Potentially (ok - not currently), “24 gigatons of carbon accumulated in methane hydrates” is a serious amount. Note that as methane increases in the atmosphere, it’s lifetime increases as oxidising capacity is used up, a positive feedback. Methane may also help explain the rapid at the ends of ice ages (when sea-level rose ±100m). If there’s any really bad runaway warming scenario, it has to do with methane.
Nice article, many examples.
Except that it’s not just mountain communities that depend on glaciers - those are a key source of water for the main rivers during the dry season, especially at the western (Indus) end of the Himalayas.
Of course India could be better prepared, but the government needs to show this is a priority, rather than temples and Hindutva.
Maybe regional state governments could do better ?
The article is right to say that 1.5C is only a political goal not deduction from physical-science, a target which the Indian government did not, afaik, explicitly support, despite pressure from all the smaller neighbouring countries which clearly did. India always emphasised equity in the climate negotiations, but too much from a point of view of equitable access to global atmospheric space (i.e. right to burn coal too, proportional to population). So they got lumped together with China which has hugely higher emissions (also higher per-capita than europe), rather than with the most vulnerable countries (especially in Africa) which will receive most of the adaptation funding.
Maybe stupid provocations by US can galvanise climate cooperation by rest of the world. I remember COP6 in Den Haag - which failed due to miscommunication between US (end of Clinton admin) and EU (within which, FR and UK failed to understand each other). Six months later at COP6bis, with the US then led by Bush administration (after blocking recounts in Florida) and similarly pulling out of Kyoto protocol, the rest of the world united against US, the deal was done and the whole COP went for a celebration party cruise down the Rhine (yes the numbers were smaller then, but the boat did feel a bit ‘top-heavy’).
Now, compared to then, US controls much smaller chunk of total emissions and GDP, and the technology transition has momentum. The bigger questions are whether India will follow a similar coal+concrete pathway as China, and eventually how Africa will evolve.
Good article, it makes sense to plan heat-pumps on a larger scale, hope support for such initiatives survives russian disinfo.
Couldn’t they pump some heat directly from the Danube, or would that be too problematic for ecology and countries downstream ?
Which U.S. is trying? At least with a legal process in London, there is some hope it continues.
I agree that the chinese dams pose risks to India (although also some potential benefits if they could agree about management, but then look at what brotherly neighbour Russia did to Ukraine’s dam … ) - however it’s not obvious how building another dam downstream really helps - unless the volume retained is as great as for the chinese dam which seems unlikely since India doesn’t control the deepest part of the gorge, and they keep it half-empty just-in-case there’s a surprise release. So I reckon the unspoken logic is rather - since china broke the concept that it’s a wild river, we might as well exploit it too.
I’d guess the chinese dam is rather an excuse, and the real motivation is electricity - potentially a lot from that river, although that end of Assam doesn’t yet have a huge population to use it. Also, the Brahmaputra riverbed is wide but variable, so maybe they hope by taming it they can grow crops there. But there must be a huge amount of sediment, what’s going to happen to that?
Sure it will, there’s a lot of inertia and feedbacks in the system, some kicking in recently although there’s nothing physically special about 1.5oC. Also, as well as CO2, emissions of CH4 rise fast, while those of SOx fall. My point is rather that people (especially anglophones) tend to over-estimate the importance of USA in world affairs. What matters is that the rest of the world gets on with transitions.
IIrc this has been going back and forth for years.
Does Rwanda ever explain what they are trying to achieve - permanently take over both sides of the lake ?
What kind of government would local people without guns prefer ?
(Goma is far from Kinshasa, closer even to Indian ocean).
Is it? Bush withdraw from Kyoto protocol, Trump already withdrew from PA. This game just became a predictable cycle, a bit like El Niño, the rest of the world got used to the unreliability of bipolar USA, which reduces their negotiating strength. Meanwhile regarding ambition for future emissions, what matters most for the next set of targets at COP30 is China and India (the former at peak due over-construction, and higher per-capita than Europe, the latter relatively low, but set to rise fast if there is no change of direction). We can wait out USA (but please sort out your bipolar system) - 4 years is not long in climate.
OK good, but to be really pioneering change in francophone world, they need to leave Meta too, that’s what dominates.
Ok, so now they have enough other big countries, time to kick out Russia which doesn’t fit in a ‘south’ block anyway.
Split it? I hear that the Kazakh side of the sea grows again, even though the Uzbek side turned to cotton.
Methane is a big problem, tackling CH4 may be the only fast enough way to reduce peak warming. Also, by using up atmospheric oxisidising capacity, CH4 increases it’s own lifetime (i.e. the more we put in the air, the longer it hangs around) - a problematic positive feedback. First priority of course is to tackle the obvious emissions (especially from fossil installations - many in russia as well as usa) but it’s still worth studying what might be done to reduce atmospheric CH4. Seems this proposal is not an effective solution, but partly a question of time and place .
Modern slave trade. Russia is also driving wars in Sudan, Libya, Niger, Mali, etc. - hope the loss of their Syrian base will reduce their capacity on the ground. Yet their biggest trick has been manipulation of social media algorithms in Africa (with apps made in usa, and anti-european rhetoric), it’s too easy to continue.
It’s interesting that the rise at Mauna Loa is a bit higher than the global average. From such differences one gets a clue about the origins (useful as regional biospheric and oceanic sources and sinks are still hard to quantify precisely). I note also that they are predicting a lower rise in 2025. So, if I read it correctly, there’s a small sign of hope that the trend may get better, as the factors which contributed to this anomalous rise were more in the early part of 2024, related to the earlier El Niño. Unless the latter returns again soon - keep an eye on the pacific heat.
It’s now decades too late to choose between climate mitigation and adaptation, we have to do both. This includes that more people will inevitably migrate to more ‘climate-safe’ regions. The challenge is to help that process be more gradual and equitable, which includes some issues you raise. For example development of new homes creates opportunities, including jobs, but older landowners may benefit disproportionally.
This is a global issue, not specific to USA, but given that context, while I also have little sympathy for billionaires with seaside palaces in Florida, such people are few, and it’s also hard to feel sympathy for populations in the midwest who collectively voted for decades for climate-denying politicians who blocked effective policies, even influentially on a global scale.
That’s interesting, but there are different personality types, maybe some could benefit more from a fresh start?
We are not all so tribal. I emigrated at a moment when I felt I had nothing (except a web-model), this was a a good move, at least for the first few years.
This is difficult. Yes we should discourage further mis-investment in unsustainable locations. Including whole cities, which may still be liveable for a few more decades, but not centuries. On the other hand, by pushing down market sale prices, this penalises people whose ancestors moved there, long before we knew much about climate change. So maybe they should get some compensation or help to move, although on such timescales there are plenty of other ‘bad-luck’ factors that society doesn’t compensate.
It seems the problem is the regional governments , which are prioritising regional coal mining, to prioritise regional jobs. In China there is plenty of renewable energy capacity but the sun and wind are mainly in the W and S, while the old coal mines are in the E and N. China has plenty of climate scientists and diplomats pushing central government policy, but these have less influence on ‘local government’. As many ‘local governments’ in China govern populations larger than European countries, this is something like Poland trying to keep it’s coal mines alive, in contradiction to European climate policy. Eventually there will be surplus energy, some coal contracts are going to break, question is who wins and loses then. Western observers tend to think of China as a big centrally controlled monolith - it isn’t, the ‘local’ chiefs have a lot of power. Similar central / ‘local’ governance problem with housing bubble and debt.