2645. About the History of Africa

By BBC, July 1, 2017

The pyramids from the Kingdom of Kush from one of the most spectacular sights in Sudan. Photo: Kush Communications. 

Africa has a rich and complex history but there is widespread ignorance of this heritage. A celebrated British historian once said there was only the history of Europeans in Africa. Zeinab Badawi has been asking what is behind this lack of knowledge and looking at the historical record for an African history series on BBC World News.

The Great Pyramid of Giza in Cairo is rightly considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. But travel further south along the River Nile and you will find a thousand pyramids that belonged to the Kingdom of Kush, in what is now Sudan.

Kush was an African superpower and its influence extended to what is now called the Middle East.

The kingdom lasted for many hundreds of years and in the eighth Century BC, it conquered Egypt and governed for the best part of a century.

What remains of the kingdom is equally impressive. More than 300 of these pyramids are still intact, almost untouched since they were built nearly 3,000 years ago.

Here you can find pyramids, tombs, temples and burial chambers complete with painted scenes and writings that Unesco describes as masterpieces "of creative genius demonstrating the artistic, social, political and religious values of a human group for more than 2,000 years".

Some years ago I visited these pyramids. On my return to the UK, I asked my parents what they knew of their country's historic sites. Not much, it turned out.

This was odd since both of them could tell you a lot about Henry VIII and key points in British history.

I wondered given that my parents did not know enough about their own country's history whether this was likely to be true of many other Africans.

And as I talked to people I discovered that this was indeed the case.

A few years later, at Unesco's Paris headquarters, I saw on the bookshelves of Ethiopian-born Deputy Director-General Getachew Engida a collection of volumes - the General History of Africa.

This, it turned out, is one of Unesco's and the continent's best kept secrets: Africa's history written by African scholars.

The project was conceived in the early 1960s during the period of rapid decolonisation in Africa. Some of the newly independent African leaders decided that after decolonising their countries they also wanted to decolonise their history.

Western historians had lamented the lack of written records in some African countries and had used this as a reason to legitimize such neglect.

Unesco helped African scholars put together the project, recruiting 350 experts, mostly from across Africa and from a range of disciplines, to compile eight volumes, starting from prehistory and continuing to the modern era.

The eighth volume was completed in 1990 and a ninth is now being worked on.

Unesco took the controversial step of starting the volumes with the origins of humankind, setting out the theory of evolution. By doing so, they risked incurring the wrath of Christian and Muslim communities in some African countries where there was, and still is, a widespread belief in creationism.

Kenyan paleontologist Richard Leakey, who contributed to volume one, says he still believes that the fact humans originated in Africa is anathema to some Westerners, who would prefer to deny their African origins.

The story of the Kingdom of Kush, a superpower in western Asia as well as Africa, where queens could rule in their own right, is also often overlooked.

This is also true of the Kingdom of Aksum, described as one of the four greatest civilizations of the ancient world.

The Aksumite kings controlled trade in the Red Sea from their base in what is modern-day Eritrea and Ethiopia. They were also the first rulers in Africa to embrace Christianity and make it the kingdom's official religion.

This history is little known, both in Africa and elsewhere, because a lot of academics and teachers in African countries have been a product of colonial education themselves, and so they could not receive a comprehensive and chronological account of their own history.

My own Sudanese parents were fluent in English and highly educated, but by and large were taught according to a Western curriculum.

Even when they looked at their own history, it would have been through the perspective of Western scholars.

One such view was reflected in the comments by Hugh Trevor-Roper, widely regarded as one of Britain's foremost historians.

He said in 1965: "Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present, there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa.

"The rest is largely darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history.”

The fact that very few people know about the volumes compiled under the auspices of Unesco also tells you something. You wonder why leaders did not want to shine more light on it.

I am not suggesting there was a conspiracy, of course. Just that there was not enough emphasis placed on African history by either African or non-African leaders.

This is of particular interest for Africa, though, because it has been infantilised to a degree that we have not seen in any other region of the world.

Challenging the stereotype

This is partly because there has been a way of seeing Africa in terms of poverty and conflict - the coup, the war, the famine, the corruption - which has become a kind of shorthand for the continent that still persists today.

Development issues in Africa still, to a large extent, emphasize charitable aspects and aid.

