The Heat Is On ''Climate Change aka Global Warming'' is here to stay

Sometimes it’s easier to believe in space lasers than climate change

Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) would seemingly rather claim that the government can create hurricanes than that warm Gulf water does.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/08/sometimes-its-easier-believe-space-lasers-than-climate-change/





Hurricane Helene roared through the Southeast two weeks ago, destroying an uncounted number of buildings, triggering massive flooding and leaving more than 200 people dead. In a statement, President Joe Biden extended his sympathies, saying he was “praying for those who lost loved ones from Hurricane Helene, and for those whose homes, businesses, and communities were impacted by this terrible storm.”

Except that if Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is to be believed: Maybe he caused it??

Greene is perhaps America’s second most-famous conspiracy theorist, having risen to national attention by combining doomsday rhetoric with Republican politicking — mirroring the person who holds the top spot.

One of her best-known and most dubious assertions centered around a natural disaster. When a wildfire erupted in California, Greene speculated that the conflagration had been caused by a laser beam targeted from space at the direction of investment bankers. This was not when she was a kid, mind you; she offered this explanation in 2018. So perhaps it is not surprising that her explanation for Helene’s 2024 arrival is broadly similar.

She got there slowly. First, on Oct. 3, she posted a hard-to-read map showing how Helene’s path overlapped with heavily Republican areas of Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. This isn’t incorrect, as The Washington Post also reported, but the idea is hampered by the same inaccuracy that plagues presidential election maps: lots of lightly populated rural areas vote red but occupy a lot of square mileage.

Later that day, she made the subtext explicit.

“Yes they can control the weather,” she wrote on X, the rumor-driven site that replaced Twitter. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

A “community note” — a form of internal fact-checking — was appended to that post noting that control of the weather to the scale of a hurricane was very much not possible.

But Greene dug in. Two days later, she shared a clip from CBS News describing how lasers could be used to control the weather. What was presented was theoretical, though, with the scientist being interviewed indicating that the idea was not demonstrably functional. What’s more, the same issue of scale applied. Making rain fall from a cumulonimbus is very different than ginning up massive regions of rain-filled clouds.

On Monday evening, Greene posted a meme getting at her original point, that evidence of the ability to manipulate weather was extensive. But it relied on a familiar tactic in the world of conspiracy theorizing: scraping together and misrepresenting a number of disparate and unrelated things.





Finally, about an hour later, Greene offered her most revealing assessment of the situation. Sharing a post from another user on X, she sarcastically joked that her theory was no more ludicrous than the idea that such storms were caused by “cow farts.” The question she was posing to readers was obvious: Which seemed more likely, that the government could whip up a hurricane or that Helene and other storms are worsened by methane emissions from the cattle industry?

The answer, of course, is the cow one.

Let’s set aside the ridiculousness of the weather-control argument, an argument that depends on nonexistent technology and on our assuming that the government never used this to, say, ground Russian aircraft preparing to invade Ukraine but instead saved it so they could wipe out western North Carolina.

Let’s instead focus on the abundant and convincing evidence that climate change is real, contributes to strengthening storms like Helene (and Hurricane Milton, now headed toward Florida) — and is driven to a small degree by emissions from livestock.

Climate change is a broad term referring primarily to the increase in global temperatures that has resulted from emissions of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. Those gases rise into the upper atmosphere and remain there, keeping some heat that would otherwise escape into space within the atmosphere. That has raised global air and water temperatures, including in the Gulf of Mexico.

Hurricanes draw energy from ocean water, with warmer water offering the storms more fuel. Warmer air holds more precipitation. In a warmer world, then, we would expect to see hurricanes grow large, quickly. And we do.

Cow flatulence doesn’t contribute a lot of methane to the atmosphere. As NASA explains, cow burps are the bigger problem. It’s emissions from the agriculture industry more broadly that are the bigger contributor to atmospheric methane, though. And while methane is more effective at trapping heat, it makes up much less of the greenhouse gas that blankets the planet than carbon dioxide, produced largely by burning fossil fuels.

We don’t need to post random memes with patent numbers to demonstrate this. We can, instead, point to voluminous, detailed scientific research.

