Cataloguing the Sixth Mass Extinction Part IV
In my absence the climate change bad news cycle has accelerated as quickly as warming and greenhouse gas emissions have. Another survey of recent of developments is warranted.
The aftermath of Hurricane Nicole in Daytona Beach, Florida
Cataloguing the Sixth Mass Extinction Part I
Cataloguing the Sixth Mass Extinction Part II
Cataloguing the Sixth Mass Extinction Part III
IEEFA’s report said that although carbon capture and storage is a 50-year-old technology, its results have been varied. Most CCS projects have since reused captured gas by pumping it into dwindling oil fields to help squeeze out the last drops, it pointed out.
This “enhanced oil recovery” (EOS) accounts for about 73% of the CO2 captured globally each year, in recent years, according to the report. Roughly 28m tonnes out of the 39m tonnes captured globally, according to its estimates, is reinjected and sequestered in oil fields to push more oil out of the ground.
“EOR itself leads to CO2 emissions both directly and indirectly,” the report said. “The direct impact is the emissions from the fuel used to compress and pump CO2 deep into the ground. The indirect impact is the emissions from burning the hydrocarbons that could now have come out without EOR.”
A further challenge is finding suitable storage sites for carbon sequestration, where the gas will not merely be used to push out more oil. According to the report, trapped CO2 will need monitoring for centuries to ensure it does not leak into the atmosphere – raising the risk of liability being handed over to the public, years after private interests have extracted their profits from the enterprise.
The risk is that CCS technology will be used to extend the life of fossil fuel infrastructure long past the cut off point for maintaining atmospheric carbon at less than catastrophic levels, the report suggested.
The Egyptian communities and organisations most affected by environmental pollution and rising temperatures will be nowhere to be found in Sharm el-Sheikh. There will be no toxic tours, or lively counter-summits, where locals get to school international delegates about the truth behind their government’s PR. Organising events like this would land Egyptians in prison for spreading “false news” or for violating the protest ban.
International delegates can’t even read up much on current pollution and environmental despoliation in Egypt in academic or NGO reports because of a draconian 2019 law that requires researchers to get government permission before releasing information considered “political”. (The whole country is gagged, and hundreds of websites are blocked, including the indispensable and perennially harassed Mada Masr.) Human Rights Watch reports that groups have been forced to rein in and scale back their research under these new constraints, and “one prominent Egyptian environmental group disbanded its research unit because it became impossible to work in the field”. Tellingly, not a single one of the environmentalists who spoke to Human Rights Watch about censorship and repression was willing to use their real name because reprisals are so severe.
Arefin, who conducted extensive research on waste and flooding in Egyptian cities before this latest round of censorious laws, told me that he and other critical academics and journalists “are no longer able to do that work. Egypt’s environmental harms now happen in the dark.” And those who break the rules and try to turn on the lights end up in dark cells – or worse.
Set out below are the carefully documented details of this appalling and terracidal failure in all key areas of greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution.
(1). Coal use is at a record level. There has been no decrease from the present peak global coal use. Global coal use in terms of energy output totalled 94.91 exajoules in 1998, then rose steadily to 158.46 exajoules in 2011, and has thence has remained at roughly this level (161.1 exajoules in 2021)…
(2). Oil use is increasing. Daily oil use in “millions of barrels of oil per day” was 74.106 (1998), grew to 97.747 (2019), and decreased to 88.746 due to the Covid-19 Pandemic (2020), but has rebounded, increasing to 94.088 (2021)…
(3). Natural gas production is increasing. Natural gas production has steadily increased in “billion cubic metres” from 2,100 (1990) to 4,200 (2021) with small downward blips in 2009 (the Global Financial Crisis) and 2020 (the Covid-19 Pandemic).