Although this is done with the best will in the world it has nevertheless fed into this representation of Africa, whereby it is assumed that, in order for its people to develop and for them to have enough to eat, they have to rely on outsiders.

As someone who was born in Africa, and who came to the UK as an infant, I have the benefit of understanding both cultures.

The General History of Africa is a start and Unesco plans to incorporate its research into school syllabuses across the continent.

Hopefully, future generations will have a better idea of their history and see there is much for them to be proud of from their past. A past which provides the foundation for an even greater future.

2644. Chinese Companies Continue to Build Coal-Fired Power Plants

By Hiroko Tabuchi, The New York Times, July 1, 2017

When China halted plans for more than 100 new coal-fired power plants this year, even as President Trump vowed to “bring back coal” in America, the contrast seemed to confirm Beijing’s new role as a leader in the fight against climate change.

But new data on the world’s biggest developers of coal-fired power plants paints a very different picture: China’s energy companies will make up nearly half of the new coal generation expected to go online in the next decade.

These Chinese corporations are building or planning to build more than 700 new coal plants at home and around the world, some in countries that today burn little or no coal, according to tallies compiled by Urgewald, an environmental group based in Berlin. Many of the plants are in China, but by capacity, roughly a fifth of these new coal power stations are in other countries.

Overall, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries, according to Urgewald’s tally, which uses data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker portal. The new

The fleet of new coal plants would make it virtually impossible to meet the goals set in the Paris climate accord, which aims to keep the increase in global temperatures from preindustrial levels below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Electricity generated from fossil fuels like coal is the biggest single contributor globally to the rise in carbon emissions, which scientists agree is causing the Earth’s temperatures to rise.

“Even today, new countries are being brought into the cycle of coal dependency,” said Heffa Schücking, the director of Urgewald.

The United States may also be back in the game. On Thursday, Mr. Trump said he wanted to lift Obama-era restrictions on American financing for overseas coal projects as part of an energy policy focused on exports.

“We have nearly 100 years’ worth of natural gas and more than 250 years’ worth of clean, beautiful coal,” he said. “We will be dominant. We will export American energy all over the world, all around the globe.”

The frenzied addition of coal plants underscores how the world is set to remain dependent on coal for decades, despite fast growth in renewable energy sources, like wind and solar power.

In China, concerns over smog and climate change have prompted a move toward renewables, as have slowing economic growth and a gradual shift in the Chinese economy away from heavy manufacturing and toward consumer industries. The addition of domestic capacity, though large on paper, does not mean there will be growth in coal consumption. The current coal plants are operating far below capacity because demand for coal-generated power has slowed considerably.

But overseas, the Chinese are playing a different game.

Shanghai Electric Group, one of the country’s largest electrical equipment makers, has announced plans to build coal power plants in Egypt, Pakistan, and Iran with a total capacity of 6,285 megawatts — almost 10 times the 660 megawatts of coal power it has planned in China.

The China Energy Engineering Corporation, which has no public plans to develop coal power in China, is building 2,200 megawatts’ worth of coal-fired power capacity in Vietnam and Malawi. Neither company responded to requests for comment.

Of the world’s 20 biggest coal plant developers, 11 are Chinese, according to a database published by Urgewald.

Overall, Chinese companies are behind 340,000 to 386,000 megawatts of planned coal power expansion worldwide, Urgewald estimated. A typical coal plant has a capacity of about 500 megawatts and burns 1.4 million tons of coal each year, enough to power almost 300,000 homes.

Kevin P. Gallagher, a professor of global development policy at Boston University and an expert in Chinese energy investment overseas, said a strong infrastructure demand in developing countries and a sharp fall in coal financing by the World Bank and Asian Development Bank had opened up the field for Chinese involvement.

“In China, you have lots of very competitive and politically influential companies — but all of a sudden there’s no demand,” Professor Gallagher said, referring to China’s slowing economic growth. “So China is helping these companies go overseas to help make the adjustment at home less painful.”

Much of China’s overseas push has come under a state initiative called “One Belt, One Road,” announced in 2013, which calls for up to $900 billion in infrastructure investments overseas, including high-speed railroads, ports, gas pipelines and power plants.

China’s two global policy banks, the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China, have already provided more than $43 billion in overseas coal financing since 2000, according to a separate database of Chinese energy investments published this year by Boston University.

