Thread: Any doubts about Climate Change?

NOAA–August 2024 was the warmest August recorded

Summer 2024 was the warmest Summer recorded (June–August)

NOAA

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Big oil faces a rising number of climate-focused lawsuits, report finds

Big oil is facing a soaring number of climate-focused lawsuits, a new analysis has found. ItÂ’s a sign that more communities are demanding accountability for the industryÂ’s contributions to the climate crisis.

For the report, published on Thursday, Oil Change International and the climate research organization Zero Carbon Analytics pulled data from a Columbia University database, focusing on cases in which the worldÂ’s 25 largest fossil fuel producers were named as defendants.

The number of cases filed against those companies globally each year has nearly tripled since 2015 – the year the UN Paris climate agreement was signed – with 86 cases filed and 40 currently pending, the authors found.

“No major oil and gas company is pledging to do the bare minimum to prevent climate chaos, so communities are taking them to court,” said David Tong, a campaign manager at the research and advocacy group Oil Change International, who worked on the report.

The suits were filed by cities, states and other government organizations, as well as environmental groups, Indigenous tribes and individuals. Fifty were filed in US courts, while 24 were filed in European countries, five in Australia and four in Nigeria.

The largest growth in litigation was in complaints demanding compensation for climate damages, which account for 38% of cases, the authors found. Thirty-three such lawsuits have been filed since 2015, 30 of which were brought since 2017. A key reason for the increase in these cases is that “the science has just gotten a lot better”, Noah Walker-Crawford, a research fellow at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Institute, said on a Tuesday press call.

Attribution science allows scientists to “link specific extreme weather events to climate change with greater accuracy”, and also quantify the climate impacts attributable to specific fossil fuel companies’ emissions, explained Walker-Crawford, who did not work on the report.

No fossil fuel company has yet been forced to pay climate damages, but the potential liabilities are massive, with previous reports estimating the sectorÂ’s largest polluters are responsible for trillions of dollars in lost homes, livelihoods and infrastructure.

The climate damage case that has progressed the farthest was brought by a Peruvian farmer in 2015 against energy giant RWE, which he accuses of contributing to climate impacts that are threatening his Andean home. In an unprecedented move in 2022, judges from Germany visited Peru to determine the level of damage caused by RWE, which is also EuropeÂ’s largest emitter. RWE did not respond to a request for comment.

In the US, the lawsuits seeking climate damages also accuse defendants of intentionally sowing doubt about the climate crisis despite longstanding knowledge of the planet-heating impacts of their products.

The report’s authors documented an increase in other kinds of climate lawsuits, including challenges to allegedly misleading advertising. Such suits today make up 16% of all climate complaints against oil majors and are a “are a winning legal tactic”, the authors wrote. Nine cases have concluded, of which judges ruled in favor of the defendant in only one.

About 12% of climate lawsuits in the analysis were brought against fossil fuel companies over their failure to implement emissions reduction plans that align with the Paris climate accord. A landmark 2021 ruling wherein a Dutch court ordered Shell to cut its emissions by 45% by 2030 came in response to one such lawsuit. Shell declined to comment.

Ryan Meyers, senior vice-president at the fossil fuel lobby group American Petroleum Institute said the study described an “ongoing, coordinated campaign to wage meritless, politicized lawsuits against a foundational American industry and its workers”, and called the efforts “nothing more than a distraction from important national conversations and an enormous waste of taxpayer resources”.

New kinds of climate litigation are also emerging. This year, victims of climate disasters and NGOs filed the worldÂ’s first-ever criminal climate lawsuit in France against the CEO and directors of the French oil company TotalEnergies; it alleges the defendants have contributed to the deaths of victims of climate-fueled climate disasters. TotalEnergies did not respond to a request for comment.

The analysis does not account for all climate litigation filed worldwide. Other complaints target companies working in other parts of the fossil fuel supply chain, such as pipeline companies, and still others challenge governments for their pro-fossil fuel policies.

Michael Gerrard, the faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, who did not work on the analysis, said that although the fossil fuel industry faces a “formidable number of cases”, “none of them have broken through” except some focused on advertising. But he added that the coming years “may bring some important and possibly decisive developments in this campaign”, and that new legal theories are in development.

These lawsuits “will not solve the climate crisis alone”, said Tong of Oil Change International, but they can be an important vehicle to hold polluters accountable.

“The growing number of lawsuits against fossil fuel corporations underlines how their historic and continued role in driving and profiting from climate change is catching up to them,” he said.

NASA-August 2024 was the warmest August recorded

NASA Summer 2024 (June-August} was the warmest Summer recorded

NASA

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Climate scientists troubled by damage from floods ravaging central Europe

Picturesque towns across central Europe are inundated by dirty flood water after heavy weekend rains turned tranquil streams into raging rivers that wreaked havoc on infrastructure.

The floods have killed at least 15 people and destroyed buildings from Austria to Romania. The destruction comes after devastating floods around the world last week when entire villages were submerged in Myanmar and nearly 300 prisoners escape a collapsed jail in Nigeria, where floods have affected more than 1 million people.

Climate scientists say they are troubled by the damage but unsurprised by the intensity. “The catastrophic rainfall hitting central Europe is exactly what scientists expect with climate change,” said Joyce Kimutai, of Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute.

She said the death and damage across Africa and Europe highlighted “how poorly prepared the world is for such floods”.

Scientists take care when attributing extreme rains to human influence because so many factors shape the water cycle. Although it is well established that hotter air can hold more moisture, whether violent downpours occur also depends on how much water is available to fall.

Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at ETH Zürich, said immediate analyses of the central European floods suggested most of the water vapour came from the Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea, both of which have grown hotter as a result of human-induced climate breakdown, resulting in more water evaporating into the air.

“On average, the intensity of heavy precipitation events increases by 7% for each degree of global warming,” she said. “We now have 1.2C of global warming, which means that on average heavy precipitation events are 8% more intense.”

Weather station data indicates that bursts of September rainfall have become heavier in Germany, Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia since 1950, Kimutai said.

In Poland, the floods collapsed a bridge and washed houses away, according to local media. In the Czech Republic, helicopters rescued stranded citizens from rising waters. In Austria, one firefighter is reported to have died in the rescue efforts.

In the Austrian capital, Vienna, which has been home to EuropeÂ’s biggest weather and climate conference since 2005, the rain flooded a motorway and closed metro lines.

Erich Fischer, a climate scientist at ETH Zürich, said scientists at the conference used to discuss the physics of how climate change increases rainfall intensity over lunch on the banks of the New Danube. “It is ironic to now see these banks, where we were sitting in the sun and discussing the science of extreme precipitation, now being flooded.”

The death toll from floods hinges on how well communities prepare for the rain and respond to its effects. Scientists have urged governments to invest in adapting to extreme weather events through early warning systems, more resilient infrastructure and support schemes for victims, while also ending their reliance on fossil fuels.

“It’s clear that even highly developed countries are not safe from climate change,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the Grantham Institute. “As long as the world burns oil, gas and coal, heavy rainfall and other weather extremes will intensify, making our planet a more dangerous and expensive place to live.”

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Gore calls out climate backsliding amid progress on renewables

Corporate giants and some countries are backsliding on their climate commitments — a worrying sign in a year that otherwise saw hopeful growth in renewables, Al Gore and his investment colleagues say in a new report from Generation Investment Management.

Why it matters: The sustainability trends report details the slowdowns in the pace of growth of electric vehicle deployment in the U.S., along with hiccups in the speed of wind energy deployment in some areas.

Zoom in: Gore tells Axios that the hard work of trying to meet ambitious emissions reduction and deforestation targets has become more clear to CEOs and world leaders, and led many to walk away from past promises.

• "We see that some of the ballyhooed climate promises are beginning to resemble New Year's resolutions: easy to make and hard to keep," Gore says. "And the reality is, as we note candidly, the world is not on track at present, to reach the goal of net zero emissions by 2050."
• Oil and gas companies that were leaning into the renewables side of their businesses have gone in the other direction, chasing shareholder returns.
• Meanwhile, major financial firms with sustainability targets have been fleeing groups of like-minded corporations.
• Part of this is coming from political pressure, Gore says, with a campaign against ESG investing and so-called "woke capital" stoking fears of potential legal liability for companies that stay in certain climate alliances.

Yes, but: Renewable electricity generation has made major gains in the past year, Gore says, with solar power as the big standout. The overall snapshot from the report of the energy transition is of significant momentum despite many setbacks.

• "The way we see it, there is a big wheel turning in the right direction, and some smaller wheels turning in the opposite direction," he says.
• "The big wheel is going to prevail in setting the direction of travel for the world, but the pace of the transition away from fossil fuels is what's being struggled over now."
• In particular, Gore and his colleagues call for a "new wave" of laws that would set national end dates for fossil fuel use in order to put teeth into otherwise empty net zero emissions promises.

Between the lines: The report itself calls out those who have not fulfilled recent climate commitments:

• "The bigger problem has been a lack of courage, fortitude and determination at a global scale as some of the leaders who made big promises at the climate summit in Glasgow in 2021 realize how difficult those promises will be to keep," it states.

The intrigue: Gore, who serves as chairman of Generation Investment Management, says there has been a deflation of the hype surrounding the deals reached in Dubai last year, including the landmark official agreement to "transition away" from fossil fuels.

• He places much of the blame for this on fossil fuel companies and their allies, as well as interest groups going after climate commitments in the financial sector and at the national, regional and local government level.

• Gore cited green hydrogen technology and battery storage additions that could be game-changers in determining the least costly, and most reliable sources of power.

Zoom out: In the U.S., the Biden administration has pitched its climate programs as ways to add domestic jobs and factories.

• But the report finds the goals of shifting quickly to "clean" energy and using the transition as industrial policy — to create jobs by expanding clean tech manufacturing, are at odds due to China's "nearly insurmountable" lead in the markets for solar panels, electric cars, batteries and more.
• "How this tension gets resolved will determine how fast the energy transition can proceed," it states.

"Renewables have been winning" the competition with fossil fuels for the cheapest source of electricity generation, he says. "Now roughly $2 are being spent on the renewables side for every one on [expanding] fossil fuels. And that's genuine progress."

• "But again, we're not on track to where we need to be," Gore says.
• Gore hopes the coming year will bring progress on a demand-side signal to reduce fossil fuel use, saying, "It's been obvious for some time that we need a global price on carbon."

The bottom line: The report reads as a "yes, but" summary of this point in the energy transition, which lines up with where the U.S. and many other countries are.

• Perhaps the most important insight is found at the start, where Gore and Blood write: "Unfortunately, the biggest problem we confront has not gone away: the sheer power of human and economic inertia."

JMA–August 2024 was the 2^nd warmest August recorded

Summer 2024 (JJA) was the 2^nd warmest Summer recorded

JMA

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• Global heating ‘doubled’ chance of extreme rain in Europe in September

Planet-heating pollution doubled the chance of the extreme levels of rain that hammered central Europe in September, a study has found.

Researchers found global heating aggravated the four days of heavy rainfall that led to deadly floods in countries from Austria to Romania.

The rains were made at least 7% stronger by climate change, World Weather Attribution (WWA) found, which led to towns being hit with volumes of water that would have been half as likely to occur if humans had not heated the planet.

“The trend is clear,” said Bogdan Chojnicki, a climate scientist at Poznań University of Life Sciences, and co-author of the study. “If humans keep filling the atmosphere with fossil fuel emissions, the situation will be more severe.”

Storm Boris stalled over central Europe in mid-September and unleashed record-breaking amounts of rain upon Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. The heavy rains turned calm streams into wild rivers, triggering floods that wrecked homes and killed two dozen people.

The researchers said measures to adapt had lowered the death toll compared with similar floods that hit the region in 1997 and 2002. They called for better flood defences, warning systems and disaster-response plans, and warned against continuing to rebuild in flood-prone regions.

“These floods indicate just how costly climate change is becoming,” said Maja Vahlberg, technical adviser at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, and co-author of the study. “Even with days of preparation, flood waters still devastated towns, destroyed thousands of homes and saw the European Union pledge €10bn in aid.”

Rapid attribution studies, which use established methods but are published before going through lengthy peer-review processes, examine how human influence affects extreme weather in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.

The scientists compared the rainfall recorded in central Europe over four days in September with amounts simulated for a world that is 1.3C cooler – the level of warming caused to date by burning fossil fuels and destroying nature. They attributed a “doubling in likelihood and a 7% increase in intensity” to human influence.

But the results are “conservative”, the scientists wrote, because the models do not explicitly model convection and so may underestimate rainfall. “We emphasise that the direction of change is very clear, but the rate is not.”

Physicists have shown that every degree celsius of warming allows the air to hold 7% more moisture, but whether it does so depends on the availability of water. The rains in central Europe were unleashed when cold air from the Arctic met warm, wet air from the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

Warmer seas enhance the rainy part of the hydrological cycle, though the trend on parts of the land is towards drier conditions, said Miroslav Trnka, a climate scientist at the Global Change Research Institute, who was not involved in the study. When the conditions were right, he said, “you can have floods on steroids”.

Trnka compared the factors that result in extreme rainfall to playing the lottery. The increase in risk from global heating, he said, was like buying more lottery tickets, doing so over a longer period of time, and changing the rules so more combinations of numbers result in a win.

“If you bet long enough, you have a higher chance of a jackpot,” said Trnka.

The study found heavier four-day rainfall events would hit if the world heats 2C above preindustrial levels, with a further increase from today of about 5% in rainfall intensity and 50% in likelihood.

Other factors could increase this even more, such as the waviness of the jet stream, which some scientists suspect is increasingly trapping weather systems in one place as a result of global heating. A study published in Nature Scientific Reports on Monday projected that such blocking systems would increase under medium- and worst-case emissions scenarios.

Hayley Fowler, a climate scientist at Newcastle University, who was not involved in the study, said: “These large storms, cut off from the jet stream, are able to stagnate in one place and produce huge amounts of rainfall, fuelled by increased moisture and energy from oceans that are record-shatteringly hot.”

“These ‘blocked’ slow-moving storms are becoming more frequent and are projected to increase further with additional warming,” she added. “The question is not whether we need to adapt for more of these types of storm but can we.”

WWA described the week following Storm Boris as “hyperactive” because 12 disasters around the world triggered its criteria for analysis, more than in any week in the organisation’s history.

The study did not try to work out how much global heating had increased the destruction wreaked by the rains but the researchers said even minor increases in rainfall disproportionately increased damages.

“Almost everywhere in the world it is the case that a small increase in the rainfall leads to a similar order-of-magnitude increase in flooding,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute and co-author of the study. “But that leads to a much larger increase in the damages.”

Global heating ‘doubled’ chance of extreme rain in Europe in September | Climate crisis | The Guardian
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• Kerry gives scathing rating on climate action: ‘Is there a letter underneath Z?

Countries are ignoring commitments they made less than a year ago to shift away from fossil fuels and to provide aid to those most vulnerable to the climate crisis, a host of leading figures have admitted during a gloomy start to a major climate summit in New York.

Al Gore, the former US vice-president, and John Kerry, the former US secretary of state and climate envoy, have led the condemnation of the largest greenhouse gas emitters, led by China and the US, for failing to follow a UN pact signed in Dubai by nearly 200 countries in December to “transition away” from oil, coal and gas.

“We made an agreement in Dubai to transition away from fossil fuels,” said Kerry, who was the US lead climate negotiator at the time. “The problem? We aren’t doing that. We’re not implementing. The implications for everybody, and life on this planet, is gigantic.”

Kerry, who in his previous position defended the US’s role as it became the world’s leading oil and gas producer under Joe Biden, admitted that the US needed to do more and said a pause placed on booming liquified natural gas export permits by the US president should remain.

“The demand is what is crushing us right now,” Kerry said of the surge in gas exports. “I have to tell you all around the world people are falling short or not even trying. In Dubai almost 200 countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in a way that’s fair, equitable and orderly … and they [fossil fuel companies] are just plowing ahead, like it’s business as usual.”

Asked to give oil and gas companies a grade in their efforts to transition to cleaner energy, Kerry said: “Is there a letter underneath Z?”

Kerry was speaking at an Axios event held as part of Climate Week NYC, a summit that has drawn about 100,000 government leaders, businesspeople, scientists and activists to New York alongside the UN general assembly.

The week is taking place amid a daunting backdrop of stubbornly high global emissions, record-breaking temperatures and the real possibility of Donald Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and has called for the demolition of Biden’s climate policies, again becoming US president in November’s election.

Wealthy countries have been handing out new oil and gas exploration leases at record levels despite the agreement at the Cop28 talks in Dubai, with decades of further planet-heating emissions set to be locked in during 2024, itself almost certain to be the hottest ever recorded. “In signing such a surge of new oil and gas licenses, they are signing away our future,” António Guterres, secretary general of the UN, said of the highest emitters in July.

“Many people felt it was a great victory to have that language about transitioning away from fossil fuels, I felt that too,” said Gore. “But now look at the agenda for this year’s Cop and they’ve completely ignored that.

“The climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis, the fossil fuel industry is the wealthiest and most powerful industry in the history of the world. They fight ferociously to stop anything that would stop consumption of fossil fuels. They are way better at capturing politicians than emissions.”

Gore said there were some optimistic signs ahead of the upcoming Cop29, to be held in Azerbaijan in November, such as the “incredible” levels of investment flowing into renewable energy like solar and wind, primarily in China, but that the pace of the transition must accelerate drastically if the world was to avoid disastrous climate impacts.

A weariness with seemingly endless, fruitless meetings about the climate crisis – there have been annual UN talks on this for nearly 30 years – and a litany of unfulfilled promises is particularly grating for the small island states most vulnerable to the impacts of floods, droughts and heatwaves, despite themselves only emitting minuscule amounts of greenhouse gases.

“I’m tired of talks, I want to see some action,” Philip Davis, prime minister of the Bahamas, told the Guardian. “We have been talking about climate change for 29 years now where are we today? For the first time in one whole year we have been over 1.5C – that should shake us. I’m not listening now, I want to see some action, real action.”

Davis said that new fossil fuel projects in countries such as the US and UK have flouted the international agreement to move away from polluting energy. “What does that signal, that we are moving away from it?” he said. “So where does the disappointment lie? It should lie with countries like ours, whose emissions are negligible.”

Davis said richer countries also “haven’t lived up to” promises on climate finance, via either a decade-long pledge to provide billions to developing countries or a more recent agreement, struck in Dubai last year, for a “loss and damage” fund that has so far raised just $800m. “Countries need to recognize $800m isn’t enough, trillions are needed and we need to find a way to get there,” he said.

It is five years since Hurricane Dorian became the worst storm to ever hit the Bahamas, killing dozens of people and causing $3.4bn in damages, more than the entire annual revenue generated by the archipelago of nearly 700 islands. Scientists have warned that Atlantic hurricanes are becoming fiercer due to a warming ocean and atmosphere.

“When people hear the rain now, sometimes they are traumatized by it,” said Davis. “We are still rebuilding and still recovering from the damage and loss from that hurricane. We are in a perpetual cycle of rebuild and recovery. Every year we pray we don’t get another hurricane so we have to borrow again, making our debt spiral. It takes away from our ability to develop our country, to deliver social services for our people.”

Kerry gives scathing rating on climate action: ‘Is there a letter underneath Z?’ | New York | The Guardian

Copernicus – September 2024 was the 2^nd warmest September recorded.

Copernicus

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Climate warning as world’s rivers dry up at fastest rate for 30 years

Rivers dried up at the highest rate in three decades in 2023, putting global water supply at risk, data has shown.

Over the past five years, there have been lower-than-average river levels across the globe and reservoirs have also been low, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) State of Global Water Resources report.

In 2023, more than 50% of global river catchment areas showed abnormal conditions, with most being in deficit. This was similar in 2022 and 2021. Areas facing severe drought and low river discharge conditions included large territories of North, Central and South America; for instance, the Amazon and Mississippi rivers had record low water levels. On the other side of the globe, in Asia and Oceania, the large Ganges, Brahmaputra and Mekong river basins experienced lower-than-normal conditions almost over the entire basin territories.

Climate breakdown appears to be changing where water goes, and helping to cause extreme floods and droughts. 2023 was the hottest year on record, with rivers running low and countries facing droughts, but it also brought devastating floods across the globe.

The extremes were also influenced, according to the WMO, by the transition from La Niña to El Niño in mid-2023. These are naturally occurring weather patterns; El Niño refers to the above-average sea-surface temperatures that periodically develop across the east-central equatorial Pacific, while La Niña refers to the periodic cooling in those areas. However, scientists say climate breakdown is exacerbating the impacts of these weather phenomena and making them more difficult to predict.

Areas that faced flooding included the east coast of Africa, the North Island of New Zealand, and the Philippines.

In the UK, Ireland, Finland and Sweden, there was above-normal discharge, which is the volume of water flowing through a river at a given point in time.

“Water is the canary in the coalmine of climate change,” said the WMO secretary general, Celeste Saulo. “We receive distress signals in the form of increasingly extreme rainfall, floods and droughts which wreak a heavy toll on lives, ecosystems and economies. Melting ice and glaciers threaten long-term water security for many millions of people. And yet we are not taking the necessary urgent action.

“As a result of rising temperatures, the hydrological cycle has accelerated. It has also become more erratic and unpredictable, and we are facing growing problems of either too much or too little water. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture which is conducive to heavy rainfall. More rapid evaporation and drying of soils worsen drought conditions,” she added.

These extreme water conditions put supply at risk. Currently, 3.6 billion people face inadequate access to water for at least one month a year, and this is expected to increase to more than 5 billion by 2050, according to UN Water.

Glaciers also fared badly last year, losing more than 600 gigatonnes of water, the highest figure in 50 years of observations, according to the WMO’s preliminary data for September 2022 to August 2023. Mountains in western North America and the European Alps faced extreme melting. Switzerland’s Alps lost about 10% of their remaining volume over the past two years.

“Far too little is known about the true state of the world’s freshwater resources. We cannot manage what we do not measure. This report seeks to contribute to improved monitoring, data-sharing, cross-border collaboration and assessments,” said Saulo. “This is urgently needed.”