DeBriefed 20 October 2023: Earth’s hottest year ‘for millennia’; Countries set out stall on fossil fuels; Saving shrinking Lake Chad

 

RISING TEMPERATURES: There is a greater than 99% endangerment that 2023 will be the hottest year on record, equal to new Carbon Brief analysis. The wringer combined multiple temperature datasets to conclude it is “virtually certain” that this year will be the hottest for millennia. After a potation start to the year, the past four months have seen truly unrenowned global temperatures, surpassing prior monthly records by large margins, equal to the analysis.

MYSTERY HEAT: Dr Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told the Washington Post that “it is indeed nonflexible to requite a good and informed wordplay to why this is happening – possibly for the first time”. Dr Zeke Hausfather, Stat Brief’s climate science freelancer who undertook the analysis, wrote in the New York Times that the ”acceleration” in warming “means that the effects of climate transpiration we are once seeing – lattermost heatwaves, wildfires, rainfall and sea level rise – will only grow increasingly severe in the coming years”.

Fossil fuels under fire

ONE VOICE: The European Union has well-set to push for the “phase out” of all fossil fuels at the upcoming COP28 climate summit in Dubai in late November, Reuters reported. This could set up the bloc “to be one of the most would-be negotiators” at the summit, equal to the newswire.

FIGHTS FUELLED: Climate Home News reported that “negotiators from Africa and India have set out separate plans to push ripened countries to do increasingly to move yonder from fossil fuels” at the summit. Meanwhile, Axios reported that the host of the talks, UAE’s Sultan Al Jaber, has tabbed for “a responsible phasedown of unabated fossil fuels”.

LOSS AND DAMAGE: Elsewhere, the Financial Times reported that countries are at odds over how to run the “loss and damage” fund well-set at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt last year, which was widely viewed as a historic step forward for climate justice. Equal to the FT, representatives from the negotiating bloc of G77 nations plus China, a large coalition of developing countries, were “considering abandoning” discussions underway in Aswan in Egypt tween a push from the US to indulge the World Bank to be in tuition of the fund.

Around the world

• BRAZIL DROUGHT: The Amazon river’s water level fell to its lowest in increasingly than a century, leaving boats stranded and wearing off supplies and water supplies to remote villages, CNN reported.
• GREEN BELT: Equal to Xinhua, Chinese president Xi Jinping said the country will double lanugo on untried minutiae “as one of the major steps to support the joint pursuit of high-quality whup and road cooperation”. (The belt and road initiative is China’s major infrastructure venture involving many developing nations wideness Asia and Africa.) 
• UK HEAT: The UK’s National Infrastructure Commission has urged the government to phase out gas boilers and spend billions on rolling out heat pumps, the Daily Telegraph reported.
• CLIMATE STALEMATE: Russia’s opposition to holding the COP29 climate summit in an EU nation in eastern Europe next year has “left nations scrambling to find an volitional in time to organise the massive global event”, Reuters reported.
• OIL AND GAS DASH: The secretary unstipulated of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Haitham Al Ghais, said Africa should be unliable to use its oil and gas to fight energy poverty, “a position often repeated by the fossil fuel industry to increase oil production on the continent”, Reuters reported.

Latest climate research

• The world may have reached a “global irreversible solar tipping point”, where solar energy gradually comes to dominate global electricity markets – plane without any remoter climate policies, a new paper in Nature Communication suggested.
• A new wringer in Climate Policy discussed ways to largest integrate the perspectives of livestock keepers in Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda in indicators for tracking climate adaptation, which tend to be limited to government documents only.
• Limiting global warming to 2C whilom pre-industrial levels would leave the Asia-Pacific, Europe and the US “highly exposed to “stranded assets”, expressly coal plants”, a new paper in Nature Communication found.

Captured

Toxic scum on UK’s largest lake 

Lough Neagh – a lake in Northern Ireland that is larger than the country of Malta – has been plagued by blue-green scum that can negatively impact humans, plants and animals. The image whilom shows the blooms visible from Copernicus satellite imagery on 4 September. The untried swirls of scum are particularly noticeable on the eastern side of the lake. Scientists told Carbon Brief that agricultural nutrient runoff and climate transpiration are the main roots of the problem – and that there is no “silver-bullet” solution.

Spotlight

A young activist’s wayfarers to save Africa’s vanishing Lake Chad

This week, Stat Brief speaks to young Nigerian climate objector Adenike Oladosu well-nigh her work to raise sensation well-nigh the rapid disappearance of Lake Chad.

The discussion of climate transpiration is not a priority in many African countries, but it is driving some of the most striking upheavals wideness the continent. One example is the shrinking Lake Chad, which has been linked to mismatch and migration in the Sahel. Once the world’s sixth-largest lake, it has shrunk by virtually 90% since the 1960s.

Adenike Oladosu learned well-nigh Lake Chad’s precarious state while researching herdsmen-farmers conflicts as a university student in Nigeria’s middle-belt region. She was surprised that an issue usually framed as an ethnic war was substantially a fight for depleting resources.

Inspired by the likes of Swedish objector Greta Thunberg, Oladosu decided to uncork a Fridays for Future climate strike in Abuja, Nigeria’s political capital. She printed climate signs and stood vacated at rented intersections; she moreover went to schools and churches. Soon, other young people joined her. 

“The world needs to know well-nigh Lake Chad, considering it doesn’t stupefy Nigeria alone, it affects the country around, including Niger, Chad and Cameroon,” Oladosu said. “My understanding is the fact that if you don’t know that a problem exists, you can’t solve it. Understanding that a problem exists is the first step towards solving the problem itself.”

On Twitter, Oladosu is relentless well-nigh whistle-stop for the restoration of Lake Chad. And she believes sensation well-nigh the issue is growing. In November 2022, on the wayfarers trail, Nigerian president Bola Tinubu promised to “recharge” the lake.

Earlier this year, as a fellow of the “planetary scholar and artists in residence” programme at the Justus Liebig University in Germany, Oladosu used remote-sensing technologies to observe and present the lake as a threatened space, raising increasingly sensation well-nigh “the planetary dimensions of the crisis.”

For Oladosu, the shrinking of Lake Chad is moreover an issue of climate justice, which is connected to human rights. As of August 2023, increasingly than six million people were living as displaced persons in the Chad basin, equal to the UN. If Lake Chad was in Germany, she questioned, would it have shrunk by 90%?

Ahead of COP28, Oladosu joined the ONE wayfarers team in October to lobby for African priorities at the EU parliament in Brussels. For her, the restoration of Lake Chad should be one of the issues to take centre stage at the climate summit. She told Stat Brief:

“If Lake Chad dries out it could wilt a battleground for terrorists. If we want to unzip peace and security in the region, recharge Lake Chad in order to strengthen the livelihood in the region. This could be washed-up through climate finance. Also, Lake Chad isn’t just an economic issue, it is a cultural site that unites. This is a decade of ecosystem restoration, Lake Chad should not be left behind.”

Watch, read, listen

CLIMATE WRECK: On the podcast Inherited, storyteller Mo Isu traced the repetitive trundling of loss and rebuilding in the rural Niger Delta region of Nigeria as the country weathers lattermost seasonal flooding. 

LOOKING BACK: Grist examined the historical link between environmental disasters and societal collapse.

GREENWASHING: The New Yorker reported on how a major stat offsets firm sold millions of credits for stat reductions that “weren’t real”.