But Republicans such as Greene have invested enormous political capital in the idea that climate change isn’t real or is overstated. The issue has been deeply politicized over the past two decades, in part thanks to the efforts of fossil fuel companies. By now, the partisan damage has been done, with politicians such as Greene tossing out goofy claims about cow farts as a way to trigger conditioned scoffing from her political allies. To her and to many of her allies, climate change is as ridiculous an explanation for a hurricane as “maybe it was a government megalaser” is to objective observers.

This is the world we live in, one where a random person’s motivated poking around on the internet is presented as equivalent to actual controlled research. Where the poking around, when done by the right person, can spur a cadre of allies to step up in defense — regardless of how silly the results of the “research.”

Over on her official X account, Greene summarized her argument, again suggesting that the weather is under government control.

“Climate change is the new Covid,” she claimed. But this is backward. The right spent more than a decade devising ways to undercut climate science and stoke distrust in scientists, efforts that were leveraged to undercut confidence in the pandemic response and vaccines.

At the very least, Greene is (seeming inadvertently) admitting that climate change, like covid, is dangerous.

Scientists have said that we can cool the planet back down. Now they’re not sure it will be so easy.

It might be possible to “overshoot” and then return to our climate targets. But some changes will be irreversible.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/10/09/overshoot-climate-targets-one-point-five/





For years, scientists and world leaders have pinned their hopes for the future on a hazy promise — that, even if temperatures soar far above global targets, the planet can eventually be cooled back down.

This phenomenon, known as a temperature “overshoot,” has been baked into most climate models and plans for the future. In theory, even if global warming reaches the dreaded 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures, it could be brought back down by pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

But a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature shows that blowing past climate goals is more dangerous than it originally seemed. Even if temperatures come back down to 1.5 degrees C, the authors found, many climate impacts — like rising sea levels and thawing permafrost — will persist for centuries to millennia.

For example, for every 10 years Earth’s temperature remains 1.5 degrees C above preindustrial levels, the researchers calculated, sea level will rise by about 4 centimeters, or 1.6 inches. Even a small increase in sea-level rise can lead to more dangerous flooding when hurricanes and heavy rains strike. (In Florida, which is currently facing the danger of Hurricane Milton, sea levels are already 8 inches higher than they were in 1950.)

And as the planet teeters closer to that temperature limit, overshoot is looking more and more likely.

“A 1-in-10 chance of an existential threat is not small,” Joeri Rogelj, a professor of climate science at Imperial College London and one of the authors of the new paper, said on a phone call with reporters on Tuesday.

Since the Paris agreement, world leaders have promised to attempt to hold the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C. That target has stayed in place, even as countries have failed to limit fossil fuel burning: Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are rising at a record pace, according to observations in March at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory.

But in a special United Nations report in 2018, scientists and climate modelers popularized a controversial idea: that nations could “overshoot” the target temporarily, and then bring temperatures back down in the future.

By using techniques like direct air capture or other forms of sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, scientists said, countries could cool the Earth back down even if the planet has already reached 1.6 C or 1.7 C above preindustrial levels.

In recent years, as emissions have continued to climb, the idea of “overshooting” climate targets hasn’t just become popular — it’s now essential to reach the world’s most famous climate goal.

“Emissions reductions haven’t happened as planned,” said Glen Peters, a senior researcher at the Center for International Climate Research in Norway who was not involved in the new study. “So if you still want to get to 1.5 degrees, you need overshoot.”

Last year, The Washington Post analyzed 1,200 pathways to 1.5 degrees C, and found that there were no pathways with “reasonable” assumptions about technological development that didn’t include some kind of overshoot.

But scientists have begun to warn that flying past our climate goals and then returning to them isn’t the same as meeting them in the first place.

In the new study, the authors warn that sea-level rise and melting permafrost may be irreversible for hundreds, if not thousands of years, even if temperatures later come back down. The extinction of species that could result from these massive planetary shifts, they added, are also not reversible.

“Excess deaths are not reversible,” said Rogelj. “If you have a couple of decades in which large proportions of vulnerable people are exposed to extreme heat in a society that is not adapted to this — that’s not reversible.”

