carbon reduction – Page 5 – Desdemona Despair

Delegates applaud as COP27 president Sameh Shoukry delivers a statement during the closing plenary at the climate summit in Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on Sunday, 19 November 2022. Photo: Mohamed Abd El Ghany / Reuters

November 20, 2022

The big takeaway from COP27? These climate conferences just aren’t working – “It really does beggar belief, that in the course of 27 COPs, there has never been a formal agreement to reduce the world’s fossil fuel use”

By Bill McGuire 20 November 2022 (The Guardian) – In the end, the recent shenanigans at the COP27 meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh at least ended up making modest progress on loss and damage: high-emissions nations agreeing to pay those countries bearing the brunt of climate mayhem that they had little to do with bringing about. But, yet […]

An activist holds a sign showing Earth with a fever and an oral thermometer at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), in Sharm El-Sheikh, 19 November 2022. Photo: Sedat Suna / EPA

November 20, 2022

The 1.5C climate goal died at COP27, but hope must not – “It is mindboggling that countries did not muster the courage to call for phasing down fossil fuels”

By Damian Carrington 20 November 2022 (The Guardian) – When the history of the climate crisis is written, in whatever world awaits us, COP27 will be seen as the moment when the dream of keeping global heating below 1.5C died. Does that mean giving up? Absolutely not. The 1.5C target is not a threshold beyond which hope […]

Nakeeyat Dramani Sam holds up a placard at an informal stocktaking session during the COP27 climate summit, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, 18 November 2022. Photo: Mohamed Abd El Ghany / REUTERS

November 19, 2022

COP27 nears breakthrough on climate finance in scramble for final deal – “We’d rather have no decision than a bad decision”

By Kate Abnett, Shadia Nasralla, and Gloria Dickie 19 November 2022 SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Reuters) – Negotiators at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt neared a breakthrough deal on Saturday for a fund to help poor countries being ravaged by the impacts of global warming but remained locked over how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions driving […]

Deforested area of Amazon rainforest in Brazil, 2006-2021, with large increases shown during the Bolsonaro regime. Data: Brazil National Institute for Space Research (INPE). Graphic: DW

November 19, 2022

Lula insists “Brazil is back” at UN climate summit

By Stuart Braun 16 November 2022 (DW) – One of the most-watched visitors to the UN climate summit in Egypt this week has been incoming Brazilian president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — more commonly referred to as Lula. With his successful election campaign having included a promise to arrest record deforestation in the Amazon, Lula carried huge expectations into the yearly climate summit […]

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Secretary-General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres, Saudi Adel Al-Jubeir, Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Hassan Shoukry, Crown Prince and the Prime Minister of Bahrain Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa and other leaders pose for a family photo during the COP27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, 7 November 2022. Photo: Mohammed Salem / REUTERS

November 19, 2022

At COP27, climate change framed as battle for survival – “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator”

By William James, Valerie Volcovici, and Simon Jessop 7 November 2022 SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Reuters) – World leaders and diplomats framed the fight against global warming as a battle for human survival during opening speeches at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt on Monday, with the head of the United Nations declaring a lack of […]

Components of the global carbon budget and their uncertainties, 1960-2021 and projected to 2022. Components are presented individually for (a) fossil CO2 and cement carbonation emissions (EFOS), (b) growth rate in atmospheric CO2 concentration (GATM), (c) emissions from land-use change (ELUC), (d) the land CO2 sink (SLAND), (e) the ocean CO2 sink (SOCEAN), and (f) the budget imbalance that is not accounted for by the other terms. Positive values of SLAND and SOCEAN represent a flux from the atmosphere to land or the ocean. All data are in GtC yr−1 with the uncertainty bounds representing ±1 standard deviation in shaded colour. Data sources are as in Fig. 3. The red dots indicate our projections for the year 2022, and the red error bars the uncertainty in the projections. Graphic: Friedlingstein, et al., 2022 / Earth System Science Data

November 19, 2022

Global Carbon Budget 2022: Global carbon emissions in 2022 remain at record levels – No sign of decrease in global CO2 emissions – “This year we see yet another rise in global fossil CO2 emissions, when we need a rapid decline”

11 November 2022 (Global Carbon Project) – Global carbon emissions in 2022 remain at record levels – with no sign of the decrease that is urgently needed to limit warming to 1.5°C, according to the Global Carbon Project science team (Global Carbon Budget 2022). If current emissions levels persist, there is now a 50% chance […]

Satellite view of the turf farm site in the Qatar desert, August 2021. World Cup organisers have created a large-scale tree and turf nursery, the largest turf farm in the world, according to the organisers, in the middle of the desert. It covers an area of 425,000 m2. While irrigation uses treated sewage water, the claim that this will absorb CO2 emissions from the atmosphere and contribute to reducing the impact of the event is not credible as this carbon storage is unlikely to be permanent in these artificial and vulnerable green spaces, while carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for centuries to millenia. Lusail stadium is the largest of the FWC stadiums, with a capacity of 80,000 seats. It is represented here to show the scale of the turf farm. Lusail stadium is not located next to the turf farm. Photo: Google Earth

November 19, 2022

World Cup 2022: The “mirage” of carbon offsetting

By Stéphane Mandard 19 November 2022 (Le Monde) – Organizers will have to buy 3.6 million carbon credits to compensate for emissions, according to FIFA. Carbon Market Watch says this estimate is too low – and a long way off. FIFA claims that the World Cup in Qatar will be the first to be “carbon […]

November 13, 2022

COP27: Corporate climate pledges rife with greenwashing, says U.N. expert group – “Too many of these net-zero pledges are little more than empty slogans and hype”

By Gloria Dickie and Simon Jessop 8 November 2022 SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Reuters) – Promises by companies, banks and cities to achieve net-zero emissions often amount to little more than greenwashing, U.N. experts said in a report on Tuesday as they set out proposed new standards to harden net-zero claims. The report, released at the […]

A man from the Maasai pastoralist community affected by the worsening drought due to the failed rainy season, attends to an emaciated cow at a livestock market in Ilbisil settlement of Kajiado, Kenya, 17 October 2022. Photo: Thomas Mukoya / REUTERS

November 13, 2022

Climate disasters put plight of displaced in COP27 focus – “Drought kills the plants, it kills everything, and then the rain comes washes away your homes”

By Gloria Dickie; editing by Katy Daigle and Ros Russell 13 November 2022 SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Reuters) – Issack Hassan lives in a migrant camp in Baidoa city in Somalia – one of more than a million people displaced since January after five successive failed rainy seasons. With Somalia in the grips of its worst […]

Projections of GHG emissions under different scenarios to 2050 and indications of emissions gap and global warming implications over this century (medians only). Looking beyond 2030, this figure projects global GHG emissions out to 2050 under different scenarios and indicates the associated global warming implications over this century. The figure illustrates the substantial increase in the emissions gap for 2050 if climate efforts implied by current policies and NDC scenarios are continued without further strengthening. Implementation of net-zero targets by around mid-century would significantly reduce these gaps, but even then, gaps with the 1.5°C scenarios would remain. Graphic: UNEP

November 1, 2022

UN: Inadequate progress on climate action makes rapid transformation of societies only option – “It is a tall, and some would say impossible, order to reform the global economy and almost halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, but we must try”

NAIROBI, 27 October 2022 – As intensifying climate impacts across the globe hammer home the message that greenhouse gas emissions must fall rapidly, a new UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report finds that the international community is still falling far short of the Paris goals, with no credible pathway to 1.5°C in place. However, the Emissions Gap Report […]