External websites

The Conversation - Wolfgang Knorr

Troutnut / shutterstock

Author

• Wolfgang Knorr
  Senior Research Scientist, Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University

Humanity has only recently become accustomed to a stable climate. For most of its history, long ice ages punctuated with hot spells alternated with short warm periods. Transitions from cold to warm climates were especially chaotic.

Then, about 10,000 years ago, the Earth suddenly entered into a period of climate stability modern humans had never seen before. But thanks to ever accelerating emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, humanity is now bringing this period to an end.

This loss of stability could be disastrous. If the coronavirus pandemic can teach us anything about the climate crisis it is this: our modern interconnected global economy is much more vulnerable than we thought, and we must urgently become more resilient and better prepared for the unknown.

After all, a stable climate underpins much of modern civilisation. About half of humanity depends on stable monsoon rains for food production. Many agricultural plants need certain temperature variations within a year to produce a stable crop, and heat stress can damage them greatly. We rely on intact glaciers or healthy forest soils to store water for the dry season. Heavy rains and storms can wipe out the infrastructure of whole regions.

These are the sorts of climate impacts that we know about, and have been extensively studied by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the biggest risk may yet come from climate-related chaos that we did not expect.

Impossible heatwaves – in consecutive years

In 2018, a prolonged heat wave and drought hit much of western and northern Europe and decimated much of the potato harvest in the region. Temperatures in my native Germany reached record highs in a summer that was drier and hotter than in many parts of the Mediterranean. Climate models had predicted Europe’s most extreme heat increases would occur in Greece, Turkey and Ukraine, so the odds of such a heatwave seemed impossibly low.

The Rhine dries up: Germany, July 2019. Friedemann Vogel / EPA

Only one year on, in 2019, western Europe was struck by another “impossible” heat wave. In Germany, with temperatures topping 40°C, the record of the previous year was broken twice. Even in the Netherlands, known for its cool sea breeze even at peak summer, peak temperatures exceeded a searing 39°C.

Huge wildfires arrived decades early

A large part of Australia’s forests are concentrated in the south-east of the country. This valuable ecosystem evolved with fire and thus is supposed to burn frequently. In these natural fires, typically 1-2% of the area is consumed by flames.

Massive bushfires arrived decades before the models predicted. Mick Tsikas / EPA

Wildfire and climate models – including one I worked on myself – did predict a large increase in bushfire activity in the forests of south-east Australia. But they predicted this would happen towards the end of this century. The models certainly did not foresee that megafires wiping out as much as 20% of these forests would strike as early as 2020.

Locusts are a climate crisis

In the long term, the IPCC predicts crop yields will decrease by around 10% or more, but to date it has ignored the possibility of large-scale pest outbreaks, which can wipe out entire harvests.

At the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020, the Arabian peninsula experienced much wetter weather than normal, likely owed to ocean warming. This created conditions that enabled numbers of desert locusts to explode.

Fighting the locusts in Somaliland, March 2020. Daniel Irungu / EPA

This unusual event was followed by another, a storm that shifted most of this locust army, now several hundred billion strong, to East Africa. In Kenya, it became the worst such outbreak for more than 70 years. With the rainy season just arrived and seeds sown for the next cropping season, it is now feared that continued breeding of the locusts will create a second wave that will be far worse than the first one.

Climate scientists tend to focus on slow changes with their climate predictions. But how much the weather becomes more chaotic is notoriously difficult to predict with climate models. We also have only a very superficial understanding of how vulnerable our modern society is to climate chaos and unexpected climate-related events.

Instead of seeing the climate problem as one felt by the next generations, we need to start focusing on what could happen tomorrow, or next year. To do that, we must better understand, appreciate and acknowledge the vulnerability of modern society – and address this vulnerability at its core.

Links

• Why the Indian Ocean is spawning strong and deadly tropical cyclones
• Coronavirus shows we are not at all prepared for the security threat of climate change
• Nature’s comeback? No, the coronavirus pandemic threatens the world’s wildlife
• We climate scientists won’t know exactly how the crisis will unfold until it’s too late
• Richer countries must do more to help those already experiencing the climate crisis
• Climate scientist: our profession is letting down humanity – we must change the way we approach the climate crisis
• Weathermen of Westeros: does the climate in Game of Thrones make sense?

Hello Giggles - Morgan Noll

Scott Heins, Getty Images

In recent years, the climate change conversation has advanced beyond the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” catchphrase.

Though individual lifestyle changes can have a positive impact over time, the youth activists at the forefront of the climate movement aren’t leading climate strikes in order to get the everyday individual to switch to reusable straws.

 They’re showing up with demands for government officials and policymakers to put people over profit, raise their voices to ask leaders to care about the future of the planet, and communicate a common message: We’re running out of time.

Zero Hour, an education-focused youth climate and environmental justice movement, has a running countdown on the homepage of its site. Less than nine years and 253 days remain on the clock.

That’s how much time is left before the worst impacts of climate change will be irreversible, according to a 2018 special report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Though so much of the climate movement is made up of children and teenaged activists who may not even be eligible to vote yet, they’re pushing for immediate government action because of this sense of urgency.

“A lot of us feel like we have no choice, because we feel like unless we do it, who else is gonna do it?” says Ivy Jaguzny, the 18-year-old press lead for Zero Hour.

If you’re not immersed in the movement, however, the information can be daunting—and it can be hard to figure out exactly what you can do. So we asked climate activists to break down the most important climate justice policies, how to check candidates on their environmental agendas, and how to join the movement.

Their answers boiled down to two main initiatives: getting the Green New Deal worked into the country’s infrastructure and getting fossil fuels out.

So, what is the Green New Deal and why does it matter?
Mike Kemp, Getty Images

The idea of a “Green New Deal” has been around for a while. Investopedia reports that Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman coined the term in a New York Times column in January 2007, where he argued for a transition away from fossil fuels and toward clean, renewable energy through government action.

The name is a reference to former President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s domestic programs—the New Deal—which he designed as a response to the Great Depression.

Since the idea was first conceived, the Green New Deal has become somewhat of an umbrella term for environmental policies, with various politicians adding interpretations of the deal to their platforms. In recent years,

 Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has brought widespread attention to the Green New Deal by putting it at the center of her platform, introducing a policy package in Congress in February 2019.

The 14-page document calls for a “10-year national mobilization” plan that aims to rework current U.S. infrastructure in order to transition to 100% clean and renewable energy. Those 10 years weren’t selected at random: The plan is a direct response to that 2018 report mentioned above, and it’s a proposed answer for beating the clock—and avoiding the point of no return.

As The New York Times reports, the Green New Deal also “calls on the federal government to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions; create high-paying jobs; ensure that clean air, clean water, and healthy food are basic human rights; and end all forms of oppression.”

The Green New Deal is central to the platform of Sunrise Movement, a youth-powered organization dedicated to fighting climate change and creating “millions of good jobs in the process,” as its website reads.

Ritwik Tati, a 16-year-old coordinator for the South Jersey hub of Sunrise Movement, says the group is dedicated to both advocating for and educating people on the policy package.

He likes to explain, however, that the Green New Deal is a vision rather than a specific piece of legislation.

“[At Sunrise Movement,] we’re not necessarily having people unpack what the Green New Deal specifically is and what each climate policy is, but making them understand that we need an aggressive climate solution,” Tati says.

Any climate legislation that aligns with the values of the Green New Deal can be considered a part of it, Tati says. Those values include things like efforts to provide living wages for workers and protect marginalized communities, in addition to more climate-specific policies like bans on fossil fuels and fracking.
Climate activists like Tati also emphasize how important it is to understand climate change as an intersectional issue, one that is as connected to systemic racism as it is the environment.At Zero Hour, Jaguzny says that they see the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic as somewhat of a “dress rehearsal,” showing all of the issues the climate crisis will exacerbate if it’s not addressed.

When we talk about the climate crisis, Jaguzny says, “we don’t talk about the people [who] are actually being hurt by this, which is working people, Black and Brown people, Indigenous people, [and] the same people [who] are being [disproportionately] affected by COVID-19.”

Like the current pandemic, Jaguzny says the climate crisis is going to put pressure on our infrastructure and healthcare system and that, if we’re not prepared, “the people [who] are most vulnerable in this country are going to be really negatively impacted.”

She believes that implementing the Green New Deal is the way to be prepared because of how it addresses the underlying systems of oppression that cause and perpetuate the crisis.

One way the Green New Deal does this is in how it plans for a just transition. The plan acknowledges the fact that many workers will lose their jobs if fossil fuel industries are taken down.

So, a just transition makes sure that these workers—many of whom are from low-income, marginalized communities—aren’t simply laid off and ignored, but are supplied with the training and resources to access jobs in the clean energy industry. The plan also pushes for those jobs to offer benefits and living wages.
If implemented, climate activists believe the Green New Deal could provide a holistic approach to reversing the climate crisis. But there’s one major thing standing in its way.Lukas Schulze, Getty Images

“The biggest thing blocking a Green New Deal is the investment in fossil fuels,” Jaguzny says.

The environmentalism movement has long advocated for a ban on fossil fuels due to their negative impact on the environment.

When fossil fuels are burned, they release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the environment, making them a primary contributor to global warming and climate change, according to National Geographic. To make matters worse, fossil fuel companies are significant stakeholders in the climate conversation, which can halt any large-scale progress.

Climate activist Ayisha Siddiqa has seen this dynamic play out firsthand. Siddiqa was one of the lead organizers of the September 20th New York City Climate Strike, which attracted 250,000 people, according to Vox. “We did all of our homework,” she says. “Me and my peers worked day in, day out for three entire months planning.”

At the age of 21, Siddiqa says she’s learned things that people usually learn in their late thirties, things like: how to get a permit for an event, how to write a press release, how to lobby. She and her peers put in tireless work to gain momentum for the protests and the climate movement. Then, a few days later, the U.N. Climate Action Summit happened.

“We came in with packets of information that we wanted to say, and we were met with Instagram influencers, people teaching us how to use Photoshop and Adobe Flash Player at the U.N. And policy was not even spoken about,” Siddiqa says.

The same thing happened a few months later at COP25, the 25th United Nations Climate Change Conference. Climate activists showed up, ready to talk policy, and they were shut out from having serious conversations. And Siddiqa has a pretty a good idea for why this happened: COP25 was sponsored by some of Spain’s biggest greenhouse gas polluters and fossil fuel companies.

“If you can understand what’s happening, it’s actually very scary,” Siddiqa says. “The body of government, the place where decisions are supposed to be made, are being sponsored by fossil fuels. How in the world are you supposed to expect actual change if the same people responsible for causing the damage are [controlling the decision-making]?”

The short answer? You can’t. That’s why Siddiqa co-founded Polluters Out, an organization fighting for a conflict of interest policy that would remove the influence of the fossil fuel industry from the places where climate decisions are made.

So, what can you do to support these movements?
Brenton Geach, Getty Images

For starters, you can join them. Polluters Out, Sunrise Movement, and Zero Hour all have various options on their site for those who are interested in taking action to fight climate change. Extinction Rebellion, 350.org, and Fridays For Future are more groups with goals to fight the climate crisis.

Siddiqa also urges people to sign Polluters Out’s petition, which demands that “Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), refuse funding from fossil fuel corporations for COP26.”

On a more local level, Tati recommends that people focus on getting their elected officials to sign the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge. The pledge is intended to get politicians to refuse to take any contributions over $200 from oil, gas, and coal industry executives, lobbyists, or PACs.

Jaguzny also wants to see a commitment from the government to stop bailing out fossil fuel companies when they’re in debt and to start holding them accountable.

“Stop giving these companies tax breaks. Stop allowing them to destroy communities and not pay for it,” she says. “The effects of fossil fuels are local, like there are local communities all over the United States that are being hurt by these companies and the companies don’t do anything. They just turn away.“
So Jaguzny’s advice for individuals is to help raise awareness about how these companies are affecting their local communities and to put the pressure on their local governments to divest from fossil fuels.

When it comes to selecting a candidate to endorse or vote for, Tati says that Sunrise Movement looks for “climate champions,” candidates who support the Green New Deal and have shown a commitment to climate legislation in the past.

This election cycle, the movement has endorsed Senate candidates like Kentucky State Representative Charles Booker, former Speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives Andrew Romanoff, and Senator Ed Markey (who sponsored the Green New Deal alongside AOC).

As far as the presidential election goes, with Bernie Sanders now out of the race, Tati says, “I think it’s important that we see that a [Joe] Biden presidency is exponentially better than a Trump presidency, even if it doesn’t align with the goals of the climate movement.”

Biden doesn’t see that as top priority, however./ “Focusing on congressional elections and state legislature elections [are] more important because we may have a Democratic president in office, but none of this progressive policy can be passed without a Congress that is more progressive and is majority Democrat,” Tati says.

Below is a checklist of what Tati and Jaguzny believe a climate champion candidate should look like.

A climate champion candidate:
 
1. Supports the Green New Deal
Though there is some room for interpretation with the Green New Deal, Tati says it’s important not to compromise for a less aggressive version.
This would be one that involves changes, like allowing for a more lenient timeline on reducing emissions, or one that compromises any of the fundamental values which prioritize people over profit.
For example, Tati explains that some Democrats (like Nancy Pelosi and Biden) are advocating for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, which, according to the IPCC’s timeline, will be too late.

2. Supports a ban on fracking and divestment from fossil fuels
Fracking, short for hydraulic fracturing, is a method of extracting natural gas and oil by fracturing the earth with pressurized liquid.
Though some argue that fracking natural gas is a cleaner option than drilling for oil or coal, climate activists argue that the health risks far outweigh any comparative benefits.
According to Greenpeace, a non-governmental environmental organization, fracking can cause a serious threat to local water resources, and some of the chemicals used in the process have been identified as cancer-causing contaminants.
A 2017 study published in the journal Science Advances also found that infants born within about two miles of fracking sites are more likely to suffer from poor health.
As far as divestment from fossil fuels goes, Jaguzny wants to see candidates “acknowledging that the era of fossil fuels is ending and acknowledging that we really cannot get anywhere if we’re still hanging onto fossil fuels.”

