Skeptical Science New Research for Week #32 2024

Geographical Patterns in Mortality Impacts Due To Heatwaves of Different Characteristics in Spanish Cities, Paredes-Fortuny et al., GeoHealth Open Access 10.1029/2024gh001092

Other

Expansive learning of climate scientists towards transdisciplinarity, McClure et al., Climate Risk Management Open Access 10.1016/j.crm.2024.100642

Informed opinion, nudges & major initiatives

Achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions critical to limit climate tipping risks, Möller et al., Nature Communications Open Access 10.1038/s41467-024-49863-0

Coral reefs deserve evidence-based management not heroic interference, Streit et al., Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-024-02063-6

Ethics in climate AI: From theory to practice, Acquaviva et al., PLOS Climate Open Access 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000465

Rebuilding Ukraine’s energy supply in a secure, economic, and decarbonised way, Tröndle et al., Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability Open Access 10.1088/2634-4505/ad6738

The physical science basis of climate change empowering transformations, insights from the IPCC AR6 for a climate research agenda grounded in ethics, Masson-Delmotte, PLOS Climate Open Access 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000451

Articles/Reports from Agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations Addressing Aspects of Climate Change

Investing in Nature to Fight Climate Change and Help Communities Thrive, Hayes et al., Stanford Law School’s Law and Policy Lab, the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, and the Bezos Earth Fund

The authors describe the shortcomings in how nature-based solutions are measured, monitored, reported on, and verified (MMRV) as a fundamental weakness that is holding back the deployment of nature-based solutions. Measurement and verification deficiencies limit confidence in claims that investing in “climate-smart” agricultural or forestry practices or prioritizing investments in restoring natural coastal barriers, will produce measurable and confirmable carbon emissions reductions or removals. This opens the door to criticism of governmental incentive programs; corporate “insetting” claims regarding low-carbon practices in supply chains; and carbon credit claims in voluntary carbon markets. This is unfortunate as nature-based solutions can and should play a major role in reducing GHG emissions and removing carbon from the atmosphere, while often also generating climate resilience and other ecosystem service co-benefits.

Climate Unscripted. The Reality of Climate Change and Sustainability Solutions in Unscripted TV, Rogers et al., USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center

Building upon prior research on climate change issues in scripted film/TV, the authors examine the prevalence of sustainability and climate-related topics in unscripted television. By examining sustainability-related keywords over six months spanning 200,000 hours of unscripted programming, the authors found more than 28,000 keyword mentions across all unscripted TV genres — with home shows, docuseries, and food shows leading the way.

Aligning Corporate Value Chains to Global Climate Goals, Pineda et al., Science Based Targets initiative

The authors offer an overview of the status and current practices of scope 3 target setting among companies with SBTi-validated targets. They discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with Scope 3 target setting and explore potential solutions to enhance the effectiveness and impact of the value chain decarbonization to support the SBTi in delivering its’ mission “to drive science-based climate action in the corporate sector consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C.”

Evidence Synthesis Report Part 1: Carbon Credits, Borjigin-Wang et al., Science Based Targets initiative

The authors present a synthesis of the relevant evidence on carbon credits submitted to the Science Based Targets initiative during the 2023 call for evidence on the effectiveness of environmental attribute certificates in corporate climate targets.

Critical Minerals: Status, Challenges, and Policy Options for Recovery from Nontraditional Sources, Bothwell et al., Government Accountability Office

Critical minerals are essential for technologies used across the economy, including in energy, defense, health care, and electronics. However, the U.S. supply is highly dependent on foreign countries. One strategy for increasing and diversifying the domestic supply of critical minerals is by recovering them from nontraditional sources. The authors conducted a technology assessment that presents (1) the benefits of recovering critical minerals from nontraditional sources; (2) the status of available technologies to use on mining wastes, coal wastes, and geothermal and other brines; (3) the challenges of recovery from nontraditional sources; and (4) options policymakers could consider to help address the challenges.

ChargerHelp Annual Reliability Report. The State of EV Charging and the Driver Experience, ChargerHelp

The authors tackle critical reliability issues in the expanding U.S. EV charging network, now with over 175,000 ports. Analyzing 19 million data points, they identify key challenges and offer actionable strategies to enhance system reliability. They explored three interrelated categories including a) the discrepancy between reported uptime and true uptime, b) how reliability varies by electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) age, state, and network, and c) the drivers of downtime and what it takes to improve uptime. Findings include true uptime is often lower than reported uptime; software inaccuracy compounds reliability shortcomings, reducing driver confidence; equipment age correlates with downtime and how reliability varies geographically by state; charging reliability varies dramatically by network; the causes of downtime and failed charge sessions are multifaceted, although certain problems dominate; and addressing “problem” stations can alleviate a disproportionate burden on EVSE O&M.

Solar in the Southeast, Pohnan et al., Cleanenergyorg

The authors describe the critical role that utilities, policymakers, and customers have in the growing solar market in the Southeast. Utilities in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee operate as monopolies and are granted the responsibility and control over power supplies. Consequently, the location of a home or business is the primary determinant not only of which utility will supply the electricity but also the amount of solar within that portfolio. To provide a normalized comparison among hundreds of different utilities in the Southeast, the authors ranked utilities based on solar watts per customer (W/C). This illustrates the amount of solar power sourced to a utility or state relative to the amount of retail customers. As a regional organization. The authors then document current progress and trends at both utility and state levels, as well as identify policies and practices to drive continued solar growth in the Southeast.

The Worsening Urban-Rural Divide: The Role of Local Government in EV Charging Infrastructure, Lee et al., CivicPulse

The authors show that more rural, conservative counties are significantly less likely to have EV charging infrastructure than more urban, liberal counties. The authors shine a light on the role that local governments across the United States play in developing electric vehicle charging infrastructure nationwide. Local governments with existing charging stations are more likely to report an intent to take action in the future to procure additional stations. Local governments without stations are twice as likely to cite a lack of technical knowledge as a barrier.

Obtaining articles without journal subscriptions

We know it’s frustrating that many articles we cite here are not free to read. One-off paid access fees are generally astronomically priced, suitable for such as “On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light”  but not as a gamble on unknowns. With a median world income of US$ 9,373, for most of us US$ 42 is significant money to wager on an article’s relevance and importance. 

• Unpaywall offers a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that automatically indicates when an article is freely accessible and provides immediate access without further trouble. Unpaywall is also unscammy, works well, is itself offered free to use. The organizers (a legitimate nonprofit) report about a 50{2add217ad2235d262e63a186eb2903fa1b3aade4b9d8db7a510444e5d82aac71} success rate

• The weekly New Research catch is checked against the Unpaywall database with accessible items being flagged. Especially for just-published articles this mechansim may fail. If you’re interested in an article title and it is not listed here as “open access,” be sure to check the link anyway. 

How is New Research assembled?

Most articles appearing here are found via  RSS feeds from journal publishers, filtered by search terms to produce raw output for assessment of relevance. 

Relevant articles are then queried against the Unpaywall database, to identify open access articles and expose useful metadata for articles appearing in the database. 

The objective of New Research isn’t to cast a tinge on scientific results, to color readers’ impressions. Hence candidate articles are assessed via two metrics only:

• Was an article deemed of sufficient merit by a team of journal editors and peer reviewers? The fact of journal RSS output assigns a “yes” to this automatically. 
• Is an article relevant to the topic of anthropogenic climate change? Due to filter overlap with other publication topics of inquiry, of a typical week’s 550 or so input articles about 1/4 of RSS output makes the cut.

A few journals offer public access to “preprint” versions of articles for which the review process is not yet complete. For some key journals this all the mention we’ll see in RSS feeds, so we include such items in New Research. These are flagged as “preprint.”

The section “Informed opinion, nudges & major initiatives” includes some items that are not scientific research per se but fall instead into the category of “perspectives,” observations of implications of research findings, areas needing attention, etc.

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Journals covered

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Previous edition

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