By Brenda Shaffer

The  G-7 countries are meeting this week in Kananaskis in Alberta, Canada. This G-7 meeting will focus on geopolitical issues. While many disagreements currently prevail among the G-7 countries, all likely agree that African countries deserve a shot at pulling themselves up out of poverty. Africa is the only continent in the world where the population’s electricity access is declining,  and poverty is growing. Not only is electricity access in Africa waning, but the G-7 supported policies have led to a new phenomenon—wide-spread establishment of unreliable electricity. To avoid consumption of fossil fuels, the G-7 and its supported institutions such as the World Bank have been promoting off-grid solar, and renewable expansion in Africa without expanding baseload power sources such as fossil fuels or nuclear energy. Sporadic electricity can power a lamp or charge a phone, but not industry, water pumps and refrigeration, which are necessary for poverty reduction. It  is time for the G-7  to end its embargo on Africa’s access to reliable electricity, and remove the World Bank’s limitations on financing fossil fuels production and electricity generation. Africans deserve real electricity.

The G-7 2021 decision to stop financing fossil fuel production and electricity generation  was based on the idea that  that if there is limited access to fossil fuels, people will turn to solar, wind and hydropower. However, in reality, without access to affordable and  reliable fossil fuel power plants,  most in Africa continue to burn dung and other biomass for energy, rather than consuming more renewable energy. And this increased use of traditional biomass generates greater pollution and emissions and harms health more than fossil alternatives, such as natural gas.

Following the G-7 decision, the World Bank prioritized lowering emissions over poverty reduction in Africa, in defiance of  its defined mission. The International Energy Agency also abandoned its mission of energy security and took up climate policy in its place. The organizations  recommend more expensive and less reliable renewable energy for Africa, and don’t even suggest fossil fuel options, even though these could more readily  power African  development and help Africa rise from poverty. Moreover, restricting loans and capital to renewable energy leaves  Africans  with more expensive power. This does not seem like the right policy for the world’s poorest.

About a quarter of the new electricity access in sub-Saharan Africa  in recent years is from off-grid solar energy. Thus, many of the new electricity users do not have full  electricity access. In Africa, the  World Bank no longer promotes policies for  provision of  baseload power in electricity supply, in order to avoid admitting that Africa needs fossil fuels. There is no large-scale stable electricity without  baseload power. 

Global climate policies to restrict public funding and capital for investments in natural gas projects have disproportionately hurt Africa. High-income countries don’t need public funding for energy development, unlike most African states. Private capital markets also reduced investments in recent years in  fossil fuel production despite market demand. This drove-up energy prices, pushing energy access out of reach for many Africans and leaving many new gas discoveries in Africa, untapped. 

The U.S., Canada and other main donors should not allow the World Bank, International Energy Agency  and other entities they fund to count partial electricity access as full electricity access. If a village gets a solar energy unit that provides a few hours a day of power, this does not power machinery and stable supplies for refrigeration and water pumps. As a  result, this electricity access is highly  limited in its ability to  spur economic growth, and it is incorrect to describe these villagers as having real access to electricity. Data on electricity access in U. S. government, IEA, World Bank, and UN reports should be categorized as reliable or not. Africans receiving a few hours a day of unreliable power should not be counted as achieving full electricity access.

It is time to flip the high moral position. Those that aspire to net-zero are condemning Africa to extreme poverty. Those that promote African access to fossil fuels, want Africans to have the chance to rise up. 

Prof. Brenda Shaffer is an energy expert at the U.S. Naval Post-graduate School. @ProfBShaffer

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.

By Andy May

As seen in the first post of this series the AMO (Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation) and the WHWP (Western Hemisphere Warm Pool) area are the two climate oscillations that explain most of the variability (64%) in the HadCRUT5 global mean surface temperature reconstruction (GMST) since 1950. Adding the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) explains 77% of HadCRUT5 variability.

The Western Hemisphere warm pool or the WHWP is an anomaly based on the area of the ocean warmer than 28.5°C (that is within the 28.5°C isotherm) and approximately within the rectangular region from 7°N – 27°N and 110°W to 50°W. This area extends from the eastern North Pacific (west of Mexico, Central America, and Columbia) to the Gulf of America, the Caribbean, and well into the Atlantic during the WHWP peak in August and September (Wang & Enfield, 2001) and (Wang & Enfield, 2003). It is significant because deep convection starts at about 28°C (Sud, Walker, & Lau, 1999).