(4). Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is increasing. Global atmospheric CO2 increased from 338 ppm (parts per million) in 1980 to 416 ppm in 2022…
(5). Atmospheric CO2 equivalent (CO2-e) is increasing. The atmospheric CO2 equivalent (CO2-e, CO2-equ, CO2-equivalent) including other greenhouse gases (excepting water, H2O) is steadily increasing…
(6). Atmospheric methane (CH4) is increasing. Global atmospheric CH4 increased from 1.64 ppm in 1984 to 1.77 ppm in 2000, remained at 1.77 ppm until 2006 (possibly due to decreased swamp methanogenesis), and has thence increased at an ever-increasing rate to the 1.91 ppm in 2022…
(7). Atmospheric nitrous oxide (N2O) is increasing. Global atmospheric N2O increased from 0.315 ppm in 2018 to 0.336 ppm in 2022…
(8). Global crude steel production is increasing. World crude steel production rose steadily from 1,650 million metric tons (Mt) in 2012 to 1,951 Mt in 2021...
(9). Global annual usable iron ore production is increasing. Global annual usable iron ore production increased from 1,830 Mt (2006) to 2,200 Mt (2009), then fell to 1,870 Mt (2016), and then subsequently rose steadily to 2,600 Mt in 2021.
(10). Global cement production is increasing. Global cement production has steadily risen from 1.39 billion tons (1995) to 4.4 billion tons (2021), and is increasing…
(11). World cattle numbers are slightly increasing. The number of cattle worldwide slightly increased from 1001.72 million (2012) to 1009.69 million (2022)…
(12). Tropical deforestation remains huge in the 21st century. Decadal world deforestation has decreased 3-fold since the 1980s but levelled out at an appalling 50 Mha per decade in the 2000s and 2010s…
Regarding deforestation, some very bad news from one of the world’s largest rainforests:
“If oil exploitation takes place in these areas, we must expect a global climate catastrophe, and we will all just have to watch helplessly,” said Irene Wabiwa, who oversees the Congo Basin forest campaign for Greenpeace in Kinshasa.
Congo’s about-face in allowing new oil drilling in environmentally sensitive areas comes eight months after its president, Félix Tshisekedi, stood alongside world leaders at the global climate summit in Glasgow and endorsed a 10-year agreement to protect its rainforest, part of the vast Congo Basin, which is second in size only to the Amazon.
The deal included international pledges of $500 million for Congo, one of the world’s poorest nations, over the first five years.
But since then, the world’s immediate priorities have shifted.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent oil prices soaring and led to U.S. and British bans on Russian energy and, last week, a call to ration natural gas in Europe.
At the same time, Norway, a leading advocate of saving forests, is increasing oil production with plans for more offshore drilling. And President Biden, who pledged early in his term to wean the world from fossil fuels, traveled to Saudi Arabia recently where he raised the need for more oil production. Back home, Mr. Biden’s ambitious domestic climate agenda is largely doomed.
The devastating destruction that's happening across the Amazon might be what comes to your mind first when thinking about deforestation – but it's by no means the only place where dwindling forests are a worry, as a new study highlights.
It's the first study to comprehensively examine the amount of forest lost to intensive industrial mining activities in the tropics, and it's not pretty. Some 3,264 square kilometers (1,260 square miles) of tropical forest was lost due to mining between 2000 and 2019, the researchers found – greater than the area of Yosemite National Park.
Satellite data showed four-fifths of this deforestation happened in just four countries: Indonesia, Brazil, Ghana, and Suriname. Indonesia was at the top of the table, solely responsible for 58.2 percent of the recorded tropical deforestation directly caused by the expansion of industrial mines.
"There is a broad range of environmental damage caused by mining operations on top of deforestation, including destruction of ecosystems, loss of biodiversity, disruption of water sources, the production of hazardous waste and pollution," says Stefan Giljum, an associate professor at the Institute for Ecological Economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business in Austria.
"Government permitting should take all of this into account: an industrial mine can easily disrupt both landscapes and ecosystems. Industrial mining remains a hidden weakness in their strategies to minimize environmental impacts."
The study data covered a total of 26 different countries, accounting for 76.7 percent of the total mining-related tropical deforestation that happened between 2000 and 2019. These mining activities covered coal, gold, iron ore and bauxite extraction.
Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere this year reached 421 parts per million, the highest in human history, and the planet just experienced one of its hottest summers on record.
