ZNAK SAGITE — više od fantastike — edicija, časopis, knjižara...

Climate change could have a significant impact on our economy

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Climate change may have many economic impacts, including loss of crops, changes in water supply, increased incidence of natural disaster, and spikes in health care costs related to infectious diseases and temperature-related illnesses. However, hard evidence about the effects of climate change on economic activity has been inconsistent.
A new paper published in Nature takes on the ambitious task of connecting micro- and macro-level estimates of climate costs. The study finds that climate change can be expected to reshape the global economy by reducing average global incomes roughly 23 percent by the year 2100. This study is important because it solves a problem that has existed in prior models of climate change effects on economics: discrepancies between macro- and micro-level observations. This study presents the first evidence that economic activity in all regions is coupled in some way to global climate. The study also sets up a new empirical paradigm for modeling economic loss in response to climate change.
The study uses data from the years 1960 to 2010 to analyze what's clearly a complex relationship between temperature and economic productivity. The authors' analysis uses a novel approach to dealing with confounding variables, which allowed them to account for four important factors: (1) constant differences between countries, such as cultural differences, (2) common contemporaneous shocks, such as global price changes, (3) country-specific trends in growth rates, and (4) non-linear effects of annual average temperature and rainfall.
This modeling allowed them to examine whether country-specific deviations from growth trends were related to country-specific differences in temperature and precipitation trends, while accounting for any global shifts that would be experienced to affect all countries.
The main results from this analysis show that there is an overall non-linear pattern in the relationship between temperature and economic development. Instead of a linear relationship, the productivity rises steadily and slowly until it reaches a peak at the ideal average annual temperature for productivity (55 degrees Fahrenheit or 15 degrees Celsius). Then, past this peak ideal temperature, there is a very sharp and steady decline in productivity as temperatures continue to rise. This relationship is partially due to geographic effects, as most low-income countries are in warmer regions and therefore likely to suffer stronger effects from climate change. By contrast, richer and more industrialized countries tend to be in more temperate areas, so climate change will have a less severe effect on their economies.
This finding does bring an important historical question to mind: are wealthy countries wealthier because they're in regions that are less susceptible to climate-related economic variability? Unfortunately, answering that question goes beyond the scope of this study, but it could be a compelling direction for future research.
The study suggests that overall economic productivity reaches its peak at an annual average temperature of 55 degrees Fahrenheit (or 15 degrees Celsius) and declines sharply at both higher and lower temperatures. It appears that this finding applies to all countries included in the study and has been constant since 1960, which suggests that it is applicable to all types of economic activities, including agricultural and industrial, and in all types of countries, including richer and poorer nations. However, the countries that exist closest to this ideal temperature for productivity tend to be more industrialized countries, which raises a question about the existence of a causal relationship for this finding. Did the ideal temperature allow these countries to become more productive, or did their high productivity bias the findings such that their average temperatures were found to be the most productive?
The most striking finding of the study, however, is that continued global warming will cause average global incomes to fall by approximately 23 percent by the year 2100. In addition, as global incomes fall, global income inequality will continue to widen. Scenarios in which climate change is limited don't see similar decreases in global incomes.
The take home message of this article is that climate change has serious economic consequences, especially in lower-income countries, which are the most likely to suffer adverse economic consequences. If there's one thing everyone responds to, it's a hit to their wallets, and this study demonstrates that unless we take steps to rein in climate change, we'll all be taking that hit in the later decades of this century.
Nature, 2015. DOI: 10.1038/nature15643 (About DOIs).

To ako ih ne zabrine ništa neće.

znate, bas nesto razmisljam, ima tu nesto; ono, kad te sredinom jedanaestog mjeseca nocu trgne iz sna podmukli napad komarca, a nisi u brazilu...

A na koga tacno mislis?

na komarca. aktivni komarac u nj sredinom 11. mj.
sad vec negdje brinem za dalmose, no zelja za povratkom panonskog mora jaca.

Pa..da se vrati Panonsko more, ja bih prva stradala.

hm, cek, sad kad kazes, nasao bih se tu negdje i ja.

For d rekord, protekli Oktobar je i po NASA podacima i po podacima Japanske Meteorološke Agencije najtopliji otkad se beleže ovi podaci:




http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/11/16/nasa-reports-astonishing-uptick-in-surface-temperature/

a tek studeni, em opet komarac, em pljusak, grmljavina.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/climate-change-science-communication-failure-1.3345524

'I was tossed out of the tribe': climate scientist Judith Curry interviewed

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It is safe to predict that when 20,000 world leaders, officials, green activists and hangers-on convene in Paris next week for the 21st United Nations climate conference, one person you will not see much quotedis Professor Judith Curry. This is a pity. Her record of peer-reviewed publication in the best climate-science journals is second to none, and in America she has become a public intellectual. But on this side of the Atlantic, apparently, she is too 'challenging'. What is troubling about her pariah status is that her trenchant critique of the supposed consensus on global warming is not derived from warped ideology, let alone funding by fossil-fuel firms, but from solid data and analysis.
Some consider her a heretic. According to Professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, a vociferous advocate of extreme measures to prevent a climatic Armageddon, she is 'anti-science'. Curry isn't fazed by the slur.
'It's unfortunate, but he calls anyone who doesn't agree with him a denier,' she tells me. 'Inside the climate community there are a lot of people who don't like what I'm doing. On the other hand, there is also a large, silent group who do like it. But the debate has become hard — especially in the US, because it's become so polarised.' Warming alarmists are fond of proclaiming how 97 per cent of scientists agree that the world is getting hotter, and human beings are to blame. They like to reduce the uncertainties of climate science and climate projections to Manichean simplicity. They have managed to eliminate doubt from what should be a nuanced debate about what to do.
Professor Curry, based at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, does not dispute for a moment that human-generated carbon dioxide warms the planet. But, she says, the evidence suggests this may be happening more slowly than the alarmists fear.
In the run-up to the Paris conference, said Curry, much ink has been spilled over whether the individual emissions pledges made so far by more than 150 countries — their 'intentional nationally determined contributions', to borrow the jargon — will be enough to stop the planet from crossing the 'dangerous' threshold of becoming 2°C hotter than in pre-industrial times. Much of the conference will consist of attempts to make these targets legally binding. This debate will be conducted on the basis that there is a known, mechanistic relationship between the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and how world average temperatures will rise.
Unfortunately, as Curry has shown, there isn't. Any such projection is meaningless, unless it accounts for natural variability and gives a value for 'climate sensitivity' —i.e., how much hotter the world will get if the level of CO2 doubles. Until 2007, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gave a 'best estimate' of 3°C. But in its latest, 2013 report, the IPCC abandoned this, because the uncertainties are so great. Its 'likely' range is now vast — 1.5°C to 4.5°C.
This isn't all. According to Curry, the claims being made by policymakers suggest they are still making new policy from the old, now discarded assumptions. Recent research suggests the climate sensitivity is significantly less than 3˚C. 'There's growing evidence that climate sensitivity is at the lower end of the spectrum, yet this has been totally ignored in the policy debate,' Curry told me. 'Even if the sensitivity is 2.5˚C, not 3˚C, that makes a substantial difference as to how fast we might get to a world that's 2˚C warmer. A sensitivity of 2.5˚C makes it much less likely we will see 2˚C warming during the 21st century. There are so many uncertainties, but the policy people say the target is fixed. And if you question this, you will be slagged off as a denier.'
Curry added that her own work, conducted with the British independent scientist Nic Lewis, suggests that the sensitivity value may still lower, in which case the date when the world would be 2˚C warmer would be even further into the future. On the other hand, the inherent uncertainties of climate projection mean that values of 4˚C cannot be ruled out — but if that turns out to be the case, then the measures discussed at Paris and all the previous 20 UN climate conferences would be futile. In any event, 'the economists and policymakers seem unaware of the large uncertainties in climate sensitivity', despite its enormous implications.
Meanwhile, the obsessive focus on CO2 as the driver of climate change means other research on natural climate variability is being neglected. For example, solar experts believe we could be heading towards a 'grand solar minimum' — a reduction in solar output (and, ergo, a period of global cooling) similar to that which once saw ice fairs on the Thames. 'The work to establish the solar-climate connection is lagging.'
Curry's independence has cost her dear. She began to be reviled after the 2009 'Climategate' scandal, when leaked emails revealed that some scientists were fighting to suppress sceptical views. 'I started saying that scientists should be more accountable, and I began to engage with sceptic bloggers. I thought that would calm the waters. Instead I was tossed out of the tribe. There's no way I would have done this if I hadn't been a tenured professor, fairly near the end of my career. If I were seeking a new job in the US academy, I'd be pretty much unemployable. I can still publish in the peer-reviewed journals. But there's no way I could get a government research grant to do the research I want to do. Since then, I've stopped judging my career by these metrics. I'm doing what I do to stand up for science and to do the right thing.'
She remains optimistic that science will recover its equilibrium, and that the quasi-McCarthyite tide will recede: 'I think that by 2030, temperatures will not have increased all that much. Maybe then there will be the funding to do the kind of research on natural variability that we need, to get the climate community motivated to look at things like the solar-climate connection.' She even hopes that rational argument will find a place in the UN: 'Maybe, too, there will be a closer interaction between the scientists, the economists and policymakers. Wouldn't that be great?'

Da vidimo  kako se završio klimacki samit u Parizu:

With landmark climate accord, world marks turn from fossil fuels

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The global climate summit in Paris agreed a landmark accord on Saturday, setting the course for a historic transformation of the world's fossil fuel-driven economy within decades in a bid to arrest global warming.
After four years of fraught U.N. talks often pitting the interests of rich nations against poor, imperiled island states against rising economic powerhouses, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius declared the pact adopted to the standing applause and whistles of delegates from almost 200 nations."With a small hammer you can achieve great things," Fabius said as he gaveled the agreement, capping two weeks of tense negotiations at the summit on the outskirts of Paris.Hailed as the first truly global climate deal, committing both rich and poor nations to reining in rising emissions blamed for warming the planet, it sets out a sweeping long-term goal of eliminating net man-made greenhouse gas output this century."It is a victory for all of the planet and for future generations," said U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who led the U.S. negotiations in Paris."We have set a course here. The world has come together around an agreement that will empower us to chart a new path for our planet, a smart and responsible path, a sustainable path."It also creates a system to encourage nations to step up voluntary domestic efforts to curb emissions, and provides billions more dollars to help poor nations cope with the transition to a greener economy powered by renewable energy.Calling it "ambitious and balanced", Fabius said the accord would mark a "historic turning point" in efforts to avert the potentially disastrous consequences of an overheated planet.The final agreement was essentially unchanged from a draft unveiled earlier in the day, including a more ambitious objective of restraining the rise in temperatures to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, a mark scientists fear could be a tipping point for the climate. Previously, the goal on temperature rise was set at 2 degrees Celsius in 2010.In some ways its success was assured before the summit began: 187 nations have submitted detailed national plans for how they will contain the rise in greenhouse gas emissions, commitments that are the core of the Paris deal.While leaving each country to pursue those measures on its own, the agreement finally sets a common vision and course of action after years of bickering over how to move forward. Officials hope a unified stance will be a powerful symbol for world citizens and a potent signal to the executives and investors they're counting on to spend trillions of dollars to replace coal-fired power with solar panels and windmills."This agreement establishes a clear path to decarbonize the global economy within the lifetimes of many people alive today," said Paul Polman, the CEO of consumer goods maker Unilever and a leading advocate for sustainable business practices.It will "drive real change in the real economy".TOO MUCH, OR NOT ENOUGH?While some climate change activists and U.S. Republicans will likely find fault with the accord - either for failing to take sufficiently drastic action, or for overreacting to an uncertain threat - many of the estimated 30,000 officials, academics and campaigners who set up camp on the outskirts of Paris say they see it as a long overdue turning point.Six years after the previous climate summit in Copenhagen ended in failure and acrimony, the Paris pact appears to have rebuilt much of the trust required for a concerted global effort to combat climate change, delegates say."Whereas we left Copenhagen scared of what comes next, we'll leave Paris inspired to keep fighting," said David Turnbull, Director at Oil Change International, a research and advocacy organization opposed to fossil fuel production.Most climate activists reacted positively, encouraged by long-term targets that were more ambitious than they expected, while warning it was only the first step of many."Today we celebrate, tomorrow we have to work," European Climate Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete said.From the outset, some have criticized the deal for setting too low a bar for success. Scientists warn that the envisaged national emissions cuts will not be enough to keep warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit).Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, the last major climate deal agreed in 1997, the Paris pact will also not be a fully legally binding treaty, something that would almost certainly fail to pass the U.S. Congress. 

ево и првих акција после сјајног хепенинга у паризу! британска влада је одлучном акцијом подржала напоре свих 40000 учесника (од којих неки нису слетели на оближњи аеродром) климатског самита у ле буржеу смањењем субвенција за соларне плоче за 65%!

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UK cuts to renewable energy make a mockery of its pledge at Paris climate talks
The Tory party's cuts to clean energy subsidies won't save consumers more than a few pounds a year – but will cost the industry, and the climate, dearly

"My priority is to ensure energy bills for hardworking families and businesses are kept as low as possible," said energy and climate change secretary Amber Rudd, announcing sweeping cuts to renewable energy subsidies on Thursday.
Yet this rationale crumbles to dust under the slightest scrutiny. The nations's most popular energy technology, solar power, adds just a few pounds a year to energy bills. The best cost-saving measure - energy efficiency - has had its support slashed by Rudd and the Conservative party has forgone the cheapest of all low-carbon energy, onshore wind.
Coming just five days after a global agreement on climate change was signed in Paris, which Rudd attended and said was "vital for our long-term economic and global security", the government was under heavy pressure to row back on its proposed 87% cut to subsidies for solar panels on homes.
It did, reducing the cut to 65%. But it has also imposed a cap on the total subsidy paid out, meaning the rate of domestic solar installations is set to halve, according to the Solar Trade Association. Larger solar installations (more than 1MW) on roofs and in solar parks have had their support cut by 85% and 71% respectively, meaning the market for the most cost-effective projects is all but dead.
All this while the global solar market soars and while the UK solar industry had already said it wanted to be off subsidies by 2020. These cuts are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. It makes a mockery of prime minister David Cameron's speech to the Paris climate summit: "Instead of making excuses tomorrow to our children and grandchildren, we should be taking action against climate change today."
Rudd said on Thursday: "We have to get the balance right and I am clear that subsidies should be temporary, not part of a permanent business model. When the cost of technologies come down, so should the consumer-funded support."
Yet this only applies to renewable energy. Nuclear power, whose cost never comes down, will enjoy 35 years of bill payer subsidies to support Hinkley Point, the most expensive power station ever built.
Fossil fuels enjoy £27bn a year in subsidies in the UK, according to the IMF, £425 for every man, woman and child in the country. Are these coming down? No, the UK is the only G7 nation increasing fossil fuel subsidies.
What about carbon capture and storage (CCS), the technology deemed vital to tackling global warming by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? The UK government's own advisers, the Committee on Climate Change, warn that without CSS the costs of meeting carbon targets will double.
But at the last moment, the government reneged on its manifesto commitment and last month abandoned a £1bn competition for demonstration plants. Does that sound like "ensuring energy bills for hardworking families and businesses are kept as low as possible" or "taking action against climate change today"?
Action is certainly being taken on shale gas, with measures to allow fracking under protected areas pushed through on Wednesday. Rudd signalled a new dash for gas power stations just a month ago. Nick Mabey, from the thinktank E3G, summed this up pithily: "The government replaces domestic renewables and efficiency with imported gas, then proposes shale to solve the [energy] security problem. Mad."
In May, Rudd said: "I want to unleash a new solar revolution – we have a million people living under roofs with solar panels and that number needs to increase."
When the renewable energy industry has friends like Rudd, who needs enemies?
But enemies there are, principally George Osborne, the driving force behind the barrage of anti-green moves since May's election.
Matthew Spencer, at the Green Alliance, has wise advice for the chancellor: "Unlike budget announcements, successful infrastructure policy can't be made tactically; if Osborne does eventually become prime minister, he risks inheriting an energy policy mess he has created, and will find that the remaining policy levers in his hands don't produce quick results ... He'd better not leave it too late to get on the right side of the [climate] argument."

тако се то ради у цивилизованом свету

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The government has decided to cut subsidies to householders installing rooftop solar panels by 65% just days after agreeing to move swiftly to a low-carbon energy future at the climate change conference in Paris.
An impact assessment study by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) admits the move could wipe out up to 18,700 of the industry's 32,000 jobs.
A second subsidy scheme known as the renewables obligation has also been cut for small-scale and large projects angering both the solar industry and environmentalists, who dismissed the moves as "huge and misguided".
The government argues it needs to protect wider energy bills from the rising impact of renewable energy subsidies and that this justifies paying rooftop solar installers 4.39p per kilowatt hour from February instead of the existing 12.47p.
The new figure means Amber Rudd, the energy and climate change secretary, has rowed back from an original proposal to slash subsidies by 87% to 1.63p after a storm of criticism.
"My priority is to ensure energy bills for hardworking families and businesses are kept as low as possible whilst ensuring there is a sensible level of support for low carbon technologies that represent value for money," she said.
"We have to get the balance right and I am clear that subsidies should be temporary, not part of a permanent business model. When the cost of technologies come down, so should the consumer-funded support."
The government said there would be a £100m cap on spending by 2019.
The shadow energy and climate secretary, Lisa Nandy, said the solar cuts were misguided, especially after ministers had just forked out £175m to diesel farm developers.
"These short-sighted cuts will place big limits on our solar industry and lead to thousands of job losses. These cuts stand in stark contrast to the generous handouts ministers recently announced to dirty diesel generators. At a time when energy bills are a big concern it makes no sense to limit one of the cheapest forms of clean energy."
Friends of the Earth said it was disappointing that less than a week after the UK government agreed a deal in Paris to keep global temperature rises to well below 2 degrees, the government had shown its true colours – "and they're certainly not green".
Alasdair Cameron, FoE's renewable energy campaigner, said: "These huge, misguided cuts to UK solar are a massive blow for jobs and the economy, and further undermine the government's already tarnished credibility on tackling climate change."
The Solar Trade Association had warned that more than 6,000 jobs have been lost, with solar installers such as the Mark Group closing down ahead of likely cuts.
Greenpeace said the government was moving in the wrong direction. "Bowing to pressure from the public and businesses, the government has swapped a blunt axe for a sharp scalpel, but it's still cutting in the wrong place," said Barbara Stoll.
"In just one month, one nuclear plant at Hinkley would swallow up four years' worth of subsidies for the whole solar sector. Why are ministers signing a blank cheque for expensive, outdated nuclear power while pinching pennies for an energy source on the cusp of a massive investment boom? This makes no economic sense and will only put up bills in the long run.
"With costs falling, demand rising, and post-Paris momentum growing, the UK solar sector will see off the government's attacks. The question is how many more jobs, investments, and business opportunities are we wasting because of George Osborne's incoherent policies.
"If the government is as committed as it claims to be to the Paris climate deal, then solar is one of the cheapest and safest ways for the UK to deliver on it."
Paul Barwell, chief executive of the Solar Trade Association, said he was particularly concerned the government was cutting the "grandfathering" commitment from the renewables Obligation, which ensures that any subsidy levels are protected for the lifetime of a project.
"Closing the renewables obligation for solar is not in the interests of billpayers when solar is soon to become the cheapest low-carbon energy source. Following the Paris agreement, this needs rethinking.
"Removing the grandfathering guarantee makes no sense for solar – it's the thin end of the wedge. If you invest £1m of capital into a solar project today, in 20 years' time you have still invested £1m – it is a sunk cost. You cannot have the level of support changing over the lifetime of a project as investors won't take the risk."

http://www.knowable.com/a/arnold-schwarzenegger-just-blew-everyone-away-with-this-post-on-fb-wow

Last January Was the Hottest Global Temperature Anomaly of Any Month on Record

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NASA has released its global temperature data for January 2016, and, once again, the record for the hottest month in recorded history has been shattered. At a time when these kinds of records are broken with some regularity, it takes a particularly scorching month to raise eyebrows in the climate science community. It has to be the hottest hottest month by a pretty hot margin.
Sure enough, last January did the trick: It was 1.13˚ C warmer than the global average of 1951-1980 (the benchmark NASA uses to measure warming trends)—in other words, a full 2˚F warmer than pre-1980 levels.
In fact, January 2016 was a full 0.3˚ C hotter than January 2015. That, as Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of physics at Potsdam University, points out, makes for not only the hottest January, but the "biggest increase over previous record and hottest anomaly for any month ever."
Regional heat anomalies appear most acute in parts of Asia, particularly, it appears, the Caucasuses, and the Arctic—Canada, Russia, and Alaska were abnormally hot—and parts of the North Pole hit close to 32˚F and risked thawing in early January. "For the Arctic this is definitely the strangest winter I've ever seen," Mark Serreze, the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, told climate reporter Andrew Freedman.
Plenty of other regions were far hotter than average, too, however—southern Europe and Saharan Africa were scorched, as were the northwestern nations in South America.

January NASA data: hottest January, biggest increase over previous record and hottest anomaly for any month ever.

pic.twitter.com/W517iYwuja
— Stefan Rahmstorf (@rahmstorf) February 15, 2016

NASA isn't alone in declaring January the hottest yet by a remarkable factor, either. Even two of the nation's most notorious climate change skeptics, John Christy and Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama, declared January 2016 "the warmest first month of the year since satellite data began to be reported in 1978," according to Reason, which reported on the duo's satellite findings. "January's global average temperature was +0.54 degrees Celsius above the 30-year average (1981-2010) for the month reported."
So, last month was an especially hot one during what is by far the hottest period in recent human history.

January--that's the far right--was the hottest month ever measured on our planet

pic.twitter.com/Gngl45gmld
— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) February 15, 2016 2015 was the hottest year ever recorded by a large margin. 2015 was alarmingly hot, but 2016 may already be on track to surpass it.

Nivo mora raste brže nego ikada u poslednjih 2800 godina veli nova studija. Studija je čitava dostupna ovde:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/02/17/1517056113


A evo i dajdžesta za nas nedostojne hardkor nauke:



Sea levels are rising faster than they have in 2,800 years

QuoteSea levels on Earth are rising several times faster than they have in the past 2,800 years and are accelerating because of human-caused global warming, according to new studies.


Robin Edwards and Benjamin Horton coring a salt marsh in Newfoundland, Canada, to retrieve a record of sea level for the past 2,000 years. (Ben Horton)
An international team of scientists dug into two dozen locations across the globe, including a salt marsh and coastal wetland in Newfoundland, to chart gently rising and falling seas over centuries and millennia. Until the 1880s and the world's industrialization, the fastest seas rose was about three to four centimetres (1 to 1.5 inches) a century, plus or minus a bit. During that time global sea level really didn't get much higher or lower than eight centimetres (three inches)  above or below the 2,000-year average.
But in the 20th century the world's seas rose 14 centimetres (5.5 inches). Since 1993 the rate has soared to 30 centimetres (a foot) per century. And two different studies published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said by 2100 that the world's oceans will rise between 28 to 131 centimetres (11 to 52 inches), depending on how much heat-trapping gas Earth's industries and vehicles expel.


"There's no question that the 20th century is the fastest," said Rutgers earth and planetary sciences professor Bob Kopp, lead author of the study that looked back at sea levels over the past 3,000 years. "It's because of the temperature increase in the 20th century which has been driven by fossil fuel use."
To figure out past sea levels and rates of rise and fall, scientists engaged in a "geological detective story," said study co-author Ben Horton, a Rutgers marine scientist. They went around the world looking at salt marshes and other coastal locations and used different clues to figure out what the sea level was at different times. They used single cell organisms that are sensitive to salinity, mangroves, coral, sediments and other clues in cores, Horton said. On top of that they checked their figures by easy markers such as the rise of lead with the start of the industrial age and isotopes only seen in the atomic age.
When Kopp and colleagues charted the sea level rise over the centuries — they went back 3,000 years, but aren't confident in the most distant 200 years — they saw Earth's sea level was on a downward trend until the industrial age.
Sea level rise in the 20th century is mostly man-made, the study authors said. A separate, not-yet-published study by Kopp and others found since 1950, about two-thirds of the U.S. nuisance coastal floods in 27 locales have the fingerprints of man-made warming.
And if seas continue to rise, as projected, another 45 centimetres (18 inches) of sea level rise is going to cause lots of problems and expense, especially with surge during storms, said study co-author Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
"There is such a tight relationship between sea level and temperature," Horton said. "I wish there wasn't, then we wouldn't be as worried."


An international team of scientists dug into two dozen locations across the globe, including this coastal wetland in Newfoundland, to chart gently rising and falling seas over centuries and millennia. (Ben Horton)
The link to temperature is basic science, the study's authors said. Warm water expands. Cold water contracts. The scientists pointed to specific past eras when temperatures and sea rose and fell together.
The Kopp study and a separate one published by another team projected future sea level rise based on various techniques. They came to the same general estimates, despite using different methods, said Anders Levermann, a co-author of the second paper and a researcher at the Potsdam Institute.
If greenhouse gas pollution continues at the current pace, both studies project increases of about 57 to 131 centimetres (22 to 52 inches). If countries fulfil the treaty agreed upon last year in Paris and limit further warming to another 1 C (2 degrees Fahrenheit), sea level rise would be in the 28 to 56 centimetres (11 to 22 inch range).
Jonathan Overpeck at the University of Arizona, who wasn't part of the studies, praised them, saying they show a clear cause and effect between warming and sea level rise.

Science can now link climate change with some extreme weather events

QuoteExtreme weather events like floods, heat waves and droughts can devastate communities and populations worldwide. Recent scientific advances have enabled researchers to confidently say that the increased intensity and frequency of some, but not all, of these extreme weather events is influenced by human-induced climate change, according to an international National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report released today (March 11).
"In the past, many scientists have been cautious of attributing specific extreme weather events to climate change. People frequently ask questions such as, 'Did climate change cause Hurricane Sandy?' Science can't answer that because there are so many relevant factors for hurricanes. What this report is saying is that we can attribute an increased magnitude or frequency of some extreme weather events to climate change," said David Titley, professor of practice in Penn State's Department of Meteorology and founding director of Penn State's Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk, who chaired the committee that wrote the report.
The committee found that scientists can now confidently attribute some heat waves and cold events, and to a lesser degree droughts and extreme rainfall, to human-caused climate change. Even a decade ago, many scientists argued that research could not confidently tie any specific weather events to climate change, which the committee reports today is no longer true today.
"If we can actually understand how and why frequencies or magnitudes change of extreme events are changing, those are two components of risk. Understanding that risk is crucial for governments and businesses. For example, if you're managing a business, you may need to know whether there may be more droughts in the future because that may impact supply chain logistics and, ultimately, your bottom dollar," said Titley.
Scientific confidence for attributing extreme weather events is a three-legged stool, said Titley. To confidently link specific weather events to climate change, researchers need an understanding of the underlying physical causes of weather events, enough observational data to place a specific event within a historical context and the ability to replicate an event with computer models. For example, when examining hurricanes and typhoons, the lack of a high-quality, long-term historical record, uncertainty regarding the impact of climate change on storm frequency and inability to accurately simulate these storms in most global climate models raises significant challenges when attributing assessing the impact of climate change on any single storm.
Attributing the cause of extreme weather to climate change or other factors can "enhance scientists' ability to accurately predict and project future weather and climatic states," said Titley. Predicting both the frequency and intensity of extreme events—those that are rare in a location—could allow society to lessen their impact and potentially avoid loss of life and destruction.
The committee identified research priorities to further enhance the scientific community's ability to attribute specific extreme weather events to climate change. In addition to endorsing action on relevant items outlined by the World Climate Research Programme in 2014, the report recommends developing transparent community standards for attributing classes of extreme events, and formulating systematic criteria for selecting events to be studied. The committee also recommends that some future event attribution activities could be incorporated into an integrated weather-to-climate forecasting efforts on a broad range of timescales, with an ultimate goal of providing predictive risk-based forecasts of extreme events at lead times of days to seasons.
More information: The report, "Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change," was created by the NAS Committee on Extreme Weather Events and Climate Change Attribution.
Provided by: Pennsylvania State University

Climate Change Is Much Worse Than We Thought, According to the Scientist Who First Warned

Quote

The rewards of being right about climate change are bittersweet. James Hansen should know this better than most—he warned of this whole thing before Congress in 1988, when he was director of NASA's Institute for Space Studies. At the time, the world was experiencing its warmest five-month run since we started recording temperatures 130 years earlier. Hansen said, "It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here."
Fast forward 28 years and, while we're hardly out of the Waffle House yet, we know much more about climate change science. Hansen is still worried that the rest of us aren't worried enough.
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Last summer, prior to countries' United Nations negotiations in Paris, Hansen and 16 collaborators authored a draft paper that suggested we could see at least 10 feet of sea-level rise in as few as 50 years. If that sounds alarming to you, it is—10 feet of sea-level rise is more than enough to effectively kick us out of even the most well-endowed coastal cities. Stitching together archaeological evidence of past climate change, current observations, and future-telling climate models, the authors suggested that even a small amount of global warming can rack up enormous consequences—and quickly.
However the paper, publicized before it had been through peer review, elicited a mix of shock and skepticism, with some journalists calling the news a "bombshell" but a number of scientists urging deeper consideration.
Now, the final version of the paper has been published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. It's been reviewed and lightly edited, but its conclusions are still shocking—and still contentious.
So what's the deal? The authors highlight several of the threats they believe we'll face this century, including many feet of sea-level rise, a halting of major ocean circulatory currents, and an outbreak of super storms. These are the big threats we've been afraid of—and Hansen et al. say they could be here before we know it — well before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's sanctioned climate models predict.
Here we help you understand their new paper:Sea-level RiseThe scientists estimate that existing climate models aren't accounting well enough for current ice loss off of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Right now, Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets both contribute under or near 1 millimeter to sea-level rise every year; they each contain enough stored ice to drive up ocean levels by 20 and 200 feet, respectively.
This study suggests that, since the rate of ice loss is increasing, we should think of it not as a straight line but as an exponential curve, doubling every few years. But how much time it takes to double makes a big difference. Right now, measurements of ice loss aren't clear enough to even make a strong estimate about how long that period might be. Is it 10 years or is it 40? It's hard to say based on the limited data we have now, which would make a big difference either way.
But then again, we don't even know that ice loss is exponential. Ian Joughin—a University of Washington researcher unaffiliated with the paper and who has studied the tipping points of Antarctic glaciers—put it this way: Think about the stock market in the '80s. If you observed a couple years of accelerating growth, and decided that rate would double every 4 years—you'd have something like 56,000 points in the Dow Jones Industrial by now.
Or if stocks aren't your thing, think about that other exponentially expanding force of nature: bacteria. Certain colonies of bacteria can double their population in a matter of hours. Can they do this forever? No, or else we'd be nothing but bacteria right now (and while we're certainly a high percentage of bacteria, there's still room for a couple other things).
Nature tends to put limits on exponential growth, Joughin points out — and the same probably goes for ice loss: "There's only so fast you can move ice out of an ice sheet," Joughin explained. While some ice masses may be collapsing at an accelerating rate, others won't be as volatile.
This means, while some parts of ice sheet collapse may very well proceed exponentially, we can't expect such simple mathematics to model anything in the real world except the terror spike of the Kingda Ka.Ocean TurnoverMmm mm, ocean turnover: Is it another word for a sushi roll or a fundamental process that keeps the climate relatively stable and moderate?
That's right—we're talking the Atlantic Meridonal Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, and other currents like it.
As cold meltwater flows off of glaciers and ice sheets at enormous rates, it pools at the ocean's surface, trapping the denser but warmer saltwater beneath it. This can seriously mess with the moving parts of the ocean, the so-called "conveyor belts" that cycle deep nutrient-rich water to the surface. These slow currents are driven by large-scale climate processes, like wind, and drive others, like the carbon cycle. But they also rely on gradients in temperature and density to run; if too much cold water from the glaciers pools at the surface, the whole conveyor belt could stutter to a stop.
In the North Atlantic, this would mean waters get colder, while the tropics, denied their influx of colder water, would heat up precipitously. Hansen says we're already seeing the beginnings of AMOC's slowdown: There's a spot of unusually cool water hanging out off of Greenland, while the U.S. East Coast continues to see warmer and warmer temperatures. Hansen said it plainly in a call with reporters: "I think this is the beginning of substantial slowdown of the AMOC."SuperstormsPointing to giant hunks of rock that litter the shore of the Bahamas, among other evidence of ancient climates, the study's authors suggest that past versions of Earth may have featured superstorms capable of casually tossing boulders like bored Olympians.
And as the temperature gradient between the tropic and the polar oceans gets steeper, thanks to that slowing of ocean-mixing currents, we could see stronger storms, too.
This is surprisingly intuitive: Picture a temperature gradient like a hill, with the high temperatures up at the top and the low temperatures down at the bottom. As the highs get higher and the lows get lower, that hill gets a lot steeper—and the storms are the bowling balls you chuck down the hill. A bowling ball will pick up a lot more speed on a steep hill, and hurt a lot more when it finally runs into something. Likewise, by the time these supercharged storms are slamming into coasts in the middle latitudes, they will be carrying a whole lot of deadly force with them.So What Does it all Mean?Whether other scientists quibble over these results or not—and they probably will—the overall message is hardly new. It's bad, you guys. It might be really, truly, deeply bad, or it might be slightly less bad. Either way, says Hansen, what we know for sure is that it's time to do something about it. "Among the top experts, there's a pretty strong agreement that we've reached a point where this is truly urgent," he said.
So Hansen is frustrated once more with the failure of humanity to respond adequately. The result he'd hoped for when he released an early version of the paper online last summer was to get world leaders to come together in Paris to agree on a global price on carbon. As he told Grist's Ben Adler at the time, "It's going to happen." (It didn't happen, but some other stuff did.)
Still, true urgency would require more of us than just slowing the growth of emissions—it requires stopping them altogether. In a paper published in 2013, Hansen found that we have to cut 6 percent of our use of carbon-based fuels every year, if we want to avoid dangerous climate change.
Carbon prices and emissions cuts are more the purview of politicians and diplomats, but if anything, Hansen has shown he is unafraid to stray beyond the established protocol of academic science.
"I think scientists, who are trained to be objective, have something to offer by analyzing the problem all the way to the changes that are needed in order to address it," he said on a press call. "That 6 percent reduction—that's not advocacy, that's science. And then I would advocate that we do that!"
And to pre-empt the haters, Hansen wants you to remember one thing. "Skepticism is the life blood of science. You can be sure that some scientists will find some aspects in our long paper that they will think of differently," he said. "And that's normal."
So while scientists continue their debate over whether the ice sheets are poised to collapse in the next 50 years or the next 500, the prognosis is the same: The future is wetter, stranger, stormier unless we make serious moves to alternative energy sources now. Will we? Maybe. We've started but we still have a long, long way to go. If it's a race between us and the ice sheets, neither I nor James Hansen nor anyone else can tell you for sure who will win.
Hey, no one said telling the future was easy.

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Anthropogenic carbon release rate unprecedented during the past 66 million years



Abstrakt:

QuoteCarbon release rates from anthropogenic sources reached a record high of ~10 Pg C yr⁻¹ in 2014. Geologic analogues from past transient climate changes could provide invaluable constraints on the response of the climate system to such perturbations, but only if the associated carbon release rates can be reliably reconstructed. The Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) is known at present to have the highest carbon release rates of the past 66 million years, but robust estimates of the initial rate and onset duration are hindered by uncertainties in age models. Here we introduce a new method to extract rates of change from a sedimentary record based on the relative timing of climate and carbon cycle changes, without the need for an age model. We apply this method to stable carbon and oxygen isotope records from the New Jersey shelf using time-series analysis and carbon cycle–climate modelling. We calculate that the initial carbon release during the onset of the PETM occurred over at least 4,000 years. This constrains the maximum sustained PETM carbon release rate to less than 1.1 Pg C yr⁻¹. We conclude that, given currently available records, the present anthropogenic carbon release rate is unprecedented during the past 66 million years. We suggest that such a 'no-analogue' state represents a fundamental challenge in constraining future climate projections. Also, future ecosystem disruptions are likely to exceed the relatively limited extinctions observed at the PETM.

Ostalo košta 32 dolara da se čita. Ali eo prepričano u Wpostu:



What we're doing to the Earth has no parallel in 66 million years, scientists say

QuoteIf you dig deep enough into the Earth's climate change archives, you hear about the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. And then you get scared.
This is a time period, about 56 million years ago, when something mysterious happened — there are many ideas as to what — that suddenly caused concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to spike, far higher than they are right now. The planet proceeded to warm rapidly, at least in geologic terms, and major die-offs of some marine organisms followed due to strong acidification of the oceans.
The cause of the PETM has been widely debated. Some think it was an explosion of carbon from thawing Arctic permafrost. Some think there was a huge release of subsea methane that somehow made its way to the atmosphere — and that the series of events might have been kickstarted by major volcanic eruptions.
[We had all better hope these scientists are wrong about the planet's future]
In any case, the result was a hothouse world from pole to pole, some 5 degrees Celsius warmer overall. But now, new research suggests, even the drama of the PETM falls short of our current period, in at least one key respect: We're putting carbon into the atmosphere at an even faster rate than happened back then.
  This high-resolution animation shows carbon dioxide emitted from fires and megacities over a five day period in June 2006. The model is based on real emission data so that scientists can observe how the greenhouse gas behaves once it has been emitted. (Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)  Such is the result of a new study in Nature Geoscience, led by Richard Zeebe of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and colleagues from the University of Bristol in the UK and the University of California-Riverside.
"If you look over the entire Cenozoic, the last 66 million years, the only event that we know of at the moment, that has a massive carbon release, and happens over a relatively short period of time, is the PETM," says Zeebe. "We actually have to go back to relatively old periods, because in the more recent past, we don't see anything comparable to what humans are currently doing."
That's why this time period is so crucial to study — as a possible window on our own.
There's no doubt that a lot of carbon — about as much as contained the fossil fuel reserves that humans have either already burned, or could still burn, combined — made its way into the atmosphere during the PETM. The result was a major warming event that lasted over 100,000 years. But precisely how rapidly the emissions occurred is another matter.
"If anthropogenic emissions rates have no analogue in Earth's recent history, then unforeseeable future responses of the climate system are possible," the authors write.
To examine what happened in the PETM, the researchers used a deep ocean core of sediment from off the coast of New Jersey. The goal was to determine the ratios between different isotopes, or slightly different elemental forms, of carbon and oxygen, in the sediments during the PETM.
The relationship between the two lets researchers determine how atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, as reflected in the ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 13, in turn influenced temperatures (which can be inferred based on oxygen isotopes in the ocean).
"In terms of these two systems, the first shows us when the carbon went into the system, and the second tells us when the climate responded," says Zeebe.
It turns out that there is a lag time between massive pulses of carbon in the atmosphere and subsequent warming, because the oceans have a large thermal inertia. Therefore, a large lag would indicate a greater carbon release, whereas the lack of one actually means that carbon dioxide came out more slowly.
The geologic evidence from the new core did not show a lag, the new study reports. That means, the authors estimate, that while a gigantic volume of carbon entered the atmosphere during the PETM — between 2,000 and 4,500 billion tons — it played out over some 4,000 years. So only about 1 billion tons of carbon were emitted per year. In contrast, humans are now emitting about 10 billion tons annually — changing the planet much more rapidly.
"The anthropogenic release outpaces carbon release during the most extreme global warming event of the past 66 million years, by at least an order of magnitude," writes Peter Stassen, an Earth and environmental scientist at KU Leuven, in Belgium, in an accompanying commentary on the new study.
The analogy between the PETM and the present, then, is less than perfect — and our own era may be worse in key ways. "The two main conclusions is that ocean acidification will be more severe, ecosystems may be hit harder because of the rate" of carbon release, says Zeebe.
And not only have we only begun to see the changes that will result from current warming, but there may be other changes that lack any ancient parallel, because of the current rate of change.
"Given that the current rate of carbon release is unprecedented throughout the Cenozoic, we have effectively entered an era of a no-analogue state, which represents a fundamental challenge to constraining future climate projections," the study concludes.

Rockefeller fund dumping fossil fuels, hits Exxon on climate issues

QuoteThe Rockefeller Family Fund said on Wednesday it will divest from fossil fuels as quickly as possible and "eliminate holdings" of Exxon Mobil, chiding the oil company for allegedly misleading the public about the threat of climate change.
The move by the U.S. based charity, which will also include coal and Canadian oil sands holdings, is especially notable because a century ago John D. Rockefeller Sr. made a fortune running Standard Oil, a precursor to Exxon Mobil.  Exxon did not immediately comment.

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China Is on an Epic Solar Power Binge

QuoteIt's worth taking a minute to appreciate the sheer scale of what China is doing in solar right now. In 2015, the country added more than 15 gigawatts of new solar capacity, surpassing Germany as the world's largest solar power market. China now has 43.2 gigawatts of solar capacity, compared with38.4 gigawatts in Germany and 27.8 in the United States.

According to new projections, it seems that trend is going to continue. Under its 13th Five Year Plan, China will nearly triple solar capacity by 2020, adding 15 to 20 gigawatts of solar capacity each year for the next five years, according to Nur Bekri, director of the National Energy Administration. That will bring the country's installed solar power to more than 140 gigawatts. To put that in context, world solar capacity topped 200 gigawatts last year and is expected to reach 321 gigawatts by the end of 2016.

Of course, China is also the world's largest carbon emitter, it burns more coal than any other nation, and its solar capacity is only a small fraction of its total energy portfolio. What's more, capacity does not always equate to generation: the National Energy Administration estimates that nearly one-third of solar capacity in Gansu province, and more than one-quarter in Xinjiang, was idle last year.

China's stated goal in adding such gargantuan amounts of solar is that it wants meet its targets for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases under the Paris climate accord. But that's far from the whole story. China's leaders are desperate to reduce the coal-fired air pollution that renders the air in big cities like Shanghai and Beijing virtually unbreathable.

And China's massive solar panel manufacturing sector needs new markets for its products. Patrick Jobin, an analyst at Credit Suisse, said Monday that a solar panel glut could hit the sector this year as China's top three producers, JA Solar, JinkoSolar, and Trina Solar, continue to ramp up production despite flattening international demand. "We believe solar manufactures face an exacerbated, oversupplied environment in 2016," he wrote. So the central government's bold plans could be a strategy for soaking up the excess supply.It's worth taking a minute to appreciate the sheer scale of what China is doing in solar right now. In 2015, the country added more than 15 gigawatts of new solar capacity, surpassing Germany as the world's largest solar power market. China now has 43.2 gigawatts of solar capacity, compared with38.4 gigawatts in Germany and 27.8 in the United States.
   According to new projections, it seems that trend is going to continue. Under its 13th Five Year Plan, China will nearly triple solar capacity by 2020, adding 15 to 20 gigawatts of solar capacity each year for the next five years, according to Nur Bekri, director of the National Energy Administration. That will bring the country's installed solar power to more than 140 gigawatts. To put that in context, world solar capacity topped 200 gigawatts last year and is expected to reach 321 gigawatts by the end of 2016.
Of course, China is also the world's largest carbon emitter, it burns more coal than any other nation, and its solar capacity is only a small fraction of its total energy portfolio. What's more, capacity does not always equate to generation: the National Energy Administration estimates that nearly one-third of solar capacity in Gansu province, and more than one-quarter in Xinjiang, was idle last year.

China Is on an Epic Solar Power BingeChina Is on an Epic Solar Power Binge

Scientists say Antarctic melting could double sea level rise. Here's what that looks like.
Uprkos malo blicovskom naslovu, tekst je dovoljno ozbiljan a ne kopiram ga ovde jer ima dosta slika i grafikona.

It's settled: 90–100% of climate experts agree on human-caused global warming

Quote
All-star team with authors of seven previous climate consensus studies collaborate to debunk the 'no consensus' myth once and for all

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Strangest Chart Ever Created?

Fossil fuels could be phased out worldwide in a decade, says new study

QuoteThe worldwide reliance on burning fossil fuels to create energy could be phased out in a decade, according to an article published by a major energy think tank in the UK.

Professor Benjamin Sovacool, Director of the Sussex Energy Group at the University of Sussex, believes that the next great energy revolution could take place in a fraction of the time of major changes in the past.

But it would take a collaborative, interdisciplinary, multi-scalar effort to get there, he warns. And that effort must learn from the trials and tribulations from previous energy systems and technology transitions.

In a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Energy Research & Social Science, Professor Sovacool analyses energy transitions throughout history and argues that only looking towards the past can often paint an overly bleak and unnecessary picture.

Moving from wood to coal in Europe, for example, took between 96 and 160 years, whereas electricity took 47 to 69 years to enter into mainstream use.

But this time the future could be different, he says – the scarcity of resources, the threat of climate change and vastly improved technological learning and innovation could greatly accelerate a global shift to a cleaner energy future.

The study highlights numerous examples of speedier transitions that are often overlooked by analysts. For example, Ontario completed a shift away from coal between 2003 and 2014; a major household energy programme in Indonesia took just three years to move two-thirds of the population from kerosene stoves to LPG stoves; and France's nuclear power programme saw supply rocket from four per cent of the electricity supply market in 1970 to 40 per cent in 1982.

Each of these cases has in common strong government intervention coupled with shifts in consumer behaviour, often driven by incentives and pressure from stakeholders.

Professor Sovacool says: "The mainstream view of energy transitions as long, protracted affairs, often taking decades or centuries to occur, is not always supported by the evidence.

"Moving to a new, cleaner energy system would require significant shifts in technology, political regulations, tariffs and pricing regimes, and the behaviour of users and adopters.

"Left to evolve by itself – as it has largely been in the past – this can indeed take many decades. A lot of stars have to align all at once.

"But we have learnt a sufficient amount from previous transitions that I believe future transformations can happen much more rapidly."

In sum, although the study suggests that the historical record can be instructive in shaping our understanding of macro and micro energy transitions, it need not be predictive.

Explore further: Energiewende in the Alps: Switzerland's transition away from nuclear

More information: Benjamin K. Sovacool. How long will it take? Conceptualizing the temporal dynamics of energy transitions, Energy Research & Social Science (2016). DOI: 10.1016/j.erss.2015.12.020


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-04-fossil-fuels-phased-worldwide-decade.html#jCp

Solar is now cheaper than coal, says India energy minister

 Warmest March in Global Recordkeeping; 2016 Roars Ahead of Pack



A ima i ovo:

QuoteToo soon? I estimate >99% chance of an annual record in 2016 in @NASAGISS temperature data, based on Jan-Mar alone

San Francisko usvojio uredbu po kojoj sve novoizgrađene zgrade moraju da imaju ugrađene solarne panele. Vrlo lepo.

Ovo bi moglo i na potforum koji se bavi tehnologijom ali ajde ovde jer je politički vezano:


Tesla will install more energy storage with Solarcity in 2016 than the USA installed in 2015

Ako ste pomislili da je izbeglica sa bliskog istoja i iz severne Afrike i pored svih sukoba ipak premalo, imate sreće.


Climate-exodus expected in the Middle East and North Africa

Well... bar je smanjen efekat staklene bašte aj ges:


Electric, hybrid and other eco-friendly cars fill the air with as many toxins as dirty diesels say scientists

Quote

   
• Eco-friendly electric and hybrid cars fill air with as many toxins as diesels
• That was finding of a study looking at particles from tyre and brake wear
• Greener alternative produces more tiny particles because they are heavier
• Made heavier by batteries and parts meaning tyres and brakes wear faster

Research: Electric, hybrid and other eco-friendly cars fill the air with as many toxins as dirty diesel vehicles, scientists have found (file photo)Electric, hybrid and other eco-friendly cars fill the air with as many toxins as dirty diesel vehicles, scientists have found.
The greener alternative produce more tiny particles from tyre and brake wear because batteries and other parts needed to propel them make them heavier.
It happens because when eco-cars accelerate or slow down the tyres and brakes wear faster, in turn producing more particulates. More particles are also whipped up from the road surface because of the extra weight.
These extra emissions are almost equal to the toxic particulates saved by reduced engine use, according to Jonathan Leake at The Sunday Times.
The research, led by Peter Achten and co-author Victor Timmers of Edinburgh University, is published in the journal Atmospheric Environment.
Achten said: 'We found that non-exhaust emissions, from brakes, tyres and the road, are far larger than exhaust emissions in all modern cars.
'These are more toxic than emissions from modern engines so they are likely to be key factors in the extra heart attacks, strokes and asthma attacks seen when air pollution levels surge.'
The research used technical data from the motor industry and government research agencies, including direct tests of brake, tyre and road wear rates.
The aim was to show that non-exhaust emissions a vehicle produces its directly related to its weight.
Scientists found that electric and eco-friendly cars weighed around 24 per cent more than conventional vehicles, a discovery that linked to anecdotal complaints from greener car owners that their tyres wear out faster.
A leading professor at the University of Hertfordshire, Ranjeet Sokhi, also led a study into the impact of non-exhaust emissions.
After installing particulate air pollution monitors in the southbound Hatfield tunnel on the A1(M), which has 49,000 vehicles a day travelling through it, scientists found that each one produced 34-39 micrograms of particles per kilometre. But only a third came from the engine.        The greener alternative, including hybrid cars (similar to the one pictured), are said to produce more particles from tyre and brake wear because batteries and other parts needed to propel them make them heavier


Everything else was from small pieces of bitumen whipped up from the road, rubber from tyres and brake dust.
Professor Sokhi said the findings highlighted the significance of non-exhaust emissions and a need for legislation.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Department of Transport said eco-vehicles still had huge benefits in cutting CO2 emissions.

Evo i same studije (pejvolovane):


Non-exhaust PM emissions from electric vehicles

QuoteAbstractParticulate matter (PM) exposure has been linked to adverse health effects by numerous studies. Therefore, governments have been heavily incentivising the market to switch to electric passenger cars in order to reduce air pollution. However, this literature review suggests that electric vehicles may not reduce levels of PM as much as expected, because of their relatively high weight. By analysing the existing literature on non-exhaust emissions of different vehicle categories, this review found that there is a positive relationship between weight and non-exhaust PM emission factors. In addition, electric vehicles (EVs) were found to be 24% heavier than equivalent internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs). As a result, total PM₁₀ emissions from EVs were found to be equal to those of modern ICEVs. PM_2.5 emissions were only 1–3% lower for EVs compared to modern ICEVs. Therefore, it could be concluded that the increased popularity of electric vehicles will likely not have a great effect on PM levels. Non-exhaust emissions already account for over 90% of PM₁₀ and 85% of PM_2.5 emissions from traffic. These proportions will continue to increase as exhaust standards improve and average vehicle weight increases. Future policy should consequently focus on setting standards for non-exhaust emissions and encouraging weight reduction of all vehicles to significantly reduce PM emissions from traffic.
Highlights•A positive relationship exists between vehicle weight and non-exhaust emissions.•Electric vehicles are 24% heavier than their conventional counterparts.•Electric vehicle PM emissions are comparable to those of conventional vehicles.•Non-exhaust sources account for 90% of PM₁₀ and 85% of PM_2.5 from traffic.•Future policy should focus on reducing vehicle weight.

Ljudi koji komentarišu ove stvari na slešdotu su uvereni da je ovo hrpa besmislica...

S druge strane:


Germany had so much renewable energy on Sunday that it had to pay people to use electricity

QuoteOn Sunday, May 8, Germany hit a new high in renewable energy generation. Thanks to a sunny and windy day, at one point around 1pm the country's solar, wind, hydro and biomass plants were supplying about 55 GW of the 63 GW being consumed, or 87%.
Power prices actually went negative for several hours, meaning commercial customers were being paid to consume electricity.


Last year the average renewable mix was 33%, reports Agora Energiewende, a German clean energy think tank. New wind power coming online should push that even higher.
"We have a greater share of renewable energy every year," said Christoph Podewils of Agora. "The power system adapted to this quite nicely. This day shows again that a system with large amounts of renewable energy works fine."
Critics have argued that because of the daily peaks and troughs of renewable energy—as the sun goes in and out and winds rise and fall—it will always have only a niche role in supplying power to major economies. But that's looking less and less likely. Germany plans to hit 100% renewable energy by 2050, and Denmark's wind turbines already at some points generate more electricity than the country consumes, exporting the surplus to Germany, Norway and Sweden.
Germany's power surplus on Sunday wasn't all good news. The system is still too rigid for power suppliers and consumers to respond quickly to price signals. Though gas power plants were taken offline, nuclear and coal plants can't be quickly shut down, so they went on running and had to pay to sell power into the grid for several hours, while industrial customers such as refineries and foundries earned money by consuming electricity.Read this next: Where in the world have we achieved 100% renewable power?

Tesla co-founder says hydrogen fuel cells are a 'scam'

Quote
People affiliated with Tesla have often been outspoken about how hydrogen fuel cells are simply a bad solution to the sustainable transport issue. Just last week we reported on Tesla co-founder and CTO, JB Straubel, going on a quick rant about hydrogen and saying that fuel cells will soon be "irrelevant" in the transportation industry.
Now another Tesla co-founder, Marc Tarpenning, went a little further than Straubel and called hydrogen fuel cells a "scam". He also said out loud what many in the industry are thinking – that energy companies are supporting the technology for its inefficiency.
Tarpenning is not with Tesla anymore, but he is one of the original co-founders with his long-time friend and business partner, Martin Eberhard. He was on the Internet History Podcast last week to talk about his ventures and he explained in great details the foundings of his two companies; NuvoMedia and Tesla Motors.
The podcast is worth listening in full – see below (Tesla starts at about 25 minutes in), but I found the rant about hydrogen fuel cells particularly interesting.
After selling NuvoMedia, a maker of e-book readers, he and Eberhard first investigated alternative fuel sources in order to start a company to solve the sustainable transport issue. They looked into hydrogen fuel cells and quickly dismissed it:

If your goal is to reduce energy consumption, petrol or whatever resource, you want to use it as efficiently as possible. You don't want to pick something that consumes a lot for whatever reason, and hydrogen is uniquely bad.
There's a saying in the auto industry that hydrogen is the future of transportation and always will be. It's a scam as far as I can tell because the energy equation is terrible. It's just terrible.
People will say that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but it's abundant out there in the universe not here. We live on a planet where hydrogen is super reactive – it's bound up into everything. It's bound up into water, wood and everything else. They only way that you get hydrogen requires you to pour energy into it to break it from the chemical bonds.
Electrolysis is the most commen method. You put electricity in water and it separates it, but you are pouring energy in order to make hydrogen, and then you have to compress it and that takes energy, and then you have to transport it to wherever you actually need it, which is really difficult because hydrogen is much harder to work with than gasoline or even natural gas – and natural gas is not that easy.
And then you ultimately have to place it into a car where you'll have a very high-pressure vessel which offers its own safety issues – and that's only to convert it back again to electricity to make the car go because hydrogen fuel cell cars are really electric cars. They just have an extraordinary bad battery.
Hydrogen is an energy carrier and not a primary fuel source on this planet. Maybe out somewhere in the universe, but not on a terrestrial planet.
When you add that all up, it turns out that the amount of energy per kilometer driven is just terrible. It's way worse than almost anything else you can come up with – which I always suspected is one of the reasons why the energy companies have long been big proponents of it.
When we were raising money the first time, we had very carefully gone through the math to understand fuel cells because there was a bunch of money going into fuel cells at the time and we also looked at biofuels and ethanols – we sort of went down the whole list to figure out what the most energy efficient system was – which turned out to be battery electric cars.

Tarpenning then described how they included a slide about hydrogen fuel cells in their powerpoint presentation when trying to raise money from venture capitalists for Tesla. The slide was of course about why Tesla would use batteries to power its vehicles and not hydrogen.
He says that half of the VCs would ask them to skip the slide saying that they already ran their own cost analysis and they are aware of the inefficiency of the system, but the other half of the VCs would go really quiet and then start asking more questions. Marc explained that those VCs had already invested in fuel cell companies, which most went out of business by now.
Tarpenning left Tesla in 2008 after an internal power-struggle saw his co-founder Martin Eberhard ousted as CEO and Elon Musk took over not long after. He is still involved in the electric vehicle industry. He invested, alongside Eberhard, in electric motorcycle maker Alta Motors in 2014.
We also recently reported on him joining the advisory board of 'self-driving vehicles for industry' company: Clearpath Robotics.
Here's the podcast in full:

http://youtu.be/8vMJq8-RuA4

'Healing' detected in Antarctic ozone hole 

Quote
Researchers say they have found the first clear evidence that the thinning in the ozone layer above Antarctica is starting to heal.
The scientists said that in September 2015 the hole was around 4 million sq km smaller than it was in the year 2000 - an area roughly the size of India.
The gains have been credited to the long term phasing out of ozone-destroying chemicals.
The study also sheds new light on the role of volcanoes in making the problem worse.
Skin cancer worry The natural production and destruction of ozone in the stratosphere balances itself out over long time, meaning that historically there has been a constant level to protect the Earth by blocking out harmful ultraviolet radiation from the Sun.
Its absence increases the chances of skin cancer, cataract damage, and harm to humans, animals and plants.
British scientists first noticed a dramatic thinning of ozone in the stratosphere some 10 kilometres above Antarctica in the mid 1980s.
In 1986, US researcher Susan Solomon showed that ozone was being destroyed by the presence of molecules containing chlorine and bromine that came from chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). These gases were found in everything from hairsprays to refrigerators to air conditioning units.
The reason the thinning was occurring mainly over Antarctica was because of the extreme cold and large amounts of light. These helped produce what are termed Polar Stratospheric Clouds.
In these chilled-out clouds, the chlorine chemistry occurs that destroys the ozone.
Thanks to the global ban on the use of CFCs in the Montreal Protocol in 1987, the situation in Antarctica has been slowly improving.
Several studies have shown the declining influence of CFCs, but according to the authors this new study shows the "first fingerprints of healing" and the ozone layer is actively growing again.
Prof Solomon and colleagues, including researchers from the University of Leeds in the UK, carried out detailed measurements of the amount of ozone in the stratosphere between 2000 and 2015.
Using data from weather balloons, satellites and model simulations, they were able to show that the thinning of the layer had declined by 4 million sq km over the period. The found that more than half the shrinkage was due solely to the reduction in atmospheric chlorine.
Normally measurements are taken in October when the ozone hole is at its largest. But this team believed they would get a better picture by looking at readings taken in September, when temperatures are still low but other factors that can influence the amount of ozone, such as the weather, are less prevalent.
"Even though we phased out the production of CFCs in all countries including India and China around the year 2000, there's still a lot of chlorine left in the atmosphere," Prof Solomon told the BBC World Service Science in Action programme.
"It has a lifetime of about 50-100 years, so it is starting to slowly decay and the ozone will slowly recover.
"We don't expect to see a complete recovery until about 2050 or 2060 but we are starting to see that in September the ozone hole is not as bad as it used to be."

One finding that puzzled researchers was the October 2015 reading that showed the biggest ozone hole on record over Antarctica.
The scientists believe that a key contributor to the record hole was volcanic activity.
"After an eruption, volcanic sulphur forms tiny particles and those are the seeds for Polar Stratospheric Clouds," Prof Solomon told Science in Action.
"You get even more of these clouds when you have a recent major volcanic eruption and that leads to additional ozone loss."
"Until we did our recent work no-one realised that the Calbuco eruption in Chile, actually had significantly affected the ozone loss in October of last year."
The study has been hailed as "historically significant" by some other researchers in the field.
"This is the first convincing evidence that the healing of the Antarctic ozone hole has now started," said Dr Markus Rex from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany.
"Right now the state of the ozone layer is still really bad, but I find it very important that we know the Montreal Protocol is working and has an effect on the size of the hole and that is a big step forward."
Differing views However others are not entirely convinced that the decline shown in the new study is down to a reduction in the amount of chlorine in the stratosphere.
"The data clearly show significant year to year variations that are much greater than the inferred trends shown in the paper," said Dr Paul Newman from Nasa.
"If the paper included this past year, which had a much more significant ozone hole due to lower wave driven forcing, the overall trend would be less."
Regardless of these questions, the scientists involved in the study believe the ozone story is a great role model for how to tackle global environmental problems.
"It's just been remarkable," said Prof Solomon.
"This was an era in which international co-operation went rather well on some issues. I was inspired by the way the developed and developing countries were able to work together on dealing with the ozone hole," said Prof Solomon.
The study has been published in the journal Science.

Upravo mi je palo na pamet ideja za hlađenje Zemlje. Najviše Sunčeve energije se upija u okeanima, jel tako? Što ne bismo pokrili okeane nekom materijom koja je lakša od vode, ne degradira na suncu i u slanoj vodi, i nije škodljiva po živi svet? I pritom odbija sunčeve zrake nazad u svemir! Još ako može sama da se replicira...

Ovaj mac bi bio zajeban ludi naučnik u nekom stripu.

U međuvremenu, nešto što bi moglo da actually bude efikasno, mada zvuči skoro predobro da bi bilo stvarno:


Solar Cells converts Co2 into hydrocarbon fuel

QuoteResearchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have engineered a potentially game-changing solar cell that cheaply and efficiently converts atmospheric carbon dioxide directly into usable hydrocarbon fuel, using only sunlight for energy.

The finding is reported in the July 29 issue of Science and was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. A provisional patent application has been filed.

Unlike conventional solar cells, which convert sunlight into electricity that must be stored in heavy batteries, the new device essentially does the work of plants, converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into fuel, solving two crucial problems at once. A solar farm of such "artificial leaves" could remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and produce energy-dense fuel efficiently.

"The new solar cell is not photovoltaic — it's photosynthetic," says Amin Salehi-Khojin, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at UIC and senior author on the study.

"Instead of producing energy in an unsustainable one-way route from fossil fuels to greenhouse gas, we can now reverse the process and recycle atmospheric carbon into fuel using sunlight," he said.


While plants produce fuel in the form of sugar, the artificial leaf delivers syngas, or synthesis gas, a mixture of hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide. Syngas can be burned directly, or converted into diesel or other hydrocarbon fuels.
The ability to turn CO2 into fuel at a cost comparable to a gallon of gasoline would render fossil fuels obsolete.

Chemical reactions that convert CO2 into burnable forms of carbon are called reduction reactions, the opposite of oxidation or combustion. Engineers have been exploring different catalysts to drive CO2 reduction, but so far such reactions have been inefficient and rely on expensive precious metals such as silver, Salehi-Khojin said.

"What we needed was a new family of chemicals with extraordinary properties," he said.

Salehi-Khojin and his coworkers focused on a family of nano-structured compounds called transition metal dichalcogenides — or TMDCs — as catalysts, pairing them with an unconventional ionic liquid as the electrolyte inside a two-compartment, three-electrode electrochemical cell.

The best of several catalysts they studied turned out to be nanoflake tungsten diselenide.

"The new catalyst is more active; more able to break carbon dioxide's chemical bonds," said UIC postdoctoral researcher Mohammad Asadi, first author on the Science paper.

In fact, he said, the new catalyst is 1,000 times faster than noble-metal catalysts — and about 20 times cheaper.
Other researchers have used TMDC catalysts to produce hydrogen by other means, but not by reduction of CO2. The catalyst couldn't survive the reaction.

"The active sites of the catalyst get poisoned and oxidized," Salehi-Khojin said. The breakthrough, he said, was to use an ionic fluid called ethyl-methyl-imidazolium tetrafluoroborate, mixed 50-50 with water.

"The combination of water and the ionic liquid makes a co-catalyst that preserves the catalyst's active sites under the harsh reduction reaction conditions," Salehi-Khojin said.

The UIC artificial leaf consists of two silicon triple-junction photovoltaic cells of 18 square centimeters to harvest light; the tungsten diselenide and ionic liquid co-catalyst system on the cathode side; and cobalt oxide in potassium phosphate electrolyte on the anode side.

When light of 100 watts per square meter – about the average intensity reaching the Earth's surface – energizes the cell, hydrogen and carbon monoxide gas bubble up from the cathode, while free oxygen and hydrogen ions are produced at the anode.

"The hydrogen ions diffuse through a membrane to the cathode side, to participate in the carbon dioxide reduction reaction," said Asadi.

The technology should be adaptable not only to large-scale use, like solar farms, but also to small-scale applications, Salehi-Khojin said. In the future, he said, it may prove useful on Mars, whose atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, if the planet is also found to have water.

"This work has benefitted from the significant history of NSF support for basic research that feeds directly into valuable technologies and engineering achievements," said NSF program director Robert McCabe.

"The results nicely meld experimental and computational studies to obtain new insight into the unique electronic properties of transition metal dichalcogenides," McCabe said. "The research team has combined this mechanistic insight with some clever electrochemical engineering to make significant progress in one of the grand-challenge areas of catalysis as related to energy conversion and the environment."

Ако је ово могуће наука ће нам средити и проблеме с килажом.

Мада, цака је да ће произвести гориво, како то онда може да буде еколошки боље од тренутне ситуације?

Да ли стварно обрада смећа смањује смеће?

Brzo si prepoznao kvaku u ovom pristupu: vadiš ugljendioksid iz atmosfere, vezuješ ga u gorivo koje onda koristiš da opet oslobodiš ugljendioksid u atmosferu. Dakle, u stvari ne smanjuješ koncentraciu ugljendioksida direktno, ali pretpostavka je da ćeš tim gorivom zameniti druga goriva - fosilna, pre svega, jelte - pa će apsolutna količina ugljendioksida emitovanog u atmosferu da se smanjuje.

vas dvojicu bih u tim samo da mislite

dobar je pravac kretanja, umjesto da se smeće odlaže ono se ponovo koristi, još kad bi bukvalno otpad počeli da prerađuju bilo bi super

nadam se samo da neće, po običaju, naftne kompanije da izvrše pritisak, uklone konkurenciju i zadrže stare dobre fosile

evo ti i primer kako se prerada otpada radi ozbiljno

http://www.vienna.convention.at/Event-Planning/Green-Meetings---CSR/Eine-lebenswerte-Stadt/Waste-management-and-recycling.aspx

https://www.wien.gv.at/umwelt/ma48/service/publikationen/pdf/abfallwirtschaft-en.pdf

Quotevas dvojicu bih u tim samo da mislite

Ekspertska mišljenja su od krucijalnog značaja kod timskog rada...

ti si nam CEO al računala sam da se to podrazumeva 

Koliko smo mi ovdje propali govori i podatak da je par bosanskih gradova bukvalno smrdilo početkom ljeta, zbog neadekvatnog odlaganja... nači ne znaju ni da odlože smeće, ne da ga prerade. Najgore od svega je što sam ponekad u ovim balkanskim državicama viđao kontejnere predviđene za staklo, plastiku itd, a čak i u njih ljudi bacaju klasično smeće... ludo



a pošto nema maca da ovo promisli umjesto nas, rekao bih i da trigliceridno gorivo takođe ne bi škodilo da proizvedu

ukačiš crijevo u pupak a drugi kraj u automobil

Earth's resources used up at quickest rate ever in 2016

QuoteIn just over seven months, humanity has used up a full year's allotment of natural resources such as water, food and clean air – the quickest rate yet, according to a new report.  The point of "overshoot" will officially be reached on Monday, said environmental group Global Footprint Network -- five days earlier than last year.
"We continue to grow our ecological debt," said Pascal Canfin of green group WWF, reacting to the annual update.
"From Monday August 8, we will be living on credit because in eight months we would have consumed the natural capital that our planet can renew in a year."


The gloomy milestone is marked every year on what is known as Earth Overshoot Day.
In 1993, the day fell on October 21, in 2003 on September 22 and last year on August 13.
In 1961, according to the network, humankind used only about three-quarters of Earth's annual resource allotment. By the 1970s, economic and population growth sent Earth into annual overshoot.
"This is possible because we emit more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than our oceans and forests can absorb, and we deplete fisheries and harvest forests more quickly than they can reproduce and regrow," the network said in a statement.
To calculate the date for Earth Overshoot Day, the group crunches UN data on thousands of economic sectors such as fisheries, forestry, transport and energy production.
Earth-warming greenhouse gas emissions, it said, are now the fastest-growing contributor to ecological overshoot, making up 60 percent of humanity's demands on nature -- what is called the ecological "footprint".
According to the UN, the number of people on Earth is forecast to grow from 7.3 billion today to 11.2 billion by the end of the century -- piling further pressure on our planet and its finite resources.
But there was some good news, too.
"The rate at which Earth Overshoot Day has moved up on the calendar has slowed to less than one day a year on average over the past five years, compared to an average of three days a year since the overshoot began in the 1970s," said the network.
(AFP)

Every Month This Year Has Been the Hottest in Recorded History




Despite the cruise ship that's now plowing through a melting Arctic, or the wildfires that have consumed parts of North America, and devastating drought that's stricken in East Africa, it can still be easy to ignore sometimes that our climate is rapidly changing. But 2016 has been a remarkable year for record-breaking temperatures, and even in the midst of it, July stands out as the hottest month of all.
On Wednesday, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that July was the hottest month ever recorded on our planet, since modern record-keeping began in 1880.

JUST IN:

#July was hottest month on record for globe - @NOAANCEIclimate #StateOfClimatehttps://t.co/yfJUYpFugi pic.twitter.com/wCU2odlLZ2
— NOAA (@NOAA) August 17, 2016 NASA has reached the same conclusion. July smashed all previous records.

July 2016 was absolutely the hottest month since the instrumental records began.

pic.twitter.com/GQNsvARPDH
— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) August 15, 2016Keep in mind that July almost always stands out as the warmest month in a given year, across the planet. "July is, climatologically speaking, the world's warmest month of the year," NOAA climatologist Ahira Sanchez-Lugo told me in an interview. That's because the Northern hemisphere "has more landmass, and less ocean" than the South, she continued, and the land heats up more quickly.
But this July was the hottest month recorded on Earth, ever—beating the previous record, which was actually just set the July before.


Temperature records are falling like dominoes, month after month, year after year. Although July stands out, each consecutive month in 2016 has broken its own previous record (May was the hottest May, April the hottest April, etc.) Consider this:
June 2016 was the hottest on record.
So was May.
April smashed previous temperature records.
March did by a long shot.
February and January were the hottest ever.


"The streak of consecutive records started in May 2015," Sanchez-Lugo told me. We've now lapped ourselves, and are starting to break records set within this same streak, last year.
According to the NOAA, July was the fifteenth month in a row where the global land and ocean temperature was the highest recorded since 1880. "This marks the longest such streak in NOAA's 137 years of record keeping," its report says. (NASA's analysis varies, but only slightly: It calls July the tenth record-breaking month in a row.)
It seems pretty certain that 2016 will go down in history as the hottest recorded year on Earth, although we'll have to wait for the data to confirm that. If and when that happens, this will be the third record-breaking year in a row, which would be a new record in itself: Let's not forget that 2015 set its own annual temperature record, breaking the one set in 2014.
"We should be absolutely concerned," Sanchez-Lugo said. "We need to look at ways to adapt and mitigate. If we don't, temperatures will continue to increase."
Next year is expected to be slightly less intense, with the fierce El Niño we've been experiencing now abating. But the truth is that record-breaking temperatures, month after month, year after year, are starting to look less like an exception, more like the norm.

Paris climate deal: US and China formally join pact

Quote
The US and China - together responsible for 40% of the world's carbon emissions - have both formally joined the Paris global climate agreement.
After arriving with other leaders of G20 nations for a summit in the city of Hangzhou, Mr Obama said: "History will judge today's effort as pivotal."
CO2 emissions are the driving force behind climate change.
Last December, countries agreed to cut emissions in a bid to keep the global average rise in temperatures below 2C.
What is climate change?
What does the climate deal mean for me?
The Paris deal is the world's first comprehensive climate agreement. It will only come into force legally after it is ratified by at least 55 countries, which between them produce 55% of global carbon emissions.
Members of China's National People's Congress Standing Committee adopted "the proposal to review and ratify the Paris Agreement" on Saturday morning at the end of a week-long session.

---

Analysis: BBC environmental analyst Roger Harrabin                                                                                                    This is a big step towards turning the Paris climate agreement into reality.
Other nations will still tussle over their own ratification, but this will put pressure on G20 nations over the weekend to move faster with their pledge to phase out subsidies to fossil fuels.
But even if enough other players step forward to make the Paris deal law, huge challenges lie ahead.
Read more from Roger

---

Before China made its announcement, the 23 nations that had so far ratified the agreement accounted for just over 1% of emissions.
The UK has yet to ratify the Paris deal. A spokesman for the prime minister told BBC News that the government would ratify as soon as possible - but gave no date.
The White House issued a statement on Saturday morning announcing the US move.


In a speech in Hangzhou, Mr Obama said the Paris deal was the "single best chance that have to deal with a problem that could end up transforming this planet".
He praised US and Chinese leadership on the climate issue, saying: "We are moving the world significantly towards the goal we have set."


UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon praised Mr Obama for what he called "inspiring" leadership.
Mr Ban said Mr Obama and China's President Xi Jinping had both been "far-sighted, bold and ambitious".
However, analysts warn that the target of keeping temperature rises below 2C is already in danger of being breached.
For 14 consecutive months meteorologists have recorded the hottest month on record, and the UK's Met Office has forecast that 2016 is likely to hit temperatures 1.1C above pre-industrial levels.
Average temperatures worldwide are likely to increase more in the coming years as the effect of previous carbon emissions makes itself felt.
Environmental campaigning group Friends of the Earth welcomed the move by China and the US.
But spokesman Asad Rehman added: "The Paris agreement is a step in the right direction, but the reality is it's too weak and delays action to the next decade.
"What's needed is comprehensive and urgent action now to slash emissions and build a low-carbon future."
The G20 summit in Hangzhou starts on Sunday.
This is expected to be Mr Obama's last trip to Asia as US president.
However, as he arrived there was a security dispute on the tarmac at Hangzhou airport as White House officials, including National Security Adviser Susan Rice, and reporters tried to get closer to the president. A Chinese official shooed them away shouting: "This is our country! This is our airport!"

---

Paris agreement: Key points

   
• To keep global temperature increase "well below" 2C and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5C
• To peak greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible and achieve a balance between sources and sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century
• To review progress every five years
• $100bn a year in climate finance for developing countries by 2020, with a commitment to further finance in the future
• Once the deal comes into force, countries that have ratified it have to wait for a minimum of three years before they exit

Nego, ne mogu da se setim da li sam već na ovom topiku linkovao sajt Skeptical Science koji je vrlo koristan izvor proverljivih podataka a koji se tiču mitova, predrasuda, laži i drugih dilema vezanih za klimacke promene.

https://www.skepticalscience.com/

Ovde je spisak čestih, recimo, dilema:


https://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php

Costa Rica has gone 76 straight days using 100% renewable electricity 

Indirektno vezano:

10 Percent of the World's Wilderness Has Been Lost Since 1990s

QuoteWilderness areas around the world have experienced catastrophic declines over the last two decades, with one-tenth of global wilderness lost since the 1990s, according to a new study.
Since 1993, researchers found that a cumulative wilderness area twice the size of Alaska and half the size of the Amazon has been stripped and destroyed.
The shrinking wilderness is due, in part, to human activity such as mining, logging, agriculture, and oil and gas exploration. The researchers said theirfindings underscore the need for international policies to recognize the value of wilderness and to protect wilderness areas from the threats they face. [In Images: One-of-a-Kind Places On Earth]
"Globally important wilderness areas — despite being strongholds for endangered biodiversity, for buffering and regulating local climates, and for supporting many of the world's most politically and economically marginalized communities — are completely ignored in environmental policy," study lead author James Watson, an associate professor in the School of Geography Planning and Environmental Management at the University of Queensland, in Australia, said in a statement.
"Without any policies to protect these areas, they are falling victim to widespread development. We probably have one to two decades to turn this around," said Watson, who is also director of the Science and Research Initiative at the Wildlife Conservation Society.
Central Africa and the Amazon saw the most wilderness decline, the researchers found. Of the roughly 1.27 million square miles (3.3 million square kilometers) of global wilderness lost, the Amazon accounted for nearly one-third, and 14 percent of the world's wilderness was lost from Central Africa, according to the study.
The researchers determined that only 11.6 million square miles (30.1 million square km) of wilderness is left, which equates to just 20 percent of the Earth's total land mass.
"The amount of wilderness loss in just two decades is staggering," study co-author Oscar Venter, an associate professor of ecosystem science and management at the University of Northern British Columbia, said in the statement. "We need to recognize that wilderness areas, which we've foolishly considered to be de-facto protected due to their remoteness, is actually being dramatically lost around the world."
The researchers defined wilderness as "biologically and ecologically intact landscapes that are mostly free of human disturbance." In their new study, the scientists mapped these areas around the world to assess how their ecosystems have changed over the years. The researchers noted that wilderness areas do not exclude people, but rather have lower levels of human impact that results in biophysical disturbance to natural habitats.
Once wilderness is gone, it cannot be restored because the ecological processes that underpin the ecosystems are destroyed, the researchers said. The only option, they said, is to proactively protect what is left.
"If we don't act soon, there will only be tiny remnants of wilderness around the planet, and this is a disaster for conservation, for climate change, and for some of the most vulnerable human communities on the planet," Watson said. "We have a duty to act for our children and their children."
The study was published online Thursday (Sept. in the journal Current Biology.
Original article on Live Science.

Odličan opis klimatskih promena u poslednjih 22000 godina.

http://xkcd.com/1732/

The Sixth Mass Extinction Will Be Like Nothing In Earth's History 

Quote

The sixth mass extinction—the one that seven billion humans are doing their darnedest to trigger at this very moment—is shaping up to be like nothing our planet has ever seen. That's the conclusion of a sweeping new analysis, which compared marine fossil records from Earth's five previous mass extinction events to what's happening in the oceans right now.
"There is no past event that looks biologically like what's happening today," lead study author Jonathan Payne, of Stanford University, told Gizmodo. Unlike the past, Payne said, "processes like warming and ocean acidification are not the dominant cause of threat in the modern ocean."
Instead, the dominant threat is people. It's the nets, harpoons, and trawlers that are systematically emptying the oceans of fish and other marine life forms. Whereas the mass extinctions of the past tended to target organisms in certain environments, the sixth mass extinction is poised to hit the biggest animals the hardest. And that could have have profound implications for how our planet's future unfolds.
  A paleontologist by training, Payne and his research group started compiling data on modern marine organisms several years back, in order to study how body size and ecological traits have changed over evolutionary time. Payne, who has studied the End Permian extinction event that wiped out more than 95 percent of all marine species 250 million years ago, soon realized that his dataset—which included living and extinct members of nearly 2500 marine genera—could serve another purpose.


"We thought the data we had would allow us to examine extinction in the modern [era] in a way that would be very comparable to the fossil record," Payne said. "Our hope was that we might be able to identify past events that biologically were most similar to the extinction threat the oceans are facing today."
    So that's exactly what the researchers did. By comparing the extinction threat faced by modern marine genera (as indicated by their official conservation status) with their ancestral counterparts, Payne and his colleagues discovered that modern extinction threat is more strongly associated with body size. Larger animals face a greater risk of disappearing than smaller animals.
In past mass extinction events, body size didn't matter that much. Instead, it was an organism's habitat that dictated its fate. Animals that lived in the open ocean, or pelagic zone, went extinct at a higher rate than benthic creatures living on the seafloor.

This difference in "extinction selectivity" can be explained by different drivers. During the End Permian, changes in ocean chemistry triggered by microbes, volcanoes, or some combination of the two are thought to have created a toxic environment for most marine life. At the end of the Cretaceous period, an enormous asteroid impact followed by supervolcano eruptions sent plumes of dust into the sky, choking out sunlight and cutting off the energy supply at the bottom of the food chain. In both cases, organisms that lived in more isolated, sheltered environments away from the ocean's surface fared better.
Today, the dominant driver of marine extinction is people, and people aren't terribly selective about which environments they pluck animals from. We go for the biggest game, fishing down the food web and removing top predators. Within species, too, we tend to hunt the largest individuals, which is why North Atlantic cod and Chesapeake oysters were historically much larger. "In a sense, we're driving evolution [toward smaller individuals]," Payne said.
   

There are a few big caveats to the analysis. For the sake of comparison, Payne and his co-authors only analyzed marine genera that have fossil counterparts, which means certain soft-bodied organisms that don't preserve well (like octopods) were excluded. What's more, they only looked at organisms whose extinction risk has been assessed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). That creates a rather serious bias toward big, charismatic groups—fish, sea turtles, marine mammals, and the like. There are countless species of marine invertebrates that we simply don't have enough data on to do a proper threat assessment.

Perhaps most significantly, the study excluded corals, which are currently in the midst of a catastrophic, global die-off. As habitat for roughly a quarter of all marine species, the loss of coral reefs due to global warming and ocean acidification would be a major blow to the health of the oceans overall.
"This study largely does not address the impact we are having on ocean ecosystems through global climate change," Mark Eakin, a biological oceanographer with NOAA who was not involved with the study told Gizmodo. "Our increases in atmospheric CO2 will add to the impacts found by the authors to broaden our species' destructive reach."
Even considering the omissions, the pattern the authors uncovered implies that the trajectory of the sixth mass extinction could be unique. The loss of large animals tends to cause what ecologists call a "tropic cascade," basically, a ripple effect down the food chain. Larger organisms also play an outsized role in global nutrient cycling—whale poop fertilizes the oceans with iron, for instance, while salmon migrations bring nitrogen and phosphorus upstream and even onto the land.
It's unclear whether the loss of these ecosystem services will make it harder for marine life to recover, but it's certainly a possibility. The study minces no words to this point: "The preferential removal of the largest animals from the modern oceans, unprecedented in the history of animal life, may disrupt ecosystems for millions of years."
There is, however, a bright spot: things haven't gotten too terrible yet. In Payne's dataset, there is only one genus that has actually gone extinct in the past 500 years. While more species have gone extinct, and some genera are too poorly studied to be sure, we're at best on the precipice of a sixth mass extinction. We can still turn this sinking ship around.
"We have the opportunity to totally avert this, if we make the right decisions," Payne said. "Even on the land, where we have lost a bunch of large species, almost everything at the genus level is still here."

"To claim we're in a sixth mass extinction is something very enormous," he continued. "It is a possibility. It is not the reality yet."
[Science]
This article has been updated to include comments from Dr. Mark Eakin.