Crypto News: Climate science you missed

Today's newsletter is a roundup of recent findings in climate science from the latest issue of Bloomberg Green's magazine. Subscribe to receive the magazine in print, and sign up to receive the Green Daily newsletter in your inbox. Read and share this story on Bloomberg.com.

By Eric Roston

An encouraging trend is emerging, even as extreme weather losses mount. Estimates for global warming are coming down. The International Energy Agency expects fossil fuel demand and emissions to peak by 2030. (OPEC disagrees.) The Inevitable Policy Response, a United Nations-supported research group for investors, now delivers a "high-conviction forecast" that the rise in the global average temperature will peak at 1.7C to 1.8C, and countries will zero out emissions by 2080. That's less dangerous than 2C but more dangerous than 1.5C, the high- and low-end international targets. The first UN assessment of national climate commitments finds "the Paris Agreement has led to contributions that significantly reduce forecasts of future warming, yet the world is not on track to meet the long-term goals."

A man in Ahmedabad, India. Photographer: Bloomberg

July and August were the hottest and second-hottest months ever recorded. Almost half of the world's population withered through greenhouse-gas-juiced heat for at least 30 days, according to Climate Central researchers. Ocean temperatures broke records. The hottest parts of the world—India and Pakistan, the Persian Gulf, northern Australia—are already experiencing heat that puts lives in danger, and most of the rest of the world can expect a taste of dangerous heat in the future. If nothing else, advances in modeling may make truly unprecedented heat waves easier to see coming.

These are boom times for invasive species, which cause $423 billion in damage every year and factor into 60% of observed extinctions. Take invasive, stinging fire ants, which have established a stable beachhead in Europe, on Sicily. Seven percent of the continent is hospitable to the insect, but that figure could grow to 25% by midcentury.

Fire ants in Indonesia. Photographer: Getty Images

Fossil fuel emissions are making wildfires worse in many parts of the world, drying out vegetation and extending fire season. The rising risks are making apparent the need for better forest management than is typical in western North America. Suppressing fires indirectly cost British Columbia as much as $24 billion in 2021, a figure vastly greater than the price tag for pruning or burning away fire fuel. The number of US homes at a 5% or greater risk of wildfire damage could double over the next quarter-century, to 3.3 million, compared with the average from 2000 to 2018.

Fire damage in Celista, British Columbia, in August. Photographer: Bloomberg

Scrutiny of forest-based carbon credits continues to raise doubts about their effectiveness. Many of the world's biggest companies say they'll rely on the practice to net out their emissions. But an analysis from the University of California at Berkeley found that one leading program lacks transparency, uses unrealistic metrics for gauging carbon storage and gives developers too much flexibility. A commentary by three researchers in the journal One Earth puts the problem plainly: "Carbon offsets are incompatible with the Paris Agreement."

The Ross Moore Lake wildfire in British Columbia in July. Photographer: Bloomberg

Nudging people toward new behavior actually works. Researchers are constantly trying to invent ways to prompt better decision-making. In partnership with social scientists, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s food delivery service, Eleme, changed the default option in its checkout process to no plastic cutlery, rewarding the choice with " green points" toward tree planting in China's desert.

Overuse of groundwater, and its subsequent flow into oceans, is shifting the planet's axis—yes, the one it rotates on—eastward by 4.3 centimeters (1.7 inches) a year.

Geologists read the Earth's layers of rock like a book, marking chapters of time into eras, periods and epochs. Where they find the strongest physical evidence for a massive geological change, they place a physical marker into the rock formation denoting the new chapter. In July a team of scientists settled on Crawford Lake in Ontario as proof that humanity has taken us into a new chapter: The lake's sediment holds unique traces of plutonium from nuclear bomb tests, heavy metals, microplastics and ash from burning fossil fuels that may prove that a new, human epoch, the Anthropocene Epoch, is underway.

38 days

That's how many times global daily average temperatures exceeded 1.5C as of Sept. 12, beating every other year, according to the annual State of the Climate report.

"It's like removing a couple of wheels from a car and trying to drive it home."

Dmitry Nicolsky

Geophysicist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks

Nicolsky has struggled to collaborate with Russian colleagues since the invasion of Ukraine, putting vital research in jeopardy.

Animals leave traces of themselves virtually everywhere they go, all of which contain DNA. Much as law enforcement agencies use DNA fingerprinting to link crimes to potential suspects, researchers can use eDNA to tie animal species—elephants or weasels or grasshoppers—to the ecosystems through which they've recently passed. Startups are using cutting-edge eDNA science to help big companies measure their biodiversity impact. It could be an accountability breakthrough—or the new vanguard of greenwashing.

A butterfly at the American Natural History Museum in New York. Photographer: Ismail Ferdous/Bloomberg

Life in Kushiro, a Japanese city of about 160,000 on the northern island of Hokkaido, has revolved around coal for more than a century. Executives and politicians have done everything they can to keep the country's last underground mine open, but local residents are ambivalent about continuing to rely on the dirtiest fossil fuel. Tadamichi Ikeda, a 62-year-old veteran miner, is proud to pass his skills on to young trainees from overseas. He also wants his son to stay away from a physically punishing industry that's in decline. "I wouldn't want him here," he says.

Inside the Kushiro coal mine. Photographer: Noriko Hayashi/Bloomberg

By Brian K. Sullivan

Storm Ciaran will move northeast through Cornwall, Wales and England Wednesday night into Thursday. The storm will bring "disruptive wind and rain, especially to southern parts of the UK," Rachel Ayers, a UK Met Office meteorologist, said in a video briefing.

Critical fire conditions continue across a sliver of Southern California, including Oxnard, Palmdale and Thousand Oaks. A wider area is facing an elevated risk both there and along the border with Arizona. There are red flag fire warnings up in the region through 10 p.m.

It is Santa Ana season, where high pressure over the inland US matches up with low pressure off the Pacific coast. That creates a flow of wind heading offshore. As the winds cross the mountain ranges they dry out and heat up. The dry air can leave vegetation parched and winds can quickly spread any fires that spark. Farther to the north these winds are also called Sundowners or Diablos.

A large swath of the southern and central US extending throughout the Midwest are seeing temperatures drop, which has prompted freeze warnings in the area. Meanwhile coastal flood advisories and warnings are up along from Maryland to Connecticut, including New York City and Long Island, as tides are expected to run higher than normal.

This week, the International Energy Agency published its flagship report: The World Energy Outlook. It's dominating climate news because what the IEA says makes a big difference to how governments tweak their energy policies. But how did an organization formed by a handful of countries in response to the 1973 oil crisis come to hold so much influence over our response to the climate crisis? For the answer, this week we're revisiting one of our favorite episodes: an interview with Fatih Birol, the head of the IEA about how the IEA has cemented its role in the energy transition. Subscribe to Zero on Apple or Spotify to get new episodes every Thursday.

BloombergNEF has opened applications for its Pioneers awards for startups working to solve three major climate challenges. Those include reducing buildings' carbon footprints, easing the bottleneck to getting clean energy on the grid and creating fuels that don't fry the planet. Read more about the program here. Applications are open through Oct. 27.