cientists and engineers working at a major power plant in Iceland have shown for the first time that carbon dioxide emissions can be pumped into the earth and changed chemically to a solid within months--radically faster than anyone had predicted. The finding may help address a fear that so far has plagued the idea of capturing and storing CO2 underground: that emissions could seep back into the air or even explode out. A study describing the method appears this week in the leading journal Science.
Carbon emissions caused by burning tropical peatlands in Indonesia vary considerably depending on if the fires are initial or recurrent, according to new research conducted at the University of Leicester.
The study, which was co-authored by Professor Susan Page and Dr Kevin Tansey from the University of Leicester's Department of Geography, also found that peatlands closer to canals have a higher probability of high frequency fires, which release harmful carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
The study, 'Variable carbon losses from recurrent fires in drained tropical peatlands', which was conducted with researchers at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich (LMU) and published in the journal Global Change Biology, presents the first spatially explicit investigation of fire-driven tropical peat loss and its variability, suggesting that there is a strong relationship between burned area depth, fire frequency and distance to drainage canals in tropical peatlands.
China will cut emissions of major pollutants in the power sector by 60 percent by 2020, the cabinet announced on Wednesday, after world leaders met in Paris to address climate change.
China will also reduce annual carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power generation by 180 million tonnes by 2020, according to a statement on the official government website. It did not give comparison figures but said the cuts would be made through efficiency gains.
In Paris, Christiana Figueres, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said she had not seen the announcement, but linked it to expectations that China's coal use would peak by the end of the decade.
"I can only assume they are talking about the same thing," she told Reuters.
Researchers at Chinese government-backed think-tanks said last month that coal consumption by power stations in China would probably peak by 2020.
An EU official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Wednesday's announcement seemed to relate more to air pollutants than greenhouse gas emissions.
Inequality, climate impacts on the future poor, and carbon prices
Authors:
Dennig et al
Abstract:
Integrated assessment models of climate and the economy provide estimates of the social cost of carbon and inform climate policy. We create a variant of the Regional Integrated model of Climate and the Economy (RICE)—a regionally disaggregated version of the Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy (DICE)—in which we introduce a more fine-grained representation of economic inequalities within the model’s regions. This allows us to model the common observation that climate change impacts are not evenly distributed within regions and that poorer people are more vulnerable than the rest of the population. Our results suggest that this is important to the social cost of carbon—as significant, potentially, for the optimal carbon price as the debate between Stern and Nordhaus on discounting.
Spatial response of coastal marshes to increased atmospheric CO2
Authors:
Ratliff et al
Abstract:
The elevation and extent of coastal marshes are dictated by the interplay between the rate of relative sea-level rise (RRSLR), surface accretion by inorganic sediment deposition, and organic soil production by plants. These accretion processes respond to changes in local and global forcings, such as sediment delivery to the coast, nutrient concentrations, and atmospheric CO2, but their relative importance for marsh resilience to increasing RRSLR remains unclear. In particular, marshes up-take atmospheric CO2 at high rates, thereby playing a major role in the global carbon cycle, but the morphologic expression of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration, an imminent aspect of climate change, has not yet been isolated and quantified. Using the available observational literature and a spatially explicit ecomorphodynamic model, we explore marsh responses to increased atmospheric CO2, relative to changes in inorganic sediment availability and elevated nitrogen levels. We find that marsh vegetation response to foreseen elevated atmospheric CO2 is similar in magnitude to the response induced by a varying inorganic sediment concentration, and that it increases the threshold RRSLR initiating marsh submergence by up to 60% in the range of forcings explored. Furthermore, we find that marsh responses are inherently spatially dependent, and cannot be adequately captured through 0-dimensional representations of marsh dynamics. Our results imply that coastal marshes, and the major carbon sink they represent, are significantly more resilient to foreseen climatic changes than previously thought.
China's long-awaited nationwide carbon market will cover as many as 10,000 firms and regulate nearly half of the country's total emissions once launched in 2017, a senior official said on the sidelines of the Paris climate talks on Tuesday.
Jiang Zhaoli, vice-head of the climate office of the state planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), said China's carbon market would become the world's biggest, and its targets would be higher than those set by the state "in order to guarantee it had sufficient effect".
"When the market begins in 2017 it will already have almost 10,000 firms," Jiang said. "After 2020, the size will be bigger and will involve more enterprises."
The market will cover 31 provinces, six industrial sectors and 15 sub-industries, and will involve 4 billion tonnes of annual carbon emissions at its launch, amounting to almost half of the country's total, he said.
The warming effects of climate change usually conjure up ideas of parched and barren landscapes broiling in a blazing sun, its heat amplified by greenhouse gases. But a study led by Princeton University researchers suggests that hotter nights may actually wield much greater influence over the planet's atmosphere as global temperatures rise -- and could eventually lead to more carbon flooding the atmosphere.
Since measurements began in 1959, nighttime temperatures in the tropics have had a strong influence over year-to-year shifts in the land's carbon-storage capacity, or "sink," the researchers report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Earth's ecosystems absorb about a quarter of carbon from the atmosphere, and tropical forests account for about one-third of land-based plant productivity.
During the past 50 years, the land-based carbon sink's "interannual variability" has grown by 50 to 100 percent, the researchers found. The researchers used climate- and satellite-imaging data to determine which of various climate factors -- including rainfall, drought and daytime temperatures -- had the most effect on the carbon sink's swings. They found the strongest association with variations in tropical nighttime temperatures, which have risen by about 0.6 degrees Celsius (33 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1959.
Growing agricultural crops on organic (peat) soils is not good for the climate. When organic soils are drained and cultivated the organic matter in the soil will decompose which leads to emissions of greenhouse gases. This emission makes up as much as 6 percent of Denmark's total greenhouse gas emission. The good news is that we can do something about it.
Reducing the emission from cultivated organic soils is an obvious choice to achieve greenhouse gas emission reductions from agriculture, says Professor Jørgen E. Olesen from the Department of Agroecology at Aarhus University.
Canada's new Liberal government vowed Friday [12/4/15] to work in 2016 toward putting a price on carbon emissions in order to curb CO2 pollution warming the planet.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's administration, however, has yet to say exactly how it might proceed -- possibly implementing either a carbon tax or a CO2 cap and trade scheme -- or when new regulations would come into effect.
Annual global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels could drop slightly in 2015, according to a report from the Global Carbon Project led by a Stanford University researcher. This surprising result contrasts with the rapid growth in emissions before 2014, underlining the need for action to stabilize and permanently lower global CO2 emissions, the researchers conclude.
"In 2014, global CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels grew by just 0.6 percent," said lead author Rob Jackson, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford. "This year we expect total emissions to flatten or drop slightly, despite strong growth in gross domestic product worldwide."
While CO2 emissions have slowed during times of economic recession, this would be the first decline during a period of strong global economic growth, Jackson said.
EVERY so often a country comes along whose economic transformation has a vast impact on the world’s climate system. For the past generation that country has been China. Next it will be India.
Given India’s size and population (1.3 billion), its emissions of carbon dioxide are in relative terms still tiny. At 1.6 tonnes of carbon per person each year, they are roughly the same as China’s per-head emissions in 1980, when that country dived into economic reforms. Now India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, wants to emulate China’s sizzling growth. He has set India a target of expanding GDP by 8% a year. If it comes close to meeting that target, emissions will soar, just as China’s have done. Today, Chinese emissions per head are four times those in India.
Impact of fossil fuel emissions on atmospheric radiocarbon and various applications of radiocarbon over this century
Author:
Graven et al
Abstract:
Radiocarbon analyses are commonly used in a broad range of fields, including earth science, archaeology, forgery detection, isotope forensics, and physiology. Many applications are sensitive to the radiocarbon (14C) content of atmospheric CO2, which has varied since 1890 as a result of nuclear weapons testing, fossil fuel emissions, and CO2 cycling between atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial carbon reservoirs. Over this century, the ratio 14C/C in atmospheric CO2 (Δ14CO2) will be determined by the amount of fossil fuel combustion, which decreases Δ14CO2 because fossil fuels have lost all 14C from radioactive decay. Simulations of Δ14CO2 using the emission scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report, the Representative Concentration Pathways, indicate that ambitious emission reductions could sustain Δ14CO2 near the preindustrial level of 0‰ through 2100, whereas “business-as-usual” emissions will reduce Δ14CO2 to −250‰, equivalent to the depletion expected from over 2,000 y of radioactive decay. Given current emissions trends, fossil fuel emission-driven artificial “aging” of the atmosphere is likely to occur much faster and with a larger magnitude than previously expected. This finding has strong and as yet unrecognized implications for many applications of radiocarbon in various fields, and it implies that radiocarbon dating may no longer provide definitive ages for samples up to 2,000 y old.
The intense farming practices of the "Green Revolution" are powerful enough to alter Earth's atmosphere at an ever-increasing rate, boosting the seasonal amplitude in atmospheric carbon dioxide to about 15 percent during the last five decades.
That's the key finding of a new atmospheric model that estimates that on average, the amplitude of the seasonal oscillation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing at the rate of 0.3 percent every year.
A report on the results of the model, called VEGAS, is published today in the journal Nature.
"What we are seeing is the effect of the 'Green Revolution' on Earth's metabolism," says Ning Zeng, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Maryland and the lead developer of VEGAS, a terrestrial carbon cycle model that, for the first time, factors in changes in 20th and 21st century farming practices.
"Changes in the way we manage the land can literally alter the breathing of the biosphere."
Scientists have known since the 1950s that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere hit an annual low during late summer and early fall in the Northern Hemisphere, which has a greater continental landmass than the Southern Hemisphere and therefore has more plant life.
The atmosphere's carbon dioxide level falls in spring and summer as the hemisphere's plants reach their maximum growth, taking in carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen.
In the autumn, when the plants are decomposing and releasing stored carbon, the atmosphere's carbon dioxide levels rapidly increase.
China will aim for a peak in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, while the United States will strive to cut total emissions by more than a quarter by 2025, as the two countries try to drive through a new global climate pact in Paris next year.
According to a joint announcement by President Xi Jinping and U.S. counterpart Barack Obama in Beijing on Wednesday, China will aim to reach peak CO2 emissions by "around 2030" and strive to achieve the target earlier, while the United States would slash emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent from the 2005 level.
Senior U.S. administration officials said the commitments, which are the result of months of dialogue between the world's top two CO2 emitters, would encourage other nations to make pledges and deliver "a shot of momentum" into negotiations for a new global agreement set to go into force in 2020.
"It is a very good sign for both countries and injects strong momentum (into negotiations), but the targets are not ambitious enough and there is room for both countries to negotiate an improvement," said Tao Wang, climate scholar at the Tsinghua-Carnegie Center for Global Policy in Beijing.
China also pledged to increase the share of non-fossil fuels in its energy mix to around 20 percent by 2030, from less than 10 percent in 2013, a move that could require 1,000 gigawatts of new nuclear and renewable capacity, but Wang said the figure took China little further than "business as usual".
"That figure isn't high, because China aims to reach about 15 percent by 2020, so it is only a five percentage point increase in 10 years, and given the huge growth in renewables, it should be higher," he said.
Efforts to reduce China's carbon dioxide emissions are being offset by the country's rampant economic growth, according to new research from the University of East Anglia (UEA).
Research published today in Nature Climate Change reveals how carbon efficiency has improved in nearly all Chinese provinces. But the country's economic boom has simultaneously led to a growth in CO2-emitting activities such as mining, metal smelting and coal-fired electricity generation – negating any gains.
According to the study, China, the world's largest producer of CO2 emissions, increased its carbon intensity by 3 per cent during a period of unprecedented economic growth. This was despite its pledge to reduce carbon intensity by up to 45 per cent by 2020 (relative to the 2005 level).
The findings are part of a seven-year study conducted by Prof Dabo Guan of UEA's School of International Development, and an international research team. The research was partly funded by the Economic and Social Research Council's (ESRC) Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP) at the University of Leeds.
Wide variations were reported between China's 30 provinces. The less economically advantaged province of Guizhou achieved a 98 per cent gain in carbon efficiency, but concurrent production increases led to a 125 per cent efficiency loss. Consequently, the net carbon efficiency of the province fell by 27 per cent.
The most marked improvements occurred in the economically advanced coastal areas and the heavily industrialised inland regions.
While the implementation of new, less wasteful technologies helped most provinces boost their carbon efficiency, China's emissions-intensive capital projects offset those advances. For example, Inner Mongolia replaced many inefficient, carbon-intensive factories with large-scale modern facilities. This resulted in metal smelting and cement production increasing 14-fold between 2002-2009. As a consequence, the region experienced a 159 per cent efficiency improvement, but a 141 per cent increased scale of production meant the net efficiency gain was a comparatively modest 18 per cent.
Likewise, the carbon efficiency of China's coal-fired power plants improved by 10 per cent, while its production capacity more than doubled and its share in the total economy also increased. Other CO2-intensive industries showed similar trends.
In the past decade, China has maintained at least an 8 per cent annual GDP, propped up by the construction of railroads, highways, power grids and housing.
