Skeptical Science New Research for Week #43 2023

Informed opinion, nudges & major initiatives

Atlantic overturning: new observations and challenges, Srokosz et al., Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 10.1098/rsta.2022.0196

Should AMOC observations continue: how and why?, Frajka-Williams et al., Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences Open Access 10.1098/rsta.2022.0195

The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory, Ripple et al., BioScience Open Access pdf 10.1093/biosci/biad080

The Environmental Footprint of Bitcoin Mining Across the Globe: Call for Urgent Action, Chamanara et al., Earth’s Future Open Access pdf 10.1029/2023ef003871

Wilderness areas under threat from global redistribution of agriculture, Gardner et al., Current Biology Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.cub.2023.09.013

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

Accelerating Decarbonization in the United States: Technology, Policy, and Societal Dimensions (2023)*, Pacala et al., National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Through an assessment of current federal, state, and local climate and energy policies, the authors identify gaps and barriers to implementation that would prevent the nation from attaining its climate, economic, and societal goals. The authors organize their assessment around five major objectives of decarbonization policy—GHG emission reductions, equity and fairness, health, employment, and public engagement that cut across eight sectors: electricity, buildings, land use, transportation, industry, finance, fossil fuels, and nonfederal actors.

* This link leads to a preprint version of the report. Reading the published version unfortunately requires sharing contact information. If sharing contact information is not an issue, the completed report may be read here. Scroll down and choose “download as guest.”

Climate Action at Work, Tides Center

Reducing carbon emissions by 50% by 2030 to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 will require sweeping changes at all levels of government – federal, state, and local. The corporate sector could help accelerate the passage of ambitious climate policy, but too many companies are narrowly focused on reducing emissions in their own operations or investing in innovation for the long term. These are vital – but bold policies are needed to scale solutions much more quickly. The challenge is that ambitious public policy is needed to solve the climate crisis at scale. Employees can exert an outsized impact when they raise their voices about the climate at work. However, employees do not often realize that this lever is available to them, and when they do, it can be daunting to act without a playbook and without fellow colleagues to work with. The authors present such a playbook.

Beyond Divestment, David Whyte, Corporate Watch and Centre for Climate Crime and Climate Justice

The top 20 shareholders in both BP and Shell have increased their total number of shares by three-quarters of a billion in BP, and half a billion in Shell since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015. Although 47% of BP shareholders and 54% of Shell shareholders have reduced their stake in Shell and BP, net share ownership has risen by 10% in both BP and Shell. Any trend towards divestment amongst the 47% and 54% of BP and Shell shareholders is being canceled out by the largest shareholders, who happen to include the world’s largest and most powerful asset managers. Moreover, what might look like divestment cannot always be read as such; more than a quarter of the 20 investors who made the most significant reductions in shareholdings in either BP or Shell actually increased their shares in the other company. Only 60 institutional investors have sold all their shares in the two oil firms. This represents 3% of BP and 4% of Shell shareholders. The enormous increase in both market capitalization and share price for the two oil giants since the Paris Agreement reaffirms the conclusion that divestment campaigns are not having the necessary impact. If shareholder divestment is not working fast enough – as this report shows – then we need to pursue other forms of intervention that drastically scale back oil and gas production.

Integrating Climate Security into Policy Frameworks: Jordan, Spencer McMurray, adelphi and CGIAR

The climate crisis is increasing security risks in Jordan. Of the manifold risks Jordan must contend with, the most pressing are those with direct implications for water resources which are already under significant strain due to both climatic and human-induced factors. Higher temperatures are leading to more evapotranspiration and reduced rainfall is especially critical, straining the groundwater and aquifer reserves that are already over-exploited. Extreme weather events and their impacts, including droughts, flash floods, and landslides, further complicate matters. These risks translate into important implications for Jordanians across a variety of areas, including political, social, demographic, and economic realms, especially when combined with pre-existing grievances and especially poverty. Together, these create significant challenges for food, water, and livelihood security, affecting the overall health and well-being of Jordanians.

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

The previous edition of Skeptical Science New Research may be found here.