July 2016 – The Climate Post

July 28, 2016

Pending Deal on Montreal Protocol Amendment Second Only to Paris Agreement

The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University

World climate leaders meeting in Vienna have laid the foundation for an amendment to the 1987 Montreal Protocol, the global treaty that phased out ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). The amendment would address climate-damaging hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), the refrigerant chemicals that replaced CFCs but that can trap heat in the atmosphere at levels a thousand times higher than carbon dioxide and that can “undo much of our progress in reducing other carbon emissions under the Paris Climate Agreement,” said Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy in a blog post.

Under the current draft of the agreement, expected to be concluded in October in Kigali, Rawanda, more affluent nations would virtually eliminate HFCs by the 2030s,whereas poorer nations would do so about a decade later.

McCarthy told Bloomberg BNA that the seriousness with which countries are taking the amendment owes in part to regulatory actions that the United States has taken under its Significant New Alternatives Policy program to drive the market for HFC alternatives.

“That’s what the SNAP program does,” McCarthy said. “So it has effectively driven domestic action that is putting the U.S. in a leadership position. We fully expect that with the actions we’ve already taken, that we’ll be able to meet the reductions that the international community will be embracing [under a Montreal Protocol amendment].”

An agreement to reduce HFC use would be the biggest single measure to curb climate change since governments adopted the Paris Agreement, thereby pledging to keep global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit that increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The HFC amendment can help avoid 0.5 degrees Celsius of warming by century’s end compared with business-as-usual growth, reports Climate Change News.

Speaking Friday at the conference of parties to the 1987 Montreal Protocol, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that the conference was as important a gathering as another he hosted on combatting the Islamic State. “What you are doing here right now,” he said, “is of equal importance, because it has the ability literally to save life on this planet.”

Climate Change and the U.S. Presidential Election

Last week, delegates to the Republican National Convention approved a party platform that downplayed use of renewable energy and rejected the Paris Agreement, a carbon tax, and other action on climate change. This week, delegates to the Democratic National Convention addressed climate change as a “real and urgent threat.”

In their party platform, Democrats described climate change as “too important to wait for climate deniers and defeatists in Congress to start listening to science” and said government officials must take any steps they can to reduce pollution.

“We believe the United States must lead in forging a robust global solution to the climate crisis,” the party platform states. “We are committed to a national mobilization, and to leading a global effort to mobilize nations to address this threat on a scale not seen since World War II. In the first 100 days of the next administration, the President will convene a summit of the world’s best engineers, climate scientists, policy experts, activists, and indigenous communities to chart a course to solve the climate crisis.”

In addition to calling for a tax code that creates incentives for renewable energy, the platform aims to generate half the country’s electricity from clean sources in the next decade.

Inside Climate News presents a chart illustrating just how differently the two parties view climate and energy issues.

Emissions from Commercial Jets Next Up for Regulation

The EPA on Monday proposed an “endangerment finding” under the Clean Air Act for greenhouse gas emissions from certain types of airplane engines.

The proposal—which finds that airplane engines contribute to pollution that endangers public health and contributes to climate change—parallels the 2009 endangerment finding for motor vehicles under another section of the Clean Air Act and follows on the heels of the International Civil Aviation Organization’s proposed regulations to cut carbon from aircraft.

“Addressing pollution from aircraft is an important element of U.S. efforts to address climate change,” said EPA Acting Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation Janet McCabe, noting that aircraft are the third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector.

No timetable was set for release of a rule regulating emissions from aircraft, but TheNew York Times reports that it could come in early January.

The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.

July 21, 2016

Survey, Party Platforms Reveal Deep Divide on Climate Change

In March, the Guardian issued an election-related call-out to online readers in the United States, asking them to identify the “one issue that affects your life you wish the presidential candidates were discussing more.” The results are in. Of the 1,385 respondents from all 50 states, one in five expressed discontent about lack of discussion of climate change, an issue described in vivid terms, such as “cataclysmic” and “slow-motion apocalypse.” Respondents expressed greatest concern about sea-level rise and decreasing food and water security.

“Climate change is the common denominator for us all regardless of gender, creed or political affiliation,” said Sarah Owen in a video response to the survey.

Between parties, there’s divide on the topic of climate change. Eleven House Republicans who are trying to change their party’s attitude about climate change and four of five Republican senators with a record of supporting action on it skipped this week’s GOP convention, where delegates approved a party platform that rejected the Paris Agreement, a carbon tax, and other action on climate change and that downplayed use of renewable energy.

“Climate change is far from this nation’s most pressing national security issue. This is the triumph of extremism over common sense, and Congress must stop it,” reads the platform.

In resisting aggressive climate action, the Republican platform stands in stark contrast to the draft Democratic Party platform, which calls for more regulations and laws to fight climate change.

Just how ambitious the Democratic Party will be in attempting to reduce carbon emissions—particularly, its stance on a carbon tax—remains to be seen. The full platform committee will hammer out details in Orlando on Friday and Saturday.

In an interview with ClimateWire, U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Jonathan Pershing suggested that the U.S. presidential election will have less impact on American efforts to combat climate change than a host of other factors ranging from new technologies and appliance standards to political support for renewable energy tax credits.

