Cosmic Log
Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee joined with other governors today in New York to declare they’re “squarely on track” to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement that the Trump administration says it rejects.
Inslee and the governors of 13 other states and the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico have banded together to form the U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition that aims to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions through state and regional initiatives.
A statistical analysis led by researchers at the University of Washington sees almost no chance that the world’s nations will be able to keep the rise in global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over the course of the 21st century, as promised in last year’s Paris climate accord.
“Our analysis shows that the goal of 2 degrees is very much a best-case scenario,” lead author Adrian Raftery, a UW professor of statistics and sociology, said today in a news release. “It is achievable, but only with major, sustained effort on all fronts over the next 80 years.”
The analysis, published in Nature Climate Change, is consistent with the mainstream view held by climate scientists and policymakers.
In discussions about the future effects of climate change, the 2-degree mark has been called a “speed limit” that, if broken, would significantly heighten humanity’s peril. But even as the goal was being set, experts voiced worries that it would be very hard to stay below the speed limit by 2100.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk says he’ll have no choice but to leave his posts on the White House’s advisory councils if President Donald Trump decides to withdraw from the landmark Paris climate accord.
Multiple news reports, attributed to unnamed administration officials, suggest that Trump is leaning toward doing just that – although there may be some added “caveats” that complicate the outcome.
Musk, a strong proponent of a revenue-neutral carbon tax, said he’s been urging the president to abide by the Paris pact, which calls on nations to reduce their carbon emissions in accordance with voluntary plans.
“Don’t know which way Paris will go, but I’ve done all I can to advise directly to POTUS [president of the United States], through others in WH [White House] and via councils, that we remain,” Musk tweeted.
Billionaire brainiac Elon Musk already has a lot on his hands with Tesla, SpaceX and the quest to make humanity a multiplanet species, but now he’s delving other deep subjects, ranging from politics to his top-secret tunnel plan.
First, let’s check in on the politics: Before the election, Musk said he thought Donald Trump was probably “not the right guy” to become president. But after the election, he joined the president’s Strategic and Policy Forum – which met with Trump at the White House this week.
This week, Musk tweeted his support for Rex Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil CEO whom Trump picked to become secretary of state. Today, Musk explained his thinking via Twitter in an exchange of direct messages with Gizmodo.
Badlands National Park tweeted the inconvenient truth about climate change today, despite the Trump administration’s crackdown on environmental outreach. And the Twittersphere went wild.
The South Dakota park’s staff typically focuses its Twitter account on bighorn sheep and the like, but at least one of the account’s keepers delved into atmospheric carbon dioxide readings.
Today’s outlook for climate trends is a good-news, bad-news situation for the Pacific Northwest.
First, the bad news: NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say 2016 ranked as the hottest year on record in terms of global mean temperatures.
NOAA said the year’s average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 58.69 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 1.69 degrees F above the 20th-century average and 0.07 degrees F above the previous record, set in 2015.
NASA used a slightly different set of figures, including more readings from the Arctic, to determine that last year’s global average was 1.78 degrees above the 20th-century average and 0.22 degrees above 2015. By either measure, the average is the highest since modern recordkeeping began in 1880.
In the closing days of his White House term, President Barack Obama argues that the push toward renewable energy is unstoppable, and that it’s a valid strategy for economic growth.
The substance of Obama’s argument isn’t as surprising as where it was made: in a commentary for Science, one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals.
“The mounting economic and scientific evidence leave me confident that trends toward a clean-energy economy that have emerged during my presidency will continue,” Obama writes, “and that the economic opportunity for our country to harness that trend will only grow.”
The latest update on Arctic climate shows that temperatures at the top of the world are increasing at twice the global rate, setting an assortment of records and near-records.
“Rarely have we seen the Arctic show a clearer, stronger or more pronounced signal of persistent warming and its cascading effects on the environment than this year,” Jeremy Mathis, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic Research Program, said in a news release.
The Arctic Report Card, issued annually by NOAA, was released today in conjunction with the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in San Francisco. The annual report brings together peer-reviewed findings produced by 61 scientists from 11 nations.
Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the presidential election opens the way for a profound reversal in environmental policies, even as officials are working on implementing this year’s Paris climate agreement.
During the campaign, Trump repeatedly declared that climate concerns were a hoax, and that he intends to “cancel” U.S. compliance with the pact that was reached in Paris.
The agreement, which officially entered into force just five days ago, currently calls on the United States to reduce carbon emissions by at least 26 percent from its 2005 levels over the next nine years.
This week, officials from more than 200 nations are meeting in Morocco to hash out the details surrounding implementation of the agreement. Officials and activists said they would soldier on despite Trump’s past statements.
For a time, the Internet was agog over Leonardo DiCaprio’s claim that he’s getting a ticket to Mars – presumably as part of SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk’s plan to send a million people to the Red Planet over the next century.
Then the truth came out: The Oscar-winning star of “Titanic” and “The Revenant” was only joking. Which you could have figured out immediately by watching the video of Oct. 3’s repartee with President Barack Obama and climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe.