Long stories short, here’s the top six news items of note in climate news for Aotearoa this week, and a discussion above between Bernard Hickey and The Kākā’s climate correspondent Cathrine Dyer:
Gas is worse for the climate than coal, over any timeframe that is relevant for a ‘bridging strategy’. The headlines are calling this a landmark study that changes everything, but the core findings were established by the same researcher 13 years ago. Why the delay? Or perhaps the bigger question is ‘how’, given that we probably already know why ($!).
Have we hit a tipping point? Global land sinks temporarily collapsed in 2023, failing to absorb any net carbon dioxide emissions. The failure of global sinks could double the pace of warming and is not accounted for in any models.
If we haven’t already triggered that tipping point, the AMOC continues to look wobbly. This week, 44 globally renowned scientists penned a stark warning to the Nordic Council of Ministers, hoping to tip them into action.
Lawyers for Climate Action are taking Simeon Brown to court, saying that his decision to weaken the Clean Car Standard was unlawful.
Climate Change Commissioner Catherine Leining has co-authored a study suggesting that a set of narrow lenses on ‘national interest’ are paralysing Government action on offshore mitigation.
The chart of the week highlights the scale of the temperature anomaly in Atlantic sea surface temperatures over the past 12 months.
(See more detail and analysis below, and in the video and podcast above. Cathrine Dyer’s journalism on climate and the environment is available free to all paying and non-paying subscribers to The Kākā and the public. It is made possible by subscribers signing up to the paid tier to ensure this sort of public interest journalism is fully available in public to read, listen to and share. Cathrine wrote the wrap. Bernard edited it. Lynn copy-edited and illustrated it.)
1. The truth about LNG emerges after a 15-year cover-up
A new study, showing that exported Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) in the US is responsible for greenhouse gas emissions that are 33% greater than those from coal over a 20-year timeframe, has upended the industry.
The paper first appeared in a pre-print earlier this year, and is alleged to have played a significant role in President Biden’s order to put a hold on new approvals for LNG export facilities in the US.
“In January this year, seemingly out of nowhere, US President Joe Biden made a decision that sent shock waves through the trillion-dollar global gas industry.
With the stroke of a pen, Mr Biden put a pause on approvals for any new project looking to ship super-chilled liquefied natural gas — or LNG — from US shores.
It was a decision that left many in the industry floored.
After all, within just a few short years America had rocketed from a position of having no LNG industry to being one of the world's biggest exporters of the fuel alongside Australia and Qatar.” ABC News Australia.
The critical gas involved is methane, not carbon dioxide. While carbon dioxide emissions are higher when you burn coal compared to LNG, methane is a much more potent GHG, and was found by principal researcher, Professor Robert Howarth, to be leaking at every point along the chain of gas production and distribution. Methane has a greenhouse effect that is more than 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over a twenty-year timeframe.
“From extraction of gas at the well to liquefying it through chilling; from the transport on specially designed ships to its regasification and distribution in pipes when unloaded — in each step methane escaped into the atmosphere.” ABC News.
Howarth estimates that as much as 5% of the gas is leaked as methane from LNG projects in the US.
But the core findings from that study are not new. Howarth first published a study (with co-authors Renee Santoro and Anthony Ingraffea) showing that shale gas was worse than coal over a 20-year timeframe in 2011, thirteen years ago. They suggested in a follow-up commentary that year that the health and environmental effects of natural gas from shale were too high, that fracking should be stopped, and that shale gas should not be used as a bridge fuel.
In a 2014 review of research to date, titled ‘A bridge to nowhere’, Howarth found the best available data showed that both shale gas and conventional natural gas have a larger GHG footprint than either coal or oil over a 20 year timeframe – a critical period for reducing emissions. This was before the US shale gas boom transformed global geo-politics, delivered trillions of dollars into the bank accounts of oil and gas companies, and hastened the trajectory of global warming.
Then, and today, the oil and gas industry has vigorously challenged Howarth’s work, claiming it was inaccurate and that it didn’t use the same leakage figures as the International Energy Agency (IEA) or the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). They called the Scientist’s work ‘sloppy’, accused him of 'cherry-picking data' and labelled him ‘an anti-fossil fuel activist’.
In the lead-up to his 2011 study being published, his computer was hacked and an advance copy of the study were stolen, as part of an attempt to discredit his work.
What the current headlines fail to appreciate is the role that the oil and gas industry has played in submerging and overwhelming the evidence with their own disinformation. They have continued to present LNG as a less-polluting bridging fuel, capable of supporting the global transition away from coal, while banking massive profits at the expense of climate stability.
Standing, as we now are, on the precipice of several tipping points that could devastate modern global society, the question that the media needs to be asking is why this news, and an appropriate response to it, is thirteen crucial years too late.
How is industry disinformation successfully incapacitating appropriate policy measures in response to a threat so severe that it risks the habitability of the planet? Some clues can be found in the work of Drilled Media, and in the efforts of ex-MIT employee and whistleblower Edmund Carlevale on Linkedin.
2. Failing carbon sinks a tipping point that could double rate of warming
Last week, The Guardian reported on a pre-print (published online prior to peer review) by an international group of researchers who found that the amount of carbon being absorbed by global land sinks had collapsed, at least temporarily, in 2023. The researchers said that:
“In 2023, the CO2 growth rate was 3.37 ± 0.11 ppm at Mauna Loa, 86% above the previous year, and hitting a record high since observations began in 1958, while global fossil fuel CO2 emissions only increased by 0.6 ± 0.5%. This implies an unprecedented weakening of land and ocean sinks, and raises the question of where and why this reduction happened.”
If you saw the report and were wondering how important natural carbon sinks are, in the greater scheme of things, Associate Professor and Earth System Scientist James Dyke, who is not one of the researchers in the study, has your back. Picking up on a quote in the Guardian article from Professor Andrew Watson, head of Exeter University’s marine and atmospheric science group, he summarised the situation about as succinctly as you can.
Natural land and ocean carbon sinks currently absorb about 50% of human-caused CO2 emissions, while oceans currently take up about 90% of the heat caused by the rest of the GHGs that are left in the atmosphere. The models on which we rely for policy setting assume that this will continue to be the case in the future, even though “we don’t thing they’re [natural sinks] always going to be with us”.
3. Another week, another study showing AMOC close to collapse
Last week, a group of 44 renowned climate scientists, from 15 countries, took the unusual step of delivering a stark warming about the imminent danger of crossing an ocean circulation tipping point in an open letter to the Nordic Council of Ministers.
In the letter they warn that the risk of a collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is underestimated by the IPCC in light of several recent studies, and that ”the passing of this tipping point is a serious possibility already in the next few decades”. The impacts would be particularly devastating for Nordic countries, who would suffer major cooling, so much so that “adaptation to such a severe climate catastrophe is not a viable option”. An AMOC collapse threatens the viability of agriculture throughout northwestern Europe.
The most recent AMOC tipping point paper, still in pre-print, estimates the collapse timeframe to be “between 2037-2064 (10-90% CI) with a mean of 2050 and the probability of an AMOC collapse before the year 2050 is estimated to be 59 +/- 17%.”
4. Lawyers for climate action are taking Simeon Brown to court
Lawyers for climate action and the Better New Zealand Trust are suing the Minister for Transport for his unlawful decision to weaken the Clean Car Standard, saying that “the Government’s own advice shows this will reduce the uptake of low-emission vehicles and increase New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions, while ignoring the Emissions Reduction Plan targets.” LCANZI
5. Focus on ‘national interest’ paralyses progress on offshore mitigation
Catherine Leining, Climate Change Commissioner and Policy Fellow at Motu Economic and Public Policy Research, has co-authored a new research paper showing how the funding of off-shore mitigation by Aotearoa New Zealand to meet 2030 targets under the Paris Agreement, could help to accelerate global climate progress.
The paper identifies four competing mindsets that are paralysing progress: Dismissive Detractors, Carbon Colonialism, Domestically Driven, and Least-Cost Compliance, each of which applies a narrow lens to serving the purpose of national interests. The paper recommends shifting to a ‘cooperative mindset’ and details how the government should proceed in getting started with offshore mitigation.
6. The Atlantic Ocean’s 12-month Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly
This week’s chart comes complete with another expletive from the field of climate science. Leon Simons is an expert on the climate effects of declining atmospheric sulphate aerosols, contributing to James Hanson’s ‘Global warming in the Pipeline’ paper.
https://x.com/leonsimons8/status/1846286329711415665?s=46
Other ‘must-reads’ this week include several in the ‘solution space’
Once we pass 1.5˚C, there is no going back in New Scientist.
We need a new ecological economics … This critique of the ten key hypotheses that form the foundations of neoclassical economics are found to be fundamentally flawed, failing to satisfy the basic requirements of scientific practice.
In a piece re-published on Resilience.org, Robert Jensen argues that efforts to control the world via technological fundamentalism are doomed to fail. We must instead control ourselves.
Evidence that radical protests work: A new study in Nature Sustainability shows that radical climate protests are linked to increases in public support for moderate organisations, suggesting they are an under-utilised strategic resource within the broader climate movement.
Ka kite ano
Bernard and Cathrine
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