The WHWP nearly disappears in the Northern Hemisphere winter and begins in the eastern Pacific off the coast of Mexico and Central America each spring (think the current Hurricane Erick). It spreads northeastward across Mexico via an atmospheric bridge into the Caribbean and the Gulf of America in June and July. It typically reaches its maximum size in September (see figure 1). Unlike the western Indo-Pacific warm pool which straddles the equator, the WHWP is entirely north of the equator (Wang & Enfield, 2003). Figure 1 shows some key maps of the 1950-2000 average 28.5°C SST isotherm from Wang and Enfield’s 2003 paper.

All indices of Atlantic tropical cyclone activity include a multidecadal variation that is consistent with multidecadal variations of the AMO (Goldenberg, Landsea, Mestas-Nuñez, & Gray, 2001) and the Atlantic portion of the WHWP, sometimes called the AWP or the Atlantic Warm Pool (Wang, Lee, & Enfield, 2008). When the Atlantic portion of the WHWP is large it reduces vertical wind shear and increases the instability of the troposphere, both of which increase hurricane activity (Wang, Lee, & Enfield, 2008). The WHWP has strong ties to the AMO and a statistical connection to ENSO (Wang, Lee, & Enfield, 2008) and (Enfield & Mayer, 1997).

Due to the equatorial Atlantic easterly winds and ocean currents, water warmed by the Sun in the Northern Hemispheric summer collects in the Gulf of America and Caribbean forming the core of the AWP. While the Gulf Stream carries away a lot of this heat, it cannot keep up in the summer and the water warms until deep convection starts. The deep convection forms high level clouds that keep longwave radiation from escaping and act as a positive feedback. The increase in SST and evaporation act to lower sea level air pressure further increasing cloudiness and forming organized storms (Wang & Enfield, 2003). Atlantic and Caribbean hurricanes form within the WHWP and act as giant air conditioners that suck heat from the sea surface and take it almost as high as the stratosphere in some strong storms, they also transport heat as far as the North Atlantic and Canada. These processes accelerate the transport of the excess energy to outer space.

Hurricanes often rapidly intensify both south and north of Cuba in August and September. The WHWP very quickly dissipates after October. The heat fluxes in the WHWP are illustrated in figure 2, which is from Wang & Enfield (2003).

In figure 2a SST, net heat flux, and ocean heat storage are plotted by average 1950-2000 monthly values. The horizontal blue line is at zero ocean heat storage to divide ocean cooling from ocean warming, the boundaries are in February and August. SST changes follow heat flux changes by three to four months. The individual heat fluxes are plotted in figure 2b, the net flux in (a) is the shortwave (solar) flux minus the net longwave, net latent (evaporation), and net sensible fluxes which are all negative (Wang & Enfield, 2003).

The longwave radiation is computed using the graybody flux from the ocean surface and factoring in the back radiation from clouds. The latent flux takes into account evaporation, which is a function of SST and average windspeed. Sensible heat flux is mostly a function of wind speed. The average depth of the mixed layer, and thus the SSTs shown in figure 1, is about 25 meters.

The WHWP is closely correlated to both the Niño-3 anomaly and the tropical North Atlantic anomaly, R² = 0.68 and 0.63 respectively (Wang & Enfield, 2003). Unsurprisingly, the eastern North Pacific portion of the WHWP is very closely correlated with Niño-3 with a zero time-lag. Niño-3 and the overall WHWP have a three-month lag. Figure 3 displays the full year WHWP and its 5-year running mean.

As we saw in post one, the WHWP is closely related to the global mean surface temperature (GMST) something also pointed out in Wang and Enfield, 2003. The annual development and destruction of the WHWP correlates closely with seasonal precipitation, temperature, and storminess over North and Central America. The WHWP nearly disappears every winter, so the key months for the WHWP are from May through October. Figure 4 plots the average just for these critical months, I added the HadCRUT5 GMST for comparison. The close relationship between HadCRUT5 and WHWP is easily seen.

Although the WHWP is not discussed as much as the AMO, PDO, ENSO, and other oscillations it is a good predictor of the HadCRUT5 global mean surface temperature. In combination with the Antarctic Oscillation or Southern Annular Mode and the AMO it does a very good job. This suggests that The North Atlantic and the Southern Hemisphere circulation patterns correlate very well with global climate trends, CO₂ may fit in there somewhere, but it must share the spotlight with these natural oscillations.