Some of the countries targeted for coal-power expansion, like Egypt or Pakistan, currently burn almost no coal, and the new coal plants could set the course of their national energy policies for decades, environmentalists warn.

In Egypt, coal projects by Shanghai Electric and other global developers are set to bring the country’s coal-fired capacity to 17,000 megawatts, from near zero, according to the Urgewald database.

2643. Climate change: Three years to safeguard our Climate

By  Christiana Figueres, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Gail Whiteman, Johan Rockström, Anthony Hobley & Stefan Rahmstorf, Nature, June 28, 2017

Fort Lupton solar farm, United States. 

In the past three years, global emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels have leveled after rising for decades. This is a sign that policies and investments in climate mitigation are starting to pay off. The United States, China and other nations are replacing coal with natural gas and boosting renewable energy sources. There is almost unanimous international agreement that the risks of abandoning the planet to climate change are too great to ignore.

The technology-driven transition to low-carbon energy is well under way, a trend that made the 2015 Paris climate agreement possible. But there is still a long way to go to decarbonize the world economy. The political winds are blustery. President Donald Trump has announced that the United States will withdraw from the Paris agreement when it is legally able to do so, in November 2020.

The year 2020 is crucially important for another reason, one that has more to do with physics than politics. When it comes to climate, timing is everything. According to an April report¹(prepared by Carbon Tracker in London, the Climate Action Tracker consortium, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut), should emissions continue to rise beyond 2020, or even remain level, the temperature goals set in Paris become almost unattainable. The UN Sustainable Development Goals that were agreed in 2015 would also be at grave risk.

That’s why we launched Mission 2020 — a collaborative campaign to raise ambition and action across key sectors to bend the greenhouse-gas emissions curve downwards by 2020 (www.mission2020.global).

As 20 leaders of the world’s largest economies gather on 7–8 July at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, we call on them to highlight the importance of the 2020 climate turning point for greenhouse-gas emissions, and to demonstrate what they and others are doing to meet this challenge. Lowering emissions globally is a monumental task, but research tells us that it is necessary, desirable and achievable.

After roughly 1°C of global warming driven by human activity, ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are already losing mass at an increasing rate. Summer sea ice is disappearing in the Arctic and coral reefs are dying from heat stress — entire ecosystems are starting to collapse. The social impacts of climate change from intensified heatwaves, droughts and sea-level rise are inexorable and affect the poorest and weakest first.

The magnitude of the challenge can be grasped by computing a budget for CO2 emissions — the maximum amount of the gas that can be released before the temperature limit is breached. After subtracting past emissions, humanity is left with a ‘carbon credit’ of between 150 and 1,050 gigatonnes (Gt; one Gt is 1 × 10⁹ tonnes) of CO2 to meet the Paris target of 1.5 °C or well below 2 °C (see go.nature.com/2rytztf). The wide range reflects different ways of calculating the budgets using the most recent figures.

At the current emission rate of 41 Gt of CO2 per year, the lower limit of this range would be crossed in 4 years, and the midpoint of 600 Gt of CO2 would be passed in 15 years. If the current rate of annual emissions stays at this level, we would have to drop them almost immediately to zero once we exhaust the budget. Such a ‘jump to distress’ is in no one’s interest. A more gradual descent would allow the global economy time to adapt smoothly.

Harness momentum

The good news is that it is still possible to meet the Paris temperature goals if emissions begin to fall by 2020 (see ‘Carbon crunch’).

Greenhouse-gas emissions are already decoupling from production and consumption. For the past three years, worldwide CO2 emissions from fossil fuels have stayed flat, while the global economy and the gross domestic product (GDP) of major developed and developing nations have grown by at least 3.1% per year (see go.nature.com/2rthjje). This is only the fourth occasion in the past 40 years on which emission levels have stagnated or fallen. The previous three instances — in the early 1980s, 1992 and 2009 — were associated with global economic predicaments, but the current one is not².

Emissions from the United States fell the most: by 3% last year, while its GDP grew by 1.6%. In China, CO2 emissions fell by 1% in 2016, and its economy expanded by 6.7% (ref. 2). Although it is too early to tell whether this plateau will presage a fall, the signs are encouraging.

In 2016, two-thirds of China’s 5.4% extra demand for electricity was supplied by carbon-free energy resources, mostly hydropower and wind². In the European Union, wind and solar made up more than three-quarters of new energy capacity installed; coal demand was reduced by 10% (ref. 3). In the United States, almost two-thirds of the electricity-generating capacity installed by utility companies was based on renewables 
(see go.nature.com/2skv20g).

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has predicted that, by 2020, renewable sources could deliver 26–27% of the world’s electricity needs, compared with 23.7% of electric power at the end of 2015. But that underestimates the pace of change in energy systems.

Growth in electric vehicles alone could displace 2 million barrels of oil per day by 2025, according to a February report⁴. It suggests that, by 2050, this could reach 25 million barrels of oil per day — a stark contrast to expectations from the fossil-fuel industry that demand for oil will rise. And solar power alone could supply 29% of global electricity generation by 2050. This would remove the need for coal and leave natural gas with only a 1% market share. However, the oil firm ExxonMobil predicts that all renewables will supply just 11% of global power generation by 2040 (ref. 4).

Investors, meanwhile, are growing wary of carbon risks. BlackRock and Vanguard, the two largest fund managers, voted — along with many others — against ExxonMobil management at its annual general meeting on 31 May and instructed the company to report on the profit impact of global measures to keep climate change below 2 °C. Earlier this month, Norway’s US$960-billion sovereign-wealth fund declared that it will ask the banks in which it has invested to disclose how their lending contributes to global greenhouse-gas emissions.

Last year, the installed capacity of renewable energy set a new record of 161 gigawatts; in 2015, investment levels reached $286 billion worldwide, more than 6 times that in 2004. Over half of that investment, $156 billion, was for projects in developing and emerging economies⁵.

There is a strong headwind against the low-carbon transition in some places, which may impede progress. For example, the Financial CHOICE Act — a bill passed by the US House of Representatives on 8 June — would make it nearly impossible for investors to challenge companies on climate-risk disclosure through shareholder proposal processes, as at ExxonMobil. However, as the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, said in New York last month: “The sustainability train has left the station.” The fossil-free economy is already profitable⁶ and creating jobs (www.clean200.org). A report this year by the International Renewable Energy Agency and the IEA shows that efforts to stop climate change could boost the global economy by $19 trillion⁷. The IEA has also said that implementing the Paris agreement will unlock $13.5 trillion or more before 2050.

Recent geopolitical events, too, have galvanized activity in support of the Paris agreement. For example, the #WeAreStillIn campaign — involving more than 1,000 governors, mayors, businesses, investors and universities from across the United States — has declared that it will ensure the nation remains a leader in reducing carbon emissions.

Six milestones

To prioritize actions, we’ve identified milestones in six sectors. Developed with knowledge leaders, these were reviewed and refined in collaboration with analysts at Yale University, the Climate Action Tracker consortium, Carbon Tracker, the low-carbon coalition We Mean Business, the Partnership on Sustainable, Low Carbon Transport (SLoCaT), advisory firm SYSTEMIQ, the New Climate Economy project and Conservation International.

These goals may be idealistic at best, unrealistic at worst. However, we are in the age of exponential transformation and think that such a focus will unleash ingenuity. By 2020, here’s where the world needs to be:

Energy. Renewables make up at least 30% of the world’s electricity supply — up from 23.7% in 2015 (ref. 8). No coal-fired power plants are approved beyond 2020, and all existing ones are being retired.

Infrastructure. Cities and states have initiated action plans to fully decarbonize buildings and infrastructures by 2050, with funding of $300 billion annually. Cities are upgrading at least 3% of their building stock to zero- or near-zero emissions structures each year⁹.

Transport. Electric vehicles make up at least 15% of new car sales globally, a major increase from the almost 1% market share that battery-powered and plug-in hybrid vehicles now claim. Also required are commitments for a doubling of mass-transit utilization in cities, a 20% increase in fuel efficiencies for heavy-duty vehicles and a 20% decrease in greenhouse-gas emissions from aviation per kilometer traveled.

Land. Land-use policies are enacted that reduce forest destruction and shift to reforestation and afforestation efforts. Current net emissions from deforestation and land-use changes form about 12% of the global total. If these can be cut to zero next decade, and afforestation and reforestation can instead be used to create a carbon sink by 2030, it will help to push total net global emissions to zero, while supporting water supplies and other benefits. Sustainable agricultural practices can reduce emissions and increase CO2 sequestration in healthy, well-managed soils.

