Emissions on the Increase ‘Sharply’

January 8, 2019

(Illustration found here)

Beyond the T-Rump being a personal, nasty-piece-of-shit, he’s also a wide-ranging, worldwide, pathological villain — via the Guardian late this afternoon:

A new analysis shows US greenhouse gas levels are increasing as the Trump administration unravels efforts to slow climate change.
Carbon emissions rose sharply last year, increasing 3.4-percent, according to new estimates from the economic firm Rhodium Group.
That year’s jump in emissions is the biggest since the bounce back from the recession in 2010.
It is the second largest gain in more than two decades.
Coal plants are shutting down, but electricity demand is growing.
Natural-gas fired power emits about half as much carbon as coal but still contributes to climate change.
The fossil fuel is replacing most of the coal plants that are closing and also fed most of the higher demand, increasing power-sector climate pollution.
Outside of the power sector, transportation, industry and buildings all increased their emissions as well, according to the estimates.
The numbers undercut one of the Trump administration’s key defenses for dismissing federal science reports that show rising temperatures will wreak havoc on the economy, kill people and cause more extreme weather.
Trump has said he doesn’t believe the findings and his officials have argued they are exaggerated.

But the EPA is rescinding Obama-era climate work, including regulations meant to speed a shift from coal.
The agency contends that Donald Trump’s agenda is driving energy innovation that could help cut emissions.
Energy experts, however, say Trump is doing the opposite by rolling back the rules and policies that could have sped renewable growth and by forgoing new regulations beyond the electricity sector.

And if that doesn’t melt your kitty litter — Greenland has started with the whole methane-release thingie, a dangerous set of circumstances where methane frozen in permafrost melts into the environment, the process a longtime fear of climate scientists. New research has indicated the future is already here (Scientific American): ‘Methane leaks are always interesting to climate scientists because of their potential to exacerbate global climate change, should they occur on a large enough scale. It’s the reason permafrost has become such an important area of climate science in recent years. For the time being, though, the impact of methane contributions from glaciers remains highly uncertain.’
Per snips of the study’s science-nerd-like Abstract, published last week at Nature:

Here we find that subglacially produced methane is rapidly driven to the ice margin by the efficient drainage system of a subglacial catchment of the Greenland ice sheet. We report the continuous export of methane-supersaturated waters (CH4(aq)) from the ice-sheet bed during the melt season.

Sustained methane fluxes over the melt season are indicative of subglacial methane reserves that exceed methane export, with an estimated 6.3 tonnes (discharge-weighted mean; range from 2.4 to 11 tonnes) of CH4(aq) transported laterally from the ice-sheet bed.

Atmospheric evasion is the main methane sink once runoff reaches the ice margin, with estimated diffusive fluxes (4.4 to 28 millimoles of CH4 per square metre per day) rivalling that of major world rivers6.

Our findings suggest that such environments have been previously underappreciated and should be considered in Earth’s methane budget.

Yes, ‘underappreciated‘ is a good word for some bad tidings…shit’s ‘worse than expected.’

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