[Jan 2-Jan 8’23] Net-zero oil and other bull💩

Gas stoves = 12.5% childhood asthma, 1B$ Amazon fund, important climate questions for 2023 and “net-zero oil” is a term to watch in 2023.

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.

🙀 Don’t want your kids to have asthma? Get rid of your fossil gas stove

😻 Brazil’s new President Lula, revived 1B$ Amazon Fund on first day

😼 5 climate actions questions to address in 2023 by Grist

💩 According to DeSmog, “net-zero oil” is a term to watch in 2023

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👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

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

[#newwords] — This one is from just before x-mas but I just stumbled upon it. It goes through some words that have recently introduced to our vocabulary due to climate change from cold dunkelflaute to bomb cyclone.

[#heatcold] — In EU we kicked off the new year with a heat wave. A heat dome settled over the area which raised temperatures in some cases by more than 20C compared to normal. While the EU is kicking the year off with a heatwave the US is kicking it off with yet another dangerous winter storm, which comes just a few weeks after one killed 60 people and stranded thousands during their holiday travel.

[#researchinmedia] — Here’s an overview of the climate science research papers that were most featured by the media in 2022. The high scorer was a paper titled: “Climate change increases cross-species viral transmission risk”, see the article for a top 10.

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📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

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

[#pumpedhydro] — An interesting look at the construction of a 1.6B$ pumped hydro electric dam project in Portugal. It‘s a great introduction and deep dive into pumped hydro and if you’re unfamiliar with this technology highly worth a read.

[#ukwind] — The UK set a new record for wind power generation on December 30 2022. A whopping 20.91 GW of electricity was produced by wind power. This combined with clean nuclear power put the share of clean electricity of the UKs grid on that day at 87.2%.

[#wastedenergy] — Here’s a look at how finding ways to utilize wasted energy could make a significant dent in decarbonization. (And the article is apparently co-written with the ChatGPT AI tool).