Industry. Heavy industry is developing and publishing plans for increasing efficiencies and cutting emissions, with a goal of halving emissions well before 2050. Carbon-intensive industries — such as iron and steel, cement, chemicals, and oil and gas — currently emit more than one-fifth of the world’s CO2, excluding their electricity and heat demands.

Finance. The financial sector has rethought how it deploys capital and is mobilizing at least $1 trillion a year for climate action. Most will come from the private sector. Governments, private banks and lenders such as the World Bank need to issue many more ‘green bonds’ to finance climate-mitigation efforts. This would create an annual market that, by 2020, processes more than 10 times the $81 billion of bonds issued in 2016.

Further, faster, together

If we delay, the conditions for human prosperity will be severely curtailed. There are three pressing and practical steps to avoid this.

First, use science to guide decisions and set targets. Policies and actions must be based on robust evidence. Uncensored and transparent communication of peer-reviewed science to global decision-makers is crucial. Academic journal articles are not easily read or digested by non-experts, so we need a new kind of communication in which Nature meets Harvard Business Review. Science associations should provide more media training to young scientists and hold communication boot camps on how to make climate science relevant to corporate boards and investors.

Those in power must also stand up for science. French President Emmanuel Macron’s Make Our Planet Great Again campaign is a compelling example. He has spoken out to a global audience in support of climate scientists and invited researchers to move to France to help accelerate action and deliver on the Paris agreement. To encourage others to speak, scientists should forge connections with leaders from policy, business, and civil society. The Arctic Basecamp at Davos in January, for instance, brought scientists into high-level discussions on global risk at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Switzerland.

“The fossil-free economy is already profitable.”

Second, existing solutions must be scaled up rapidly. With no time to wait, all countries should adopt plans for achieving 100% renewable electricity production, while ensuring that markets can be designed to enable renewable-energy expansion.

Third, encourage optimism. Recent political events have thrown the future of our world into sharp focus. But as before Paris, we must remember that impossible is not a fact, it’s an attitude. It is crucial that success stories are shared. Demonstrating where countries and businesses have over-achieved on their targets will raise the bar for others. More-ambitious targets become easier to set.

The upcoming G20 meeting in Hamburg is the perfect moment for heads of state to integrate the six milestones into their discussions on how to ensure a resilient, prosperous, inclusive and interconnected global economy. This would pave the way for a year of raised ambition in 2018 when nations take stock of progress and revise national commitments under the Paris agreement.

The G20 is due to adopt the recommendations of the Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, on how the global finance system will manage the risk of climate change. It requires financial institutions to design, disclose and implement a transition strategy with a view to full decarbonization of operations, value chains and portfolios by 2050. National governments and financial regulators must enact these recommendations swiftly.

Cities and provincial governments must help to drive the ambition of national governments on climate change, particularly through smart infrastructure and transport policy. C40 Cities, a network of megacities committed to addressing climate change, has adopted a strategy called Deadline 2020 that aligns its emissions-reductions plans with the Paris agreement. Other cities now have an opportunity to follow suit, for example through the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy.

Our co-signatory list, which includes eminent scientists, business leaders, economists, analysts, influencers and representatives of non-governmental organizations, is an example of the strength of radical collaboration across unusual partners, who all share a mission to seize this opportunity to improve people’s lives, the planet, and the global economy.

There will always be those who hide their heads in the sand and ignore the global risks of climate change. But there are many more of us committed to overcoming this inertia. Let us stay optimistic and act boldly together.

Nature 546, 593–595 (29 June 2017) doi:10.1038/546593a

References

1. Mission 2020. 2020: The Climate Turning Point (Mission 2020, 2017); available at http://go.nature.com/2takuw3
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2. International Energy Agency. World Energy Outlook 2016 (International Energy Agency, 2016).
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3. WindEurope. Wind in Power: 2016 European Statistics (WindEurope, 2017).
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4. Carbon Tracker. Expect the Unexpected (Carbon Tracker, 2017).
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5. Frankfurt School–UNEP Centre/BNEF. Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2016(Frankfurt School, 2016).
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6. IRENA. Renewable Energy and Jobs: Annual Review 2017 (IRENA, 2017).
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7. IEA/IRENA. Perspectives for the Energy Transition (IEA/IRENA, 2017).
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8. REN21. Renewables 2016: Global Status Report (REN21, 2016).
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9. Climate Action Tracker. 10 Steps (Climate Action Tracker, 2016); available at http://go.nature.com/2ryh56j
Show context