Pershing indicted that many U.S. steps to curb greenhouse gas emissions, including the Paris climate change deal negotiated under President Obama, will survive no matter who wins the White House.

“To me, there’s more likely to be continuity no matter who’s in office,” Pershing said.

Projecting Clean Power Plan Costs, Impacts

The Clean Power Plan aims to reduce carbon emissions from existing power plants. Assuming the rule survives judicial review and is implemented, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects a reduction of power sector emissions of about 35 percent by 2030.

Assuming the Clean Power plan is upheld, EIA projects emissions outcome and electricity generation mix for multiple state implementation strategies—that is, pursuit of mass-based emissions targets or rate-based emissions targets. EIA projects higher prices if emissions allocations under a mass-based regime are given to generators rather than load-serving entities, but “price effects are similar in the [mass] and CPP rate cases where the average electricity price from 2022 through 2030 in both cases is 2 percent higher than in the No CPP case, and 3 percent higher on average from 2030 through 2040,” analysts wrote.

As the EIA data suggests, utilities and other power producers are likely to be in different positions if the rule moves forward—some will benefit from the rule, and others will face costs to comply, which can lead to monetary transfers among different producers and consumers of electricity. A new policy brief by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions builds on this understanding by exploring the distributional impacts of choosing rate-based and mass-based approaches to comply with the Clean Power Plan. It finds that states adopting a mass-based compliance approach can use allowance allocation to largely control monetary transfers within a state. States adopting a rate-based compliance approach lack this direct control mechanism.

Each state’s system of electricity regulation and any changes in wholesale prices for electricity due to the policy in regional electricity markets will play a major role in determining how cost distribution and potential transfers play out, the authors said.

Study: Warm Water, Not Air, Accelerating Glacier Retreat on Western Antarctic Peninsula

A study published in the journal Science found that ocean warming, rather than atmospheric warming, is the primary cause of retreat of 90 percent of the 674 glaciers on the western Antarctic Peninsula. Because the peninsula’s glaciers are among the main contributors to sea-level rise, the study suggests that better understanding of how and why they’re changing will increase the accuracy of ice-loss predictions.

“Scientists know that ocean warming is affecting large glaciers elsewhere on the continent, but thought that atmospheric temperatures were the primary cause of all glacier changes on the Peninsula,” said lead author Alison Cook of Swansea University. “We now know that’s not the case.”

The scientists came to that conclusion after linking a distinct pattern of melt from north to south on the peninsula with a pattern of temperatures at mid-ocean depths that mirrored the melt. At the southern end of the western side of the peninsula, they found that a welling up of warm Circumpolar Deep Water wears away the fronts of glaciers. At the northern end of the peninsula, the fronts of glaciers are more stable because they terminate at colder waters that come from a different source.

“Our results are key for making predictions of ice loss in response to ocean warming in this region,” Cook said. “The Antarctic Peninsula is one of the largest current contributors to sea-level rise, and the glaciers here are highly sensitive, so [they] are key indicators of how the ice will respond to future changes.”

The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.

July 14, 2016

Study Quantifies Climate-Change-Related Deaths

A study in Environmental Research Letters suggests a fifth of premature deaths during a 2003 heatwave in Europe are linked to human-caused climate change.

“We are now able to put a number on the deaths caused by climate change in a heat wave,” said lead author Daniel Mitchell of the University of Oxford. “This has never been done before. Previous studies have attributed changes in heat waves to climate change, or related increased heat stress to human deaths, but none have combined the two.”

The study’s U.S. and U.K researchers calculated that, during a Europe-wide heat wave in summer 2003, 506 of 735 deaths in Paris and 64 of 315 deaths in London were due to a heat wave worsened by anthropogenic climate change. They reached that conclusion after putting the results of several thousand runs of two climate model simulations of the 2003 heat wave into a health impact assessment of death rates.

By comparing two scenarios—one reflecting the climate of 2003 without human influences and one reflecting all known climatic forces contributing to the 2003 heat wave—the researchers determined how climate change had affected that summer’s temperatures.

The study, reports Carbon Brief, analyzes a direct impact measure—mortality—rather than an indirect one—temperature. It links mortalities to climate and introduces another level of uncertainty, especially when long and reliable health datasets are not available for use in analyses.

Nevertheless, reports ClimateWire, the study demonstrates that losses can be directly linked to climate change and thus its framework can be used to assign costs of “loss and damage” and to improve planning and adaptation (subscription).

“It is often difficult to understand the implications of a planet that is one degree warmer than preindustrial levels in the global average, but we are now at the stage where we can identify the cost to our health of man-made global warming,” Mitchell said. “This research reveals that in two cities alone hundreds of deaths can be attributed to much higher temperatures resulting from human-induced climate change.”

Last week at a meeting held by the French government to study Paris Agreement-related actions to reduce health risks linked to climate change, the World Health Organization said that change is likely to kill 250,000 additional people each year by 2030—primarily through malaria, diarrhea, heat stress, and malnutrition. Children, women, older people, and the poor will be most affected.

Climate Change and Cloud Cover

A new study in the journal Nature suggests there’s evidence of climate change in satellite cloud records. By comparing satellite data from 1983 to 2009 to climate models, the authors found that the clouds forming most often are not low-lying reflective ones that cool the planet. Instead, cloud patterns were in line with what scientists would expect to see in climate models—an increase in greenhouse gases associated with human activity over the study period.

“Cloud changes most consistently predicted by global climate models are currently occurring in nature,” the authors write. “As cloud tops rise, their greenhouse effect becomes stronger.”

Clouds have both an Earth-cooling effect by reflecting solar radiation back to space and an Earth-warming effect by restricting the planet’s thermal infrared radiation.

“Even if there is no change in the overall coverage of clouds on the earth, clouds closer to the pole reflect less solar radiation because there is less solar radiation coming in closer to the pole,” said lead author Joel Norris of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

In Science magazine, Norris noted one caveat: during the study period, two major volcanic eruptions cooled and then warmed the climate, producing cloud patterns similar to those produced by greenhouse gas-related warming.

Draft Proposes Extension of California Cap-and-Trade Program

The California Air Resources Board released a draft plan to extend the state’s cap-and-trade program beyond 2020, when it is set to expire. The program—one of the first economy-wide programs put in place—aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by creating a fixed number of permits, called allowances, to emit a single ton; compliance entities and other market participants can buy and sell allowances, thereby enabling the market to determine the lowest-cost compliance path.

The draft plan calls to extend the program another decade and to reach emissions levels 40 percent below 1990 levels. It would include preliminary caps through 2050 “to signal the long-term trajectory of the program to inform investment decisions.”

No board vote is scheduled on the proposal until March 2017. A state appeals court is considering a challenge from the California Chamber of Commerce, which contends that the pollution-credit program is an illegal tax, not a fee.

The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.

July 7, 2016

Natural Fluctuations Responsible, in Part, for Antarctica Ice Growth

Natural fluctuations specifically related to the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) are responsible for the increased growth of Antarctic sea ice, according to a new study in the journal Nature Geoscience. A negative shift in the IPO has caused cooler-than-average sea surface temperatures in the Eastern Pacific, allowing Antarctic sea ice to expand since 2000.

“The climate we experience during any given decade is some combination of naturally occurring variability and the planet’s response to increasing greenhouse gases,” said National Center for Atmospheric Research scientist Gerald Meehl, lead author of the study. “It’s never all one or the other, but the combination, that is important to understand.”

But what’s new in the latest study, writes Chris Mooney in The Washington Post, “is the suggestion that this negative IPO phase had consequences that stretched all the way to the Southern Ocean waters surrounding Antarctica—and that this, in turn, explains why most climate models didn’t predict the observed growth of Antarctic sea ice.”

Study researchers suspect that the IPO began switching to a positive phase in 2014 and that ice in the region may shrink in the next decade.

Study Points to Human Influence on Changes in Earth’s Biggest Body of Warm Water

A study in Science Advances has provided the first quantitative attribution of human influences on and natural contributions to warming of the Indo-Pacific warm pool (IPWP), Earth’s largest region of warm sea surface temperatures and one “fundamental to global atmospheric circulation and the hydrological cycle.”

To “fingerprint” anthropogenic forcings and natural causes of substantial IPWP warming and expansion, researchers at Pohang University of Science and Technology and their international colleagues paired observations with multiple climate model simulations integrated with and without human influences. They found that the IPWP had warmed by 0.3 Celsius and increased in size by about a third over the last 60 years primarily due to an increase in human-made greenhouse gases.

About 12 to 18 percent of the warming has been due to natural variability in the ocean, but the remaining portion is due to the greenhouse gas increase, according to study co-author Seung-Ki Min of Pohang University in South Korea.

“We have more energy available from the hotter ocean,” said Min. “That means the atmosphere will be enhanced to transport more energy from the tropical ocean to the high latitude zone.”

The findings indicate that future ocean warming could increase storm activity over East Asia and strengthen monsoons over South Asia.

“This wasn’t entirely surprising. We’ve long suspected climate change to be behind the changes, but no one had yet proven it,” said Evan Weller, lead author, noting that what was surprising is that the western portion of the pool, near India, is expanding more than the eastern part in the Pacific. “We don’t really know why. We’ll try to figure that out next.”

Report: United States Is Oil Reserves Leader

The United States holds the largest share of the world’s oil reserves—264 billion barrels to Russia’s 256 billion and Saudi Arabia’s 212 billion, according to Rystad Energy, a Norwegian industry research group that tracks proved and probable reserves, discoveries and undiscovered fields. More than 50 percent of remaining oil reserves, it claims, are unconventional shale oil. Texas alone holds more than 60 billion barrels of shale oil.

On the basis of a three-year analysis of 60,000 fields worldwide, the group estimates global reserves to be 2,092 billion barrels—roughly 70 times the current production rate of some 30 billion barrels of crude oil per year.

“This data confirms that there is a relatively limited amount of recoverable oil left on the planet,” the report says. “With the global car-park possibly doubling from 1 billion to 2 billion cars over the next 30 years, it becomes very clear that oil alone cannot satisfy the growing need for individual transport.”

The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.