GlobalWarming & ClimateChange News Desk – The world’s oil and gas industry has been warned it faces a “moment of truth” at next week’s UN climate talks.

Ace Press News From Cutting Room Floor: Published: Nov.27: 2023: By Esme Stallard: Climate and science reporter, BBC News: TELEGRAM Ace Daily News Link https://t.me/+PuI36tlDsM7GpOJe

Dr Fatih Birol, head of energy watchdog the International Energy Agency, was speaking as the IEA published a new report on the future of fossil fuels.

He said the sector must choose between contributing to the climate crisis or “becoming part of the solution”.

Last year fossil fuel companies were responsible for just 1% of global investment in renewable energy.

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The publication of this report just a week before the start of the UN climate summit, also known as COP28, is no coincidence. The IEA will want to put pressure on governments attending the conference to get an agreement on reducing the use of fossil fuels.

“The uncomfortable truth that the industry needs to come to terms with is that successful clean energy transitions require much lower demand for oil and gas, which means scaling back oil and gas operations over time – not expanding them. There is no way around this,” Dr Birol said.

This year’s conference is also controversial because a major oil producer is host.

In the run up to COP28, the man who will chair the climate talks, Sultan Al Jaber of the United Arab Emirates, has been criticised for prioritising a technology known as carbon capture and storage.

Carbon capture stops most of the CO2 produced from burning fossil fuels in power stations from being released into the atmosphere, and either re-uses it or stores it underground. But it is expensive and in its infancy.

Some critics say fossil fuel producers hope to use the technology to allow them to continue relying on oil and gas

Dr Birol said that meeting the world’s climate goals “means letting go of the illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution”.

The report estimates that based on current oil and gas consumption the world would have to capture or remove some 32bn tonnes of carbon in order to stop temperatures rising by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, seen as a key threshold to limit the effects of climate change. 

And the amount of electricity needed to power these technologies would be greater than the entire world’s electricity demand today. Currently, only 45 million tonnes of carbon is captured worldwide each year. 

Dr Steve Smith, executive director of Oxford Net Zero and CO2RE at the University of Oxford, told the BBC the report was still calling for investment in the technology but that it must come alongside other measures.

“It goes hand in hand with emissions reductions, trying to do carbon dioxide removal at the same time as not cutting our emissions is like being in a speeding car and trying to push the brake and accelerator at the same time,” he said.

This year’s conference is controversial because a major oil producer is host

The oil and gas industry is one of the largest investors in carbon capture and storage but came under heavy criticism in the report for not investing sufficiently in renewable energy.

The world’s entire clean energy investments are estimated at about $1.8tn (£1.44tn), according to the IEA. But fossil fuel producers are responsible for just 1% of that – or $18bn – with the rest coming from governments and other industries. 

Brendan Curran, senior policy fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, said:

This report from IEA highlights that despite that cacophony of claims from oil and gas producers, the actual levels of investment in the transition to net zero sector are negligible and the industry isn’t really doing anywhere near enough. This is during a period when oil and gas companies have been recording record profits.”

The fossil fuel industry reported revenues of $5tn in 2022 – a record high. And earlier this year BP and Shell rolled back on previous commitments to cut oil production following record profits. 

As well as criticising fossil fuel companies the report also warned countries against drilling for oil as a means to provide energy security. Earlier this year UK PM Rishi Sunak granted new North Sea oil and gas licences as part of efforts, he said, to improve the UK’s resilience to volatile energy markets.

Dr Birol told the BBC that he wouldn’t comment on individual countries but that any new fossil fuel projects announced today would face “not only climate risks but business risks”, because by the time the oil reaches the market in seven or eight years’ time global oil consumption will be declining.

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GlobalWarming & ClimateChange News Desk – Is this threatening the survival of plants and animals around the globe as temperatures rise and habitats change.

Ace Press News From Cutting Room Floor: Published: Nov.26: 2023: The Conversation by Michael P. Moore Published: November 21, 2023 1.27pm GMT: TELEGRAM Ace Daily News Link https://t.me/+PuI36tlDsM7GpOJe

Some species have been able to meet the challenge with rapid evolutionary adaptation and other changes in behavior or physiology. Dark-colored dragonflies are getting paler in order to reduce the amount of heat they absorb from the sun. Mustard plants are flowering earlier to take advantage of earlier snowmelt. Lizards are becoming more cold-tolerant to handle the extreme variability of our new climate.

However, scientific studies show that climate change is occurring much faster than species are changing.

What is evolutionary adaptation?

The word “adaptation” is used in many ways by climate scientists, but it has a very specific meaning to biologists: It refers to genetic changes that are passed on from one generation to the next and improve a species’ ability to survive in its environment.

These genetic modifications make evolutionary adaptation different from “acclimation” or “acclimatization,” which involve advantages that are not passed on to offspring. For example, when people move to high-altitude cities, they start producing more red blood cells as they acclimate to the low oxygen.