3. Supports an economy that is driven by small businesses and localized production
“One thing that COVID-19 has made abundantly clear is that having these huge multinational corporations running the show isn’t economically sustainable, and as soon as any pressure is applied it totally falls apart in a crisis,” Jaguzny says.
She argues that an economy driven by local businesses is far more sustainable, since there’s no shipping overseas or exploitation of workers in other countries.

4. Supports universal healthcare
“Climate change is a healthcare issue,” Tati asserts. “And if we don’t have Medicare for all, the Green New Deal won’t be able to sustain itself.”
The Environmental Protection Agency put out an analysis in 2017 of the impacts of climate change on human health. The findings showed correlations with medical issues like heatstroke, respiratory illness, and an increased risk of the spread of disease.
“The severity of these health risks will depend on the ability of public health and safety systems to address or prepare for these changing threats, as well as factors such as an individual’s behavior, age, gender, and economic status,” the report reads.

5. Shows a willingness to pay for the demands of the Green New Deal
Jaguzny says she’s heard countless legislators tell her, “We can’t pay for your demands.” Based on things like the recent federal relief package and other ways she’s seen the government pull together resources, she says, “We see that and we kind of call bullshit.”
AOC has made it clear that the Green New Deal will be expensive, but she argues that the economic benefits will outweigh the costs. Though the specific costs of the policy package aren’t entirely clear, some evaluations have aligned with AOC’s argument.
For example, the Green New Deal advocates for a smart power grid for the entire country. A 2011 study by the Electric Power Research Institute found that this could cost as much as $476 billion, but it could lead to $2 trillion in benefits.

6. Uplifts marginalized voices
Tati emphasizes the importance of endorsing a candidate who gives voice to underrepresented communities, especially Indigenous communities.
“Not only did we steal land that wasn’t rightfully ours” from them, Tati says, but Indigenous communities have also historically shown a deeper connection with the environment.
“We need to make sure that their voices are represented and that they have a stake in this.”

Links

• These 7 women are the eco-warriors fighting for our future
• Going Green Without Going Mad
• Zero Hour
• IPCC - Special Report: Global Warming Of 1.5 ºC
• Why young climate activists have captured the world’s attention
• Green New Deal (pdf)
• What Is the Green New Deal? A Climate Proposal, Explained
• Sunrise Movement

Quartz - Michael J. Coren

Records keep on falling

Get ready for a hot one. The first three months of 2020 are now the second-hottest on record going back to 1880, according to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.
That lines up with the last decade of warming. This March marks the 423rd consecutive month that temperatures have exceeded the 20th-century global average. Last year was the second hottest on record, according to NOAA, following 2016. All five of the warmest years have been recorded since 2015.
The first three months of 2020 are already nearing temperature records Monthly temperature anomalies above 20th-century global averages (2000-2020)Quartz | qz.com Data: NOAA

The early heat makes it virtually certain that 2020 will place in the ranks of the hottest years. Global land and ocean surface temperatures were 2.09°F (1.16°C) above average. 
Records were set across the globe, particularly in eastern Europe and Asia, where temperatures were 5.4°F (3.0°C) above average.


How much hotter is it going to get? Global climate models have proved remarkably accurate, and the world is now running closer to those projected by Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change in 2015. 
Cities will feel the heat sooner: Temperatures in cities such as Moscow, London, Seattle are expected to shift from temperate to sub-tropical, rising 3.5° C to 6° C above normal, according to 2019 research in PLOS One.
Globally, research suggests we’ll see close to 2°C warming by the end of century, even in the most optimistic scenario. And that’s not the path we’re on.
In 2015, scientists introduced “shared socioeconomic pathways” reflecting different ways the world might evolve along key indices such as population, urbanization, and economic growth. 
We’re now far closer to what modelers refer to as the “regional rivalry — a rocky road” scenario, reflecting more nationalism and reduced cooperation. That scenario has global temperature rising more than 4 °C above pre-industrial averages.

Links

• NOAA: March 2020 global temperature second warmest on record
• 2019 was 2nd hottest year on record for Earth say NOAA, NASA
• Should we expect each year in the next decade (2019-2028) to be ranked among the top 10 warmest years globally?
• Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming
• How hot will Earth get by 2100?

Washington Post - Andrew Freedman | Darryl Fears

Only one drought in the past 1,200 years comes close to the ongoing, global warming-driven event

Water levels at the Ward Creek Reservoir in Grand Mesa, Colo., have gone down in recent years because of persistent drought conditions. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

A vast region of the western United States, extending from California, Arizona and New Mexico north to Oregon and Idaho, is in the grips of the first climate change-induced megadrought observed in the past 1,200 years, a study shows.

The finding means the phenomenon is no longer a threat for millions to worry about in the future, but is already here.

The megadrought has emerged while thirsty, expanding cities are on a collision course with the water demands of farmers and with environmental interests, posing nightmare scenarios for water managers in fast-growing states.

A megadrought is broadly defined as a severe drought that occurs across a broad region for a long duration, typically multiple decades.

Unlike historical megadroughts triggered by natural climate cycles, emissions of heat-trapping gases from human activities have contributed to the current one, the study finds.

Warming temperatures and increasing evaporation, along with earlier spring snowmelt, have pushed the Southwest into its second-worst drought in more than a millennium of observations.

The study, published in the journal Science on Thursday, compares modern soil moisture data with historical records gleaned from tree rings, and finds that when compared with all droughts seen since the year 800 across western North America, the 19-year drought that began in 2000 and continued through 2018 (this drought is still ongoing, though the study’s data is analyzed through 2018) was worse than almost all other megadroughts in this region.

The researchers, who painstakingly reconstructed soil moisture records from 1,586 tree-ring chronologies to determine drought severity, found only one megadrought that occurred in the late 1500s was more intense.

Historical megadroughts, spanning vast regions and multiple decades, were triggered by natural fluctuations in tropical ocean conditions, such as La Niña, the cyclic cooling of waters in the tropical Pacific.

“The megadrought era seems to be reemerging, but for a different reason than the [past] megadroughts,” said Park Williams, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.

Although many areas in the West had a productive wet season in 2019 and some this year, “you can’t go anywhere in the West without having suffered drought on a millennial scale,” Williams said, noting that megadroughts contain relatively wet periods interspersed between parched years.

“I think the important lesson that comes out of this is that climate change is not a future problem,” said Benjamin I. Cook, a NASA climate scientist and co-author of the study. “Climate change is a problem today. The more we look, the more we find this event was worse because of climate change.”

The study is part scientific grunt work, involving sifting through drought records to find past instances of comparable conditions, and part sophisticated sleuthing that employs computer models to determine how climate change is altering the likelihood of an event like this one.

Cook said the researchers analyzed climate models for the region, which showed warming trends and changes in precipitation. They compared soil moisture with and without global warming-induced trends, “and we were able to determine that 30 to 50 percent of the current drought is attributable to climate change.”

That conclusion is a first, says Jonathan Overpeck, a climate researcher at the University of Michigan who did not participate in the new study.

“They are the first to show conclusively that we’re experiencing our nation’s first megadrought of the instrumental era,” he said via email.

“The real take home,” Overpeck said, “is that the Southwest is being baked by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities, and the future implications are dire if we don’t stop climate change.”

Looking for a megadrought, only to find it’s already here

Fire crews look for remaining hot spots left over by the Getty Fire, which destroyed a dozen homes, during the early morning hours in Brentwood, Calif., in October. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post


In 2015, Cook took part in a study that predicted a megadrought would grip the American Southwest starting about 2050 and persist for 35 years, with a few wet years to break long dry spells.

At the time, California was experiencing a severe four-year drought. As it dragged past a fifth year, Cook and others asked a question: “Are these changes in drought patterns that we expected in the future already beginning to happen?”

They then set out to answer that question.

For the study, the authors started from scratch, analyzing tree-ring data rather than relying solely on archived information. They took apart calculations already in the record and modified them where needed. Not only was a megadrought happening, they concluded, it had been in progress since the turn of the century.

The same year that Cook and other researchers published their first study, a Stanford University scientist, Noah Diffenbaugh, led a separate study that said rising temperatures and significant declines in snow and rainfall will parch California for years to come.

Diffenbaugh, a professor and senior fellow who studies the Southwest, had also analyzed data showing that the region was becoming hotter and drier. He said Thursday’s study, which he was not involved with, is a breakthrough because of its comparison of droughts in the past two decades to those in the previous thousand years.

“Placing the two-decade period in the whole region in the context of the last millennium is very striking, very powerful,” Diffenbaugh said. “We can conclude that without the warming, this period would not have produced such a severe, regionwide drought.”

What this means for the West

Valerie Trouet, a researcher at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, says that the megadroughts of the past brought about major societal impacts, particularly those that persisted for decades.

For example, the megadrought seen in the late 800s is thought to have instigated the downfall of the Mayan civilization. The severe drought in the 16th century may have contributed to the Chichimeca War in Mexico, during which Native Americans and European settlers fought for decades.

“All of these past megadroughts have had severe impacts,” Trouet said in an interview. “We can expect there to be societal impacts now, too.”

These effects may not be as devastating in the future, however. Modern humans have more ways to adapt, Cook said.

“There are a lot of things we can do about it. People in the West are dealing with this drought in a number of ways,” Cook said.

California has already provided a model for living in a warmer and drier region, although it has involved sacrifice at times. Amid its drought in 2015, the state took aggressive steps to preserve water and limit wildfires on thirsty land with varying success. Former governor Jerry Brown (D) imposed the first water restrictions in state history and declared that watering lawns was going to be “a thing of the past” in California.

Water utilities essentially rationed supply, telling residents to dramatically cut the minutes they showered to no longer than 12 and all but mandating more efficient machines for laundry and dish washing.

Utilities encouraged homeowners to purchase new appliances with rebates subsidized by the state, water bills spiked and penalties were imposed on any household that went over their limits. Neighbors spied on neighbors who washed cars, watered grass and sprayed driveways, all outlawed.

A swimming pool contrasts with the drought-dried landscape in East Porterville, Calif., in 2015. With access to water limited, the pool's owner doesn't drain it, instead using chemicals to keep it clean. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

East Porterville, Calif., in the Central Valley became a town without water. A church set up a shower trailer so residents whose wells went dry could wash. The state placed water tanks outside homes so their toilets would flush. Laundering clothes, washing hands and brushing teeth became luxuries.

The drought and the drive to save water had environmental consequences, as well. It resulted in the death of trees that improved air quality, provided animal habitats and beautified urban areas across California. Urban trees joined about 12.5 million wild trees that died in dry California forests during 2015’s drought, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

Such serious drought effects happened with only about 1 degree Celsius of warming since the industrial revolution, Diffenbaugh said. “The impacts we’ve already seen from one degree of warming really highlights the intensification of what’s coming,” he said.


Extreme weather, like the polar vortex, is becoming more common as the Arctic continues to be disrupted by climate change. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)

Links

• Two degrees Celsius: Extreme climate change has arrived in America
• Climate change made a southwestern U.S. drought one of the worst in 1,200 years
• Climate change: US megadrought 'already under way'
• US Drought Could Last A Century As We Now Enter A Megadrought, Study Finds
• US megadrought is being made more intense by effects of climate change
• Southwest Drought Rivals Those of Centuries Ago, Thanks to Climate Change
• The western U.S. is locked in the grips of the first human-caused megadrought, study finds

New York Times - Rhiana Gunn-Wright

Addressing climate change is a big-enough idea to revive the economy.

A home in Baton Rouge, La., near an ExxonMobil oil refinery. Credit...Emily Kask for The New York Times

Rhiana Gunn-Wright is the director of climate policy at the Roosevelt Institute.
She has worked with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the creation of the Green New Deal.
Gunn-Wright was a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford in 2013.  On the last Friday in March, I lost hope. I have always believed in America: not in our inherent goodness — I am too black for that — but in our sheer animal will to survive.

Crisis after crisis, our country has evolved to meet the moment, even if that meant changing the way we thought the world worked or striving to upend the imbalance of power.

But on that Friday, I was on my couch working when the messages started to pour in.

Friends sent me video after video of Republican senators debating stimulus measures to address the coronavirus crisis, standing in the Senate chamber, saying that the Green New Deal — a proposal that I helped create — was the reason millions of Americans would not receive the help that they need.

I was furious. Of the nearly $2 trillion in aid proposed in that first version of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, known as the CARES Act, $500 billion went toward a business-relief fund with little to no oversight. Fifty-eight billion of this was earmarked for airlines, and a lax definition of eligible businesses created a loophole for oil and gas.

The bill included no climate protections, so the claim that it was being held up over Green New Deal provisions was absurd. And the changes proposed by Democrats — emissions reductions for airlines, limiting bailouts for fossil fuel industries, protections for airline workers — were modest.

The senators I saw did not mention those things. Nor did they mention that the airlines had requested $50 billion after spending $45 billion on stock buybacks over the past five years.

They did not mention that emissions reductions requested would not be required until 2025 or that when they were, the reductions would be less than 3 percent per year. And no one stood up and asked why corporations should be exempt from loan terms when the rest of us are not.

Why is it “opportunism” when we try to design policy that would address more than one problem at a time, but it’s “efficiency” when businesses do the same? (The final version of the CARES Act does not provide targeted funding for fossil fuels and reduced the aid for passenger airlines to $25 billion. None of the climate policies mentioned were included in the final version of the bill.)

Covid-19 and the economic collapse it has caused have laid bare how connected our problems are. Congress and the Federal Reserve are not going to lay out trillions of dollars, over and over, in perpetuity.

Refusing to include measures related to climate and environmental justice in economic stimulus packages related to the coronavirus is not neutral when there is no guarantee of other opportunities to do so later.

We need to design the stimulus not only to help the U.S. economy recover but to also become more resilient to the climate crisis, the next multitrillion-dollar crisis headed our way.

Pandemics like the coronavirus may occur more often when climate change is unabated. Warming and changing weather patterns shift the vectors and spread of disease. Heavily polluting industries also contribute to disease transmission.

 Studies have linked factory farming — one of the largest sources of methane emissions — to faster-mutating, more virulent pathogens. The same corporations that exacerbated the climate crisis are literally helping to create deadlier diseases, more quickly, in a world that keeps changing how they spread.

Similarly, the same populations that are bearing the brunt of the health and economic effects of the coronavirus are the same populations that bear the brunt of fossil fuel pollution — which, in turn, makes them more vulnerable to serious complications.

