SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the more-good-news-for-your-children-and-yourself dept.
It looks like the Paris Agreement is as dead as the fried chicken at my local deli.
At Paris, in 2015, the World agreed to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The latest report of the EU's Climate Change Service shows (summary pdf) that this target has been royally breached, at least for Europe. Temperatures there, averaged over the last 5 years, have increased by 2.2 degrees celsius.
Europe, at least, has a climate change service to measure these things. As for the rest of the world, an extrapolation of the pattern shown in Figure 1c, here, indicates that, there too, demand for swimming pools and flood insurance will grow.
To illustrate the complexity of the problem, the heatwave in mid-July of 2022 was caused by hot air from the Sahara moving into Europe, driving temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius. By mid-August, a stationary high-pressure system with clear skies and weak winds took hold, and caused a second heatwave, which was made worse due to the soil being dried out by the mid-July event, and no rains since.
Events above the Sahara might have come a second time in play, here. Increasing temperatures lead to a stronger evaporation over sea, while the land heats up more. This results in a stronger temperature gradient, which draws rains deeper inland: heavier rainfalls now are reported in the central Sahara, in summer, with formerly dry valleys being put under four meters of water. This causes less Sahara dust in the atmosphere, and hence shields the land less from solar radiation: the EU's report mentions that 2022 surface solar radiation was the highest in a 40 year record, and part of a positive trend.
To end with a positive note, the EU ain't doing so bad, compared to Greenland: three different heatwaves in 2022, and an average September temperature more than 8 degrees Celsius higher than normal.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Monday April 24, @08:25AM
I've got a different take on Europe and renewable energy.
Renewable energy here (the Low Countries and Germany) started out as a grassroots efforts at the end of the '80s. (The main influence there could well have been an American: Lester Brown, of the WorldWatch Institute.)
First attempts to plunk down wind mills were made in the Netherlands in '88/'89 (if memory recalls correctly), but failed commercially, and kept failing throughout the 90s. Somewhere around the turn of the century was the tipping point, where power from wind mills started turning profitable, helped by government subsidies. (I got in in 2003.)
Russian gas was sold as a cure to climate change, a quick and easy win to lower greenhouse gas emissions, and not the other way around. Note that the plans for NordStream I were only made in 2005 -- or 7 years after the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to which Western European countries were signatories.
Note that new heating installations based on oil or gas are forbidden since 2021 (i.e. before Russia's invasion of Ukraine) in my region. A similar measure is being negotiated in the Bundestag in Germany now.