This article was written by Oliver Milman and was published in The Guardian on January 12, 2024.
This article was written by Rachel Donald and was published in The Guardian on January 13, 2024.
This article was written by Zeke Hausfather and was published in the Carbon Brief on January 12, 2024.
This article was written by Louise Boyle and was published in the Independent on January 8, 2024.
This article was written by Damian Carrington and was published in The Guardian on January 11, 2024.
This article was written by Linda McQuaig and was published in the Toronto Star on January 11, 2024.
One can only imagine the positive buzz these days inside the boardrooms of Canada’s oil companies, as they rake in record profits and plan major expansions of their oil production.
Amid all the good cheer, one could easily lose sight of the fact that those plans will push the world dangerously closer to the brink of irreversible climate chaos. Even as the world finally signed a commitment at UN climate talks last month to begin transitioning away from fossil fuels, Canada’s major oil companies are poised to do exactly the opposite — to greatly expand their fossil fuel production.
These plans position Canada to be the world’s second largest expander of oil and gas production (after the U.S.) over the next 25 years, according to Oil Change International.
Of course by now anyone who is even minimally informed realizes that the only real hope of averting climate catastrophe involves transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy. But Big Oil wants us to believe otherwise — that there’s a magic bullet that will allow them to go on producing oil without destroying the planet.
And Ottawa is largely going along with this fairy tale.
The magic bullet, according to the fossil fuel industry, is carbon capture and storage (CCS) — a controversial technology that involves physically capturing carbon emissions and storing them underground. CCS has been around for 50 years and has mostly been used to increase oil production in exhausted wells.
But the focus has shifted in recent years toward using CCS technology to reduce carbon emissions — an area where it has been much less successful. In five decades, it has managed to eliminate only an extremely tiny share of global emissions — about 0.001 per cent, according to the David Suzuki Foundation.
Even if CCS technology were to succeed in significantly removing carbon from oil production, it wouldn’t make much difference to the climate, since about 80 per cent of the carbon emissions from a barrel of oil occur when the oil is burned in cars or furnaces. And CCS does nothing to reduce those emissions.
“CCS gives the illusion that we can somehow have ‘green’ oil,” says Angela Carter, a political scientist at Memorial University and a senior associate with the International Institute for Sustainable Development. “But we can’t. The burning of oil creates huge carbon emissions, and there’s no way of greening that up.”
So, although CCS may be helpful in reducing emissions in some industrial processes, such as cement production, it is in no way a substitute for the known solution of transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy, Carter insists.
CCS is also wildly expensive. According to a just-released Oxford University report: “The cost of CCS implementation has not declined at all in 40 years, in contrast to renewable technologies like solar, wind and batteries, which have fallen in cost dramatically.”
The Oxford study concludes that seeing CCS as “a way to compensate for ongoing fossil fuel burning is economically illiterate.”
But it’s not economically illiterate from the viewpoint of oil companies, since they plan to transfer most of the cost to us, the taxpaying Canadian public. The companies estimate it will cost up to $75 billion to get the oil sands to net-zero emissions by 2050, and they’re brazenly seeking to get two-thirds of that — a staggering $50 billion — covered by Canadian taxpayers.
Ottawa has already announced plans to provide the companies with a generous new CCS tax credit, expected to cost taxpayers $10 billion over the next eight years, which is far more generous than the subsidies going to renewables, said Julia Levin, an associate director with the group Environmental Defence.
And so it is that the Trudeau government is providing Big Oil with a giant fig-leaf, enabling it to pretend it has a serious plan to reduce its emissions, even as it ramps up its fossil fuel production. And the bill for that expensive fig-leaf is coming our way.
This article was written by Seth Borenstein and was published in the Toronto Star on January 10, 2024.
Earth last year shattered global annual heat records, flirted with the world’s agreed-upon warming threshold and showed more signs of a feverish planet, the European climate agency said Tuesday.
The European climate agency Copernicus said the year was 1.48 C above pre-industrial times. That’s barely below the 1.5 C limit the world hoped to stay within in the 2015 Paris climate accord to avoid the most severe effects of warming.
And January 2024 is on track to be so warm that for the first time a 12-month period will exceed the 1.5 C threshold, Copernicus deputy director Samantha Burgess said. Scientists have repeatedly said that Earth would need to average 1.5 C of warming over two or three decades to be a technical breach of the threshold.
The 1.5 C goal “has to be (kept) alive because lives are at risk and choices have to be made,” Burgess said. “And these choices don’t impact you and I but they impact our children and our grandchildren.”
