‘A rallying cry’: What the UN’s new climate report means for North Carolina
From warmer nights to wetter hurricanes, North Carolinians have felt the impacts of climate change in recent years.
A report released Monday by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change evaluated the most up-to-date climate science and determined it is “unequivocal” that climate change has been caused by humans’ emissions of greenhouse gases. The report, crafted by 234 authors from 66 countries, also warned that failing to curb emissions as soon as possible would result in more severe consequences.
“It’s more dire than ever,” said Kate Konschnik, the director of the Climate and Energy Program at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
“You would like this to be a galvanizing force,” Konschnik said. “In the policy piece of the report, you can tell that there really is that intent to, let’s use this as a rallying cry,”
Already, the report warns, it will be difficult for the world to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, even as every additional degree of warming comes with more drastic consequences.
The report comes as North Carolina legislators are debating an energy bill that could shape carbon emissions in the state for decades and as cabinet agencies try to fulfill the clean energy goals set out in Gov. Roy Cooper’s Executive Order 80.
“The climate crisis is more urgent than ever,” Cooper said Monday in a statement. “I’ve set ambitious goals for NC to do its part through emission reduction and a transition to clean energy because the science is clear and the cost of inaction is too high.”
North Carolina climate science
Cooper signed Executive Order 80 in 2018, shortly after Hurricane Florence drenched Eastern North Carolina with immense amounts of rainfall. Some of the goals included in Executive Order 80 are to reduce by 2025 the state’s greenhouse gas emissions 40% from 2005 levels; increase the number of non-emitting vehicles registered in the state to 80,000 by 2025; and reduce energy consumption in state-owned buildings.
The production of the N.C. Climate Science Report was also part of the order. Led by the N.C. Institute for Climate Studies, that effort concluded that human-caused global warming will lead to more changes to North Carolina’s climate than the state has ever seen.
North Carolina will grow warmer, scientists found, with temperatures increasing 2 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 depending on the amount of greenhouse gas emissions. North Carolina will grow wetter, with heavy rains becoming more frequent and ongoing sea level rise leading to more coastal floods. And the state will grow more humid, with warmer air trapping more moisture.
In an N.C. Medical Journal article published in September 2020, a team of scientists involved in the state science report wrote, “Our urban communities have challenges with extreme heat in urban heat islands. Our rural communities are struggling with the challenges of outdoor labor in extreme temperatures. Water quality is threatened by extreme precipitation, and water quantity — our drinking water — is at stake on the other side of the coin.”
The only way to bring a halt to or slow those changes, the North Carolina report said, is for the emission of greenhouses gases to slow or stop across the globe.
Monday’s U.N. report means North Carolina’s climate is set to change in a way never seen before, said David Easterling, the Asheville-based director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climate Assessment Technical Support Unit.
“We’re going to see an increase in extremes, we’re going to see an increase in sea level, and at this point it’s going to change,” Easterling said. “It’s just how much it’s going to change depends on how much carbon dioxide and how much methane is emitted into the atmosphere as we continue into the 21st century.”
Easterling, who assisted with the U.S. government’s review of the report released Monday, was a lead author on the previous two versions and a contributing author to the two before that.
Over time, Easterling noted, the language in the reports has changed. For instance, previous reports might have said that humans emitting greenhouse gases “likely” or “very likely” contributed to climate change. Monday’s report said humanity’s impact is “unequivocal.”
“We’re beginning to see a lot of the consequences of climate change,” Easterling said, “and so the urgency is even greater to begin to address the issues.”
NC energy legislation
House Bill 951 represents a key step in how North Carolina will approach the transition away from coal-fired power plants.
The Republican-sponsored legislation calls for all but two of Duke Energy’s coal-fired power plants to be fully retired by 2030 and would require about 5,500 megawatts of solar energy to be developed by 2030, an amount that industry officials believe would power 750,000 to 1 million homes.
Grace Trilling Rountree, a Duke Energy spokeswoman, wrote, “The (IPCC) analysis underscores the urgency of the transition to clean energy, and there is an opportunity today in North Carolina with House Bill 951 to help accelerate efforts to retire coal, generate cleaner energy and reduce carbon emissions.”
Opponents have raised alarms about the requirement that the coal-fired plants at the Marshall facility in Catawba County be replaced by a natural gas plant, which emits methane, a high-powered greenhouse gas. While the bill does not say how the coal-fired plant at Caswell County’s Roxboro site should be replaced, a natural gas plant meets all of the requirements outlined in the legislation.
North Carolina’s Clean Energy Plan calls for a 70% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions for the electricity sector by 2030, but a N.C. Utilities Commission Public Staff analysis of House Bill 951 found it would only lead to about a 62% reduction.
Andrew Whelan, a spokesman for CleanAIRE NC, said, “House Bill 951 is just not the answer that we need. It is a handout, we believe, to fossil fuel interests, and North Carolina just cannot afford to fall behind on climate action. It would derail our transition to a clean energy economy right at a time when this report makes clear that we need to ramp up that transition.”
In order to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the IPCC report said, coal-fired power needs to be eliminated entirely and natural gas power needs to be limited to about 8% of the world’s generation, with those plants paired with carbon capture and sequestration.
“The choices we’re making right now on what to replace our aging coal fleet with is critical to getting to the emissions reductions,” Konschnik said.
This story was produced with financial support from 1Earth Fund, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work.
This story was originally published August 10, 2021 at 6:20 AM.