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Clean Energy Set To Provide 35% Of Australia's Electricity Within Two Years
The Guardian - Adam Morton
The renewable boom will end without a national policy to encourage future clean investments, industry warns
Wind, hydro and solar power made up 22.3% of electricity used across the month, peaking at 39.2% in the middle of the day on 30 June. Photograph: Dan Himbrechts/AAP Clean energy will be providing 35% of Australia’s total electricity needs within two years, analysts say, as new data underlines the pace at which solar power is transforming the national energy market.
A report by consultants Green Energy Markets found rooftop solar systems and new large-scale farms regularly pushed renewable energy to beyond 30% of generation at midday during June, one of the least sunny months.
Wind, hydro and solar power made up 22.3% of electricity used across the month. The level of clean energy in the system at one time peaked at 39.2% in the middle of the day on 30 June.
Renewable energy share of total generation in June
Hourly breakdown of national electricity market generation over June for renewable energy sources
Source: Green Energy Markets
Tristan Edis, a Green Energy Markets director and analyst, said clean energy growth would continue in the short term as a number of projects were in development and yet to come online. But he said the boom was expected to end in the absence of a policy to encourage further investments.
He said he expected clean energy would provide on average 35% electricity by 2021.
“What we are seeing now is just a glimpse of what’s ahead because you’ve still got a substantial number of solar farms coming through,” Edis said. “We’re going to be regularly having 50% of renewables – solar, wind and hydro – across the national electricity market in the middle of the day in the next 12 months. But it is also soon going to get hard to get new stuff built.”
A report by the Clean Energy Regulator last week found enough projects were committed to meet the 2020 renewable energy target, roughly equivalent to 23% of electricity. While most recent investment has been driven by incentives attached to the target, and to a lesser extent a state target in Victoria, recent large-scale clean plants have been funded on a commercial basis by businesses wanting to lock in cheap solar and wind deals while wholesale electricity prices were high.
But Edis said this would end as abundant free solar power during the day reduced wholesale prices to a level where investment in any type of new large-scale generation was not financially attractive. In the absence of federal policy to drive grid transformation, he said investment was likely to slow until the circumstances in the market changed – for example, a coal-fired power plant closed, reducing supply.
He said the tumbling price of wholesale electricity in the middle of the day, in some cases to $0, would make life harder for coal-fired power plants that could not compete on price around the clock but by design usually could not be turned off and on. Those coal plants that could be turned off and on would increasingly be used in a similar way to gas peaking plants, which sell electricity only when they are needed.
“It just shows how crazy this idea is that we should go and build another coal-fired generator to run as baseload,” Edis said. “If we do that it just means another coal-fired power plant is going to shut down because nothing can outcompete solar and wind.”
Greenhouse gas emissions from electricity are expected to continue to be reduced in the short-term, but at a slower pace than experts say is possible or necessary for Australia its part under the Paris climate agreement. While federal data released last month found emissions from electricity were down, national emissions continue to rise due to increased carbon pollution from the resources industry, mostly liquefied natural gas production for export, and transport.
‘Any of them could do the job’
At an Australian clean energy summit in Sydney on Tuesday, the Clean Energy Council chief executive, Kane Thornton, said it had been a record-breaking two years, with more than $24bn worth of large-scale renewable energy projects, solar panels on 2m homes and the world’s biggest battery based in South Australia.
But he said a survey of 75 chief executives showed industry confidence had fallen since December due to policy uncertainty, growing constraints on the grid and the pace at which regulations and markets that had been designed for last century were having to be changed. The survey found energy bosses believed the single greatest challenge facing the industry was getting new farms and plants connected to the grid. A lack of energy and climate policy was the second biggest challenge.
“The economics of clean energy continues to improve and we no longer require subsidy,” Thornton said. “But the wholesale market is riddled with uncertainty.”
He said collaboration on energy between the commonwealth and the states was near non-existent, noting federal and state ministers energy ministers had not met for eight months and no meeting was planned.