The record heat made life miserable and sometimes deadly in Europe, North America, China and many other places last year. But scientists say a warming climate is also to blame for more extreme weather events, like the lengthy drought that devastated the Horn of Africa, the torrential downpours that wiped out dams and killed thousands in Libya and the Canada wildfires that fouled the air from North America to Europe.
In a separate Tuesday press event, international climate scientists who calculate global warming’s role in extreme weather, the group’s leader, Imperial College climate scientist Friederike Otto, said “we definitely see in our analysis the strong impact of it being the hottest year.”
The World Weather Attribution team only looks at events that affect at least one million people or kill more than 100 people. But Otto said her team was overwhelmed with more than 160 of those in 2023, and could only conduct 14 studies, many of them on killer heat waves. “Basically every heat wave that is occurring today has been made more likely and is hotter because of human-induced climate change,” she said.
This article was written by Seth Borenstein and was published by the Associated Press on January 9, 2024.
Earth last year shattered global annual heat records, flirted with the world’s agreed-upon warming threshold and showed more signs of a feverish planet, the European climate agency said Tuesday.
Earth last year shattered global annual heat records, flirted with the world’s agreed-upon warming threshold and showed more signs of a feverish planet, the European climate agency said Tuesday.
The European climate agency Copernicus said the year was 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times. That’s barely below the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit that the world hoped to stay within in the 2015 Paris climate accord to avoid the most severe effects of warming.
And January 2024 is on track to be so warm that for the first time a 12-month period will exceed the 1.5-degree threshold, Copernicus Deputy Director Samantha Burgess said. Scientists have repeatedly said that Earth would need to average 1.5 degrees of warming over two or three decades to be a technical breach of the threshold.
The 1.5 degree goal “has to be (kept) alive because lives are at risk and choices have to be made,” Burgess said. “And these choices don’t impact you and I but they impact our children and our grandchildren.”
The record heat made life miserable and sometimes deadly in Europe, North America, China and many other places last year. But scientists say a warming climate is also to blame for more extreme weather events, like the lengthy drought that devastated the Horn of Africa, the torrential downpours that wiped out dams and killed thousands in Libya and the Canada wildfires that fouled the air from North America to Europe.
In a separate Tuesday press event, international climate scientists who calculate global warming’s role in extreme weather, the group’s leader, Imperial College climate scientist Friederike Otto said “we definitely see in our analysis the strong impact of it being the hottest year.”
The World Weather Attribution team only looks at events that affect at least 1 million people or kill more than 100 people. But Otto said her team was overwhelmed with more than 160 of those in 2023, and could only conduct 14 studies, many of them on killer heat waves. “Basically every heat wave that is occurring today has been made more likely and is hotter because of human-induced climate change,” she said.
Hottest year ever, what can be done? Plenty: more renewables and nuclear, less methane and meat
The United States lurched through 28 weather disasters last year that caused at least $1 billion in damage, smashing the old record of 22 set in 2020, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Tuesday. The number of these costly disasters, which are adjusted to account for inflation, has soared, averaging only three per year in the 1980s and just under six per year in the 1990s.
The U.S. billion-dollar disasters last year included a drought, four floods, 19 severe storms, 2 hurricanes, a wildfire and a winter storm. They combined to kill 492 people and cause nearly $93 billion in damage, according to NOAA.
Antarctic sea ice hit record low levels in 2023 and broke eight monthly records for low sea ice, Copernicus reported.
Copernicus calculated that the global average temperature for 2023 was about one-sixth of a degree Celsius (0.3 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the old record set in 2016. While that seems a small amount in global record-keeping, it’s an exceptionally large margin for the new record, Burgess said. Earth’s average temperature for 2023 was 14.98 degrees Celsius (58.96 degrees Fahrenheit), Copernicus calculated.
“It was record-breaking for seven months. We had the warmest June, July, August, September, October, November, December,” Burgess said. “It wasn’t just a season or a month that was exceptional. It was exceptional for over half the year.”
There are several factors that made 2023 the warmest year on record, but by far the biggest factor was the ever-increasing amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that trap heat, Burgess said. Those gases come from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.
Other factors including the natural El Nino — a temporary warming of the central Pacific that alters weather worldwide — other natural oscillations in the Arctic, southern and Indian oceans, increased solar activity and the 2022 eruption of an undersea volcano that sent water vapor into the atmosphere, Burgess said.
Malte Meinshausen, a University of Melbourne climate scientist, said about 1.3 degrees Celsius of the warming comes from greenhouse gases, with another 0.1 degrees Celsius from El Nino and the rest being smaller causes.
Copernicus records only go back to 1940 and are based on a combination of observations and forecast models. Other groups, including the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office and Berkeley Earth go back to the mid-1800s and will announce their calculations for 2023 on Friday, with expectations of record-breaking marks.
