Parts of Greenland now hotter than at any time in the past 1,000 years, scientists say

New research in the northern part of Greenland finds temperatures are already 2.7 degrees warmer than they were in the 20th century

By Chris Mooney, The Washington Post, Jan. 18, 2023

The coldest and highest parts of the Greenland ice sheet, nearly two miles above sea level in many locations, are warming rapidly and showing changes that are unprecedented in at least a millennium, scientists reported Wednesday.

That’s the finding from research that extracted multiple 100-foot or longer cores of ice from atop the world’s second-largest ice sheet. The samples allowed the researchers to construct a new temperature record based on the oxygen bubbles stored inside them, which reflect the temperatures at the time when the ice was originally laid down.

“We find the 2001-2011 decade the warmest of the whole period of 1,000 years,” said Maria Hörhold, the study’s lead author and a scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany.

And since warming has only continued since that time, the finding is probably an underestimate of how much the climate in the high-altitude areas of northern and central Greenland has changed. That is bad news for the planet’s coastlines, because it suggests a long-term process of melting is being set in motion that could ultimately deliver some significant, if hard to quantify, fraction of Greenland’s total mass into the oceans. Overall, Greenland contains enough ice to raise sea levels by more than 20 feet.

The study stitched together temperature records revealed by ice cores drilled in 2011 and 2012 with records contained in older and longer cores that reflect temperatures over the ice sheet a millennium ago. The youngest ice contained in these older cores was from 1995, meaning they could not say much about temperatures in the present day.

The work also found that compared with the 20th century as a whole, this part of Greenland, the enormous north-central region, is now 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer, and that the rate of melting and water loss from the ice sheet — which raises sea levels — has increased in tandem with these changes.

The research was published in the journal Nature on Wednesday by Hörhold and a group of researchers at the Alfred Wegner Institute and two other institutions in Germany, the Niels Bohr Institute and the University of Bremen.

The new research “pushes back the instrument record 1,000 years using data from within Greenland that shows unprecedented warming in the recent period,” said Isabella Velicogna, a glaciologist at the University of California at Irvine who was not involved in the research.

“This is not changing what we already knew about the warming signal in Greenland, the increase in melt and accelerated flow of ice into the ocean, and that this will be challenging to slow down,” Velicogna said. “Still, it adds momentum to the seriousness of the situation. This is bad, bad news for Greenland and for all of us.”

Scientists have posited that if the air over Greenland becomes warm enough, a feedback loop would ensue: The ice sheet’s melting would cause it to slump to a lower altitude, which would naturally expose it to warmer air, which would cause more melting and slumping, and so forth.

That this north-central part of Greenland is now 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in the 1900s does not necessarily mean the ice sheet has reached this feared “tipping point,” however.

Recent research has suggested that Greenland’s dangerous threshold lies at about 1.5 degrees Celsius or higher of planetary warming — but that is a different figure than the ice sheet’s regional warming. When the globe reaches 1.5C of warming on average, which could happen as soon as the 2030s, Greenland’s warming will likely be even higher than that — and higher than it is now.

Researchers consulted by The Washington Post also highlighted that the northern region of Greenland, where these temperatures have been recorded, is known for other reasons to have the potential to trigger large sea-level rise.

“We should be concerned about north Greenland warming because that region has a dozen sleeping giants in the form of wide tidewater glaciers and an ice stream … that awakened will ramp up Greenland sea level contribution,” said Jason Box, a scientist with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.

Box published research last year suggesting that in the present climate, Greenland is already destined to lose an amount of ice equivalent to nearly a foot of sea-level rise. This committed sea-level rise will only get worse as temperatures continue to warm.

The concern is focused on the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream, which channels a major portion — 12 percent — of the ice sheet toward the sea. It’s essentially a massive slow-moving river that terminates in several very large glaciers that spill into the Greenland Sea. It is already getting thinner, and the glaciers at its endpoint have lost mass — one of them, the Zachariae Isstrom, has also lost its frozen shelf that once extended over the ocean.

Recent research has also demonstrated that in past warm periods within the relatively recent history of the Earth (i.e., the last 50,000 years or so), this part of Greenland has often held less ice than it does today. In other words, the ice stream might extend farther outward from the center of Greenland than can be sustained at current temperatures, and be strongly prone to moving backward and giving up a lot of ice.

“Paleoclimate and modeling studies suggest that northeast Greenland is especially vulnerable to climate warming,” said Beata Csatho, an ice sheet expert at the University at Buffalo.

In the same year when the researchers were drilling the ice cores on which the current work is based — 2012 — something striking happened in Greenland. That summer, in July, vast portions of the ice sheet saw surface-melt conditions, including in the cold and very high-elevation locations where the research took place.

“It was the first year it has been observed that you have melting in these elevations,” said Hörhold. “And now it continues.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/01/18/greenland-hotter-temperatures/

US emissions rose in 2022. Here’s why that’s not as bad as it sounds.

As renewables overtook coal, economic growth outpaced the rise in carbon emissions.

By Jake Bittle, Grist, Jan. 10, 2023

A new report from the Rhodium Group, a research firm that models greenhouse gas emissions, brings good news and bad news. First, the bad: U.S. emissions increased by just over 1 percent last year, making 2022 the second consecutive year of carbon emissions growth since the American economy began recovering from the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The good news is that there are signs that the U.S. economy is already starting to kick its addiction to planet-warming emissions, even before the implementation of the landmark clean energy law passed by Congress last year. Although carbon emissions grew in 2022, the 1.3 percent year-over-year growth was far smaller than the 6.2 percent surge in 2021. More significantly, emissions didn’t rise as fast as overall economic output, indicating that the U.S. economy became less carbon-intensive even as it roared back to life after the 2020 lockdowns. 

The main reason for this increasing divergence between economic growth and emissions growth is the decline of coal power, which is by far the most carbon-intensive form of electricity generation. As coal plants across the U.S. have shuttered over the past decade, natural gas plants have largely opened up to replace them. While natural gas is a fossil fuel, burning it produces around half the emissions that burning coal does.

Even more notably, the past two years have seen a dramatic surge in renewable energy. Carbon-free power generation grew 12 percent in 2022, according to Rhodium, driven by the breakneck adoption of solar and wind. This growth came in spite of the fact that new solar deployments actually slowed down in 2022 as the industry grappled with snarls in the supply chain for polysilicon and other critical materials used to make solar panels. An ongoing squabble over tariffs on Chinese solar materials may further hamper the industry.

Even so, the continued rollout of solar and wind facilities helped renewables overtake coal power in 2022, marking a major milestone in the energy transition. Solar, wind, and hydropower combined now account for around 22 percent of U.S. power generation, more than coal at 20 percent or nuclear at 19 percent, according to Rhodium. That hasn’t been the case in more than 60 years, ever since coal first surpassed hydropower.

The new data from Rhodium suggests that, despite the shocks of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the U.S. is on a long-term path toward a cleaner grid. The drop in power-sector emissions last year doesn’t reflect the potential effect of the Inflation Reduction Act, the major climate law signed by President Biden last August, which provides extensive new tax credits for renewable energy as well as for electric vehicles and home energy efficiency. The first projects that benefit from the legislation aren’t expected to arrive until late 2023, but the subsidies will only further juice the current trend toward clean energy over the coming decade.

Last year, as the United States emerged from the first wave of the pandemic, emissions grew faster than the economy did, thanks to a temporary resurgence in cheap coal and a huge jump in the number of automobile trips taken nationwide. Carbon pollution from the transportation and building sectors continued to rise this year, according to Rhodium’s data, reflecting the continued dominance of internal-combustion vehicles and gas heat. It was only in the power sector that emissions fell year-over-year.

That’s in keeping with a long-term trend. U.S. emissions have fallen by 15.5 percent since their peak in 2005, largely thanks to the slow death of coal power. It was a market-driven shift toward gas and renewables, rather than any climate-focused public policy, that spurred this reduction, but now the Inflation Reduction Act should help extend these gains to other segments of the economy, pushing the U.S. closer to meeting the goals of the 2016 Paris climate accords, in which the world’s countries collectively pledged to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

The report from Rhodium notes that federal policy, “together with additional policies from leading states as well as action from private actors, can put the [Paris] target within reach—but all parties must act quickly.” The report also says that the U.S. may see emissions fall as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act as soon as this year — “if the government can fast-track implementation.”

https://grist.org/energy/us-carbon-emissions-2022-rhodium-report/

The Last 8 Years Were the Hottest on Record

By Henry Fountain and Mira Rojanasakul, The New York Times, Jan. 10, 2023

The world remained firmly in warming’s grip last year, with extreme summer temperatures in Europe, China and elsewhere contributing to 2022 being the fifth-hottest year on record, European climate researchers said on Tuesday.

The eight warmest years on record have now occurred since 2014, the scientists, from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, reported, and 2016 remains the hottest year ever.

Overall, the world is now 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.1 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than it was in the second half of the 19th century, when emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels became widespread.

Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus service, said the underlying warming trend since the pre-industrial age made 2022’s ranking in the top five “neither unexpected or unsurprising.”

“The rare event now would be to see a really cold year,” he said.

Last year was among the warmest despite the persistence of La Niña for the third consecutive year. La Niña is a climate pattern marked by colder-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean that tend to suppress global temperatures.

“We are continuing the long-term warming trend of the planet,” said Zeke Hausfather, a researcher at Berkeley Earth, an independent organization that analyzes environmental data. “If you draw a straight line through temperatures since 1970, 2022 lands almost exactly on where you’d expect temperatures to be.”

Berkeley Earth will issue its own analysis of 2022 data later this week, as will NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Copernicus scientists said Europe had its hottest summer ever in 2022, with several heat waves rolling across the continent that set temperature records in many cities. Separate research has shown that heat waves in Europe are increasing in frequency and intensity at a faster rate than almost anywhere else, fueled by warming but also, most likely, by shifts in atmospheric and oceanic circulation.

The effects of such a warm year were felt elsewhere around the world as well. Eastern and Central China, Pakistan and India all experienced lengthy and extreme heat waves in 2022, and monsoon floods in Pakistan ravaged much of the country. The heat and accompanying dryness also contributed to extensive wildfires in the Western United States.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/climate/earth-hottest-years.html?campaign_id=54&emc=edit_clim_20230110&instance_id=82345&nl=climate-forward&regi_id=66704053&segment_id=122127&te=1&user_id=97eb24ff9121d1a70f01fac05f86ea1b

3 ways to tap billions in new money to go green — starting next month

In 2023, you can electrify your home — and your car — with the help of the U.S. government. Here’s how.

By Shannon Osaka, The Washington Post, Dec. 29, 2022

Earlier this year, Congress passed the biggest climate bill in history — cloaked under the name the “Inflation Reduction Act.” But while economists say the bill may not reduce inflation very much, it could do one important thing for a country trying to move away from fossil fuels: Spur millions of households across America to switch over to cleaner energy sources with free money.

10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprint

Starting in the new year, the bill will offer households thousands of dollars to transition over from fossil-fuel burning heaters, stoves and cars to cleaner versions. On Jan. 1, middle-income households will be able to access over a half-dozen tax credits for electric stoves, cars, rooftop solar and more. And starting sometime in mid-2023, lower-income households will be able to get upfront discounts on some of those same appliances — without having to wait to file their taxes to get the cash back. This handy online tool shows what you might be eligible for, depending on your Zip code and income.

But which credits should Americans focus on — and which are best for the climate? Here’s a guide to the top climate-friendly benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act, and how to access them.

Heat pumps — the best choice for decarbonizing at home

Tax credit available on Jan. 1: 30 percent of the cost, up to $2,000

Income limit: None

Ah, heat pumps — one of the most popular technologies of the transition to clean energy. “Heat pump” is a bit of a misnomer for these machines, which are more like super-efficient combo air conditioning and heating systems. These appliances run on electricity and move heat, instead of creating it, and so can be three to five times more efficient than traditional gas or electrical resistance heaters.

“For a lot of people, a heat pump is going to be their biggest personal impact,” said Sage Briscoe, the federal senior policy manager at Rewiring America, a clean-energy think tank. (Heat pumps have become so iconic that Rewiring America even has a heat pump mascot.)

Heat pumps can have enormous cost and carbon savings. According to one analysis using data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, switching to a heat pump can save homeowners anywhere from $100 to $1,200 per year on heating bills and prevent anywhere from 1 to 8 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year. For comparison, going vegan for an entire year saves about 1 metric ton of CO2 emissions.

But many consumers encounter obstacles when switching over to heat pumps. In some areas, it can be difficult to find a contractor trained and willing to install them; some homeowners report that contractors share misinformation about heat pumps, including that they don’t work in cold climates. (Modern heat pumps do work in cold climates, and can heat a home even when outdoor temperatures are down to minus-31 degrees Fahrenheit.) Briscoe recommends that homeowners look for skilled contractors who know about heat pumps and do advance research to figure out which models might work best for their home.

Electric vehicles — top choice for cutting car emissions

Tax credit available on Jan. 1: Up to $7,500 depending on the make and model of the car

Income limit: <$150,000 for single filers; <$300,000 for joint filers

If you are like the millions of Americans who don’t live in a community with ample public transit, the best way to decarbonize your transport is switching to an electric car. But electric cars can be prohibitively expensive for many Americans.

Starting Jan. 1, a new EV tax credit will offer consumers up to $7,500 off the purchase of an electric vehicle. For the first few months, Americans will get somewhere between $3,751 and $7,500 off their purchase of an EV, depending on the size of the battery in the car.

There are limitations, per the new law. The vehicles will also have to be assembled in North America, and cars that cost more than $55,000 aren’t eligible, nor are vans or trucks that cost more than $80,000. This week, the Internal Revenue Service provided a list of vehicles that are expected to meet the criteria starting Jan. 1.

Beginning about March, however, that $7,500 credit will be split into two parts: Consumers can get a $3,750 credit if the vehicle has a battery containing at least 40 percent critical minerals from the United States (or a country that the United States has a free-trade agreement with) and another $3,750 credit if at least 50 percent of the battery’s components were assembled and manufactured in North America. Those rules haven’t been finalized yet, so the tax credit starting on Jan. 1 is a stopgap measure until the White House has ironed out the final version.

Joe Britton, the executive director of the EV industry group Zeta, said that means there will likely be a wider group of vehicles eligible for the full tax credit in January and February than there will be later in 2023. Because of this, he recommended that potential EV owners act fast in 2023.

“I would be buying a car in the first quarter,” he said.

Rooftop solar — the best choice for generating clean energy

Tax credit available now: 30 percent of the cost of installation, no cap

Income limit: None

For those who want to generate their own clean energy, there is always rooftop solar panels. This tax credit has actually been available since the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law in August 2022. It offers a tax credit equal to 30 percent of the cost of installing rooftop solar, with no cap. According to Rewiring America, the average 6 kilowatt solar installation costs about $19,000, making the average solar tax credit about $5,700. (The Inflation Reduction Act also includes a 30 percent tax credit for homeowners that need to upgrade their electricity panel for rooftop solar, and a 30 percent tax credit for installing battery storage.)

Solar panels can save homeowners tens of thousands of dollars in utility bills and, when combined with battery storage, can also provide a power backup in the case of a blackout or other disaster. For someone trying to move their entire home away from fossil fuels, solar panels become even more enticing: Switch everything over to electricity, and then make the electricity super cheap with the help from the sun.

For people who don’t own their own homes, there are other options as well. Renters can subscribe to a community solar project to lower their electricity bills and get indirect benefits from the tax credits.

Tips, tricks and words of caution

There are many other credits also coming out in 2023: for EV chargers (up to $1,000), heat pump water heaters (up to $2,000), and even cash for sealing up the doors and windows of your home (up to $1,200).

The most important thing to know, Briscoe said, is whether you qualify for the upfront discounts for low- and moderate-income Americans — which won’t be available until later in 2023 — or the tax credits, which will be available Jan. 1. (Try this tool.) If going the tax credit route, it’s better to spread the upgrades out across multiple years, since there is an annual limit on how many of the credits you can claim in a given year. And, she warned, it is not always going to be easy: It can be hard to find the right installers and the right information for how to make use of all the available government resources.

But ultimately, Briscoe said, how you start decarbonizing your life isn’t as important as just starting.

“It’s like dieting or any other change in your life,” she said. “You have to take the first step, and then another step.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/12/29/climate-tax-credits-clean-energy/

What’s a “carbon border adjustment mechanism,” and what does it mean for U.S. exports?

By Andy Uhler, Marketplace, Dec. 14, 2022

European Union officials announced a plan Tuesday to impose a tax on imports based on the greenhouse gases emitted in making them. It’s called a carbon border adjustment mechanism, and it would be the world’s first tax on the carbon content of imported goods. 

It’s sure to have implications for international trade — especially for countries that don’t have a set price for carbon emissions, like the U.S. 

The carbon border adjustment mechanism, essentially a tariff, would initially apply to the most energy-intensive products. “Iron and steel and cement and aluminum and fertilizer,” said Noah Kaufman, an economist at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

Europe already has a carbon-pricing system to offset the emissions linked to manufacturing products, he said. So countries there want to level the playing field.

“If you’re charging a carbon price on stuff produced at home, you want to charge the same carbon price on things that you import,” said Roberton Williams, a professor of environmental economics at the University of Maryland.

Ultimately, this discourages the importing of cheaper, energy-intensive goods from places like China and the U.S. because firms in those countries will be hit with this new tariff.

The European Union is trying to set up a sort of climate club, per Shi-Ling Hsu, who teaches environmental law at Florida State University.