Other recent papers have shown that catastrophic tipping points are more likely for each increment above 1.5 degrees C. In a study released in Nature Communications in August, researchers found that every tenth of a degree above that threshold increased the likelihood of triggering tipping points — like the Amazon rainforest transforming into a dry savanna or the collapse of the Atlantic Ocean circulation system — by 1 to 1.5 percent.

At the same time, scientists warn that cooling the planet might not even be technically feasible. The tools to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and reverse warming have not been deployed at a large scale. At the moment, companies pull about 2 million tons of CO2 out of the air every year — but that number would need to be increased by a factor of 1,000 in just the next few decades.

And future generations may not even be motivated to do so. Oliver Geden, a senior fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, says that once the world warms more than 1.5 degrees C, countries may not want to spend the money and energy to bring temperatures back down. “We’re in a world that does not even manage to bring emissions down now,” he said.

One thing, scientists say, is clear: Humanity is headed for a world with more than 1.5 degrees C of warming. The planet has already experienced a 12-month period during which temperatures exceeded that limit, and by the early 2030s, it will be above that mark for multiple years at a time — which is what matters under the text of the Paris agreement.

Overshoot is a way of softening that blow, of making it seem like the world’s climate target is still within reach. But sooner or later, world leaders will have to wrestle with the fact that the most famous climate goal is impossible to meet.

Geden says that many scientists accept that the world will go beyond 1.5 degrees C. “But,” he added, “nobody can decide what the next target will be.”

A utility promised to stop burning coal. Then Google and Meta came to town.

An energy crunch forces continued coal burning in a low-income area as data centers strain the regional power supply.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/08/google-meta-omaha-data-centers/




OMAHA — Residents in the low-income, largely minority neighborhood of North Omaha celebrated when they learned a 1950s-era power plant nearby would finally stop burning coal. The community has some of the region’s worst air pollution and high rates of asthma.

But when the 2023 deadline to rid that plant of coal arrived, the power company that owns it balked. Eliminating toxic emissions conflicted with a competing priority: serving massive, power-hungry Meta and Google data centers the utility helped recruit to the region before it secured enough new energy to meet the extra demand.

The fast-growing data centers — which provide computing power for artificial intelligence — are driving explosive growth in the area’s energy use. Electricity demand in Omaha has increased so much overall, according to the Omaha Public Power District, that permanently switching off the two coal-burning generators at its North Omaha plant could buckle the area’s electricity system.

“A promise was made, and then they broke it,” said Cheryl Weston, who has lived for five decades in North Omaha. “The tech companies bear responsibility for this. The coal plant is still open because they need all this energy to grow.”

Coal is now planned to burn in North Omaha through 2026, according to the utility, although Weston and other critics are skeptical it will stop then.

The disputes in Omaha over data centers and power demand are playing out across the United States. Rapid data center growth has also been accompanied by utility plans to prolong the use of coal in Georgia, Utah and Wisconsin. The Nebraska story reveals in detail how the race by giant technology companies to gain the advantage in AI is conflicting with climate goals and potentially harming public health.

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Power Grab
The artificial intelligence industry is driving a nationwide data center building boom. These sprawling warehouses of computing infrastructure are creating explosive demand for power, water and other resources. Power Grab investigates the impacts on America and the risks AI infrastructure creates for the environment and the energy transition.
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The Omaha Public Power District blames the missed closure date for its North Omaha coal-burning units on the slow arrival of clean energy supplies from wind and solar, which have met with heavy opposition in rural areas. It also cites regulatory delays that have slowed a plan to replace coal-burning units with natural gas, pointing to long waits to connect new projects to the regional electrical grid and mandates for minimum power supplies. But others in the energy industry say that’s not the full story.

The electricity that Google and Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — are devouring is a major factor in the extension of coal burning, they say. According to the utility’s own estimates, two-thirds of projected growth in demand in the Omaha area is attributable to the massive data centers rising largely on former farmland in the surrounding prairie.





“If not for the data centers and poor planning by the utility, they would not need to push to keep those coal units open,” said Devi Glick, a principal at the consulting firm Synapse Energy Economics. “It is disingenuous to say that is not what is driving this.”

The data centers’ need for electricity is enormous. Meta’s Nebraska data center alone used nearly as much energy as the North Omaha coal units produced in 2023, company and federal energy disclosures show. It is enough electricity to power more than half the homes in Omaha.

Google’s electricity use in the Omaha region eclipses that of Meta, according to tracking by the research firm DC Byte. The data shows Google uses more total electricity in Nebraska than anywhere in the United States.

The conflicts in Omaha are not unique. Companies are scouring the nation for alternative sites for data centers as they encounter land and energy shortages in tech hubs such as Northern Virginia and California’s Bay Area. Communities that recently landed on the radar of Silicon Valley are being visited by battalions of tech executives, energy developers and real estate brokers looking for power.

Omaha emerged as prime territory because of its bountiful, cheap electricity and seemingly endless opportunities to convert cornfields into vast solar and wind farms.

Despite the slow arrival of new solar and wind sources into the utility’s portfolio, tech companies insist their data center operations in Nebraska are green. By signing contracts with distant renewable power developers, they claim to have “net zero” impact on greenhouse gas emissions, even as the North Omaha coal plant continues to pollute locally.

Residents say those faraway clean power purchases offer little comfort. Asthma rates in North Omaha, where people of color make up 68 percent of the population, are among the highest in the country, according to a study released last year. Coal power plants have been linked to asthma and elevated mortality rates in neighboring communities nationwide.

The newest Omaha-area data centers are so massive, and so unexpected among the corn stalks and sorghum plants, that they seem like science fiction come to life. Meta’s sprawling facility is 4 million square feet spread over nine giant complexes. The largely windowless Google and Meta buildings are filled with the racks and servers that power the world’s cloud computing needs today and increasingly power the revolution in AI.





Data centers could consume as much as 17 percent of all U.S. electricity by 2030, according to new research from Bloomberg Intelligence, nearly quadruple what they consume today. In the Omaha region, utility officials have announced they will need to double the amount of electricity they generate by that time.

Meta originally passed over Omaha. To woo the tech company, local utility executives created a special industrial electricity rate in 2017. The utility then aggressively marketed the rate to Google. Then-Gov. Pete Ricketts (R) said in 2020 that the Omaha Public Power District was the “linchpin” to getting Google to come to Nebraska.

“It took us 75 years to get where we are today,” Omaha Public Power District CEO Javier Fernandez said in a blog post. “By 2030, we are going to nearly double our generation portfolio. That’s incredible.” Utility officials say they will eventually bring online a huge amount of wind and solar energy — enough to meet as much as 60 percent of the new electricity demand. Much of the rest would come from gas.

Local activists are dismayed by what they say is a muted tech company response to the continued use in Omaha of fossil fuels, not just coal but also natural gas. They say these companies need to be clear that they will not continue to expand if the power company serving them is using dirty energy.

“They’re sitting on the sidelines and watching,” said Preston Love, a longtime North Omaha community organizer who is running for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat. “They’re not in the game. Shame on them. They need to be speaking up.”

The tech companies, which declined interview requests, said every watt of power they use for their data centers is matched with purchases of clean energy elsewhere on the regional power grid. But those contracts feed into a vast power grid, spanning 14 states from Louisiana to Montana. Many experts and activists say much of that clean power would probably get produced whether the tech companies were signing contracts or not.

“These tech companies are doing a lot of paper pushing in Nebraska, and there are not enough real projects being built that get new wind and solar on the grid now,” said Jane Kleeb, founder of Bold Nebraska, which played a key role in killing the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project.

She said tech companies should help overcome rural opposition that has emerged to huge wind and solar arrays. “The Googles and Metas are basically saying ‘Yes, we’re net zero’ and then leaving all the responsibility of actually building clean energy to us, without supporting our efforts,” she said.

The Omaha Public Power District’s marquee solar project in development, a 2,800 acre industrial-scale project on York County farmland, 100 miles from Omaha, is getting a frosty reception from locals. At community meetings they have expressed alarm about the project size, its impact on agriculture, alleged chemicals in solar panels and worries the solar generation will be noisy. Some of the anxieties are spawned from what experts say is misinformation spreading online, but others are concerns of a rural community fearing its farming heritage is under threat.

