Arquivo da tag: Estatísticas climáticas

Brasil oficializa ‘pedalada climática’ em nova meta de redução de gases (Folha de S.Paulo)

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www1.folha.uol.com.br

Phillippe Watanabe

7 de abril de 2022

Uma atualização das metas de redução de gases estufa foi registrada pelo Brasil, nesta quinta-feira (7), na UNFCCC (sigla em inglês para Convenção-Quadro das Nações Unidas sobre Mudança do Clima), formalizando, dessa forma, uma “pedalada climática“.

As novas metas aparecem mais de cinco meses depois da COP26, a Conferência das Nações Unidas para Mudanças Climáticas, e, mesmo assim, ainda não formalizam todas promessas feitas durante o evento à comunidade internacional.

Entre os objetivos atualizados está a neutralidade de carbono até 2050, a redução, em 2025, de 37% dos gase estufa, em comparação com as emissões de 2005, e a diminuição, em 2030, de 50% dos gases, também em comparação com 2005.

As emissões brasileiras são resultado, principalmente, de desmatamento e atividade pecuária.

As promessas, feitas durante a COP, de zerar o desmatamento até 2030 e de redução na emissão de metano não constam no documento, ausência apontada por entidades como o Política por Inteiro e o Observatório do Clima.

Os cortes de emissões de gases para 2030 e a neutralidade de carbono em 2050 tinham sido anunciados pelo ministro do Meio Ambiente, Joaquim Leite, em 1º de novembro do ano passado.

As organizações também criticam a “pedalada climática” das metas apresentadas.

A pedalada ocorre pela mudança no dado das emissões de 2005, que foi atualizado nos mais recentes inventários nacionais de gases estufa, ou seja, ocorreu uma mudança na base de comparação.

A primeira NDC brasileira (sigla para contribuição nacional determinada e que pode ser, de modo mais simples, traduzida como meta climática) é de 2015, ano do Acordo de Paris. Nela, o Brasil se compromete a até 2030 reduzir em 43%, em relação a 2005, as emissões de gases estufa. Nesse cenário e com os dados disponíveis naquele momento, o país emitiria, em 2030, cerca de 1,208 gigatoneladas de gás carbônico equivalente (em linhas gerais, uma soma dos gases que causam o aquecimento global).

Com a evolução nas metodologias para medir os gases, os dados de 2005 sofreram correções e aumentaram. A meta brasileira, porém, não foi alinhada a essa correção e permaneceu em 43% de redução. Como os dados de base (2005) são menores, a redução de 43% passou a significar emissões maiores em 2030 (cerca de 1,620 gigatoneladas), em comparação ao prometido inicialmente. Surgiu, assim a pedalada climática.

Aumentando-se mais o percentual de corte de emissões, a situação poderia ser corrigida com a nota meta nacional submetida ao UNFCCC. Mas isso não aconteceu. Considerando o documento que foi submetido com 50% de redução de emissões, o Brasil em 2030 estará emitindo 1,281 gigatoneladas de CO2e (leia gás carbônico equivalente), segundo análises do Observatório do Clima e do Política por Inteiro.

O alerta sobre a manutenção da pedalada já tinha sido soado no momento em que Leite anunciou a nova meta, na COP26. No dia anterior à promessa, o Brasil havia, inclusive, submetido uma carta-adendo à UNFCCC em que oficializava somente a meta de neutralidade climática até 2050, sem citações aos objetivos desta década.

Organizações apontam que as novas metas nacionais não aumentam a ambição climática, algo que era esperado das nações que assinaram o Acordo de Paris.

“O teto de emissões estipulado para 2030 está uma Colômbia inteira (em termos de emissões anuais) acima daquele estipulado anteriormente pelo Governo do Brasil”, afirma uma análise produzida pelo Política por Inteiro. Já o teto de 2025 está uma Polônia inteira acima do estipulado anteriormente aponta o documento.

O Política por Inteiro ainda aponta que o país deve resolver em definitivo a questão de atualização de metas. “As sucessivas demonstrações de retrocesso afetam diretamente a credibilidade do país na esfera internacional”, diz a análise.

