#climate trace

[greenfue]

بيانات انبعاثات السيارات في المدن أقل من الواقع بنسبة 70%

بيانات انبعاثات السيارات في المدن أقل من الواقع بنسبة 70%

[greenfue]

تقديرات الانبعاثات قد تكون أقل بـ70% في بيانات مناخية عالمية جديدة

تقديرات الانبعاثات قد تكون أقل بـ70% في بيانات مناخية عالمية جديدة

[greenfue]

Cop30.. 12 دولة توقع على إعلان مكافحة التضليل المناخي لأول مرة في تاريخ الأمم المتحدة

ملخص يومي من قمة المناخ.. Cop30 اليوم الثالث شهد اليوم الثالث من قمة المناخ الـ30 (Cop30) في بيلém فعاليات مكثفة أبرزت صراعًا مستمرًا بين مصالح الدول الكبرى وحركات العدالة المناخية والشعوب المتضررة من أزمة الكوكب. مؤتمر المناخ كوب 30- البرازيلcop30 في بيليم البرازيل قمة الشعب ومشاركة المجتمع المدني وصلت إلى المدينة المستضيفة أكثر من 100 قارب تحمل نحو 5,000 ناشط من السكان الأصليين ومدافعين عن…

Cop30.. 12 دولة توقع على إعلان مكافحة التضليل المناخي لأول مرة في تاريخ الأمم المتحدة

[alicemccombs]

Former VP Al Gore unveils new global database serving as pollution watchdog: 'They have simply ignored lots of emissions that we can measure

Former U.S. vice president Al Gore and his global coalition, Climate TRACE, are helping companies decarbonize their supply chains.

[rjzimmerman]

Opinion | The Global Carbon Surveillance State Is Coming

The conventional picture of climate change and what is causing it is about to change.

Excerpt from this Op-Ed by David Wallace-Wells from the New York Times:

For decades, those of us wondering why so little action had been taken to reduce carbon emissions, and why the public felt so little urgency about that failure, would sometimes lament that carbon dioxide was invisible. Unlike the pollution that smogged up cities, set rivers on fire and inspired the Clean Air and Water Acts here and similar legislation abroad, the stuff that was damaging the climate was being put into the atmosphere without anyone really seeing it.

That’s why one of the most fascinating developments from this year’s major climate conference, COP27, which kicked off Nov. 6 with the U.N. secretary general António Guterres declaring that the world was on a “highway to climate hell,” is a new online tool released by the nonprofit coalition Climate Trace that allows us to see emissions in near-real time.

For a while, we’ve used ballpark estimates for emissions from countries, industries and the planet as a whole. The point of the Climate Trace project is to bring it down to the level of individual polluting facilities: to make it possible to track climate-damaging carbon released from more than 72,000 “steel and cement factories, power plants, oil and gas fields, cargo ships, cattle feedlots,” as The Times put it — to name just a handful of the sources.

The Climate Trace project doesn’t turn that carbon from invisible to red or green, and it is only one of many recent efforts to better assess the real-time state of emissions rather than imprecise approximations and modeling. But it marks another step toward what is beginning to seem like the inevitable development of a sort of global carbon surveillance state — one which, even independent of any global enforcement mechanism, promises to change some aspects of the conventional picture of climate change and what is causing it.

The basics, of course, remain the same: The world’s carbon emissions are produced primarily from the burning of fossil fuel, and the power, transportation and industrial sectors dominate. But examining the flow of pollution in a more granular and detailed way does change some features of the carbon landscape in three key ways.

To begin with, methane begins to look much more significant.

Second, it starts to seem less intuitive that we should build our understanding of emissions and decarbonization around the unit of the nation.

The emerging surveillance state also points the way to a third change in the way we think about emissions, offering another piece of the emerging framework for global sanctions and climate litigation. In the United States, dozens of lawsuits are already proceeding against individual companies, part of a broader global movement to push climate action into the courts to hold nations accountable to their own promises, as well as corporations for their damages and greenwashing. Clarity of data helps here, as it will in any future effort to incorporate emissions into trade agreements, too.