Some of the tension is rooted in resentment that Omaha recruited the data centers and is getting the tax revenue and jobs they bring, but is now looking to far-flung, rural communities to host the industrial-scale energy installations needed to power them.

“I guarantee the people who say they are in favor of this project wouldn’t want to have them in their backyard,” local resident Jim Jackson said at a county meeting in June, according to the meeting minutes.

“Why pick on prime farm ground?” York County commissioner Stan Boehr said to Omaha utility officials at the gathering. “Why not go to places where you are not interfering with people’s lives?” County officials did not respond to requests for comment. York County’s draft ordinance would prohibit large solar projects from being installed within a half-mile of other properties.

Fernandez, the Omaha Public Power District CEO, called the York County measure “unreasonable and detrimental to crucial clean energy projects.”

Omaha Public Power itself sided against a battery project that clean energy advocates say is needed to support wind and solar farms in the state. (Batteries maintain a steady flow of electricity when solar and wind are not producing energy.)

The Omaha Public Power District ruled in April that the developer, Eolian, could not connect to the grid batteries it plans to install on an industrial lot near Omaha’s coal-fired plant. The power company said private companies are prohibited from hooking up such projects because Nebraska is a “public power” state where infrastructure must be community owned.

Eolian officials, after working on their plan for six years, say they were blindsided by the decision. They argue Nebraska law has specific exemptions allowing the purchase of clean energy from private firms.

“Given the large and growing data center footprint in Omaha, it is confounding that the local utility would intentionally impede the addition of multi-hour battery energy storage resources,” said Eolian CEO Aaron Zubaty. The utility said in a statement that the exceptions are limited and do not allow for “a privately owned, stand-alone battery storage facility.” Eolian and the utility will now make their case to the Nebraska Power Review Board, which has authority to approve the project.

As these controversies play out, North Omaha residents accuse the power company and tech firms of dealing with the challenges not by curbing energy use, but by turning North Omaha into a “sacrifice zone.”

Residents in the community say it has been neglected and underserved for decades. The average household income of $47,300 is far below that of the rest of the city. While tech companies and local politicians say the data centers have brought hundreds of millions of dollars in investment and thousands of jobs to the region, North Omaha residents say they are seeing little of it. But they are stuck with two more years of coal emissions.

“This would never be allowed to happen to an affluent White community,” said Anthony Rogers-Wright, a North Omaha activist. “People here are seen as expendable. … If the power company was not ready to provide clean energy, it should not have been recruiting these data centers to come to Omaha.”

Everyone loves rooftop solar panels. But there’s a problem.

One of the most popular methods to cut your household’s carbon footprint may be a mixed bag.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/10/16/rooftop-solar-emissions-climate-change/





Over the past decade, millions of solar panels have been installed on homes from California to Massachusetts. These solar panels allow their owners to cut down on their bills, pull electricity directly from their rooftops, and sometimes even store it in home batteries to use later in the day.

But are those solar panels the best way to reduce fossil fuel emissions?

The answer is more complicated than it seems. Researchers argue that home solar panels are raising the price of electricity and reducing the need for cheaper large solar farms — making the entire transition to clean energy more expensive. And as more and more homeowners turn to solar, thanks in part to more generous government incentives, that could actually make it harder for the United States to meet its overall climate goals.

Jesse Jenkins, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, said that rooftop solar is an example of the “crises and mismatches” that occur when electricity is billed in the wrong ways. “Some people are going to pay more than they should, and some people are going to pay less than they should,” he said. “It’s going to cause unnecessary costs.”

The issue is that solar, unlike other energy sources, only produces power during a particular time of day — when the sun is shining. Solar panels can provide a ton of power between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.; in states like California during the spring, solar can almost provide all of the state’s energy during those hours.

That means that solar on peoples’ homes is partly competing with large solar farms run by utilities. “I call it a ‘solar-shaped hole’ in the electricity grid,” Jenkins said. “The more rooftop solar you have, the less valuable utility-scale solar is.”

At some level, that’s not a big problem: As long as there are solar panels producing power, why does it matter whether they come from a big farm in the desert or the rooftop of a suburban home?