Works Cited

Enfield, D. B., & Mayer, D. A. (1997). Tropical Atlantic sea surface temperature variability and its relation to El Niño-Southern Oscillation. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 102(C1). doi:10.1029/96JC03296

Goldenberg, S. B., Landsea, C. W., Mestas-Nuñez, A. M., & Gray, W. M. (2001). The Recent Increase in Atlantic Hurricane Activity: Causes and Implications. Science, 293(5529), 474-479. doi:10.1126/science.1060040

Sud, Y. C., Walker, G. K., & Lau, K. M. (1999). Mechanisms Regulating Sea-Surface Temperatures and Deep Convection in the Tropics. Geophysical Research Letters, 26(8), 1019-1022. doi:10.1029/1999GL900197

Wang, C., & Enfield, D. B. (2001). The Tropical Western Hemisphere Warm Pool. Geophysical Research Letters, 28(8). doi:10.1029/2000GL011763

Wang, C., & Enfield, D. B. (2003). A Further Study of the Tropical Western Hemisphere Warm Pool. Journal of Climate, 16(10), 1476-1493. doi:10.1175/1520-0442(2003)016<1476:AFSOTT>2.0.CO;2

Wang, C., Lee, S.-K., & Enfield, D. B. (2008). Atlantic Warm Pool acting as a link between Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and Atlantic tropical cyclone activity. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, 9(5). doi:10.1029/2007GC001809

Essay by Eric Worrall

“Australia must ditch its distrust and collaborate” – and not purchase any US nuclear submarines.

I’ve seen the energy future and it’s in China, and Australia must ditch its distrust and collaborate

Caroline Wang
Jun 18, 2025

I’ve seen the energy future, and it’s in China. 

On a recent delegation, I saw the futuristic factory of solar giant Longi in Jiaxing, with its omnipresent robots, combining automation, big data, AI and 5G to flexibly customise solar module components for diverse application scenarios and customers, revolutionising advanced manufacturing at massive scale. 

This is not an isolated case. China leads the world by a huge and growing margin across almost all of the frontiers of our decarbonised future, from sophisticated clean tech manufacturing to domestic renewable energy installations to foreign direct investment into the energy transition.

…

As John Grimes, CEO of peak industry body the Smart Energy Council said on our recent delegation, “It is the Australia-China relationship that gives the world a fighting chance in addressing climate change”.

However, as Grimes acknowledges, a crude geostrategic lens continues to dominate the Australian government’s thinking on partnership with China. 

…

As Dr Cao Yu, Executive Director of CMBI Capital Management, commented: “The Australian side of the relationship is not stable”, referring to Australia’s partnership in AUKUS, a China containment strategy costing $368bn and now under review by the Trump Administration – funding that could be spent on renewable energy to help solve the world’s largest threat: climate change. 

…

Read more: https://reneweconomy.com.au/ive-seen-the-energy-future-and-its-in-china-and-australia-must-ditch-its-distrust-and-collaborate/

AUKUS, among other things, is a deal for Australia to purchase three US nuclear powered Virginia class submarines. Such submarines would present a grave strategic threat towards any Chinese aggression in the South Pacific, where depending on the target of that aggression, maritime military supplies would potentially have to be transported through thousands of miles of open ocean.

But this US / Australia / UK submarine deal is under threat, because of Australia’s public hostility towards some US foreign policy positions, and Australia’s outright rejection of Trump’s request for Australia to spend more on defence. All of this appears to be undermining US confidence in Australia’s reliability as a US ally.

China would love for Australia to align more closely with China. Australia refused China’s recent appeal to “join hands” to oppose US tariffs, an international embarrassment which likely shocked China’s leadership. As Australia’s largest trading partner, the market for over 30% of Australia’s exports, China may have assumed Australia was already part of their sphere of influence.

China may have underestimated how much they upset Aussie voters, by conducting unannounced live fire exercises near the Australian coast in March this year. This anger over China’s infringement on Australia’s sovereignty makes it politically difficult for Australian leaders to appear too friendly towards China.

There is another problem. Paying for AUKUS commitments AND Prime Minister Albanese’s green energy promises would really stretch Australia’s finances.

Something has to give. I don’t know the intentions of the Albanese government, but if the AUKUS submarine deal was to collapse, and if the majority of Aussie voters believed President Trump was to blame for the collapse of the deal, there would be no significant Aussie electoral backlash for going soft on China. The $386 billion currently earmarked for purchasing the US nuclear submarines could instead be diverted to attempting to fulfil the Albanese government’s renewable energy electoral promises.

Achieving Net Zero is a major goal of Australia’s left wing Albanese government, but they are struggling to attract investment and enthusiasm – in fact the entire Australian economy is showing signs of a slump in productivity. Part of the reason for this lack of renewable investment enthusiasm might be the threat a future coalition government could cancel renewable subsidies. But if subsidised green industries could be grown sufficiently to become a major employer of Aussie voters, it would be much costlier in terms of political capital for a future coalition government to cancel those subsidies.

The Albanese government would also be able to use some of that cancelled submarine money to kickstart their “Future made in Australia” programme, a key election promise to revive Australian manufacturing through subsidised investment in green manufacturing industries.

Perhaps China senses an opportunity in this ongoing Australian political and fiscal turmoil.