China's new coal power plant capacity in 2020 grew more than 3 times rest of the World's
In this newsletter:
1) China's new coal power plant capacity in 2020 grew more than 3 times rest of the World's
Reuters, 3 February 2021
2) China’s Covid comeback is bad news for climate as CO2 emissions rise
Bloomberg News, 3 February 2021
3) China uses climate change to threaten Joe Biden administration
Newsweek, 2 February 2021
Reuters, 3 February 2021
2) China’s Covid comeback is bad news for climate as CO2 emissions rise
Bloomberg News, 3 February 2021
3) China uses climate change to threaten Joe Biden administration
Newsweek, 2 February 2021
4) Myanmar’s army chief challenges Biden, and bets big on China
Bloomberg, 1 February 2021
5) Phil Flynn: Biden plan for energy sector would make OPEC great again
Fox Business, 29 January 2021
6) EU mulls expanded carbon border tax
Argus Media, 2 February 2021
7) David Whitehouse: Accurate reporting falls like leaves in autumn
GWPF Observatory, 3 February 2021
8) And Finally: Climate Model Failure
Andy West, Watts Up With That, 2 February 2021
5) Phil Flynn: Biden plan for energy sector would make OPEC great again
Fox Business, 29 January 2021
6) EU mulls expanded carbon border tax
Argus Media, 2 February 2021
7) David Whitehouse: Accurate reporting falls like leaves in autumn
GWPF Observatory, 3 February 2021
8) And Finally: Climate Model Failure
Andy West, Watts Up With That, 2 February 2021
Full details:
1) China's new coal power plant capacity in 2020 grew more than 3 times rest of the World's
Reuters, 3 February 2021
SHANGHAI - China put 38.4 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power capacity into operation in 2020, according to new international research, more than three times the amount built elsewhere around the world and potentially undermining its short-term climate goals.
Reuters, 3 February 2021
SHANGHAI - China put 38.4 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power capacity into operation in 2020, according to new international research, more than three times the amount built elsewhere around the world and potentially undermining its short-term climate goals.
The country won praise last year after President Xi Jinping pledged to make the country "carbon neutral" by 2060. But regulators have since come under fire for failing to properly control the coal power sector, a major source of climate-warming greenhouse gas.
Including decommissions, China's coal-fired fleet capacity rose by a net 29.8 GW in 2020, even as the rest of the world made cuts of 17.2 GW, according to research released on Wednesday by Global Energy Monitor (GEM), a U.S. think tank, and the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
"The runaway expansion of coal-fired power is driven by electricity companies' and local governments' interest in maximizing investment spending, more than a real need for new capacity," said Lauri Myllyvirta, CREA lead analyst.
The country's National Energy Administration (NEA) didn't immediately respond to Reuters' request for comment.
China approved the construction of a further 36.9 GW of coal-fired capacity last year, three times more than a year earlier, bringing the total under construction to 88.1 GW. It now has 247 GW of coal power under development, enough to supply the whole of Germany.
A team of central government environmental inspectors delivered a scathing assessment of China's energy regulator last Friday, accusing officials of planning failures and focusing too much on guaranteeing energy supply.
The NEA had allowed plants to be built in already polluted regions, while projects in less sensitive "coal-power bases" had not gone ahead, they said.
China has been criticized for pursuing an energy-intensive post-COVID recovery based on heavy industry and construction, and experts say new coal plants could end up becoming heavily-indebted "stranded assets."
Full story
2) China’s Covid comeback is bad news for climate as CO2 emissions rise
Bloomberg News, 3 February 2021
China was likely the only major economy that grew last year after swiftly containing the coronavirus. It’s also the only major economy that saw carbon emissions rise.
In December, emissions surpassed 2019 levels for the first time all year, according to data from Carbon Monitor, a collaborative effort between researchers in China, Europe and the U.S. that offers near real-time monitoring. That lifted total emissions in the country for 2020 to 10.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, 0.5% higher than the year before.
