Latin American country Costa Rica, which aims to be 100% carbon-neutral by 2021, derived 99.99% of its total generated electricity from renewable sources in the month of May 2019, says a news report.
Citing data from National Energy Control Center (Cence), the geothermal energy news and research website Think Geo Energy added that the country generated a total of 984.19 GWh of energy during the month. While 80.04% of this came from the hydel sources; 12.9% was produced by geothermal plants, 6.99% by wind, and 0.06% by biomass and solar energy. Only 0.01% was generated by pollution-causing thermal plants.
The achievement is all the more significant given that demand for electricity has surged over the past few decades. As noted by a Wikipedia page on the topic, electricity consumption had increased by 4.2 times between 1980 and 2009 and 99.5% of the population had access to electricity.
However, when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions, the country’s transportation system still has a long distance to cover. A sequential rise in the number of vehicles has led to an increase in the consumption of fossil fuels.
Earth’s highest ever temp recorded in July 2019
July 2019 was the warmest month ever recorded on Earth. According to report by Statista based on the NASA data, the average global temperature over the past month was 2.34°C above the average temperature calculated for the years from 1980 to 2015.
The chart shared by Statista shows the monthly temperatures of selected years since 1880. According to the data journalist Katharina Buchholz, “Winter temperature is naturally below the multiyear average of the reference period, which is a single figure showing the average temperature over a long period of time irrespective of seasons.”
The data (see chart) indicates that summer temperatures have been naturally moving above the base period multiyear average, but have also been diverging further from it.
The statistics point out that though there has been a steady increase in monthly averages over a 20-year period, summer of 2019 was among the warmest since the beginning of recorded temperatures.
The global data for near-surface temperatures comes from onshore weather stations as well as from ship, buoys and satellite measurements of the oceans.
“According to scientific findings, the continuing global warming will lead to changes in the strength, frequency, spatial extent and duration of extreme weather events. 2019 heat also had a strong impact on polar ice conditions,” the report stated.
It also noted that the Arctic ice pack reached a historic low of 19.8% below average in July, as did the Antarctic ice pack, which reached its smallest extent for July in 41 years of observations.
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