[Oct 3-9’22] You love someone who will be alive in 2100

Status of methane emissions since pledges, are we on track to get rid of fossil fuels? and the fossil fuel industry’s “lawfare” techniques.

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.

🙀 What has happened to methane emissions since the political methane pledges last year?

😻 Remember, you love someone who’s still alive in 2100

😼 Is the world on track to get rid of fossil fuels?

💩 The fossil fuel industry and their “lawfare” techniques

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👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

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

[#oceanwarming] — A new study reveals that changing winds in the southern hemisphere is causing the ocean to warm at an “alarming” rate. This not only drive general ocean warming, but also creates so called ocean hotspots which are hurting biodiversity.

[#summer] — A new study has found that this summer was hotter and drier globally because of — yes you guessed it — climate change. This is one of those articles that I feel like I post every year around this time. So here’s this years article of why this summer was so hot and dry.

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📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

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

[#demandresponse] — This is a quite nice introductory article to the topic of demand response. In short: Demand response is when the electricity grid operators pays users of the grid to either turn on or off appliances. Why is this helpful? Because in some cases the grid might not be able to provide enough power (if for instance fossil gas power plants stops working) or it might need to rid of too much power in the grid. This problem is only going to get bigger as more renewables get’s on the grid thus demand response will be a center pillar of our future grid.

[#agrivoltaics] — This article look at the many benefits of so called agrivoltaics, in which solar and agriculture co-exist and creates interesting synergies. Everything from having cattle to graze around solar panels in order to keep grass from growing too high to planting pollinator friendly flower species in solar power plants.

[#greenwashing] — A new report published by the Sierra Club give the US utility companies a low D grade in their attempts to decarbonize. In short, Associate Professor, Leah Stokes sums it up: “Most of these companies are just greenwashing”.