“If you could set up this club of free trade, where, in order to get in, you’ve got to have some sort of a carbon price, then that flips those incentives around to create some impetus within a country to say, ‘Hey, let’s get a carbon price so we can get in on this club,’” Hsu said.

This new precedent will likely force industry leaders and policymakers to talk about establishing a carbon price in the U.S. — even if they’re against it, he said.

“I suspect the U.S. will push back fairly hard, or at least industries will push back hard,” said Tom Lyon, faculty director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan.

That pushback will likely come in the form of lobbying and political contributions to maintain the status quo, he said.

https://www.marketplace.org/2022/12/14/whats-a-carbon-border-adjustment-mechanism-and-what-does-it-mean-for-u-s-exports/

Renewables Will Overtake Coal by Early 2025, Energy Agency Says

In a new report, the international group said that solar, wind and other renewable sources will expand much more swiftly than forecast last year.

By Elena Shao, The New York Times, Dec. 6, 2022

Worldwide, growth in renewable power capacity is set to double by 2027, adding as much renewable power in the next five years as it did in the past two decades, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday.

Renewables are poised to overtake coal as the largest source of electricity generation by early 2025, the report found, a pattern driven in large part by the global energy crisis linked to the war in Ukraine.

“This is a clear example of how the current energy crisis can be a historic turning point toward a cleaner and more secure energy system,” said Fatih Birol, the I.E.A. executive director, in a news release.

The expansion of renewable power in the next five years will happen much faster than what the agency forecast just a year ago in its last annual report, said Heymi Bahar, a senior analyst at the I.E.A. and one of the lead authors of the report. The report revised last year’s forecast of renewable growth upward by 30 percent after the introduction of new policies by some of the world’s largest emitters, like the European Union, the United States and China.

While there has been a wartime resurgence in fossil fuel consumption as European countries have scrambled to replace gas from Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in February, the effects are likely to be short-lived, the agency said.

Instead, over the next five years, the global energy crisis is expected to accelerate renewable energy growth as countries embrace low-emissions technology in response to soaring fossil fuel prices, including wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear power plants, hydrogen fuels, electric vehicles and electric heat pumps. Heating and cooling buildings with renewable power is one of the sectors that needs to see larger improvement, the report said.

The United States passed the Inflation Reduction Act this year, a landmark climate and tax law that, among many investments to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, made an “unforeseen” expansion in long-term tax credits for solar and wind projects extending through 2032, Mr. Bahar said. Previously, these tax credits had been revised a few years at a time. Extending the credits until 2032 provides better certainty for investors, which is important in the energy industry, Mr. Bahar said.

China alone is forecast to install almost half of the new global renewable power capacity over the next five years, based on targets set in the country’s new five-year plan. Even still, the country is accelerating coal mining and production at coal-burning power plants.

The recent momentum in renewable energy growth is not enough to help the world limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to preindustrial levels, said Doug Vine, director of energy analysis at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. The goal was set by the landmark Paris climate agreement in 2015; beyond that threshold, scientists say the risk of climate catastrophe, including deadly heat waves and coastal flooding, increases significantly.

Scientists have calculated that meeting the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal would require countries to curb or offset all carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. “We are still not there,” Mr. Bahar said, but the agency’s new report indicates that narrowing the gap is “within the reach of government policies and actions.”

The main obstacles in wealthy countries are lengthy permitting procedures and lack of improvements and expansion to grid infrastructure, the report said. Some European countries have made progress on that front, including Germany, which has reduced permitting timelines, and Spain, which has streamlined permitting and increased grid capacity for renewable energy projects.

For low-income countries, the report said, the challenge is both weak grid infrastructure and the lack of access to affordable financing for renewable projects, which require higher upfront costs for capital than they do for maintenance and operation. High interest rates on loans are often a barrier for many lower-income countries that are the most vulnerable yet least responsible for climate change.

At last month’s United Nations climate conference in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, many global leaders made calls to overhaul two powerful financial institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which represent a global financial system that the leaders say disadvantages poorer countries. If implemented, supporters say, the reforms could offer struggling countries lower interest rates and enable financial institutions to attract trillions of dollars in private capital to help those countries transition to renewable energy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/06/climate/iea-renewable-energy-coal.html?campaign_id=54&emc=edit_clim_20221206&instance_id=79458&nl=climate-forward&regi_id=66704053&segment_id=115183&te=1&user_id=97eb24ff9121d1a70f01fac05f86ea1b