Climate Briefing (9th March)
Good morning, and welcome to ScholarTribe’s first ever climate briefing! Twice every month we will be bringing you the best new research from the world of academia, and distilling it down into an easily digestible format.
This week we’ll be talking about:
🌍 The new IPCC working group 2 report
🇺🇦 The impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on clean energy investments
⚡️ Whether big energy companies really are decarbonising their industry
❄️ …and we’ll also be giving you a crash course in polar amplification!
A long expected sequel
The IPCC working group 2 report was released last Monday to much fanfare in the climate science community. “Finally” — the community collectively said — “we’re going to find out what happens to the Earth after last series’ cliffhanger!”
Well, unfortunately for them, the new report says that the fate of the world still hangs in the balance, with some irreversible changes already taking place. What this publication brings into particularly sharp relief is the imbalance of impacts felt among the population, with the ‘3.3–3.6 billion’ who are most vulnerable to the effects climate change being the least well-equipped to adapt to them. These effects are wide and varying, but a central theme in the report is flooding, drought, sea-level rise and loss of ecosystems.
The report isn’t just concerned with the bleakness of our situation though — it also presents the keys to solving the crisis, summarised by the phrase ‘climate-resilient development’. This forms section D of the report, and is the confluence of adaptation and mitigation techniques with sustainable development. This is covered in detail in the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers, but the important thing to take away is that opportunities for climate-resilient development are already shrinking. The report uses the example of mass urbanisation — it’s a trend which wont last forever, but if done in a climate-resilient fashion, will have lasting impacts on those new communities it creates.
If you want to learn more about this, we would highly recommend the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers and the press conference on YouTube.
The crisis in Ukraine
A new report from the Lowy Institute has detailed the potential long-term
impacts of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which go much deeper than the
current increases seen in the price of oil, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and coal.
Not wishing to be held over a barrel by Russia’s oil pipelines and LNG exports
any longer, European countries will be urgently looking to invest in renewable
and clean energy sources, which are crucially localised and depend less on
global markets. Germany in particular will have a lot of work to do, given that
it currently receives over half of its gas supply from Russia, and that the
Nordstream 2 pipeline has been halted. We can only hope that if any good can
come out of the current crisis, it will be a long-awaited change in our energy
consumption habits.
“I’ll do it tomorrow” — an oil company once said
The recent increase in climate-related discourse from BP, Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron is not being backed up by concrete actions, according to a new paper by Mei Li of Tohoku University, Japan. Their analysis shows that while mentions of clean energy keywords in their annual reports have increased three-fold over the last decade, their capital investment into low-carbon tech has remained ‘opaque and insignificant’. This study comes amid a wave of accusations of greenwashing directed at these companies, and the numbers certainly don’t come to their defense — across the industry in 2021, only 4.1% of oil and gas industry spending was on renewables and CCS. So for now, the accusations of greenwashing seem well-founded, and we can only hope that companies start putting their money where their mouth is before it is too late.
Here is a link to the original paper, and a handy summary by CarbonBrief
Physical Climate Demystified — what is Polar Amplification?
It is at this point in the newsletter that we’d like to introduce our first regular
feature - physical climate demystified. It is here where we will try to explain
some of the key concepts of climate science, in less time than it takes to listen
to verse and a chorus of Back for Good by Take That (77 seconds). So, without
further ado, here is this week’s section on polar amplification!
Polar amplification is the name we give to the frightening phenomenon we
are currently experiencing where the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the
rest of the world. This is largely because of a positive feedback mechanism
between rising temperatures and the melting of sea ice.
To understand how this works, we need to introduce the concept of albedo.
This is a single number associated with each type of surface, and represents
the percentage of incoming radiation from the sun which is reflected back
into the atmosphere. Sea ice, for example, has an albedo of around 60%,
meaning that over half of the incoming energy (and therefore incoming
warming) is sent straight back out away from the Earth.
The ocean, however, has an albedo more like 6%. So, when the planet warms,
and some of that sea ice melts, the bare ocean which replaces it is going to
absorb loads more energy than the sea ice used to. This leads to more
warming, then even more melting, then even more warming, and so on.
This is likely the main mechanism driving polar amplification, but there are
thought to be a couple of other contributing processes as well. The impacts,
though, are straightforward to predict, and include ecosystem loss, an
increase in extreme weather events, and the potential release of trapped
methane in permafrost (which in itself would cause a new, even scarier
positive feedback!).