Related stories and links

From nature.com

• Let Trump claim a better deal on climate
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• The G20 must govern the shift to low-carbon energy
07 June 2017

• Don't link carbon markets
21 March 2017

• Renewables need a grand-challenge strategy
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• Economics: Support low-carbon investment
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• Climate science: Vast costs of Arctic change
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From elsewhere

• Mission 2020

• G20 Germany 2017

Author information

Affiliations

. Christiana Figueres is vice-chair of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, and Convener of Mission 2020.

. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber is director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany.

. Gail Whiteman is director of the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business, Lancaster University, UK.

. Johan Rockström is executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden.

. Anthony Hobley is chief executive of Carbon Tracker, London, UK.

. Stefan Rahmstorf is head of Earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany.

Corresponding author

• Correspondence to: Christiana Figueres

Supplementary information

PDF files

1. Supplementary Information (74K)

2642. Carbon in Atmosphere Is Rising, Even as Emissions Stabilize

By Justin Gillis, The New York Times, June 26, 2017

CAPE GRIM, Tasmania — On the best days, the wind howling across this rugged promontory has not touched land for thousands of miles, and the arriving air seems as if it should be the cleanest in the world.

But on a cliff above the sea, inside a low-slung government building, a bank of sophisticated machines sniffs that air day and night, revealing telltale indicators of the way human activity is altering the planet on a major scale.

For more than two years, the monitoring station here, along with its counterparts across the world, has been flashing a warning: The excess carbon dioxide scorching the planet rose at the highest rate on record in 2015 and 2016. A slightly slower but still unusual rate of increase has continued into 2017.

Scientists are concerned about the cause of the rapid rises because, in one of the most hopeful signs since the global climate crisis became widely understood in the 1980s, the amount of carbon dioxide that people are pumping into the air seems to have stabilized in recent years, at least judging from the data that countries compile on their own emissions.

That raises a conundrum: If the amount of the gas that people are putting out has stopped rising, how can the amount that stays in the air be going up faster than ever? Does it mean the natural sponges that have been absorbing carbon dioxide are now changing?

“To me, it’s a warning,” said Josep G. Canadell, an Australian climate scientist who runs the Global Carbon Project, a collaboration among several countries to monitor emissions trends.

Scientists have spent decades measuring what was happening to all of the carbon dioxide that was produced when people burned coal, oil and natural gas. They established that less than half of the gas was remaining in the atmosphere and warming the planet. The rest was being absorbed by the ocean and the land surface, in roughly equal amounts.

In essence, these natural sponges were doing humanity a huge service by disposing of much of its gaseous waste. But as emissions have risen higher and higher, it has been unclear how much longer the natural sponges will be able to keep up.Should they weaken, the result would be something akin to garbage workers going on strike, but on a grand scale: The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would rise faster, speeding global warming even beyond its present rate. It is already fast enough to destabilize the weather, cause the seas to rise and threaten the polar ice sheets.The record increases of airborne carbon dioxide in 2015 and 2016 thus raise the question of whether this has now come to pass. Scientists are worried, but they are not ready to draw that conclusion, saying more time is needed to get a clear picture.

Many of them suspect an El Niño climate pattern that spanned those two years, one of the strongest on record, may have caused the faster-than-usual rise in carbon dioxide, by drying out large parts of the tropics. The drying contributed to huge fires in Indonesia in late 2015 that sent a pulse of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Past El Niños have also produced rapid increases in the gas, though not as large as the recent ones.

Yet scientists are not entirely certain that the El Niño was the main culprit; the idea cannot explain why a high rate of increase in carbon dioxide has continued into 2017, even though the El Niño ended early last year.

Scientists say their inability to know for certain is a reflection not just of the scientific difficulty of the problem, but also of society’s failure to invest in an adequate monitoring system to keep up with the profound changes humans are wreaking on the planet.

“It’s really bare bones, our network, contrary to common misperceptions about the government wasting money,” said Pieter Tans, chief of a unit that monitors greenhouse gases at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

While the recent events have made the scientific need for an improved network clear, the situation may be about to get worse, not better. President Trump’s administration has targeted American science agencies for cutbacks, with NOAA, the lead agency for tracking greenhouse gases, being one of those on the chopping block.

