Sunny climate, stormy climate | Edition #5
Welcome to the fifth edition of Sunny climate, Stormy climate - your weekly dose of climate news
Hello and welcome to the fifth edition of Sunny climate, Stormy climate! Here, every week I bring to you 5 stories about the climate
3 stormy ones - concerning stories that are a source of alarm
2 sunny ones - green shoots that tell you that all is not yet lost
So let’s look at what we have this week!
Stormy news
UN: World temp may breach the 1.5 C increase before 2027
What are we talking about?
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released a report last week that said that there is a very strong chance (66% to be precise) that the global avg. temperature will be more than 1.5 degree C above pre-industrial levels (1850-1900 avg.) for at least 1 year between 2023 and 2027.
Currently (For 2022), the world avg. temperature was recorded to be 1.1 deg C above the pre-industrial levels
The hottest year on record so far was 2016 when the avg. temperatures were 1.28 deg C above pre-industrial levels
The report also says that there is a 98% probablity that at least one of the next 5 years will breach the record for the hottest year so far. This will be driven by a combination of El Nino coming back and human activity induced climate change
What is the big deal about 1.5 degrees?
1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels was the target countries pledged to limit temperature increase in the landmark 2015 Paris climate agreement
This target was based on scientific advice that heating beyond that level would unleash a cascade of increasingly catastrophic and potentially irreversible impacts. What could happen if temperatures anomalies exceed the 1.5 deg C mark -
At 1.5 degrees Celsius, it's likely that 70 to 90% of coral reefs will die off worldwide. At 2 degrees Celsius of warming, 99% are lost.
Extreme heat waves will become 3 times more likely (than present) at 2 deg C of warming, compared to 2 times more likely than present at 1.5 degrees of warming
At 1.5 deg C of warming more than half of all ocean ice we had in 2021 would be lost
Devastating floods in Northern Italy - the latest in a series of extreme weather events
A flooded street in Conselice, near Ravenna, on May 21, 2023; Source: The Atlantic What is happening?
Emilia - Romagna region, in Northern Italy saw the worst floods in 100 years last week. Heavy storms in the region resulted in landslides and 21 rivers bursting their banks leading to flooding. At least 14 people have died so far and thousands have been evacuated. There was severe damage to infrastructure, crops and lives.
Is this really because of climate change?
Weather-related disasters have been on the rise in Italy, a country deemed particularly vulnerable to climate change. In 2022, the hottest year on record in Italy, 310 extreme weather events were registered, causing the deaths of 29 people, according to Legambiente, an environmental group.Before the latest floods, Emilia-Romagna and other areas of northern Italy were blighted by a long drought that dried out land, reducing its capacity to absorb water.
Methane becomes ‘green’ in Ohio with the stroke of a pen; Tennessee joins the party too!
What is happening?
In January, Ohio’s Governor Mike DeWine passed a law designating methane gas as “green energy”
With this the law lumps natural gas into the same legal classification as “green energy” or renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and water.
Receently, Tennessee governor signed a similar law that legally defines methane as “clean energy”
Why is this concerning?
While methane is a natural occurring, it is considered the single largest driver of global warming patterns. This is due to the fact it absorbs much more energy than carbon dioxide - the warming impact of methane is estimated to be 80 times that of CO2. Hence, calling methane ‘green energy’ is the ultimate act of greenwashing!
These laws are part of an industry funded strategy to condify climate misinformation about natural gas into laws.
Sunny news
The next hot title: CHO ‘Chief Heat officer’
Have you heard of a title called ‘Chief Heat officer’? It’s real and there are 7 such Chief heat officers across the world, who interestingly are all women.
What does a CHO do?
Chief Heat Officers are officials focused on delivering a unified response to extreme heat, protecting their constituents.
They raise awareness of extreme heat risk and solutions in their cities.
Identify communities and neighborhoods which are most vulnerable to extreme heat
Work to improve planning and response to heat waves
Identify and implement long-term heat risk-reduction and cooling projects
Why do we need CHOs?
Climate change is amplifying the “heat island effect,” where cities are often several degrees warmer than nearby rural areas. About 20 percent of the most populated cities in the world could warm by more than 4°C by 2050 and about 25 percent could warm by more than 7°C by 2100.
Hence actions and mitigations needed to keep the warming of our cities in check need special and urgent attention.
Since the first CHO was appointed in 2021, these climate leaders have taken critical action in their respective cities. They have spearheaded projects that range from installing cool pavements and roofs to mitigate the heat island effect, to categorizing heatwaves to help residents prepare for extreme events, to planting trees to create canopy.
UK and EU advertising regulators get stricter about green washing
So, what is green washing?
The Lipton ad that was censured by the Advertising Standards Authority for making a misleading sustainability claim about the packaging of its bottled RTDs If you read the above ad and thought that it meant that the bottle in which you got the drink was 100% recycled, you are not alone. But the claim made by Pepsi co (owner of the Lipton brand) is indeed not true, as was found by ASA, the UK advertising regulator. The ad had small text at the foot of the poster read: “Bottle made from recycled plastic, excludes cap and label”, which was not really legible. The regulator made Pepsico take down the ad noting that “the overall impression of the ad was that all components of the bottle were made entirely from recycled materials”.
This is a classic example of Green washing - the process of conveying a false impression or misleading information about how a company's products are environmentally sound
So what is the good news?
Advertising Standards Authority’s (ASA) in the UK is to begin stricter enforcement around the use of terms such as “carbon neutral”, “net zero” and “nature positive”
ASA will take action against firms that tell consumers they can buy their products without making global heating or nature loss worse by virtue of purchasing offsets – unless they can demonstrate they really are effective.
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Read this on my way to office. Interesting article on the world climate and some real examples prevalent around. Looking forward to more. Stormy and sunny! I like the name.