Renewable Revolution

Heat Waves In Europe Caused By Climate Change Says Scientists


By Rina Marie Doctor, Tech Times | July 5, 9:09 AM

Experts say that the latest heat waves in Europe is "virtually certain" to be caused by climate change. This week, Germany, Spain and London all experienced the hottest July day ever recorded.

A group of climate experts from universities, meteorological facilities and research teams from all around the world came up with a real-time analysis of climate data on Friday, July 4. According to the scientists, the heat waves striking Europe this week, or coined as three-day periods of excessive heat, are increasing in frequency.

The heat wave analysis is a segment of the bigger World Weather Attribution program, spearheaded by Climate Central, which is a science journalism group based in the US. The analysis was also supported by international organizations such as the University of Melbourne, Oxford University, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. The objectives of the said program include utilizing weather information, forecasting and climate frameworks to present how the constantly changing patterns of weather are associated with climate change. Ultimately, the program targets that adequate public understanding be achieved to better prepare the people for radical weather alterations such as the latest heat waves in Europe.

The weather changes that transpired in Europe are highly varied. For example, in De Bilt in the Netherlands, the heat wave that is expected to hit the place in the coming days is said to happen only once in every 30 years in the 1900s. But at present, the said drastic change may occur every three and a half years, the scientists noted.

The heat wave that typically happens once every 100 years was said to have occurred in Mannheim, Germany in the last few days. According to the experts, this type of heat wave is expected to happen every 15 years with the present condition of the planet.

London hit its all-time highest temperature for July on Wednesday, July 1, as Heathrow Airport was detected to have reach 98.06 degrees Fahrenheit (36.7 degrees Celsius), the scientists said.

The connection of the increased frequency of heat waves and climate change is felt by more and more people and that we are encountering a new normal, says Maarten van Aalst, director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.

In the Netherlands, the Central Bureau of Statistics estimates that an average population of 200 or more people will succumb to death each week that the country faces a heat wave. This translates to a 10 percent increase in mortality rates.

Deaths in older adults are of particular significance to this current scenario. In 2003, an additional 70,000 people were widely made up of the elderly population when France and other European countries suffered from a heat wave.

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/66079/20150705/heat-waves-in-europe-caused-by-climate-change-says-scientists.htm

we ask that the Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust commit now to divesting from the top 200 fossil fuel companies within five years. And that they immediately freeze any new investment in the same companies. - The Guardian

The Argument for Divesting from Fossil Fuels is Becoming Overwhelming  

by The Guardian – March 17, 2015 

As progressive institutions, the Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust should commit to taking their money out of the companies that are driving global warming, says The Guardian’s editor-in-chief By Alan Rusbridger

The world has much more coal, oil and gas in the ground than it can safely burn. That much is physics.

Anyone studying the question with an open mind will almost certainly come to a similar conclusion: if we and our children are to have a reasonable chance of living stable and secure lives 30 or so years from now, according to one recent study 80 percent of the known coal reserves will have to stay underground, along with half the gas and a third of the oil reserves.

If only science were enough. 

If not science, then politics? MPs, presidents, prime ministers and members of congress are always telling us (often suggesting a surrender of civil liberties in return) that their first duty is the protection of the public.

But politics sometimes struggles with physics. Science is, at its best, long term and gives the best possible projection of future risk. Which is not always how politics works, even when it comes to our security. Politicians prefer certainty and find it difficult to make serious prudent planning on high probabilities.

On climate change, the public clamor is in inverse proportion to the enormity of the long-term threat. If only it were the other way round. And so, year after year, the people who represent us around the UN negotiating tables have moved inches, not miles.

When, as Guardian colleagues, we first started discussing this climate change series, there were advocates for focusing the main attention on governments. States own much of the fossil fuels that can never be allowed to be dug up. Only states, it was argued, can forge the treaties that count. In the end the politicians will have to save us through regulation – either by limiting the amount of stuff that is extracted, or else by taxing, pricing and limiting the carbon that’s burned.

If journalism has so far failed to animate the public to exert sufficient pressure on politics through reporting and analysis, it seemed doubtful whether many people would be motivated by the idea of campaigning for a paragraph to be inserted into the negotiating text at the UN climate talks in Paris this December. So we turned to an area where campaigners have recently begun to have marked successes: divestment. 

There are two arguments in favour of moving money out of the biggest and most aggressive fossil fuel companies – one moral, the other financial.

The moral crusaders – among them Archbishop Desmond Tutu – see divestment from fossil fuels in much the same light as earlier campaigners saw the push to pull money out of tobacco, arms, apartheid South Africa – or even slavery. Most fossil fuel companies, they argue, have little concern for future generations.

Of course, the companies are run by sentient men and women with children and grandchildren of their own. But the market pressures and fiduciary duties involved in running public companies compel behavior that is overwhelmingly driven by short-term returns.

Agelbert NOTE: See Empathy Deficit Disorder based "fiduciary duties" ignoring viable biosphere math = suicidal Homo SAPS.   

So – the argument goes – the directors will meanwhile carry on business as usual, no matter how incredible it may seem that they will be allowed to dig up all the climate-warming assets they own. And, by and large – and discounting recent drops in the price of oil – they continue to be reasonably good short-term businesses, benefiting from enormous subsidies as they search for even more reserves that can never be used.

The pragmatists argue the case on different grounds. It is simply this: that finance will eventually have to surrender to physics.

Photo of Alan Rusbridger (at link) in London, for the launch of the Guardian’s climate change campaign.

If – eventually – the companies cannot, for the sake of the human race, be allowed to extract a great many of the assets they own, then many of those assets will in time become valueless. So people with other kinds of fiduciary duty – people, say, managing endowments, pension funds and investment portfolios – will want to get their money out of these companies before the bubble bursts.

Of course, the financial risk comes not simply from the threat of regulation, but could also be hastened by the march of alternative clean energy. Global investment in clean energy jumped 16% in 2014 to £205bn, but because of the rapid drop in the price of that energy (the cost of solar has dropped by two-thirds in 6 years), the money invested last year bought almost double the amount of electricity capacity as in 2011.

Renewable energy=                                 =Fossil Fuelers

So there’s a risk calculation to be done by anyone invested in fossil fuels – which, one way or another, is probably most of us. Get out too early and you might forgo the reasonable returns based on current performance and the book value of the assets that are notionally exploitable.

But what of the risk of being a late exiter? Do you wait and judge when the politicians could finally summon the will to start making regulatory and market interventions … and then get out? And at the same time as everyone else is trying to do the same?

This is why the divestment movement has changed from being a fringe campaign to something every responsible fund manager can no longer ignore. How could they, when even the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has warned that the “vast majority of reserves are unburnable” and the bank itself is conducting an inquiry into the risk that inflated fossil fuel assets pose to the stability of the financial system?

When the president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, urges: “Be the first mover. Use smart due diligence. Rethink what fiduciary responsibility means in this changing world. It’s simple self-interest. Every company, investor and bank that screens new and existing investments for climate risk is simply being pragmatic”?

When the Bank of England’s deputy head of supervision for banks and insurance companies, Paul Fisher, warns, as he did this month: “As the world increasingly limits carbon emissions, and moves to alternative energy sources, investments in fossil fuels – a growing financial market in recent decades – may take a huge hit”?

Or listen to Hank Paulson, no bleeding liberal, but secretary of the Treasury under Bush and former CEO of Goldman Sachs: “Each of us must recognize that the risks are personal. We’ve seen and felt the costs of underestimating the financial bubble. Let’s not ignore the climate bubble.”

President Obama puts it most pithily: “We’re not going to be able to burn it all.”

So the argument for a campaign to divest from the world’s most polluting companies is becoming an overwhelming one, on both moral and pragmatic grounds. But the divestment movement is sometimes misunderstood. The intention is not to bankrupt the companies, nor to promote overnight withdrawal from fossil fuels – that would not be possible or desirable.

Divestment serves to delegitimize the business models of companies that are using investors’ money to search for yet more coal, oil and gas that can’t safely be burned. It is a small but crucial step in the economic transition away from a global economy run on fossil fuels.

The usual rule of newspaper campaigns is that you don’t start one unless you know you’re going to win it. This one will almost certainly be won in time: the physics is unarguable.

But we are launching our campaign today in the firm belief that it will force the issue now into the boardrooms and inboxes of people who have billions of dollars at their disposal.


Full article at link. Don't miss how much the Gates Foundation (and other notables) have invested in dirty energy.

http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/elist/eListRead/the_argument_for_divesting_from_fossil_fuels_is_becoming_overwhelming/

Markets are abandoning carbon companies—even if society continues to burn far too much of it. Photo credit: Shutterstock


Get Ready for Ugly as Markets Begin to Deal With Climate Crisis

Carl Pope | July 28, 2015 9:31 am

Advocates of “market-based” climate solutions paint pastel pictures reflecting smoothly adjusting macro-economic models. Competitive markets gradually nudged by carbon pricing glide into a low carbon future in a modestly disruptive fashion, much as sulfur pollution from power plants was scaled back in the 1990’s.

But commodity markets for oil and gas don’t work that way. These real markets are poised to savagely strand assets, upset expectations, overturn long established livelihoods and leave a trail of wreckage behind them—unless climate advocates start owning the fruits of their own success and preparing for the transition. Schumpeter’s destructive engine of capitalism is about to show its ugly side.

Two powerful forces are currently driving energy markets and climate outcomes.

Fossil fuel prices are indeed opening the door to climate solutions, but not through the gradual carbon pricing mechanisms so favored by economists (and recently, reluctantly beginning to be explored by conservative thinkers). Instead, the divergence between clean energy price curves, which fall rapidly with increased market share and fossil fuel prices, which rise with consumption, are about to collide explosively.

Second, Investors are indeed, moving away from fossil fuel stocks and bonds, but not out of ethical concern over climate risk, or even an expectation of global regulation of carbon combustion. They are racing to the exit as bloated coal and oil stock values collapse on the other side of the “Commodity Super-Cycle” which until early 2014 was the dominant paradigm.

Two weeks ago I wrote two pieces in Bloomberg Views suggesting that the fossil divestment movement was arguably behind market trends in arguing that coal and oil were bad investments. The following week witnessed a cascade of commentary making my pieces look milquetoast and timid. Markets are abandoning carbon companies—even if society continues to burn far too much of it.

Look at the numbers:

U.S. coal consumption has fallen, in the face of competition from performance (efficiency), alternatives (natural gas) and disrupters (solar and wind.) Five years ago we burned a billion tons of coal; now we burn 850 million tons. Solid progress. But still 850 million tons.

What happened to coal company share values? In the last five years, a coal company has gone bankrupt on the average every month.    The second largest U.S. coal company, Alpha, after one bankruptcy and reorganization, was just dumped from the NY Stock Exchange because its price fell below $1.00. Even a coal producer (Walter) whose output, metallurgical coal, still enjoys a strong market had to file for bankruptcy. The biggest U.S. coal company, Peabody, which traded in 2011 at $73, is now selling at $1.29. The bond markets have abandoned coal. All coal company debt is now graded “junk.” In the last quarter the three worst performing major U.S. bonds were all coal:

Alpha Natural Resources: -70 percent
 Peabody: -40 percent
 Arch: -30 percent

Coal, as an investment class, is effectively finished  —coal companies will go through a series of reorganizations. After each one only those with the best balance sheets and cheapest mines will remain. The reclamation bonds which the U.S. government and the State of Wyoming allowed these companies to self-insure against their balance sheets are about to go south, creating sequential calls on capital that will push even more companies first into Chapter 11 and then into Chapter 7. Outside the U.S., 1/6th of Australia’s coal mines now operate at a loss. Companies in the sector are in liquidation, even though the world will use a lot of coal for quite a while to come. Eventually slumping demand will be overtaken by declining production and more mines will become cash flow positive, but existing stakeholders will be liquidated first. That’s the dynamic of shrinking commodity markets—investors, communities and workers lose fast even as markets shrink slowly.

Page 2 of this two page article that outlines the writing on the wall for fossil fuels. 

http://ecowatch.com/2015/07/28/carl-pope-oil-gas-markets/2/

Moo or false: do cow farts contribute to climate change? – quiz
 
How savvy are you about the unexpected forces affecting our planet? Take this quiz to find out

See how cows did on the quiz in this video:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/24/cow-farts-climate-change-methane-environment-quiz

Agelbert NOTE: The energy density of farts (and other hydrocarbons) is, uh, not the issue here.