• About
    • Which Energy Mix is this?
  • Climate News Network Archive
  • Contact
The climate news that makes a difference.
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
  • Canada
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Cities & Communities
  • Electric Mobility
  • Heat & Power
  • Community Climate Finance
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
  • Canada
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Cities & Communities
  • Electric Mobility
  • Heat & Power
  • Community Climate Finance
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Cities & Communities
  • Electric Mobility
  • Heat & Power
  • Community Climate Finance
  FEATURED
REVEALED: Imperial Oil, Alberta Regulator Knew of Toxic Seepage at Kearl Mine for Years, Kept First Nation in the Dark October 3, 2023
Oil and Gas, Buildings Drive 2.1% Rise in Canada’s Climate Pollution October 2, 2023
Shell CEO Doubles Down on Renewable Cuts Despite Internal Pushback October 2, 2023
Leading Climate Models Underestimate Clean Energy Progress, Overstate Cost, Study Finds October 2, 2023
UAE Holds Major Oil and Gas Conference Before Hosting COP 28 Climate Summit October 2, 2023
Next
Prev

The week that's gone: 20 April 2013

April 26, 2013
Reading time: 6 minutes
Primary Author: Alex Kirby

 

This is a summary of the stories we have published in the week ending Saturday 20 April.

Antarctic Peninsula’s thaw speeds up

14 April – Summer ice melt in the Antarctic Peninsula has increased almost 10-fold in the last 600 years,  weakening the area’s large ice shelves and reducing glacier size, scientists have discovered. The findings explain a series of sudden collapses of ice shelves in the last 20 years, which scientists studying them had not expected. The researchers say the melting that is now occurring could lead to further dramatic events, making the loss of large quantities of ice on the Peninsula more likely, and adding to sea level rise. The results are significant because in the last two decades scientists have been divided on whether the Antarctic would gain mass through extra snow falling and so reduce sea level rise, or would lose ice because of higher sea and air temperatures and so multiply the effect. The new data come from a 1,000-year Antarctic Peninsula climate reconstruction published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

  • The climate news you need. Subscribe now to our engaging new weekly digest.
  • You’ll receive exclusive, never-before-seen-content, distilled and delivered to your inbox every weekend.
  • The Weekender: Succinct, solutions-focused, and designed with the discerning reader in mind.
Subscribe

Biofuels cost both rich and poor

15 April – Biofuels, widely seen as the green way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, may in some cases be worse for the climate than fossil fuels, a report says. Not only will they cost motorists more than ordinary petrol and diesel and increase fuel consumption: they will also make food more expensive. From 15 April, to meet European Union targets, suppliers in the UK are required to blend 5% of biofuel into the petrol and diesel they sell for transport. Rob Bailey, the author of the report, entitled The Trouble with Biofuels, says: “Current biofuels are at best an expensive way of reducing emissions. “At worst they produce more emissions than the fossil fuels they replace and contribute to high and unstable food prices. Policymaking needs to catch up with the evidence base.”

Solar link will bridge Mediterranean

16 April – The world’s largest concentrated solar power plant opened in March in the middle of Abu Dhabi’s western region, amid the country’s giant oil fields. The $600m plant’s hundreds of mirrors direct sunlight towards pipes full of oil to drive steam turbines that in turn provide enough electricity for thousands of homes. In a country whose vast wealth is generated by oil, adopting a new technology that produces only 100 megawatts of power – about a tenth the amount of a large coal-fired plant – may seem a mere token, but it is part of a much larger industrial strategy for the region. Serious money and political clout in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa is aimed at building hundreds of similar plants. The potential is so great that all the electricity requirements of these desert countries – and a good slice of Europe’s – could be met by 2050. European companies are now putting serious investment into a scheme to bring electricity from North Africa across the Mediterranean to their shores.

Climate alters global vegetation

17 April – The amount of vegetation in the world, and the way it is spread across the planet, has changed significantly in the last three decades, researchers say. They attribute more than half the changes they detected to the effects of the warming climate, with people responsible for only around a third. Surprisingly, perhaps, they are at a loss to attribute about 10% of the changes unequivocally to either the climate or us. They say their work marks a scientific advance, because it has only recently become possible to quantify how far climate variability, human activity or a combination of the two are responsible for what is happening. While the researchers, geographers from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and colleagues from the Netherlands, say the last 30 years have seen substantial changes, satellites have during that time been recording how vegetation has altered. In a striking and perhaps unexpected development, the team found that while vegetation has declined south of the Equator, it has increased in the northern hemisphere.

EU carbon plan is refused reprieve

17 April – The rejection by the European Parliament on 16 April of a rescue plan for the European Union’s flagship carbon-trading scheme, the EU ETS, has caused widespread dismay among environmental groups and green industries. The winners were the coal-mining and heavy industries, backed by Eastern European governments, particularly Poland (see our story of 20 February), which believed that paying for carbon credits would damage their competitiveness when the EU is already struggling for growth. The decision, by a narrow margin of 19, with more than 650 MEPs voting, is a severe setback for the EU’s attempts to cut carbon emissions. The pioneer carbon-trading scheme, launched in 2008, was seen as a way of using market forces to both clean up the environment and encourage green industries by forcing factories to modernize. Immediately after the vote the EU’s Council of Environment Ministers vowed it would think of another way of reviving carbon trading to help green technologies.

Fossil fuels ‘risk being wasted assets’

19 April – The first problem is this: most climate scientists agree that we cannot afford to burn the huge reserves of fossil fuel we have if we want any chance of preventing global average temperatures rising by more than 2°C. The second problem: last year the world spent $674 billion finding and developing more fossil fuel. If this continues unabated for ten more years, a report by an influential group of economists and scientists says, there will be a third problem: economies will have wasted more than $6 trillion of capital in pursuit of assets which are literally unburnable (and legally so too, if there are internationally agreed limits on fossil fuel emissions by 2023). The research is published in a report, Unburnable Carbon: Avoiding wasted capital and stranded assets, produced by the Carbon Tracker Initiative and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. The report says 60-80% of coal, oil and gas reserves of publicly listed companies could be classified as unburnable if the world is to cut emissions with an 80% probability of not exceeding global warming of 2°C.

Heat may defeat marathon records

20 April – Tragic events in Boston have cast a shadow over the London Marathon on 21 April and for the moment eclipsed a much longer-term and lower-urgency concern: will marathon records go on being broken? Or will rising global temperatures slowly begin to take the spring out of each competitor’s step? The question is a difficult one, because international marathon events are hard to compare: they are run at different altitudes, in different climates and at different times of the year, and each attracts an exceptional mix of competitors with varying race strategies. But the question gets new focus from the Boston tragedy, because the Boston marathon is unique. It is the oldest continuous annual marathon, and it has been run on the same course on approximately the same day each year since 1924. So last year four scientists from Boston University in Massachusetts reasoned in PLOS ONE, the journal of the Public Library of Science, that the Boston event’s annual records could help answer the question, largely because Boston could also provide the longest and most complete series of daily weather data recorded between midday and 2pm on the day of the race.

 



in Climate News Network

The latest climate news and analysis, direct to your inbox

Subscribe

Related Posts

moerschy / Pixabay
Biodiversity & Habitat

Planetary Weight Study Shows Humans Taking Most of Earth’s Resources

March 19, 2023
53
U.S. Geological Survey/wikimedia commons
Biodiversity & Habitat

Climate Change Amplifies Risk of ‘Insect Apocalypse’

December 1, 2022
67
Alaa Abd El-Fatah/wikimedia commons
COP Conferences

Rights Abuses, Intrusive Conference App Put Egypt Under Spotlight as COP 27 Host

November 14, 2022
34

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Trending Stories

jasonwoodhead23/flickr

REVEALED: Imperial Oil, Alberta Regulator Knew of Toxic Seepage at Kearl Mine for Years, Kept First Nation in the Dark

October 3, 2023
147
Ramon FVelasquez/Wikipedia

Shell CEO Doubles Down on Renewable Cuts Despite Internal Pushback

October 2, 2023
142
Iota 9/Wikimedia Commons

‘Huge Loss’ for Local Green Economy as Vancouver Shutters Its Economic Commission

September 28, 2023
359
YouTube

UAE Holds Major Oil and Gas Conference Before Hosting COP 28 Climate Summit

October 3, 2023
75
Solarimo/pixabay

Leading Climate Models Underestimate Clean Energy Progress, Overstate Cost, Study Finds

October 2, 2023
261
Jon Sullivan/flickr

Thorold Gas Peaker Plant Won’t Be Built After Unanimous City Council Vote

September 21, 2023
880

Recent Posts

Dawn Ellner/flickr

Oil and Gas, Buildings Drive 2.1% Rise in Canada’s Climate Pollution

October 2, 2023
62
Northvolt plant in Sweden, Spisen/wikimedia commons

Quebec Lands $7B Battery Gigafactory Investment from Sweden’s Northvolt

October 2, 2023
62
GFDL/Wikimedia Commons

Clean Energy Funding Isn’t Just About Money, Policy Expert Warns

October 2, 2023
39
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Wikimedia Commons

Climate Change Brings Rapid Ice Loss to Antarctica, Arctic, Swiss Glaciers

October 2, 2023
58
Duffins Agriculture Preserve/North Country House Media via Greenbelt Foundation

Green Space Groups Gear for Bigger Fights After Ontario Reverses Greenbelt Land Grab

September 28, 2023
221
DiscoverEganville/wikimedia commons

EV Rentals to Improve Transportation Access for Ontario Townships

September 28, 2023
82
Next Post

Cut your carbon: Stay warm, lose the lawn

The Energy Mix - The climate news you need

Copyright 2023 © Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy and Copyright
  • Cookie Policy

Proudly partnering with…

scf_withtagline
The Energy Mix - Energy Central
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Cities & Communities
  • Electric Mobility
  • Heat & Power
  • Community Climate Finance

Copyright 2022 © Smarter Shift Inc. and Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}