Roll up, roll up! It’s that time of the fortnight again - a time where we bring you the biggest and best climate research news of the moment. In this episode:
🌳 Tales from a recent Greenhouse Gas Removal event in London
🔥 How the risk of hot-dry events is evolving
💰 And some ideas on how to split the remaining carbon budget!
Hope you enjoy it!
Carbon removal necessary for net zero
"Whether you like it or not" we are going to have to take a lot of CO2 out of the air - Cameron Hepburn of The Smith School, Oxford
The UK Greenhouse Gas Removal Hub recently held an event in London, where climate change experts, economists and government advisers met to discuss the role of greenhouse gas removal in helping the UK reach net-zero by 2050. They talked about a range of techniques, from ocean carbon store restoration to direct air capture, and how an increasing combination of these techniques is unavoidable if the Paris agreement is to be met. A link to a summary from Oxford’s CO2RE can be found here.
One of these techniques is of huge interest if, like myself, you are a land-dwelling creature. I talked in the last edition about the restoration of Scottish Peatlands as a method of carbon sequestration, but this is but one of many different facets to a nationwide (and worldwide) nature recovery effort. This article in The Guardian explores five more of the most exciting schemes, which aim to restore heathlands, revive wetlands and rediscover sustainable farming practices.
Katy Perry - Hot n Cold Dry
A bit like Jedward, heatwaves and droughts are a double act that no-one wants to experience. They are the subject of a new paper by Bevacqua et al., exploring how the risk of weather events that are both hot and dry is changing in response to climate change, and in particular what that risk will be at 2 degrees warming.
Their findings are that the chance of a summer being both in the hottest 10% and driest 10% of past summers is currently 3%, but will rise fourfold if the 2 degree threshold is reached. The main driver for this change, according to the authors, is that ‘local warming will be large enough that future droughts will always coincide with at least moderately hot extremes’. It is very interesting reading, and I would recommend the paper to anyone who fancies getting their teeth into some hardcore climate science!
A link to the paper, published in Nature
Sharing is caring
According to the IPCC’s 6th assessment report, the remaining carbon budget for ‘likely’ remaining under 1.5 degrees is 400 GtCO2. This isn’t a particularly useful number on its own though, as different industries and sectors operate independently from one another, yet all contribute to using that remaining budget up. A new article by Dr Sven Teske and Kriti Nagrath from Sydney attempts to address this, by splitting the carbon budget between 12 key sectors. Obviously the way this is split is up for debate, given the many stakeholders and diversity of opinions involved, but it’s useful to think about new methodologies for doing so. Check out the full article below!