[rjzimmerman]

Our Story - Climate TRACE

Climate TRACE makes climate action faster and easier by mobilizing the global tech community to track greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Interesting concept: measuring greenhouse gas emissions using four different filters (carbon dioxide equivalent, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide) for the type of emissions, determined by country and by sector (e.g., transportation, mining, manufacturing), or by global aggregate. The on the home page, narrated by Al Gore, tells you about Climate Trace, with some additional information. The menu (upper right) leads to you choices for your exploring. I fiddled with all of them. The map is a little clumsy, which might reflect limitations on my computer or the download speed, but once it gets rolling, it is really interesting.

Example from my fiddling around. I used the “Compare Assets” interactive, to compare two countries, the US and China, in the manufacturing sector, and for a carbon dioxide equivalent. Here’s what I got:

Clearly, China’s manufacturing sector emits more greenhouse gas than does the US’s sector over the period chosen (100 years). Could be lots of reasons why, including the number of manufacturing facilities or the degree to which emissions are controlled, and so on.

I noted with interest the number one emitter in the US: the US Steel Works in Gary, Indiana. I was born and raised in Gary, and I get that completely. The air was foul.

[rjzimmerman]

A nonprofit backed by Al Gore and other big environmental donors says it can track emissions down to individual power plants, oil fields and cargo ships.

Notes: Heat anomaly data from Oct. 25, 2021. Steel plant hot spots shown are based on average heat anomaly between 2017 and 2021. Sources: TransitionZero and Climate TRACE (analysis with Sentinel-2 satellite image by Copernicus); Planet Labs (satellite image for the graphic). By Zach Levitt.

Notes: Emissions include all greenhouse gases expressed in carbon dioxide equivalents. Data includes over 800 identified steel plants. Sources: TransitionZero and Climate TRACE. By Zach Levitt.

Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:

Upstream from Shanghai along the Yangtze River, a sprawling factory complex in eastern China is churning out tens of millions of tons of steel a year — and immense quantities of planet-warming gases.

The plant’s owner has not disclosed how much the site emits. Now, though, researchers say that by peering down from space, they have found that the factory’s emissions are likely higher than those of any other steel plant on Earth.

Here’s how they did it.

Their estimates are part a new global compendium of emissions released on Wednesday by Climate TRACE, a nonprofit coalition of environmental groups, technology companies and academic scientists. By using software to scour data from satellites and other sources, Climate TRACE says it can project emissions not just for whole countries and industries, but for individual polluting facilities. It catalogs steel and cement factories, power plants, oil and gas fields, cargo ships, cattle feedlots — 72,612 emitters and counting, a hyperlocal atlas of the human activities that are altering the planet’s chemistry.

Scientists have been measuring atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases for decades. They know how much average levels are rising worldwide, and they know that burning of fossil fuels is the main driver. It’s when they try to apportion the blame more precisely — How much are specific industries and companies emitting? In which countries? — that things get complicated.

Governments and organizations don’t have monitoring devices strapped to every smokestack and tailpipe, so they generally project emissions using measures of activity: how much coal is burned, how much steel is produced, how much traffic is on the roads. Such estimates aren’t always precise, however, and it can be tricky to avoid double counting.

Satellites from NASA and its Japanese and Chinese counterparts can measure amounts of greenhouse gases in the column of air beneath them, but clouds and nighttime darkness obstruct their observations. And satellite measurements don’t directly indicate where or when the gases were emitted. Gases mix and get blown around by weather. They linger in the sky for years, even centuries.

Climate TRACE says it can produce emissions estimates that are more up-to-date than existing ones, and that rely less on information reported by governments about their own countries’ emissions. It does this largely by mining satellite imagery and other data to get a more precise measure of individual facilities’ production activity, then estimating their emissions.

With steel plants, for instance, the group uses satellite measurements of the heat from blast furnaces to estimate steel output. (The owner of the steel plant in China, Shagang Group, declined to comment.) For power stations, Climate TRACE uses satellite images of the vapor wafting from their chimneys to predict electricity generation.

The group’s analysis suggests that the oil and gas industry emits far more than countries have previously reported, in part because of underestimated emissions from flaring, or the burning of unwanted methane, and the large gas leaks known as “super-emitter events.” In other sectors, though, Climate TRACE’s estimates broadly align with existing ones, said one of the group’s researchers, Gavin McCormick.

[voisplanet]

Climate TRACE’ for Real-time Monitoring of Emissions

Climate TRACE is a data-based project which claims to discover previously unrecorded GHG emissions, mainly from shipping and aviation. The project draws on data from satellites from different countries and complex computer analysis.