But rooftop solar costs much more than a giant solar farm. Installing solar panels on the roof of a house or apartment building will cost a homeowner around $4.20 per watt before tax breaks and incentives — while installing them in a large solar farm costs closer to $1.16 per watt.

“Pooling together private and federal money, it’s just going to be a lower cost way to get kilowatt-hours of solar, if it’s utility-scale,” said Duncan Callaway, a professor of energy and resources at the University of California at Berkeley.

Rooftop solar groups counter that the cost of utility-scale solar doesn’t include all of the other expenses involved in building big solar farms.

“They are not adding in the cost of what it takes to deliver that electron to your home,” said Bernadette del Chiaro, the executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association.

At the moment, about 28 percent of all solar installed in the country is on the rooftops of homes and businesses, according to Wood Mackenzie and the Solar Energy Industries Association. By 2035, the country needs around 1,000 gigawatts of solar power to hit climate goals — if more of that is rooftop solar than utility-scale solar, the country could spend billions of extra dollars on the transition to clean energy.

Some of that cost is covered by the individuals installing systems on their homes; but part of it is covered by government tax credits and lower electricity rates faced by those customers. At the moment, homeowners can receive a federal tax credit for 30 percent of the cost of installing solar panels; avoided costs of paying electricity bills can be in the hundreds of dollars per year.

Rooftop solar does have other benefits. Advocates say that it can help lower other costs — solar panels on a home don’t require long-distance, large power lines to carry energy from a faraway desert solar farm to major cities. (The nation’s slow build-out of power lines is one of the major factors holding back a transition to clean energy; it can also take a long time to connect solar farms to the larger electricity system.)

Panels on the roofs of big box stores or suburban homes also save space; they won’t interfere with prairie ecosystems or endangered species. Large-scale wind and solar farms can take 10 times the space of coal and gas-fired power plants — although some developers have experimented with combining solar farms with grazing cattle or growing crops.

“These installations benefit everyone by taking strain off the grid,” Abigail Ross Hopper, the president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in an email. “We need massive increases in solar deployment at all scales in order to decarbonize the grid.”

“This is clearly an apples to oranges comparison,” said Amy Heart, senior vice president of public policy at Sunrun, a home solar and battery storage company. Heart says that half of all the systems Sunrun is currently installing include battery storage, alleviating the problem of solar all being generated at the same time.

Callaway says that it depends on what people value: cleaning up the grid cheaply or saving land. “Some people prefer to leave open space open,” he said. “If that is the value, then rooftop solar makes sense.”

Rooftop solar in the United States also costs more than in other places around the world. In other countries, rooftop solar and large solar farms cost approximately the same amount per watt. In America, high costs for advertising and the sheer difference of American homes ramp up costs.

“We have local counties and cities that have their own building codes,” said Joachim Seel, a policy researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “There are local permitting procedures and inspections.” Even the variety of American homes — ranch houses, townhouses, multistory colonials — can drive up costs compared to other countries. “I don’t think there’s an easy way around it,” he added.

Heart says that the United States has 40,000 jurisdictions and red tape that solar providers have to go through — much more than in other countries. “We make it so complicated,” she said.

Researchers say that part of the issue is that many states and utilities provide very lucrative deals for users of rooftop solar — often compensating owners of home panels more than the value of their solar to the grid. In states like California and Arizona, Jenkins said, in the middle of the day homeowners might get 20 cents back for each kilowatt-hour they send to the grid. But for a grid already flooded with solar, the value of that extra energy is close to zero.

The result is that richer homeowners who can afford solar get cheap electricity bills — while poorer residents see higher bills to compensate. In California alone, researchers at UC Berkeley and the California Public Advocates Office estimated that rooftop solar will add between $4 billion and $6.5 billion to customers’ bills in 2024. One solution is to match the tax breaks and benefits of rooftop solar more closely to the value it actually adds to the electricity grid.

Some groups dispute that this cost-shift is taking place. The California Solar and Storage Association argues that solar has helped avoid peak middle-of-the-day demand in the state — and that most of the growth in electric bills has come from high utility spending. Utilities say that they need higher rates to protect their infrastructure from wildfire and other climate extremes.

