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18436
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: World on 'thin ice' as UN climate report gives stark warning
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ignorant jokers... World on 'thin ice' as UN climate report gives stark warning SETH BORENSTEIN and FRANK JORDANS, Associated Press March 20, 2023 BERLIN (AP) — Humanity still has a chance, close to the last, to prevent the worst of climate change ’s future harms, a top United Nations panel of scientists said Monday. But doing so requires quickly slashing nearly two-thirds of carbon pollution by 2035, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said. The United Nations chief said it more bluntly, calling for an end to new fossil fuel exploration and for rich countries to quit coal, oil and gas by 2040. “Humanity is on thin ice — and that ice is melting fast,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. “Our world needs climate action on all fronts — everything, everywhere, all at once.” Stepping up his pleas for action on fossil fuels, Guterres called for rich countries to accelerate their target for achieving net zero emissions to as early as 2040, and developing nations to aim for 2050 — about a decade earlier than most current targets. He also called for them to stop using coal by 2030 and 2040, respectively, and ensure carbon-free electricity generation in the developed world by 2035, meaning no gas-fired power plants either. That date is key because nations soon have to come up with goals for pollution reduction by 2035, according to the Paris climate agreement. After contentious debate, the U.N. science report approved Sunday concluded that to stay under the warming limit set in Paris the world needs to cut 60% of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2035, compared with 2019, adding a new target not previously mentioned in six previous reports issued since 2018. “The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts for thousands of years,” the report, said calling climate change “a threat to human well-being and planetary health.” “We are not on the right track but it’s not too late,’’ said report co-author and water scientist Aditi Mukherji. “Our intention is really a message of hope, and not that of doomsday.’’ With the world only a few tenths of a degree away from the globally accepted goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, scientists stressed a sense of urgency. The goal was adopted as part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement and the world has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit). This is likely the last warning the Nobel Peace Prize-winning collection of scientists will be able to make about the 1.5 mark because their next set of reports may well come after Earth has either breached the mark or is locked into exceeding it soon, several scientists, including report authors, told The Associated Press. After 1.5 degrees “the risks are starting to pile on,” said report co-author Francis X. Johnson, a climate, land and policy scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. The report mentions “tipping points” around that temperature of species extinction, including coral reefs, irreversible melting of ice sheets and sea level rise on the order of several meters (several yards). “1.5 is a critical critical limit, particularly for small islands and mountain (communities) which depend on glaciers,” said Mukherji, who’s also the climate change impact platform director at the research institute CGIAR. “The window is closing if emissions are not reduced as quickly as possible,” Johnson said in an interview. “Scientists are rather alarmed.” Many scientists, including at least three co-authors, said hitting 1.5 degrees is inevitable. “We are pretty much locked into 1.5,” said report co-author Malte Meinshausen, a climate scientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia. “There’s very little way we will be able to avoid crossing 1.5 C sometime in the 2030s ” but the big issue is whether the temperature keeps rising from there or stabilizes. Guterres insisted “the 1.5-degree limit is achievable.” Science panel chief Hoesung Lee said so far the world is far off course. “This report confirms that if the current trends, current patterns of consumption and production continues, then ... the global average 1.5 degrees temperature increase will be seen sometime in this decade," Lee said. Scientists emphasize that the world, civilization or humanity won’t end suddenly if and when Earth passes the 1.5 degree mark. Mukherji said “it's not as if it's a cliff that we all fall off.” But an earlier IPCC report detailed how the harms – from Arctic sea ice absent summers to even nastier extreme weather – are much worse beyond 1.5 degrees of warming. “It is certainly prudent to be planning for a future that’s warmer than 1.5 degrees,” said IPCC report review editor Steven Rose, an economist at the Electric Power Research Institute in the United States. If the world continues to use all the fossil fuel-powered infrastructure either existing now or proposed Earth will warm at least 2 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, the report said. Because the report is based on data from a few years ago, the calculations about fossil fuel projects already in the pipeline do not include the increase in coal and natural gas use after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It comes a week after the Biden Administration in the United States approved the huge Willow oil-drilling project in Alaska, which could produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil a day. The report and the underlying discussions also touch on the disparity between rich nations, which caused much of the problem because carbon dioxide emissions from industrialization stay in the air for more than a century, and poorer countries that get hit harder by extreme weather. Residents of poorer climate vulnerable nations are “up to 15 times more likely to die in floods, droughts and storms,” Lee said. If the world is to achieve its climate goals, poorer countries need a three-to-six times increase in financial help to adapt to a warmer world and switch to non-polluting energy, Lee said. Countries have made financial pledges and promises of a damage compensation fund. The report offers hope if action is taken, using the word “opportunity” nine times in a 27-page summary. Though opportunity is overshadowed by 94 uses of the word “risk.” “The pace and scale of what has been done so far and current plans are insufficient to tackle climate change,” IPCC chief Lee said. ”We are walking when we should be sprinting." Lee said the panel doesn't tell countries what to do to limit worse warming, adding “it's up to each government to find the best solution.” Activists also found grains of hope in the reports. “The findings of these reports can make us feel disheartened about the slow pace of emissions reductions, the limited transition to renewable energy and the growing, daily impact of the climate crisis on children,” said youth climate activist Vanessa Nakate, a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF. “But those children need us to read this report and take action, not lose hope.” Peter Thorne, a researcher at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth and one of the report's authors, said the responsibility for action rests with everyone. “The reality is we at all levels — governments, communities, individuals — have made climate change somebody else’s problem," he said. “We have to stop that.” ___ Borenstein reported from Kensington, Maryland. |