The increase comes as global emissions likely dropped by 4.4% in 2020, according to Carbon Monitor, with declines in Brazil running to about 10% and nearly 13% in the U.S. China’s emissions dropped 11% in the first quarter, during its intense pandemic lockdown, as gross domestic product shrank 6.8% from a year earlier.
Carbon Monitor’s research captures emissions from burning fossil fuels and from cement production. Its estimates are subject to change as more data becomes available.
The emissions comeback underscores the challenge China and the rest of the world face as they balance economic revival and long-term climate goals. Because it was the first country to encounter and contain the virus, China’s pandemic path has often foreshadowed the experiences of other countries.
China’s recovery picked up speed last month, putting it further ahead of rivals. Industrial production surged in the fourth quarter, with the country producing more than 1 billion tons of crude steel in 2020, an annual record.
The nation’s long-term climate plans including hitting peak emissions by 2030 at the latest, and reaching net-zero emissions by 2060. Reaching that will require an overhaul of its mostly coal-based power sector, which contributed nearly half of the country’s emissions in 2020, according to Carbon Monitor data.
3) China uses climate change to threaten Joe Biden administration
Newsweek, 2 February 2021
China is using climate change as a bargaining chip to gain President Joe Biden's acceptance of its "irreconcilable" policies in Xinjiang and elsewhere, according to a leading think tank researcher.
The increase comes as global emissions likely dropped by 4.4% in 2020, according to Carbon Monitor, with declines in Brazil running to about 10% and nearly 13% in the U.S. China’s emissions dropped 11% in the first quarter, during its intense pandemic lockdown, as gross domestic product shrank 6.8% from a year earlier.
Carbon Monitor’s research captures emissions from burning fossil fuels and from cement production. Its estimates are subject to change as more data becomes available.
The emissions comeback underscores the challenge China and the rest of the world face as they balance economic revival and long-term climate goals. Because it was the first country to encounter and contain the virus, China’s pandemic path has often foreshadowed the experiences of other countries.
China’s recovery picked up speed last month, putting it further ahead of rivals. Industrial production surged in the fourth quarter, with the country producing more than 1 billion tons of crude steel in 2020, an annual record.
The nation’s long-term climate plans including hitting peak emissions by 2030 at the latest, and reaching net-zero emissions by 2060. Reaching that will require an overhaul of its mostly coal-based power sector, which contributed nearly half of the country’s emissions in 2020, according to Carbon Monitor data.
3) China uses climate change to threaten Joe Biden administration
Newsweek, 2 February 2021
China is using climate change as a bargaining chip to gain President Joe Biden's acceptance of its "irreconcilable" policies in Xinjiang and elsewhere, according to a leading think tank researcher.
During his campaign, Biden reiterated his intention to work with Beijing on matters of common interest, such as addressing global warming and the proliferation of nuclear arms, while at the same time confronting its "abusive behavior" in other realms.
The pledge was emphasized as recently as Monday by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell that there were still "cooperative" aspects of the U.S.-China relationship.
A few days earlier, however, the Chinese government had already indicated that it would not cooperate on climate without Washington's willingness to first accept Beijing's own conditions.
"China is ready to cooperate with the United States and the international community on climate change," China's foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said last Thursday.
He added: "That said, I would like to stress that China-U.S. cooperation in specific areas... is closely linked with bilateral relations as a whole. China has emphasized time and again that no one should imagine they can ask China to understand and support them in bilateral and global matters when they blatantly interfere in China's domestic affairs and undermine China's interests."
He urged the Biden administration to create "favorable conditions" for cooperation. The phrase is perceived by observers to mean an acceptance or tolerance of Beijing's controversial domestic policies, including its widely reported human rights abuses against Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, as well as its quashing of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. [...]
Ian Easton, senior director at the Virginia-based Project 2049 Institute, told Newsweek there was "a near-zero possibility" that cooperation between Washington and Beijing in areas such as climate and global health would bear any fruit.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping's policies in these domains were "antithetical to the goals of President Biden," he added. "When two governments have such divergent interests, how can they cooperate?"
"Any cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party on environmental protection and global health would be difficult to sustain at a time when Beijing is denying its complicity in the COVID-19 pandemic, exporting unsafe medical supplies, and devastating the environment by exporting dirty coal-fired electric plants to the developing world," said Easton, who is the author of The Chinese Invasion Threat: Taiwan's Defense and American Strategy in Asia.
He added: "Far better would be to cooperate with like-minded allies against CCP actions harming global health and accelerating global warming."
Su Tzu-yun, an associate research fellow at Taiwan's first national security think tank, said President Biden may seek cooperation with Beijing, "but now the ball is in China's court."
China will attempt to bargain for its domestic policies, he added. "But as Easton says, these domestic political issues are irreconcilable."
Su, who is a director at the government-funded Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, said China seeks tolerance of its policies in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Hong Kong, as well as its campaign of military pressure on Taiwan.
Secretary Blinken, however, has already sounded agreement with the former administration's description of China's policies in Xinjiang as "genocide," and also said he felt America should be following the U.K. in accepting political refugees from Hong Kong.
"Biden views climate change as a common issue, and it's best if Beijing can participate because China is among the world's largest energy consumers. But Beijing is overly sensitive; it sees every issue as needing to be resolved all at once," said Su.
Full story
The pledge was emphasized as recently as Monday by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell that there were still "cooperative" aspects of the U.S.-China relationship.
A few days earlier, however, the Chinese government had already indicated that it would not cooperate on climate without Washington's willingness to first accept Beijing's own conditions.
"China is ready to cooperate with the United States and the international community on climate change," China's foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said last Thursday.
He added: "That said, I would like to stress that China-U.S. cooperation in specific areas... is closely linked with bilateral relations as a whole. China has emphasized time and again that no one should imagine they can ask China to understand and support them in bilateral and global matters when they blatantly interfere in China's domestic affairs and undermine China's interests."
He urged the Biden administration to create "favorable conditions" for cooperation. The phrase is perceived by observers to mean an acceptance or tolerance of Beijing's controversial domestic policies, including its widely reported human rights abuses against Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, as well as its quashing of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. [...]
Ian Easton, senior director at the Virginia-based Project 2049 Institute, told Newsweek there was "a near-zero possibility" that cooperation between Washington and Beijing in areas such as climate and global health would bear any fruit.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping's policies in these domains were "antithetical to the goals of President Biden," he added. "When two governments have such divergent interests, how can they cooperate?"
"Any cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party on environmental protection and global health would be difficult to sustain at a time when Beijing is denying its complicity in the COVID-19 pandemic, exporting unsafe medical supplies, and devastating the environment by exporting dirty coal-fired electric plants to the developing world," said Easton, who is the author of The Chinese Invasion Threat: Taiwan's Defense and American Strategy in Asia.
He added: "Far better would be to cooperate with like-minded allies against CCP actions harming global health and accelerating global warming."
Su Tzu-yun, an associate research fellow at Taiwan's first national security think tank, said President Biden may seek cooperation with Beijing, "but now the ball is in China's court."
China will attempt to bargain for its domestic policies, he added. "But as Easton says, these domestic political issues are irreconcilable."
Su, who is a director at the government-funded Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, said China seeks tolerance of its policies in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Hong Kong, as well as its campaign of military pressure on Taiwan.
Secretary Blinken, however, has already sounded agreement with the former administration's description of China's policies in Xinjiang as "genocide," and also said he felt America should be following the U.K. in accepting political refugees from Hong Kong.
"Biden views climate change as a common issue, and it's best if Beijing can participate because China is among the world's largest energy consumers. But Beijing is overly sensitive; it sees every issue as needing to be resolved all at once," said Su.
Full story
Bloomberg, 1 February 2021
By seizing power on Monday, Myanmar’s generals are providing U.S. President Joe Biden with an early test of his efforts to counter the appeal of China’s authoritarian model in Asia.
Army chief Min Aung Hlaing, who was bumping up against a mandatory retirement age this year, already faces sanctions from the U.S. and U.K. due to a brutal crackdown against Rohingya Muslims that has led to accusations of genocide. Beijing, meanwhile, has shown him respect: In a meeting last month with the 64-year-old general, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called the two countries “brothers" while praising the military’s “national revitalization."
