Archives par mot-clé : Asia

climate-debate

SE Asian Sea Levels Were 3-4 Meters Higher Than Today 7-4 Thousand Years Ago

by K. Richard, Dec 12, 2023 in NoTricksZone

Comprehensive data analysis shows relative sea levels were anywhere from 1 to 7 meters (~3.9 m) higher than present throughout the Mid-Holocene at 15 of 16 assessed sites across Southeast Asia.

A new study (Li et al., 2023) compiles highstand records from sites spanning Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Borneo, Sunda Shelf, Makassar Strait…and indicates that throughout southeast Asia there was a “peak RSL [relative sea level] highstand of ~3.9 ±1.1 m at ~6 ka BP or later.”

Of the 16 locations assessed, just 1 did not indicate sea levels were higher than present back when CO2 levels were alleged to be 265 ppm.

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energy and fields

Asia Building Hundreds Of Coal Power Plants

by P. Homewood, Oct 29, 2021 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

UDANGUDI, India/TOKYO, Oct 29 (Reuters) – On the coastline near India’s southern tip, workers toil on a pier carrying a conveyor belt that cuts a mile into the Indian Ocean where the azure waters are deep enough for ships to berth and unload huge cargoes of coal.

The belt will carry millions of tonnes of coal each year to a giant power plant several kilometres inland that will burn the fuel for at least 30 years to generate power for the more than 70 million people that live in India’s Tamil Nadu state.

The Udangudi plant is one of nearly 200 coal-fired power stations under construction in Asia, including 95 in China, 28 in India and 23 in Indonesia, according to data from U.S. nonprofit Global Energy Monitor (GEM).

This new fleet will produce planet-warming emissions for decades and is a measure of the challenge world leaders face when they meet for climate talks in Glasgow, where they hope to sound the death knell for coal as a source of power.

Coal use is one of the many issues dividing industrialised and developing countries as they seek to tackle climate change.

Many industrialised countries have been shutting down coal plants for years to reduce emissions. The United States alone has retired 301 plants since 2000.

But in Asia, home to 60% of the world’s population and about half of global manufacturing, coal’s use is growing rather than shrinking as rapidly developing countries seek to meet booming demand for power.

More than 90% of the 195 coal plants being built around the world are in Asia, according to data from GEM.

Tamil Nadu is India’s second-most industrialised state and is one of the country’s top renewable energy producers. But it is also building the most coal-fired plants in the country. read more

“We cannot depend on just solar and wind,” a senior official at Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corp told Reuters.

“You can have the cake of coal and an icing of solar,” he said, declining to be named as he was not authorised to speak to media.

Full story here.

 

climate-debate

China, India And 85 Nations Snub U.N. Deadline To Update CO2-Reduction Targets

by Dr. B. Peiser, Aug  2, 2021 in GWPF/ClimateChangeDispatch

In a warning shot across the bows of Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, China, India, and 85 other nations have decided to ignore a UN deadline to submit its pledges for cutting CO2 emissions in time for the UN climate summit in Glasgow later this year.

To underscore their opposition to Joe Biden’s and Boris Johnson’s Net Zero agenda, India has snubbed the UK’s climate meeting last week while China is rolling back its climate policies in an attempt to prop up its economy.

Meanwhile, South Africa has demanded that developed countries should set a target of $750 billion a year to help poorer nations transition to renewable energy.

The latest demands and developments look increasingly like a farcical repeat of the fiasco of the Copenhagen climate summit (COP15) in 2009.

As seasoned COP observers remember, after two weeks of deadlocked negotiations in Denmark’s capital, the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (the so-called BRICS nations) took charge of the climate summit which was on the brink of disaster and drafted the final communique behind closed doors.

A humiliated US President Obama had to gatecrash the meeting while the entire EU was excluded from the meeting and the final statement.

In many ways, Copenhagen’s diplomatic and political fiasco was a historical watershed that marked the turning point when 500 years of Western dominance was symbolically terminated by China and India.

If Boris and Biden are not very careful, they may face a very similar situation in Glasgow. If push comes to shove there is a pretty good chance that China and India (together with a number of emerging nations) could take over a deadlocked COP yet again and draft an agreement that suits them and humiliates the US, UK, and the EU.

There is, of course, one shrewd game plan to avoid a Copenhagen-type fiasco: Boris Johnson could simply pull the plug on current summit plans, turn COP26 into a virtual conference, and blame Covid for the failure to achieve a breakthrough.

After all, Boris has developed a habit of kicking irreconcilable issues into the long grass … just saying.

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energy and fields

Five Asian countries account for 80% of new coal power investment

by J. Ambrose, One 30, 2021 in TheGuradian

Five Asian countries are jeopardising global climate ambitions by investing in 80% of the world’s planned new coal plants, according to a report.

Carbon Tracker, a financial thinktank, has found that China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam plan to build more than 600 coal power units, even though renewable energy is cheaper than most new coal plants.

The investments in one of the most environmentally damaging sources of energy could generate a total of 300 gigawatts of energy – enough to power the UK more than three times over – despite calls from climate experts at the UN for all new coal plants to be cancelled.

