Farmers looted bags of DAP fertiliser from a warehouse in the third such incident in Chambal division of Madhya Pradesh in the last five days, police said. There is an acute shortage of DAP, especially in the northern parts of the state just before the winter crop sowing season and farmers are becoming desperate, they added.
The farmers in the region have also resorted to blocking roads, demanding distribution of DAP. Most of the warehouses are almost empty and the supply is not in consonance with the demand, said local government officials.
Chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on Tuesday said there was no shortage of fertiliser in the state. MP requires 4 lakh tonne of DAP for the Rabi season and the state has already received 2.5 lakh tonne, the CM said.
Home minister Narottam Mishra, however, said on Thursday that there were reports of illegal hoarding and supply of substandard fertilisers in DAP bags and the government has decided to invoke national security act (NSA) against the businessman for black marketing and illegal hoarding of fertiliser.
On Monday farmers, who were waiting in the queue in grain market in Sabalgarh in Morena, looted more than 50 bags of fertiliser from a truck, police said. Police said a group of farmers stole fertiliser bags from warehouses of cooperative societies in Fup and Mehgaon area of Bhind in two separate incidents. An FIR has been registered only in one of these cases, said police.
Bhind superintendent of police Manoj Kumar Singh suspended Fup police station in-charge Anita Gurjar for not registering FIR and taking action against farmers who stole fertilizers on Saturday night.
State officials and experts said the major reasons behind the crisis are changes in crop pattern, black marketing and farmers defaulting on loan repayments. Farmers are eligible for fertiliser at subsidised rates only if they have repaid loans.
Agriculture expert Vinayak Tomar said: “ 61% of total mustard production of the state takes place in Morena, Bhind, Sheopur and Gwalior. With the sudden increase in the price of mustard from ₹4800 per quintal to ₹8000/per quintal, many farmers, who used to sow wheat and bajra, have started sowing mustard for winter crop also. Mid-September and October is the best time for sowing mustard so the demand for fertiliser has increased suddenly.”
Then there is black marketing.
“The (state) agriculture department gives fertilisers to cooperative societies according to the agricultural land of registered farmers. There is a ban on open sale of fertilisers from the societies to stop black marketing in UP and Rajasthan (the fertiliser from the state is illegally shipped there). Similarly, societies are not providing fertilisers to defaulter farmers, who have not cleared their loans,” said Shiv Mangal Singh, former president of district cooperative bank in Morena. He added that the DAP has premium rate of ₹1200 per bag but being sold at ₹1500.
Gwalior and Morena district administration raided warehouses of two traders in past two days and recovered more than 200 bags, which were being hoarded.
Over the hundreds of thousands of years of our existence on the planet, modern humans have managed to adapt to a huge range of climates—from the arid heat of the Sahara Desert to the icy chill of the Arctic. But we have our limits. If temperatures and humidity rise high enough, even a robustly healthy person sitting still in the shade with access to water will succumb to the heat.
As heat waves grow hotter and more frequent, research has suggested some places will begin to see events that reach that limit of human tolerance in the coming decades. But now a new study shows they already have. The findings, published on Friday in Science Advances, underscore the need to rapidly curtail emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases and develop policies that will help vulnerable populations stay cool.
High temperatures prompt the human body to produce sweat, which cools the skin as it evaporates. But when sky-high humidity is also involved, evaporation slows down and eventually stops. That point comes when the so-called the wet-bulb temperature—a measure that combines air temperature and humidity—reaches 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit).
Previous analyses using climate models suggested that parts of the Persian Gulf region, the Indian subcontinent and eastern China would regularly see heat waves breaching this limit by later in the century. But they looked at broad areas over several hours, which can mask more localized, shorter-term spikes in extreme conditions. To see what other researchers might be missing, “we decided to zoom in a little bit closer,” says Colin Raymond, who conducted the new study when he was a Ph.D. student at Columbia University.
Raymond and his co-authors examined temperature data from more than 7,000 weather stations around the world going back to 1979. They found that extreme humid heat occurs twice as often now as it did four decades ago and that the severity of this heat is increasing. Many places have hit wet-bulb temperatures of 31 degrees C and higher. And several have recorded readings above the crucial 35-degree-C mark. Identifying that trend is “important because it builds on [weather] station data, which is the most direct evidence that we usually have,” says Massachusetts Institute of Technology climate scientist Elfatih Eltahir, who was not involved in the new research but has done previous work on the topic.
These humid heat extremes have already emerged in the same places that earlier modeling studies had identified as future hotspots. Most are coastal areas that are both near warm bodies of water, which can supply abundant moisture, and subject to soaring overland temperatures. Others, particularly in the Indian subcontinent, are regions where monsoon winds usher in moisture-laden air.
Given the paucity of weather stations in some of the involved places, such as parts of Pakistan, “there’s probably even higher [wet-bulb] values out there,” says Raymond, who now works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The highest extremes were typically only reached for an hour or two, so they do not yet necessarily hit the limit of human tolerance. But such events will start to last longer and cover larger areas in a warmer future. Also, even much lower wet-bulb temperatures can be deadly, particularly to the elderly or those with underlying health conditions. The historic heat waves that killed thousands of people across much of Europe in 2003 and in Russia in 2010 never had a wet-bulb temperature above 28 degrees C. “These are very, very nasty conditions,” Eltahir says.
The new paper also found that parts of the world will regularly see wet-bulb temperatures higher than the 35-degree-C limit if global average temperatures rise just 2.5 degrees C above those of the preindustrial climate. The world has already warmed about 1 degree C above that level. “These kinds of events can become a regular occurrence with not much more warming than we’ve experienced,” says Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who was also not involved with the study.
That projection underscores the need to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming as much as possible, which would restrict how often such events might happen in the future. It also raises several questions, including what policies governments will need to develop to safeguard vulnerable groups, such as establishing cooling centers for elderly residents or sending out warnings before heat waves. And industries whose workers toil outdoors—such as agriculture and construction—may need to shift their schedules to cooler times of day. Even in the abundantly air-conditioned U.S., heat currently kills more people than cold, floods or hurricanes.
The production of renewable energy is increasing every year. But after analysing the growth rates of wind and solar power in 60 countries, researchers at Chalmers, Lund University and Central European University in Vienna, Austria conclude that virtually no country is moving sufficiently fast to avoid global warming of 1.5°C or even 2°C.
"This is the first time that the maximum growth rate in individual countries has been accurately measured, and it shows the enormous scale of the challenge of replacing traditional energy sources with renewables, as well as the need to explore diverse technologies and scenarios", says Jessica Jewell, Associate Professor in Energy Transitions at Chalmers University of Technology.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has identified energy scenarios compatible with keeping global warming under 1.5°C or 2°C. Most of these scenarios envision very rapid growth of renewable electricity: on average about 1.4 per cent of total global electricity supply per year for both wind and solar power, and over 3 per cent in more ambitious solar power scenarios. But the researchers’ new findings show that achieving such rapid growth has so far only been possible for a few countries.
Measuring and predicting the growth of new technologies like renewable energy is difficult, as they do not grow linearly. Instead, the growth usually follows a so-called S-curve. This means that when production of wind or solar power begins in a country it first accelerates exponentially, then stabilizes to linear growth for a while, and in the end slows down as the market becomes saturated.
"Scholars typically assess technological growth by measuring how fast a given technology reaches market saturation. But for wind and solar power this method does not work, because we don’t know when and at what levels they will saturate. We came up with a new method: to use mathematical models to measure the slope of the S-curve, i.e. the maximum growth rate achieved at its steepest point. It is an entirely novel way to look at the growth of new technologies", says Jessica Jewell.
Analysis of 60 countries
The researchers use these mathematical models to estimate the maximum growth rates achieved in the 60 largest countries which together produce ca 95% of the world’s electricity. They show that the average rate of onshore wind power growth achieved at the steepest point of the S-curves is 0.8% (with half of the countries falling within the 0.6-1.1% range) of the total electricity supply per year. For solar power, these estimates are somewhat lower: 0.6% on average (range 0.4-0.9%).
Higher rates, comparable to those required in climate scenarios, are indeed sometimes achieved, but typically in smaller countries. For example, wind power in Ireland expanded at some 2.6% per year while solar power in Chile has grown at 1.8% per year. However, fast growth is much rarer in larger countries. Among larger countries, only Germany has so far been able to sustain growth of wind power comparable with median climate scenarios (above 1.5% per year).
"In other words, to stay on track for climate targets, the whole world should build wind power as fast as Germany has recently" says Aleh Cherp, a professor in Environmental Sciences and Policy at Central European University and Lund University.
(As a side-note, Sweden has been growing wind power (including offshore) at about 1.6% per year in the last decade but this is at the upper end of the growth we observed in other countries.)
Why late adopter grow equally slow
To investigate future prospects of renewables, the researchers have also compared their growth in the pioneering countries (mostly in the European Union and other high-income industrialised nations) and in the rest of the world, where solar and wind power were introduced later. The latter group includes most developing and emerging economies that would be responsible for the bulk of global energy use and thus need to deploy most of wind and solar power in the 21st century. It is hypothetically possible that these countries could skip the trial-and-error stage which slowed down the early adopters, and thus leapfrog to higher growth rates. Unfortunately, the researchers discover that this is not the case.
"There are usually reasons why they are late to enter the race. It can be because of vested interests, weaker institutions, and an investment environment that doesn’t support new technologies as well as from unsuitable geography. Those reasons have prevented renewable energy from taking off in the first place and make it especially difficult to replicate or exceed the growth rates achieved in leaders. Thus, we cannot automatically assume that the countries which introduce wind and solar power later would learn from prior experience and grow these technologies faster", says Cherp.
Challenges for policy makers
The study highlights several policy challenges. One is for high-income countries to avoid the slowdown of solar and wind expansion, recently observed in several places. Another is for major Asian economies such as India and China to increase the growth rates so that renewables start growing faster than electricity demand and eventually push out fossil fuels. This can be achieved by widening the cost gap between renewables and the fossils, which include subsidies, phasing out or taxing competing technologies and supporting grid integration.
"Finally, we should recognize that there may be natural limits to how fast wind and solar can be expanded and thus we should systematically investigate the feasibility of other climate solutions", says Cherp.
Plans by governments to extract fossil fuels up to 2030 are incompatible with keeping global temperatures to safe levels, says the UN.
The UNEP production gap report says countries will drill or mine more than double the levels needed to keep the 1.5C threshold alive.
Oil and gas recovery is set to rise sharply with only a modest decrease in coal.
There has been little change since the first report was published in 2019.
With the COP26 climate conference just over a week away, there is already a huge focus on the carbon-cutting ambitions of the biggest emitters.
But despite the flurry of net zero emission goals and the increased pledges of many countries, some of the biggest oil, gas and coal producers have not set out plans for the rapid reductions in fossil fuels that scientists say are necessary to limit temperatures in coming years.
Earlier this year, researchers from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned of the dangers for humanity of allowing temperatures to rise by more than 1.5C this century. To keep under this threshold will require cuts in carbon emissions of around 45% by 2030 based on 2010 levels.
But instead of curbing carbon, many of the biggest emitting countries are also planning to significantly increase their production of fossil fuels, according to the UN.
The production gap report finds that countries plan to produce around 110% more fossil fuel than would be compatible with a 1.5C temperature rise by the end of this century. The plans are around 45% more than what's needed to keep the temperature rise to 2C.
According to the study, coal production will drop but gas will increase the most over the next 20 years, to levels that are simply incompatible with the Paris agreement.
The report profiles 15 major production countries including Australia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the US and UK.
Most governments continue to provide significant policy support for fossil fuel production, the authors say.
"The research is clear: global coal, oil, and gas production must start declining immediately and steeply to be consistent with limiting long-term warming to 1.5C," says Ploy Achakulwisut, a lead author on the report from the Stockholm Environment Institute.
"However, governments continue to plan for and support levels of fossil fuel production that are vastly in excess of what we can safely burn."
While countries have devoted far more of their recovery spending after the Covid pandemic towards fossil fuel activities, there are some positives when it comes to financing.
Funding for oil, coal and gas from multilateral banks has decreased significantly in recent years - and also from some of the richer nations.
"This report shows, once again, a simple but powerful truth: we need to stop pumping oil and gas from the ground if we are to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement," said Andrea Meza, Costa Rica's minister for environment and energy.
"We must cut with both hands of the scissors, addressing demand and supply of fossil fuels simultaneously. That is why, together with Denmark, we are leading the creation of the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance to put an end to the expansion of fossil fuel extraction, plan a just transition for workers and start winding down existing production in a managed way."
Climate change is set to become the “defining narrative of human health,” a top medical journal warned Wednesday — triggering food shortages, deadly disasters and disease outbreaks that would dwarf the toll of the coronavirus. But aggressive efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions from human activities could avert millions of unnecessary deaths, according to the analysis from more than 100 doctors and health experts.
In its annual “Countdown on health and climate change,” the Lancet provides a sobering assessment of the dangers posed by a warming planet. More than a dozen measures of humanity’s exposure to health-threatening weather extremes have climbed since last year’s report.
“Humanity faces a crucial turning point,” the doctors say, with nations poised to spend trillions of dollars on economic recovery from the pandemic and world leaders set to meet in Glasgow for a major U.N. climate conference in less than two weeks. The United States is working to assemble a set of climate policies to help coax bigger commitments from other top emitters at that conference, even as the Biden administration is scaling back its climate legislation, given opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), who represents a coal-producing state.
Rising temperatures have led to higher rates of heat illness, causing farmworkers to collapse in fields and elderly people to die in their apartments. Insects carrying tropical diseases have multiplied and spread toward the poles. The amount of plant pollen in the air is increasing, worsening asthma and other respiratory conditions. Extreme floods and catastrophic storms have boosted the risk of cholera and other waterborne diseases. Smoke from fires in California infiltrates the lungs and then the bloodstreams of people as far away as Texas, Ohio and New York. Droughts intensify, crops fail, hunger stalks millions of the world’s most vulnerable people.
“If nothing else will drive the message home about the present threat that climate change poses to our global society, this should,” said Lachlan McIver, a Doctors Without Borders physician who was not involved in writing the Lancet report. “Your health, my health, the health of our parents and our children are at stake.”
The Lancet study is just the latest salvo from health professionals demanding a swift end to burning fossil fuels and other planet-warming activities. In a special report released last week, the World Health Organization called climate change “the single biggest health threat facing humanity,” warning that its effects could be more catastrophic and enduring than the coronavirus pandemic. Dozens of public health experts are headed to the U.N. climate summit starting at the end of the month, aiming to convince world leaders that they must take bolder action to curb their nations’ carbon output.
Yet just half of countries surveyed said they have a national climate and health strategy in place, the Lancet study said. Trends in renewable energy generation and adaptation initiatives have improved only slightly. And most of the world’s biggest emitters, including the United States, continue to subsidize fossil fuels at rates of tens of billions of dollars per year — rivaling the amounts they spend on public health.
The outcomes of national spending debates and international climate negotiations will either “lock humanity into an increasingly extreme and unpredictable environment,” the report says, or “deliver a future of improved health, reduced inequity, and economic and environmental sustainability.”
“Lowering greenhouse gas emissions is a prescription,” said Renee Salas, an emergency medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital who helped write the “Countdown” and an accompanying policy brief aimed at U.S. lawmakers. “The oath I took as a doctor is to protect the health of my patients. Demanding action on climate change is how I can do that.”
The world has not committed yet to cutting emissions enough to avert the worst effects of warming. Based on countries’ current pledges under the Paris climate accord, average temperatures are on track to increase by a catastrophic 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.9 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. The planet has already warmed about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the preindustrial era.
And a U.N. report released Wednesday found that governments are still planning to boost fossil fuel use on a scale far beyond even those insufficient targets. G-20 countries have directed more new funding to fossil fuels than clean energy since the start of the pandemic, the report says.
The United States is one of the worst offenders, slated to increase oil and gas production by a combined nine exajoules by 2030 — the equivalent of about 215 million tons of oil — despite President Biden’s pledge to more than halve emissions by the end of the decade.
“A carbon-intensive COVID-19 recovery would irreversibly prevent the world from meeting climate commitments,” the Lancet report warns.
The report draws repeated parallels between the coronavirus pandemic and the health crisis posed by climate change. Both have exposed and exacerbated inequality, and highlight the folly of prioritizing short-term economic interests over long-term consequences.
Yet the death toll from climate change will outstrip that of the coronavirus, the scientists warned — unless drastic action is taken to avert further warming and adapt to changes underway.
Already, climate change routinely threatens to overwhelm health systems’ capacity to respond. When record-high temperatures scorched the Pacific Northwest this summer, the rate of emergency room admissions spiked to 69 times higher than the same period in 2019.
David Markel, an emergency physician at Swedish Medical Center’s Cherry Hill campus in Seattle, said at the time that the surge of patients rivaled the worst days of the pandemic. He and his colleagues were treating patients in hallways, stuffing ice packs into people’s armpits to bring their temperatures down.
“This is going to impact us all,” Markel said. “The more crises like this we face, the more clear it is.”
Just 0.3 percent of global climate change adaptation funding has been directed at health systems, the Lancet report says, despite an explosion of evidence for the health consequences of unchecked emissions. In the past month, studies in academic journals have reported the following:
El Niño weather patterns — which are projected to intensify as the planet warms — cause about 6 million children to go hungry.
Air pollution causes tens of thousands of early deaths among Americans each year, even at low levels deemed safe by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The warming of the Amazon, combined with deforestation, will expose roughly 11 million people to potentially lethal heat by the end of the century.
This drumbeat of new studies has been accentuated by a crescendo of recent climate-linked disasters: Drought in Madagascar has pushed more than 1 million people to the brink of starvation. Flash floods in Niger worsened the West African nation’s cholera epidemic.
According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data, at least 538 Americans have died in major climate disasters this year. That doesn’t account for the less-direct deaths: people who get sick from mold that forms after their home is deluged during a hurricane and patients whose chronic conditions are exacerbated by extreme temperatures. Studies suggest that smoke from wildfires led to thousands more coronavirus cases out West, and in one county was linked to 41 percent of deaths.
Nearly 1 in 3 Americans was hit by a climate disaster this summer
Recent disasters “are grim warnings that for every day that we delay our response to climate change, the situation gets more critical,” said Marina Romanello, research director and lead author for the “Countdown.”
Yet climate change’s greatest dangers are not always associated with the most obvious weather extremes. Other threats will emerge from relatively slow, subtle transformations of the Earth and air.
By far the deadliest hazard comes from the act of burning fossil fuels, which generates tiny, lung-irritating particles known as PM2.5. One estimate published this February put the toll of this pollution at more than 10 million excess deaths each year. The Lancet study is more conservative, putting the figure closer to 1 million.
When it comes to the consequences of warming, heat is the world’s worst killer. Elderly people and infants younger than 1 — the groups most vulnerable to heat — are exposed to roughly four more extremely hot days per year now than a generation ago, the Lancet report found. Almost 350,000 people died of heat-related illness in 2019.
Steadily rising temperatures, combined with habitat disruption and globalization, have also given infectious diseases a chance to evolve and expand.
Fungal illnesses, which can’t be treated with vaccines or antibiotics, may be on the rise. Historically, there haven’t been many fungi capable of infecting humans, because the microbes don’t thrive at typical body temperatures. But as global warming increases the average temperatures in the environments where fungi live, it may be pressuring these species to adapt. This in turn could make them better suited for invading human guts or respiratory tracts, scientists suggest.
An April study in the journal PLOS Pathogens noted that Candida auris, a treatment-resistant infection that was first identified only 12 years ago, may have evolved this way. Same goes for a new kind of Cryptococcus gattii, a lung-infecting fungi typically found in the tropics, that recently emerged in the Pacific Northwest. In the Southwest United States, scientists have documented a rise in Valley Fever cases, which are caused by a fungus whose spores are spread on dusty, windy days that are now common because of climate-induced drought.
“They are kind of lurking in the soil and lurking in the environment,” said Anita Sil, a microbial geneticist at the University of California at San Francisco who studies disease-causing fungi. “They’re in the air we breathe.”
Meanwhile, disease-carrying mosquitoes are moving to more temperate areas and higher elevations, their life cycles accelerated and their biting behaviors intensified. Shifting environmental factors have raised the basic reproductive rates of illnesses like Zika and chikungunya, enhancing their potential to explode into epidemics. A study published by the Lancet Planetary Health this July found that unabated carbon emissions would put almost 90 percent of the world’s population at risk of malaria and dengue by the end of the century.
In the past decade, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified at least 128 cases in which people contracted dengue within the mainland United States. One case emerged as far north as New York.
But the diseases will continue to hit hardest in the low-lying, tropical nations where they are already endemic. In sub-Saharan Africa, McIver said, the toll could amount to as many as 50 additional deaths every hour, most of them in children under 5.
Other studies suggest that the rate of diarrheal diseases in children will increase as much as 5 percent for every 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of temperature rise.
The particular danger to young children underscores what McIver calls the “cruel irony” of climate-related health threats: “Those who are being the most affected by the problem are those contributing least to the phenomenon of climate change,” he said. “That’s the thing we should all be staying awake at night thinking about.”
On Capitol Hill and in international negotiations, the high price tag of addressing these impacts and moving the world away from fossil fuels has been an obstacle to climate legislation.
The Lancet “Countdown” argues that inaction will be even more expensive.
Last year, the direct costs of climate disasters totaled more than $178 billion, the report says. Drought affected 19 percent of the world’s total land surface area, damaging yields of crucial crops such as wheat, corn and soy. Extreme heat harmed workers and shut down operations at farms and factories, depriving the world of 295 billion potential work hours.
But curbing emissions, investing in clean energy and funding adaptation efforts could save money as well as lives, the report says. The reduced air pollution that would result from eliminating fossil fuels alone could deliver global health benefits in the trillions of dollars. A 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that deaths from fine-particle pollution cost the United States more than $800 billion per year; more than half of those costs were attributable to pollution from the energy and transportation sectors.
“We have an enormous opportunity to get to the root cause of health harms from the burning of fossil fuels,” Salas said. “To me there is no greater treatment that will have the widest health benefits for my patients than reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”
Nickel surged to a seven-year high in London amid concerns that there’ll be less supply of the key industrial metal to meet resilient demand from economies reopening as the pandemic retreats.
Vale SA, one of the top nickel producers, cut its production guidance for this year due to a strike at its Canadian mine, while the world’s largest refined nickel producer, MMC Norilsk Nickel PJSC, reported lower output in the third quarter. The Philippines, the second-largest producer of the metal used in kitchenware and electric car batteries, said output this year may be 10% less than the annual average, hampered by more frequent rains and fewer vessels coming in.
Nickel for three-month delivery on the London Metal Exchange settled 4.6% higher at $20,963 a metric ton as of 5:53 p.m. local time, the highest since May 2014.
“Buying filtered in over the course of today’s session on the back of supply-side stress ranging from Vale reduced production guidance, Norilsk’s weaker production report, and Vale’s Brazilian mine stoppage at Onca Puma,” Michael Cuoco, head of hedge-fund sales for metals and bulk materials at StoneX Group.