Greenhouse gas emissions from the production and use of shale gas would be comparable to conventional natural gas, but the controversial energy source actually faired better than renewables on some environmental impacts, according to new research.
The UK holds enough shale gas to supply its entire gas demand for 470 years, promising to solve the country's energy crisis and end its reliance on fossil-fuel imports from unstable markets. But for many, including climate scientists and environmental groups, shale gas exploitation is viewed as environmentally dangerous and would result in the UK reneging on its greenhouse gas reduction obligations under the Climate Change Act.
University of Manchester scientists have now conducted one of the most thorough examinations of the likely environmental impacts of shale gas exploitation in the UK in a bid to inform the debate. Their research has just been published in the leading academic journal Applied Energy and study lead author, Professor Adisa Azapagic, will outline the findings at the Labour Party Conference in Manchester, England, today (Monday, 22 September).
"While exploration is currently ongoing in the UK, commercial extraction of shale gas has not yet begun, yet its potential has stirred controversy over its environmental impacts, its safety and the difficulty of justifying its use to a nation conscious of climate change," said Professor Azapagic.
"There are many unknowns in the debate surrounding shale gas, so we have attempted to address some of these unknowns by estimating its life cycle environmental impacts from 'cradle to grave'. We looked at 11 different impacts from the extraction of shale gas using hydraulic fracturing – known as 'fracking'– as well as from its processing and use to generate electricity."
The researchers compared shale gas to other fossil-fuel alternatives, such as conventional natural gas and coal, as well as low-carbon options, including nuclear, offshore wind and solar power (solar photovoltaics).
The results of the research suggest that the average emissions of greenhouse gases from shale gas over its entire life cycle are about 460 grams of carbon dioxide-equivalent per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated. This, the authors say, is comparable to the emissions from conventional natural gas. For most of the other life-cycle environmental impacts considered by the team, shale gas was also comparable to conventional natural gas.
Excitement around connected and autonomous vehicles has been building for years with consumers interested in the convenience of never having to touch the steering wheel and governments anticipating significant improvements in road safety. It's presumed that these technologies will also have energy efficiency and emissions reductions benefits, but only recently have experts been able to quantify them.
A recent report by the Intelligent Transportation Society of America projects that so-called intelligent transportation systems (ITS) could achieve a 2 to 4 percent reduction in oil consumption and related greenhouse gas emissions each year over the next 10 years as these technologies percolate into the market.
Wally Broeker, the first person to alert the world to Global Warming, has called for atmospheric CO2 to be captured and stored underground. He says that Carbon Capture, combined with limits on fossil fuel emissions, is the best way to avoid global warming getting out of control over the next fifty years. Professor Broeker (Columbia University, New York) made the call during his presentation to the International Carbon Conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, where 150 scientists are meeting to discuss Carbon Capture and Storage.
He was presenting an analysis which showed that the world has been cooling very slowly, over the last 51 million years, but that human activity is causing a rise in temperature which will lead to problems over the next 100,000 years.
"We have painted ourselves into a tight corner. We can't reduce our reliance of fossil fuels quickly enough, so we need to look at alternatives.
"One of the best ways to deal with this is likely to be carbon capture – in other words, putting the carbon back where it came from, underground. There has been great progress in capturing carbon from industrial processes, but to really make a difference we need to begin to capture atmospheric CO2. Ideally, we could reach a stage where we could control the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, like you control your central heating. Continually increasing CO2 levels means that we will need to actively manage CO2 levels in the environment, not just stop more being produced. The technology is proven, it just needs to be brought to a stage where it can be implemented.
Global agriculture and carbon trade-offs
Authors:
Johnson et al
Abstract:
Feeding a growing and increasingly affluent world will require expanded agricultural production, which may require converting grasslands and forests into cropland. Such conversions can reduce carbon storage, habitat provision, and other ecosystem services, presenting difficult societal trade-offs. In this paper, we use spatially explicit data on agricultural productivity and carbon storage in a global analysis to find where agricultural extensification should occur to meet growing demand while minimizing carbon emissions from land use change. Selective extensification saves ∼6 billion metric tons of carbon compared with a business-as-usual approach, with a value of approximately $1 trillion (2012 US dollars) using recent estimates of the social cost of carbon. This type of spatially explicit geospatial analysis can be expanded to include other ecosystem services and other industries to analyze how to minimize conflicts between economic development and environmental sustainability.
