Tag: climate change

El Niño Is Coming – and the World Isn’t Prepared

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That’s the title of this Wired article, and it makes scary reading.

I have no doubt that climate change is a very real thing, but I have often commented that I am regularly unimpressed by the hyperbole and drama with which the news stories around it are presented.

This one seems a little different.

Current forecasts suggest that La Niña will continue into early 2023, making it – fortuitously for us – one of the longest on record (it began in Spring 2020). Then, the equatorial Pacific will begin to warm again. Whether or not it becomes hot enough for a fully fledged El Niño to develop, 2023 has a very good chance – without the cooling influence of La Niña – of being the hottest year on record.

Sure, there are predictions of hurricanes and crop failure, of food shortages and economic impacts, of power outages and ever increasing temperatures, but there’s no embellishment: just facts and indications of what we might expect.

It still doesn’t sound good.

I was less sure about climate change 15 years ago. I was put off by the constantly incorrect predictions and yes, probably swayed by peer pressure when it came to believing (or not believing) what was going on. But if I hadn’t changed my mind about climate change before 2020 (I had, but…) then Covid sealed the deal for me. Not because I believe that the latter was due to the former, but because I watched experts being experts and sharing their expert knowledge, and it being shot down because of poor reporting or just sheer bloody ignorance.

Now I know how those climatologists felt.

The worst bit about knowing that this is happening is not being able to do anything about it. Because it really doesn’t matter how much good stuff like recycling and switching off our geysers that you or I do, when (e.g.) China is building another 15GW-worth of coal-fired power stations in the first six months of 2023 and (e.g.) India is reopening more than 100 coal mines to make more electricity. While collective effort at a local level probably assisted with some degree of relief during our awful drought in Cape Town, it’s absolutely laughable to try to get consumers to behave more responsibly when it comes to climate change when Jinping and Modi are chucking out more CO2 than ever before.

We don’t even have enough electricity to go around, but we’re being told (and paid) by Europe to shut down our 18 coal-fired plants, which at full capacity (ha!) amount to about 45GW of generation capacity. Meanwhile, China is operating over 1,100 coal-fired stations for 1,110GW. And all the emissions that come with them.

Until that sort of dichotomy is rectified, (and I understand how depressing and pessimistic this sounds) it feels utterly pointless to try and “do our bit” on a personal level.

That a-ha Article

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First of all, please let me say a big thank you to all the 6000 miles… readers who took the time to send me that BBC article about a-ha’s role in popularising electric vehicles in Norway. It’s this sort of reader engagement that makes me all warm and fuzzy inside, and I really am very grateful.

I’m also clearly sending out some very specific vibes on here though, because I received links to this article no fewer than eleven times, on three different platforms, and from four different continents, all within a couple of hours of it being published.

Amazing.

Had I heard this story before? Well, yes, but only recently: in this thread on twitter early last year.

And yes, seemingly because of the efforts of Morten et al., it seems that Norway – who made all their money from invading Scotland in the 9th Century dirty oil – are now well ahead of the curve when it comes to electric cars:

In the first half of 2022, 78% of new car sales in Norway were pure electric.
The country intends to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2025 which is five years ahead of the UK.

and:

Add to that the fact that almost 99% of Norway’s electricity comes from renewable sources (and that climate change will make it wetter and windier there, ironically meaning more opportunities for hydroelectric and wind power), and it’s actually a very green picture for a nation which exported 114million cubic metres of oil in 2022 (and will increase that by 15% next year).

Merely moving climate change elsewhere won’t help anyone. Except apparently, as noted above, Norway.

But I suppose that I’m being a little cynical. This isn’t really greenwashing: Norway is actually giving other nations a great example to follow when it comes to electric vehicles.

And it was all thanks to a-ha.

[Did you manage to get the “The Sun Always Shines On EV” pun in? – Ed.]

Back to it (and it’s hot back home)

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After a couple of really awful days, today has been… less awful. I still have no voice, and am subject to painful coughing fits, but things are slowly improving. I have more hope for tomorrow.

Back in the UK, all the news (apart from all the other news) has been about the record-breaking temperatures. It looked like Sheffield – SHEFFIELD! – might even get up towards 40C today. That’s quite literally unheard of. Clearly, something is up. And yet, the climate change deniers (you may recognise them from being anti-vax/pro-Trump/pro-Russian invasion of Ukraine on any given day of any week) have stuck their oar in again with the old:

Lol. So this is “climate change”, is it?
We used to call it “summer”.

