in reality it is still crawling.”
Unusually, this five-year plan did not set out GDP targets for the whole five-year period, but allowed for annual targets, with the first for this year a target of 6% growth. The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air said that coupled with the emissions intensity target, this could allow the growth rate of China’s emissions to speed up even further, rather than slow down, as is needed.
by Jeanne Marcq, March 5, 2021 in ScienceClimatEnergie
Carbon neutrality aiming to limit the rise in global temperature is a lure from the economic points of view and humanity. It is also the weakness of environmentalists, vegans and the “green” provided people of the northern hemisphere advocating worldly decay.
However, the food and energy resources exist in sufficiency on earth but are poorly dispatched (see FAO data). Developing countries cannot be selfishly prevented from using fossil fuels to build their own economies instead of being plundered by new colonizers. No political regime has ever managed to erase socio-economic inequalities in society. With a world population currently growing until 2050 (FAO), any limitation of food production and economic development would be damaging to humanity.
Continental warming, coastal cooling and shifting rainbelts 1000 years ago
Global climate is currently undergoing major change. Experts agree that this change is driven by a combination of man-made and natural factors. However, full quantification of the anthropogenic and natural components is still a matter of debate. In order to better understand the contribution of natural climate variability and distinguish this from man-made influence, researchers worldwide have gone out to the field to study Earth’s pre-industrial climate history. Of particular interest are the past thousand years, which in Europe and North America have seen the transition from a rather warm medieval period to major cooling of the Little Ice Age, followed by the temperature rebound of the Current Warm Period which was further intensified by human greenhouse gas emissions. Our understanding of medieval climate outside this well-studied North Atlantic region is unfortunately still poor.
An international team led by geoscientist Sebastian Lüning wants to change this. Lüning is a professional resources geologist who in his sparetime works on paleoclimatological studies with the Switzerland-based Institute for Hydrography, Geoecology and Climate Sciences. Together with colleagues from Poland, Nigeria, Turkey and Germany they embarked on a journey through the scientific literature to shed light on the so-called ‘Medieval Climate Anomaly’, a period comprising of the years 1000-1200 AD. The initial focus region of their study was Africa. Lüning and his team crawled through hundreds of publications and mosaiced together a fascinating picture of African medieval climate change that tracks ancient heat waves, local cooling, drought and phases of amplified rainfall. Using modern database and visualization technology, the team managed to synthesize astonishing trends from the large amount of filtered data. Lüning explains the challenge:
Understanding natural cycles the key to model projections
Sufficient rainfall is the basic condition for high-yield agriculture and food security for the population. Until recently, however, it was not possible to reliably predict rainfall several months in advance, which repeatedly led to unexpected crop failures. For some years now, however, progress has been emerging. The literature has repeatedly reported exciting correlations between temperature and air pressure patterns on the world’s oceans with rainfall and droughts in Africa and on other continents.
A group of researchers led by Horst-Joachim Lüdecke wanted to know more and meticulously searched for patterns in the monthly rainfall data of 49 African countries for the period 1901 to 2017 using statistical methods.
“Large number of robust correlations”
The scientists compared the rainfall fluctuations with five oceanic indices of natural origin that are firmly established in science, as well as with solar activity. The evaluation revealed a large number of robust correlations across the African continent with characteristic seasonal patterns. It has been known for some time that the Atlantic Ocean influences precipitation in Morocco and the Sahel via the so-called Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). In East Africa, influences from the Indian and Pacific Oceans have been reported so far.
There has been an unending stream of media reports about how the last few years have been the warmest on record.
They gloss over that they are only referring to the last 150 years, because temperatures have been higher than today on several occasions over the past 10,000 years, a period between glaciations know as the Holocene.
Recently, a presentation by Tony Heller caught my attention, in which he had facts, coupled with evidence, that shed light on the media’s hypocrisy.
What follows uses some of the materials from Mr. Heller’s presentation, coupled with additional information. (Relevant links are itemized below.)
The first chart is Figure 3, from Dr. Roy Spencer’s evaluation of the heat island effect.
It shows that the urban heat island effect has skewed reported temperatures higher than where population density is low. Areas with low population density are representative of the vast majority of land surface areas.
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Today’s temperatures are not the highest, or second highest, on record: Not for the past one-hundred-fifty years, or for the past 10,0000 years.
The first organisms to “breathe” oxygen—or at least use it—appeared 3.1 billion years ago, according to a new genetic analysis of dozens of families of microbes. The find is surprising because the Great Oxidation Event, which filled Earth’s atmosphere with the precious gas, didn’t occur until some 500 million years later.
“I was pretty thrilled to see this paper,” says Patrick Shih, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California (UC), Davis. The advent of proteins that can use oxygen, Shih and others say, marks a key step in the emergence of aerobic microbes, which are those able to harness oxygen. “The transition from a world that was mostly anaerobic to one that was mostly aerobic was one of the major innovations in life,” says Tim Lyons, a biogeochemist at UC Riverside.
Scientists broadly agree that Earth’s early atmosphere and oceans were all but devoid of oxygen gas. But there are signs that there was some oxygen around. Geochemists, for example, have found mineral deposits dated to about 3 billion years ago that they argue could only have formed in the presence of oxygen. And some evidence suggests cyanobacteria, the earliest photosynthetic organisms to release oxygen gas as a waste product—although not use it—may have arisen as early as 3.5 billion years ago.
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La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
