All posts tagged: climate

Former world leaders seek $25bn levy on oil states’ revenues to pay for climate damage | Cop28

Published by Sam

The bumper revenues of oil-producing states should be subject to a $25bn levy to help pay for the impact of climate disasters on the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people, a group of former world leaders and leading economists has said. Seventy international figures led by the former UK prime minister Gordon Brown signed a letter calling for the measure before a crucial UN climate summit, Cop28, that begins in Dubai on Thursday. The signatories include 25 former prime ministers or presidents. Such a levy would shave off only a small fraction of the bonanza that oil-producing countries have made in recent years, and would help to fill a fund for the “loss and damage” to poor countries afflicted by the impacts of the climate crisis. Brown told the Guardian: “The deadlock on climate finance has to be broken if Cop28 is to succeed. After more than a decade of broken promises, a $25bn oil and gas levy paid by the petrol states and proposed by the UAE as chair of Cop would kickstart finance …

Stones inside fish ears mark time like tree rings – and now they’re helping us learn about climate change

Published by skeptic

As a marine biologist, I’ve always found it fascinating to learn about how animals adapt to their habitat. But climate change has made it more important than ever – wild animals’ futures may depend on how much we understand about them. Fish have a kind of stone in their ear that scientists can read like tree rings. My team’s new research found a way to decode the chemicals in these stones to measure how much energy they used when alive. What we learned could help bluefin tuna survive the climate crisis. There is still so much we don’t know about how animals respond when their habitat suddenly changes. Temperature is one of the most important puzzle pieces, as it affects the rates of the chemical reactions that define life. For animals, rising temperatures act like inflation. Rising prices mean housing and food take up more of our budget, leaving less money for luxuries. More heat means more of an animal’s bodily resources, like food and oxygen, are needed to fuel basic functions, like breathing and …

China’s coal addiction puts spotlight on its climate ambitions before Cop28 | China

Published by Sam

China’s addiction to building new coal-fired power plants is becoming increasingly entrenched, even as the country is on track to reach peak CO2 emissions before its 2030 target. As climate officials from around the world prepare to meet in the United Arab Emirates for Cop28, many are hoping that the recent joint climate agreement between the US and China, released days before Joe Biden and Xi Jinping met in California, can lay the groundwork for positive commitments at the UN’s climate conference. The last major breakthrough involving China at Cop was at Cop26 in Glasgow, in 2021. At that conference, China pledged CO2 emissions would peak by 2030. Xi said that China would “strictly control coal-fired power generation projects”. But 2021 was also the year in which severe power outages blighted many parts of China, leading to rationing, closed factories and cold homes as local authorities struggled to cope with sudden shortages of energy. In 2022, further energy crunches in south-west China underlined the importance of stable energy supplies to Chinese officials. That has put …

Happy, faithful and tied to nature: life adapting to the climate crisis – photo essay | Fiji

Published by Sam

When Poiongo Lisati returned to her home of Kioa after decades away, she welcomed the shift in the pace of life. The 58-year-old left the busyness of Fiji’s capital Suva for the island of about 400 people, who live off the land they are deeply connected to. But some changes she noticed were stark. “When I left the island, a good part of the beach was there,” Lisati says. “But when I came back after 40 years … around six metres or more had been washed away.” Lisati saw other changes: king tides now swept to the flats of the island and the water reached closer to the villages. Coconut and pandanus plants, relied on for food and medicine, no longer grew on the beachfront. Months that were once hot and dry had become colder and windier. Above: Kioa island, Fiji, at sunrise.Below: A resident of Kioa strips the thorny edges from the fronds of pandanus palms. It is one of many steps in the process of preparing the fronds to be woven into traditional …

EU climate chief: China must help fund rescue of poorer nations hit by disaster | Cop28

Published by Sam

China and other big developing nations must pay into a fund to rescue poor countries stricken by the climate disaster, the EU’s climate chief has said as world leaders prepare to gather in Dubai for a crucial climate summit. Wopke Hoekstra, EU commissioner for climate action, said there was no longer any reason to exclude big emerging economies with high greenhouse gas emissions such as China and petrostates in the Gulf from the obligation to provide aid to the poorest and most vulnerable countries. “We need so much more money that we need basically everyone with the ability to pay to chip in,” Hoekstra said to a small group of journalists, including the Observer. “Climate financing, climate action, will take significantly more money. I’m not talking about 20% or 30% more – incremental amounts – but factors more in the years to come. We need private sector money and we need a lot more public sector money.” The question of finance for poor countries will take centre stage at Cop28, a fortnight-long summit of world …

The climate emergency really is a new type of crisis – consider the ‘triple inequality’ at the heart of it | Adam Tooze

Published by Sam

Stare at a climate map of the world that we expect to inhabit 50 years from now and you see a band of extreme heat encircling the planet’s midriff. Climate modelling from 2020 suggests that within half a century about 30% of the world’s projected population – unless they are forced to move – will live in places with an average temperature above 29C. This is unbearably hot. Currently, no more than 1% of Earth’s land surface is this hot, and those are mainly uninhabited parts of the Sahara. The scenario is as dramatic as it is because the regions of the world affected most severely by global heating – above all, sub-Saharan Africa – are those expected to experience the most rapid population growth in coming decades. But despite this population growth, they are also the regions that, on current trends, will contribute least to the emissions that drive the climate disaster. So extreme is inequality that the lowest-earning 50% of the world population – 4 billion people – account for as little as …

Singapore-based Climate Alpha analyzes the impact of climate change on real estate

Published by skeptic

Founded by an expert on geography and globalization, Climate Alpha’s AI-based platform helps real estate owners and investors analyze the impact of climate change on their portfolios. The Singapore-based startup announced today it has raised $5 million in seed funding led by Jungle Ventures through its new First Cheque@Jungle program for second-time founders and operators with a lot of experience. Climate Alpha’s customers include institutional investors like Oaktree Capital and BentallGreenOak, and American homebuilder Lennar Corporation. The platform uses Geographic Information System (GIS) data and economic modeling to help real estate owners understand the impact climate change will have on their property. It also uses public and private data streams and proprietary machine learning algorithms to generate forecasts of climate change’s financial impact. Before founding Climate Alpha, founder Parag Khanna wrote a book called “Move: Where People are Going for a Better Future,” that looks at how climate change, geopolitical upheaval and tech are influencing where people live. While working on the book, Khanna and his brother also started helping their parents look for climate-resilient …

UK to build new satellite to monitor climate crisis and natural disasters | Space

Published by Sam

The UK will help fund and build a new spacecraft that will help scientists monitor the climate crisis and natural disasters. The new pathfinder satellite will be funded with £3m from the UK Space Agency, joining Spain and Portugal in the €80m (£70m) Atlantic Constellation project. Co-funding will be provided by Open Cosmos, based on the Harwell campus in Oxfordshire. The project is developing a group of satellites to monitor the Earth and it is hoped it will provide “valuable and regularly updated data” to help detect, monitor and reduce the risk of natural disasters. Andrew Griffith, a minister in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, said: “Earth observation will play an absolutely vital role in tackling global challenges like climate change and disaster relief, providing the data we need at speed, while supporting key UK industries like agriculture and energy. “By working with Open Cosmos on a new satellite and supporting our Atlantic partners, Spain and Portugal, we can harness space tech for our shared goals, while creating new skills opportunities and jobs …

2023 Cements Its Place in the History of Climate Change

Published by skeptic

We all just lived through our first 2-degree Celsius day November 20, 2023, 6:25 PM ET On Friday, November 17, 2023, the Earth appeared to have crossed a threshold into new climatic territory. That day was the first that the average air temperature near the surface of the Earth was 2 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial levels. Saturday was the second. The planet has been this hot before, but never in the era relevant to modern humanity.  For those two days, we were the furthest we have ever been from the average climate of 1850–1900, the time just before humans began industrializing in earnest and adding large quantities of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. We are now a large margin away from the climate in which nearly all of human history has played out. The news of the 2-degree Celsius days came first from Samantha Burgess, the deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, which published the results from a model that uses observations to estimate global climate conditions in real time. The numbers …