Mira Adler-Gillies at the ABC looks at How deadly is 50-degree heat? Australia’s cities face the new reality of climate change:
With wildfires raging around the Arctic Circle, unprecedented heatwaves in the Northern Hemisphere and record temperatures being set from Algeria to Canada, the world is getting inexorably hotter.
Back in 2003 a heatwave centred in France killed over 70,000 people. Another which struck Moscow in 2010 killed 10,000. During the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria 173 people tragically lost their lives from the fire. However, health authorities believe Victoria’s record-breaking heatwave may have contributed to the deaths of about another 374 people with the state’s death toll 62% higher than at same time in the previous year.
The elderly were worst affected, but the very young and those in frail health are also typically affected in events like this. Continue reading Sizzling summers presage a global future
This is the first of several posts which will show that climate change is becoming a real and present danger.
Climate Central has a graph showing the hottest 10 years on the record: Continue reading The heat is on!
Patrick Brown of Stanford University in California, working with Ken Caldeira, has found that the planet will warm 10 to 20 per cent more than previously thought. Here is the critical graph from their research:
On Monday and Tuesday this week we are going to have the AFR national Energy Summit in Sydney with everyone there, including Josh, Jay, Bill, Andrew Vesey and a different Malcolm Roberts (Chief Executive, APPEA). Should be fun.
The Weekend AFR had about half a dozen articles, led off by an article by Ben Potter, Angela Macdonald-Smith and Mark Ludlow (no doubt pay-walled) which said our energy has become dirty, expensive and annoyingly unreliable. They reckon something has to be done, it’s just that:
the causes identified by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull – or unofficial backbench energy spokesman Tony Abbott – are not the same as the causes power industry experts and regulators highlight. Continue reading Climate clippings 117
When Elon Musk dramatically promised to build a grid-scale battery in South Australia, the media was enthralled. Share traders and a string of Australian fund managers smirked. They’d seen it all before, and were shorting him in the market.
In that very week he was in the market with plans to raise $US1.15 billion in equity and convertible notes. I understand also that Tesla has gone strangely quiet about SA since then. Continue reading Climate clippings 201
The third record year in a row has been declared. The last time it was as hot as this was 115,000 years ago. The last time CO2 was this high was in the Pliocene, 3 to 5 million years ago when the temperature became roughly 3 to 4 degrees Celsius warmer than today, and the sea level up to 40 metres higher.
Andrew Simms for The Guardian polled a number of scientists about whether we could keep warming under 2°C. Not a single one thought we would. One scientist said “not a cat in hell’s chance”. Kevin Anderson, now professor in Uppsala, said politically we gave up years ago. Prof Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, would “only confirm that it is still possible to keep global warming below 2C”. Technically speaking, I assume. Continue reading Record 2016 heat spells trouble on global scale
Back in 2001 the IPCC devised the famous Burning embers graph to reflect a broad perspective of risks emanating from climate change. Seventeen scientists have now had another look, original paper here. The graph has been enhanced with more information, which is itself more up to date. Continue reading Climate risks re-examined
The Global Methane Budget 2016 has been released, and the news is not good.
“Methane emissions were stable for quite a few years at the end of the 2000s. But they’ve begun to grow much faster, in fact 10 times faster, since 2007,” said Dr Canadell, who is also the executive director of the Global Carbon Project.
James Hansen and Makiko Sato have just released a new temperature graph, which highlights the underlying trend, and is more than a little alarming:
See also his blog post that looks at the implications and what we need to do. Continue reading Hansen’s new temperature graph heads north
That’s the judgement of NASA GISS boss Gavin Schmidt, while praising her two million-year temperature reconstruction.
National Geographic reports that other scientists have backed Schmidt’s judgement, while praising her temperature reconstruction. The paper claims that the long-term committed warming from today’s CO2 levels is 5ºC (range 3-7ºC), and that if emissions double the long-term increase will be ~9ºC (range 7-13ºC). She’s talking long-term, over the next few millenia. Continue reading Carolyn Snyder’s temperature forecasts are just plain wrong!
Seasonally planet Earth is hottest in July. Northern summers are hotter because of the greater land mass in the Northern Hemisphere. This July was a scorcher, being the hottest single month since records began:
The cool spot below Greenland is now average. Continue reading July 2016 Earth’s hottest month may herald step change in climate
