[Feb 13-19’23] Drop in Amazon deforestation

Wood burning biggest cause of PM2.5 pollution in UK, EU formally bans gas and diesel car sales, how quick we need to phase-down fossils and greenwashing in large companies.

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].

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‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 Biggest cause of PM2.5 air pollution in UK is burning wood for heating

😻 EU formally bans gas and diesel car sales by 2035

😼 How quickly do we require “phase-down” of fossil fuels?

💩 New report looks at the degree of greenwashing in the 24 biggest companies climate plans

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👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#feedbackloops] — A new study looks at so called feedback and tries to evaluate the risks they pose. According to the current targets set forth by countries we might limit warming to 2.7C by the end of the century but if some of the feedback loops get’s triggered we might end up with 4C.

[#thwaitesglacier] — Researchers are monitoring the so called “Doomsday glacier” also known as Thwaites Glacier closely and two new studies concludes (1) that the glacier is melting slower than anticipated (yay!) and (2) that it is melting faster along large cracks underneath it (nay!). From what I understand the latter could mean that the glacier will break up which might accelerate the melting of it suddently.

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📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#phasedown] — Even though UN language around what we must do to fossil fuels was recently weakened from phase out to phase down the question can still be asked: How fast must these fuels by phased down? That question then becomes quite complicated because as it turns out developed nations “only” rely about 19% on coal for instance, where as low-middle income developing nations rely on it for 54% of their electricity generation. This means that these countries must phase down / out much faster than rich nations, who are the one’s that are accountable for the problem in the first place, that is obviously not fair. Still it must happen, so how?

[#windrecord] — Chinese wind turbine company Envision Energy has demonstrated it’s new 10MW onshore wind turbine which is a big step up from the previous record of around 7MW.

[#megatonstomw] — The Megatons to Megawatt program ran from 1993 to 2013 and converted 20.000 nuclear warheads to electricity in the US. Can we do that again?

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#skyscraper] — The story of an outdated skyscraper. Back in 2016 when the One Vanderbilt skyscraper was built on Manhattan it was built with a lot of state-of-the-art and well-meaning climate features, like raincollectors. But it also generates it’s own power — something that was definitely the most climate friendly option back in 2016, but not so much today as the power plant it houses is of course based on fossil gas.