Thornton said a sensible energy policy could accelerate investment, drive down power prices and deliver jobs in rural areas. The industry did not mind whether the policy was the abandoned national energy guarantee, an extended renewable energy target, the clean energy target proposed by the chief scientist, Alan Finkel, or a baseline-and-credit trading scheme. “Any of them could do the job,” he said.
NSW threatens to go it alone
Matt Kean, the New South Wales energy and environment minister, repeated his warning that the Berejiklian government would introduce its own climate and energy policy if the federal government did not act.
“The NSW government still supports the national energy guarantee and will continue to support a national mechanism that integrates climate and energy policy,” he told the summit. “As I’ve said before, if the commonwealth won’t get on board NSW will consider going it alone.”
Kean said NSW wanted to be known as the easiest jurisdiction in the OECD for energy construction.
Thornton said the industry was still on track for 50% clean energy before 2030 and a fully renewable energy system was now inevitable and could be achieved well before mid-century. He said the next stage would be decarbonising other sectors such as transport and building a renewable export industry selling green hydrogen and clean energy via undersea cable.
“It’s now time we started debating when Australia should target 200% renewable energy generation,” he said.
Links
The renewable boom will end without a national policy to encourage future clean investments, industry warns
Wind, hydro and solar power made up 22.3% of electricity used across the month, peaking at 39.2% in the middle of the day on 30 June. Photograph: Dan Himbrechts/AAP Clean energy will be providing 35% of Australia’s total electricity needs within two years, analysts say, as new data underlines the pace at which solar power is transforming the national energy market.
A report by consultants Green Energy Markets found rooftop solar systems and new large-scale farms regularly pushed renewable energy to beyond 30% of generation at midday during June, one of the least sunny months.
Wind, hydro and solar power made up 22.3% of electricity used across the month. The level of clean energy in the system at one time peaked at 39.2% in the middle of the day on 30 June.
Renewable energy share of total generation in June
Hourly breakdown of national electricity market generation over June for renewable energy sources
Source: Green Energy Markets
Tristan Edis, a Green Energy Markets director and analyst, said clean energy growth would continue in the short term as a number of projects were in development and yet to come online. But he said the boom was expected to end in the absence of a policy to encourage further investments.
He said he expected clean energy would provide on average 35% electricity by 2021.
“What we are seeing now is just a glimpse of what’s ahead because you’ve still got a substantial number of solar farms coming through,” Edis said. “We’re going to be regularly having 50% of renewables – solar, wind and hydro – across the national electricity market in the middle of the day in the next 12 months. But it is also soon going to get hard to get new stuff built.”
A report by the Clean Energy Regulator last week found enough projects were committed to meet the 2020 renewable energy target, roughly equivalent to 23% of electricity. While most recent investment has been driven by incentives attached to the target, and to a lesser extent a state target in Victoria, recent large-scale clean plants have been funded on a commercial basis by businesses wanting to lock in cheap solar and wind deals while wholesale electricity prices were high.
But Edis said this would end as abundant free solar power during the day reduced wholesale prices to a level where investment in any type of new large-scale generation was not financially attractive. In the absence of federal policy to drive grid transformation, he said investment was likely to slow until the circumstances in the market changed – for example, a coal-fired power plant closed, reducing supply.
He said the tumbling price of wholesale electricity in the middle of the day, in some cases to $0, would make life harder for coal-fired power plants that could not compete on price around the clock but by design usually could not be turned off and on. Those coal plants that could be turned off and on would increasingly be used in a similar way to gas peaking plants, which sell electricity only when they are needed.
“It just shows how crazy this idea is that we should go and build another coal-fired generator to run as baseload,” Edis said. “If we do that it just means another coal-fired power plant is going to shut down because nothing can outcompete solar and wind.”
Greenhouse gas emissions from electricity are expected to continue to be reduced in the short-term, but at a slower pace than experts say is possible or necessary for Australia its part under the Paris climate agreement. While federal data released last month found emissions from electricity were down, national emissions continue to rise due to increased carbon pollution from the resources industry, mostly liquefied natural gas production for export, and transport.
‘Any of them could do the job’
At an Australian clean energy summit in Sydney on Tuesday, the Clean Energy Council chief executive, Kane Thornton, said it had been a record-breaking two years, with more than $24bn worth of large-scale renewable energy projects, solar panels on 2m homes and the world’s biggest battery based in South Australia.
But he said a survey of 75 chief executives showed industry confidence had fallen since December due to policy uncertainty, growing constraints on the grid and the pace at which regulations and markets that had been designed for last century were having to be changed. The survey found energy bosses believed the single greatest challenge facing the industry was getting new farms and plants connected to the grid. A lack of energy and climate policy was the second biggest challenge.
“The economics of clean energy continues to improve and we no longer require subsidy,” Thornton said. “But the wholesale market is riddled with uncertainty.”
He said collaboration on energy between the commonwealth and the states was near non-existent, noting federal and state ministers energy ministers had not met for eight months and no meeting was planned.
Thornton said a sensible energy policy could accelerate investment, drive down power prices and deliver jobs in rural areas. The industry did not mind whether the policy was the abandoned national energy guarantee, an extended renewable energy target, the clean energy target proposed by the chief scientist, Alan Finkel, or a baseline-and-credit trading scheme. “Any of them could do the job,” he said.
NSW threatens to go it alone
Matt Kean, the New South Wales energy and environment minister, repeated his warning that the Berejiklian government would introduce its own climate and energy policy if the federal government did not act.
“The NSW government still supports the national energy guarantee and will continue to support a national mechanism that integrates climate and energy policy,” he told the summit. “As I’ve said before, if the commonwealth won’t get on board NSW will consider going it alone.”
Kean said NSW wanted to be known as the easiest jurisdiction in the OECD for energy construction.
Thornton said the industry was still on track for 50% clean energy before 2030 and a fully renewable energy system was now inevitable and could be achieved well before mid-century. He said the next stage would be decarbonising other sectors such as transport and building a renewable export industry selling green hydrogen and clean energy via undersea cable.
“It’s now time we started debating when Australia should target 200% renewable energy generation,” he said.
Links
- The new electricity boom: renewable energy makes staggering leap but can it last?
- Liberal states in talks to revive Turnbull's dumped energy policy
- Australia's energy future: the real power is not where you’d think
- 'Just a matter of when': the $20bn plan to power Singapore with Australian solar
- Pumped hydro projects unveiled as Tasmania bids to be 'battery of the nation'
- 'Way off the planet': regional businesses use renewables to slash costs
- Pumped hydro project that reuses old goldmine expected to win federal funding
- Renewable energy generates enough power to run 70% of Australian homes
- Victoria moves to become first state to enshrine renewable energy targets in law
- Renewables roadshow: how Broken Hill went from mining to drag queens and solar farms
Categories: External websites
When Climate Change Interferes With Ability 'To Listen To The Earth'
Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam
The Wik people of western Cape York often can't follow their traditional routes because "huge salt water lakes" appear where they hadn't before, and they say climate change is the obvious culprit.
Bruce Martin, a Wik-Nagthan man, says the disruption from rising sea levels and other impacts is not only damaging the ecosystems of the far north but also the cultures of the Indigenous people who inhabit the region.
The death of over 1000 kilometres of mangrove forests along the Gulf of Carpentaria has been blamed on extreme conditions including record temperatures. Vision courtesy James Cook University.
"If we're not able to move on the same routes as we have for generations, obviously it affects our songs and ceremonies," Mr Martin said. "It also affects our cultural resilience and our ability to pass it down to the future."
Elsewhere, erosion is cutting deeply into the coast, with islanders telling Donna Green, a climate researcher at the University of NSW, "they have had to walk along the shoreline after a king tide looking for and picking up bones of their ancestors" after graveyards were exposed.
The fate of remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders is one focus of a new report, Health and Climate Change: From Townsville to Tuvalu - released by the Global Health Alliance Australia on Wednesday.
The 47 groups making up the alliance say people across Australia and the Pacific are already suffering from rising temperatures and altered weather patterns such as stronger cyclones - and the health and other threats are going to get worse.