O Observatório do Clima aponta que o país está descumprindo o Acordo de Paris e que mente no documento enviado ao UNFCCC ao afirmar que está aumentando sua ambição.

“Continua sendo um retrocesso, num momento em que as Nações Unidas fazem um chamado para os países aumentarem suas ambições. O Brasil não responde ao chamado e ainda continua retrocedendo”, diz, em nota, Marcio Astrini, secretário-executivo do Observatório do Clima.

Past eight years: Warmest since modern recordkeeping began (Science Daily)

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2021 tied for sixth warmest year in continued trend, analysis shows

Date: January 13, 2022

Source: NASA

Summary: Earth’s global average surface temperature in 2021 tied with 2018 as the sixth warmest on record, according to independent analyses done by NASA and NOAA. Collectively, the past eight years are the warmest years since modern recordkeeping began in 1880.

Earth’s global average surface temperature in 2021 tied with 2018 as the sixth warmest on record, according to independent analyses done by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Continuing the planet’s long-term warming trend, global temperatures in 2021 were 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit (0.85 degrees Celsius) above the average for NASA’s baseline period, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. NASA uses the period from 1951-1980 as a baseline to see how global temperature changes over time.

Collectively, the past eight years are the warmest years since modern recordkeeping began in 1880. This annual temperature data makes up the global temperature record — which tells scientists the planet is warming.

According to NASA’s temperature record, Earth in 2021 was about 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit (or about 1.1 degrees Celsius) warmer than the late 19th century average, the start of the industrial revolution.

“Science leaves no room for doubt: Climate change is the existential threat of our time,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Eight of the top 10 warmest years on our planet occurred in the last decade, an indisputable fact that underscores the need for bold action to safeguard the future of our country — and all of humanity. NASA’s scientific research about how Earth is changing and getting warmer will guide communities throughout the world, helping humanity confront climate and mitigate its devastating effects.”

This warming trend around the globe is due to human activities that have increased emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The planet is already seeing the effects of global warming: Arctic sea ice is declining, sea levels are rising, wildfires are becoming more severe and animal migration patterns are shifting. Understanding how the planet is changing — and how rapidly that change occurs — is crucial for humanity to prepare for and adapt to a warmer world.

Weather stations, ships, and ocean buoys around the globe record the temperature at Earth’s surface throughout the year. These ground-based measurements of surface temperature are validated with satellite data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Scientists analyze these measurements using computer algorithms to deal with uncertainties in the data and quality control to calculate the global average surface temperature difference for every year. NASA compares that global mean temperature to its baseline period of 1951-1980. That baseline includes climate patterns and unusually hot or cold years due to other factors, ensuring that it encompasses natural variations in Earth’s temperature.

Many factors affect the average temperature any given year, such as La Nina and El Nino climate patterns in the tropical Pacific. For example, 2021 was a La Nina year and NASA scientists estimate that it may have cooled global temperatures by about 0.06 degrees Fahrenheit (0.03 degrees Celsius) from what the average would have been.

A separate, independent analysis by NOAA also concluded that the global surface temperature for 2021 was the sixth highest since record keeping began in 1880. NOAA scientists use much of the same raw temperature data in their analysis and have a different baseline period (1901-2000) and methodology.

“The complexity of the various analyses doesn’t matter because the signals are so strong,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of GISS, NASA’s leading center for climate modeling and climate change research. “The trends are all the same because the trends are so large.”

NASA’s full dataset of global surface temperatures for 2021, as well as details of how NASA scientists conducted the analysis, are publicly available from GISS (https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp).

GISS is a NASA laboratory managed by the Earth Sciences Division of the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The laboratory is affiliated with Columbia University’s Earth Institute and School of Engineering and Applied Science in New York.

For more information about NASA’s Earth science missions, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/earth

NASA. “Past eight years: Warmest since modern recordkeeping began: 2021 tied for sixth warmest year in continued trend, analysis shows.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 13 January 2022. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/01/220113230132.htm>.

Last Year’s Overall Climate Was Shaped by Warming-Driven Heat Extremes Around the Globe (Inside Climate News)

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insideclimatenews.org

A quarter of the world’s population experienced a record-warm year in 2021, research shows.

By Bob Berwyn – January 14, 2022

Earth’s annual average temperature checkup can mask a lot of the details of the climate record over the previous year, and 2021 showed that deadly heat-related climate extremes happen, even if it’s not a record-warm year.

Global average temperature isn’t always the most important measure, University of Michigan climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck said, after United States federal agencies released the Global State of the Climate report, ranking 2021 as the sixth-warmest year on record for the planet. 

“As with politics, it is often what happens locally that matters most, and 2021 was one of the most deadly and destructive years on record because of the unusually warm atmosphere that is becoming the norm,” he said. “Extreme heat waves were exceptional in 2021, including the deadly Pacific Northwest U.S. and Canada heatwave that killed hundreds and also set the stage for fires that wiped out a whole town.”

Last year, the climate “was metaphorically shouting to us to stop the warming, because if we don’t, the warming-related climate and weather extremes will just get worse and worse, deadlier and deadlier,” he said. “Even tornadoes are now thought to strengthen as a result of the warming, and this effect probably also was the reason we had tornadoes in 2021 that reached northward into parts of Minnesota for the first time ever in December.”

The Pacific Northwest heat wave was the most extreme hotspot in a series of heat extremes that together seemed to stretch across the entire northern hemisphere for much of the summer, said Chloe Brimicome, a climate scientist and heat expert at the University of Reading.

“What really stood out for me was this period in summer, in July,” she said. “Everywhere you looked, consecutive records in many countries for temperature were being broken, day on day on day. I don’t think we’d ever really seen that before, or at least we hadn’t heard about it in the same way before.”

July 2021 ended up being the single hottest month for Earth since measurements started, and on the ninth day of the month, a thermometer at Furnace Creek, in California’s Death Valley, recorded 54.4 degrees Celsius (130 degrees Fahrenheit) for the second year in a row, in what could stand as the highest reliably measured temperature on record. 

Near the end of July, a heat wave disrupted Tokyo Olympic Games scheduling, and less than two weeks later, on Aug. 11, a Syracuse, Sicily weather station measured Europe’s warmest-ever temperature, at 48.8 degrees Celsius (119.8 Fahrenheit), during Europe’s hottest summer on record. A few days after that, it rained at the summit of the two-mile thick Greenland Ice Sheet for the first time on record, yet another sign that pervasive warming is affecting the whole globe.

The year ended with a long and extreme autumn heat wave in the Western United States that contributed to Colorado’s costliest wildfire to date, and also with off-the-charts heat extremes in the European Alps, with above-freezing temperatures on the highest summits on Dec. 31. 

And to reinforce that global warming doesn’t stop as the calendar year ends, 2022 started as the previous year ended, with a grain-withering heat wave in the Southern Hemisphere centered over Argentina, while farther south in Patagonia, vast tracts of forest are on fire. On Jan. 13, meteorologists reported a preliminary reading of 50.7 degrees Celsius in Australia, tying the Southern Hemisphere record.

Brimicome said that, with last year’s heat extremes, it hit home that, “Oh dear, this has already started, it’s catching up with us, it’s here now.” 

She added, ”We’re going to see more and more of this sort of extreme heat and extreme weather. It wasn’t a shock because that’s what had been projected, but a surprise, because it had always kind of crept up on us.”

Ocean Heat Peaks Again

The reports released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA show that increasing greenhouse gas pollution has driven Earth’s annual average temperature above the pre-fossil fuel era by 1.04 degrees Celsius (1.87 degrees Fahrenheit), as measured by an 1880 to 1900 baseline. And the long-term rate of warming has doubled in recent decades, from an early pace of about 0.08 degrees Celsius (0.14 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade, to 0.18 degrees Celsius (0.32 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade since 1980.

Based on the most recent evaluations of greenhouse gas emissions and concentrations, especially of methane, which recently reached another record level, as well as studies of other important climate indicators, warming could speed up even more in the years ahead. By 2023, the global annual temperature could pass the 1.5 degree Celsius warming limit set by the Paris Agreement, climate scientist James Hansen wrote in his Jan. 11 monthly climate update.

A separate study, published last week, showed that, while the planet’s globally averaged surface temperature has wobbled the past six years, the world’s oceans continued to warm steadily during that time, setting a new record each year, including 2021. That matters a lot for the climate because more than 90 percent of the sun’s heat trapped by greenhouse gases is going into the oceans, said Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a co-author of the study.

“The ocean is where most of it goes,” he said. “If you’re tracking that over time, we should be able to match that with measurements from satellites. That would be the best indicator of total energy imbalance for the planet.” 

By another measure, that energy imbalance is growing at a rate equivalent to the energy from about five Hiroshima-sized atom bombs exploding every second of every day of every year, all captured by the oceans. Manifesting as heat, the energy melts sea ice and ice shelves, raises sea levels and supercharges tropical storms. 

Rising ocean heat content is increasing the frequency and intensity of ocean heat waves that have killed huge areas of coral reefs across the world’s tropical oceans and shifted fish populations, threatening the food supplies of up to 3 billion people, mostly in developing countries in the global south.

And there is no doubt that ocean heat waves are linked with heat waves and drought over land. A 2020 study showed that heat waves and droughts starting over the ocean and moving over land are often longer lasting and more intense than purely land-born events. In another case, a team of researchers studied ecosystem details of how a 2011 ocean and land heat wave interacted over Australia.

Concerns about faster warming ahead are also heightened because warmer oceans are less able to take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Currently, oceans absorb about 25 percent to 30 percent of human carbon dioxide emissions, said Lijing Cheng, lead author of the new ocean heat paper and associate professor with the International Center for Climate and Environmental Sciences at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. 

That leads to ocean acidification and “reduces the efficiency of oceanic carbon uptake and leaves more carbon dioxide in the air,” which traps even more heat, he said. 

Cheng said the study showed that the pattern of ocean warming “is a result of human-related changes in atmospheric composition,” adding that warmer oceans create more powerful storms and hurricanes, “as well as increasing precipitation and flood risk.” 

Fully understanding ocean-atmosphere heat exchange is key to implementing and tracking climate mitigation goals, he added.

Co-author Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, said the oceans will keep warming until net carbon emissions fall to zero. 

“Aside from causing coral bleaching and threatening sea life and fish populations we rely upon for roughly 25 percent of our protein intake globally,” Mann said, ocean warming “is destabilizing Antarctic ice shelves and threatens massive (meters) of sea level rise if we don’t act. So this finding really underscores the urgency of climate action now.”

Record Heat in 25 Countries 

Another global annual climate summary from a team of scientists with the Berkeley Earth laboratory showed that 1.8 billion people in 25 countries—about a quarter of the world’s population—experienced a record-warm annual average in 2021. 

“No one lives at the global average temperature,” said Berkeley Earth lead scientist Robert Rohde. “Most land areas will experience more warming than the global average, and countries must plan their responses to this.” 

Some of the world’s most populous countries experienced their hottest years on record, including China, South Korea and Nigeria, and many of them are countries that are already very hot, including Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East. 

Overall, the Berkeley team’s data showed that the global warming caused by greenhouse gases is broadly distributed, as expected, because the pollutants are spread through the atmosphere. 

In 2021, 87 percent of Earth’s surface was significantly warmer compared to a 1951-1980 baseline, with 11 percent of the surface at a similar temperature, and only 2.6 percent significantly colder. An absence of cold extremes also illustrates the overall warming trend, as the team reported that no place on Earth recorded a record cold annual average. 

A building level of greenhouse gases from human activities “is the direct cause of recent global warming,” Rohde said. “If the Paris Agreement’s goal of no more than 2 degrees Celsius warming is to be reached, significant progress toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions needs to be made soon.”

Brimicome, who does research on extreme heat, said the spate of climate extremes in 2021 may mark a start of a widespread coming to terms with climate change.

“I think we’ve always had these rose-tinted glasses toward it, like yes, climate change is happening, but it’s not going to happen to me,” she said. “We need to take off those glasses and be realistic about what’s happening. Although part of our brain is telling us it can’t be true, it is completely in front of us. If we continue with this narrative, even like I did, that we’re surprised and shocked, it’s kind of like saying it’s not real. But it is real.”