In three of the states with the highest number of Covid-19 cases — Illinois, Michigan and Louisiana — African-Americans made up 40 to 70 percent of deaths from the disease, far outpacing the percentage of black people in each state. Many of the black communities ravaged by Covid-19 are “front-line communities” — where residents live adjacent to heavily polluting industries.

If you’re black or Latinx — and especially if you’re poor — it is difficult not to live in a front-line community. Oil, gas and petrochemical industries have concentrated so heavily in low-income, majority-black-and-brown areas that black people are 75 percent more likely to live near industrial facilities than the average American.

Metro Detroit, the epicenter of Michigan’s Covid-19 outbreak, is home to steel mills, waste-processing plants and the only oil refinery in the state — all in or near low-income, black and Latinx neighborhoods.

The people most likely to die from toxic fumes are the same people most likely to die from Covid-19. It’s like we are watching a preview of the worst possible impacts of the climate crisis roll right before our eyes.

Emissions from the Marathon oil refinery in Detroit have been an ongoing concern for the neighborhoods within its range.  Credit...Erin Kirkland for The New York Times

Leaders on both sides of the aisle have argued that folding policies to address climate and environmental injustice into coronavirus-related legislative packages would distract from efforts to provide immediate relief.

But addressing climate change and environmental injustice will not diffuse efforts to address the virus and its economic fallout if we apply intersectional policies such as the Green New Deal.

They are designed to address connected issues in a way that protects the most vulnerable while building a more just and sustainable economy. Some states have already begun to connect the coronavirus to climate action. New York, for example, passed the Accelerated Renewable Energy Growth and Community Benefit Act on April 3.

The legislation comes on the heels of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act — sometimes referred to as New York’s Green New Deal. And if New York’s response is any indication, none of this appears to have detracted from efforts to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Addressing climate change doesn’t have to slow down the economic recovery, either. In fact, it can push it forward. No one knows the depth of the recession, but it is hard to see how we will put the 16 million people who have filed for unemployment back to work without significant public investment.

If history is any indication, rebounding from an economic disruption this large requires an equally large spike in demand and production.

Outside of war, climate change is the only issue large enough to provide such a spike. Now is the time to create policies that provide immediate relief to communities, such as federal assistance to transition homes and businesses to renewable energy; give “green” fiscal aid to states; and fuel economic recovery with the creation of federally funded green jobs. But none of this can happen so long as our leaders keep convincing themselves that the greatest country in the world cannot walk and chew gum at the same time.

A climate-focused economic recovery — much less a coronavirus response that acknowledges the climate crisis — could require a new Congress and a new president, a tall order in an America this divided.

But maybe it is time to stop acting as though politics is a force of nature when we are facing actual and deadly forces of nature. It’s past time to elect leaders who are fit to handle the crises we face, instead of hoping for problems small enough to fit the leaders we have.

The Americans I know would like to survive, even if it means our country has to evolve — which many of us have been ready for long before the pandemic.

Links

• How Climate Change Increases Our Risk For Pandemics
• U.S. airlines want a $50 billion bailout. They spent $45 billion buying back their stock.
• House Democrats would give airlines, contractors $40 billion bailout
• How might climate change affect the spread of viruses?
• Climate change and health: Impacts and risks
• Unpacking New York's Big New Climate Bill: A Primer

The Conversation - Terry Hughes | Morgan Pratchett

Author supplied

Authors

• Terry Hughes
  Distinguished Professor, James Cook University

• Morgan Pratchett
  Professor, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University

The Australian summer just gone will be remembered as the moment when human-caused climate change struck hard. First came drought, then deadly bushfires, and now a bout of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef – the third in just five years.

Tragically, the 2020 bleaching is severe and the most widespread we have ever recorded.

Coral bleaching at regional scales is caused by spikes in sea temperatures during unusually hot summers. The first recorded mass bleaching event along Great Barrier Reef occurred in 1998, then the hottest year on record.

Since then we’ve seen four more mass bleaching events – and more temperature records broken – in 2002, 2016, 2017, and again in 2020.

This year, February had the highest monthly sea surface temperatures ever recorded on the Great Barrier Reef since the Bureau of Meteorology’s records began in 1900.

Source: Australian Academy of Science.

Not a pretty picture

We surveyed 1,036 reefs from the air during the last two weeks in March, to measure the extent and severity of coral bleaching throughout the Great Barrier Reef region. Two observers, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, scored each reef visually, repeating the same procedures developed during early bleaching events.

The accuracy of the aerial scores is verified by underwater surveys on reefs that are lightly and heavily bleached. While underwater, we also measure how bleaching changes between shallow and deeper reefs.

Of the reefs we surveyed from the air, 39.8% had little or no bleaching (the green reefs in the map). However, 25.1% of reefs were severely affected (red reefs) – that is, on each reef more than 60% of corals were bleached. A further 35% had more modest levels of bleaching.

Bleaching isn’t necessarily fatal for coral, and it affects some species more than others. A pale or lightly bleached coral typically regains its colour within a few weeks or months and survives.

The 2020 coral bleaching event was the second-worst in more than two decades. ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies

But when bleaching is severe, many corals die. In 2016, half of the shallow water corals died on the northern region of the Great Barrier Reef between March and November. Later this year, we’ll go underwater to assess the losses of corals during this most recent event.

Compared to the four previous bleaching events, there are fewer unbleached or lightly bleached reefs in 2020 than in 1998, 2002 and 2017, but more than in 2016. Similarly, the proportion of severely bleached reefs in 2020 is exceeded only by 2016. By both of these metrics, 2020 is the second-worst mass bleaching event of the five experienced by the Great Barrier Reef since 1998.

The unbleached and lightly bleached (green) reefs in 2020 are predominantly offshore, mostly close to the edge of the continental shelf in the northern and southern Great Barrier Reef. However, offshore reefs in the central region were severely bleached again. Coastal reefs are also badly bleached at almost all locations, stretching from the Torres Strait in the north to the southern boundary of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

CC BY-ND

For the first time, severe bleaching has struck all three regions of the Great Barrier Reef – the northern, central and now large parts of the southern sectors. The north was the worst affected region in 2016, followed by the centre in 2017.

In 2020, the cumulative footprint of bleaching has expanded further, to include the south. The distinctive footprint of each bleaching event closely matches the location of hotter and cooler conditions in different years.

Poor prognosis

Of the five mass bleaching events we’ve seen so far, only 1998 and 2016 occurred during an El Niño – a weather pattern that spurs warmer air temperatures in Australia.

But as summers grow hotter under climate change, we no longer need an El Niño to trigger mass bleaching at the scale of the Great Barrier Reef. We’ve already seen the first example of back-to-back bleaching, in the consecutive summers of 2016 and 2017. The gap between recurrent bleaching events is shrinking, hindering a full recovery.

For the first time, severe bleaching has struck all three regions of the Great Barrier Reef. ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies

After five bleaching events, the number of reefs that have escaped severe bleaching continues to dwindle. Those reefs are located offshore, in the far north and in remote parts of the south.

The Great Barrier Reef will continue to lose corals from heat stress, until global emissions of greenhouse gasses are reduced to net zero, and sea temperatures stabilise. Without urgent action to achieve this outcome, it’s clear our coral reefs will not survive business-as-usual emissions.

Links

• I studied what happens to reef fish after coral bleaching. What I saw still makes me nauseous
• 'This situation brings me to despair': two reef scientists share their climate grief
• Attention United Nations: don't be fooled by Australia's latest report on the Great Barrier Reef
• (AU) Scientists Trial Cloud Brightening Equipment To Shade And Cool Great Barrier Reef
• Big Parts Of The Great Barrier Reef Are Dying
• More Than Half Of Remote Reefs In Coral Sea Marine Park Suffered Extreme Bleaching
• (AU) Great Barrier Reef Found To Be Coral Bleached From North To South For First Time
• Rescuing The Great Barrier Reef: How Much Can Be Saved, And How Can We Do It?
• Climate Crisis May Have Pushed World's Tropical Coral Reefs To Tipping Point Of 'Near-Annual' Bleaching
• (AU) Great Barrier Reef’s Latest Bleaching Confirmed By Marine Park Authority
• (AU) Climate Change The Biggest Threat To Great Barrier Reef: Ley

Rolling Stone - Stephen Rodrick

How one Swedish teenager armed with a homemade sign ignited a crusade and became the leader of a movement 

Jack Davison for Rolling Stone
There is persona and there is reality in Greta Thunberg. It is Valentine’s Day in her hometown of Stockholm, but there’s only wind, no hearts and flowers. A few hundred kids mill about, with a smattering of adults. If there were not signs reading “Our Earth, We Only Have One,” it could be mistaken for a field trip to the ABBA museum.

But where is Greta? I find a scrum of reporters interviewing a child in a purple puffer jacket, pink mittens, and a homemade-looking knit hat. It takes me a minute to realize that it’s Greta. She is 17, but could pass for 12. I can’t quite square the fiery speaker with the micro teen in front of me. She seems in need of protection.

Of course, this is emphatically wrong. Greta Thunberg has Asperger’s, which, she says, gives her pinpoint focus on climate minutiae while parrying and discarding even the smallest attempt at flattery. We stand near the Swedish Parliament house, where less than two years ago Thunberg started her Skolstrejk för klimatet, School Strike for Climate.

Back then, it was just Greta, a sign, and a lunch of bean pasta in a reusable glass jar. Then it was two people, and then a dozen, and then an international movement. I mention the bravery of her speeches, but she waves me away. She wants to talk about the loss of will among the olds.

“It seems like the people in power have given up,” says Thunberg, taking her hat off and pushing back her mussed up brown-blond hair. She remains on message despite the tourists and teens taking her picture and mugging behind us. “They say it’s too hard — it’s too much of a challenge. But that’s what we are doing here. We have not given up because this is a matter of life and death for countless people.”

It was my second encounter with Greta in three weeks. Back in January, before the Coronavirus brought the world to its knees, forcing Greta to move her Friday protests online, she was in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual conference of the World Economic Forum, where billionaires helo into the Swiss resort town and talk about solving the world’s problems without making their lives any harder. Thunberg had appeared last year and made her now iconic “Our House Is on Fire” speech, in which she declared the climate crisis to be the mortal threat to our planet. Solve it or all the other causes — feminism, human rights, and economic justice — would not matter.

“Either we choose to go on as a civilization or we don’t,” said Thunberg with cold precision. “That is as black or white as it gets. There are no gray areas when it comes to survival.”

The speech made Thunberg the unlikely and reluctant hero of the climate crisis. She crossed the ocean in a sailboat — she doesn’t fly for environmental reasons — to speak before the United Nations. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year, conjuring the manic jealousy of Donald Trump, who called the honor “so ridiculous” and suggested she go to the movies and chill out.

In Davos, the illuminati prattled on about planting a trillion trees, even as we are still clear-cutting actual trees from the Amazon all the way to Thunberg’s beloved Sweden. This did not amuse nor placate the hoodie-wearing Greta. She seemed irritated and perhaps a little sick; she canceled an appearance the day before because she wasn’t feeling well. She was in no mood for flattery and nonsense. So when Time editor Edward Felsenthal asked her how she dealt with all the haters, Greta didn’t even try to answer diplomatically.

“I would like to say something that I think people need to know more than how I deal with haters,” she answered, before launching into details from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report. She mentioned that if we are to have even a 67 percent chance of limiting global temperature change to under 1.5 C, the point where catastrophic changes begin, we have less than 420 gigatons of CO2 that we can emit before we pass the no-going-back line. Thunberg stated that, at the current rate, we have eight years to change everything.

Thunberg’s face was controlled fury. This was the persona: an adolescent iron-willed truth teller. The Davos one-percenters clapped and rattled their Rolexes. It has become a disconcerting pattern for Thunberg appearances that would be repeated at the European Commission: Greta tells the adults they are fools and their plans are lame and shortsighted. They still give her a standing ovation. A few minutes later, she was gone and the audience dispersed into a fleet of black BMWs and Mercedes, belching diesel into the Alpine sky.

Greta Thunberg illustration by Shepard Fairey. Based on a photograph by Markus Schreiber/AP Images/Shutterstock

My Greta travels featured a Vancouver-Zurich round trip and then an L.A.-Stockholm trip. In between, I fly from Vancouver to L.A. for another story. It’s the job, but I take stock in horror and calculate that my three flights burn more carbon than the yearly usage of the average citizen of more than 200 countries. I torch the atmosphere so I can hear others praise the girl who won’t fly.

“The phrase ‘A little child shall lead them’ has come to mind more than once,” Al Gore tells me in Davos, before sharing his favorite Greta moment. It was at the U.N. summit last fall. “She said to the assembled world leaders, ‘You say you understand the science, but I don’t believe you. Because if you did and then you continue to act as you do, that would mean you’re evil. And I don’t believe that.’” Gore shook his head in wonderment. “Wow.” He then gives a history lesson: “There have been other times in human history when the moment a morally-based social movement reached the tipping point was the moment when the younger generation made it their own. Here we are.”

Activist-actress Jane Fonda was so inspired by Greta that she has been hosting a series of Fire Drill Fridays. “I was just filled with depression and hopelessness, and then I started reading about Greta,” Fonda tells me one winter afternoon in Los Angeles. “She inspired me to get out there and do more.”

But in Stockholm, the world of presidential taunts, former vice presidents slathering praise, and Oscar winners rhapsodizing seems far away.

Outside of the Parliament building, Greta tells me she doesn’t worry about her safety despite Trump and others speaking cruelly about her on social media. (According to her mother, locals have shoved excrement into the family mailbox.) Later in February, she would march in Bristol, England, and be met by social media posts suggesting she deserved to be sexually assaulted.

“It’s just the people with 10 accounts who sit and write anonymously on Twitter and so on,” Greta says. “It’s nothing you can take seriously.”

Still, all is not rotten. America has come up with the Green New Deal. In Trumplandia, that seems like a beacon of hope, right?

Nope.

“If you look at the graphs to stay below the 1.5 degree Celsius global average temperature and you read the Green New Deal, you see that it doesn’t add up,” says Thunberg with some impatience. She references her Davos speech about how the world only has 420 gigatons of CO2 to burn over the next eight years or the 1.5 goal becomes impossible. “If we are to be in line with the carbon-dioxide budget, we need to focus on doing things now instead of making commitments like 10, or 20, 30 years from now. Of course, the Green New Deal is not in line with our carbon-dioxide budget.”

Meanwhile, the main criticism of the Green New Deal at home is that it moves too fast in getting the United States to zero carbon emission by 2050. But Greta doesn’t do politics.

“At least it has got people to start talking about the climate crisis more,” says Thunberg in a tone that suggests the slightest of praise. “That of course is a step in the right direction, I guess.”

There’s more to say, but now it’s time to march. The children’s crusade forms into a regimented mob. Greta moves to the front and holds a Skolstrejk för klimatet banner with some other teens. The taller kids lift it too high, and she nearly vanishes. All you can see is Greta’s winter hat and her gray eyes. That’s enough.

Al Gore was right. A child leads us.

Technically, Greta Thunberg’s childhood continues for another year. But she hasn’t been a kid for some time. She is one of two daughters of Malena Ernman, an opera-singer-turned-Eurovision-contestant, and Svante Thunberg, an actor. According to the family’s book, Our House Is on Fire, the bohemian clan has endured a scroll of psychological disorders beginning with Malena, who suffered from bulimia and still deals with ADHD. Greta’s younger sister, Beata, was diagnosed with OCD and ADHD, and has an acute noise sensitivity, which has meant at times the rest of the family eating in a guest room with plastic plates to keep noise to a minimum. When Beata went to dance class, Malena wasn’t allowed to move during the two-hour session lest Beata have a tearful meltdown.

Greta battled her own life-threatening demons. When she was 11, she stopped eating and rarely spoke to anyone outside of her family for months. Sometimes she would come home after being bullied at school — recess was spent hiding out in the bathroom — and either spend hours petting her dogs or crying at her own pain. She lost 20 pounds as her parents chronicled her food intake. (“Five pieces of gnocchi in two hours.”)

Somehow, it was Greta turning her weakness into strength that made her a global icon. According to Malena, Greta fell silent after seeing a film in school depicting floating armies of plastic infesting our oceans. Other students were horrified, but quickly returned to their iPhones and talk of upcoming ski trips. Not Greta. She fell silent and obsessed over the climate’s demise.

“I felt very alone that I was the only one who seemed to be worried about this,” Greta tells me in Stockholm. “I was the only one left in this sort of bubble. Everyone else could just continue with their lives as usual, and I couldn’t do that.”

Greta read all she could and sometimes went online and battled with climate deniers, oft exclaiming triumphantly, “He blocked me,” to her parents. She eventually wrote an essay on the climate crisis for a Swedish newspaper. Eco-activists contacted her, and Greta mentioned the inspiration she took from the school strikes after the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting, and suggested a climate version. The activists showed little interest. Greta didn’t care and slowly broke out of her cocoon.

“I thought what the Parkland students did was so brave,” says Thunberg. “Of course, it was not the only thing that got me out of that feeling. I did it because I was tired of sitting and waiting. I tried to get others to join me, but no one was interested and no one wanted to do that. So I said, ‘I’m going to do this alone if no one else wants to do it.’ ”

So in August 2018, Greta and her father bicycled down to the Swedish Parliament, across the cobblestone street from where Greta and I now stand. She propped up the first Skolstrejk för klimatet sign, which she’d made from scrap wood. Greta also wrote up an information sheet with climate data and a hint of the defiant humor that eventually led her to make her Twitter profile read, “A teenager working on her anger management problem,” after Trump told her to chill out. Her bio was simple:

“Because you grown-ups don’t give a damn about my future, neither do I. My name is Greta, I am in ninth grade, and I am going on strike from school for the climate.”

Photograph by Jack Davison for Rolling Stone
Her dad left, and she sat alone. She posted a couple of images to Instagram. It was passed on by a few of her followers. Then a reporter noticed. And then local activists from Greenpeace. Within two months, there were hundreds of fellow travelers, and the news spread through Scandinavia to Europe and on to America. Within a year, climate student strikes attracted tens of thousands, from London to New York.

Greta’s rise was the activist version of a perfect storm. Her ascension from bullied Swedish student to global climate icon has been driven by both a loss and a regaining of hope. It is not a coincidence that her ascent happened immediately in the aftermath of the election of Trump. It’s impossible to see a Greta-like phenomena emerging during the Obama-driven run up to the Paris climate talks, when it actually looked like nations of the world were getting their shit together to deal with global warming. It became obvious after Trump and the Paris implosion that 30 years of rhetoric and meetings had created very little except more talk.

And then you had the natural disasters. California could not stop burning. Floods ravaged Europe. We now watch glaciers melt and collapse in real time. The dawn of 2020 brought the Australian calamity, with images of scorched earth, koalas and kangaroos burned alive, and the death of a way of life.

The irony of the Greta Age is that we now have options, but refuse to take them. Clean-energy technology has evolved to a point where old arguments that fossil fuels remain the cheapest way to create energy are now obviously nonsense. The cost of clean energy is no longer a barrier to change. Over the past decade, it became an obvious truth: Burning fossil fuels no longer made economic sense anywhere, anytime. What remains is the power and influence of the energy conglomerate superpowers to maintain the status quo. No politician has the courage to face them down. By 2018, it became even clearer that politicians could not be trusted. Talk was wasted. Companies would continue to put profits before nature. We were on our own.

And that’s when Greta came along.

Thunberg’s perceived psychological weakness became her superpower. Her flat, affectless, blunt voice was the perfect counterpoint to the bureaucratic bullshit of the climate negotiators. It cut through all the gobbledygook about offsets and the economic necessity of coal and cost curves of solar power. She put it in simple human language: We are losing our planet. Unlike many activists before her, she is not political. She is not interested in reforming the process. Her voice is unabashedly and explicitly moral — “How dare you.”

“I think she is extraordinary in her determination,” says Eva Jones, an American high school senior who recently spent a week protesting for climate justice in Davos. “When you hear her speak, she doesn’t do vanity interviews. It’s never like, ‘So what do your friends think about this?’ She’s like, ‘No, I don’t want to talk about my friends, I want to talk about the crisis.’ She’s absolutely insane about getting reporters and getting politicians and getting whoever’s talking to her back to the subject.”

All of this from a teenager who sometimes still wears her hair in pigtails.

Thunberg and her fellow protesters head toward Medborgarplatsen (Citizen Square), in central Stockholm. They pass over a bridge by the harbor, where massive renovations are being done so the city can host even more waste-multiplying mega cruise ships. The kids chant in Swedish, “What do we want? Climate justice! When? Now! When? Now, now, now!” At the square, the squirrelly tweens play tag and are entertained by a rapper in a ski mask (some things don’t translate).

Eventually, Greta takes the stage. She speaks in her native Swedish, and her tone is faster and more emotional than in English. She mentions that temperatures in Sweden have been 5 to 10 degrees Celsius above normal this winter, and how globally 19 of the past 20 years have been the warmest on record.

“I have been on the road and visited numerous places and met people from all over the globe,” says Greta. “I can say that it looks nearly the same everywhere I have been: The climate crisis is ignored by people in charge, despite the science being crystal clear. We don’t want to hear one more politician say that this is important but afterward do nothing to change it. We don’t want more empty words from people pretending to take our future seriously.”

She pauses, and her face goes grim. “It shouldn’t be up to us children and teenagers to make people wake up around the world. The ones in charge should be ashamed.”

The crowd chants, “Greta, Greta, Greta.…”

She must hate that.

Greta keeps moving. In January, it was Davos. This week it is Stockholm. Next Friday is Hamburg. It’s a debilitating schedule since she doesn’t fly. Greta says it won’t go on forever. And she’s right. Within a few weeks, the world would shut down for the coronavirus, with Greta and her father both falling ill (neither of them was tested for the virus, but she said she thought it was “extremely likely” that they had it, given her schedule). Besides, she is nearing the end of her gap year, between high school and university. “I really hope that we can solve this thing now because I want to get back to studying,” says Thunberg, shivering a bit in the Stockholm wind. I can’t tell if she is joking or is having a rare moment of optimism.

Still, she is so small, and the world is so big. I wonder how she continues forward as the world pays lip service and not much else.

For the first time, Thunberg softens.

“I’m very weak in a sense,” says Thunberg quietly. “I’m very tiny and I am very emotional, and that is not something people usually associate with strength. I think weakness, in a way, can be also needed because we don’t have to be the loudest, we don’t have to take up the most amount of space, and we don’t have to earn the most money.”

A friend comes over and whispers in her ear. It’s time to go, maybe home for a silent walk with her two dogs, Moses and Roxy. But she isn’t quite finished.

“We don’t need to have the biggest car, and we don’t need to get the most attention. We just need to…”

Mighty Greta’s voice trails off as if she is lost in thought or searching for the right word in English. Then, she looks up, locks eyes, and smiles for the first time.

“We need to care about each other more.”



Links

• Greta Thunberg Says EU Is 'Pretending' To Tackle Climate Change Crisis
• Greta Thunberg Clashes With US Treasury Secretary In Davos
• Greta Thunberg: Climate Activism Has Made Her 'Very Happy', Says Father
• Greta Thunberg And Mass Protests Defined The Year In Climate Change
• 'How Is This Possible?': Greta Thunberg Weighs In On Australia's Bushfire Crisis
• Governments, Business 'Misleading' On Climate, Teen Activist Greta Thunberg Said
• Expect Family Talks About Climate Change This Christmas? Take Tips From Greta Thunberg
• 'Overwhelmed' Greta Thunberg Leaves Climate March Early After Rockstar Welcome
• Greta Thunberg Catches Lift To UN COP25 Climate Summit In Madrid With Australian Sailing Couple

Rolling Stone - Reed Dunlea

She founded Zero Hour, organized a national climate march, wrote ‘Youth to Power,’ and still goes to high school



Between founding a youth climate coalition, organizing a national climate march, writing a book, and going to high school, 18-year-old Jamie Margolin’s schedule is pretty packed. “What am I doing to address climate change?” asks Margolin. “Girl, what am I not doing to address climate change is the real question.”

The engaged teenager started working on issues surrounding the climate crisis when she was a freshmen in high school in Seattle. She testified on and lobbied for legislation at the city and state levels, gave speeches, and organized and attended events.

“Then after about a little over a year of doing this, I was growingly frustrated that the work I was doing locally was not enough; people were not taking enough action,” Margolin explains. She took to social media and started an organization called Zero Hour to put together a youth climate march in Washington, D.C., and around the world, which took place on July 21, 2018.

According to Margolin, governments should be treating the climate crisis as an emergency of the same importance as COVID-19. “I’m not saying that they’re acting perfectly, because a lot of governments, including the United States government, have been making a lot of mistakes in the handling of it. But the general idea of the way that they’re treating the coronavirus — with that urgency, that, ‘Oh, my god, this is an emergency, we need to act!’ — that’s how they need to be treating the climate crisis.”

She points to fossil-fuel divestment, lowering emissions, reforestation, protecting wildlife, investing in renewable energy, and investing in and listening to communities of color and low-income and indigenous people as all much-needed solutions.

For individuals to feel empowered, Margolin implores others to focus on systemic change over individual change. “We can’t blame someone for using a plastic utensil if that’s all they have,” says Margolin. “We’re not in this climate crisis because a couple of individuals were irresponsible. We’re in this climate crisis because there has been mass systematic oppression, capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and racism. All of these systems have been pushing people down for so long, and communities are suffering.”



Links

• 'You Need To Act Now': Meet 4 Girls Working To Save The Warming World
• (US) Kelsey Juliana: 'What If Fashion Came To Represent A New Way Of Living?'
• Young Canadians Sue Government For Failing To Act On Climate Change
• Our Young Girls Are Bearing The Burden Of Climate Action. But Should They Be?
• Youth Leaders At U.N. Demand Bold Climate Change Action
• Climate Activist Greta Thunberg On The Power Of A Movement
• Dave Eggers: Why We Should Listen To Teenagers Speak About Climate Crisis
• Kids Suing The US Over Climate Change Are Getting Global Support
• Students From 1,600 Cities Just Walked Out Of School To Protest Climate Change. It Could Be Greta Thunberg's Biggest Strike Yet
• ‘Now I Am Speaking To The Whole World.’ How Teen Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Got Everyone To Listen
• 'Resist, Goddamn It. Resist': James Cromwell's Message on Climate Change

Discover - Gemma Tarlach

These organisms have played an important role in how our world was shaped, and they can even record history.

 A ghost forest on Oregon’s coast Credit: WRITTEN IN SILVER VISUALS/SHUTTERSTOCK

1. I think that I shall never see an organism as vital as a tree. Without these woody, perennial members of the plant kingdom, we might still be squirming around the seafloor.


2. About 400 million years ago, early trees transformed terrestrial environments by reducing atmospheric carbon. The result: more hospitable ecosystems for marine animals experimenting with the landlubber life.


3. Researchers described one such inviting habitat in December in Current Biology: The find, the earliest forest in the fossil record, is roughly 385 million years old. The site included primitive, fernlike cladoxylopsids as well as species once thought to have evolved millions of years later.


4. Some of these more advanced varieties also had extensive root systems spreading out more than 30 feet across, suggesting trees got bigger earlier than previously documented.


5. Today’s biggest of the big are California’s towering redwoods; the tallest is about 380 feet. But don’t sell Australia’s Eucalyptus regnans short. Also known as the mountain ash, one specimen in 1881 measured 374 feet.


6. The calculation, done by a professional surveyor, is considered credible — though they cut the tree down to verify it.


7. The tallest living mountain ash, found in Tasmania, is about 330 feet tall. A 2019 forest fire damaged the mighty tree, known as Centurion, but it survived. More than a dozen other giants on the Australian island were not so lucky.


8. Climate change is fueling extreme fire events, threatening trees of all sizes. At the same time, trees are key assets in the fight to save the planet. American forests, for example, offset up to 20 percent of our annual carbon emissions, according to the U.S. Forest Service.


9. So are more trees the answer to our current crisis? Maybe. In July, a study in Science declared “global tree restoration as our most effective climate change solution to date.”


10. The authors identified an additional 2.2 billion acres of land worldwide — an area about the size of the entire U.S., including Alaska — that could be turned into forest without infringing on current urban or agricultural areas.


11. Other researchers raised concerns about haphazard tree planting, however. For example, depending on the locality, adding more trees could increase fire risk, stretch already-limited water supplies and wreck established ecosystems.


12. Plus, most current reforestation projects focus on creating tree plantations, or mixing crops with trees, rather than allowing a forest to regenerate naturally. Per acre, natural forests store six times more carbon than agroforestry zones and 40 times more than plantations.


13. Trees are important for the planet’s future, but they’re also great historians. Even minor fluctuations in temperature, precipitation and other factors change cell size and density in tree rings as they form, allowing researchers to reconstruct ancient climate patterns.


14. Otherworldly phenomena can also leave a mark. In October, researchers reported a significant radiocarbon increase in growth rings dated to the year 660 B.C. in southeastern Poland.


15. The radioactive isotope spike may reflect a surge in the number of cosmic rays bombarding Earth when the rings formed. While physicists still debate the source of these high-energy particles, they could be remnants of violent cosmic events, such as supernovas.


16. Trees can also record Earth’s violent inner workings. For example, the Pacific Northwest was long considered to be at low to moderate earthquake risk. In the 1980s, however, researchers studying “ghost forests” along its coast came to a disturbing realization.


17. These dead, upright tree trunks, clustered in tidal zones, were similar to ghost forests in Alaska that were created when a massive earthquake caused coastal areas to sink several feet and flood with tree-killing saltwater.


18. Analysis of Washington’s and Oregon’s ghost forests revealed the real danger of the Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ), a fault that stretches from Canada’s Vancouver Island to the Northern California coast.


19. Dating the dead trees helped researchers discover that the CSZ produces megathrust earthquakes — the most powerful kind — about every 400 to 600 years. (It’s been 320 years since the last one, which was big enough to send a tsunami to Japan.)


20. Ghost forests aside, many mythologies reference a “Tree of Life.” The concept thrives in modern science, too. Biologists employ cladistics — a method that organizes species on schematic trees — to understand how life diversified over time. That’s right: Trees made us possible, and now help us trace how we happened.

Links

• Australian Forest Study May Challenge Climate Change Optimism
• (AU) We Must Fight Climate Change Like It’s World War Iii – Here Are 4 Potent Weapons To Deploy
• (UK) Climate Change: Will Planting Millions Of Trees Really Save The Planet?
• (AU) Ancient Australian Trees Face Uncertain Future Under Climate Change, Study Finds
• Greta Thunberg Tells Davos Leaders That Planting Trees Isn't Enough As Donald Trump Talks Up Economy
• Opinion: Current Proposals To Plant Trees To Fight Climate Change Are Badly Misguided
• Examining The Viability Of Planting Trees To Help Mitigate Climate Change 

The Guardian - Graham Readfearn 

Exclusive: experiment uses a modified turbine to spray trillions of nano-sized salt crystals into the air from a barge


Can cloud-brightening help save the Great Barrier Reef? Trials have begun.

Scientists have carried out a trial of prototype cloud brightening equipment on the Great Barrier Reef they hope could be scaled up to shade and cool corals and protect them from bleaching caused by rising global temperatures.

The experiment used a modified turbine with 100 high-pressure nozzles to spray trillions of nano-sized ocean salt crystals into the air from the back of a barge.

In theory, the tiny salt crystals are able to mix with low-altitude clouds, making them brighter and reflecting more sunlight away from the ocean surface.

The trial was not designed to test the effectiveness of cloud-brightening itself, but Daniel Harrison of Southern Cross University, who led the project, told Guardian Australia it had successfully demonstrated that the delivery system worked.

Between 25 and 28 March, Harrison and a small team of researchers from the university and the Sydney Institute of Marine Science carried out the experiment beside Broadhurst reef off Townsville, in Queensland.

Researchers from the University of Sydney and Queensland University of Technology were also on hand to test the prototype, developed in partnership with EmiControls of Italy. Several other researchers, including an EmiControls representative, were unable to join the crew as planned because of Covid-19 travel restrictions.

A seperate vessel 5km away carrying atmospheric modelling equipment was able to detect the mist created by the prototype. Future experiments will measure if the salt particles do brighten clouds.

The cloud-brightening approach is just one of 43 concepts being funded under a $150m government-backed research and development program announced on Thursday.

Scientists are racing to find measures that could be used to reduce the impact of rising ocean temperatures on corals caused by global heating.

In 2020, the Great Barrier Reef experienced its third outbreak of mass coral bleaching in five years. Tropical coral reefs are especially sensitive to global heating. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says 70-90% of coral reefs will die as global heating gets to 1.5C.

Harrison said the technology, deployed in March under a permit from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, had promise because it was relatively cheap, could be deployed at scale and kick-started a process that occurs naturally.

“Nature does most of the work for you,” he said. “This makes a nano-sized salt crystal at hundreds of trillions per second. They get into a cloud and grow a cloud droplet that reflects a lot more sunlight.”

Harrison said the technique was effectively boosting a natural process, because clouds mostly form over the ocean when moisture gathers around salt crystals stirred up by winds from the ocean surface.

He said while a cloud of mist was visible off the back of the boat, about 99% of the particles created by the nozzles were too small to see. However, they could be detected by atmospheric measuring equipment on the accompanying vessel.

A trial on the Great Barrier Reef of cloud brightening equipment. Photograph: Brendan Kelaher/Southern Cross University

“We thought we might only be able to detect it a couple of kilometres downwind, but we detected it 5km downwind,” Harrison said.Scientists on the barge said they could see corals “bleaching around us” as they carried out the experiment.

Harrison and the core team drove 3,600km north to Townsville from Coffs Harbour, and back, camping and preparing their own food along the way to remain isolated from others not involved in the project as Covid-19 travel restrictions began to be rolled out.

Future research will also examine any downstream risks from the technique, and any local impacts on rainfall.

Manduburra traditional owner Usop Drahm, who joined the expedition, said: “We welcome scientific research where Indigenous people and the rest of Australia work together to maintain the reef ecosystem for future generations.

“This technology might help prevent bleaching and we like that it uses no chemicals and relies on natural processes.”

Harrison said while the trial was not set up to detect if clouds had been brightened, “the theory says [the particles] would have mixed up to the heights of low-level clouds about 800 metres up”.

The salt crystals would have remained in the air for only one or two days in the initial experiment, he said. The approach does not make clouds, but brightens those already in the atmosphere.

There are plans to scale up the experiment using more and larger turbines so that their output is about 10 times larger.

This, Harrison said, could cover an area of hundreds of square kilometres – a scale large enough to slightly cool ocean temperatures.

Within four years, Harrison said, it was hoped the project would show a brightening response in the clouds.

But he said the success of such projects would depend on action to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

He said as temperatures went up, the cloud brightening technique became less and less effective at protecting corals from mass bleaching.

Links

• Rescuing the Great Barrier Reef: how much can be saved, and how can we do it?
• Big Parts Of The Great Barrier Reef Are Dying
• More Than Half Of Remote Reefs In Coral Sea Marine Park Suffered Extreme Bleaching 
• Great Barrier Reef's third mass bleaching in five years the most widespread yet
• Snow-white coral of once-vibrant Great Barrier Reef a sign urgent action must be taken
• Climate crisis may have pushed world's tropical coral reefs to tipping point of 'near-annual' bleaching
• Great Barrier Reef could face 'most extensive coral bleaching ever', scientists say
• Great Barrier Reef on brink of third major coral bleaching in five years, scientists warn
• Great Barrier Reef coral at risk of bleaching from Queensland flood waters
• Coral bleaching on Great Barrier Reef worse than expected, surveys show
• Great Barrier Reef at 'terminal stage': scientists despair at latest coral bleaching data
• Australia must choose between coal and coral – the Great Barrier Reef depends on it

The Economist

The bleaching adds to Australia’s summer of unnatural calamities


OVER THE southern hemisphere’s summer, mercifully now at an end, Australia burned under a pitiless sun. Bush fires down the continent’s eastern flank consumed 46m acres of countryside, destroying homes, taking lives and driving rare animals towards extinction. To many Australians, the satellite pictures showing huge plumes of smoke drifting off to the east over the Great Barrier Reef seemed a portent of life in an age of man-made warming.
It turns out that high temperatures were wreaking havoc under the water as well. This month comes news that exceptionally warm seas have led the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s biggest coral system, to suffer its third mass bleaching in five years. The bush and the reef, both ravaged on a gargantuan scale: Australians almost define themselves by these two ecosystems, which once seemed boundless.
Coral bleaching takes place when sea temperatures spike, causing the coral polyps that make up reefs to eject the algae that generate their food via photosynthesis. Without the pigmented algae, coral soon dies, leaving the intricate colonies a ghostly white. Reefs can recover from occasional bleachings: the fastest-growing corals regenerate in a decade or so. But mass bleachings on the Great Barrier Reef are becoming ever more frequent. The first occurred only in 1998. There have since been four more: in 2002, 2016, 2017 and now this year. They have become so common that the Bureau of Meteorology issues forecasts for them.
The latest bleaching is not as severe as the worst one, in 2016, when about half of the northern part of the 2,300km-long reef died. But the run of recent bleachings had already killed off relatively heat-intolerant coral species. What is striking this year, says Terry Hughes of James Cook University in Queensland, who led a recent aerial survey of the reef, is that for the first time the bleaching extended to the southern part of the reef. There, closer to the pole, waters should be cooler. Not this year. February saw the highest sea-surface temperatures across the reef since monitoring began 120 years ago.
The biblical rains that recently extinguished the bush fires have also helped to lower water temperatures over the reef. The rains are proof to climate-change deniers—who are given a platform by Rupert Murdoch’s press and who are represented on the ruling coalition’s backbenches—that recent fires, droughts and floods are simply part of the natural cycle. They point with glee to the bush springing back to life. Yet while important habitats, such as those dominated by eucalypts, depend upon fire to regenerate, this summer’s fires, exceptionally, destroyed temperate rainforests too. They also incinerated perhaps a third of koalas in New South Wales—hardly a run-of-the-mill dip in the population.
Regarding the reef, the deniers play down the damage and insist on the ability of “nature to fix nature”. That is despite the cumulative effect of successive bleachings from which reefs struggle to recover. Mr Hughes says the Great Barrier Reef can no longer return to its state of even five years ago; in the coming decades, healthy coral is likely to be confined to ever smaller patches.
The bush fires threw the prime minister, Scott Morrison, off balance. Holidaying in Hawaii made him look out of touch, while his Liberal Party’s cosy links to oil, gas, coal and iron-ore interests came under closer scrutiny. Among big economies Australia ranks behind only Saudi Arabia in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions per head—and that does not count the emissions when its exports of coal and gas are consumed elsewhere.
Perhaps in this respect, the new coronavirus is a tonic for Mr Morrison. His polls, hurt by the fires, have risen as Australia has escaped an epidemic on a par with Europe or America. Meanwhile, the government intones it is on course to “meet and beat” national commitments under the Paris agreement on climate to cut emissions—although that is thanks in part to an accounting gimmick.As for the latest bleaching, the government has largely ignored the news. 
Mr Morrison’s official “envoy” to the Great Barrier Reef, Warren Entsch, a Queensland politician, points out that “bleached corals are not dead corals” and predicts that many will recover. Although he admits climate change is a concern, he once complained that “indoctrinating” youngsters to be worried about it is a form of “child abuse”. Most Australians care both about climate change and about the Great Barrier Reef—but not enough, alas, to call their government out over such ambivalence.
Links

• More Than Half Of Remote Reefs In Coral Sea Marine Park Suffered Extreme Bleaching 
• Great Barrier Reef's third mass bleaching in five years the most widespread yet
• Snow-white coral of once-vibrant Great Barrier Reef a sign urgent action must be taken
• Climate crisis may have pushed world's tropical coral reefs to tipping point of 'near-annual' bleaching
• Great Barrier Reef could face 'most extensive coral bleaching ever', scientists say
• Great Barrier Reef on brink of third major coral bleaching in five years, scientists warn
• Great Barrier Reef coral at risk of bleaching from Queensland flood waters
• Coral bleaching on Great Barrier Reef worse than expected, surveys show
• Great Barrier Reef at 'terminal stage': scientists despair at latest coral bleaching data
• Australia must choose between coal and coral – the Great Barrier Reef depends on it

The Guardian - Editorial

Steep falls in emissions have been the pandemic’s immediate effect. But what’s needed is a green recovery

A wind farm in Norfolk. ‘Every possible effort must now be made to ensure that any and every stimulus package is directed towards renewable energy and zero- or low-carbon infrastructure and transport.’ Photograph: Richard Osbourne/Blue Pearl Photographic/Alamy

So far, discussions of a coronavirus exit strategy have mainly focused on the steps that could bring an end to the lockdown. In the short term, both in the UK and elsewhere, there is nothing more desirable than letting people resume their lives, once it is safe to do so.

But the speed of the “return to normal” is not the only thing that matters. The manner in which the world’s leaders manage the colossal economic and political shocks caused by the virus is also of the utmost importance. And at the top of their list of priorities, alongside human welfare, must be the biosphere and its future.

It’s too soon to say with any confidence what impact coronavirus will have on the climate emergency. The brakes placed on economic activities of many kinds, worldwide, have led to carbon emission cuts that would previously have been unthinkable: 18% in China between February and March; between 40% and 60% over recent weeks in Europe. Habits and behaviours once regarded as sacrosanct have been turned on their heads: road traffic in the UK has fallen by 70%. Global air traffic has halved.

Meanwhile, a much-needed spotlight has been thrown on humans’ troubling relationship to wildlife, with some experts arguing that the degradation of the natural world and exploitation of other species is among the pandemic’s causes. In human terms, the economic contraction precipitated by the virus – and predicted by the World Bank to lead to a severe depression – is sure to be brutal. No one, and least of all an elected government, would have chosen to limit emissions in this way.

But if further savage waves of destruction to people’s livelihoods are to be avoided, rather than simply stored up or ignored until they become unignorable, just as coronavirus was, every possible effort must now be made to ensure that the recovery, when it comes, is as green as possible; that any and every stimulus package is directed towards renewable energy and zero- or low-carbon infrastructure and transport.

The urgency and desperation surrounding all such efforts are likely to militate against progressive measures. Already, governments are coming under huge pressure to bail out oil and gas companies (in the US and Canada this has already begun). But while in the short term the low oil price, which is also the result of a price war being waged by Saudi Arabia and Russia, could have the damaging effect of making oil more competitive against renewables, plunging demand and turmoil in the industry provide an opportunity that must be seized by all who oppose the continued dominance of fossil fuels.

There are other questions besides the future of oil that the crisis has opened up in unexpected ways. Huge political shifts are under way, with fiscally conservative governments such as Boris Johnson’s intervening in economies to an unprecedented extent. What was once impossible (socialist, reckless) now turns out not to be, at all. Could the renewed shock of human vulnerability in the face of Covid-19 make way for an increased willingness to face other perils, climate chaos among them?

Impossible to say at this stage, perhaps. Certainly not without a fight against all those who will promote a return to business (and emissions) as usual. But with the postponement of crucial UN biodiversity and climate conferences, it has never been more important to keep up the pressure. There is no exit strategy from our planet.

Links

• (US) Editorial: Climate Change Is Just As Real As Covid-19. Now’s The Last, Best Chance For Our Government To Treat It That Way
• (AU) Editorial: Climate Change Impossible To Deny
• (AU) Bushfire Tragedy Shows Need For Climate Leadership
• (AU) Australia’s Bushfires Have Exposed Its Leaders’ Failings
• Loud Environmental Protests Are A Great Australian Tradition
• Editorial: Surviving Climate Change Means An End To Burning Fossil Fuels. Prepare Yourself For Sacrifices
• The Guardian View On Climate Breakdown: An Emergency For All, But Especially The Poor
• Adani Decision Must Not Be Last Word In Climate Fight

New York Times - Catrin Einhorn

Scientists found a “cliff edge” instead of the slippery slope they expected.

A sea turtle hatchling headed for the ocean in Aceh Province, Indonesia. Credit...Chaideer Mahyuddin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Climate change could result in a more abrupt collapse of many animal species than previously thought, starting in the next decade if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced, according to a study published this month in Nature.

The study predicted that large swaths of ecosystems would falter in waves, creating sudden die-offs that would be catastrophic not only for wildlife, but for the humans who depend on it.

“For a long time things can seem OK and then suddenly they’re not,” said Alex L. Pigot, a scientist at University College London and one of the study’s authors. “Then, it’s too late to do anything about it because you’ve already fallen over this cliff edge.”

The latest research adds to an already bleak picture for the world’s wildlife unless urgent action is taken to preserve habitats and limit climate change. More than a million plant and animal species are at risk of extinction because of the myriad ways humans are changing the earth by farming, fishing, logging, mining, poaching and burning fossil fuels.

The study looked at more than 30,000 species on land and in water to predict how soon climate change would affect population levels and whether those levels would change gradually or suddenly.

To answer these questions, the authors determined the hottest temperature that a species is known to have withstood, and then predicted when that temperature would be surpassed around the world under different emissions scenarios.

Coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. Scientists say recent bleaching events suggest that major die-offs in tropical seas are already underway. Credit...James Cook University Australia/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

When they examined the projections, the researchers were surprised that sudden collapses appeared across almost all species — fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals — and across almost all regions.

“It’s not that it happens in some places,” said Cory Merow, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut and one of the study’s authors. “No matter how you slice the analysis, it always seems to happen.

”If greenhouse gas emissions remain on current trajectories, the research showed that abrupt collapses in tropical oceans could begin in the next decade. Coral bleaching events over the last several years suggest that these losses have already started, the scientists said. Collapse in tropical forests, home to some of the most diverse ecosystems on earth, could follow by the 2040s.

But if global warming was held to below 2 degrees Celsius, the number of species exposed to dangerous climate change would drop by 60 percent. That, in turn, would limit the number of ecosystems exposed to catastrophic collapse to about 2 percent.

“The benefits of early and rapid action are massive and prevent the extinction of thousands of species,” said Christopher H. Trisos, a scientist at the University of Cape Town and one of the study’s authors.

The study does not take into account other factors that could help or hurt a species’ survival. For example, some species may tolerate or adapt to higher temperatures; on the other hand, if their food sources could not, they would die off just the same.

“It provides yet another, critical wake-up call about the massive repercussions of a rapidly warming world,” said Walter Jetz, an ecologist at Yale University who did not participate in the study.

He added that it was more evidence of the importance of following through on the pledges that nations around the world made in the Paris Agreement on climate change. The Trump administration is in the process of withdrawing from that commitment.

The study suggested that even keeping global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius, in accordance with the Paris Agreement, would still leave many people and ecosystems vulnerable.

“If we take action now, we limit this abrupt disruption to 2 percent of the planet,” Dr. Trisos said. “But that two percent of the planet still has a lot of people living there in tropical regions. And they need our help.”

Catrin Einhorn reports on wildlife and extinction for the Climate desk. She has also worked on the Investigations desk, where she was part of the Times team that received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its reporting on sexual harassment.

Links

• Unchecked Global Warming Could Collapse Whole Ecosystems, Maybe Within 10 Years
• The projected timing of abrupt ecological disruption from climate change
• Climate Change Could Cause Sudden Biodiversity Losses Worldwide
• More signs of the pressure on our environment
• Wildlife destruction 'not a slippery slope but a series of cliff edges'
• Climate change could trigger sudden losses of world's wildlife - study
• Entire Ecosystems Could Abruptly Go Extinct Within This Decade
• Climate change could cause collapses in wildlife populations and series of biodiversity ‘cliff edges’

The Conversation - Kate Guy

Kim Ludbrook / EPA

Kate Guy is a PHD student in International Relations at Oxford University, where she studies the intersection of climate change, national security, and global governance.
She most recently worked in American politics as the Senior Policy Program Manager with the Truman National Security Project, and as assistant to the Campaign Manager of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential race. How might a single threat, even one deemed unlikely, spiral into an evolving global crisis which challenges the foundations of global security, economic stability and democratic governance, all in the matter of a few weeks?

My research on threats to national security, governance and geopolitics has focused on exactly this question, albeit with a focus on the disruptive potential of climate change, rather than a novel coronavirus.

In recent work alongside intelligence and defence experts at the think-tank Center for Climate and Security, I analysed how future warming scenarios could disrupt security and governance worldwide throughout the 21st century.

Our culminating report, A Security Threat Assessment of Global Climate Change, was launched in Washington just as the first coronavirus cases were spreading undetected across the US.

The analysis uses future scenarios to imagine how and where regions might be increasingly vulnerable to the resource, weather and economic shocks brought about by an increasingly destabilised climate. In it, we warn:
Even at scenarios of low warming, each region of the world will face severe risks to national and global security in the next three decades. Higher levels of warming will pose catastrophic, and likely irreversible, global security risks over the course of the 21st century. Little did we know when writing these words and imagining the rapidly evolving shocks to come, that a very similar test of our global system was already brewing as governments sputtered to contain the damage of COVID-19.

Over the first few crucial weeks of this crisis, we’ve seen world leaders take a number of actions that indicate how climate shocks could destabilise the world order. With climate change disasters, as with infectious diseases, rapid response time and global coordination are of the essence.

At this stage in the COVID-19 situation, there are three primary lessons for a climate-changing future: the immense challenge of global coordination during a crisis, the potential for authoritarian emergency responses, and the spiralling danger of compounding shocks.

An uncoordinated response

First, while the COVID-19 crisis has engendered a massive public response, governments have been largely uncoordinated in their efforts to manage the virus’s spread. According to Oxford’s COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, countries vary widely in the stringency of their policies, with no two countries implementing a synchronised course of action.

While traditionally a great power like the US might step forward to direct a collective international response, instead the Trump administration has repeatedly chosen to blindside its allies with the introduction of new limitations on trade and movement of peoples.

This mismanagement has led to each nation going on its own, despite the fact that working together would net greater gains for all. As the New York Times’s Mark Landler put it, the voices of world leaders are forming “less a choir than a cacophony”, leading to mixed global messages, undetected spread, and ongoing fights over limited resources.

Politicians have sent mixed messages. Tasos Katopodis / EPA

In the face of climate change, such a lack of coordination could be be highly destabilising to world social and economic order. The mass displacement of people, the devaluation of assets, rising seas and natural disasters will call for shared practices and common decency in the face of continued tragedy.

Many climate impacts will raise new questions the world has yet to answer. What do we do with nation-states that can no longer reside in their homeland? How do we compensate sectors for ceasing harmful practices such as fossil fuel extraction and deforestation, especially where national economies may depend on them?

We also face new global governance questions around the use of risky geoengineering technologies, which can be deployed unilaterally to alter local climates, but with the potential for vast unintended regional or even global consequences.

These are challenges which, like climate change itself, can only be solved collectively through coordinated policies and clear communication.

 The sort of wayward responses and lack of leadership in response to COVID-19 would only lead to further destruction of livelihoods and order in the decades to come.

Authoritarian agendas

This historic moment is also offering new opportunities for leaders to further dangerous, illiberal agendas. Authoritarians have long used emergency situations as a pretext to further curtail individual rights and consolidate personal power against backdrops of real or imagined public danger. We’ve seen these actions spiral worldwide in the past month in autocracies and backsliding democracies, alike.

President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines has given security services the directive to open fire on protestors while Vladimir Putin is deploying mass surveillance technologies and new criminal penalties to monitor the Russian population. Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán has forced new emergency powers through parliament that muzzle political opposition and allow for his indefinite rule.

 Even the supposed democratic bastions of the US and the UK are seeing worrying signs of autocratic policies, as surveillance drones are deployed to monitor citizens, scientific expertise is undermined, and open-ended emergency powers are granted to police forces for undetermined time frames.

Police across the world have been given new powers. Yuri Kochetkov / EPA

A warming world will only result in more disaster-related events for power-hungry leaders to take advantage of in the years ahead. From the nationalisation of resources to the deployment of militaries in response to climate shocks, it can be all-too-easy for public safety needs to bleed into personal political opportunities.

The second-order effects of climate change, from supply chain instability to the migration of peoples, will also provide authoritarian leaders more fodder for their ethno-nationalist ideologies, which inflame divisions in society and could help broaden their personal appeal.

Without clear and sturdy limits on executive power, the disruptive impacts of climate change will be used to further chip away at democratic freedoms across the world.

Overlapping shocks are the new normal

Finally, this situation is teaching the globalised world new lessons on the devastating consequences of compounding shocks. Managing a deadly global pandemic is bad enough, even before you layer on the massive unemployment, trade disruptions and economic shutdown that its mitigation sets in motion.

The months ahead will bring about additional crises – some related to the pandemic, like a massive uptick in public debt used to bail out national economies. But other near-term shocks may themselves be climate change-induced, from new forecasts for large-scale floods this spring in the central US, to a prospective repeat of 2019’s severe summer heat waves across Europe.

Recent floods in Mosul, Iraq. Can we handle climate-related disasters during a pandemic? Ammar Salih / EPA

These disasters have the potential to strike just at the time when people are being advised to shelter inside, many in at-risk areas and without adequate indoor cooling. Overlapping, historic shocks like this are becoming the new normal in our climate-changed era. As public disaster response budgets spiral and loss of life mounts each year, governments will continue to struggle to contain their compounding damage.

Scientists and security professionals alike have long warned about the devastating potential of climate change, alluding to how it might rattle our global governance systems to breaking point. But few could have expected that the fissures in our institutions would be revealed so soon, let alone on such a disturbingly large scale.

We can treat the current global crisis as a sort of “stress test” on these institutions, exposing their vulnerabilities but also providing the urgent impetus to build new resilience. In that light, we could successfully rebound from this moment with more solid global security and cooperation than we knew going into it.

Decision-makers should take a hard look at their current responses, problem-solving methods, and institutional design with future climate forecasts like our Threat Assessment in mind.

We know that even steeper and more frequent global shocks are in store, particularly without serious climate change mitigation efforts. What we don’t yet know is whether we’ll repeat current patterns of mismanagement and abuse, or if we’ll chart a more proactive and resilient course through the risks that lie ahead.

Links

• Chad is the country most vulnerable to climate change – here’s why
• Climate change is a security threat – so where is the UN Security Council?
• ‘Climate migration’ proved too political for the Paris agreement – and rightly so
• A Security Threat Assessment Of Global Climate Change: How Likely Warming Scenarios Indicate a Catastrophic Security Future
• (AU) Climate Change Is A Serious Threat To National Security
• (AU) 'Dystopian Future': Climate Change To Force Review Of Military's Role
• Could Climate Change Become A Security Issue — And Threaten Democracy?
• Climate Change Poses A ‘Direct Threat’ To Australia’s National Security. It Must Be A Political Priority

The Guardian - Jillian Ambrose

Reduction of 5% would represent biggest drop in demand for industry on record

Analysts expect a slump in heavy industry to drive demand for gas and coal down by about 2.3% each. Photograph: National Geographic Image Collection/Alamy

Global carbon emissions from the fossil fuel industry could fall by a record 2.5bn tonnes this year, a reduction of 5%, as the coronavirus pandemic triggers the biggest drop in demand for fossil fuels on record.

The unprecedented restrictions on travel, work and industry due to the coronavirus is expected to cut billions of barrels of oil, trillions of cubic metres of gas and millions of tonnes of coal from the global energy system in 2020 alone, according to data commissioned by the Guardian.

The coronavirus pandemic could result in a 5% fall in global carbon emissions
Guardian graphic. Source: Global Carbon Project (GCP), Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC)

This would lead to the fossil fuel industry’s biggest drop in CO2 emissions on record, in a single year eclipsing the carbon slumps triggered by the largest recessions of the last 50 years combined.

Climate experts expected global carbon emissions from fossil fuels and cement production to rise in 2020, from an estimated 36.8bn tonnes of carbon dioxide last year. Instead, emissions may fall by about 5%, or 2.5bn tonnes of CO2, to its lowest levels in about a decade.
Dr Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, has warned against viewing the steep decline in emissions from fossil fuels as a climate triumph.

“This decline is happening because of the economic meltdown in which thousands of people are losing their livelihoods, not as a result of the right government decisions in terms of climate policies,” he said.

“The reason we want to see emissions decline is because we want a more livable planet and happier, healthier people.”

