Climate change: 'Uncharted territory' fears after record hot March
Climate change could move "into uncharted territory" if temperatures don't fall by the end of the year, a leading scientist has told the BBC.
The warning came as data showed last month was the world's warmest March on record, extending the run of monthly temperature records to 10 in a row.
It's fuelled concerns among some that the world could be tipping into a new phase of even faster climate change.
A weather system called El Niño is behind some of the recent heat.
Temperatures should temporarily come down after El Niño peters out in coming months, but some scientists are worried they might not.
"By the end of the summer, if we're still looking at record breaking temperatures in the North Atlantic or elsewhere, then we really have kind of moved into uncharted territory," Gavin Schmidt, the director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told BBC News.
"A big boost for a climate solution: electricity made from the heat of the Earth"
One method of making electricity cleanly to address climate change has been quietly advancing and on Tuesday it hit a milestone.
A California utility is backing the largest new geothermal power development in the U.S. — 400 megawatts of clean electricity from the Earth’s heat — enough for some 400,000 homes.
Southern California Edison will purchase the electricity from Fervo Energy, a Houston-based geothermal company, Fervo announced.
The company is drilling up to 125 wells in southwest Utah.
Clean electricity like this reduces the need for traditional power plants that cause climate change. The boost could go a long way toward bringing down the cost of a new generation of geothermal energy, said Wilson Ricks, an energy systems researcher at Princeton University.
“If these purchases help to get this technology off the ground, it could be massively impactful for global decarbonization,” he said. Decarbonization refers to switching out things that produce carbon dioxide and methane, which cause the climate to change, in favor of machines and methods that don’t.
Today the world still relies mainly on fossil fuels for round-the-clock power. This new deal shows that clean power can meet a growing demand for electricity, said Sarah Jewett, vice president of strategy at Fervo.
“I think that’s why it’s so exciting. This isn’t a niche energy resource going to a niche use,” she said. “And that is something we have not had, you know, readily available” and able to be scaled up.