“The utilities view rooftop solar as competition — it directly conflicts with their business model,” del Chiaro said. “We see it as very convenient scapegoating.”

Few scientists or researchers want to abandon home solar panels entirely. Research has shown that solar panels are contagious — the best way to predict whether a household will install them is whether their neighbors already have. Taking individual steps to change your lifestyle can also encourage people to take other steps: installing climate-friendly heat pumps, buying electric cars and eating less meat.

“Having your own solar system on your own rooftop — I think for many people it helps them think about energy consumption and energy efficiency in general, and take ownership of that,” Seel said. “From that perspective, it’s important.”

Planet-warming pollution is growing at the fastest rate in history, scientists say

Most of the growth comes from people burning coal, oil and gas, the report said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/10/28/wmo-report-record-greenhouse-gases/





Planet-warming pollution in Earth’s atmosphere last year hit the highest levels in human history, scientists announced Monday — a worrying indicator of the world’s failure to curb climate change as global temperatures are on track to hit yet another record high.

Concentrations of carbon dioxide — the most important driver of global warming — are now growing faster than at any time since our species evolved, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin. The increase can be traced back to stubbornly high rates of fossil fuel consumption, the report said, as well as ecosystems that are becoming more likely to produce emissions and potentially less capable of absorbing excess carbon.

Levels of the potent greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide also hit all-time highs in 2023, the WMO said. The total heat-trapping potential of the atmosphere is now 51.5 percent higher than in 1990, when United Nations scientists first warned the world was on track for catastrophic climate change.

This should set alarm bells ringing among decision makers,” WMO Secretary General Celeste Saulo said in a statement. “Every part per million and every fraction of a degree temperature increase has a real impact on our lives and our planet.”

For the past 14 months, global temperatures have been at least 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than preindustrial levels, according to Europe’s top climate agency. In a report last week, U.N. researchers said nations must cut greenhouse house emissions to 42 percent below 2019 levels to avoid permanently exceeding that threshold and triggering the most dangerous consequences of global warming.

But Monday’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin shows the world is nowhere near achieving that target.

Drawing on data from hundreds of measurement stations spread across more than 80 countries and all the world’s ocean basins, the report found that atmospheric levels of heat-trapping gases have grown at an accelerating rate in the past decade.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere last year exceeded 420 parts per million — a level not seen since the Pliocene Epoch more than 3 million years ago. At that time, global temperatures were 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer, sea levels were 30 to 60 feet higher, and Homo sapiens did not yet exist.

Most of the recent growth comes from people burning coal, oil and gas, the report said. But the WMO researchers also found worrying evidence that human-driven warming has caused natural systems to release more greenhouse gases and may be hurting the Earth’s ability to absorb what people emit.

The hike in carbon dioxide concentrations last year coincided with the largest-observed spike in carbon monoxide — a related gas that is produced when trees burn, the scientists said. Global carbon emissions from forest fires were 16 percent above average during the 2023-2024 fire season, as Australia endured a historic drought and Canada saw a record 37 million acres of forest go up in flames.

Surging levels of methane may also be traced to degraded ecosystems, data suggests. Chemical analysis of the gas, which traps 28 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 100-year time frame, suggests that it is increasingly coming from microbial activity, rather than fossil fuel burning. Though some of that increase can be attributed to bacteria living in landfills and the guts of cows, researchers worry it is also being produced by warming tropical wetlands and thawing Arctic permafrost.

Meanwhile, the net amount of carbon taken up by ecosystems last year was about 28 percent lower than in 2021 and 2022, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Monitoring Laboratory. This decline may be in part because of 2023’s record-high temperatures, which are known to stress plants and cut into ecosystems’ ability to serve as a carbon sink.

The more the world continues to warm, the researchers said, the more natural carbon sinks will weaken, and the harder it will be to achieve the world’s climate goals.

“We face a potential vicious cycle,” WMO Deputy Secretary General Ko Barrett said in a statement. “These climate feedbacks are critical concerns to human society.”

Scientists may have figured out why a potent greenhouse gas is rising. The answer is scary.

Methane emissions spiked starting in 2020. Scientists say they have found the culprit.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/11/04/methane-emissions-microbes-climate-change/

Almost two decades ago, the atmosphere’s levels of methane — a dangerous greenhouse gas that is over 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the short term — started to climb. And climb.

Methane concentrations, which had been stable for years, soared by 5 or 6 parts per billion every year from 2007 onward. Then, in 2020, the growth rate nearly doubled.

Scientists were baffled — and concerned. Methane is the big question mark hanging over the world’s climate estimates; although it breaks down in the atmosphere much faster than carbon dioxide, it is so powerful that higher than expected methane levels could shift the world toward much higher temperatures.

But now, a study sheds light on what’s driving record methane emissions. The culprits, scientists believe, are microbes — the tiny organisms that live in cows’ stomachs, agricultural fields and wetlands. And that could mean a dangerous feedback loop — in which these emissions cause warming that releases even more greenhouse gases — is already underway.

“The changes that we saw in the last couple of years — and even since 2007 — are microbial,” said Sylvia Michel, lead author of the paper published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. “Wetlands, if they are getting warmer and wetter, maybe they’re producing more methane than they used to.”

It’s difficult for scientists to identify all the sources of methane in the world. It comes from leaking oil and gas operations, from cows belching, from landfills and marshes and from thawing permafrost in the Arctic. When methane emissions increase, finding the cause is like solving a complicated algebra problem with too many unknowns.

And it’s a problem that will determine the fate of the climate.

For a time, scientists thought that soaring methane emissions stemmed from the growth in the use of natural gas, which is largely methane. Leaks from drilling or from pipelines can leach the greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

But the new paper points to microbes as the biggest source of the methane spike. Michel and her co-authors analyzed samples of methane, or CH4, from 22 sites around the globe at a Colorado laboratory. Then they measured the “heaviness” of that methane — specifically, how many of the molecules had a heavier isotope of carbon in them, known as C13.

Different sources of methane give off different carbon signatures. Methane produced by microbes — mostly tiny, single-celled organisms known as archaea, which live in cow stomachs, wetlands and agricultural fields — tends to be “lighter,” or have fewer C13 atoms. Methane from fossil fuels, on the other hand, is heavier, with more C13 atoms.

As the amount of methane has risen in the atmosphere over the past 15 years, it’s also gotten lighter and lighter. The scientists used a model to analyze those changes and found that only large increases in microbial emissions could explain both the rising methane and its changing weight.

“What’s key about their conclusion is that it wasn’t fossil or geological,” said Stanford University professor Rob Jackson, who was not involved in the study and is part of the Global Methane Budget, a project that tracks the sources and emissions of methane across the planet.

The research, however, doesn’t show how many of those emissions were natural or human-caused. While microbes in wetlands are largely natural, the tiny creatures can also pump out methane from reservoirs, agricultural lands and landfills.

Another recent study found that two-thirds of current methane emissions are caused by humans — from fossil fuels, rice cultivation, reservoirs and other sources.

“Methane forms biologically in warm, wet, low-oxygen environments,” Jackson said. “The wetlands of a rice paddy and the gut of the cow are all similar.”

But evidence is also emerging that natural wetlands may be responding to warming temperatures by pumping out more methane. Satellite data from recent years has shown global methane hot spots in the tropical wetlands of the Amazon and the Congo.

“Wetlands will emit more methane as temperatures warm,” Jackson said. “This may be the start of a reinforcing feedback, that higher temperatures release more methane from natural ecosystems.”

Michel says it’s too early to say whether this is the beginning of a vicious cycle. “Are these coming from human-caused changes in freshwater systems, or are they a kind of scary climate feedback?” she said. “I want to be careful about what we can and cannot say with this data.”

Researchers say it doesn’t mean that the world can just keep burning natural gas. If wetlands are releasing methane faster than ever, they argue, there should be an even greater push to curb methane from the sources humans can control, like cows, agriculture and fossil fuels.

Over 100 countries have pledged to reduce their methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030, compared with 2020 levels — but so far, that pledge has yet to see results. Instead, satellite measurements show concentrations are rising at a rate that is in line with the worst-case climate scenarios.

“You can turn a wrench in an oil and gas field to quench methane emissions,” Jackson said. “There’s no wrench for the Congo or the Amazon.”