Almost half of new electricity is now clean and green reported by New Scientist's Fred Pearce.

Did I not tell you, if you do not have your own sources, & resources use my New Scientist RSS-Feed.

Almost half of new electricity is now clean and green is long awaited good news but there is still along trek ahead in an ever tightening schedule!

"That's a lot of clean power. Almost half of new electricity generation is now renewable, and the costs of wind and solar power are falling sharply. It "should give governments confidence to forge a robust climate agreement" next year, says Achim Steiner, director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

This comes a week before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's assessment of how to prevent dangerous climate change. The IPCC will stress the importance of quickly converting to renewables.

The latest annual Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment, published today by UNEP, reveals that 44 per cent of all generating capacity installed last year around the world was renewable. That is despite a 14 per cent decline in renewables investment, and in new electricity generally.

But the politics of green energy are changing fast. China is now the world's leader, having overtaken Europe. Last year, China invested $56 billion in green power.

Going clean

The green bubble seems to have burst in cash-strapped Europe, which was the vanguard of renewable energy for more than a decade. The continent cut investment by 44 per cent.

The only big exception was the UK, which increased investment by 12 per cent despite rumblings of discontent in the governing Conservative party. For the first time, the UK outspent Germany, with projects like the giantWestermost Rough wind farm leading the way.

Japanese investment also soared, increasing by 80 per cent. This was thanks to a rush to install solar panels, after nuclear power stations were closed following the 2011 Fukushima disaster.

Renewables kept 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from being emitted in 2013, says report author Ulf Moslener of the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management in Germany. Aside from hydroelectric dams, photovoltaic solar panels and onshore wind turbines are the biggest contributors.

The cost of generating solar power has fallen by 25 per cent since 2009, and the cost of wind power has fallen 53 per cent over the same period. As a result, the report says a growing number of such projects are being built without any subsidy. What's more, share prices in clean-energy companies, which have been in free fall since the start of the global recession, rose 54 per cent last year."

World must adapt to unknown climate future, says IPCC-Reports from New Scientist(NSci) via NSci-RSS Feed on this blog

NSci_Report on Climate Change, 03 April 2014 by Michael Slezak of NSci.

Perhaps chance readers may not have taken notice of my New Scientist feed links on Climate Change - Global Warming and their relationship to exessive GHG-GreenHouse Gases represented most often by ever increasing CO2 levels (inspite of some efforts to correct this).

Here, I have simply quoted the introduction to M. Slezaks article in order to draw readers attention to the renowned journal "New Scientist" and its effort to bring Climate (Change) Science & its important (life threatening) implications to as wide a public as possible and to the interest & to the importance & convenience of examining NSci's RSS feed links on my page heading.

"There is still great uncertainty about the impacts of climate change, according to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released today. So if we are to survive and prosper, rather than trying to fend off specific threats like cyclones, we must build flexible and resilient societies.

Today's report is the second of three instalments of the IPCC's fifth assessment of climate change. The first instalment, released last year, covered the physical science of climate change. It stated with increased certainty that climate change is happening, and that it is the result of humanity's greenhouse gas emissions. The new report focuses on the impacts of climate change and how to adapt to them. The third instalment, on how to cut greenhouse gas emissions, comes out in April.

The latest report backs off from some of the predictions made in the previous IPCC report, in 2007. During the final editing process, the authors also retreated from many of the more confident projections from the final draft, leaked last year. The IPCC now says it often cannot predict which specific impacts of climate change – such as droughts, storms or floods – will hit particular places.

Instead, the IPCC focuses on how people can adapt in the face of uncertainty, arguing that we must become resilient against diverse changes in the climate."

FOR MORE ON THIS VISIT  The New Scientist's Climate Change Topic Guide. and get your community involves in the combat, "The Good Fight, The Fight for Good" and our future generation's health, safety and happiness.