Prices were also helped by China’s softer nickel pig iron and refined nickel output figures for September and the return of Indonesian political export noise and adverse weather in the Philippines, he said. Nickel pig iron is a cheap substitute for refined nickel, which is used to make stainless steel — the largest end-use of nickel.
Vale’s nickel output will likely reach 165,000 to 170,000 tons this year, down from a previous projection of 200,000 tons, the company said Tuesday. That came a day after the Brazilian mining giant said its Onca Puma mine is again suspended by court.
Nickel production at Nornickel fell 23% to 129,858 tons in the first three quarters from the same period a year earlier, according to a statement.
The prospect of lower supplies comes as stainless steel demand improved in recent months, with aerospace and oil-and-gas industries rebounding from last year’s Covid-19 nadir. Ongoing logistics woes from the pandemic, with shipping jams in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian basins, make it more difficult for consumers to get raw materials such as nickel.
Expectations that there’ll be less nickel ores from top supplier Indonesia are also helping the price rally. The Southeast Asian nation indicated last month that it plans to either ban or tax exports of semi-processed products used to make stainless steel to keep more of the metal in the country and support a domestic industry focused on electric-vehicle batteries.
Indonesia has been known to reverse its own policies since the first export ban on unprocessed mineral products in 2014, BloombergNEF analyst Allan Ray Restauro said in a note. Exports were permitted again in 2017, but only to companies with operational smelters. The ban on exports was then brought forward two years early to 2020.
BloombergNEF expects the nickel price to remain elevated above $18,000 a ton, although it will continue to underperform copper and aluminum.
A series of extreme weather events of unprecedented severity affected millions of people in 2021 and caused tremendous economic damage, including numerous casualties and incalculable human suffering. As the sixth warmest year on record so far (the first five hottest years on record all occurred after 2015.), 2021 featured 18 “billion-dollar” climate-related events in the period of January to September alone in the U.S., with a total estimated damage of $104.8 billion.
This is the third value for this time in year on record with Hurricane Ida which led to widespread flooding from Louisiana and to the Northeast including New York estimated as the costliest single disaster (more than $60 billion).
Globally, severe floods from extreme rainfall devastated cities in Central Europe, China and Turkey, while extreme heat occurred in India, the Mediterranean, Siberia and Northern Africa. For the first time, the UK Met office issued and extreme heat warning.
Not only the number but also the extent by which some of the recent weather extremes broke prior records was extraordinary. The Pacific Northwest heatwave of late June and early July broke prior records by double digits — and would have been be virtually impossible in a pre- industrial climate. The rainfall extremes that flooded Central Europe and killed 200 people in Germany alone and provided more than a month’s worth of rain within 24 hours in some regions and was estimated as once in a “500 years” event.
Even under given climatic conditions such events are thought of as very rare events. The recent cluster of these very extreme events might suggest that climate models tend to underestimate their frequency. While climate models have been very accurate in projecting future mean warming, extreme weather events often involve complex interactions of several physical variables on different spatial and temporal scales and are therefore more challenging. Therefore, projections of future extreme weather frequency and magnitude should be considered conservative estimates.
In addition, climate extreme decreasingly act in isolation. A global increase in weather extremes exceedingly leads to situations in which several extremes interact e.g. through their spatial or temporal vicinity or joint effects on global supply chains. This can strongly amplify their impacts, far beyond the hypothesized sum of each disaster occurring in isolation. Such complex interactions make them difficult to predict, prepare for and manage in particular because capacities for disaster response is naturally limited, and needs are generally measured by past, historical events.
Concurrent extremes can push societies beyond the limits of adequate disaster response. Imagine a situation of simultaneous wildfires. Often, states provide assistance when support is needed, but who can help when everybody is struggling with their own fires. One wildfire might be easily controlled, but which fire do you put out first when several occur simultaneously and who will make these climate-triage decisions?
A series of consecutive weather extremes can severely slow down and at times inhibit recovery. Extremes often have long-lasting effects on human wellbeing, the economy and the resilience to future extremes with strong gradients between the global North and South. An increase in the frequency if weather extremes makes consecutive disasters more likely, at times preventing full recovery. This can permanently lower the quality of life in affected regions, making retreat the last options at times. The average time between billion-dollar disasters in the United States dropped from 82 days to 18 days comparing the 80s with the past five years.
“There is no glory in prevention” was a bon mot often repeated at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when severe lockdown decisions had to be justified as pre-emptive measures to avoid a breakdown of the health sector. There is no glory in seeing predictions becoming a reality either. Climate scientists have warned of catastrophic weather extremes as a result of unmitigated greenhouse gas emissions for decades.
Misinformation campaigns from the fossil fuel industry, however, have managed to delay action, through denial of the existence, relevance and human contribution of climate change and by pushing misleading narratives of individual guilt, diverting the focus from necessary systemic changes. Since the 2015 Paris Agreement was passed, CO2 emissions have continued to increase — reaching their highest values in 4 million years.
It seems as if climate science is heading toward a “tragic triumph” — being scientifically right but being ignored when it actually counts — without any notable effect on the steady rise of global emissions.
The tendency of climate models to underestimate extreme weather events and the complicated dynamics by which they can affect societies are a reminder that the 1.5-degree Celsius guardrail agreed upon by the international community in the Paris Agreement does not leave room for further delay.
With the UN’s climate conference COP26 around the corner, states need to build back trust in the international climate negotiation process by quick and effective actions to limit global emissions. A further increase in climate extremes whose impacts are becoming more and more harmful and increasingly difficult to manage must be avoided.
Europe’s magnesium shortage could shutter industrial operations within weeks, threatening thousands of businesses and millions of jobs in sectors from cars to packaging, associations warned.
Chinese exports of magnesium -- a critical material for hardening aluminum alloys and used in everything from power tools to laptops -- has plunged as the nation cuts output because of an energy crunch. That’s caused prices to spike and left buyers worldwide exposed.
Europe, which buys 95% of its magnesium from China, is expected to run out of the metal by the end of November, a group of industry associations including European Aluminium, Eurometaux and industriAll said on Friday. Production shortages, factory closures and job losses could follow unless reserves are replenished, they said.
The magnesium shortfall is among a growing list of headaches for a wide range of industries that have been hit by record gas and power prices, higher prices of materials such as copper and snarled supply chains.
Prices surge as China power curbs throttle output
“Supply of magnesium originating from China has either been halted or reduced drastically since September 2021, resulting in an international supply crisis of unprecedented magnitude,” the group said. It urged governments and the European Commission “to urgently work toward immediate actions with their Chinese counterparties to mitigate the short-term, critical shortage issue, as well as the longer-term supply effects on European industries.”
There have been similarly stark warnings in the U.S., where a leading producer of aluminum billet told customers it may curtail output and ration deliveries as soon as next year due to the shortage. Alcoa Corp., the largest U.S. maker of raw aluminum, has also voiced concerns about magnesium scarcity and has seen some suppliers suspending deliveries.
Matalco Inc., the largest U.S. producer of aluminum billet, is warning customers it may curtail output and ration deliveries ... ...
Alcoa Corp., the largest U.S. maker of raw aluminum, also voiced concerns about magnesium scarcity and has been seeing so-called force majeure declarations by some suppliers. Force-majeure clauses are embedded in sales contracts to allow suppliers to suspend deliveries owing to circumstances outside of their control.
From the earlier Bloomberg report
By any objective measure, leisure time in the US has dramatically increased over the past 200 years. We cab argue about how to measure hours worked, but if you are going to use the term "leisure time" there is no question that has increased dramatically.
My grandmother didnt work. But all that time she spent running clothes over a washboard doesn't count as leisure time.
You are being petty. But let me patiently explain this to you.
1) Frank claimed that Americans are working more hours than ever. I disagreed.
2) Frank provided data on hours worked by family. Frank was definingnwork as employment in a paying job. This definition specifically mexcludes women tending a house.
