We were supposed to hit peak emissions. Why won’t they stop rising?

“The big reason is that fossil fuel consumption is up. Oil and gas account for the bulk of this increase in emissions, with coal a distant third. While greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere are rising, their output is level or falling from some of the largest historical emitters. The European Union’s emissions are declining. US emissions are holding steady. China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, is on track to see its output grow by just 0.2 percent this year, one of the tiniest increases in years.
Bucking this trend are many developing countries like India, currently the world’s third-largest emitter. India has seen a huge increase in renewable energy deployment, but its still developing energy from all sources, including fossil fuels. The Global Carbon Budget found India’s fossil fuel emissions are on track to increase 4.6 percent this year.

There are a few additional factors that drove up emissions this year. The lingering effects of El Niño helped push global temperatures to record highs. Extraordinary heat waves in India and China pushed up energy demand for cooling, and that meant burning more fossil fuels. “We’re beginning to see some of those negative feedback loops where the climate crisis itself is impacting on the energy system and making it harder to reduce emissions,” Grant said.

Still, there are glimmers of good news. More than 30 countries have already managed to grow their economies while cutting carbon dioxide pollution, a clear sign that coal, oil, and natural gas are not the only paths to prosperity. These countries have already summited their emissions peaks and are now on the descent, breaking a pattern that has held for nearly two centuries.”

https://www.vox.com/climate/385183/cop29-climate-change-emissions-rising-trump-baku

Is climate change really making hurricanes worse?

“Several factors converged to make 2024 so fertile for tropical storms. Hurricanes feed on warm water, and the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico provided ample nourishment as they reached record-high temperatures. Wind shear — where air currents change speed and direction with altitude — tends to rip apart tropical storms before they can form hurricanes, but there was little of that this year due in part to the ripple effects of the shift to La Niña in the Pacific Ocean.”

“The world has already heated up by about 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. There’s some evidence of this warming playing out in various hurricane traits, but there are also places where it’s absent.”

“scientists need more observations and more time to confirm whether climate change is having any influence on the number of hurricanes.”

“the IPCC report does show hurricanes changing in ways beyond their overall numbers. One is that hurricanes in recent decades have likely been shifting toward the poles, farther away from their normal habitat in the tropics. That makes sense knowing that hurricanes need warm water, around 80 degrees Fahrenheit, so hotter oceans mean these storms can have a greater range.
Another changing trait is that hurricanes appear to be moving slower. That means the storms that make landfall spend more time parked over a given region, forcing the area to endure more wind and rainfall. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 was an exemplar of this as it sauntered along the Texas coast at 5 miles per hour and drenched Houston.

Rapid intensification is a climate change hallmark as well. This is where a tropical storm gains 35 miles per hour or more in windspeed in 24 hours. Hurricane Milton rapidly intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane with winds up to 180 miles per hour in just one day. The IPCC found that the global frequency of rapid intensification in tropical cyclones has likely increased over the past 40 years to an extent that can’t be explained by natural variability alone.

One of the strongest signals of climate change in hurricanes is rain. The average and maximum rainfall rates from hurricanes are increasing, largely a function of rising water and air temperatures. More recently, some researchers have begun to connect the increase in rainfall from individual hurricanes to climate change. The World Weather Attribution research group analyzed the rain from Hurricane Helene. They found the precipitation from the storm was 10 percent heavier due to climate change and that such extreme rain is now 40 to 70 percent more likely because of warming. Looking at Hurricane Milton, the researchers reported that heavy one-day rain events like those spawned from the storm are at least 20 to 30 percent more probable.”

https://www.vox.com/climate/378359/hurricane-climate-change-flood-helene-milton-warming

One chart shows how Hurricane Helene turned into a monstrous storm

“This record ocean heat is a clear reason why Hurricane Helene — which has been traveling through the Gulf on its way to Florida — has intensified so quickly. Put simply, hotter water evaporates more readily, and rising columns of warm, moist air from that evaporation are ultimately what drive hurricanes and their rapid intensification.”

https://www.vox.com/climate/373874/hurricane-helene-florida-forecast-warm-ocean-water

Get used to more absurdly hot Octobers

“This October heat is largely the result of a phenomenon currently happening in the West known as a “heat dome” — which involves a high-pressure system trapping heat closer to the Earth’s surface.
Long-term climate change, however, is likely exacerbating the heat dome’s effects. Greenhouse gasses that fuel climate change also trap heat, leading to higher temperatures that can make an already hot heat dome even hotter.

According to a study from the climate nonprofit Climate Central, 91 million people in the US experienced 30 or more “risky heat days” this summer, and those were made twice as likely because of climate change. The organization describes “risky heat” days as ones warmer than “90 percent of temperatures observed in a local area over the 1991-2020 period.”

Climate change has also led to higher temperatures around the world throughout this past year, including a particularly hot summer in states across the US. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), this was the country’s fourth-hottest summer on record, when looking at temperatures from June through August 2024. During those months, the average temperature in the contiguous United States was 73.8 degrees Fahrenheit — 2.5 degrees above the average from 1991-2020.

That was noticeable in multiple places, including Phoenix, which experienced more than 100 consecutive days of 100-degree heat or higher this year. Globally, the world could also be on track to hit its hottest year on record.

In addition to getting warmer, summers are getting longer, with Drexel University researchers noting that seasonal temperatures are lasting 30 days longer than they have in the past, meaning well into October for some in the northern hemisphere.

That means fall doesn’t bring the same relief from heat it once did. As a September Climate Central report, which looked at 242 US cities, found, fall temperatures went up 2.5 degrees, on average, between 1970 and 2023.

The warmer fall days could have major implications for natural disasters, especially for wildfires in places like Southern California, where heat amplifies the risk of potential blazes on drier landscapes that have also seen decades of fire suppression. While wildfire season has typically run from early summer into the fall, it has the potential to go longer as higher temperatures persist.

More days with higher temperatures can also translate to increased cases of heat stroke, cardiovascular problems caused by stress on the heart, and respiratory challenges. They can extend, too, the window when people experience seasonal allergies.

Additionally, warmer falls could affect plant and animal preparations for hibernation, severely shortening the time they usually take to prepare for winter, and delaying processes like changes in foliage and leaf dropping. Farmers may increasingly need to shift planting and harvesting schedules for different crops as temperatures continue to fluctuate as well.

Short of major changes needed to curb human contributions to global warming, this year’s October heat waves aren’t likely to be a fluke. As Mann told Vox, “The warming will continue until we bring carbon emissions to zero.””

https://www.vox.com/climate/375996/extreme-heat-october-climate-change

Washington Worsened Hurricane Helene’s Destruction

“People choose to remain in flood-prone areas for many reasons, including proximity to family, work, and school. Uprooting oneself and one’s family can be a painful thing to do, and choosing to take on risk to stay where you’ve established your home is understandable. But choosing to stay in these areas genuinely does involve considerable risk. According to FEMA, the average flood insurance claim in 2018 was $40,000, and that risk should be borne by the risk-taker.
The Biden-Harris administration approved an additional $715 million for FEMA’s Flood Mitigation Assistance Program (FMAP) in advance of Hurricane Helene on September 23. FMAP, which falls under NFIP, makes up 15.5 percent of FEMA’s budget and provides homeowners with subsidized flood insurance.

FEMA itself recognizes the folly of providing homeowners insurance at below-market rates. Established by the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968, the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012 (BW-12) was passed to reduce debt incurred by the NFIP from Hurricanes Rita, Wilma, and Katrina in 2005.

BW-12 removed discounts for some NFIP policyholders so that their insurance rates would “more accurately reflec[t] their expected flood losses,” according to FEMA’s 2018 affordability framework. These reforms were as actuarially sound as they were unpopular and were overturned two years later.

The Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act of 2014 (HFIAA) restored pre-BW-12 rates, repealed certain rate increases, and capped annual premium increases at 18 and 25 percent for primary homes and secondary residences, respectively. Congress instituted these effective price ceilings to encourage participation, but FEMA’s affordability framework recognizes the market price of insurance as “one of the best signals of risk that a consumer receives.”

The 2018 framework candidly admits that flood insurance affordability programs create perverse incentives, including “encouraging lower-income households eligible for assistance to purchase properties in very risky areas.” And that’s just what the NFIP has done: approximately 13 million homeowners live in Special Flood Hazard Areas (SFHAs), where there is at least a 1 percent annual risk of flooding.

NFIP deems 12 percent of these homeowners to have Principal, Insurance, Taxes, Insurance (PITI) to household income ratios in excess of the maximum affordable standard. Even with mandatory enrollment in SFHAs, which reduces insurance rates by forcibly expanding the base of the insurance program, the average policyholder cost for a single-family home is $1,098—more than twice the cost of policies outside the SFHAs.

Without NFIP-subsidized insurance, rates would increase, becoming unaffordable for some homeowners. Unaffordability is a feature of insurance markets, not a bug. High insurance rates discourage risky behavior that is likely to be even more painful than having to pull up roots.”

https://reason.com/2024/09/30/washington-worsened-hurricane-helenes-destruction/

This chart of ocean heat is terrifying

“The Gulf is now the hottest it’s been in the modern record, according to Brian McNoldy, a climatologist at the University of Miami, who produced the chart. Taking a dip would feel like a bath: The average temperature of the surface is close to 90 degrees, according to recent measures of sea surface temperature.
“This is out of bounds from the kinds of variability that we’ve seen in [at least] the last 75 years or so,” Ben Kirtman, director of the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies, a joint initiative of the University of Miami and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told Vox. “That can be scary stuff.”

These record temperatures are just one signal of a more widespread bout of warming across the North Atlantic that ramped up last year. It’s still not entirely clear what’s causing it, though scientists suspect a combination of factors including climate change — which raises the baseline ocean temperature — as well as lingering effects of El Niño, natural climate variability, and perhaps even a volcanic eruption.”

https://www.vox.com/climate/368324/hurricane-season-2024-gulf-mexico-ocean-warming

Pete Buttigieg says he had a call with Elon Musk to talk about Hurricane Helene because ‘the best thing to do is just to pick up the phone’

“Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says he had a call with Elon Musk, despite their differences — because sometimes, it’s just better to get on the horn with someone and clear things up.
On Friday, Buttigieg refuted a series of claims made by the Tesla and SpaceX CEO. Musk had in an X post accused the government of closing the airspace in Asheville, North Carolina, to block recovery efforts.

Musk also blamed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the government’s disaster relief group, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Buttigieg responded to Musk, writing: “No one is shutting down the airspace and FAA doesn’t block legitimate rescue and recovery flights. If you’re encountering a problem give me a call.”

The two men then had a chat via phone call, Buttigieg confirmed in an interview with MSNBC’s Jen Psaki released on Sunday.

“He called,” Buttigieg told Psaki. “We had a conversation.”

Buttigieg told MSNBC that some of the confusion on X stemmed from Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFRs), a move by the Federal Aviation Administration to ensure safety for aircraft conducting Hurricane Helene rescue and recovery activities.

Buttigieg said, however, he and Musk managed to get to the bottom of what was happening, and sort out problems for pilots helping to get Starlink equipment to disaster-hit areas.

“We were able to take care of it,” Buttigieg said. “And, I think, to me it’s an example of how often the best thing to do is just to pick up the phone.”

Later on Friday, Musk had a more positive tone while replying to a post from Buttigieg on X about the government delivering additional emergency relief to South Carolina.

Musk said, “Thanks for expediting approval for support flights. Just wanted to note that Sec Buttigieg is on the ball.”

Buttigieg replied, writing: “Glad we could address — thanks for engaging.”

Musk and Buttigieg have had public disagreements over everything from tax credits for electric vehicles to the safety of driverless cars.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/pete-buttigieg-says-had-call-081754462.html

Oil companies sold the public on a fake climate solution — and swindled taxpayers out of billions

“According to Exxon’s own disclosures and an analysis conducted by IEEFA in 2022, only around 3 percent of the carbon captured there (roughly 6 million tonnes) has been permanently sequestered underground. Of the rest of the 240 million tonnes of carbon emitted over the facility’s first 35 years in operation, half has been sold to various oilfield operators for enhanced oil recovery, or EOR — a process by which oil companies inject carbon underground to get more oil out — and approximately 120 million tonnes has been vented into the atmosphere.”

“When CO2 is actually sequestered underground, there’s no guarantee it stays there. “CO2 has a way of moving through the air, of leaking through pipelines, and because we have no cradle-to-grave tracking, we have no way of actually knowing how much is leaking, how much is really being collected, how much is hitting the wellhead, and how much is really staying underground,” Raffensperger said.
That’s not just concerning from a climate perspective, but from a public health perspective as well. Raffensperger notes that the pipelines built to transport condensed carbon from oil fields to storage facilities, or to other oil fields for EOR, are surrounded by “kill zones.”

“These are not your grandmother’s pipelines,” Raffensperger said. “They could be lethal. We talk about the kill zone or a fatality zone around a CO2 pipeline. We don’t talk about that with oil and gas pipelines. These are uniquely dangerous and underregulated.”

Following a 2020 CO2 leak and explosion in Satartia, Mississippi, that abruptly stopped cars on roadways, caused widespread dizziness and nausea, and sent several residents to the hospital, the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration began looking into rules for CO2 pipelines. They were set to finalize that rule this summer, pending review by the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, but that deadline has been extended to fall 2024. The lack of finalized safety regulations has not stopped the permitting of CO2 pipelines, though. The Summit pipeline, a massive project that would carry carbon across five states, just got the go-ahead in June for the first step of its construction process in Iowa: seizing land through eminent domain to make way for the pipeline.”

“Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, has called the industry’s plan to offset its emissions with carbon capture “fantasy.”

But the US government is all in on that fantasy now.

“[The carbon capture tax credit] 45Q is not based on net climate benefit or net CO2 reductions, it’s based on gross CO2 capture,” Blackburn, the environmental lawyer, said. “Why would you think making carbon a commodity would reduce CO2 emissions? It’s like the opposite of carbon tax, we’re actually paying them to produce more of it.””

https://www.vox.com/climate/363076/climate-change-solution-shell-exxon-mobil-carbon-capture