Month: February 2024

All over the map

Climate Change by Taymaz Valley via Flickr CC

What to make of net zero? Is it really happening? Is it possible? Will there be enough money? Is there enough staying power on the part of companies and organizations? When?

One recent World Bank report,  Net Zero Energy by 2060: Charting Europe and Central Asia’s Journey Toward Sustainable Energy Futures, says that with decisive action, net zero energy is within reach in Europe and Central Asia (ECA). “The World Bank has developed a model to project an optimal least-cost pathway for ECA to achieve a net zero energy target by 2060. Together, the 23 countries included in the model produce almost a tenth of global greenhouse gas emissions. The report considers the profound impact the war in Ukraine has had on energy security by representing energy trade flows on the basis of gas pipeline flows and capacities as of May 2023 and under a stress test. This novel analysis delivers insights not covered by previous works, focused mainly on the European Union.” Continuing, in the short term, “Central Asia faces a tightening gas supply balance and some difficult choices. Central Asia has been a large net exporter of gas, notably to China. Rapidly growing demand within the entire subregion, combined with stagnating production (especially in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan), limits the ability to meet export commitments to China and peak winter demand at home simultaneously. Russia’s proposed gas union with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan could improve Central Asia’s natural gas balance, although the poor state of pipeline infrastructure (IEA 2016) poses uncertainties. Improving regional gas trade in Central Asia and increasing gas imports from Turkmenistan could be also used to replace coal in Kazakhstan, fill the emerging supply gap in Uzbekistan, and meet growing demand across Central Asia.”

So basically, it’s time for ECA to ditch fossil fuels and embrace renewables for energy security and sustainable growth. It sounds easy enough, but it’s complicated. Very complicated

Another recent report, an article in RealClear World, says Net Zero’s days are “numbered.” Former IMF chief economist Oliver Blanchard poured water on the claim that net zero is a major growth opportunity when he told the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee that there would be a “substantial fiscal cost to achieve anything close to Net Zero.”

Of course, it’s going to be expensive, and no one really knows how costly it will be! Is it, as some say, a growth opportunity that will pay for itself? That would be nice, but that is probably way too optimistic.

For example, a recent analysis revealed that the world is not on course to achieve the target of zero-emission fuels comprising five percent of international shipping fuels by 2030, according to Reuters. This shortfall threatens the shipping industry’s broader objective of decarbonizing by 2050. The assessment indicates that the existing production capacity for scalable zero-emission fuels (SZEF) will only cover a quarter of the required fuel volume by 2030. As of the end of 2022, there were 24 ships capable of operating on SZEF, primarily methanol, with an additional 144 on order.

However, current orders represent only one-fifth of the necessary volume to achieve mid-term sustainability goals. “It’s just not enough at scale or at the pace that is needed,” said UN COP Climate Champions shipping lead Kathryn Palmer.

And here is a wild one: An article in Fortune says, “Germany’s latest ‘net zero’ plan involves storing carbon dioxide underground beneath the sea.” Wait, what? “According to the article, Germany plans to enable underground carbon storage at offshore sites, pushing ahead with a much-discussed technology in an acknowledgment that time is running out to combat climate change,” the country’s vice chancellor said. How difficult and expensive will that be?

Yes, but what happens if the globe somehow reaches net zero? That’s a big if, of course, because there is so much work to do by companies, organizations, and governments.

A recent paper from a group of scientists, published by Frontiers in Science, “The Zero Emissions Commitment and Climate Stabilization,” has some unnerving conclusions, including this one: “How confident are we that when we stop carbon emissions, we also stop global warming?” Yikes, there’s an enigma.

Here are some “key points” in the paper:

  • Substantial uncertainty remains in both the sign and magnitude of the Zero Emissions Commitment (ZEC): the expected additional change in global surface temperature once we achieve net zero CO2 emissions.
  • Uncertainty in ZEC has implications for the remaining carbon budget to stay below the temperature limits of the Paris Agreement: a positive ZEC reduces the remaining budget; a negative ZEC opens the door for more ambitious targets or more time to reach net zero.
  • The prospect of additional warming after net zero is both plausible and significant, with a chance that ZEC could exceed 15% of total global warming.
  • While a ZEC of 0 means no further change to global surface temperatures, other aspects of the Earth system, such as sea levels, will continue to change in a net zero world due to warming realized previously. These changes should be factored into the assessment of safe warming limits and adaptation plans.
  • Current climate models do not adequately represent the full scope of complex and interdependent Earth system processes that determine ZEC. (bold added)

The paper presents “a structure for quantifying uncertainty in ZEC and proposes a roadmap for future research into quantifying ZEC and reducing its uncertainties.

Uncertainly, thy name is net zero.

The sponge knows?

               Sponge by Olly Clarke via Flickr CC

Perhaps it should be net-below-zero. 

According to a study in Nature, the planet has already passed the 1.5 °C warming threshold that climate crisis experts are saying is the goal for climate action.

At the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, nations agreed not to exceed 1.5 °C, a main guardrail of climate change. But the problem is that the planet has already passed 1.5 °C of warming, according to a new measuring technique that goes back further in time than current methods. The technique involves dating ancient sponges.

“We have an alternate record of global warming,” said coral-reef geochemist Malcolm McCulloch, at the University of West Australia Oceans Institute in Crawley, and lead author of the study. “It looks like temperatures were underestimated by about half a degree.”

However, McCulloch says that long-lived marine sponges can provide indications of temperature as far back as the eighteenth century. He and his colleagues analyzed the ratio of the elements strontium to calcium in the 300-year-old calcium carbonate skeletons of a coral-like species of sponge, Ceratoporella nicholsoni, that grows off the coasts of Puerto Rico. This ratio changes only with changes in water temperature, making it a sort of thermometer, according to the study published in Nature Climate Change.

The sponges were sampled from one particular section in the Caribbean — the only place where they are found. They were collected at a depth of 33–91 meters, in what’s called the ocean mixed layer. “Sea-surface temperature can be highly variable on top,” McCulloch was quoted as saying. “But this mixed layer represents the whole system down to a couple hundred meters, and it’s in equilibrium with the temperatures in the atmosphere.”

The sponge skeletons suggest that the planet started to warm up in the mid-1860s, during the period currently defined as the pre-industrial baseline.

“The baseline is where we measure our current temperatures from, so when we say 1.5 [degrees of warming], it’s to do with this reference point,” said McCulloch.

McCulloch and colleagues have calculated that global temperatures had in fact increased by 0.5 °C more than what was estimated by the IPCC. “That’s a huge difference relative to the total amount of warming,” says McCulloch. Furthermore, the planet exceeded 1.5 °C of warming by around 2010–2012 and is on track to surpass 2 °C in the next few years.

Climate change is all about calibration and constantly trying to catch up; our planet operates on its own time schedule, no matter how hard we try to understand.