The fossil fuel analysis undertaken by Rystad Energy, a Norwegian energy consultancy, found a sharp contraction in GDP and the abrupt halt of flights and driving could cause the world’s oil demand to fall by more than five times the drop in demand triggered by the global financial crisis in 2008.

The analysts estimate demand for crude will fall by an average of 11m barrels of oil a day this year, or 4bn barrels in total. This alone would cut 1.8bn tonnes of CO2 emissions, which would otherwise have contributed to the global climate crisis this year, according to Rystad.

The analysts also expected a slump in electricity use and heavy industry to drive demand for gas and coal down by about 2.3% each, erasing carbon emissions from each fossil fuel by 200mtonnes and 500m tonnes respectively.

Erik Holm Reiso, a senior partner at Rystad, said: “The coronavirus pandemic is an unprecedented event for energy markets, which will have a substantial impact on the world’s total carbon emissions.

“The last time demand for oil contracted, during the financial crisis in 2008 to 2009, demand fell by 1.3m barrels of oil a day. But Covid-19 could cause oil demand to fall by more than five times as much.”

The unprecedented drop in oil demand will emerge in large part due the global aviation industry, he said. Typically there are about 99,700 commercial flights per day but the crackdown on non-essential travel to curb the spread of the virus could see air traffic fall by an average of almost a quarter over the year.

Fewer cars on the road will also dent demand for petrol and diesel by an average of 9.4% over the year, shrinking oil demand in 2020 by an average of 2.6m barrels of oil a day.

The analysts say the use of transport fuels may start recovering in the second half of the year, but found demand would lag the figures recorded last year.

Energy demand in China, the world’s biggest importer of oil, is expected to begin recovering next month, four months after the outbreak in the Wuhan province. However it will not make a full return to normal levels until September at the earliest, according to Rystad. This could stoke a slow rise in global energy demand in the second half of 2020 but a recovery to 2019 levels is not forecast for this year.

Resio said: “The real question is over the long-term impact of the virus. If we learn that remote working can work people may begin to question whether we need to take long haul flights to meet people in person. This could alter whether demand for oil ever recovers to the levels we have seen in previous years.”

However, Birol said if governments didn’t take the right measures to include support for clean energy in new economic stimulus packages “then this decline could be easily wiped out in the rebound of the economy”, once Covid-19 is brought under control.

He said: “These figures are important and impressive. But they don’t make me happy. For me it’s more important about what happens next year, and the year after that.”

Links

• Climate Change: For Big Emissions Reductions, We Need To Think Small
• (AU) Call To Integrate Post-Virus Rebuild With Land And Climate Repair
• (AU) Australia Emits 1.2 Per Cent Of The World's Greenhouse Gases. So Who Must Act To Cut Emissions?
• (AU) Scott Morrison's Menu Still Doesn't Offer An Emissions-Free Option
• The Trio Of Obstacles On Climate Change
• (AU) What Are The Full Economic Costs To Australia From Climate Change?
• Top Academics Write To Morrison Government Asking For 'Deep Cuts' To Australia's Greenhouse Gas Emissions
• (AU) 'Breaking Point': Bushfires To Grow Australia' Carbon Footprint.
• Strengthen worldwide climate commitments to improve economy, study finds
• Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow postponed until 2021
• Campaigners attack Japan's 'shameful' climate plans release

The Guardian - Fiona Harvey

Global economy could lose out by $600tn by end of century on current emissions targets

The study’s authors call their findings a ‘self-preservation strategy’ for government. Photograph: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images

Every country in the world would be economically better off if all could agree to strengthen their commitments on the climate crisis through international cooperation, new research has found.

But if countries go no further than their current CO2 pledges – which are too weak to meet the goals of the Paris agreement, and would lead to dangerous levels of global heating – then they face steep economic losses.

The global economy would lose out by as much as $600tn (£476tn) by the end of the century, on current emissions targets, compared with its likely growth if countries meet the Paris goals, according to a paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

If countries fail even to implement their current plans – which would lead to an estimated 3C (5.4F) of heating, far beyond the 2C or 1.5C settled on as the limit of safety in the 2015 Paris agreement – then the outlook is even worse, with losses of up to $800tn by 2100, according to the report from a group of scientists from the Beijing Institute of Technology and other mainly Chinese institutions.

The study’s authors call their findings a “self-preservation strategy” for governments. They calculated the potential benefits by including the social welfare aspects of cutting emissions and of economic growth, which gives more weight than some other models to developing countries with large populations of poor and vulnerable people. They found that better international cooperation on emission would lead to better outcomes for such people, who are likely to be worst affected by climate breakdown.

However, their findings also show such a strategy has greater benefits for developing countries with high emissions, such as India, Indonesia, Nigeria and China, than for developed countries such as the US and the EU in the medium term, though all benefit in the longer term.

Their findings come at a critical time for governments around the world grappling with the coronavirus crisis, and its dire economic impacts. Many are under pressure to ignore or roll back previous commitments on the climate, and some stricken industries with high emissions – such as airlines and carmakers – have lobbied for a weakening of green measures. Oil producers have called a truce in their price war.

But reneging on green commitments now only stores up future problems, and will hasten climate breakdown, scientists have warned, and any respite from rising emissions caused by the crisis will be only temporary. All countries are supposed to come forward with improved national plans on curbing greenhouse gas emissions this year, before vital UN climate talks aimed at keeping the Paris agreement on track.

The UN and the UK government have been forced to delay the talks, called Cop26, until next year. That gives governments more time to improve their national plans, called nationally determined contributions in the UN jargon, but so far there is little sign they are doing so. Only Japan and Chile, the host of last year’s talks, among major countries have so far submitted fresh plans, and while Chile agreed to step up climate action, Japan’s plan showed no improvement.

A UK government spokesperson for Cop26 told the Guardian: “We welcome Chile’s climate leadership as Cop25 president in submitting a strengthened emissions reduction target, and hope to see all countries following their lead.”

Current climate plans showed that the rich world must do more, said Rachel Kennerley, climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth. “Budgets should be rebalanced to provide emergency finance and help poorer nations – it’s the fair and right thing to do. If we don’t pay now, this is the kind of bill that, like a person ignoring a credit card statement, will only multiply in time.

“And it’s the kind of expenditure that repays multiple benefits and should really be seen as a smart investment. As if stopping climate change isn’t enough, it will deliver a better quality of life for more people around the world, faster.”

The economic benefits of curbing greenhouse gas emissions, compared with the high costs of reneging, should spur governments to act on the climate, according to the Nature study’s authors. However, investments are needed to realise these gains, particularly from developed countries. The outlay would amount to between $5tn and $33tn for the US, and between $16tn and $105tn for the G20 countries as a whole.

The study said: “Early and quick action will provide a better chance to close the widening emissions gap, even though a large amount of abatement cost would occur in the short term.”

Links

• Carbon emissions from fossil fuels could fall by 2.5bn tonnes in 2020
• Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow postponed until 2021
• Campaigners attack Japan's 'shameful' climate plans release
• 'It's a nightmare': Fife residents demand inquiry into flaring at petrochemical plant
• EU member states call for 2030 climate target
• UN predicts above-average temperatures even without El Niño
• World may miss carbon targets unless big firms improve – Mark Carney
• JP Morgan economists warn climate crisis is threat to human race

The Guardian - Patrick Suckling*

The Covid-19 pandemic is a harbinger of climate disasters to come and the resilience we need to build into our systems

“We are in both a health and economic crisis. In dealing with the former we cannot lose a generation to the latter.” Photograph: Guillaume Horcajuelo/EPA

Recovery from coronavirus must reckon with climate change. The current and urgent focus properly needs to be flattening the curve and saving lives.

Yet even as this overriding priority absorbs us, governments now need to be thinking how to support the strongest possible recovery as we emerge from this crisis.

The prime minister, Scott Morrison, underscores we are in both a health and economic crisis. In dealing with the former we cannot lose a generation to the latter.

Focus on recovery must be on maximising economic growth and jobs, and ensuring this includes everyone. This was the guiding star that steered the international response to the global financial crisis.

I was advising the prime minister Kevin Rudd at that time and saw first hand just how much foresight, coordination and effort was required for success. This is much worse, and so will demand so much more.

Reckoning with climate change will support a strongest possible recovery. The threat of climate change that is driving global action against it has not gone away. Indeed, the Covid-19 pandemic is a harbinger of climate disasters to come and the resilience we need to build into our systems – including health – to deal with what we know will be the adverse impacts of climate change.

We know that unless we address this challenge, we will all be worse off; and the longer we take in addressing the challenge, the worse it will be. Just as Covid-19 requires us to act now to save lives in the next few weeks, climate change requires action now to avert a future global catastrophe. The logic of climate action has increasingly applied to global economic activity since the Paris agreement, and must continue to underpin the investment decisions governments make going forward.

Decisions that support the strongest possible recovery in growth will help to shape the future of the Australian economy. We must ensure these pathways to the future do not lock-in those that lead to damaging dead-ends: higher emissions and less climate resilience down the track to our economic, environmental and community disadvantage. Borrowing, as we are, from our kids to fund the billions in recovery stimulus, we cannot further burden them with such dead-ends.

Significantly, climate related investments in many cases will offer the best prospects for economic growth and jobs. On that basis alone they should be prioritised. The OECD report Investing in Climate, Investing in Growth demonstrated this in detail for the G20 in 2018.

For example, they provide options for major infrastructure investments which should be a bedrock of government stimulus for recovery: clean energy and new transport systems, more sustainable homes and buildings, improved agricultural practices water and waste management.

In short, if banks will not finance new coal-fired power in Australia but will lend for renewable energy and storage, which would you tend toward, and where then are the growth and jobs, and best place for stimulus?

Corporates are increasingly working this out. There were a slew of announcements over summer largely subsumed by our preoccupation with drought, bushfires and pandemic. They show business banking on climate smart investment for growth.

The most significant example was BlackRock announcing a game-changing move to place sustainability at the centre of its investment approach because the returns to investors will be greater. BlackRock manages over US$7 trillion of assets, meaning other large asset managers will follow, as happened days after the announcement when State Street– managing US$3 trillion - went the same way.

As corporates are now integrating climate change as core business strategy, so should governments as core economic strategy, not least for recovery.

We know where such investments can be made. They are not hypothetical, whether outlined in CSIRO’s excellent technology roadmap for a low-emissions Australian economy, or Ross Garnaut’s recent excellent book on the growth opportunities Superpower: Australia’s Low Carbon Opportunity or last week’s inspiring report by Climate Works on de-carbonising Australia’s future, or presumably in the Government’s forthcoming low-emissions technology roadmap for Australia.

We are not short on ideas, including on climate resilience.

An obvious starting point could be a nation-building stimulus investment around our decrepit energy system. By now the federal and state governments have a much stronger grasp of what we need for success, encouragingly evident on the recent $2bn federal-NSW government package for better access, security and affordability.

Turbocharging this with a stimulus package for more renewable energy and flexible storage of all sorts (including hydrogen), accompanying transmission and security technologies for our electricity grid, and investment in dramatically improving energy efficiency would – literally and figuratively – power our economy forward.

Not just for the growth and jobs in this sector alone but in the scope provided to power other sectors for growth, such as electrifying transport across the country – which stimulus could also spur.

In the aftermath of our drought and bushfires, another obvious area for nation-building investment is our land sector. Farm productivity can be dramatically improved by precision agriculture and regenerative farming technologies while building resilience to drought.

New sources of revenue for farmers can be created through soil carbon and forest carbon farming – with carbon trading from these activities internationally set to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars over the coming decade. These solutions and sources of growth and jobs can be harvested now with a little government support, keeping farmers on their land and regional communities thriving.

In these times of despair this prospect holds out great hope. Showing it is not a dream, the EU has already said its recovery stimulus will invest in climate for growth and jobs. We should too.

*Patrick Suckling was Australia’s ambassador for the environment, is a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute and senior partner at Pollination, a specialist climate investment and advisory firm.

Links

• Australia can be a better, fairer place after the coronavirus, if we're willing to fight for it
• It's not too early to start thinking about Australia after the crisis
• Investing in Climate, Investing in Growth (pdf)
• (AU) Climate Scientists Say Coronavirus Could Be Australia's Golden Opportunity
• It’s Important To Keep Talking About Climate Change Now
• How Coronavirus Could Help Us Fight Climate Change: Lessons From The Pandemic
• Here’s What The Coronavirus Pandemic Can Teach Us About Tackling Climate Change
• Low Emissions Technology Roadmap
• Pathways to deep decarbonisation in 2050: how Australia can prosper in a low carbon world

The Conversation - Joshua Dean

Joshua Dean, Author provided



Joshua Dean is Lecturer in Biogeochemical Cycles, University of Liverpool.
He has 12 years experience in the global carbon cycle since completing his PhD on water resources.
Joshua Dean has worked on carbon cycling in the Canadian and Siberian Arctic, peatlands in the UK, and urban waterways in Europe.

The Arctic is predicted to warm faster than anywhere else in the world this century, perhaps by as much as 7°C. These rising temperatures threaten one of the largest long-term stores of carbon on land: permafrost.

Permafrost is permanently frozen soil. The generally cold temperatures in the Arctic keep soils there frozen year-on-year. Plants grow in the uppermost soil layers during the short summers and then decay into soil, which freezes when the winter snow arrives.

Over thousands of years, carbon has built up in these frozen soils, and they’re now estimated to contain twice the carbon currently in the atmosphere. Some of this carbon is more than 50,000 years old, which means the plants that decomposed to produce that soil grew over 50,000 years ago. These soil deposits are known as “Yedoma”, which are mainly found in the East Siberian Arctic, but also in parts of Alaska and Canada.

As the region warms, the permafrost is thawing, and this frozen carbon is being released to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane. Methane release is particularly worrying, as it’s a highly potent greenhouse gas.

Arctic landscapes are changing rapidly as the region warms. Joshua Dean, Author provided

But a recent study suggested that the release of methane from ancient carbon sources – sometimes referred to as the Arctic methane “bomb” – didn’t contribute much to the warming that occurred during the last deglaciation – the period after the last ice age.

This occurred 18,000 to 8,000 years ago, a period that climate scientists study intently, as it’s the last time global temperatures rose by 4°C, which is roughly what is predicted for the world by 2100.