The Japanese Meteorological Agency, which uses similar techniques as Copernicus and goes back to 1948, late last month estimated that it was the warmest year at 1.47 degrees Celsius (2.64 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. The University of Alabama Huntsville global dataset, which uses satellite measurements rather than ground data and dates to 1979, last week also found it the hottest year on record, but not by as much.
Though actual observations only date back less than two centuries, several scientists say evidence from tree rings and ice cores suggest this is the warmest the Earth has been in more than 100,000 years.
“It basically means that our cities, our roads, our monuments, our farms, in practice all human activities never had to cope with the climate this warm,” Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo said at a Tuesday press conference. “There were simply no cities, no books, agriculture or domesticated animals on this planet the last time the temperature was so high.”
For the first time, Copernicus recorded a day where the world averaged at least 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) more than pre-industrial times. It happened twice and narrowly missed a third day around Christmas, Burgess said.
And for the first time, every day of the year was at least one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times. For nearly half the year — 173 days — the world was 1.5 degrees warmer than the mid-1800s.
Meinshausen, the Australian climate scientist, said it’s natural for the public to wonder whether the 1.5-degree target is lost. He said it’s important for people to keep trying to rein in warming.
“We are not abolishing a speed limit, because somebody exceeded the speed limit,” he said. “We double our efforts to step on the brakes.”
But Buontempo said it’s only going to get hotter: “Following the current trajectory in a few years time the record-breaking year of 2023 will probably be remembered as a cold year.”
This article was written by Wendy Stueck and was published in the Globe & Mail on January 10, 2024.
‘Persistently’ high temperatures set off string of climate milestones
The heat waves and balmy oceans set the stage and now it is official: 2023 is the warmest year on record, with the global temperature increase on track to exceed a 1.5-degree Celsius threshold meant to limit the most severe effects of climate change.
Unprecedented global temperatures from this past June onward resulted in 2023 overtaking the previous warmest year, 2016, by a large margin, Copernicus Climate Change Service said in a Tuesday press release. And it’s likely that a 12month period ending in January or February, 2024, will exceed 1.5 C above the preindustrial level, the group said, reflecting record-setting temperatures on land and seas around the world.
Copernicus, a component of the European Union’s space program that focuses on climate data, cited a string of heat-related milestones over the past year, including above-average temperatures in Europe for 11 months during 2023.
“2023 was an exceptional year with climate records tumbling like dominoes,” Copernicus deputy director Samantha Burgess said in the statement.
“Not only is 2023 the warmest year on record, it is also the first year with all days over 1 C warmer than the preindustrial period,” she said, adding that temperatures in 2023 likely exceed those of any period in at least the past 100,000 years.
The 1.5-degree threshold has been part of the climate-change dialogue since at least 2015, when nearly 200 countries, including Canada, signed the Paris Agreement. That treaty, which came into force in 2016, was based on scientific research that concluded human activities are releasing greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.
The pact is designed to limit the global average temperature rise to below 2 C above preindustrial levels, while focusing on holding the increase to 1.5 C, based on research that indicates going over the 1.5 C threshold increases the risk of more severe climate-change effects, including more frequent and severe droughts, heat waves and rainfall. (The term “preindustrial” in climate science usually refers to the period between 1850 and 1900 – the earliest period for which there are near-global temperature records available.)
To limit global warming to 1.5 C, greenhouse-gas emissions must peak before 2025 at the latest and fall by 43 per cent by 2030, according to a United Nations summary of the agreement.
But global greenhouse-gas emissions have increased since 2015 and hit a new high in 2022, according to the 2023 edition of the United Nations Emissions Gap Report, an annual report that tracks the gap between actual global emissions and where they should be to limit warming to 1.5 C.
Annual average air temperatures were the warmest on record, or close to the warmest, over sizable parts of all ocean basins and all continents except Australia, Copernicus said.
Global average sea surface temperatures were “persistently and unusually high” in 2023, driving marine heat waves around the globe, the agency said. Last year also saw the Earth shift into an El Nino year, a global climate pattern that typically brings higher temperatures to some parts of the world. But the transition to El Nino does not explain the widespread increases in ocean surface temperatures in 2023, Copernicus said, noting that high sea temperatures extended beyond the equatorial Pacific region most affected by El Nino.
The one-year record does not mean that the world has surpassed the limits set by the Paris Agreement because those limits are based on long-term warming, over periods of at least 20 years, but it sets a dire precedent, Copernicus said in its release.
This opinion was written by Katrina Miller and was published in Canada’s National Observer on January 8, 2024.
Mobilize, Canada! 