Climate Change

Margaret Torn, a senior scientist in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)’s Earth & Environmental Sciences Area (EESA), has been named by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) as a 2017 AGU Fellow. Every year, the AGU Fellows program recognizes members who have made exceptional contributions to the Earth and space sciences. Vetted by a committee of AGU Fellows, honorees represent no more than 0.1 percent of AGU’s 60,000 members.

Getting to 100 percent renewable energy in Hawaii by 20245 means granting energy access to "everyone, everywhere," said Holmes Hummel, director of Clean Energy Works and former senior policy advisor in the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Policy and International Affairs. "It gives me hope that 30 years after 2045, we may be able to celebrate an energy sector that is fossil-free worldwide," she said. To do that, the International Energy Agency said that $1 trillion of energy investment capital must be deployed every year for over the next decade.

Rising sea levels, as well as droughts and earthquakes, threaten the levees protecting the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta, which supplies 25 million Californians with fresh water. But the state’s solution isn’t to build higher but lower—150 ft below the earth.

Fellow Laura Wisland says losing solar energy during the eclipse isn't a big deal for grid operators in California and elsewhere, since they can take advantage of a range of alternative options for electricity generation. However, she is hoping the state can back-fill the lost power by convincing Californian's to use less power during the two-hour eclipse window.

Ouachita has embraced an energy efficiency financing method known as Pay As You Save (PAYS), which uses an innovative method to fund retrofits. Rather than loan the money to pay for an improvement, and saddle the customer with debt, the PAYS method uses an on-bill tariff that is tied to the the home's meter. There are some specific metrics that must be present, including payoff length and whether a member co-pay is needed, but the end result is instant on-bill savings for the customer and decreased load for the cooperative. ...

The changes to California’s climate since 1980 — higher temperatures, with more extreme swings between droughts and floods — are caused directly by human activity and will accelerate rapidly unless greenhouse gas emissions are cut sharply, according to a new federal climate report that is awaiting action by the Trump administration.

The Trump administration began the formal process to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, but says it’s willing to "re-engage" if terms more favorable to the U.S. are met. The State Department said it notified the United Nations that the U.S. will pull out of the global agreement as soon as it can under the terms of the 2015 accord, but President Donald Trump would agree to remain in the deal was reconfigured to be better for U.S. interests ... Observers said they doubted the administration truly intended to renegotiate the climate deal.

Potent, climate-warming gases are being emitted into the atmosphere but are not being recorded in official inventories, a BBC investigation has found....Among the key provisions of the Paris climate deal, signed by 195 countries in December 2015, is the requirement that every country, rich or poor, has to submit an inventory of its greenhouse-gas emissions every two years. Under UN rules, most countries produce "bottom-up" records, based on how many car journeys are made or how much energy is used for heating homes and offices.

To slow climate change, lawmakers in a handful of states are proposing bills or passing laws that convert their local electricity grids to renewable sources. ...