All over the world, plants and animals have adapted to many different warm and dry habitats, prompting scientists to question whether speciesmight also adapt to our rapidly changing climate, too.

Thus far, the answer seems to be no for most species.

Evolving, fast and slow

A recent study of the populations of 19 bird and mammal species, including owls and deer, shows one potential barrier to adaptation. 

In animals that take several years to reach breeding age, the climate has already shifted by the time their offspring are born. Genes that gave the parents an advantage – like hatching at exactly the right time or growing to the best size – are no longer as beneficial for the offspring.

Populations of these slow-maturing animals are adapting to climate change, but not enough during each generation to thrive in the changing conditions. In fact, the rate of evolution is so mismatched to the rate of global warming that the study’s authors estimate that nearly 70% of the local populations they studied are already vulnerable to climate-driven extinction over the coming decades.

Small-bodied animals, such as many fish, insects and plankton, typically mature quickly. Yet, recent research on small fish and a type of fast-maturing plankton called a copepod revealed another hurdle for rapid genetic adaptation to climate change.

Many species possess genes that permit them to live in environments that are 1 to 2 degrees Celsius (about 2 to 4 Fahrenheit) warmer than today, but new genetic mutations must arise to enable survival if climates reach 4 to 5 C (about 7 to 9 F) warmer, as is possible in some regions, particularly if greenhouse gas emissions continue at a high rate.

To test species’ resilience, scientists warmed populations of these fast-maturing species over many generations to observe their genetic changes. They found that both the copepods and the small fish were able to adapt to the first couple degrees of warming, but populations soon went extinct above that. This was because genetic mutations that increased their ability to live in hotter conditions occurred at a slower rate than the temperatures rose.

Cold-blooded species, such as lizards, frogs and fish, are especially vulnerable to climate change because they have a limited capacity to regulate their own body temperatures. Their ability to evolve in response to climate change is expected to be critical for their survival.

However, rapid adaptation to climate change often comes at a cost: Populations get smaller due to the deaths of individuals that cannot tolerate new, hotter temperatures. Therefore, even if species do evolve to survive with climate change, their smaller populations may still go extinct due to problems such as inbreeding, harmful new mutations or plain old bad luck, such as a disease epidemic.

In a now-classic study, researchers studying lizards in Mexico discovered that the high death rates of just the heat-sensitive individuals – representing only a subset of the entire population – caused 12% of all lizard populations in Mexico to go extinct between 1975 and 2009. Even with some heat-tolerant adult lizards surviving in each population under the warmer conditions, the researchers estimated climate change would kill so many heat-sensitive adults within each population that 54% of all populations would go extinct by 2080.

Evolutionary adaptation isn’t species’ only option

Another way species adjust to rising temperatures is acclimation, sometimes called “phenotypic plasticity.” For example, great tits in the U.K. – small birds that are common in yards and forests – lay their eggs earlier in warmer years so that their nestlings hatch right as the winter weather ends, no matter when that happens.

However, a recent analysis of more than 100 beetle, grasshopper and other insect species all over the world found that acclimation may not help those species enough.

The study’s authors found that the species they reviewed gained an average of only 0.1 C (about 0.2 F) greater heat tolerance when acclimating to 1 C (about 2 F) warmer air temperatures during their development. Thus, the rate of global warming seems to be outstripping species’ abilities to acclimate, too.

Plants and animals could also escape the impacts of global warming by migrating to cooler habitats. A global analysis of more than 12,000 different plants and animal species recently showed that many species are migrating toward the poles fast enough to keep pace with rising temperatures, and many tropical species are moving upslope to higher elevations as well.

Nonetheless, migration has its limits. Research shows that tropical birds that already live high in the mountains could be doomed because there is no room for them to migrate any farther upward. Tropical species, therefore, may be on what the authors call an “escalator to extinction.”

High-latitude and high-elevation habitats also present numerous challenges for species to overcome besides temperature.

Our own research across 800 species of insects all over the Earth shows that butterflies, bees and other flying insects are especially hindered from migrating to higher elevations because there is not enough oxygen for them to survive.

Many species lack obvious climate strategies

Overall, evolutionary adaptation appears to help lessen the impacts of global warming, but the evidence thus far shows that it is insufficient to overcome current rates of climate change. Acclimation and migration provide faster solutions, but research shows that those may not be enough, either.

Of course, not all evolution is driven by warming temperatures. Plant and animal species appear to be also gradually adapting to other kinds of environments, including human-created ones like cities. But the fast pace of global warming makes it one of the major threats that species must respond to immediately.

The evidence indicates that humanity cannot simply assume that plants and animals will be able to save themselves from climate change. To protect these species, humans will have to stop the activities that are fueling climate change.

Editor says …Sterling Publishing & Media Service Agency is not responsible for the content of external site or from any reports, posts or links and thanks for following as always appreciate every like, reblog or retweet and comment thank you

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