More renewables and new steps forward in energy efficiency, but much more coal instead of gas made dear by the war in Ukraine. And the environment presents us with the bill, dramatic: it becomes even more difficult, perhaps impossible, to meet the goal of limiting global warming to a maximum of 1,5 degrees by 2100 compared to the pre-industrial era. The signals come from the main world centers of climate and environmental analysis: in the coming weeks they will officially update their diagnoses but someone is going ahead by painting an even more disturbing scenario than what was known and feared.
Here, in the Old Continent, the paradigm of disaster is given to us, so to speak, by Germany. With a perfect summary of the contradictory moves that risk accelerating the catastrophe.
One step forward and two steps back
The ingredients? Here they are: in Germany there is a substantial boost to renewables and energy efficiency, but it is more than canceled out by the new massive recourse, officially "temporary" but we don't know, precisely to the most harmful fuel for the climate effect: the coal. The German cousins burned it, to push the power plants and to continue to feed as traditional uses have always done in the most energy-intensive industrial sectors such as the steel industry, almost 20% more than the previous year. In truth, they are not the only ones: always on this side of the world, Poland has burned 12% more coal, while in the rest of the planet, the sad primacy of China remains, which alone continues to transform half of all the world's coal, with India following more and more after doubling its use from 2007 to today.
Does any justification really come from the gas emergency? The fact is that our German partners behaved in a very different way from what we did in thermoelectric production. Where in Italy the impact of the climate effect it is even more evident that in other parts of Europe, the old coal-fired power plants have been practically closed, and what little is left is the result of a drastic (and costly) reconversion to the very latest technologies for depolluting the black mineral, as in the case of the Civitavecchia plant in Lazio. The Germans, on the other hand, preferred to put many of their coal or even lignite-fired plants prudently on standby. And to replace the gas subjected to the bloodletting caused by the war, they promptly reactivated them, rather than canceling in 2022 the good results they achieved in the energy efficiency of the industrial sector, accompanied by an excellent result in photovoltaic production, increased by 23% compared to 2021 thanks to the entry into operation of new plants and to a sun that was more generous in the period.
And so Germany – like remarks the think tank Agora Energiewende – has blatantly missed all the climate targets set for last year, emitting 150 million tonnes of CO2 compared to the 139 million tonnes required by climate protection regulations which were supposed to ensure alignment with international targets. This is despite the combined effect of the greater efficiency of the industrial sector and the squeeze on consumption caused precisely by the high price of gas, which led to a 5% decrease in overall consumption.
The new ban from the EU
To anticipate the new global warning that will undoubtedly come in the coming weeks from all the most quoted analysts and in the meantime the report of the climate observatory of the European Commission, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) in its 2022 report which confirms all the signals that have already been circulating for weeks: the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2022 has reached levels that have not been recorded since practically immemorial times since the globe went through its great epochal passages between the glaciations and the boiling of the other geological eras. In a dismal record, which has not been reached for at least 2 million years, in 2022 the average concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere marked 417 parts per million (ppm), more than two more than in 2021. Historical record in memory man also beaten for the average concentration of methane in the atmosphere, which reached the threshold of 1900 parts per billion, more than 10 more than the previous year. This confirms that even natural gas, indicated by almost everyone as a transitional fuel towards the clean energy of the future, must in any case be handled (and consumed) with due care.
Even the ocean rebels
In the meantime, ocean warming also sets a new record, as ENEA points out here in Italy, citing the study Another year of record heat for the oceans just published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Science, created by an international team of 24 researchers including two Italians: Simona Simoncelli of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) and Franco Reseghetti of ENEA. In 2022, the ocean heat index (OHC) between the surface and 2000 meters depth increased compared to 2021 by about 10 Zetta Joule (ZJ). A value equivalent "to about 100 times the world's electricity production in 2021, about 325 times that of China, 634 times that of the United States and just under 9.700 times that of Italy".
The consequences? Dramatic: an increase in stratification, i.e. "the separation of water into layers which can reduce up to the point of canceling mixing and exchanges between the surface and deeper areas" with an anomalous increase in salinity in already salty areas and vice versa a decrease in already relatively fresh areas, altering “the way heat, carbon and oxygen are exchanged between the ocean and the atmosphere”. This is also the source of many of the climatic upheavals that modify marine biodiversity "inducing, for example, important fish species to move, causing critical situations in communities dependent on fishing and their economy" and above all contribute significantly to the growth of those "anomalies at meteorological" in the name of the alternation between long droughts and sudden floods that has created so many problems in recent months also for our country.
