Global Climate Change Science News

[Brian Peacock]

Wow! That's made me question the very basis of my existence!

[Brian Peacock]

[Svartalf]

COP sucks, it's useless, as the followup to cop 21 and the paris agreements shows

[Brian Peacock]

As was probably always going to be the case, vested interests have captured politics in order to continue profiteering from polluting. These people will kill us all to maintain share value, for all the good it'll do them.

[macdoc]

[Brian Peacock]

Polluter elite.

Richest 1% account for more carbon emissions than poorest 66%, report says

[macdoc]

This is climate science news?

[Brian Peacock]

Yep.

[Brian Peacock]

Revealed: the huge climate impact of the middle classes.

[macdoc]

It all helps...

'Cooling glass' blasts building heat into space
New coating can be applied to exterior surfaces to reduce AC use, fight climate change

Date:
November 13, 2023

Summary:
Researchers aiming to combat rising global temperatures have developed a new 'cooling glass' that can turn down the heat indoors without electricity by drawing on the cold depths of space. The new technology, a microporous glass coating, can lower the temperature of the material beneath it by 3.5 degrees Celsius at noon, and has the potential to reduce a mid-rise apartment building's yearly carbon emissions by 10 percent.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 192100.htm

[Brian Peacock]

A 10% across the board reduction in annual carbon emissions would be c.4bn tonnes at current levels. Not an insignificant number. With 250bn tonnes of the carbon budget remaining to hit the 50% chance of staying below 1.5°C by 2050, an across the board reduction in C02 emissions by 10% amounts to an overall temp reduction of around 0.024°C, at the current rate of global emissions. However, we're not talking an across the board reduction of 10% but the reduction of 10% from a very small number of buildings that have yet to be fitted with the glass composite. This is without factoring in the carbon footprint of the tech's production and deployment. With the current rate of carbon emissions sitting at around 40bn tones pa, and still rising, that gives us just 6 years to spend the remaining carbon budget. As interesting and useful as this tech could be I still think claiming it could be helpful is a wild overestimation of its potential impact - which is to say, it's not very helpful at all while pulluters continue to pollute at their current levels, or higher.

[JimC]

Brian, it's true that political change to add urgency to their fight against climate change is necessary, but it's also true that the development and implication of clever technology is vital. Here is an interesting, and even optimistic article from our ABC:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-22/ ... /103132904

One of the world's foremost energy modellers has forecast that temperature rises are set to be kept within 2 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels thanks to the rapidly advancing efficiency and affordability of clean technologies.

Rystad Energy, a Norway-based firm, has released a report casting an upbeat light on the world's progress towards decarbonisation, despite continuing increases in global emissions.

In the report, Rystad said disruptive technologies led by solar power were being developed at a pace that would "outcompete fossil fuels sufficiently fast to limit … emissions" and temperature rises.

Jarand Rystad, the company's chief executive, said temperatures were set to increase between 1.6C and 1.9C under those scenarios.

"In addition, new technologies for methane emission reduction are coming, representing an upside of up to 0.2 degree of avoided global warming," Mr Rystad said.

According to Rystad, a dozen technologies will collectively be the key to capping emissions by 2027 and then reducing them to ensure temperature rises are kept in check.

Chief among these technologies would be solar power, which Rystad said had rapidly become the "cheapest form of energy in history".

The firm said new solar installations needed to grow from 250 gigawatts a year to 1,300 gigawatts by the mid-2030s.

It noted that while "this sounds aggressive", there was already a staggering 1,200 gigawatts of solar manufacturing capacity under construction around the world – a figure almost 20 times bigger than the capacity of Australia's biggest power grid.

"The current landscape of solar energy … is a testament to the remarkable strides made in cost reduction and efficiency," Rystad said.

"The sector is already 29 per cent ahead of the tall order set under the 1.5 degrees Celsius scenario.

"This growth is characterised by an exponential increase in production capacity, with the cost per unit continuing to decrease as capacity doubles."

Besides solar, Rystad said there were also massive gains to be made in electrifying the transport fleet.

It noted that electric vehicles were so much more efficient than those powered by fossil fuels, they alone could lower total energy demand by 22 per cent by 2050.

"By electrifying cars according to a 1.6-degree scenario, losses in road transportation can be reduced by a staggering 63 per cent by 2050," the firm said.

[Brian Peacock]

I'm not anti tech, but we need to decarbonise and rapidly transform the economy in order to secure a habitable and socially stable world in which we could reap the benefits of future tech. There's no shortage of great ideas we could implement, but they'll amount to nowt if the polluters are effectively granted a licence to continue business as normal - as they are lobbying for, and indeed are continuing to do.

[JimC]

The thing is, Brian, that perhaps the capitalist system itself will undermine fossil fuel companies, as renewable energy technologies become more and more economically more efficient than them...

[Brian Peacock]

What the fossil lobby are chiefly concerned about when it comes to renewables is having their assets stranded by a shift in the energy economy. From extraction, to pipelines, to processing, transport and distribution, and onto retail, there's a huge amount of global infrastructure that, until recently, we've all been completely dependent on. Then there's the finance investment, treaties, and subsidies all that is built on, geared to returning trillions in profit annually.

All that would become redundant if the world shifted to renewables - indeed will become redundant anyway on a 3 degree heated planet, and so must become redundant through the processes of rapid managed decline that were outlined in the Paris Agreement.

The slower the pace of change the better the fossil sector like it. Add that to the sheer economic weight of the fossil sector, and how that translates in terms of political influence globally, and we have probably the most significant capital interests in human history not simply resisting the green energy transition, but actively seeking to undermine it. COP28 is their boldest ploy yet. They're not even pretending any more - they're capturing and controlling the systems which were specifically created with the idea of managing their decline.