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Heat loss to air change

In May and June 2019 four short articles on this blog discussed heat loss from buildings through air changes, air quality in buildings, and methods of measuring rates of air change.  “ A Change of Air” noted that an appreciable proportion of the total energy supplied to a building may be lost through excessive air change rates and outlined methods of measuring the rates through pressure testing, energy balance calculation, and CO2 decay. “Indoor air quality” described the main groups of pollutants which affect indoor air quality, and “CO2 in the Home” discussed indoor CO2 levels, how they might affect the health of occupants, and their measurement.  CO2 decay methods and their limitations were discussed in more detail in “Measuring Air Change Rates by CO2 Decay”. More recent work will be outlined below, referencing papers published from 2021 to 2024. Nazaroff (2021) presented a review of field studies that measured residential air-change rates. These were mainly in north America, no
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Citizen’s climate assemblies

A Westminster Forum conference held in January was entitled “Priorities for UK climate policy following COP28”. Topics included financial markets, legal commitments, the Climate & Ecology Bill, a just transition, buildings and energy, and the Global Cooling Pledge. The introductory session addressed broader issues such as public attitudes to greenhouse gas reduction; arguments against climate action; climate and the social contract; and the role of citizens’ climate assemblies. Following the UK Parliament’s decision in 2019 to set in law a commitment to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, a citizens’ assembly on climate change was set up to consider how this target should be reached. The issues which it addressed included how we travel; what we eat and buy; how we heat our homes and generate our electricity; how we use the land; and the trade-offs involved in reaching decisions on these issues. The Climate Assembly UK Report, The path to net zero , is the outcome of this as
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Beyond Net Zero

A recent BBC news item about global climate change included the claim by a UK academic that we have only to stop emitting carbon and the temperature will start to fall. The speaker perhaps intended to provoke thought rather than to be taken literally; this post will consider some answers to the question of what would happen to earth’s temperature if greenhouse gas emissions could indeed be suddenly and completely stopped. In 2007 NASA’s Earth Observatory Climate blog responded to the question: “Even if all emissions were to stop today, the Earth’s average surface temperature would climb another 0.6 degrees or so over the next several decades before temperatures stopped rising.” The single reason given was that “a great deal of the excess energy is stored in the ocean” and the thermal inertia associated with its huge heat capacity would result in a time lag of several decades before temperatures stopped rising. NASA pointed out that “If we wait until we feel the amount or impact of gl
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Finance and Climate

“Fossil fuel financing from the world’s 60 largest banks has reached USD $5.5 trillion in the seven years since the adoption of the Paris Agreement”, according to the report Banking on Climate Chaos (2022). It was published by a group of environmental and campaigning organisations, and its topics include the commitments of banks to fossil fuel finance, their policies, and fossil fuel expansion and trends. The group’s website lists the twelve banks which have done most to finance fossil fuels globally and data are provided for sixty banks with the sums involved for each year from 2016 to 2022. The policies of the banks are summarised in terms of projects, expansion, and phase-out. The funding data can also be searched for each of the several hundred companies supported. A graphic shows the funding flows from ten key banks to twenty top fossil fuel companies. Data on financing are also given for sectors such as tar sands, Artic oil and gas, fracking, and coal mining. An Oil and Gas Poli
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Local Authorities and Net-Zero

The report “Local government and net zero in England” from the National Audit Office (NAO, 2021) estimated that 91% percent of the 232 local authorities in its sample had adopted at least one commitment to decarbonise in line with government net zero policy. It gave the total number of principal local authorities in England – London borough councils, unitary authorities, metropolitan councils, county councils and district councils – as 333. The report focussed on “local authority work that contributes to the UK’s net zero target rather than on climate work more broadly”, on contributions to emissions reductions within the UK, rather than on climate change adaptation or on emissions from imported goods and “on the relationship between the UK government and local authorities in England for net zero.” The list of key findings indicated that central government had not developed with local authorities “any overall expectations about their roles in achieving the national net zero target” and
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SDGs, Sunak’s retrenchment, and the UK carbon budget

A June editorial in Nature (2023) commented that “the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are heading for the rocks” although the “failure to meet even one of the SDGs is not for want of trying.” It referred to the 2023 Global Sustainable Development Report, published a few days previously, in which “an independent group of science advisers to the UN proposed a way forwards” (GSDR, 2023). The Nature editorial promised a series of articles looking forward to the September session of the UN General Assembly in New York, at which the Sustainable Development Goals would be debated. The UN described this 78th session as marking “a crucial milestone in the journey towards achieving the 2030 Agenda and the urgent need to put the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) back on track.” (UN, 2023) The General Debate took place between 19 th and 26 th September. On September 20 th , The Guardian carried an article about PM Sunak’s plans to delay some climate targets, in order “to save money fo
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Climate fiction and climate action

The interactions between climate fiction and environmental activism are the subject of a paper by Alacovska and Holt (2023). They describe environmental activism as “grassroots, decentralised social movements” which attempt to address issues of “inequality and systemic injustice arising from anthropogenic climate change, environmental degradation and ecological collapse” by means of non-hierarchical collective organising. The main object of their paper is to propose methods for future research, but here we will only draw on their introduction to the subject and its background. They believe that the popular genre of climate fiction influences climate activism , with the potential to stimulate the imagination and to energise the “quest for the attainment of better climate alternatives”. This stands in contrast with much writing on climate change, which is concerned with data and “mathematical prediction models for forecasting and comprehending the gravity of global environmental challeng
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