This article was written by Adam Vaughan and was published on June 18, 2015.
This article was written by Damian Carrington and was published in The Guardian on May 11, 2024
This article was written by Damian Carrington and was published in The Guardian on May 9, 2024.
This article was written by Seth Borenstein, Suman Naishadham, Sibi Arasu, and Fabiano Maisonnave, and was published in the Globe & Mail on May 9, 2024.
If pace of warming continues, 2024 could be a record year for disasters, scientist warns
In sweltering Brazil, flooding killed dozens of people and paralyzed a city of about four million people. Voters and politicians in India, amid national elections, are fainting in heat that hit as high as 46.3 degrees Celsius.
A brutal Asian heat wave has closed schools in the Philippines, killed people in Thailand and set records there and in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Maldives and Myanmar. Record temperatures – especially at night when it just won’t cool down – have hit many parts of Africa. Flooding devastated Houston, and the United States as a whole just had its second highest number of tornadoes for the month of April.
In a world growing increasingly accustomed to wild weather swings, the past few days and weeks have seemingly taken those environmental extremes to a new level. Some climate scientists say they are hard pressed to remember when so much of the world has had its weather on overdrive at the same time.
“Given that we’ve seen an unprecedented jump in global warmth over the last 11 months, it is not surprising to see worsening climate extremes so early in the year,” said University of Michigan environment dean Jonathan Overpeck. “If this record pace of warming continues, 2024 will likely be a record year of climate disasters and human suffering.”
When the world is warmer, it is likely to have more extreme weather and climate events, including record heat and rainfall, scientists say. And climate change is also changing weather patterns, leading to rainy and hot systems stalling over areas and the jet stream meandering, said Álvaro Silva, a climate scientist at the World Meteorological Organization.
Adding to the stronger effects of human-caused climate change is a now-weakening El Nino – a natural warming of parts of the central Pacific that changes weather worldwide – that came on the heels of a three-year La Nina, its cool counterpart, Mr. Silva said.
Scientists also pointed to 13 straight months of record hot oceans as a potential factor in the weather extremes.
This all comes as the world just finished its 11th record-setting hot month in a row, the European climate service Copernicus reported Wednesday.
The average global temperature of 15 C in April beat the old record from 2016 by 0.14 degrees. Copernicus’s data set goes back to 1950, while other climate monitoring agencies go back to 1850 but have yet to report April calculations.
Last month was 1.58 degrees warmer than the preindustrial late 19th century. The world in 2015 adopted a goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial times, but it mostly applies to being that warm for a decade or more, not a month.
While several factors play a role in this recent spate of extremes, “climate change is the most important one,” Mr. Silva said.
The trouble is that the world has adapted to and constructed cities designed for 20th-century temperatures and rainfall, but climate change brings more heat and downpours, said Andrew Dessler, a Texas A&M University climate scientist. “They’re getting slightly more extreme, but they’re passing our ability to handle them,” Dr. Dessler said.
In just the first five days of May, 70 countries or territories broke heat records, said climatologist Maximiliano Herrera, who tracks temperature records across the world.
Nandyala and Kadapa in India’s southern state of Andhra Pradesh set an all-time high at 46.3 C, Mr. Herrera said.
This week in Southeast Asia, “it was the hottest May night ever,” Mr. Herrera posted on X (formerly Twitter).
In late April, parts of northern Thailand hit 44 degrees, while Chauk township in Myanmar’s hottest region hit a record 48.2 degrees.
The deadly heat wave felt across West Africa last month was linked to human-caused climate change, according to scientists at the World Weather Attribution group.
In Mexico’s Ciudad Altamirano, the temperature neared 46 C with record heat all over Latin America, Mr. Herrera said. Bolivia had its hottest May night on record and Brazil its hottest day in May.
This article was written by Damian Carrington and was published by The Guardian on May 9, 2024.
This article was written by Damian Carrington and was published in The Guardian of May 8, 2024.
This opinion was written by Gillian Steward and was published in the Toronto Star on May 7, 2024.
It’s the time of year when corporate commanders pull together their shareholders and employees to brag about how many millions or billions of dollars they brought in last year.
In Calgary, that means it’s show time for the Alberta oil sands operators. And they do indeed have a lot to brag about. Canadian Natural Resources and Suncor both racked up $8.2 billion in profit in 2023. And those are just two of the six companies shipping out just over three million barrels of oil a day.
But while there’s lots to be smug about at corporate head offices, industry leaders seem wilfully blind to the ongoing global transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy; from gasoline guzzlers to electric vehicles; from fossil fuel generated electricity to solar and wind power.
Instead they are fixated on what they see as obstacles to their success imposed by the federal government as it tries to reduce carbon emissions, limit global warming and incentivize renewable energy.
So, it was not surprising when a shareholder stood up at Canadian Natural Resources annual meeting last week and complained about the federal government and in particular Steven Guilbeault, minister of environment and climate change, for constantly attacking Alberta and its oil industry.
Murray Edwards, Canadian Natural Resources executive chair, and a billionaire three times over, who resides in St. Moritz, Switzerland, told the shareholder that he has met with federal officials many times and “they are starting to realize how important the oil and gas industry is to the country … and that this sector has to be successful.”
Starting to realize? Did he mean the feds didn’t realize that when Justin Trudeau and then-Alberta premier Rachel Notley struck a deal in 2018 that saw the federal government eventually buy the foundering Trans Mountain Pipeline and pour $35 billion into it so Alberta could export oil to Asia?
Or when the federal government shipped $1.7 billion to western provinces to clean up abandoned oil wells that the industry should be paying for; most of those messes were in Alberta and still haven’t been cleaned up.
Or when the Trudeau government offered significant tax credits (the industry wants even more) for a multibillion-dollar carbon capture utilization and storage project that the oil sands operators are promising but have yet to do much about.
The Trans Mountain pipeline expansion finally started shipping oil to the West Coast last week and that will surely benefit Canadian Natural Resources, Edwards told the meeting. He didn’t mention that it was the Trudeau government that made that possible. Edwards is also a co-owner of the Calgary Flames, which struck a deal with the city to build a new $1-billion arena that will see city taxpayers cough up most of the money. That might be the model the oil industry is hoping to rely on when cleaning up toxic tailings ponds and abandoned oil wells becomes too expensive for them.
Of course, the oil barons couldn’t ask for a better promoter than Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. She sees an ever-increasing and never ending supply of oil sloshing out of Alberta that will somehow also be carbon free. Who needs renewable energy when you have oil? The word delusional doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Oil production isn’t going to be shut down overnight even though carbon emissions from the fossil fuel industry are causing the planet to rapidly heat up. We will need gasoline, diesel fuel and plastics for some years yet.
But how much and at what price? Albertans and other Canadians have grown used to the jobs, wealth and government revenue provided by the oil and gas industry. But what will happen when demand drops, prices soften and that sector of our economy isn’t as key as it used to be?
That’s the scenario Canada’s oil industry and Alberta’s premier refuse to plan for. But no matter what happens, the oil barons will walk away with millions of dollars while the rest of us will have to pay for their sins.
Canadians have grown used to the jobs, wealth and government revenue provided by the oil and gas industry. But what will happen when demand drops, prices soften and that sector of our economy isn’t as key as it used to be?
This article was written by Benjamin Shingler and was published by CBC News on May 2, 2024.
This article was written by Hannah Ritchie and was published by Our World in Data on March 25, 2024.
Mobilize, Canada! 