For years, climate experts have been begging the world's biggest economies to wean themselves off of fossil fuels. Instead, coal use is at an all time high, hitting a brand new record of 8.3 billion metric tons in 2022, up 3.3% from the prior year, according to figures from the International Energy Agency (IEA). The uptick in coal demand has been concurrent with a clean energy boom, as countries across the world turned to non-petroleum based energy sources last year thanks to soaring oil and gas prices. All told, the world produced 10,440 terawatt hours from coal in 2022 - about 36% of the world's electricity generation.

Russia's war in Ukraine, which kicked off an entirely war over energy supply and sanctions in Europe over the course of 2022, sent shockwaves through global energy markets. To shore up energy security, global economies scrambled to find alternative energy supply chains. In the West, this mostly manifested as an intensive growth in the renewable energy sector. In China and India, however, the coal business is booming. The picture is a bit more complex in China, however, where renewables growth has outpaced every other country on earth several times over, but coal still reigns supreme in the global energy mix.

In Buenos Aires, where the average high on Aug. 1 is 58 degrees (14 Celsius), it surpassed 86 (30 Celsius) on Tuesday.

“South America is living one of the extreme events the world has ever seen,” weather historian Maximiliano Herrera tweeted, adding, “This event is rewriting all climatic books.”

The most extreme conditions have occurred in the southern half of the continent, and particularly in the Andes Mountains region.

Temperatures Tuesday rose past 95 degrees (35 Celsius) in numerous locations, including at elevations of about 3,500 to 4,500 feet in the Andes foothills. In some cases, the temperature crested above 100 degrees (38 Celsius) after leaping from morning lows in the 30s and 40s (single-digits Celsius).

For decades to come, under almost all scenarios, climate scientists say we should be prepared to see records shattered so frequently, so routinely, that the statistics and the superlatives — warmest, wettest, lowest, driest — might melt together in the public mind like asphalt in August.

The previously abnormal is becoming our normal.

China’s steel sector has invested around US$100 billion in new coal-based iron and steel capacity since 2021, despite overcapacity, low profitability and China’s commitments to reduce carbon emissions, according to a climate think tank.

Steel firms received approvals from provincial governments to build a massive amount of new coal-based capacity between 2021 and the first half of 2023, including 119.8 million tonnes per annum (Mtpa) of blast furnaces (BFs) and 76.6 Mtpa of basic-oxygen furnaces (BOFs), according to a report released by the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) on Tuesday. By the time these plants are fully operational around 2025, their carbon emissions will be roughly equal to the entire emissions of the Netherlands, which emitted over 140 million tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2021, according to CREA.

By 2050, solar waste will total some 78 million tons globally, said Mool Gupta, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Virginia. The reason recycling and recovery isn’t robust yet, Gupta said, is that companies struggle to justify the $30 per panel cost when it costs only $1 to send it to a landfill.

If we hope to one day see 100% of retired solar recycled, said Garvin Heath, distinguished member of the research staff at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, “Let’s not make it any more expensive than what it would cost to landfill the module ... let’s not have it cost the consumer anything and instead have it break even for the recycler.”

While China’s deployment of solar panels is highly impressive, its actual generation from these assets is much less so. China is apparently deploying scarce solar assets irrationally, installing substantial numbers of solar panels in several renewables-poor provinces while largely ignoring sun-soaked regions. Even worse, more than half of China’s new solar installations are dedicated to “distributed” rooftop generation sites, which suffer from poor utilization factors compared with utility-scale solar from power plants.

While China’s solar deployment has been extremely wasteful from an economic or environmental perspective, the shape of Beijing’s solar build may be influenced in part by security considerations. While rooftop solar increases an electricity grid’s “attack surface” and potential exposure to cyberattacks, it also disperses generation and generally increases system resilience, especially if microgrids are employed. Beijing’s solar strategy has evidently prioritized deployment of rooftop solar for government buildings and in provinces that hold key naval bases. If tensions over Taiwan, for example, increase or even break into open conflict, mainland China’s distributed deployment of rooftop solar could reduce its overall vulnerability to cyberattacks or other disruptions, granting Beijing’s leadership greater flexibility.

In the study, Korean researchers simulated how removing large quantities of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the air might affect the progress of local climate changes related to global warming. The study, based on computer modeling, examined a hypothetical scenario, in which carbon dioxide concentrations continued to rise from present-day levels for 140 years, then were gradually reduced back to the initial levels over another 140-year period.

The researchers were particularly interested in how these changes would affect vulnerable subtropical regions, which are known to suffer from more intense and more frequent droughts as climate change progresses.

The study results suggest that the local climate in these areas would not return to normal for more than 200 years after the carbon dioxide concentrations drop. The Mediterranean region, for example, plagued by ever more severe heatwaves, droughts and wildfires, would continue to suffer and could become even drier, the study found.

There’s a big winner in the record heat waves baking the United States, China and other countries — fossil fuels.

The United States is setting records for natural gas consumption this week at the power plants that keep the nation’s air conditioners humming, according to estimates from S&P Global Commodity Insights. In China, power plants are burning more coal to keep up with electricity needs, helping to feed a record-pace in demand this year for the world’s largest source of carbon dioxide, the International Energy Agency said Thursday.

That demand is feeding what the Paris energy watchdog calls a “vicious cycle” that further boosts world temperatures. As heat waves multiply and intensify, it creates more demand for fossil fuels, which add to the greenhouse-gas emissions that intensify extreme heat around the world.

The world’s power grids are still too reliant on gas and coal, complicating efforts by the Biden administration and other governments to phase down their use. Despite climate commitments, governments face immediate imperatives to prevent power blackouts and skyrocketing energy prices to cool buildings and protect people from life-threatening conditions.

A sediment core from underneath the Greenland ice sheet has provided the first direct evidence that much of the ice disappeared during an interglacial period 400,000 years ago, when global temperatures were similar to what they are today.

The findings show that even if the planet doesn’t get any warmer than it is now, ice loss from Greenland alone would add at least 1.5 metres to the global average sea level and possibly as much as 5 metres. This is in line with existing projections, but the study provides direct evidence to back them up.

“It’s a pretty sobering warning that we not only have to stop putting carbon in the atmosphere, we’ve got to start taking it out if we hope to save Greenland’s ice,” says Paul Bierman at the University of Vermont.

Natural gas, long seen as a cleaner alternative to coal and an important tool in the fight to slow global warming, can be just as harmful to the climate, a new study has concluded, unless companies can all but eliminate the leaks that plague its use.

It takes as little as 0.2 percent of gas to leak to make natural gas as big a driver of climate change as coal, the study found. That’s a tiny margin of error for a gas that is notorious for leaking from drill sites, processing plants and the pipes that transport it into power stations or homes and kitchens.

The bottom line: If gas leaks, even a little, “it’s as bad as coal,” said Deborah Gordon, the lead researcher and an environmental policy expert at Brown University and at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit research organization focused on clean energy. “It can’t be considered a good bridge, or substitute.”

The peer-reviewed study, which also involved researchers from Harvard and Duke Universities and NASA and is set to be published next week in the journal Environmental Research Letters, adds to a substantial body of research that has poked holes in the idea that natural gas is a suitable transitional fuel to a future powered entirely by renewables, like solar and wind.