But climate change isn’t the only issue on everyone’s minds: Inflation, conflict, food shortages, supply chain snarls, rising energy prices, and still, the Covid-19 pandemic are also present concerns, even if they aren’t specifically on the agenda. That’s likely to impair the push for more aggressive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
The United States is awaiting the outcome of midterm elections that could speed up or stall its climate change efforts. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis has led countries like Germany to restart coal power plants, while fuel shortages are driving up demand for more mining and drilling for fossil fuels. Inflation worries have tempered efforts to deploy clean energy in Canada, while China approved more than 15 gigawatts in new coal-fired power generation. Driving and flying are also up compared to 2021.
As a result, one of the targets of the Paris climate agreement — keeping global average temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels this century — is drifting even further out of reach, and time is running out. Meeting this target would require global greenhouse gas emissions to fall by roughly half from current levels by 2030, but they are poised to rise once again this year.
This 1.5 degree target is now looking unlikely, even by doggedly optimistic perspectives. As it becomes more implausible a goal, the media has shifted from recognizing it as an important point of no return to priming the population to prepare for greater, more disastrous rises and the attendant severity of natural disasters:
A report released Wednesday by the UN Environment Programme suggests it’s time we “learn to live with fire” and adapt to the uptick in the frequency and severity of wildfires that will inevitably put more lives and economies in harm’s way.
Even with the most ambitious efforts to slash heat-trapping emissions, the report shows that those near-term consequences are locked in.
Although the situation is dire and that eliminating wildfire risks is impossible, communities can still reduce their risk and exposure, said Andrew Sullivan, principal research officer with Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization and editor of the report.
“Uncontrollable and devastating wildfires are becoming an expected part of the seasonal calendars in many parts of the world,” Sullivan said at a Monday news conference. “Where wildfires have historically occurred, they may increase; however, where wildfires have not historically occurred, they may become more common.”
Up to one-sixth of the tree species found in the continental United States face possible extinction, yet only a handful enjoy federal protection under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, a new study finds.
The study, which focused on 881 tree species native to the continental United States, drew on field data indicating where trees occur and scientific literature detailing threats they face. (Hawaii has a vastly different flora that’s being assessed separately.) Researchers evaluated how endangered each tree is according to criteria developed by the organizations NatureServe and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). As a result of invasive insects, pathogens, climate change, development, and other threats, the team found, 11% to 16% of those trees—as many as 135 species—face possible extinction.
“That’s a lot of species,” says Murphy Westwood, vice president of science and conservation at the Morton Arboretum and lead author of the study, which was published this week in the journal Plants People Planet.
The number is consistent with extinction estimates for other groups of organisms, says Noah Greenwald, endangered species director for the Tucson, Arizona–based Center for Biological Diversity, who was not involved in the research. Earlier this year, for example, researchers reported that one in five of the world’s reptiles is threatened.
Environmental groups are calling on the White House to take more concrete steps to shield the nation’s most important forests — the vast majority of which are on federal lands, and most of which have no formal protection.
“It’s the large trees — the oldest trees in the forest — that are our best carbon reservoirs,” forest scientist Dominick DellaSala of advocacy group Wild Heritage told reporters on Tuesday.
About 35 percent of U.S. forestland is composed of these forests, principally on federal land, according to a study DellaSala co-authored in September, published in Frontiers.
Yet only a quarter of those most valuable forests are under explicit protection, the authors found — and if logged over the next decade, would result in a significant uptick in U.S. emissions.
That leaves the U.S. government with a choice, he added. “Do we protect primary forests as carbon reservoirs, or do we turn them into carbon sources — treating the atmosphere as a dumping ground for carbon dioxide?”
Even assuming we cease deforestation, the worldwide planting of trees to make up the sequestration deficit is an unworkable plan:
Countries’ climate pledges rely on “unrealistic” and “extensive” amounts of land for carbon removal projects like tree planting schemes, a new report from the University of Melbourne said.
A landmass larger than the entire United States, about 1.2 billion hectares, would be needed for countries to deliver on those plans, which largely ignore who lives on and manages the lands at issue, including the rights of Indigenous peoples and other land-based communities living in rural areas that rely on land for survival and culture.
“Countries are loading up on land pledges to avoid the hard work of steeply reducing emissions from fossil fuels, decarbonizing food systems and stopping the destruction of forests and other ecosystems,” said Kate Dooley, the lead author of the so-called Land Gap Report and a researcher at the University of Melbourne.
Dooley and her co-authors, more than 20 researchers from around the world, reviewed governmental climate plans and other official statements from 166 countries and the European Union as well as public land use data to determine the total land area needed for planned carbon removal and ecosystem restoration projects.
About 65 percent of the 1.2 billion hectares of land identified in the report would come from land currently being used for other purposes, such as agriculture, while the remainder would consist of degraded land identified for ecosystem restoration projects, such as the African “Great Green Wall” project aimed at planting trees, grasslands and plants across the continent’s Sahel region.
Agriculture is already set to be strained due to climate-exacerbated droughts, floods, heatwaves, etc.:
I’ve been researching bee health for over 10 years, with a focus on honey bees. In 2021, I began hearing for the first time from beekeepers about how extreme drought and rainfall were affecting bee colony health.
Drought conditions in the western U.S. in 2021 dried up bee forage – the floral nectar and pollen that bees need to produce honey and stay healthy. And extreme rain in the Northeast limited the hours that bees could fly for forage.
In both cases, managed colonies – hives that humans keep for honey production or commercial pollination – were starving. Beekeepers had to feed their bees more supplements of sugar water and pollen than they usually would to keep their colonies alive. Some beekeepers who had been in business for decades shared that they lost 50% to 70% of their colonies over the winter of 2021-2022.
These weather conditions likely also affected wild and native bees. And unlike managed colonies, these important species did not receive supplements to buffer them through harsh conditions.
Two studies that investigated calving — the term that describes the breaking off of chunks of ice from the edge of a glacier — found that the crumbling ice in Antarctica is actually double that of previous estimates and details how the continent is changing. The two studies were led by researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California and reveal what NASA says is “unexpected” new data about how the Antarctic Ice Sheet has been losing mass in recent decades.
The first study, published in Nature and titled Antarctic calving loss rivals ice-shelf thinning, maps how iceberg calving has changed the coastline of the polar continent over the last 25 years.
“Antarctica’s ice shelves help to control the flow of glacial ice as it drains into the ocean, meaning that the rate of global sea-level rise is subject to the structural integrity of these fragile, floating extensions of the ice sheet,” the researchers write.
“Until now, data limitations have made it difficult to monitor the growth and retreat cycles of ice shelves on a large scale, and the full impact of recent calving-front changes on ice-shelf buttressing has not been understood.”
The researchers combined data from multiple optical and radar satellite sensors and show that from 1997 to 2021, Antarctica experienced a net loss of 36,701 square kilometers (1.9%) of ice-shelf area that they say cannot be fully regained before the next series of major calving events.
The past eight years were the eight hottest ever recorded, a new UN report has found, indicating the world is now deep into the climate crisis. The internationally agreed 1.5C limit for global heating is now “barely within reach”, it said.
The report, by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO), sets out how record high greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are driving sea level and ice melting to new highs and supercharging extreme weather from Pakistan to Puerto Rico.
The stark assessment was published on the opening day of the UN’s Cop27 climate summit in Egypt and as the UN secretary-general warned that “our planet is on course to reach tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible”.
The WMO estimates that the global average temperature in 2022 will be about 1.15C above the pre-industrial average (1850-1900), meaning every year since 2016 has been one of the warmest on record.
For the past two years, the natural La Niña climate phenomenon has actually kept global temperatures lower than they would otherwise have been. The inevitable switch back to El Niño conditions will see temperatures surge even higher in future, on top of global heating.
The planet’s temperature is increasing unevenly—oceans and the poles are warming at a much higher rate than elsewhere, driving the kind of sea level rise which exacerbates the impact of even relatively weak storms:
CNN: “And behind it all, sea level in this part of Florida has risen more than a foot in the past 100 years, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and most of that rise has occurred in the past three decades.” This rate of sea level rise has doubled since 1993; “The past two and a half years alone account for 10% of the overall rise in sea level since satellite measurements started nearly 30 years ago.”
Their estimates are part a new global compendium of emissions released on Wednesday by Climate TRACE, a nonprofit coalition of environmental groups, technology companies and academic scientists. By using software to scour data from satellites and other sources, Climate TRACE says it can project emissions not just for whole countries and industries, but for individual polluting facilities. It catalogs steel and cement factories, power plants, oil and gas fields, cargo ships, cattle feedlots — 72,612 emitters and counting, a hyperlocal atlas of the human activities that are altering the planet’s chemistry…
Climate TRACE says it can produce emissions estimates that are more up-to-date than existing ones, and that rely less on information reported by governments about their own countries’ emissions. It does this largely by mining satellite imagery and other data to get a more precise measure of individual facilities’ production activity, then estimating their emissions.
With steel plants, for instance, the group uses satellite measurements of the heat from blast furnaces to estimate steel output. (The owner of the steel plant in China, Shagang Group, declined to comment.) For power stations, Climate TRACE uses satellite images of the vapor wafting from their chimneys to predict electricity generation.
The group’s analysis suggests that the oil and gas industry emits far more than countries have previously reported, in part because of underestimated emissions from flaring, or the burning of unwanted methane, and the large gas leaks known as “super-emitter events.” In other sectors, though, Climate TRACE’s estimates broadly align with existing ones, said one of the group’s researchers, Gavin McCormick.
Stunningly, these companies are underreporting their emissions by a factor of three. Further:
Australia’s largest plastic bag recycling program has collapsed amid revelations hundreds of millions of bags and other soft plastic items dropped off by customers at Coles and Woolworths are being secretly stockpiled in warehouses and not recycled.
Instead of being taken to companies that use the plastic to make other items, REDcycle has been transporting the plastic to warehouses for long-term storage in what some experts consider a potential environmental and fire safety risk.
The Melbourne-based company, which claims to collect up to 5 million plastic items a day from public drop-off points at nearly 2000 supermarkets across the country, did not publicly announce the suspension of the recycling component of its program, and has for months continued collecting large volumes of soft plastics including shopping bags, pet food bags, ice cream wrappers, bubble wrap and frozen food packaging.
As the living world accelerates its freefall into oblivion, our token efforts prove unequal to the task of ensuring a livable world for future generations. Bad news will continue to pile up, always with a baffling descriptor such as “sooner than expected” or “worse than anticipated” attached. We will leave off with one of the more recent examples of this phenomenon:
More and more scientists are now admitting publicly that they are scared by the recent climate extremes, such as the floods in Pakistan and west Africa, the droughts and heatwaves in Europe and east Africa, and the rampant ice melt at the poles.
That is not because an increase in extremes was not predicted. It was always high on the list of concerns alongside longer-term issues such as sea level rise. It is the suddenness and ferocity of recent events that is alarming researchers, combined with the ill-defined threat of tipping points, by which aspects of heating would become unstoppable.
Climate computer models have typically projected a fairly consistent but smooth rise in temperatures. But recently the climate seems to have gone haywire.
The heat phenomenon in the Canadian town of Lytton, for instance, produced a “dome” of trapped heat that cranked up the temperature to 49.6C. Wildfires raged and the town was razed. I broke the news to one of the Royal Society’s leading members, Prof Sir Brian Hoskins, but at first he did not believe me. Then he said: “Oh, my god, that’s really scary.”
The high temperature itself was shocking enough but amazingly it topped the previous record by five degrees, when records are normally beaten by just a few tenths of a degree. Hoskins told me later: “Climate models have generally projected very smooth changes, whereas the real world is suffering rapid regional changes. The rise in globally averaged temperature is a useful metric of how far climate change has got, but it doesn’t bring home the message of the likely local and regional impact.
“So, land warms more than oceans; higher latitudes warm more than low latitudes, especially in winter; the warming is non-uniform which means weather changes; air that is 6C warmer can hold 50% more water and generally does, so rain storms are that much stronger; sea level rise means storm surges are more devastating.
“I have been surprised and alarmed at the record temperatures and floods we have seen in many places around the world – with only 1.1C warming [globally].”