Australia also had a recent fight over proposed cutbacks in climate science, but so far that country’s conservative government has promised continued funds for the Cape Grim science program, Australia’s most important contribution to global climate monitoring. The atmospheric observatory here, which receives some money from NASA, is one of the most advanced among scores of facilities around the world where greenhouse gases and other pollutants are monitored.

The network is complete enough to give a clear picture of the overall global trends in industrial gases in the air, scientists say. But it is too sparse to give definitive information about which parts of the planet are absorbing or releasing greenhouse gases at a given moment. Lacking such data, scientists have trouble resolving some important questions, like the reasons for the rapid increase of carbon dioxide over the past three years.

“It’s really important that people get that there’s an awful lot that’s just not known yet,” Sam Cleland, the manager of the Cape Grim station, said.

Human activity is estimated to be pumping almost 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year, an amount that Dr. Canadell of the Global Carbon Project called “staggering.” The atmospheric concentration of the gas has risen by about 43 percent since the Industrial Revolution.

That, in turn, has warmed the Earth by around 2 degrees Fahrenheit, a large number for the surface of an entire planet.

With a better monitoring network, scientists say they might be able to specify in greater detail what is causing variations in the amount of carbon dioxide staying in the air — and, perhaps, to give a timely warning if they detect a permanent shift in the ability of the natural sponges to absorb more.

Dr. Tans of NOAA would like to put sensors on perhaps a hundred commercial airplanes to get a clearer picture of what is happening just above land in the United States. The effort would cost some $20 million a year, but the government has not financed the project.

The uncertainty stemming from the recent increases in carbon dioxide is all the more acute given that global emissions from human activity seem to have stabilized over the past three years. That is primarily because of changes in China, the largest polluter, where an economic slowdown has coincided with a conscious effort to cut emissions.

“I’d estimate that we are about at the emissions peak, or if there are further rises, they won’t be much,” said Wang Yi, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, who also belongs to the national legislature and advises the government on climate policy.

Emissions in the United States, the second-largest polluter after China, have also been relatively flat, but Mr. Trump has started tearing up President Barack Obama’s climate policies, raising the possibility that greenhouse gases could rise in coming years.

Dr. Tans said that if global emissions flattened out at today’s high level, the world would still be in grave trouble.

“If emissions were to stay flat for the next two decades, which could be called an achievement in some sense, it’s terrible for the climate problem,” he said.

2641. California Adds Glyphosate to Cancer Watchlist

By Jake Johnson, Common Dreams, June 27, 2017

In a move celebrated by scientists and activists, California on Monday announced it would add glyphosate—the active ingredient in the Monsanto-produced weed killer Roundup—to its list of chemicals known to cause cancer.

The decision, made by California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), was reportedly precipitated by the World Health Organization's classification of glyphosate as a "probable carcinogen" in May of 2015.

"California is required under the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, better known as Proposition 65, to publish a regularly updated list of chemicals thought to cause cancer or birth defects," Newsweek reported.

Monsanto has been quick to respond to the move; as USA Today's Emily Bohatch noted, Monsanto is appealing a ruling on a case it brought against California last year, when the OEHHA first attempted to add glyphosate to its list of cancer-causing agents. 

In response to the agrochemical giant's legal maneuvering, activists and scientists have insisted that Monsanto's motive is profit alone—not scientific accuracy or the health of the public—and hailed California's decision as a step in the direction of justice.

The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) noted in a press release on Monday that a recent analysis "found more than half of the glyphosate sprayed in California is applied in the state's eight most impoverished counties."

"The analysis also found that the populations in these counties are predominantly Hispanic or Latino," CBD continued, "indicating that glyphosate use in California is distributed unequally along both socioeconomic and racial lines."

Nathan Donley, a former cancer researcher and a senior scientist at the CBD, called California's move "remarkable" and congratulated the state for standing up to "special-interest politics [that] hamstring our federal government from taking action to protect people from this dangerous pesticide."

"California's decision makes it the national leader in protecting people from cancer-causing pesticides," Donley concluded. "The U.S. EPA now needs to step up and acknowledge that the world's most transparent and science-based assessment has linked glyphosate to cancer."