This study suggested to many that ancient methane emissions are not something we should be worried about this century. But in new research, we found that this optimism may be misplaced.

‘Young’ versus ‘old’ carbon

We went to the East Siberian Arctic to compare the age of different forms of carbon found in the ponds, rivers and lakes.

These waters thaw during the summer and leak greenhouse gases from the surrounding permafrost.

We measured the age of the carbon dioxide, methane and organic matter found in these waters using radiocarbon dating and found that most of the carbon released to the atmosphere was overwhelmingly “young”.

Where there was intense permafrost thaw, we found that the oldest methane was 4,800 years old, and the oldest carbon dioxide was 6,000 years old. But over this vast Arctic landscape, the carbon released was mainly from young plant organic matter.

This means that the carbon produced by plants growing during each summer growing season is rapidly released over the next few summers. This rapid turnover releases much more carbon than the thaw of older permafrost, even where severe thaw is occurring.

So what does this mean for future climate change? It means that carbon emissions from a warming Arctic may not be driven by the thawing of an ancient frozen carbon bomb, as it’s often described. Instead, most emissions may be relatively new carbon that is produced by plants that grew fairly recently.

Arctic lakes are growing sources of methane emissions to the atmosphere. Joshua Dean, Author provided

What this shows is that the age of the carbon released from the warming Arctic is less important than the amount and form it takes.

Methane is 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas over a 100-year timeframe.
The East Siberian Arctic is a generally flat and wet landscape, and these are conditions which produce lots of methane, as there’s less oxygen in soils which might otherwise create carbon dioxide during thaws instead. As a result, potent methane could well dominate the greenhouse gas emissions from the region.

Since most of the emissions from the Arctic this century will likely be from “young” carbon, we may not need to worry about ancient permafrost adding substantially to modern climate change.

But the Arctic will still be a huge source of carbon emissions, as carbon that was soil or plant matter only a few hundred years ago leaches to the atmosphere. That will increase as warmer temperatures lengthen growing seasons in the Arctic summer.

The fading spectre of an ancient methane time bomb is cold comfort. The new research should urge the world to act boldly on climate change, to limit how much natural processes in the Arctic can contribute to the problem.

Links

• The Arctic is turning brown because of weird weather – and it could accelerate climate change
• Little influence of Arctic amplification on mid-latitude climate
• Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release
• Old carbon reservoirs were not important in the deglacial methane budget
• Global temperatures on track for 3-5 degree rise by 2100: U.N.
• East Siberian Arctic inland waters emit mostly contemporary carbon
• Methane Feedbacks to the Global Climate System in a Warmer World

The Conversation - Andrew Glikson

Pixabay 


Andrew GliksonDr Andrew Glikson, a Earth and paleoclimate scientist, is a Visiting Fellow at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University, where he is reviewing the effects of climate on prehistoric human evolution.He is also an Honorary Professor at the Center for Excellence in Geothermal Research, The University of Queensland, and is affiliated with the Climate Change Institute and the Planetary Science Institute, Australian National University.
  At several points in the history of our planet, increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have caused extreme global warming, prompting the majority of species on Earth to die out.

In the past, these events were triggered by a huge volcanic eruption or asteroid impact. Now, Earth is heading for another mass extinction – and human activity is to blame.

I am an Earth and Paleo-climate scientist and have researched the relationships between asteroid impacts, volcanism, climate changes and mass extinctions of species.

My research suggests the current growth rate of carbon dioxide emissions is faster than those which triggered two previous mass extinctions, including the event that wiped out the dinosaurs.

The world’s gaze may be focused on COVID-19 right now. But the risks to nature from human-made global warming – and the imperative to act – remain clear.

The current rate of CO2 emissions is a major event in the recorded history of Earth. EPA

Past mass extinctions

Many species can adapt to slow, or even moderate, environmental changes. But Earth’s history shows that extreme shifts in the climate can cause many species to become extinct.

For example, about 66 million years ago an asteroid hit Earth. The subsequent smashed rocks and widespread fires released massive amounts of carbon dioxide over about 10,000 years. Global temperatures soared, sea levels rose and oceans became acidic. About 80% of species, including the dinosaurs, were wiped out.

And about 55 million years ago, global temperatures spiked again, over 100,000 years or so. The cause of this event, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, is not entirely clear. One theory, known as the “methane burp” hypothesis, posits that a massive volcanic eruption triggered the sudden release of methane from ocean sediments, making oceans more acidic and killing off many species.

So is life on Earth now headed for the same fate?

Comparing greenhouse gas levels

Before industrial times began at the end of the 18th century, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere sat at around 300 parts per million. This means that for every one million molecules of gas in the atmosphere, 300 were carbon dioxide.

In February this year, atmospheric carbon dioxide reached 414.1 parts per million. Total greenhouse gas level – carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide combined – reached almost 500 parts per million of carbon dioxide-equivalent.

Author provided/The Conversation, CC BY-ND

Carbon dioxide is now pouring into the atmosphere at a rate of two to three parts per million each year.

Using carbon records stored in fossils and organic matter, I have determined that current carbon emissions constitute an extreme event in the recorded history of Earth.

My research has demonstrated that annual carbon dioxide emissions are now faster than after both the asteroid impact that eradicated the dinosaurs (about 0.18 parts per million CO2 per year), and the thermal maximum 55 million years ago (about 0.11 parts per million CO2 per year).

An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Shutterstock

The next mass extinction has begun

Current atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are not yet at the levels seen 55 million and 65 million years ago. But the massive influx of carbon dioxide means the climate is changing faster than many plant and animal species can adapt.

A major United Nations report released last year warned around one million animal and plant species were threatened with extinction. Climate change was listed as one of five key drivers.

The report said the distributions of 47% of land-based flightless mammals, and almost 25% of threatened birds, may already have been negatively affected by climate change.

Many researchers fear the climate system is approaching a tipping point - a threshold beyond which rapid and irreversible changes will occur. This will create a cascade of devastating effects.

There are already signs tipping points have been reached. For example, rising Arctic temperatures have led to major ice melt, and weakened the Arctic jet stream – a powerful band of westerly winds.

A diagram showing the weakening Arctic jet stream, and subsequent movements of warm and cold air. NASA

This allows north-moving warm air to cross the polar boundary, and cold fronts emanating from the poles to intrude south into Siberia, Europe and Canada.A shift in climate zones is also causing the tropics to expand and migrate toward the poles, at a rate of about 56 to 111 kilometres per decade. The tracks of tropical and extra-tropical cyclones are likewise shifting toward the poles. Australia is highly vulnerable to this shift.

Uncharted future climate territory

Research released in 2016 showed just what a massive impact humans are having on the planet. It said while the Earth might naturally have entered the next ice age in about 20,000 years’ time, the heating produced by carbon dioxide would result in a period of super-tropical conditions, delaying the next ice age to about 50,000 years from now.

During this period, chaotic high-energy stormy conditions would prevail over much of the Earth. My research suggests humans are likely to survive best in sub-polar regions and sheltered mountain valleys, where cooler conditions would allow flora and fauna to persist.

Earth’s next mass extinction is avoidable – if carbon dioxide emissions are dramatically curbed and we develop and deploy technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But on the current trajectory, human activity threatens to make large parts of the Earth uninhabitable - a planetary tragedy of our own making.

Links

• NOAA's Annual Greenhouse Gas Index
• Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
• UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’
• Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene
• Earth system analysis for sustainability (pdf)
• Our options for global C02 drawdown (pdf)
• Here's what the coronavirus pandemic can teach us about tackling climate change
• Curious Kids: What effect did the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs have on plants and trees?

The Guardian - Neha Wadekar | Will Swanson

Ibado Mohammed Abdulle is a counsellor, friend and campaigner for women who have been made refugees in their own country by the impact of the climate crisis

Ibado Mohammed Abdulle, who oversees three displacement camps in Somalia’s Sool region, works to prevent violence against displaced women. Photograph: Will Swanson

Oog, Somalia - The long, black hem of Ibado Mohammed Abdulle’s diya drags in the sand, creating mini tornadoes of dust under her sandals.

At a circular fence of waist-high thorny bushes, she knocks on the metal sheet serving as a makeshift door. A woman’s face, partially hidden by a bright green hijab, appears. “Salaam Alaikum,” Abdulle says, “peace be upon you.”

Holding up a hand to the armed guards tasked with accompanying the visiting charity staff following her around the displacement camp, she instructs them to stay outside.

“We don’t want to scare her,” she says.

Abdulle, 48, was living in the desert town of Oog in northern Somalia in 2016 when drought turned the region to dust, driving thousands of families from their homes. Now she makes daily visits to one of three sprawling displacement camps outside the town to campaign for vulnerable women and girls. Once a climate refugee herself, she knows what their lives are like.

“I tell them to gather in groups when they go out,” Abdulle says. “That most of the men are your enemies, so don’t go out alone so you can be safe from the violence and the rape, especially at night-time.”

In Somalia, climate change is driving rape, sexual violence and intimate partner violence. Droughts linked to climate change ravage the landscape with increasing frequency, hurting families who depend on farming and herding animals.

The spike in regional violence against women and girls takes two forms: domestic violence against women who have become family breadwinners , and sexual violence against women and girls who have migrated to camps near crowded urban centres.

Halima, 20, lived with her elderly husband in rural Somaliland. When he died she was left destitute and travelled to Oog, in Sool region, for help. Photograph: Will Swanson

Abdulle came from a pastoralist family, displaced by drought and conflict during Somalia’s civil war in the 80s. After a nomadic life with her family, Abdulle was sent to the capital city, Mogadishu, for her education. She returned first to her parents in northern Somalia, and then moved to Oog.

“When my family [lived] in the countryside, we had a drought like this one [in 2016],” Abdulle says. “The people were helped. Some were educated, some worked and some of them went abroad. I know something about the droughts. When the droughts come, there can be good change for the people, especially for women.”

In 2016, when waves of displaced pastoralist families streamed into Oog, looking for healthcare, food, water and shelter, Abdulle felt compelled to document the crisis and to protect and empower women and girls. She recorded videos to send to the government and the Somali diaspora, requesting support for the overwhelming need.

Abdulle’s no-nonsense attitude and unrelenting commitment encouraged the community to approach the local government to request she be put in charge of their welfare. Holding a paid leadership position overseeing men is an usual responsibility for a woman in Somalia’s male-dominated society.

“The surprising thing is that the three male heads of the three IDP camps are … happy that Ibado is above them,” said Muna Hussein, a gender officer at Oxfam, who works closely with Abdulle. “They listen to her.”

Huda, 35, stands in her home at a camp for displaced people on the outskirts of Oog, in Somaliland. Photograph: Will Swanson

Camp conditions are hazardous for women: there is no lighting at night, and no doors or fences to keep out opportunistic criminals and predators. As drought continued in 2017 and 2018, the population in Oog’s camps boomed. And crimes against women and girls mounted.

While updated statistics are hard to come by, at least 25% of Somali women have experienced gender-based violence exacerbated by conflict and displacement due to the climate emergency, World Bank data shows. Much of this violence happens in displaced communities.

Research from Oxfam suggests women in Somalia are most at risk when walking to collect water and firewood, using outdoor toilets and sleeping in makeshift huts that lack doors and lighting. The perpetrators come from both inside and outside the camps. The government, fragile and under-resourced, cannot provide protection and services to the nearly 2.6 million Somalis already displaced.

Abdulle has sought to help local women and girls protect themselves by organising groups to collect water and firewood. She has also coordinated forums, groups of volunteers who meet to learn how to campaign for their needs and rights. She also acts as a counsellor and friend for women who have been attacked.

“If a girl who was raped came to me, I would start by speaking with her,” Abdulle says. “Then, I would take her to the hospital for any treatment. And I would take her to the nearest police station immediately to arrest the perpetrator of this crime.”

Sukhra Idris, says she was abused by her husband because she tried to find work, take her children and leave him when he refused to provide for the family. Photograph: Will SwansonIn the blazing afternoon sun, with strong winds kicking up fierce dust storms, the makeshift tents in the displacement camp look identical: round huts propped up by sticks and covered in a patchwork of faded, old cloth. But Abdulle knows the women living in each one and navigates between the huts with ease.

Sukhra Idris, her name changed to protect her privacy, lives alone in this camp with her two children. When Abdulle enters, she greets her with a hug.

The lines around her eyes make Idris look older than her 23 years. She was married at 17 to a man from a wealthy family.

“I met a boy and fell in love and felt I was ready for marriage,” Idris says, pulling up the bright green hijab as her young child tugs from her head. “I was in a hurry for that because I was very young.”

When the 2016 drought hit, the couple’s livestock transportation business was ruined. . According to experts, men unable to provide for their families often become more prone to domestic violence. Idris says her husband began to abuse her, slamming her against a wall, punching and slapping her.“I told him to do his own work because we didn’t have enough to eat and needed to support old people like my mom and dad,” said Idris. “At that time, he was beating me if I asked him to bring milk for his kids.”

Abduallhi Isa Hamdulle, 81, stands with his sheep and goats in a rural part of Somaliland. Photograph: Will Swanson

Idris tried several times to leave, but social stigma pressed her to return. It was only with Abdulle’s support that Idris was able to leave for good. She struggles to survive with her children in the displacement camp and one has died from diarrhoea.

After a long day, Abdulle visits Oog’s only hotel to sit beneath the shade of a tree and sip a cup of camel milk tea. With climate change intensifying and droughts increasing in the region, Abdulle knows she alone cannot meet the overwhelming needs of all Somali women and girls. Her greatest hope is that the displaced women she is helping to train and empower will pick up the fight.

Links

• Debt relief allows Somalia to rejoin global economy after 30-year exile
• India's Women Seaweed Divers Swim Against The Tide Of Climate Change
• Women Shouldering The Burden Of Climate Crisis Need Action, Not Speeches
• Women Fighting Climate Change Are Targets For Misogynists
• Want To Go For Inclusive Climate Action? Then Start With Integrating Gender Equality Into Climate Finance
• Why The Climate Crisis Is Harming Women More Than Men
• 'You Need To Act Now': Meet 4 Girls Working To Save The Warming World
• Women In Climate Change Hotspots Face Greater Burdens When Under Environmental Stress