Oh yes. I remember the summers of my youth in Sheffield, where it regularly got up to 40C and the trams had to stop running because the overhead lines were being damaged by the heat. That happened every summer. And you couldn’t escape it, because – just like Brize Norton and Luton yesterday – the runways at the airports had all melted. That’s a typical UK summer, alright! Just what we’re known for. When someone says “English summer”, it’s always melty runways and over-stretched power lines that spring immediately to mind, amirite?

Even Ireland joined the party, recording it’s hottest day in over 100 years yesterday, and then it’s hottest day in 24 hours, today.

Temperature records have been kept in Sheffield since 1882, and while a couple of hot days as a standalone can’t be used as evidence that things are heating up generally, it’s interesting to note that the record temperature has been broken today (39.4C still TBC), yesterday (36.1C) and then in 2019 (35.1C). Before that day (25th July) in 2019, the previous highest temperature was 34.3C (1990).

Now, I recognise that these records can obviously only go up, but it’s more the speed at which they are going up which is the interesting/scary part.

Here’s a graph from 2019 which shows the gradual increase in mean temperatures in Sheffield:

…together with the maximum and minimums for each year. And those are all trending upwards.
We’ve now just seen that maximum increase by more than 5 degrees in less than 3 years. I’ve added today’s new record in as a red dot, so you can see just how much of an increase it really is. Incredible.

The climate deniers – being experts, like they are in Eurasian geopolitics (last month), vaccine development (last year) and supporting the fat orange man (since 2016) – will tell you that these things aren’t significant, but there’s actually only so many times you can dismiss these increasingly occurring events as “not significant”, before you have to come to see that in sheer numbers alone, they actually are very significant.

But this is just another wake-up call to ignore.

A note: I still don’t think that the media helps the understanding and gravitas of the situation by publishing “scare stories” and hyperbole about climate change. It belittles the situation and provides plenty of ammunition to those who want us to ignore what’s going on. So please stop doing that. [laughs]

Day 732 – Is this even a real blog…?

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Is this even a real blog if I don’t submit some sort of thoughtpiece regarding the biggest news item to hit the world in the last few years, that being the… [checks notes] Chris Rock/Will Smith incident at the Oscars last night?

Amazingly, I might have pre-empted the whole thing anyway, because if I don’t share some wise words upon the “toxic masculinity” (ugh) or the “poor taste” humour (ugh) on display, then perhaps yesterday’s post comes into play.
And if I do mention either of them, but don’t somehow manage to get a tie-in to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, then I’m doing something very wrong.

Indeed, thank goodness that this little fracas has finally removed the story of the scary temperature anomalies at the North and South Poles from all our front pages this week, am I right?

(As an scientist, I can report that it is never, ever good news when you see a graph like that.)

Anyway, I wonder which celebrity is going to be nasty to one of their peers tomorrow? After all, there’s not much time to get all that vitriol into the news cycle before Armageddon.

Day 469 – Blue

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There’s little point in me writing an essay on any given subject while I’m away and unable to discuss my thoughts on that given subject. And so that’s why I rely mainly on short posts and quota photos*.

Like this one from September 2017.

This was an art installation called Waterlicht, in which a certain pass in the Peak District National Park in the UK was flooded with blue laser light to represent rising ocean levels and general panic. To be fair, if the sea gets there, we are going to be in a lot of trouble, given that it’s about 300m above (current) sea level.

The project hadn’t been well advertised or attended on its first two evenings. But this particular night was chaos, with 6km tailbacks and lots of walking along dark country roads with traffic everywhere. Was it worth it? Probably not.
But it was an experience.

You might think from my flippant attitude just beneath the image above that I’m some sort of climate change denier.
Not so. Obviously not. I recognise that things are changing, and not in a good way. And because it’s a gradual change, rather than one specific moment in time, it’s being overlooked by many people as far less of a problem than it actually is.
I do think that we would all be better served by less sensationalism around the subject, though. Good science is still just science. It isn’t compatible with sensationalism, and I do completely understand people’s scepticism when they have been fed ridiculous headlines of doom and gloom by celebrities and newspapers for years and years, only for those predicted timelines to be wholly unfounded.

Those individuals and publications sowed the seeds of doubt; they have made the bed upon which we now lie. And yet, science still gets the blame. Regaining the trust of the public on this subject is something that we will probably never be able to do.

* this one seems to have gone on a bit though.