Benziner-Comeback: Frustrierte E-Auto-Fahrer kehren zum Verbrenner zurück. So titelt 24auto.de und beschreibt, warum in den USA ehemalige E-Auto Käufer wieder auf Benziner umsteigen.
„Jeder fünfte kalifornische Käufer eines Elektro-Autos der Jahre 2012 bis 2018 hat sich mittlerweile wieder ein Modell mit Verbrennungsmotor zugelegt, wie das National Center for Sustainable Transportation der kalifornischen Universität UC Davis herausfand. (Striktes Verbrenner-Verbot?“
Weiterlesen hier.
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Lamia Messari-Becker, die letztes Jahr elegant aus dem Sachverständigenrat für Umweltfragen der Bundesregierung gemobbt wurde, spricht bei theEuropean TV über die Schwächung der parlamentarischen Demokratie im Namen des Klimaschutzes. Zum Video geht es hier lang.
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Immer wieder wird das Jobwunder durch die Energie- und Mobilitätswende versprochen. Eingetreten ist das auch nach 20 Jahren noch nicht wirklich. Real werden aber die Arbeitsplatzverluste sein, zum Beispiel in der Automobilindustrie. Der Spiegel spricht von 221.000 Jobs, die auf der Kippe stehen. Besonders betroffen wird Baden-Württemberg sein, das Grün regiert wird wie die WELT berichtete.
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En-former, der Energieblog von RWE betrachtet die Energiesituation im Baltikum. Dabei wird das Potential von Offshore-Windkraft dort auf das Dreifache des Bedarfs geschätzt. Wie die Länder allerdings in windarmen Zeiten ihren Strom erzeugen sollen, darauf geht der Artikel nicht ein, dabei wäre das spannend. Eine Alternative für Ölschiefer wäre dringend geboten.
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Nur noch 6 Wochen und auf der Nordhalbkugel haben wir den längsten Tag des Jahres. Als Service für diejenigen, die glauben, dass es in Sibirien auch im Sommer Temperaturen immer unter dem Gefrierpunkt gibt: Auch in dem riesigen Land scheint die Sonne jetzt schon sehr lang. In dem im Jahr 2020 medial arg strapazierten Werkhoyansk geht sie momentan um 03:43 auf und um 22:25 unter. Die Sonne scheint also lange und wenn der Wind aus dem Süden kommt, hat sie Zeit die Luft zu erwärmen – anders als Wind aus Norden, der durch die Arktis gekühlt wird. Mit anderen Worten, es wird gerade Sommer in Sibirien! Das ist momentan auch in Werkhoyansk so. Hier die Aussichten bis Mitte Mai.
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Die Global Warming Policy Foundation hat ihren Report 49 herausgegeben. Autor ist Ralph Alexander:
Extreme Weather in 2020
Executive summary
The most striking feature of weather extremes in 2020 was not the extremes themselves, but the use of socio-economic stud-ies of natural disasters to link extreme weather to global warm-ing. Two international agencies, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) – in conjunction with the Centre for Re-search on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) – and the International Red Cross (IFRC), both issued reports claiming that climate-related disasters are currently escalating.However, such claims are wrong, as clearly shown by data presented in the two reports. Two different sections of the CRED-UNDRR report state that since 2000 the annual number of disasters has either risen significantly or been ‘relatively sta-ble’. But these statements are completely contradicted by data in the same report showing that the number of climate-related disasters fell by 11% from 2000 to 2020. The CRED-UNDRR report also falsely contends that more disasters occurred between 2000 and 2019 than during the preceding 20 years. This assertion is mirrored in the IFRC re-port, which makes the erroneous claim that annual climate-related disasters have risen almost 35% since the 1990s. Both spurious claims arise from a failure to account for the major increase in disaster reporting engendered by the arrival of the Internet in the late 1990s. Not only has the annual number of global disasters over the last 20 years declined, but the number of people killed by weather extremes has also been falling steadily over the past century – though this is due as much to improvements in plan-ning, engineering and early warning systems as it is to dimin-ishing natural disasters. And once financial losses from climate-related disasters, which are currently increasing, are corrected for population gain and the ever-rising value of property in harm’s way, there is very little evidence to support any connec-tion between natural disasters and global warming. Just as in previous years, little persuasive scientific evi-dence emerged in 2020 to support the mistaken belief that weather extremes are caused by emissions of greenhouse gases, or that the frequency or intensity of extreme weather is on the rise. No evidence was found for a 2020 study’s claim that the Great Barrier Reef lost 50% of its corals between 1995 and 2017 because of global warming.Notable extremes in 2020 included a prolonged heatwave in Siberia, an unusually cold summer in the northern hemi-sphere, a very active hurricane season in the North Atlantic, and wildfires in the Arctic and the western US. Yet nearly all of these extremes can be attributed to naturally occurring cycles: the Siberian heatwave to the Arctic Oscillation, cold extremes to the North Atlantic Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscil-lation, and both North Atlantic hurricanes and Arctic wildfires to the warm phase of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.
Hier können Sie das pdf herunterladen.
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Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory am 21.4.2021:
In calculating the social cost of methane, equity matters
What is the cost of 1 ton of a greenhouse gas? When a climate-warming gas such as carbon dioxide or methane is emitted into the atmosphere, its impacts may be felt years and even decades into the future—in the form of rising sea levels, changes in agricultural productivity, or more extreme weather events, such as droughts, floods, and heat waves. Those impacts are quantified in a metric called the „social cost of carbon,“ considered a vital tool for making sound and efficient climate policies.
Now a new study by a team including researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley reports that the social cost of methane—a greenhouse gas that is 30 times as potent as carbon dioxide in its ability to trap heat—varies by as much as an order of magnitude between industrialized and developing regions of the world.
Published recently in the journal Nature, the study finds that by accounting for economic inequalities between countries and regions, the social cost of methane drops by almost a factor of 10 in sub-Saharan Africa and jumps by almost a factor of 10 for industrialized countries, such as the United States. The study calculated a global mean estimate of the social cost of methane of $922 per metric ton (not accounting for the inequity), decreasing to $130 per metric ton for sub-Saharan Africa and rising to $8,040 per metric ton for the U.S.
„The paper broadly supports the previous U.S. government estimates of the social cost of methane, but if you use the number the way it’s typically used—as a global estimate, as if all countries are equal—then it doesn’t account for the inequities,“ said Berkeley Lab scientist William Collins, one of the study’s co-authors.
The lead authors of the study were David Anthoff, a professor in UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group, and Frank Errickson, a graduate student in the group at the time of the study. „The Biden administration’s climate policy agenda calls for prioritizing environmental justice and equity. We provide a way for them to directly incorporate concerns for equity in methane emission regulations,“ said Errickson, now a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. „Our results capture that the same climate impact, when measured in dollars, causes a greater loss in well-being for low-income regions relative to wealthy ones.“
Like the social cost of carbon, the social cost of methane is a metric that is not widely used by the public but is increasingly used by government agencies and corporations in making decisions around policies and capital investments. By properly accounting for future damages that may be caused by greenhouse gas emissions, policymakers can weigh present costs against future avoided harms. In fact, the recent White House executive order on the climate crisis established a working group to provide an accurate accounting of the social costs of carbon, methane, and nitrous oxide within a year.
„President Biden’s action represents a much-needed return of science-based policy in the United States,“ said Anthoff. „Devastating weather events and wildfires have become more common, and the costs of climate impacts are mounting.“
„The social costs of methane and carbon dioxide are used directly in cost-benefit analyses all the time,“ Collins said. „You have to figure out how to maximize the benefit from a dollar spent on mitigating methane emissions, as opposed to any of the other ways in which one might choose to spend that dollar. You want to make sure that you are not using a gold-plated band-aid.“
Given the current estimate of global methane emissions of 300 million metric tons per year, that puts the annual social cost of methane at nearly $300 billion, said Collins, the head of Berkeley Lab’s Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division and also a professor in UC Berkeley’s Earth and Planetary Science Department. „Wet areas will get wetter and dry areas dryer, so there’s an increase in severity of storms and droughts,“ he said. „The cost would include all the things that flow from that, such as infrastructure damaged, increased expenditures around keeping places cool, health risks associated with heat, and so on.“
While some methane comes from natural sources—mostly wetlands—about 60% of methane emissions come from human activity, including agriculture, fossil fuel production, landfills, and livestock production. It is considered a short-lived climate pollutant, staying in the atmosphere for only a decade or so, compared to more than 100 years for carbon dioxide.
„Given its potency as a greenhouse gas, regulating emissions of methane has long been recognized as critical component for designing an economically efficient climate policy,“ said Anthoff. „Our study updates the social cost of methane estimates and fills a critical gap in determining social costs.“
Under the Obama administration, the price was estimated at about $1,400 per metric ton. The Berkeley researchers made a technical correction in accounting for offsetting influences on the climate system, arriving at global mean estimate of $922 per metric ton. „We’re suggesting they slightly overestimated it,“ Collins said.
But more importantly, the uncertainty around the social cost of methane comes more from the social side, not the physics. „As a climate scientist, we’ve been busy trying to improve our estimates of the warming caused by methane,“ Collins said. „But it turns out the physics side is no longer the major source of uncertainty in the social cost of methane. It’s now moved to the socio-economic sector, accounting for the damages and inequities.“
How societies choose to develop in the future—such as expanding cities along coastlines or areas prone to flooding or wildfires, or moving away from such areas—are a big unknown. „If we choose mitigate climate change more aggressively, the social cost of methane drops drastically,“ Collins said.
„Continuing our work to further explore the relationship between climate change and socioeconomic uncertainties—not to mention the complex but important issues that arise when we account for equity—is a promising area for future research and policy exploration,“ said Anthoff.
Paper: Equity is more important for the social cost of methane than climate uncertainty, Nature (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03386-6
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FAZ am 8.4.2021:
Gründerin der „Klimaunion“: „Die Klimapolitik der Union muss ehrgeiziger werden“
Die „Klimaunion“ will eine anerkannte Vereinigung innerhalb von CDU und CSU werden. Mitgründerin Wiebke Winter erklärt im Interview, was die Gruppierung von Fridays for Future unterscheidet – und wie sie zur Atomkraft steht.
Weiterlesen in der FAZ
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5 Big Ideas for Making Fusion Power a Reality
Startups, universities, and major companies are vying to commercialize a nuclear fusion reactor
The joke has been around almost as long as the dream: Nuclear fusion energy is 30 years away…and always will be. But now, more than 80 years after Australian physicist Mark Oliphant first observed deuterium atoms fusing and releasing dollops of energy, it may finally be time to update the punch line.
Over the past several years, more than two dozen research groups—impressively staffed and well-funded startups, university programs, and corporate projects—have achieved eye-opening advances in controlled nuclear fusion. They’re building fusion reactors based on radically different designs that challenge the two mainstream approaches, which use either a huge, doughnut-shaped magnetic vessel called a tokamak or enormously powerful lasers.
What’s more, some of these groups are predicting significant fusion milestones within the next five years, including reaching the breakeven point at which the energy produced surpasses the energy used to spark the reaction. That’s shockingly soon, considering that the mainstream projects pursuing the conventional tokamak and laser-based approaches have been laboring for decades and spent billions of dollars without achieving breakeven.
Weiterlesen bei Spectrum IEEE
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Lust auf was Lustiges? Stefan Rahmstorf am 21.4.2021 im Spiegel:
Die neue Verwirrung um das 1,5-Grad-Ziel
Ein australisches Expertengremium erklärt das 1,5-Grad-Ziel des Klimaabkommens für Paris für gescheitert. Das Limit sei nicht mehr zu halten. Doch die Faktenlage ist differenzierter.
Menschen mit ganz harten Nerven bitte hier im Spiegel weiterlesen.
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Axel Bojanowski am 17.4.2021 im Blog politische Ökonomie:
Blog politische Ökonomie: Was wissen wir eigentlich über den Klimawandel? Ich habe oft den Eindruck, wir wissen weniger als Aktivisten behaupten und in Studien berechnen lassen.
Axel Bojanowski: Kurz gesagt: Die Wissenschaft hat robust belegt, dass menschengemachte Treibhausgase eine globale Erwärmung verursachen, die riskante Folgen zeitigt. Meeresspiegelanstieg, mehr Hitze, Gletscherschmelze sind eindeutig, viele andere mögliche Folgen sind unklar. Die Unsicherheiten der Erkenntnisse verlangen zweierlei: Einerseits zwingen sie dazu, Berichte über angebliche Folgen der Erwärmung mit Vorsicht zu rezipieren. Andererseits verlangen sie danach, das Experiment mit dem Klima am liebsten schnell stoppen zu wollen.
Wie viel mehr Grad können wir zunächst hinnehmen. Sind die 1.5 Grad der Goldstandard oder ist das ein selbstgesetztes politisches Ziel der Grünen und Fridays for Future?
Die 1,5 Grad sind erstens nicht zu schaffen, gut 1 Grad Erwärmung sind ja bereits eingetreten. Und zweitens sind die 1,5 Grad eine künstliche Grenze, also keine naturwissenschaftlich begründete Schwelle. Die 1,5-Grad-Grenze wurde auf der Klimakonferenz in Paris 2015 ziemlich spontan zum globalen Klimaziel. Vorteil: Die Grenze zwingt dazu, den Klimawandel strikt anzugehen. Nachteil: Sie suggeriert fälschlicherweise, die Welt stünde unmittelbar vor einer Art Klimakollaps.Wie effektiv wäre es, massiv deutschen Wald neu anzupflanzen? Oder sollen wir Brasilien und Mittelafrika helfen, um Wald aufzuforsten?
Weiterlesen im Blog politische Ökonomie