Skeptical Science New Research for Week #37 2024

Unveiling local climate action: a case study of mitigation efforts in Gauteng’s West Rand District Municipality, South Africa, Rasebechele et al., Climate Policy Open Access 10.1080/14693062.2024.2401851

Climate change adaptation & adaptation public policy research

Attending to the unattended: Why and how do local governments plan for access and functional needs in climate risk reduction?, Zhang & Xiang, Environmental Science & Policy 10.1016/j.envsci.2024.103892

Climate change impacts on human health

Bolstering community resilience through health-focused climate change adaptation: moving from talk to action in Western Canadian communities, Rose & Birchall, Climate Policy 10.1080/14693062.2024.2395920

Informed opinion, nudges & major initiatives

Collaboration can preserve the integrity of gold standard carbon data from forest inventories, Goeking et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Open Access 10.1073/pnas.2409263121

Do we have time for democracy? Climate action and the problem of time in the Anthropocene, Ejsing et al., The Anthropocene Review 10.1177/20530196241279564

Offsets, carbon markets, and climate and economic justice, Pande, Science 10.1126/science.ads1902

Temporary mitigation off-ramps could help manage decarbonization headwinds, Uden & Greig, Nature Communications Open Access 10.1038/s41467-024-52455-7

The future extent of the Anthropocene epoch: A synthesis, Summerhayes et al., Global and Planetary Change 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2024.104568

[The Lancet Planetary Health Commission] A just world on a safe planet: a Lancet Planetary Health–Earth Commission report on Earth-system boundaries, translations, and transformations, Gupta et al., The Lancet Planetary Health Open Access 10.1016/s2542-5196(24)00042-1

Articles/Reports from Agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations Addressing Aspects of Climate Change

The impact of climate change on the Australian tourism industry, Zurich Australia & New Zealand, and Mandala

Climate change is already impacting many of Australia’s tourism sites. Even under modest climate scenarios, this impact is expected to worsen. The Zurich-Mandala Climate Risk Index has been used to analyze the risk of climate change to 178 tourism assets, including major airports. The index uses IPCC climate modelling along with proprietary climate impact assessments to understand the unique risks faced by individual sites. The analysis found that half of Australia’s tourism sites and airports currently fall into the highest three climate risk categories. Under the intermediate SSP2-4.5 scenario, assuming 2 degrees Celsius of warming by 2041-2060, this is set to rise to 55% of sites by 2050. Under a more extreme (3 degrees) scenario, 80% of tourism sites will experience an increase in risk between 2025 and 2050

SEIA Solar Energy Messaging National Survey, Solar Energy Industries Association

Solar continues to be the most popular source of energy. Similar to prior surveys conducted in 2018 and 2022, solar stands out as voters’ favorite energy source, beating out wind by about 10 points and continuing to be far more popular than gas, nuclear, or coal because voters are hearing positive things about solar. Encouragingly, voters who have heard more about solar in the past year are more supportive, largely because they are hearing good things about the cost of solar and because voters see widespread benefits. Voters overwhelmingly believe that solar is clean, safe for the environment, and a boon to the fight against climate change. They also believe solar will help make electricity more reliable and boost the economy.

Changes in U.S. voters’ top reasons to reduce global warming, Carman et al, Yale University and George Mason University

As part of the latest Climate Change in the American Mind survey (April 2024), the authors asked respondents to select up to three reasons to reduce global warming (from a list of 11) that are most important to them. They also asked the same question in May 2017. Here, they summarize results for U.S. registered voters overall and by political party/ideology and compare these results to those from May 2017. The three reasons to reduce global warming that voters selected most often were to provide a better life for our children and grandchildren (47%), to help prevent extreme weather events (37%), and to prevent the destruction of most life on the planet (37%).

Big Oil in Court – The latest trends in climate litigation against fossil fuel companies, Oil Change International and Zero Carbon Analytics

The authors analyze the escalating wave of climate litigation aimed at fossil fuel companies, e.g., 86 climate lawsuits have been filed against the world’s largest oil, gas, and coal-producing corporations – including BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies. The number of cases filed against fossil fuel companies each year has nearly tripled since the Paris Agreement was reached in 2015, highlighting a growing global movement to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their role in the climate crisis.

2024 List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor, US Department of Labor

The list provides a variety of stakeholders with a roadmap to effective action and serves as a critical resource for creating a future where workers’ rights are respected and upheld. This year’s update reveals the unsettling geographic span of labor exploitation, highlighting new additions from every region in the world. This year’s additions span numerous industries, including consumer goods, electronics, garments, textiles, and manufacturing. The mining and metallurgical sectors are also areas of concern—12 additions are minerals, which are essential to our clean energy future and national security e.g., Figure 2.

