THE BRIEF [Aug 7-13’23]
THE BRIEF [Aug 7-13’23]
Mental health issues correlated with heat, solar is king and battery bloat in EVs could backfire and humans are worse than super vulcanic eruptions.
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.
🙀 Mental health issues are strongly correlated with extreme heat
😻 Solar installations globally are growing 50% YoY
😼 Battery bloat in EVs could backfire
💩 Humans are emitting carbon dioxide 200x faster than super volcanice eruptions that caused the last mass extinctions
This week’s highlights
[#wildfire] — Wildfires emit dark brown carbon particles that absorb light and cause more warming than previously thought. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis found that these particles are four times more abundant in plumes than black carbon and are resistant to sunlight-driven photochemical bleaching. The study highlights the need to revise climate models to account for the unexpected effects of brown carbon in wildfire smoke and the urgency of climate change mitigation efforts.
[#heatpumps] — Another great article by Hannah Ritchie - filled with data as always. This one deals with heat pumps, which as many of you know, heat pumps are a key technology for decarbonizing heating, and as her articles shows, are much more efficient than gas boilers. Even if all the electricity comes from gas, heat pumps use less gas overall. Heat pumps are among the most effective ways to reduce carbon emissions, and are much more efficient than hydrogen. Up-front costs for heat pumps are the biggest barrier to adoption, but costs of installing and running heat pumps can fall with further innovation and scalability, and proposed energy market reforms could go in favor of heat pumps.
[#amazonsummit] — Here’s a very detailed CarbonBrief post on the Amazon Summit, that hard to summarize properly, but basically the main outcome was called the Belèm Declaration and it calls for sustainable development, strengthening ACTO, and boosting agroforestry systems and sustainable forest management. The newly created Intergovernmental Scientific Technical Panel for the Amazon will promote sustainable development, and the Amazon Mechanism for Indigenous Peoples will strengthen and promote dialogue between governments and Indigenous peoples in the Amazon region. The declaration did not set specific targets or timeframes for cutting crime, nor did it establish a clear unified goal to end deforestation across the Amazon.
[#loneliness] — Isolation is making heat waves more deadly, as social infrastructure like libraries, local businesses, green spaces, and public transit are in short supply, leaving people who are older and live in disinvested neighborhoods most at risk from extreme heat. As heat waves become more frequent, cities are exploring strategies to build social connections and reach isolated individuals before it’s too late. Experts say that all heat-related deaths are preventable, including those that happen when a person is alone, and that it’s possible to check in on neighbors and bring people air conditioning units or help move them to cooling centers.
That’s it for this week folks!
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