Seoul has recorded its heaviest November snowfall since records began over a century ago in 1907.
The South Korean capital was covered with at least 16 cm of snow on Wednesday – beating the city’s previous record of 12.4cm from November 1972.
It caused significant disruption across the country, with local media reporting that flights had been grounded, roads closed, and that there were delays to transport services.
At least one person is reported to have died in a weather-related traffic accident near Seoul.
Weak demand for EVs and mandatory sales quotas will cost Britain’s automotive industry £6bn in 2024, according to new analysis from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).
Consequently, the UK’s automotive industry is calling for government intervention to safeguard the sector and Britain’s transition to zero emission vehicles.
Applicable since January 2024, the zero emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate sets out the percentage of new zero emission cars and vans manufacturers will be required to produce each year up to 2030. In total, 80 per cent of new cars and 70 per cent of new vans sold in the UK must be zero emission by 2030, increasing to 100 per cent by 2035.
When the mandate was unveiled, industry anticipated that 457,000 electric cars would be registered in 2024, which should have accounted for 23.3 per cent of all new car registrations. The latest outlook shows 94,000 fewer cars will be registered, totalling 363,000 with a market share of 18.7 per cent. The situation is worse for vans with the outlook halved to 20,000 units expected to be registered this year, a 5.7 per cent market share against a 2024 target of 10 per cent.
So far, manufacturers have subsidised sales, incentivising fleet, business and consumer EV sales through an estimated £4bn worth of discounts. Despite this, the industry looks likely to miss the 22 per cent EV market share demanded by the mandate, potentially creating a £1.8bn bill for compliance for those missing their targets for cars alone.
According to SMMT, the result is a ‘compliance bill’ of almost £6bn in 2024, with costs mounting in 2025. With global manufacturers making production cutbacks due to weak EV demand, such losses could force brands to withdraw from the UK market and cause global investors to question the UK’s appeal as a place to manufacture.
In a statement, Mike Hawes, SMMT chief executive, said: “We need an urgent review of the automotive market and the regulation intended to drive it. Not because we want to water down any commitments, but because delivery matters more than notional targets. The industry is hurting; profitability and viability are in jeopardy and jobs are on the line. When the world changes, so must we. Workable regulation – backed with incentives – will set us up for success and green growth over the next decade.”
A big reality check for climate models. “Climate models have greatly overestimated the solar radiation actually reaching the Southern Ocean, largely because they are not capable of correctly simulating clouds”, says a researcher. By brightening clouds, aerosols there have a cooling effect ‘opposite of—but of the same magnitude as—that of well-known warming greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide or methane’. What’s left of their supposed greenhouse effect, in this region at least?
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For the first time, researchers have quantified the global emissions of a sulfur gas produced by marine life, revealing that it cools the climate more than previously thought, especially over the Southern Ocean, says Phys.org.
The study, published in the journal Science Advances, shows that the oceans not only capture and redistribute the sun’s heat, but produce gases that make particles with immediate climatic effects; for example, through the brightening of clouds that reflect this heat.
This broadens the climatic impact of marine sulfur because it adds a new compound, methanethiol, that had previously gone unnoticed.
Researchers only detected the gas recently, because it had previously been notoriously hard to measure. Earlier work had focused on warmer oceans, whereas the polar oceans are the emission hotspots.
The researchers argue that this new work improves our understanding of how the climate of the planet is regulated by adding a previously overlooked component, and that the work illustrates the crucial importance of sulfur aerosols.
They also highlight the magnitude of the impact of human activity on the climate and that the planet will continue to warm if no action is taken. [Talkshop comment – standard waffle].
Dr. Wohl, of UEA’s Centre for Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences and one of the lead authors, said, “This is the climatic element with the greatest cooling capacity, but also the least understood. We knew methanethiol was coming out of the ocean, but we had no idea about how much and where. We also did not know it had such an impact on climate.
“Climate models have greatly overestimated the solar radiation actually reaching the Southern Ocean, largely because they are not capable of correctly simulating clouds. The work done here partially closes the longstanding knowledge gap between models and observations.”
The research was led by a team of scientists from the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC) and the Blas Cabrera Institute of Physical Chemistry (IQF-CSIC) in Spain. They included Dr. Charel Wohl, previously at ICM-CSIC and now at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK.
Their findings represent a major advance on one of the most groundbreaking theories proposed 40 years ago about the role of the ocean in regulating Earth’s climate.
This suggests that microscopic plankton living on the surface of the seas produce sulfur in the form of a gas, dimethyl sulfide, that—once in the atmosphere—oxidizes and forms small particles called aerosols.
Aerosols reflect part of the solar radiation back into space and therefore reduce the heat retained by the Earth. Their cooling effect is magnified when they become involved in making clouds, with an effect opposite of—but of the same magnitude as—that of well-known warming greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide or methane.
Despite all the whitewash thrown at it, there is still the strong smell of a conspiracy between the tight-knit community of scientists who were at the heart of efforts to push their own narrative of man-made CO2 emissions controlling the world’s surface temperature. Take a look down memory lane by reading this article which recalls those damning emails:
