Skeptical Science New Research for Week #41 2024

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

Climate, Peace and Security Fact Sheet: Colombia, Andersen et al., Stockholm International Research Peace Institute

Colombia’s decades-long conflict culminated in the 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which included aims to achieve peace through rural reform, reintegration of former combatants, addressing illicit crop cultivation, and ensuring land restitution and voluntary return for displaced individuals. The authors focus on how climate-related peace and security risks interact with specific provisions of the peace agreement and provide an update on the situation since 2022.

Global Drought Overview, Toreti et al., Joint Research Centre of the European Commission

Severe droughts are currently affecting most of South America, southern Africa and the Zambezi basin, the Mediterranean, and eastern Europe with extremely dry and warm conditions. Heatwaves and warm spells are exacerbating the impacts of the lack of precipitation. The rare combination of strong positive phases of ENSO and the Indian Ocean Dipole, together with the warm phase of the Tropical North Atlantic and climate change, are likely key drivers of drought in South America, southern and central Africa, and extreme heat in South America, Africa, the Mediterranean, and East Europe.

Pan-Arctic Methane: Current Monitoring Capabilities, Approaches for Improvement, and Implications for Global Mitigation Targets, Ackermann et al., Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars/ Polar Institute

Arctic carbon emissions from thawing permafrost will accelerate the pace of global climate disruption and reduce the remaining headroom for direct human emissions before agreed global temperature targets are exceeded—the so-called “carbon budgets” for staying below, e.g., 1.5°C or 2.0°C above the pre-industrial global average surface temperature. The key questions are how much and how fast. The proportion of future Arctic carbon emissions that will be methane (CH4) rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) is of particular importance in determining the answers because of CH4’s much higher impact, per molecule, on global temperature over the next several decades.

State of Global Water Resources 2023, Mishra et al., World Meteorological Organization

The year 2023 was marked by unprecedented heat, becoming the hottest year on record at 1.45 °C above pre-industrial levels. The transition from La Niña to El Niño conditions, as well as the positive phase of the Indian Ocean Dipole, contributed to this extreme heat and diverse weather impacts ranging from heavy rains and floods to droughts. Levels of soil moisture were predominantly below normal or much below normal across large territories globally, with North America, South America, North Africa, and the Middle East particularly dry during June–August. In 2023, glaciers lost more than 600 gigatons (Gt) of water, the largest mass loss registered in the last five decades. Following 2022, 2023 is the second consecutive year in which all glaciated regions in the world reported ice loss.

Federal Spending for Flood Adaptations, Humphrey et al., Congressional Budget Office

The federal government provides funds for flood adaptations—projects aimed at preventing damage from flooding. Those projects include constructing dams and levees, restoring beaches, and elevating or buying out individual properties. In this report, the Congressional Budget Office provides information about the amount of damage that could be reduced through spending for flood adaptations. Over the past 10 years, damage from flooding in the United States has averaged $46 billion per year (in 2023 dollars). That damage is projected to be a quarter to a third greater in 2050 because of increases in flood risk due to climate change. Although the effects of adaptation projects can vary widely, estimates from the Army Corps of Engineers indicate that two-thirds of its projects—excluding those with the highest one-sixth and lowest one-sixth of benefit-cost ratios—were expected to reduce flood damage by $2 to $6 per dollar of spending over a 50-year project lifetime. For those projects, the average expected reduction in damage was $3 for each dollar spent. CBO’s assessment of FEMA’s flood adaptation projects indicates roughly $2 in expected reductions in damage for every dollar spent. (All of those estimates reflect the value of future costs and benefits at the time the projects were planned.)

Climate Resilience: Congressional Action Needed to Enhance Climate Economics Information and to Limit Federal Fiscal Exposure, Gómez et al., Government Accountability Office

Federal fiscal exposure to climate change can be limited by enhancing climate resilience—that is, taking actions to reduce potential future losses by planning and preparing for potential climate hazards. GAO was asked to review the economic costs of climate change to the federal government and to provide details on how Congress might establish an organizational arrangement to prioritize federal climate resilience investments. The authors examine (1) available information on the projected economic costs and benefits estimated to be incurred by the federal government as a result of climate change, (2) the extent to which the federal government has developed the capacity to acquire economic data to help understand federal climate-related financial risks, and (3) what key elements should be included in a federal organizational arrangement to prioritize climate resilience projects for federal investments.

Too Hot to Handle. The scorching reality of Australia’s climate–security failure, Barrie et al., Australian Security Leaders Climate Group

The assessment of climate risks external to Australia, carried out by the Office of National Intelligence (ONI) and completed in November 2022, has been classified and hidden from politicians overseeing security and climate policy, and from the public. Climate was mentioned only in passing in the Defence Security Review. The climate analysis in the 2023 Intergenerational Report was only partial. A domestically-focused National Climate Risk Assessment is under way, but its approach to assessing risks is in our view seriously deficient. The government also has in progress a National Adaptation Plan Issues Paper and a Climate Risk and Opportunity Management Program for the public sector 2024–26. The fundamental failing running through this work is the refusal to accept the size and immediacy of climate risk in 2024, its compounding nature, and its future implications, as the basis for mitigation and adaptation policy.

Bill Savings vs. Backup Power: Evaluating operational tradeoffs for home solar+storage systems, Gorman et al., Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The authors explore tradeoffs between the use of home solar+storage systems for backup power versus day-to-day utility bill savings. They focus specifically on the “reserve setting” available with most home battery storage systems, which allows the customer to maintain some minimum level of storage in reserve in case of an unforeseen power interruption. The more capacity that is held in reserve, the greater the customer’s ability to ride through possible power interruptions, but less capacity is then available to manage utility bills on a day-to-day basis. The authors evaluate this operational tradeoff across a diverse set of locations and residential electricity tariff structures, relying on Berkeley Lab’s PRESTO model to stochastically simulate power interruption events, and exploring a range of sensitivities, including variations in customer value of lost load (VoLL), interruption frequency, and other key drivers.

Navigating the peace and security implications of climate change: Recommendations on the climate-conflict nexus at COP29, Community of Practice on Environment, Climate, Conflict, and Peace

The authors provide further nuance to some of the most pressing topics within the interlinked environmental, climate change, conflict, and peace domains. Eight core issues are explored alongside actionable recommendations that key decision-makers can enact or demand within the UNFCCC negotiations, at COP29.

Climate’s Bottom Line Carbon Budgeting and Canada’s 2035 Target, Net-Zero Advisory Body

The authors recommend developing a national carbon budget for Canada. Carbon budgets are used by other countries to better track the effect of policy decisions on the climate and the consequences of delaying action. Alongside the carbon budget, the authors recommend that Canada adopt a 2035 emissions target of 50-55% reduction below 2005 levels.

Strengthening European Climate Policy, Sánchez et al., Palgrave/MacMillian

This open-access book foregrounds 10 novel collaborations between the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), and Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines, for strengthening European climate policy.

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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