“While the coup will no doubt come with costs, the army clearly views them as affordable," said Sebastian Strangio, author of “In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century." “Recent events in Southeast Asia have shown that with China’s growing power, and democratic backsliding in the West, the U.S. and other Western countries no longer have the moral authority or economic and political means to set the normative agenda in the region."
A key part of the U.S. strategy to counter China’s rise has been an effort to rally democracies in Asia to back a “free and open" region that contrasts with Beijing’s single-party autocratic rule. Yet democracy advocates in places like Malaysia and Thailand have lost ground without consequences under the presidency of Donald Trump, whose own bid to overturn the U.S. election results prompted a deadly mob to storm the Capitol.
Although ousted Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s status as a democracy icon has taken a hit due to her defense of the army’s actions on the Rohingyas, she still has key allies in the U.S. Congress. Suu Kyi, who was detained along with other key leaders, issued a statement calling on the country’s 55 million people to oppose a return to “military dictatorship."
Biden now faces a dilemma in crafting a response that will punish Myanmar’s generals without hurting the wider population, which suffered under sanctions imposed in the 1990s before the country’s shift toward democracy a decade ago. The White House has already threatened to take action if the army doesn’t reverse course, and will likely come under more pressure to act: Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called for “strict economic sanctions" against military leaders.
China’s reaction was muted. Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin called Myanmar a “friendly neighbor" and urged all sides to “properly manage differences." As of the end of last year, China stood as Myanmar’s second-biggest investor behind Singapore with $21.5 billion in approved foreign capital. Beijing also accounts for about a third of all Myanmar’s trade -- about 10 times more than the U.S.
Full story
5) Phil Flynn: Biden plan for energy sector would make OPEC great again
Fox Business, 29 January 2021
President Joe Biden has a plan to make OPEC great again by raising the price of oil and thwarting competition from U.S. and Canadian oil producers.
On his first day in office, he made decisions that spread joy across the OPEC nations by revoking the permit for the Keystone Pipeline, which would help make Canadian oil less competitive on the global market allowing the cartel to maintain or even gain global oil market share. That eliminated at least 11,000 oil and gas jobs in the U.S. and Canada that should now be picked up by OPEC.
The administration also temporarily banned the issuance of new permits and leases for drilling and fracking on federal lands as reported by FOX Business. The U S. Chamber of Commerce warns that a ban on fracking would eliminate 19 million jobs between 2021-2025 while reducing U.S. Gross Domestic Product by $7.1 trillion over the same period.
This is a welcome shift for the poor OPEC cartel that had fallen on hard times in recent years. Not only did they take a huge financial hit from the historic drop in demand from COVID-19 last year they have also had to compete with U.S. and Canadian oil and gas producers for jobs and market share for their energy exports. Last year was also particularly tough for the group as OPEC’s net oil export revenues were a paltry $272 billion, a 45.7 percent drop compared to 2019.
Biden's policies will also be a big win for Russia and President Vladimir Putin. Maybe it is an olive branch from Biden after falsely accusing poor Vlad of conspiring with the Trump campaign.
Putin could use the help as his popularity at home has been faltering after Russia's top opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, was arrested and whose recent arrest is sparking a wave of national protests. The Biden inspired oil price pop is coming at a great time. Now Mr. Putin can focus on more important things like cyber-attacks.
Yet even before COVID-19 hit, OPEC’s prestige on the world stage had been diminishing. Instead of Saudi Arabia duking it out with Russia for the title of the world's largest oil and product producer, they gave that title up to the U.S. Now OPEC must conspire with its former competitor Russia to still have any impact at all on the price of oil.
Full post
6) EU mulls expanded carbon border tax
Argus Media, 2 February 2021
Refineries, paper and aluminium should be covered by the EU's forthcoming carbon border adjustment mechanism, alongside cement, steel, chemicals and fertilisers, say a broad cross-party group of members of the European Parliament.
By seizing power on Monday, Myanmar’s generals are providing U.S. President Joe Biden with an early test of his efforts to counter the appeal of China’s authoritarian model in Asia.
