THE BRIEF [Jun 12-18’23]
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.
🙀 Hydrogen’s dirty secret: 12x higher impact than CO2
😻 Giant heatpump installed in the Danish town of Esbjerg
😼 Detailed deep dive in the results of the Bonn climate talks
💩 Most countries still plan to maintain or expand their fossil fuel production
This week’s highlights
[#hotjune] — Temperatures around the world this June have been at their highest levels in decades for this time of year, reflecting the continued emissions of heat-trapping gases and the return of the natural climate pattern known as El Niño. This could lead to a multiyear period of exceptional warmth, more-severe hot spells, droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes. The current El Niño has emerged amid planetary conditions that could compound its warming effects, making it trickier for NOAA to forecast the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season. A volcanic eruption beneath the Pacific archipelago nation of Tonga in January 2022 may have also increased the amount of water in the global stratosphere by more than 5 percent, contributing to global warming.
[#plantbasedmilk] — Here’s another great article from Hannah Ritchie looking at whether plant-based milks are healthier than regular cow milk. And in short, plant-based milks tend to be lower in calories, protein, and fat, but fortified with vitamins and comparable amounts of calcium to cow's milk. Soy milk is the only plant-based milk with a similar amount of protein to cow's milk and is a high-quality source. However, plant-based milks may not be appropriate for populations with high protein requirements, such as infants and older people, or in low-income countries where high-quality protein is lacking.
[#cop28] — At COP28, the UAE have a plan to fight climate change by welcoming oil and gas companies to participate more fully in the talks. However, activists argue that fossil fuel companies should not have a voice in developing a plan to slow global warming. This year, however, fossil fuel lobbyists will have to identify themselves when registering for the UN COP28 climate summit, a move welcomed by campaigners as a victory for transparency. The change should make potential conflicts of interest more apparent but many campaigners say it should be only a first step towards excluding fossil fuel companies from the talks or from key parts of them - yes indeed…. The fact that fossil fuel lobbyists are allowed to a COP meeting is just ridicoulous. The UAE is already at odds with UN Chief on a key issue: Whether to phase out fossil fuels or just their emissions? UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for the phasing out of fossil fuels, not just their emissions, in a rebuke to the United Arab Emirates Cop28 presidency. Guterres urged countries to "move to leave oil, gas and coal in the ground where they belong" and invest in renewable energy. The Cop28 presidency has called for a "rapid, well-managed and just energy transition" and has backed a "phase-out of fossil fuel emissions" with carbon capture and storage technology. Guterres has criticised countries calling for the phase-out of fossil fuel emissions rather than the fuels themselves and for the large-scale deployment of carbon capture and storage technology.
That’s it for this week folks!
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