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[18437]
18437
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: arctic drilling project is a climate turning-point & Biden approved it
URL: Alaska’s Willow arctic drilling project is a climate turning-point. Biden must say no
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Remember when Biden promised 'no more drilling on federal lands, period.' ? Kim Heacox "If approved in full, the Willow project would mean the construction of 219 wells and hundreds of miles of pipelines Mon 13 Mar 2023 President Biden faces a legacy-making – or legacy-breaking – decision in arctic Alaska with the $8bn Willow project, the largest oil and gas project currently proposed on US public lands. If Biden remembers his visionary pledge – forged in the hard truth of human- caused climate change – that the US will expand into clean energy and approve no new oil drilling on federal lands, then his decision should be straightforward. He will say no. The world we live in today is not the same as the world of 1968 when oil was first discovered in arctic Alaska, in Prudhoe Bay. Back then, there were about 200 days a year that heavy vehicles could drive on so-called “ice roads.” Now, it’s down to about 130. The eight warmest years on record have been the last eight. Oceans across the world are warming and rising and turning acidic. Villages are washing into the sea. Salmon are declining. Extinction rates are estimated at 100 times higher than historic levels. The arctic is heating at twice the rate as the rest of the world. And permafrost in many places is no longer permanent. The single dirt road that crosses Denali National Park, Alaska’s Yellowstone, is closed at the midway point due to a rock glacier, loosened by warming temperatures, that has slumped down-slope and taken the road with it. To span the glacier will require a $100m bridge, paid for by US taxpayers. That’s money spent because of climate change – and just for one road. Amid it all sits the oil and gas giant ConocoPhillips, indulged by the Alaska congressional delegation and the State of Alaska, wanting more while already riding a wave of record oil profits, and with many options to drill in the state’s existing oil patch. In February alone, the company applied to drill 45 new wells in Kuparuk. When asked recently about Willow, the US Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, declined to be specific, but said that “public lands belong to every single American, not just one industry.” If approved in full (not scaled down), Willow would mean the construction of at least 219 wells, 35 miles of roads, and hundreds of miles of pipelines, plus airstrips and a new central oil processing facility, all tied into Prudhoe Bay and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. But with construction comes destruction of yet another wild and beautiful place: silent and white in winter, poetic with rivers, lakes, ponds, caribou, grizzly bears and migratory birds in summer, an Indigenous cultural home and hunting ground for thousands of years. The Interior Department estimates that Willow would release roughly 284m metric tons of carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) over its 30-year lifetime – the equivalent of the annual emissions of about 75 coal-fired power plants. “This carbon bomb,” the climate activists Zach Brown and Bill McKibben wrote last year in the Los Angeles Times, “would mock [Biden’s] campaign commitments to ease off on new oil leases – and in fact would represent a continuation of Trump-era efforts to drill big in the far north tundra.” The environmental group Evergreen Action says Willow would emit more climate pollution per year than more than 99.7% of all single-point sources in the country. Some local Inupiat people want Willow, and say it will be compatible with their subsistence lifestyles; others oppose it, some fiercely. “Oil and gas development should not happen at the expense of our health and our survival,” Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, the mayor of Nuiqsut, has said. Nuiqsut is the Inupiat village closest to the proposed Willow site, 60 miles from Prudhoe Bay, where black carbon from fossil fuel production – and reported rates of respiratory illnesses – have increased. “Our communities are not sacrifice zones.” Caribou on Alaska’s North Slope as geese fly overhead. Biden had promised during his election campaign to end federal oil and gas drilling, Outrage as US government advances $8bn Alaska oil drilling plan Read more In recent days, TikTok videos in opposition to Willow have reached millions of young viewers. Siqiniq Maupin, the executive director of Sovereign Inupiat for a Living Arctic, says those videos show that people around the world care, especially young people. It’s their future. “They understand that what happens in the arctic doesn’t stay in the arctic.” Last year, Mary Peltola, Alaska’s lone representative in the US House of Representatives, visited my little town while campaigning. When she told the audience she “believed” in climate change, I suggested she phrase it differently. Climate change is not a religion or matter of belief. It’s science. You either read and accept the peer-reviewed consensus, or you do not. She thanked me, and added that she didn’t think it was a crisis. But climate change is a crisis. More than 1,000 scientists from 80-plus countries who form the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say so. Based on the IPCC report, the United Nations calls our current state of global affairs a “code red for humanity.” Amid all the clutter and noise, Biden must focus on the objective truth of climate change. Willow is a proposed 30-year lease. Think back to 30 years ago. How often was climate change discussed then? Hardly at all. Now go forward 30 years, when climate change, unless taken seriously now, will be the problem that aggravates all other problems, and threatens civilization as we know it. As for ConocoPhillips and the State of Alaska, both are awash in money. They’ll be fine. Last fall nearly every Alaskan got a handsome check from the Alaska Permanent Fund, an oil account worth more than $70bn. It’s been this way every year for decades. At first it felt like a gift, then an entitlement. Now it feels like a bribe. What’s at stake with Willow is a critical turning point in the US commitment to addressing climate change. If Biden does the right thing, he will send a signal around the world and inspire other leaders to stand up to big oil and say no – not here, not now, not ever. No compromise, no scaling down. This oil – all of it on federal land – should stay in the ground as humankind embraces a green energy revolution that takes us into a healthy future. Kim Heacox is the author of many books, including The Only Kayak, a memoir, and Jimmy Bluefeather, a novel, both winners of the National Outdoor Book Award. His newest novel, On Heaven’s Hill, will be released this month. He lives in Alaska." |
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