Army chief Min Aung Hlaing, who was bumping up against a mandatory retirement age this year, already faces sanctions from the U.S. and U.K. due to a brutal crackdown against Rohingya Muslims that has led to accusations of genocide. Beijing, meanwhile, has shown him respect: In a meeting last month with the 64-year-old general, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called the two countries “brothers" while praising the military’s “national revitalization."
“While the coup will no doubt come with costs, the army clearly views them as affordable," said Sebastian Strangio, author of “In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century." “Recent events in Southeast Asia have shown that with China’s growing power, and democratic backsliding in the West, the U.S. and other Western countries no longer have the moral authority or economic and political means to set the normative agenda in the region."
A key part of the U.S. strategy to counter China’s rise has been an effort to rally democracies in Asia to back a “free and open" region that contrasts with Beijing’s single-party autocratic rule. Yet democracy advocates in places like Malaysia and Thailand have lost ground without consequences under the presidency of Donald Trump, whose own bid to overturn the U.S. election results prompted a deadly mob to storm the Capitol.
Although ousted Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s status as a democracy icon has taken a hit due to her defense of the army’s actions on the Rohingyas, she still has key allies in the U.S. Congress. Suu Kyi, who was detained along with other key leaders, issued a statement calling on the country’s 55 million people to oppose a return to “military dictatorship."
Biden now faces a dilemma in crafting a response that will punish Myanmar’s generals without hurting the wider population, which suffered under sanctions imposed in the 1990s before the country’s shift toward democracy a decade ago. The White House has already threatened to take action if the army doesn’t reverse course, and will likely come under more pressure to act: Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called for “strict economic sanctions" against military leaders.
China’s reaction was muted. Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin called Myanmar a “friendly neighbor" and urged all sides to “properly manage differences." As of the end of last year, China stood as Myanmar’s second-biggest investor behind Singapore with $21.5 billion in approved foreign capital. Beijing also accounts for about a third of all Myanmar’s trade -- about 10 times more than the U.S.
Full story
5) Phil Flynn: Biden plan for energy sector would make OPEC great again
Fox Business, 29 January 2021
President Joe Biden has a plan to make OPEC great again by raising the price of oil and thwarting competition from U.S. and Canadian oil producers.
On his first day in office, he made decisions that spread joy across the OPEC nations by revoking the permit for the Keystone Pipeline, which would help make Canadian oil less competitive on the global market allowing the cartel to maintain or even gain global oil market share. That eliminated at least 11,000 oil and gas jobs in the U.S. and Canada that should now be picked up by OPEC.
The administration also temporarily banned the issuance of new permits and leases for drilling and fracking on federal lands as reported by FOX Business. The U S. Chamber of Commerce warns that a ban on fracking would eliminate 19 million jobs between 2021-2025 while reducing U.S. Gross Domestic Product by $7.1 trillion over the same period.
This is a welcome shift for the poor OPEC cartel that had fallen on hard times in recent years. Not only did they take a huge financial hit from the historic drop in demand from COVID-19 last year they have also had to compete with U.S. and Canadian oil and gas producers for jobs and market share for their energy exports. Last year was also particularly tough for the group as OPEC’s net oil export revenues were a paltry $272 billion, a 45.7 percent drop compared to 2019.
Biden's policies will also be a big win for Russia and President Vladimir Putin. Maybe it is an olive branch from Biden after falsely accusing poor Vlad of conspiring with the Trump campaign.
Putin could use the help as his popularity at home has been faltering after Russia's top opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, was arrested and whose recent arrest is sparking a wave of national protests. The Biden inspired oil price pop is coming at a great time. Now Mr. Putin can focus on more important things like cyber-attacks.
Yet even before COVID-19 hit, OPEC’s prestige on the world stage had been diminishing. Instead of Saudi Arabia duking it out with Russia for the title of the world's largest oil and product producer, they gave that title up to the U.S. Now OPEC must conspire with its former competitor Russia to still have any impact at all on the price of oil.
Full post
6) EU mulls expanded carbon border tax
Argus Media, 2 February 2021
Refineries, paper and aluminium should be covered by the EU's forthcoming carbon border adjustment mechanism, alongside cement, steel, chemicals and fertilisers, say a broad cross-party group of members of the European Parliament.
Parliament's green, liberal, socialist and centre-right groups joined up to table a compromise amendment on the carbon border adjustment measure, which calls on the European Commission to propose, including from 2023, "all" imports of products and commodities covered by the EU emissions trading system (ETS), also when embedded in intermediate or final products.
Given the cross-party support, the parliament's environment committee is expected to adopt the amendment on 4-5 February, thereby setting a position ahead of the commission's formal legal proposal for a carbon border mechanism. And following an impact assessment, the group wants the carbon border to specifically cover the power sector and energy-intensive industrial sectors such as "cement, steel, aluminium, oil refinery, paper, glass, chemicals and fertilisers".
A key question for those sectors that will be covered is whether they can continue to benefit from compensation measures aimed at combating unfair competition by third-country firms not falling under the EU ETS or similar carbon pricing systems.
The committee's Green draftsman, Yannick Jadot, previously called for EU and national compensation for EU ETS costs to "immediately cease" as soon as the carbon border enters into force. Jadot had argued that this was the only way to make the EU's carbon border compatible with World Trade Organisation rules.
But another amendment, with broad cross-party support, now calls for implementation of the carbon border mechanism to go "hand in hand with the parallel, gradual, rapid and eventual complete phase-out of" current measures for EU firms facing competition from exporters in third countries that do not pay carbon costs.
Full story
see also: EU’s Carbon Border Taxes and Joe Biden’s Clean Energy plans: A double threat for developing countries
7) David Whitehouse: Accurate reporting falls like leaves in autumn
GWPF Observatory, 3 February 2021
Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science editor
If you never looked past the headline of a news story or did not venture beyond the first paragraph, you can frequently come away with a false impression of what the real story was about.
This is particularly true when the story is produced with the help of a press release taken verbatim by journalists. Perhaps this is one of the reasons so many commentators on climate matters talk like pamphlets. They distort by simplifying far too much, and then they amplify what remains beyond its true significance justifying it because they saw a headline.
Of course, I have a recent example of this and of course it’s well illustrated by the Guardian. Their recent headline was “Climate Change: Crisis making autumn leaves fall earlier, study finds.” Others had it as well for the story came from a press release, including “Inside Climate News,” (Pulitzer-Prize winning nonpartisan reporting on the biggest crisis facing our planet it says without a hint of irony.)
From the Guardian: “Global heating appears to be making trees drop their leaves earlier, according to new research.” From Inside Climate News: “New research shows that, as the planet warms, deciduous trees in temperate European forests are losing their leaves earlier.”
Seems straightforward … until you take a look at the original research.Here is the pertinent sentence regarding the onset of autumn,
"…predictions from a previously expected 2-to 3-week delay over the rest of the century to an advance of 3 to 6 days.”
Now excuse me for being a little pedantic, as scientists and journalists should be, but autumn advancing by 3-6 days over the next 80 years seems to me to be something that would be rather swamped by seasonal variations. Take the lower limit of 3 days autumnal advance in 80 years.That’s about one day every 27 years. Really! Can we tell if autumn starts a day earlier after more than a quarter of a century? Could we tell if it started two or three days earlier?
That’s about all there is to say. The punchline doesn’t match the detail. A headline of “Study finds autumn leaves fall earlier” gives one message whilst the research paper gives a figure of days by the end of this century. The latter is unmeasurable, the former is misleading.
Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com
8) And Finally: Climate Model Failure
Andy West, Watts Up With That, 2 February 2021
On January 22, 2021, John Christy presented a new online talk to the Irish Climate Science Forum. The talk was arranged by Jim O’Brien. A summary of the presentation can be read at clintel.org here.
In this post we present two interesting graphs from the presentation. These compare observations to the IPCC Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 climate models (CMIP5, 2013) and CMIP6 (current set of IPCC models) climate model projections.