Catharina Hillenbrand von der Neyen, the author of the report, said: “These last bastions of coal power are swimming against the tide, when renewables offer a cheaper solution that supports global climate targets. Investors should steer clear of new coal projects, many of which are likely to generate negative returns from the outset.”

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energy and fields

Southeast Asia: Coal Demand To Double By 2040

by Charles the moderator, November 1, 2019 in WUWT

There’s just no stopping coal in Southeast Asia. Surging investments in wind and solar energy won’t be enough to shake the fuel’s dominance in the region for decades to come, according to the International Energy Agency.

 

Coal demand is expected to double to almost 400 million tons a year by 2040, the agency said in its Southeast Asia Energy Outlook published Wednesday. That’s 2.5% higher than its forecast from two years ago, even as renewable power capacity is seen more than tripling through 2040.

“Coal is rather resistant because it is affordable,” said Keisuke Sadamori, IEA’s director for energy markets and security. “It’s really hard for Southeast Asian countries to move away from affordable coal immediately.”

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energy and fields

Coal to remain ‘King’ in Southeast Asia

by David Middleton, October 4, 2019 in WUWT

‘Coal is still king’ in Southeast Asia even as countries work toward cleaner energy
PUBLISHED MON, SEP 30 2019
Huileng Tan

KEY POINTS

• Not only will coal continue to be the dominant fuel source in power generation in Southeast Asia, its use will grow and peak in 2027 before slowing, according to a Wood Mackenzie study.

• The Indonesian government has targeted generating 23% of electricity from renewable sources by 2025 — almost double the 12% now, but it will be “difficult to achieve because capacity expansion plans are still dominated by coal,” Moody’s analysts say.

• Global coal demand grew for a second straight year to reach 0.7% in 2018, International Energy Agency data shows.

Coal is still a dominant fuel in the rapidly growing economies of Southeast Asia, even amid a general global move toward cleaner energy sources, data from several recent reports show.

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Figure 1. Global coal consumption by region (million tonnes of oil equivalent per year). BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2019.

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climate-debate, energy and fields

In Coal We Trust: The Need For Coal Power In Asia

by Tilak Doshi, June 7, 2019 in Forbes

The reigning narrative of impending global environmental catastrophe dominates the airwaves and print media. Short of a drastic reduction in the use of fossil fuels, it is asserted, we are fast approaching the “end of days”. The demonization of fossils fuels in general, and coal in particular, has been wrought under pressure from special interests groups and organized lobbies of the climate-industrial complex where aspects of economic reality are caricatured or presented out of context. Complex trade-offs in energy policy are spun into tales of spurious simplicity, leading to misleading conclusions. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the debate over the role of coal-fueled power generation in Asia.

Opposition to the building of coal power plants in the poorer countries has been justified by environmental activists, banks and multilateral development agencies such as the World Bank in two key ways. The first revolves around the claim that climate change mitigation programs carry “co-benefits” for public health in developing countries. The second utilizes the assertion that renewable energy such as solar and wind power are effective substitutes for centralized grid electricity generated by fossil fuels.

Climate change policy does not help the poor

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climate-debate

A New Temperature Reconstruction From Central Asia Shows 432 Years Of No Warming, Recent Cooling By Kenneth Richard on 2. May 2019

by K. Richard, May 2, 2019 in NoTricksZone

Tree-ring evidence reveals recent cooling and glacier thickening in Central Asia as well as flat temperatures throughout the last 432 years.

Tree rings were the proxy used by Dr. Michael Mann to invent the orignal hockey stick graph.

Twenty years later, yet another reconstruction (1580 to 2012 AD) indicates modern warmth in Central Asia is not unusual in the context of the last 432 years.

In fact, there was a recent cooling period, in line with natural variability, that was accompanied by regional glacier mass gains.

Byambaa et al., 2019

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energy and fields, press and newspapers

IEA sees Southeast Asia oil demand growing until at least 2040

by Florence Tan, October 26, 2017 in Reuters

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Southeast Asian demand for oil will keep growing until at least 2040 as emerging nations there rely on the fossil fuel to transport their rapidly growing populations, ship goods and make plastics, the International Energy Agency said on Tuesday.

Oil usage in the region will expand to around 6.6 million barrels per day by 2040 from 4.7 million bpd now, with the number of road vehicles increasing by two-thirds to around 62 million, the agency said in a report. It did not make any forecasts beyond 2040.

climate-debate

A 500-Year Record of Sea Level from Goa, India

by N.-A. Mörner, June 2017, in J. Coastal Research

Fortunately, as revealed in a number of recent studies, proof of such an acceleration of sea level rise remains elusive (see the many reviews we have posted on this topic under the subheading of Sea Level here). The latest work to demonstrate that there is nothing unusual, unnatural or unprecedented about current rates of sea level rise comes from a paper written by sea level expert Nils-Axel Mörner (Mörner, 2017) and published in the Journal of Coastal Research.