Coral Reef in Fiji. Source: Alamy via UK Guardian.
Leading climate scientists have warned that the Earth is perilously close to breaking through a 1.5C upper limit for global warming, only eight months after the target was set.
The decision to try to limit warming to 1.5C, measured in relation to pre-industrial temperatures, was the headline outcome of the Paris climate negotiations last December. The talks were hailed as a major success by scientists and campaigners, who claimed that, by setting the target, desertification, heatwaves, widespread flooding and other global warming impacts could be avoided.
Atmospheric heating has been partly triggered by a major El Niño event in the Pacific, with 2016 expected to be the hottest year on record. Temperatures above 50C have afflicted Iraq; India is experiencing one of the most intense monsoons on record; and drought-stricken California has been ravaged by wildfires.
Stanford University’s Professor Chris Field, co-chair of the IPCC working group on adaptation to climate change, told the Observer: “From the perspective of my research I would say the 1.5C goal now looks impossible or at the very least, a very, very difficult task. We should be under no illusions about the task we face.”
An atoll in the island nation of Kiribati, which is only a few feet above sea level Photo credit: Kadir van Lohiuzen, Noor Images via National Geographic.
Reported by the National Geographic, here. (I know, it's owned by Murdoch now, but what can you do?)
An annual report that is sometimes called the planet's "physical" finds that 2015 was the warmest year since records began in the mid to late 19th century. The year also marked several other milestones, from a record carbon concentration to an unusual number of tropical storms.
The 26th report, State of the Climate in 2015, released online today by theAmerican Meteorological Society (AMS), was compiled by hundreds of scientists from 62 countries and was peer reviewed.
Speaking of tropical storms, yesterday here in New Orleans an afternoon pop-up thunderstorm cloud ended up behaving like a tropical storm, with lots of leaves and small debris blown this way and that.
Here are the five key points made by the report, according to NatGeo:
3. Carbon Dioxide atmospheric content has passed the 400 ppm milestone. This was last witnessed in the middle Pliocene Era, 2-3 million years ago, or perhaps even the middle Miocene, 10-15 million years ago.
4. Global Sea-Level Rise is the highest since records were kept. The global mean sea level rise is now about 70 mm (2-3/4") higher than the levels taken in 1993, which in turn was a little bit higher than the 1988 value which was higher than the 1929 value; the post-1929 rise actually varied from town to town, due to gravity, land subsidence, seismic pressures, crustal springback because of melting ice caps, etc., etc.
5. Many parts of the world experienced extreme weather. This weird weather is well documented on YouTube by LAST MESSAGES in his 2015 IS STRANGE and 2016 IS STRANGE series (and more dating back to 2011) and by others.
Ya know, what we need is someone with the “charisma” of Donald Trump to rise up and say, “We need to stop, just stop, burning fossil fuels until those in charge can tell us what the hell is going on?”
I'm reblogging two posts from Robertscribbler about the weird weather that's been going on.
First, a new item about how the mangled Jet Stream has permitted so much warm air into the Arctic, it's forcing its way into NW Siberia and causing an Arctic Vortex invasion into East Asia, even Southeast Asia.
NW Siberian Warm Snap and East Asian Cold Snap
Source: Earth Nullschool via Robertscribbler.
Arctic Heatwave Drives Deadly Asian Cold Snap
by Robertscribbler, 26 January 2016 Link
In the Arctic today, there’s a warm wind howling over Siberia. It’s a wind blowing from the northwest. A wind originating from the Arctic Ocean. Siberia is warming up today because warm air blew in from the direction of the North Pole. This should strike everyone as ridiculously, insanely odd.
In Okinawa it snowed for the first time since 1977 this weekend. In Taiwan, a cold snap turned deadly killing 85 as tens of thousands more huddled in homes that lacked any form of central heating. In South Korea, 500 flights were grounded due to unseasonable weather. In Hong Kong, the temperature was 3 C — the same temperature as a region near the southwestern coast of Svalbard east of Greenland and above the Arctic Circle.
What the hell is going on? In short, a global warming driven heat-up of the Arctic has punched a hole in the Jet Stream and driven chill, Arctic air all the way into portions of Southeast Asia that seldom ever see temperatures go below 60 degrees Fahrenheit (16 Celsius).
Which leads into the second post by Robertscribbler, concerning El Nino and why the massive storms that accompanied previoous El Ninos haven't shown up in California so far this year.
Polar Amplification vs a Godzilla El Nino — Is the Pacific Storm Track Being Shoved North by Arctic Warming?
by Robertscribbler, 26 January 2016 Link
It’s an El Nino year. One of the top three strongest El Ninos on record. The strongest by some NOAA measures. And we are certainly feeling its effects all over the world. From severe droughts in Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America, to Flooding in the Central and Eastern US, Southern Brazil, and India, these impacts, this year and last, have been extreme and wide-ranging. During recent days, Peru and Chile saw enormous ocean waves and high tides swamping coastlines. Record flooding and wave height events for some regions. All impacts related to both this powerful El Nino and the overall influence of human-forced warming by more than 1 C above 1880s temperatures on the whole of the hydrological cycle.
Amped up by a global warming related 7 percent increase in atmospheric water vapor (and a related increase in evaporation and precipitation over the Earth’s surface), many of these El Nino related impacts have followed a roughly expected pattern (you can learn more about typical El Nino patterns and links to climate change related forcings in this excellent video by Dr Kevin Trenberth here). However, so far, some of the predicted kinds of events you’d typically see during a strong El Nino have not yet emerged. A circumstance that may also be related to the ongoing human-forced warming of the globe.
Storm Track Not Making it Far Enough South
NE Pacific Storm, 26 January 2016.
Source: Earth Nullschool vis Robertscribbler.
Particularly, there has been an absence of powerful storms running in over Southern California then surging on into Arizona, New Mexico and West Texas. During strong El Nino events, heat and moisture bleeding off the super-warmed Equator have typically fed powerful storms racing across the Pacific. These storms have tended to engulf the entire US Pacific Coast from San Diego through to Seattle. However, much of the storm energy is often directed further south toward Central and Southern California.
Big Oil and the small oil extraction companies too are getting in a heap of trouble. Big Oil is in scandal over dissassembling the truth over Climate Change while they KNEW the truth, and both Big Oil and the small fry are in trouble over their debts. The latter troubles do not bode well for the oil companies when the supply tightens up again, because of investors issues with the companies' debts that went bad before that point in the future.
Big Oil braced for global warming while it fought regulations
By Amy Lieberman and Susanne Rust of the LA Times
Dec. 31, 2015 Link
“A few weeks before seminal climate change talks in Kyoto back in 1997, Mobil Oil took out a bluntly worded advertisement in the New York Times and Washington Post.
“Let’s face it: The science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies into turmoil,” the ad said. “Scientists cannot predict with certainty if temperatures will increase, by how much and where changes will occur.”
One year earlier, though, engineers at Mobil Oil were concerned enough about climate change to design and build a collection of exploration and production facilities along the Nova Scotia coast that made structural allowances for rising temperatures and sea levels.
The problem is it’s not just AGW-Deniers and Republicans. It’s pretty much the entire political apparatus. Congress puts poison pills in must-pass bills and Obama signs off on them. Every. Fracking. Time.
During Paris Climate Summit, Obama Signed Exxon-, Koch-Backed Bill Expediting Pipeline Permits
By Steve Horn of Desmog Blog
December 31, 2015 Link
Just over a week before the U.S. signed the Paris climate agreement at the conclusion of the COP21 United Nations summit, President Barack Obama signed a bill into law with a provision that expedites permitting of oil and gas pipelines in the United States.
The legal and conceptual framework for the fast-tracking provision on pipeline permitting arose during the fight over TransCanada's Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. President Barack Obama initially codified that concept via Executive Order 13604 — signed the same day as he signed an Executive Order to fast-track construction of Keystone XL's southern leg — and this provision “builds on the permit streamlining project launched by” Obama according to corporate law firm Holland & Knight.
The first U.S. shipment of crude oil to an overseas buyer departed a Texas port on Thursday, just weeks after a 40-year ban on most such exports was lifted.
The Theo T tanker has left NuStar Energy LP’s dockside facility in Corpus Christi, Texas, along the western shore of the Gulf of Mexico, Mary Rose Brown, a spokeswoman for NuStar, said in an e-mail. The ship is carrying a cargo of oil and condensate to Italy from ConocoPhillips’s wells in south Texas that was sold to Swiss trading house Vitol Group.
A campaign by oil explorers including Continental Resources Inc., Chevron Corp. and Exxon Mobil Corp. to lift the 1970s-era export prohibition culminated in a Dec. 18 congressional decision to end the ban.
Well whaddya know! Lots and lots and lots of oil can be materialised into existence using accounting parlor tricks! And then disappeared when the tricks are corrected. The investors and creditors won't won't be happy, tho'.
Billions of Barrels of US Oil Set to Disappear. Poof
Tom Lewis of The Daily Impact Link
In a few weeks, several billion barrels of American oil will vanish in an instant. (I am not making this stuff up: the headline is right there on Bloomberg Business, hardly a chicken-little medium.) This is — shortly to be was — the oil that just a few months ago (Remember? When we were young, and happy?) was to return us to energy independence, to make us the number one oil producer in the world, to bring the happy days here again for good.
But much of that oil is about to disappear, not with the boom of an oil-train explosion or deep-well blowout or terrorist bomb, but with the quiet click of a computer mouse. And this time it’s not (as it often has been before) the Energy Information Administration revising downward a previous guess about oil reserves.
As the American shale-oil boom, a.k.a. American Oil Revolution, was accelerating back in 2009, the Masters of the Oil Universe demanded and got an accommodation from the Securities and Exchange Commission: it was made easier for the oil companies to claim as hard assets, for purposes of valuing their companies and borrowing money, the value of all the oil they estimated to be “in reserve,” which is to say lying somewhere under the ground they had under their control.
The oil companies’ estimates of their own “proven reserves” were astronomical, of course. In the careful words of one expert observer, David Hughes, “There was too much optimism built into their forecasts.” Translation: They lied.
Richard Heinberg gives a presentation here that focuses on the false promises of fracking, and how since the mid-2000s the major oil companies have invested tens of billions in expanding oil production without hardly any increase in the amount extracted. They are seeing rapidly diminishing returns, and need to maintain production levels. It’s why there is so much fracking and digging up of tar sands and drilling in the deepwater ocean and the Arctic. The low-cost, easy-to-get oil is depleting now but our dependency on oil remains.
Robert Scribbler has this to say about Prof. Heinberg's conclusions:
The old, cheap oil is a diminishing fraction of current production. Growth comes from the expensive unconventional a which is one major reason why we have so many companies facing bankruptcy. From the point of view of strategic use of money to reduce future carbon emissions, now is prime time for divestment. But given a still general lack of strong government policy, the energy markets will face a long series of shocks as a result. Laissez faire again and the result is mass malinvestment in fossil fuels and assets stranded in wave after wave.
And as the floods come down the Mississippi like a million tractor trailers barreling down the Mass. Pike, Exxon is able to close a refinery to minimize flood damage in Memphis due to lack of demand because of the weird, warm weather we've been having. The weird, warm weather that's being caused by too much Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere due to combustion of fossil fuels, particularly coal and oil.
Southern states brace for surging Mississippi River flooding
By Victoria Cavaliere of Reuters
Additional reporting by Daniel Wallis, Erwin Seba, Justin Madden and Mary Wisniewski
Bernard Orr and Tom Brown, eds.
Fri Jan 1, 2016 Link
Officials in Louisiana are checking levees daily, and Exxon Mobil Corp has decided to shut its 340,571 barrel-per-day refined products terminal in Memphis, Tennessee, as floodwaters threatened to inundate the facility just south of the city’s downtown.
“All that water’s coming south and we have to be ready for it,” Louisiana Lieutenant Governor-Elect Billy Nungesser told CNN. “It’s a serious concern. It’s early in the season. We usually don’t see this until much later.”
And Robert Scribbler finds it "very ironic and more than a little disturbing that the same oil companies that have been shoring up their own infrastructure to deal with climate change keep blocking policies that are now much needed to prevent damage to an undefended public."
Of course, the falling oil prices are going to force oil companies big and small to cut costs any way they can, or face defaults on their debts. We should expect plenty of oil company defauts and bankruptcies in 2016 which could potentially shut-in a lot of oil reserves underground (good news for Climate Change!) due to investors, including big banks, who were once bitten and will be twice shy.
Oil drops 31% in 2015 on global crude glut
By William Watts and Jenny W. Hsu
Dec 31, 2015 Link
Oil futures ended higher Thursday in the final trading session of 2015, but posted a steep annual drop for the second year in a row as markets continue to wrestle with a global glut of crude. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude futures for delivery in February rose 44 cents, or 1.2%, to finish at $37.04 a barrel. For the year, the U.S. benchmark dropped 30.5% and has lost 62.4% over the last two years. Crude hadn’t dropped two years in a row since 1998. February Brent crude, the global benchmark, rose 82 cents, or 2.3%, on London’s ICE Futures exchange to settle at $37.28 a barrel. Brent fell 35% in 2015, marking its third straight yearly drop. Oil trimmed gains somewhat after oil-field services firm Baker Hughes said the total number of U.S. oil rigs fell by two this week to 536.
Oil’s bounceback on Thursday likely reflected some short covering ahead of year-end and a three-day weekend, said Phil Flynn at Price Futures. U.S. markets will be closed Friday for the New Year’s Day holiday. Flynn said traders might be nervous about maintaining short positions amid rising tensions within Iran that could threaten the implementation of a nuclear accord that was expected to result in the lifting of sanctions that have prevented the country from exporting oil. Iran’s president has ordered his defense minister to expedite the country’s ballistic missile program following newly planned U.S. sanctions, he said Thursday, according to The Wall Street Journal. With U.S. production “growing for the last few weeks and global inventories being near storage limits, this is yet another reminder that the supply glut could take a long time to clear, which may mean even lower oil prices in the near term,” said Fawad Razaqzad at Forex.com.