Climate Change, Disaster Risk, and Homeowner’s Insurance, Campbell et al., US Congressional Budget Office

The authors analyze recent changes in property insurance markets and consider alternative insurance products as well as policy approaches to increase the availability and affordability of insurance for homeowners and renters. The highlights of that analysis include higher land and ocean temperatures, drought, sea level rise, and excessive precipitation are all features of climate change that contribute to increasing the risks of natural disasters, including wildfires, hurricanes, and floods. With increased uncertainty attributable to climate change, insurers may limit coverage for risks that are difficult to quantify or where regulators constrain their ability to set prices reflecting risk. Households may underinsure for natural disasters for a variety of reasons, including a lack of information about the risks and the extent of any post-disaster government assistance.

Addressing the Critical Shortage of Power Transformers to Ensure Reliability of the U.S. Grid, Quiniones et al., US National Infrastructure Advisory Council

The authors outline the causes of supply chain-related delays in transformer production that have resulted in a transformer shortage and a steep increase in prices. They then offer seven recommendations to encourage more domestic production capacity e.g., the Federal government should craft policies and designate funding targeted at increasing domestic capacity, such as tax credits, grants, accelerated depreciation, funding for new working apprentice and/or training programs, and other incentives, using the CHIPS Act as a model.

Climate Change Adaptation in Areas Beyond Government Control: Opportunities and Limitations, Karen Meijer and Ann Sophie Böhle, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

Areas beyond government control constitute a highly diverse subgroup of fragile and conflict-affected settings. As a result of conflict and weak governance, many of these areas have become more vulnerable to climate change and their communities have been left with limited capacity to respond to changing climatic conditions and extreme weather events. These settings pose unique challenges for external engagement and have, therefore, long been overlooked in adaptation efforts. The authors explore both opportunities for and the limitations of climate change adaptation in areas beyond government control. By highlighting the diversity of these settings and the range of possible adaptation measures, the authors propose a framework with four guiding questions designed to help identify context-appropriate adaptation options.

Evaluation of Nuclear Power Plant and Coal Power Plant Sites for New Nuclear Capacity, Omitaomu et al., US Department of Energy

The authors estimate the number of potential new sites having a capacity of 600 MWe or greater that could be situated on (1) currently operating and recently retired coal power plant (CPP) sites and (2) current nuclear power plant (NPP) sites. The evaluation of CPP sites with a minimum of 600 MWe transmission capacity indicates that 145 CPP sites may be suitable for building 128 GWe (with 1,117 MWe) reactors or 174 GWe with 600 Mwe generic advanced reactor technology.

Obtaining articles without journal subscriptions

We know it’s frustrating that many articles we cite here are not free to read. One-off paid access fees are generally astronomically priced, suitable for such as “On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light”  but not as a gamble on unknowns. With a median world income of US$ 9,373, for most of us US$ 42 is significant money to wager on an article’s relevance and importance. 

• Unpaywall offers a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that automatically indicates when an article is freely accessible and provides immediate access without further trouble. Unpaywall is also unscammy, works well, is itself offered free to use. The organizers (a legitimate nonprofit) report about a 50% success rate

• The weekly New Research catch is checked against the Unpaywall database with accessible items being flagged. Especially for just-published articles this mechansim may fail. If you’re interested in an article title and it is not listed here as “open access,” be sure to check the link anyway. 

How is New Research assembled?

Most articles appearing here are found via  RSS feeds from journal publishers, filtered by search terms to produce raw output for assessment of relevance. 

Relevant articles are then queried against the Unpaywall database, to identify open access articles and expose useful metadata for articles appearing in the database. 

The objective of New Research isn’t to cast a tinge on scientific results, to color readers’ impressions. Hence candidate articles are assessed via two metrics only:

• Was an article deemed of sufficient merit by a team of journal editors and peer reviewers? The fact of journal RSS output assigns a “yes” to this automatically. 
• Is an article relevant to the topic of anthropogenic climate change? Due to filter overlap with other publication topics of inquiry, of a typical week’s 550 or so input articles about 1/4 of RSS output makes the cut.

A few journals offer public access to “preprint” versions of articles for which the review process is not yet complete. For some key journals this all the mention we’ll see in RSS feeds, so we include such items in New Research. These are flagged as “preprint.”

The section “Informed opinion, nudges & major initiatives” includes some items that are not scientific research per se but fall instead into the category of “perspectives,” observations of implications of research findings, areas needing attention, etc.

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Journals covered

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Previous edition

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