Feed aggregator

Schools in capital worst affected by air pollution are in most socially deprived areas with high levels of obesity, finds study

Tens of thousands of the poorest children in London are facing a cocktail of health risks including air pollution, obesity and poverty that will leave them with lifelong health problems, according to a new report.

The study found that schools in the capital worst affected by the UK’s air pollution crisis were also disproportionately poor, with high levels of obesity.

Continue reading...

The human-waste bomb recently found clogging up a London sewer has an unlikely admirer – a Scottish renewable energy company

For a 130-tonne mass of grease, bound as hard as concrete by thousands of tampons, wipes and used tissues, the Whitechapel fatberg is in surprisingly high demand.

Last week, the Museum of London announced it wants to display a chunk of the human-waste bomb, recently unearthed in east London, as a way “to raise questions about how we live today”. Now, a Scottish biodiesel company is taking a piece to turn into fuel.

Continue reading...

The ambitious goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C is still within reach, a study indicates.

Could the hefty price tag to keep Liddell open prevent it from ever happening?

Better data would reassure consumers that price changes are the result of real problems, such as weather or machinery failure, rather than market manipulation.

Claxton, Norfolk Though I admire – and fear – spiders, I love bumblebees. To see this one so enmeshed required an effort of will not to intervene

I saw them as I went to the bin. In the web of a female garden cross spider, a worker common carder bee hung upside down. The two were plainly engaged in combat and I crouched to observe the drama more closely.

Yet there were more emotions at play in this encounter than mere curiosity. For although I admire spiders, I absolutely love bumblebees. To see this insect so enmeshed and at risk of being eaten required an effort of my will not to intervene. In his gloriously funny 1950 book The Spider, John Crompton admitted that he freed bees from webs without further ado.

Continue reading...

Liddell coal generator visit reveals a work-force that wants it to close. Even betting agencies are punting on its closure.

In Tal Klein’s new novel, The Punch Escrow, humans have successfully tackled disease and climate change, but powerful corporations control everything.

Two new live graphs show renewable energy share and energy emissions in each state. Rooftop solar is lowering emissions significantly during the day.

Queensland's Western Downs Region continues large-scale solar boom, with approval of 300MW battery ready Beelbee PV farm.

The window for staving off the worst of climate change is wider than we thought, but still pretty narrow.

Redflow gets second major order within months for its zinc bromine batteries for application on remote, Pacific Island sites.

New data has revealed the latest ranking of Australia's top 10 solar postcodes, including three new entries from Victoria, and one each from WA and NSW.

Huge 6MW solar upgrade at Brisbane Airport will supply 18% of electricity needs and save around $1m a year on energy bills.

Increased power production with single-phase inverters and new three-phase inverters for cost-effective larger PV systems

The Australian's story linking excessive renewable energy subsidies to the Moree solar farm, a rich Saudi playboy and the singer Rihanna is very interesting. It is also hopelessly wrong (at least on the renewables bit).

A new ReachTEL poll, commissioned by The Australia Institute’s Climate and Energy Program, asked residents of the electorates of Hunter and Shortland about energy policy, including government investment in coal, renewables and the Liddell coal power station.

CBL Markets today announced it has signed an implementation agreement pursuant to which it will acquire a controlling interest in the Australian water exchange, H2OX Markets Limited.

The biggest and the smallest of the world's fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles are most at risk of dying out.

The window for staving off the worst of climate change is wider than we thought, but still pretty narrow. Tatiana Grozetskaya/Shutterstock.com

The Paris climate agreement has two aims: “holding the increase in global average temperature to well below 2℃ above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5℃”. The more ambitious of these is not yet out of reach, according to our new research.

Despite previous suggestions that this goal may be a lost cause, our calculations suggest that staying below 1.5℃ looks scientifically feasible, if extremely challenging.

Read more: What is a pre-industrial climate and why does it matter?.

Climate targets such as the 1.5℃ and 2℃ goals have been interpreted in various ways. In practice, however, these targets are probably best seen as focal points for negotiations, providing a common basis for action.

To develop policies capable of hitting these targets, we need to know the size of the “carbon budget” – the total amount of greenhouse emissions consistent with a particular temperature target. Armed with this knowledge, governments can set policies designed to reduce emissions by the corresponding amount.

In a study published in Nature Geoscience, we and our international colleagues present a new estimate of how much carbon budget is left if we want to remain below 1.5℃ of global warming relative to pre-industrial temperatures (bearing in mind that we are already at around 0.9℃ for the present decade).

We calculate that by limiting total CO₂ emissions from the beginning of 2015 to around 880 billion tonnes of CO₂ (240 billion tonnes of carbon), we would give ourselves a two-in-three chance of holding warming to less than 0.6℃ above the present decade. This may sound a lot, but to put it in context, if CO₂ emissions were to continue to increase along current trends, even this new budget would be exhausted in less than 20 years 1.5℃ (see Climate Clock). This budget is consistent with the 1.5℃ goal, given the warming that humans have already caused, and is substantially greater than the budgets previously inferred from the 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in 2013-14.

This does not mean that the IPCC got it wrong. Having predated the Paris Agreement, the IPCC report included very little analysis of the 1.5℃ target, which only became a political option during the Paris negotiations themselves. The IPCC did not develop a thorough estimate of carbon budgets consistent with 1.5℃, for the simple reason that nobody had asked them to.

The new study contains a far more comprehensive analysis of the factors that help to determine carbon budgets, such as model-data comparisons, the treatment of non-CO₂ gases, and the issue of the maximum rates at which emissions can feasibly be reduced.

Tough task

The emissions reductions required to stay within this budget remain extremely challenging. CO₂ emissions would need to decline by 4-6% per year for several decades. There are precedents for this, but not happy ones: these kinds of declines have historically been seen in events such as the Great Depression, the years following World War II, and during the collapse of the Soviet Union – and even these episodes were relatively brief.

Yet it would be wrong to conclude that greenhouse emissions can only plummet during times of economic collapse and human misery. Really, there is no historical analogy to show how rapidly human societies can rise to this challenge, because there is also no analogy for the matrix of problems (and opportunities) posed by climate change.

There are several optimistic signs that peak emissions may be near. From 2000 to 2013 global emissions climbed sharply, largely because of China’s rapid development. But global emissions may now have plateaued, and given the problems that China encountered with pollution it is unlikely that other nations will attempt to follow the same path. Rapid reduction in the price of solar and wind energy has also led to substantial increases in renewable energy capacity, which also offers hope for future emissions trajectories.

In fact, we do not really know how fast we can decarbonise an economy while improving human lives, because so far we haven’t tried very hard to find out. Politically, climate change is an “aggregate efforts global public good”, which basically means everyone needs to pull together to be successful.

This is hard. The problem with climate diplomacy (and the reason it took so long to broker a global agreement) is that the incentives for nations to tackle climate change are collectively strong but individually weak.

Read more: Paris climate targets aren’t enough but we can close the gap.

This is, unfortunately, the nature of the problem. But our research suggests that a 1.5℃ world, dismissed in some quarters as a pipe dream, remains physically possible.

Whether it is politically possible depends on the interplay between technology, economics, and politics. For the world to achieve its most ambitious climate aspiration, countries need to set stronger climate pledges for 2030, and then keep making deep emissions cut for decades.

No one is saying it will be easy. But our calculations suggest that it can be done.

Dave Frame receives funding from the Deep South National Science Challenge and Victoria University of Wellington.

H. Damon Matthews receives funding from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada.