Het Grote Klimaatverandering Topic #9

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April 2018 was de 400e maand op rij die warmer was dan gemiddeld

December 1984, de maand waarin president Ronald Reagan net verkozen is voor zijn tweede ambtstermijn, "Dynasty" razend populair is op tv en Madonna's "Like a Virgin" op de radio. En ook de laatste keer dat de aarde een maand kende die kouder was dan gemiddeld. Sindsdien zijn alle maanden warmer geweest dan gemiddeld, en april 2018 was de 400e maand op rij waarin dat het geval was. De oorzaak? De opwarming van de aarde doordat menselijke activiteiten meer broeikasgassen uitstoten in de atmosfeer.

Luc De Roy
vr 18 mei 21:05

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Emails show cooperation among EPA, climate-change deniers

WASHINGTON — Newly released emails show senior Environmental Protection Agency officials working closely with a conservative group that dismisses climate change to rally like-minded people for public hearings on science and global warming, counter negative news coverage and tout Administrator Scott Pruitt’s stewardship of the agency.

John Konkus, EPA’s deputy associate administrator for public affairs, repeatedly reached out to senior staffers at the Heartland Institute, according to the emails.

“If you send a list, we will make sure an invitation is sent,” Konkus wrote to then-Heartland president Joseph Bast in May 2017, seeking suggestions on scientists and economists the EPA could invite to an annual EPA public hearing on the agency’s science standards.

Follow-up emails show Konkus and the Heartland Institute mustering scores of potential invitees known for rejecting scientific warnings of man-made climate-change, including from groups like Plants Need CO2, The Right Climate Stuff, and Junk Science.

The emails underscore how Pruitt and senior agency officials have sought to surround themselves with people who share their vision of curbing environmental regulation and enforcement, leading to complaints from environmentalists that he is ignoring the conclusions of the majority of scientists in and out of his agency especially when it comes to climate-changing carbon emissions.

They were obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Southern Environmental Law Center, which sued to enforce a Freedom of Information request and provided them to The Associated Press.

The EPA maintains close working relationships with a broad range of public and private groups, and Heartland is just one of many the agency engages with “to ensure the public is informed,” said EPA spokesman Lincoln Ferguson.

“It demonstrates the agency’s dedication to advancing President Trump’s agenda of environmental stewardship and regulatory certainty,” he said.

The public hearing referred to in the May 2017 email ultimately was canceled when the EPA official who runs it fell ill, the EPA said.

But Bast contended in an email sent to EPA staffers and others that the official called off the hearing after learning that climate-change “skeptics planned to attend.”

The Heartland Institute calls itself a leading free-market think-tank. It rejects decades of science saying fossil-fuel emissions are altering the climate and says on its website that curbing use of petroleum and coal to fight climate change would “squander one of America’s greatest comparative advantages among the world’s nations.”

“Of course The Heartland Institute has been working with EPA on policy and personnel decisions,” Tim Huelskamp, a former Kansas Republican congressman who now leads the group, said in a statement to the AP.

“They recognized us as the pre-eminent organization opposing the radical climate alarmism agenda and instead promoting sound science and policy,” Huelskamp wrote.

He said Heartland would continue to help Pruitt and his staff.

Ferguson said Pruitt and his top officials have also met with groups known for their campaigns against climate-changing emissions and pollutants from fossil fuels, including the Moms Clean Air Force, the American Lung Association, and others.

But Ben Levitan of the Environmental Defense Fund said mainstream climate-change groups have received nothing like the outreach and invitations that Heartland and other hard-right groups have been getting.

Certainly, “in some ways this is normal and in the course of business that ebbs and flows with the ideology of the administration in power,” said Meredith McGehee, executive director of Issue One, a non-profit promoting ethical government and bipartisan political reform.

Heartland is not registered as a lobbying group. Spokesman Jim Lakely said the group has logged its contacts with EPA and that they fall below the level required for disclosing as lobbying.

An email last February shows Bast forwarded to followers an email with the line “From the White House,” rallying activists to public hearings the EPA was then holding around the country on repealing an Obama-era power plan meant to curb fossil-fuel emissions.

The email is signed by a Pruitt political appointee and gives the name of another EPA official for activists to call. It’s not clear from the email, however, who initiated the attempt to rally conservatives for the public hearing.

Konkus was a Republican political consultant when Pruitt named him to the agency. His duties include reviewing awards of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants. The Washington Post reported in September that Konkus had been scrutinizing grant applications for mentions of climate change, which he reportedly calls “the double C-word.”

Emails show he and former EPA spokeswoman, Liz Bowman, repeatedly reached out to Heartland to talk over critical coverage by the Post.

Lakely, the Heartland spokesman, responds he’s shared the article with colleagues, “asking them to jump to your aide (sic) and defend this position.”

Konkus also contacted Heartland and other conservative groups asking for what he calls “echo” amplifying word of Pruitt’s regulation-cutting efforts, according to the emails.

And an email from Bast, shared with EPA staffers and others, shows the then-Heartland president celebrating news that a reporter, Justin Gillis, was leaving The New York Times.

“Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead . Still waiting for Chris Mooney and Juliet Eilperin at the WaPo and Seth Borenstein at AP to flame out,” Bast writes.

Spokespeople for the AP, The Washington Post and The New York Times declined comment.

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Op zaterdag 26 mei 2018 13:45 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

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Voor wie onbekend is met The Heartland Institute, dat is een libertarische think-tank voor wie ideologie belangrijker is dan wetenschappelijke correctheid. Zo zaaiden deze engnekken eerder al twijfel over de schadelijke gevolgen van (mee)roken.

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Op zaterdag 19 mei 2018 14:14 schreef zakjapannertje het volgende:

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https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws(...)-was-dan-gemiddeld/]

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Op woensdag 9 mei 2018 10:49 schreef MrRatio het volgende:
edit: andere bronnen gebruiken. Vaak genoeg gezegd nu

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Op zaterdag 19 mei 2018 14:14 schreef zakjapannertje het volgende:

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https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws(...)-was-dan-gemiddeld/]

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Op zondag 27 mei 2018 15:50 schreef MrRatio het volgende:

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Geen peer-review.

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Op vrijdag 18 mei 2018 21:18 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Ik weet niet of dit een goede plek hiervoor is, maar het hangt ook wel samen met klimaat. Het is alleen wat anders dan de temperaturen en aanverwante zaken waar het hier doorgaans over gaat...

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Wel een interessant mysterie vooralsnog.

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Foute ontmanteling van oude koelkasten is oorzaak van stijging van cfk's die de ozonlaag aantasten

Vorige week berichtten we nog dat wetenschappers onverwacht een hogere concentratie cfk's gemeten hadden in de atmosfeer. Vandaag weten we wat daarvan de oorzaak is: onzorgvuldige ontmanteling van oude koelkasten in China. Dat blijkt uit een rapport dat verscheen op het wetenschappelijke platform Environmental Science & Technology.

William Laenen
vr 25 mei 13:01

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Op zondag 27 mei 2018 16:29 schreef zakjapannertje het volgende:

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https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws(...)k-van-stijging-van-/

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Despite reports that improperly recycled refrigerators in China could explain a recent uptick in chlorofluorocarbon emissions, NOAA scientist Steve Montzka suggests the new mystery source of CFC-11 remains unaccounted for.

Earlier this month, Montzka and his colleagues identified rising levels of CFC-11, a common chlorofluorocarbon, in air samples collected in Hawaii. Emissions had been dropping globally over the last two decades.

The rise in CFC-11 concentrations first showed up in 2013, suggesting the chemical's proliferation can be explained by a new source -- a source scientists think is located somewhere in East Asia.

Chlorofluorocarbons like CFC-11 were used in a variety products, including refrigerators and air-conditioners, for decades before being phased out because of the Montreal Protocol. Many of those refrigerators and air-conditioners are still around -- as are the ozone-eating chemicals found inside them.

In diagnosing the health of the ozone and progress made in the wake of the Montreal Protocol, scientists have tried to account for these lingering chemicals. But in a study published earlier this month in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, a group of scientists argue those accounting attempts were lacking.

"Addressing such long-term impacts of refrigerants requires a dynamic understanding of the RACs' life cycle, which was largely overlooked in previous studies," scientists wrote.

The research suggests refrigerants, such as freon, found in refrigerators and air-conditioners in China aren't being properly disposed of, allowing ozone-eating chemicals to escape into the atmosphere.

"They will continue to impact our environment for decades to come if they are released due to mismanagement at the end of life," researchers wrote.

While the research illuminates a real problem, Montzka says the gas escaping from old Chinese air-conditioners can't account for his team's CFC-11 measurements.

"The emissive source of CFC-11 that is mentioned in the ES&T paper is more than one order of magnitude smaller than is needed to explain my atmospheric observations," Montzka told UPI. "Sure, the process mentioned in the ES&T paper may contribute, but their best estimate of CFC-11 emission from this activity is an amount that is not playing any appreciable role in the emission increase we reported on."

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A federal judge in a climate change lawsuit is forcing oil companies to cough up internal documents
Two cities seeking damages from BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Shell, and ConocoPhillips can now demand documents.

A federal judge wants the litigants in two high-profile climate change lawsuits against the five largest oil companies to make the case for whether he should consider the benefits of fossil fuels. He also wants the oil companies to start ponying up documents about their internal operations — documents that could reveal contradictions in one of their key arguments in the case while also opening them up to new lines of attack.

The suits, filed by the cities of Oakland and San Francisco, are seeking damages from BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Shell, and ConocoPhillips to pay for seawalls and other infrastructure to deal with the impacts of climate change. They’re significant in part because they involve uncharted legal territory: Never before have plaintiffs tried to hold industry liable for a global problem that affects everyone. They’re also the first big test for the growing wave of cities and counties that want to try the same tactic in courts around the United States.

Judge William Alsup of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, who is presiding over the San Francisco and Oakland lawsuits, on Thursday asked both sides to put together a 10-page supplemental brief on whether the court is required to weigh the benefits of fossil fuels against the harm they cause through climate change.

The judge also punted on several motions from the defendants to dismiss the case, instead opening a nine-week discovery period so the court can figure out how much control oil companies wield over their California subsidiaries. This discovery period will be a critical factor in determining whether the court has jurisdiction over these corporations.

These documents could refute the argument from some oil companies that they don’t exert enough control over their California subsidiaries to be liable for climate change damage in California, and they may reveal new targets for future litigation.

Wading into the weeds is nothing new for Alsup, who has established a reputation for his technical acumen and desire to learn about the latest research and technology. In an unprecedented move in March, he asked both sides of the suit to provide him a five-hour climate change tutorial, delving into the physics of how carbon dioxide absorbs infrared energy and the mechanism behind ice ages.

The latest developments in the lawsuits show that the judge isn’t convinced one way or the other about the merits of the cases, which could set a major precedent and yield billions in damages, just yet. But he is starting to get frustrated with the pace.

Let’s consider the new developments one at a time.

Do courts have to compare the benefits of fossil fuels to the harms from climate change?
For the brief, Alsup noted that the source of Oakland and San Francisco’s complaint is that rising sea levels due to greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels constitutes a public nuisance. “There’s no court in the history of the universe that has ever extended this to global warming,” he said. But he wanted to know if he’s considering them to be a nuisance whether he has to weigh the benefits of coal, oil, and natural gas against their harms.

“If the test is a balancing test of what is reasonable or not, I look at the broad sweep of history and see that we needed oil and fossil fuels, coal would be another one, to get from the 1850s or 1859, when they struck oil in Pennsylvania, to the present,” Alsup said. “And yes, that’s causing global warming, that’s a negative, but against that negative we need to weigh in the large benefits that have flowed from the use of fossil fuels.”

Accounting for the industrial growth and economic development driven by fossil fuels against the harm of more intense storms and coastal flooding is a difficult task, and having to include such an analysis could undermine the case for the cities that are suing.

“That’s a very tough job for a court to do and the plaintiffs wish to avoid having that balancing test for a lot of obvious reasons, and would prefer to say, ‘You’ve chosen to make these products; you simply have to pay for the damage they cause,’” David Bookbinder, chief counsel at the Niskanen Center, told Vox.

Oil companies will now have to reveal more about their inner workings, which could provide the plaintiffs more ammunition
As for ordering a discovery phase, that’s a consequence of some of the oil companies arguing that the court doesn’t have jurisdiction over such a lawsuit. Some of these companies say they are national or multinational corporations and don’t exercise enough control over their operations in California to be held liable.

Essentially, the defendants are saying cities can’t sue the parent companies of oil majors because their home offices don’t have direct control over their subsidiaries that operate in California.

So now Alsup wants them to prove it with documentation of just how much control these companies wield. The judge also bristled at the kitchen sink approach the oil companies are using to try to get the case dismissed before it goes to trial.

“You want all these trenches, you’re going to get all these trenches,” Alsup said, comparing the case to warfare. “Strategically, you should ask yourself on both sides whether you are pursuing the right course for teeing these issues up for an ultimate decision.”

As Bookbinder pointed out, oil drilling and refining operations in California belong to wholly owned subsidiaries of the big oil companies, so they’re more connected to the top office than, say, a typical McDonald’s franchise, where an independent operator effectively rents the brand name from the parent company.

Chevron, which is headquartered in California, is not contesting jurisdiction on these grounds. Chevron was also the only company that presented at Alsup’s climate tutorial, where its attorney acknowledged humanity’s role in driving climate change.

This new discovery phase in the lawsuit isn’t the big pretrial discovery where the companies would have to start coughing up incriminating internal documents, but it will force them to reveal more about how they operate than they want to, and that still has them worried.

“This is scary to them at a smaller scale,” Bookbinder said. “This is, ‘Shit, we hate it when people get into understanding our internal corporate business.’”

Outside of these lawsuits, oil companies are facing increasing scrutiny on climate change from shareholders, who are pushing oil companies to reveal more about the risks they face as average temperatures rise around the world.

twitter:

AmyAHarder twitterde op vrijdag 25-05-2018 om 18:56:00 The last big vote for the shareholder season is at Chevron on May 30. That resolution goes a step further than others by asking for a plan to decarbonize its operations. Chevron opposes it. https://t.co/eRJ4AMoaL3 reageer retweet

The main avenue for this is shareholder resolutions, which aren’t legally binding but can force companies to respond.

What it all means is that the prospect of holding major energy companies liable for their impacts on the climate is closer than ever, but years of legal wrangling still stand in the way.

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Op woensdag 30 mei 2018 09:00 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Update in de za(a)k(en) in Californië waar MrRatio en ik eerder uitwisseling hadden waarbij hij steeds herhaalde dat de rechter de zaak had stopgezet en ik herhaaldelijk bleef vragen waar dat dan stond:

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Sucking carbon dioxide from air is cheaper than scientists thought
Estimated cost of geoengineering technology to fight climate change has plunged since a 2011 analysis.

Siphoning carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere could be more than an expensive last-ditch strategy for averting climate catastrophe. A detailed economic analysis published on 7 June suggests that the geoengineering technology is inching closer to commercial viability.

The study, in Joule, was written by researchers at Carbon Engineering in Calgary, Canada, which has been operating a pilot CO2-extraction plant in British Columbia since 2015. That plant — based on a concept called direct air capture — provided the basis for the economic analysis, which includes cost estimates from commercial vendors of all of the major components. Depending on a variety of design options and economic assumptions, the cost of pulling a tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere ranges between US$94 and $232. The last comprehensive analysis of the technology, conducted by the American Physical Society in 2011, estimated that it would cost $600 per tonne.

Carbon Engineering says that it published the paper to advance discussions about the cost and potential of the technology. “We’re really trying to commercialize direct air capture in a serious way, and to do that, you have to have everybody in the supply chain on board,” says David Keith, acting chief scientist at Carbon Engineering and a climate physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Competition in the air

Founded in 2009, Carbon Engineering is one of a few companies pursuing direct air capture technologies. One competitor, Climeworks in Zurich, Switzerland, opened a commercial facility last year that can capture 900 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year for use in greenhouses. Climeworks has also opened a second facility in Iceland that can capture 50 tonnes of CO2 a year and bury it in underground basalt formations.

Climeworks says that capturing a tonne of CO2 at its Swiss plant costs about $600. Company officials expect the figure to dip below $100 per tonne in 5-10 years as operations ramp up. In the meantime, Carbon Engineering’s paper provides the most detailed look yet at the cost of such technology.

“It’s great to see human ingenuity marshalling around a problem that at first pass seemed to be intractable,” says Stephen Pacala, co-director of the carbon-mitigation initiative at Princeton University in New Jersey. Pacala also credits the Carbon Engineering team for publishing its results. “They have a proprietary interest in the technology, and nonetheless, they put out a readable and reviewable paper for sceptics to look at,” he says.

Carbon Engineering’s design blows air through towers that contain a solution of potassium hydroxide, which reacts with CO2 to form potassium carbonate. The result, after further processing, is a calcium carbonate pellet that can be heated to release the CO2. That CO2 could then be pressurized, put into a pipeline and disposed of underground, but the company is planning instead to use the gas to make synthetic, low-carbon fuels. Keith says that the company can produce these at a cost of about $1 per litre. When Carbon Engineering configured the air-capture plant for this purpose, they were able to bring costs down to as low as $94 per tonne of CO2.

Cutting costs

Klaus Lackner, a pioneer in the field who heads Arizona State University’s Center for Negative Emissions in Tempe, says that Carbon Engineering has taken a “brute-force” approach to driving down costs using known technologies. “They are coming within striking distance of making this interesting economically,” he says.

Assuming that CO2 is buried to offset vehicles’ emissions of the gas, a price of $100 per tonne would add about $0.22 cents to the price of a litre of fuel, Lackner says. That’s a substantial but not unprecedented price increase, he adds.

In the end, the economics of CO2 extraction will depend on factors that vary by location, including the price of energy and whether or not a company can access government subsidies. But the cost per tonne is still likely to remain above the market price of carbon for the foreseeable future. Carbon credits in the European Union's trading system are trading for around ¤16 (US$19) per tonne of CO2, for instance. But CO2-extraction technology could gain a foothold in markets where the CO2 can be sold at a premium, or converted into a useful product like fuel.

In the United States, Carbon Engineering is eyeing a recently expanded subsidy for carbon capture and sequestration, which could provide a tax credit of $35 per tonne for atmospheric CO2 that is converted into fuels. And regulators in California are debating a measure that would allow such fuels to qualify for the state’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard; carbon credits under that programme are currently trading around $135 per tonne.

Carbon Engineering hopes to build a small facility that can produce 200 barrels of fuel per day by 2021, and then a commercial plant that can produce 2,000 barrels per day. “This is completely doable industrial technology,” he says. “We just need to begin, set up markets and see what happens.”

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Op donderdag 14 juni 2018 10:04 schreef zoost het volgende:
Misschien kan ik geen kaartjes lezen maar volgens het NSIDC groeit de ijsmassa juist in deze periode. Als je alleen naar de laatste paar jaar kijkt, dan kun je misschien iets dergelijks verklaren, maar ik dacht dat klimaatwetenschap over de trends op lange termijn gaat, en niet over een beweging van 3-5 jaar.

https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index

[ afbeelding ]

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Op vrijdag 1 juni 2018 22:28 schreef Zwoerd het volgende:
Die 2°C gaat over de hele Aarde, niet alleen Zweeds Lapland.

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Op zondag 15 april 2018 11:59 schreef Basp1 het volgende:
Het express stukje over de vulkaan heeft het over een mogelijkheid dat deze vulkaan het laatste afsmelten de de ijskappen heeft veroorzaakt, aan de zuidzijde van onze aarde werd dan zoveel warmte geproduceerd dat het ijs aan de noordkant afsmelt, daar geloof ik weinig van. Ik wil serieuze bronnen zien, niet de express en no tricks geneuzel.

Hier het nieuwsbericht van de NASA waar de rest van de nonsens van het afsmelten bijverzonnen is. (om de skeptici maar een fijn gevoel te geven?)

https://www.nasa.gov/feat(...)ntarctic-underground

Zoals we in het NASA stukje lezen wordt er constant nog aardwarmte uitgestraald het aantal w / m^2 varieert alleen. Gaan we dadelijk nog de gemiddelde temperatuur op de aarde verklaren aan de hand van de restwarmte afgifte van de aarde, en laten we de zon en het isolerend effect van onze atmosfeer buiten beschouwing.

Ik schrijf nergens dat seismische activiteit iets met de temperatuur te maken heeft, dat maakt mr ratio ervan. Ik schrijf dat de druk op aardplaten kan verminderen door het smelten van grote ijsmassa die daarop rusten. De theorie is dan dat er door de drukvermindering er meer seismische activiteit ontstaat.

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Op vrijdag 15 juni 2018 10:06 schreef MrRatio het volgende:

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Ik heb het hier al een paar keer gemeld van vulkanen en Antartica; het zogenaamde greenhouse effect kan beter het madhouse effect genoemd gaan worden.

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Ik vraag me trouwens af of een dergelijk artikel een serieuze peer review zou overleven. Het is wetenschappelijker om meerdere hypothesen te noemen.

twitter:

ClimateAudit twitterde op vrijdag 15-06-2018 om 14:57:06 most recent scare-the-horses Nature article on Antarctic failed to caveat that grounding line of West Antarctic Ice Sheet in Ross Sea retreated nearly 1300 km since LGM about 20000 yrs BP: Conway 1999, Past and Future Grounding-Line Retreat of WAIS. See important diagram. https://t.co/6oCf4ffWmd reageer retweet

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Op vrijdag 15 juni 2018 16:29 schreef Molurus het volgende:
Hmm, Nature vs tweets van een klimaatblogger. Lastig.

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Op vrijdag 15 juni 2018 18:33 schreef MrRatio het volgende:

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Is helemaal niet lastig.