Given the cross-party support, the parliament's environment committee is expected to adopt the amendment on 4-5 February, thereby setting a position ahead of the commission's formal legal proposal for a carbon border mechanism. And following an impact assessment, the group wants the carbon border to specifically cover the power sector and energy-intensive industrial sectors such as "cement, steel, aluminium, oil refinery, paper, glass, chemicals and fertilisers".
A key question for those sectors that will be covered is whether they can continue to benefit from compensation measures aimed at combating unfair competition by third-country firms not falling under the EU ETS or similar carbon pricing systems.
The committee's Green draftsman, Yannick Jadot, previously called for EU and national compensation for EU ETS costs to "immediately cease" as soon as the carbon border enters into force. Jadot had argued that this was the only way to make the EU's carbon border compatible with World Trade Organisation rules.
But another amendment, with broad cross-party support, now calls for implementation of the carbon border mechanism to go "hand in hand with the parallel, gradual, rapid and eventual complete phase-out of" current measures for EU firms facing competition from exporters in third countries that do not pay carbon costs.
Full story
see also: EU’s Carbon Border Taxes and Joe Biden’s Clean Energy plans: A double threat for developing countries
7) David Whitehouse: Accurate reporting falls like leaves in autumn
GWPF Observatory, 3 February 2021
Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science editor
If you never looked past the headline of a news story or did not venture beyond the first paragraph, you can frequently come away with a false impression of what the real story was about.
This is particularly true when the story is produced with the help of a press release taken verbatim by journalists. Perhaps this is one of the reasons so many commentators on climate matters talk like pamphlets. They distort by simplifying far too much, and then they amplify what remains beyond its true significance justifying it because they saw a headline.
Of course, I have a recent example of this and of course it’s well illustrated by the Guardian. Their recent headline was “Climate Change: Crisis making autumn leaves fall earlier, study finds.” Others had it as well for the story came from a press release, including “Inside Climate News,” (Pulitzer-Prize winning nonpartisan reporting on the biggest crisis facing our planet it says without a hint of irony.)
From the Guardian: “Global heating appears to be making trees drop their leaves earlier, according to new research.” From Inside Climate News: “New research shows that, as the planet warms, deciduous trees in temperate European forests are losing their leaves earlier.”
Seems straightforward … until you take a look at the original research.Here is the pertinent sentence regarding the onset of autumn,
"…predictions from a previously expected 2-to 3-week delay over the rest of the century to an advance of 3 to 6 days.”
Now excuse me for being a little pedantic, as scientists and journalists should be, but autumn advancing by 3-6 days over the next 80 years seems to me to be something that would be rather swamped by seasonal variations. Take the lower limit of 3 days autumnal advance in 80 years.That’s about one day every 27 years. Really! Can we tell if autumn starts a day earlier after more than a quarter of a century? Could we tell if it started two or three days earlier?
That’s about all there is to say. The punchline doesn’t match the detail. A headline of “Study finds autumn leaves fall earlier” gives one message whilst the research paper gives a figure of days by the end of this century. The latter is unmeasurable, the former is misleading.
Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com
8) And Finally: Climate Model Failure
Andy West, Watts Up With That, 2 February 2021
On January 22, 2021, John Christy presented a new online talk to the Irish Climate Science Forum. The talk was arranged by Jim O’Brien. A summary of the presentation can be read at clintel.org here.
In this post we present two interesting graphs from the presentation. These compare observations to the IPCC Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 climate models (CMIP5, 2013) and CMIP6 (current set of IPCC models) climate model projections.
Figure 1. CMIP5 models versus weather balloon observations in green. The details of why the models fail statistically can be seen in a 2018 paper by McKitrick and Christy here.
The next graph compares the newer CMIP6 models to both the weather balloon data (light green) and the weather reanalysis data (dark green).
Figure 2. CMIP6 models versus weather balloon data in light green and weather reanalysis data in dark green.
The difference between the models and the observations is statistically significant and shows that the models have been invalidated. It is also significant that the CMIP6 spread of model results is worse than the CMIP5 spread. Thus, the newer models show less agreement to one another than the previous set. “Houston, we have a problem.”
The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment