A strange, wavy jet stream is blasting Europe with heat. Scientists say this could be the 'new normal.’

An oppressive heat wave baked Western Europe this week, setting record high temperatures in France, Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. In India, a severe drought has choked water supplies in the city of Chennai, exposing its 9 million residents to a major shortage. And after the United States’ wettest 12-month stretch on record, towns across the Midwest and the Great Plains are reeling from devastating floods.

People bathe in the Trocadero Fountain in Paris
during a severe heat wave on June 28, 2019.

The reasons behind these extreme weather events are complex, but scientists believe they have a common trigger: profound recent changes to the jet stream, a ribbon of fast-moving air that flows from west to east over the Northern Hemisphere and controls weather systems.

The jet stream is powered by temperature differences between the cooler polar region to the north and warmer air masses to the south. As it circles the planet, this river of air can become rippled in places. The resulting troughs and ridges can create unusual weather patterns, amplifying cold snaps in one region and intensifying blasts of heat in another, said Jeff Masters, co-founder and director of meteorology for Weather Underground, a commercial weather service headquartered in San Francisco.

Read the NBC News story by Denise Chow - “A strange, wavy jet stream is blasting Europe with heat. Scientists say this could be the 'new normal.’"

Saving the Paris Agreement

During the United Nations climate negotiations in Katowice, Poland, in December, the cavernous modern convention center at the heart of this grim industrial city was like a spaceship in coal country. Outside, the air was so sulfurous and polluted it gave at least one negotiator a nosebleed as they walked from their hotel to the conference center.

US President Donald Trump holds up a "Trump Digs Coal"
 sign as he arrives to speak during a Make America Great
Again Rally at Big Sandy Superstore Arena in Huntington,
West Virginia, August 3, 2017.

Katowice is the coal capital of the European Union, where hills are hollowed out with mines and the livelihoods of some 90,000 workers are dependent on what the Polish prime minister has called “black gold.” Inside the center, thousands of climate negotiators in dark suits — many of whom had likely never seen a chunk of coal in their lives — scurried down echoing hallways and engaged in long meetings about arcane differences in the language of a document designed to stop the world from burning fossil fuels and save civilization from itself. For 23 years now, climate negotiators have been holding meetings like this, producing millions of hours of talk and millions of pages of documents. And for 23 years, the world has edged closer to climate catastrophe. In Katowice, that failure was apparent with every breath you took.

Read the story from Rolling Stone by Jeff Goodell - “Saving the Paris Agreement.”

Solving the Climate Crisis Means Tackling What We Eat.

As the latest United Nations climate change conference wrapped up in Katowice, Poland earlier this month, policy makers barely kept the Paris Accord alive. Yet the 11th-hour agreement they reached won’t be enough to face of the sobering reality of climate change.

On the menu at COP24 were meaty dumplings,
but meat was left out of the discussion.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that avoiding catastrophic climate change can only succeed if governments take immediate, ambitious action across all sectors. That means a rapid shift to renewable energy and away from fossil fuels. But even that won’t be sufficient.

A growing body of research finds that another necessary action is for high-consuming countries to reduce meat and dairy consumption and move toward plant-forward diets and food systems. If current trends continue, food production will nearly exhaust the global carbon budget for all sectors — including fossil fuels — by 2050.

Read the Medium story by Stephanie Feldstein - “Solving the Climate Crisis Means Tackling What We Eat.”

David Attenborough: collapse of civilisation is on the horizon

The collapse of civilisation and the natural world is on the horizon, Sir David Attenborough has told the UN climate change summit in Poland.

The naturalist was chosen to represent the world’s people in addressing delegates of almost 200 nations who are in Katowice to negotiate how to turn pledges made in the 2015 Paris climate deal into reality.

As part of the UN’s people’s seat initiative, messages were gathered from all over the world to inform Attenborough’s address on Monday. “Right now we are facing a manmade disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years: climate change,” he said. “If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”

Read the story from The Guardian by Damian Carrington - “David Attenborough: collapse of civilisation is on the horizon.”

UN climate talks set stage for humanity’s two most crucial years

The mood was more one of relief than triumph on Sunday when the world’s governments eventually found common ground at the UN climate talks in Katowice, Poland.

COP24 in Poland highlighted the growing threat of fossil
fuel interests and the nationalist politicians they fund. 

This was not just because exhausted delegates were glad to go home after negotiations that dragged on 30 hours beyond the deadline. It also reflected the harder miles and tougher battles to come over the next two years if the planet is to remain habitable.

Scientist after scientist told the conference that the decisions made by 2020 will determine whether global heating can be kept to less than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, after which the already apparent dangers of climate instability become far worse.

Read the story by the global environment editor from The Guardian, Jonathon Watts - “UN climate talks set stage for humanity’s two most crucial years.”

COP24: Key outcomes agreed at the UN climate talks in Katowice

This year’s COP24 annual UN climate conference concluded late on Saturday evening in Katowice, Poland, after two weeks of tension-filled talks.

Nearly 23,000 delegates descended on the coal-tinged city with a deadline for hashing out the Paris Agreement “rulebook”, which is the operating manual needed for when the global deal enters into force in 2020.

This was mostly agreed, starting a new international climate regime under which all countries will have to report their emissions – and progress in cutting them – every two years from 2024.

Read the Carbon Brief story - “COP24: Key outcomes agreed at the UN climate talks in Katowice.”

‘Missed opportunity': Australia's 'difficult' position in UN climate change talks

Australia's "constructive" role at the United Nations climate change talks in Poland was undermined by its continued support for fossil fuels at home, experts say.

Delegates to the UN's COP24 climate summit in Katowice, Poland.

The two week-long summit ended in the city of Katowice on Sunday with an agreement on a so-called rulebook to increase transparency of national emissions-reduction pledges made three years earlier at the Paris Conference of the Parties (COP21).

Read the story from The Age by Megan Gorrey - “‘Missed opportunity': Australia's 'difficult' position in UN climate change talks.”

Progress and problems as UN climate change talks end with a deal

The UN climate change talks ended late on Saturday night in Poland with a deal agreed on how to put the 2015 Paris agreement into action, but with other contentious problems left to be resolved next year.

The Brazilian delegation was at the centre of
negotiations at the UN climate change talks.

Countries thrashed out the complex details of how to account for and record their greenhouse gas emissions, which will form the basis of a “rulebook” on putting the Paris goals into action. But difficult questions such as how to scale up existing commitments on cutting emissions, in line with stark scientific advice, and how to provide finance for poor countries to do the same, were put off for future years.

In the final hours, agreement was held up by a debate over the market in carbon credits, awarded to countries for their emissions-cutting efforts and for their carbon sinks, such as forests, which absorb carbon dioxide.

Read the story from The Guardian by Fiona Harvey in Katowice - “Progress and problems as UN climate change talks end with a deal.”

You Are Stealing Our Future: Greta Thunberg, 15, Condemns the World’s Inaction on Climate Change.

Fifteen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg addressed the U.N. plenary last night in Katowice, Poland, condemning global inaction in the face of catastrophic climate change.

GretaThunberg.

Watch the interview by Amy Goodman and read the transcript from Democracy Now  - "You Are Stealing Our Future: Greta Thunberg, 15, Condemns the World’s Inaction on Climate Change.”

David Attenborough: collapse of civilisation is on the horizon

The collapse of civilisation and the natural world is on the horizon, Sir David Attenborough has told the UN climate change summit in Poland.

David Attenborough at Katowice in Poland -
he has made a plea on behalf of the Earth.

The naturalist was chosen to represent the world’s people in addressing delegates of almost 200 nations who are in Katowice to negotiate how to turn pledges made in the 2015 Paris climate deal into reality.

As part of the UN’s people’s seat initiative, messages were gathered from all over the world to inform Attenborough’s address on Monday. “Right now we are facing a manmade disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years: climate change,” he said. “If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”

Read the story from The Guardian by Damian Carrington - “David Attenborough: collapse of civilisation is on the horizon.”

Poland’s coal miners: ‘EU climate proposals terrify us’

As Poland gears up to host this year’s UN climate summit, the government is on a charm offensive.

An old mine shaft in Katowice looms over
the glass buildings of the Silesian museum.

During two days in mid-September, brochures, videos, slides and dark-suited representatives succeed one another, portraying Katowice, the site of the talks, as a green success story. Chaperoned by civil servants, journalists are whizzed around the city in electric cars.

At its industrial peak in the 1980s, the capital of Upper Silesia counted 14 active coal mines. That figure has fallen to two, while museums, concert halls and sport facilities have mushroomed on former mining sites – not to mention the spaceship-like conference centre that will welcome up to 30,000 delegates in December.

Read the story by Natalie Sauer from Climate Home News - “Poland’s coal miners: ‘EU climate proposals terrify us’.”

How to ensure resilience in the grid of the future

Recently it was reported that a political dispute between Serbia and Kosovo is sapping a small amount of energy from the local grid, causing a domino effect across the 25-nation network spanning the continent from Portugal to Poland and Greece to Germany.

Collapsed electricity pylon
after a tornado in Australia.

“The deviation from Europe’s standard 50 Hz frequency has been enough to cause electric clocks that keep time by the power system’s frequency, rather than built-in quartz crystals, to fall behind by about six minutes since mid- January.”

This is a good example for a phenomenon known as the fragility of complex systems: the tendency for multilayered and interconnected systems like electricity grids, transport networks (think gridlock) and the world health system (think pandemics and antibiotic resistance) to become increasingly prone to failure as layers of organisation and connectivity are added.

Read the piece from energypost by Mark Bryne - “How to ensure resilience in the grid of the future.”

UK secretary warns about dependence on coal

Much of Australia’s electricity is sourced from the burning of coal; the export of coal is also significant to Australia economically.

Only yesterday, the UK Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Edward Davey, told the climate change talks in Warsaw, Poland, that his country was to join the U.S. in ending its support of public financing of more coal-fired power plants.

A press release from the U.K. government headed: “UK urges the world to prepare for action on climate change and puts brakes on coal firedpower plants”, Mr Davey said, “This week in Warsaw is absolutely critical to getting a deal in 2015”.

He said: “No one should leave this conference without the clear understanding and agreement that from here, we must make sure that when we arrive in Paris in 2015 were are ready to strike a deal”.