Tag Archives: carbon

U.N. says the ozone layer will be a little less screwed — a long time from now

by LilyRapphshaum Posted on September 11, 2014

HAZY FORECAST

U.N. says the ozone layer will be a little less screwed — a long time from now

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11 Sep 2014 7:56 PM

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U.N. says the ozone layer will be a little less screwed — a long time from now

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Remember those holes we poked in the ozone with refrigerants and chlorofluorocarbons during the 1980s? Well, a new United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) assessment reports that the ozone layer is well on its way to a full recovery.

The study has been framed as a victory for international action, but hold the toasts. UNEP scientists say we won’t get back to 1980 ozone levels — back when there was already an ozone hole over Antarctica bigger than 1 million square miles — until 2050. And this supposed good news about the ozone comeback comes just two weeks after NASA delivered another dose of reality: Researchers found out the atmosphere still holds a shit-ton of carbon tetrachloride, an ozone-depleting compound that was banned worldwide decades ago. Nobody knows where it came from.

More mixed news from the report: Phasing out the chlorofluorocarbons that eat up the ozone layer has meant switching to hydrofluorocarbons, which are extremely effective at heating the atmosphere. And, in a screwed-whatever-we-do twist, the release of CO2 and methane — the two greenhouse gases that are most responsible for climate change — can actually help correct ozone levels.

Folks who are susceptible to skin cancer (everyone?) aren’t yet rejoicing, either. Melanoma, the most common form of cancer in the U.S., is caused by too much exposure to the harmful ultraviolet rays that the ozone layer blocks. And the incidence of malignant skin cancer is still rising, unlike that of most cancers. I doubt we can blame that completely on tanning beds.

Of course, the U.N. report said nothing about the effects of Snooki’s Ultra Dark Tan Maximizer as a tanning agent. GTL at your own peril.

Source:
Ozone Layer on Track to Recovery: Success Story Should Encourage Action on Climate

, UNEP.

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U.N. says the ozone layer will be a little less screwed — a long time from now

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This Legendary Accounting Firm Just Ran the Numbers on Climate Change

by JeseniaYnh Posted on September 10, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

With every year that passes, we’re getting further away from averting a human-caused climate disaster. That’s the key message in this year’s “Low Carbon Economy Index,” a report released by the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The report highlights an “unmistakable trend”: The world’s major economies are increasingly failing to do what’s needed to to limit global warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels. That was the target agreed to by countries attending the United Nations’ 2009 climate summit; it represents an effort to avoid some of the most disastrous consequences of runaway warming, including food security threats, coastal inundation, extreme weather events, ecosystem shifts, and widespread species extinction.

To curtail climate change, individual countries have made a variety of pledges to reduce their share of emissions, but taken together, those promises simply aren’t enough. According to the PricewaterhouseCoopers report, “the gap between what we are doing and what we need to do has again grown, for the sixth year running.” The report adds that at current rates, we’re headed towards 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by the end of the century—twice the agreed upon rate. Here’s a breakdown of the paper’s major findings.

The chart above compares our current efforts to cut “carbon intensity”—measured by calculating the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per million dollars of economic activity—with what’s actually needed to rein in climate change. According to the report, the global economy needs to “decarbonize” by 6.2 percent every year until the end of the century to limit warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. But carbon intensity fell by only 1.2 percent in 2013.

The report also found that the world is going to blow a hole in its carbon budget—the amount we can burn to keep the world from overheating beyond 3.6 degrees:

The report singles out countries that have done better than others when it comes to cutting carbon intensity. Australia, for example, tops the list of countries that have reduced the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of GDP, mainly due to lower energy demands in a growing economy. But huge countries like the United States, Germany, and India are still adding carbon intensity, year-on-year:

Overall, PricewaterhouseCoopers paints a bleak picture of a world that’s rapidly running out of time; the required effort to curb global emissions will continue to grow each year. “The timeline is also unforgiving. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others have estimated that global emissions will need to peak around 2020 to meet a 2°C 3.6 degrees F budget,” the report says. “This means that emissions from the developed economies need to be consistently falling, and emissions from major developing countries will also have to start declining from 2020 onwards.” G20 nations, for example, will need to cut their annual energy-related emissions by one-third by 2030, and by just over half by 2050. The pressure will be on the world’s governments to come up with a solution to this enormous challenge at the much-anticipated climate talks in Paris next year.

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This Legendary Accounting Firm Just Ran the Numbers on Climate Change

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The Dirty Secret Behind Europe’s Renewable Energy Industry

by BeulahOezkfxb Posted on August 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

If you’re driving through the South and you see a denuded field filled with stubby new plantings where lush forest once stood, the blame might lie with an unlikely culprit: the European Union and its well-intentioned clean energy rules.

In March 2007, the E.U. adopted climate and energy goals for 2010 to 2020. The 27 member countries set a goal of reducing carbon emissions 20 percent by 2020 and increasing renewables to 20 percent of their energy portfolio. Unfortunately, they underestimated the carbon intensity of burning wood (a.k.a. “biomass”) for electricity, and they categorized wood as a renewable fuel.

The result: E.U. countries with smaller renewable sectors turned to wood to replace coal. Governments provided incentives for energy utilities to make that switch. Now, with a bunch of new European wood-burning power plants having come online, Europeans need wood to feed the beast. But most European countries don’t have a lot of available forest left to cut down. So they’re importing our forests, especially from the South.

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The Dirty Secret Behind Europe’s Renewable Energy Industry

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Without Much Straining, Minnesota Reins In Its Utilities’ Carbon Emissions

by Myrna Posted on July 17, 2014

While many have howled about complying with a proposed rule slashing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, Minnesota has been reining in its utilities’ carbon pollution for decades. See the original article here:  Without Much Straining, Minnesota Reins In Its Utilities’ Carbon Emissions ; ;Related ArticlesDot Earth Blog: China Clarifies its Plans on Setting a CO2 Emissions PeakThough Scorned by Colleagues, a Climate-Change Skeptic Is UnbowedSkeptic of Climate Change Finds Himself a Target of Suspicion ;

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Without Much Straining, Minnesota Reins In Its Utilities’ Carbon Emissions

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Hopefully NASA won’t screw up its CO2-measuring satellite this time

by MarilouK96 Posted on June 30, 2014

Space Oddity

Hopefully NASA won’t screw up its CO2-measuring satellite this time

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JPL/NASA

The last time NASA tried to launch a satellite to measure carbon dioxide levels from space, within minutes the $273 million project plopped into the Southern Ocean (oops). Tomorrow they’re giving it another go. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO)-2 will blast off at 2:56 a.m. PDT from the Vadenburg Air Force Base in California. This time, it’ll hopefully make it to 438 miles above the planet, where it will be in a prime position to obsessively watch Earth breathe.

JPL/NASA

Which sounds stalker-esque, but don’t get too creeped out. OCO’s main goal is to figure out where, exactly, atmospheric CO2 currently comes from – and, more mysteriously, where it ends up. While fossil fuel emissions have tripled since the 1960s, levels of atmospheric CO2 have risen by less than a quarter (but unfortunately that’s still enough to cause big global change). That’s because somehow our oceans and plants have, on average, been able to keep pace with absorbing half of the total atmospheric CO2. But scientists still don’t know a lot about the dynamics of how this is happening, which leaves them wondering: How long can we expect these carbon sinks to keep sucking the stuff down?

“Understanding what controls that variability is really crucial,” OCO project manager Ralph Basilio said at a press conference in Pasadena. “If we can do that today, it might inform us about what might happen in the future.”

The satellite will carry a 300-pound instrument that measures the colors of sunlight that bounce off the earth, because that color intensity indicates how much CO2 the light beams through. While it will only take in a square mile at a time – an area smaller than New York’s Central Park – scientists say that it will tell a much more complete story of the comings and goings of atmospheric CO2 than the 150 land-based stations from which they currently get their measurements. It will collect 24 measurements a second, which means a million a day, but scientists predict that only a tenth of them (100,000/day) will be clear enough of clouds to be usable.

If they can get it up there in the first place, that is. Ground control to Major Tom, take your protein pills and put your helmet on …


Source
NASA satellite to inventory climate-changing carbon from space, Reuters
NASA Launching Satellite to Track Carbon, The New York Times

Samantha Larson is a science nerd, adventure enthusiast, and fellow at Grist. Follow her on Twitter.

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Hopefully NASA won’t screw up its CO2-measuring satellite this time

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NASA Launching Satellite to Track Carbon

by Myrna Posted on June 29, 2014

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 is scheduled to lift off Tuesday with the aim of getting better data on how carbon moves into and out of the atmosphere — a key to understanding climate change. Link to original:  NASA Launching Satellite to Track Carbon ; ;Related ArticlesU.S. Catfish Program Could Stymie Pacific Trade Pact, 10 Nations SayCreeping Up on Unsuspecting Shores: The Great Lakes, in a Welcome TurnaroundDot Earth Blog: The Agriculture Secretary Sees a Smart (Phone) Solution to GMO Labeling Fight ;

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NASA Launching Satellite to Track Carbon

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Going vegetarian can cut your diet’s carbon footprint in half

by LeslieHides Posted on June 27, 2014

The thin edge of the veg

Going vegetarian can cut your diet’s carbon footprint in half

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The agricultural industry is a heavy global warmer, responsible for a tenth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. But not all farm bounties are climatically equal.

New research reveals that the diets of those who eat a typical amount of meat for an American, about four ounces or more per day, are responsible for nearly twice as much global warming as vegetarians’ diets, and nearly 2.5 times as much as vegans’.

That’s because directly eating vegetables and grains, instead of inefficiently funneling them through livestock to produce meat, reduces the amount of carbon dioxide produced by farms and farm machinery. It also cuts back on the amount of climate-changing nitrous oxide released from tilled and fertilized soils, and, of course, it eliminates methane belching and farting by cows and other animals.

A team of British researchers scrutinized the diets of 2,041 vegans, 15,751 vegetarians, 8,123 fish eaters, and 29,589 meat eaters, all of them living in the U.K. They estimated the greenhouse gas emissions associated with 289 types of food. Then they combined the data to determine the globe-warming impacts of those four diets, based on consumption of 2,000 calories a day.

The results were published this month in the journal Climatic Change. Here’s how much carbon dioxide pollution or equivalent (CO2e) an average man’s diet is responsible for every single day (an average woman’s is just slightly lower):

Heavy meat eaters (American average): 16 pounds of CO2e
Low meat eaters (less than two ounces per day): 10.3 pounds
Fish eaters (no other meat): 8.7 pounds
Vegetarians: 8.5 pounds
Vegans: 6.5 pounds

The researchers didn’t just quantify the climatic benefits of going veg. Their data offered another reminder of the personal health benefits of laying off the animal flesh. “There were also significant trends towards lower saturated fat, higher fibre and higher fruit and vegetable intake (but a higher intake of sugars) as the quantity of animal-based products in the diet decreases,” they wrote in their paper.

Pass the veggies?


Source
Dietary greenhouse gas emissions of meat-eaters, fish-eaters, vegetarians and vegans in the UK, Climatic Change

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Going vegetarian can cut your diet’s carbon footprint in half

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Exploring Academia’s Role in Charting Paths to a ‘Good’ Anthropocene

by Myrna Posted on June 16, 2014

Enterprising journalists and communicators report on humanity’s growth spurt, urban rush and innovations in family planning. Originally posted here:  Exploring Academia’s Role in Charting Paths to a ‘Good’ Anthropocene ; ;Related ArticlesRoundup: Can New E.P.A. CO2 Rules Have a Climate Impact?Indian Point’s Tritium Problem and the N.R.C.’s Regulatory ProblemBehind the Mask – A Reality Check on China’s Plans for a Carbon Cap ;

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Exploring Academia’s Role in Charting Paths to a ‘Good’ Anthropocene

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Fish are great at fighting climate change. Too bad we’re eating them all.

by elvys303 Posted on June 10, 2014

Fish are great at fighting climate change. Too bad we’re eating them all.

By

Hallie Bateman

Climate change may be screwing with your seafood, but it turns out your seafood has been fighting back.

Fish, like Aquaman, might not seem to have a lot of relevance in the world-saving department. Never mind that the world is 99 percent ocean by habitable volume: We’re up here in the 1 percent of living space we care about the most, and they’re stuck breathing through gills and riding around on sea-ponies.

But in a DC Comics-worthy plot twist, a new study shows that fish have been doing a lot more world-saving than we thought, by way of sequestering carbon to stave off climate change — which on the danger scale is up there with supervillain plots like blocking out the sun or moving the moon. The catch (har) is that we can’t eat all our fish and have them save the world, too.

The sea absorbs about half of the billions of tons of CO2 humans emit; if it didn’t, it would already be absorbing quite a few of us. But it’s not like the oceans are just a giant sponge passively sopping up our atmospheric mess. They’re more like a forest — a really, really big one in which plants and animals grow and photosynthesize and eat each other and die, intaking carbon as they go. And a forest is made up of trees, or in this increasingly literal metaphor, phytoplankton and fish and other organisms. You can’t cut down all the fishtrees and expect your oceanforest to keep sucking up carbon.

Though we used to think that phytoplankton near the surface of the ocean did all the work of sequestration on their own, by taking their carbon with them when they died, it it now clear that the process is a little more vigorous than that. Instead of just waiting for carbon-laden plankton to get on their level, certain deep-dwelling, nightmare-inducing predators actually hunt down the tasty upper-level nibbles before swimming back into the extreme depths where all that carbon is effectively trapped for good.

And scientists recently learned that there are 10 to 30 times more of these mid- to deep-sea fish than they thought (and I made sushi jokes about them). Since these elusive fish turn out to make up 95 percent of the biomass in the ocean, they have a lot to do with why the ocean is so good at vacuuming up all our carbon. It goes (roughly) like this: Phytoplankton near the surface gobble up CO2 and are in turn gobbled by mid-level fish who swim up for their nightly buffet. These fish, once they head back to more familiar depths, are then gobbled by even deeper sea fish. It’s the circle of extremely creepy-looking life.

As with any cycle, there is a danger that even small changes can disrupt the whole system. In this case, overfishing scoops up lots of important mid- and deep-sea fish, either as bycatch or in the form of tasty endangered species like orange roughy or Chilean sea bass. A 2008 report on deep-sea fisheries from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea found that the pressure of overfishing on these ecosystems was especially severe:

A large proportion of deep-water trawl catches (upwards of 50 percent) can consist of unpalatable species and numerous small species, including juveniles of the target species, which are usually discarded … The survival of these discards is unknown, but believed to be virtually zero due to fragility of these species and the effects of pressure changes during retrieval … Therefore such fisheries tend to deplete the whole fish community biomass.

So eating lots and lots of fish is good for the climate, but only if you’re a fangtooth cruising the mesopelagic for takeout. The rest of us now have one more reason to check Seafood Watch before digging into that sustainably caught, bycatch-free, preferably local and abundant filet-o’-fish.


Source
Fish can slow down global warming—but not if we keep eating them, Quartz
How fish cool off global warming, Scientific American

Amelia Urry is Grist’s intern. Follow her on Twitter.

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Fish are great at fighting climate change. Too bad we’re eating them all.

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The five ways to stop climate change. Oh, wait, make that one way

by HeidiJVOzd Posted on June 6, 2014

The five ways to stop climate change. Oh, wait, make that one way

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Scientists confirm what we already know, but may not want to hear: there’s no magic method to stop climate change. A new study that analyzed the five leading strategies to prevent global warming found that, really, it all comes down to reducing global carbon emissions.

The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology in the Environment, ranks the strategies according to factors such as feasibility, risk, and cost. It suggests that, if we want to keep the planet closest to how we know it now, we should focus on No. 1. If, however, all you want is inspiration for your next cli-fi piece, No. 5 might be where it’s at.

Here they are, in order from best to worst:

  1. Reduce carbon emissions through improving energy efficiency, conserving usage, and adopting renewable energy sources. The study suggests that this is, by far, the top thing we need to do to stop global warming.
  1. Sequester more carbon by letting plants do their thing. Promote forest regrowth and stop clearcutting the Amazon, and trees will suck up more CO2 for us. Also, simple agricultural practices such as leaving leftover plant waste after harvest and allowing it to break back down into the soil will bury some more of that carbon back in the ground.
  1. Sequester carbon through capture and storage. One method is to capture CO2 before it’s released into the atmosphere and pump it underground. Problem is, this is expensive, and it could lead to dangerous leaks. “No one wants to live next to a huge underground pool of carbon dioxide that might suffocate them or their children — no matter how small the risk,” says the study’s lead author, Daniela Cusack, a professor of geography at UCLA.
  1. Sequester carbon by fertilizing the ocean. This would give phytoplankton a boost, which take in CO2 through photosynthesis, and then carry it to the bottom of the ocean when they die. But letting the algae run amuck would likely drive out other marine life, which could then create ugly worldwide impacts.
  1. Geoengineer to keep out some of that dang sunlight, by creating artificial clouds, or putting solar reflectors in outer space to keep the rays from getting down here. Because, if we reach a point where we’re this far down the list, we’re probably all sun-phobic zombies, anyway

The good news is, it sounds like we know what we need to do! The bad news is, we’re still not doing enough of it.


Source
No way around it: Reducing emissions will be the primary way to fight climate change, UCLA study finds, UCLA Newsroom
Here are the five best ways to fight climate change, ranked by scientists, Smithsonian.com

Samantha Larson is a science nerd, adventure enthusiast, and fellow at Grist. Follow her on Twitter.

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The five ways to stop climate change. Oh, wait, make that one way

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