A king tide erodes a graveyard in the Torres Strait. Credit: Donna GreenNot only will some areas become unbearably hot for humans and other species for parts of the year but the warmer conditions will also aid the spread of diseases, the report finds.
For instance, Nipah, a bat-borne virus that has been fatal to pigs and humans in south-east Asia, is among the diseases expected to become established in northern Australia.
Two fruit bat species in Australia are closely related to two bat species that now carry the disease. The disease's introduction to Australia "would present substantial risks to humans, pigs and horses", the report said.
Nipah virus spread
Areas in red show the most optimistic 2050 scenario for the
potential additional range of the Henipavirus carried by fruit bats.
Source: Global Health Alliance AustraliaPhysical and cultural threats
While all populations are likely to become less resilient over time to adverse impacts of climate change, some groups such as women, children and the elderly are more vulnerable. For many Indigenous populations, the "threat is even more prevalent", the report said.
The risks include exacerbating the relatively poor health of existing communities. Climate change, though, also puts at risk food stocks, hurts populations of species of totemic significance and can undermine coastal or riverine locations where they live.
Warning: Bruce Martin."In Australia, there's been very little recognition just how vulnerable Indigenous Australians are currently [to climate change] and have been over the last decade or so," said Professor Green, an environmental scientist at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes at UNSW.
One example was the huge forest die back that killed up to 1000 kilometres of mangroves along the Gulf of Carpentaria in 2016, wiping important nurseries for totemic and food fish for local population.
Salt-water inundation is also affecting taro roots, sometimes wiping out the important food source, Professor Green said.
That salt water can also "affect the whole ecosystem", from small skinks, lizards and frogs all the way up to apex predators, Mr Martin said. "It's already started happening."
'Listening to the earth'
For some of the Wik, the first contact with Europeans did not happen until as recently as 1975, so "people know what it was like" before the changes, Mr Martin said.
As an indicator of close connections to country, the local word for the timing of a child's birth is "Aarngay", meaning "first listened to the earth", he said.
People being evacuated from Groote Eylandt and the McArthur River Mine airfield near Borroloola in the Northern Territory ahead of Cyclone Trevor last March. Credit: ADFThe people are keenly aware when "sickness" comes to the land, he said. "You're losing part of your family."
Professor Green said many groups have told her "they have a feeling of sadness" because they're unable to carry out their obligations to care for their land.
While Indigenous people can be remarkably resilient to temperature changes - central Australians have adapted to extremes ranging from about zero to "the early 50s" - limits could be crossed if the mercury keeps rising.
"My concern is we're reaching a turning point," Mr Martin said.
Darwin, for instance, could experience 35-degree or warmer days for the equivalent of nine months a year amid future warming, with humidity levels making it "intolerable" for many, Professor Green said.
Mr Martin said that, while Australians like to think they stand for a "fair go", there was little fairness in the disproportionate effects a warming world would have on their communities.
"Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders will be impacted unfairly because they have contributed very little to global warming," he said.
"Things are changing outside our experience and we'll be left to deal with it."
Mangrove forests were wiped out along a 1000-kilometre stretch of the northern Australian coast in 2016. Credit: Norman Duke
Links
The Wik people of western Cape York often can't follow their traditional routes because "huge salt water lakes" appear where they hadn't before, and they say climate change is the obvious culprit.
Bruce Martin, a Wik-Nagthan man, says the disruption from rising sea levels and other impacts is not only damaging the ecosystems of the far north but also the cultures of the Indigenous people who inhabit the region.
The death of over 1000 kilometres of mangrove forests along the Gulf of Carpentaria has been blamed on extreme conditions including record temperatures. Vision courtesy James Cook University.
"If we're not able to move on the same routes as we have for generations, obviously it affects our songs and ceremonies," Mr Martin said. "It also affects our cultural resilience and our ability to pass it down to the future."
Elsewhere, erosion is cutting deeply into the coast, with islanders telling Donna Green, a climate researcher at the University of NSW, "they have had to walk along the shoreline after a king tide looking for and picking up bones of their ancestors" after graveyards were exposed.
The fate of remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders is one focus of a new report, Health and Climate Change: From Townsville to Tuvalu - released by the Global Health Alliance Australia on Wednesday.
The 47 groups making up the alliance say people across Australia and the Pacific are already suffering from rising temperatures and altered weather patterns such as stronger cyclones - and the health and other threats are going to get worse.
A king tide erodes a graveyard in the Torres Strait. Credit: Donna GreenNot only will some areas become unbearably hot for humans and other species for parts of the year but the warmer conditions will also aid the spread of diseases, the report finds.
For instance, Nipah, a bat-borne virus that has been fatal to pigs and humans in south-east Asia, is among the diseases expected to become established in northern Australia.
Two fruit bat species in Australia are closely related to two bat species that now carry the disease. The disease's introduction to Australia "would present substantial risks to humans, pigs and horses", the report said.
Nipah virus spread
Areas in red show the most optimistic 2050 scenario for the
potential additional range of the Henipavirus carried by fruit bats.
Source: Global Health Alliance AustraliaPhysical and cultural threats
While all populations are likely to become less resilient over time to adverse impacts of climate change, some groups such as women, children and the elderly are more vulnerable. For many Indigenous populations, the "threat is even more prevalent", the report said.
The risks include exacerbating the relatively poor health of existing communities. Climate change, though, also puts at risk food stocks, hurts populations of species of totemic significance and can undermine coastal or riverine locations where they live.
Warning: Bruce Martin."In Australia, there's been very little recognition just how vulnerable Indigenous Australians are currently [to climate change] and have been over the last decade or so," said Professor Green, an environmental scientist at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes at UNSW.
One example was the huge forest die back that killed up to 1000 kilometres of mangroves along the Gulf of Carpentaria in 2016, wiping important nurseries for totemic and food fish for local population.
Salt-water inundation is also affecting taro roots, sometimes wiping out the important food source, Professor Green said.
That salt water can also "affect the whole ecosystem", from small skinks, lizards and frogs all the way up to apex predators, Mr Martin said. "It's already started happening."
'Listening to the earth'
For some of the Wik, the first contact with Europeans did not happen until as recently as 1975, so "people know what it was like" before the changes, Mr Martin said.
As an indicator of close connections to country, the local word for the timing of a child's birth is "Aarngay", meaning "first listened to the earth", he said.
People being evacuated from Groote Eylandt and the McArthur River Mine airfield near Borroloola in the Northern Territory ahead of Cyclone Trevor last March. Credit: ADFThe people are keenly aware when "sickness" comes to the land, he said. "You're losing part of your family."
Professor Green said many groups have told her "they have a feeling of sadness" because they're unable to carry out their obligations to care for their land.
While Indigenous people can be remarkably resilient to temperature changes - central Australians have adapted to extremes ranging from about zero to "the early 50s" - limits could be crossed if the mercury keeps rising.
"My concern is we're reaching a turning point," Mr Martin said.
Darwin, for instance, could experience 35-degree or warmer days for the equivalent of nine months a year amid future warming, with humidity levels making it "intolerable" for many, Professor Green said.
Mr Martin said that, while Australians like to think they stand for a "fair go", there was little fairness in the disproportionate effects a warming world would have on their communities.
"Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders will be impacted unfairly because they have contributed very little to global warming," he said.
"Things are changing outside our experience and we'll be left to deal with it."
Mangrove forests were wiped out along a 1000-kilometre stretch of the northern Australian coast in 2016. Credit: Norman Duke
Links
- Health and Climate Change in Australia and the Asia Pacific Region: From Townsville to Tuvalu
- Extreme Weather Caused By Climate Change Has Damaged 45% Of Australia’s Coastal Habitat
- 'I’m Seeing It Disappear Before My Eyes': Crisis Point In Australia's Wet Tropics
- How Much Has Tasmania's Climate Changed In The 100 Years To Now?
- Barwon-Darling River Faces 'Collapse' From Government Mistakes: Report
- 'No Limits': Victoria's Biggest Solar Farm Paves Way For More
- Protest Art: Rallying Cry Or Elegy For The Black-Throated Finch?
- Great Barrier Reef Authority Urges 'Fastest Possible Action' On Emissions
- Drought Now Officially Our Worst On Record
Categories: External websites
The Guardian View On Climate Breakdown: An Emergency For All, But Especially The Poor
The Guardian - Editorial
Record temperatures in Europe and the US have reinforced the danger of global heating for many inhabitants. But others are and will be far worse hit
A flood-affected family in Kurigram, Bangladesh on 26 July 2019. ‘Poorer countries, which broadly speaking are the least to blame for the climate crisis, will suffer most.’ Photograph: Suman Paul/AFP/Getty Images We tend to learn better from experience than from what we have simply been told. So for many in Europe, sleepless nights and suffocating buses or workplaces have helped to make real the threat posed by global heating.
Now statistics are reinforcing the message. Last week the UK had the hottest day on record: 38.7C in Cambridge. New records were set in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands in July, and June was the hottest month in US history. The Met Office says that the UK’s 10 hottest years on record have all been since 2002.
Heatwaves naturally occur in summer, but they did not used to be so hot, or so frequent. Experts say that the UK’s sweltering weather last summer was made 30 times more likely by global heating. That link has sunk in: in a new survey, 77% believed the recent heatwave was partially or wholly caused by the climate crisis. As temperatures reach unprecedented levels, so does public concern about the environment.
Yet while global heating is just that, its impact varies even within countries. Most people surveyed in July considered the weather too hot. But, while 73% of people in the east of England judged it too hot, in chillier Scotland only 47% of people agreed – and a slightly larger proportion thought it just right or not warm enough. Some may look forward to warmer staycations and the chance to grow grapes in their back garden.
Even those alarmed by July’s heat may not envision the full scale of the climate crisis. The connection between global heating and heatwaves seems self-evident. It’s intuitively harder to link it to other extreme weather events, and to take in experts’ warnings that Britain seems to be getting wetter as well as warmer. It’s more difficult still to fully comprehend how harsh its impact will be elsewhere.
For many people, even a small rise in temperatures will be catastrophic. A new report from Monash University in Melbourne warns that the climate crisis is already causing deaths; one of its authors said almost 400 people died from heat stress and heatstroke during fires in Victoria 10 years ago. It predicts climate-related stunting, malnutrition and lower IQ in children within the coming decades; a 2018 report from the World Health Organisation predicted that an additional 250,000 deaths a year will occur between 2030 and 2050 due to global heating.
Some places will experience more severe temperature shifts or will find it harder to adapt than others, often through lack of resources. Poorer countries, which broadly speaking are the least to blame for the climate crisis – emitting less carbon dioxide per capita – will suffer most. A hurricane or wildfire is deadlier when there is little capacity to prepare for it or to speed recovery. Families that spend most of their income on food struggle to eat when crops suffer.
A recent study found that global heating has already increased global inequality: in most poor countries, higher temperatures are very likely to have resulted in lower economic output than they would otherwise have enjoyed, while richer nations were not harmed to the same degree, and some were potentially able to actually benefit.
Bangladesh and sub-Saharan African nations are among those hit. The research ties in with previous projections that by 2100 the average income in the poorest countries will be 75% lower than it would be without climate change, and that some wealthy countries might even see higher incomes.
Yet none of these problems will be fully contained within national borders. Drought and famine are already forcing families from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to attempt to migrate to the United States when they are unable to feed themselves. A World Food Programme study of Central American migrants found that almost half were food insecure.
A 4C rise this century, which is now considered a realistic prospect, would produce at least 300 million refugees and drown cities in the US and China. It is the duty of richer nations to do all they can to hold back the soaring temperatures which they did most to produce, and to take what action they can to mitigate their impact – abroad as well as at home. It is also in their self-interest.
Links
Record temperatures in Europe and the US have reinforced the danger of global heating for many inhabitants. But others are and will be far worse hit
A flood-affected family in Kurigram, Bangladesh on 26 July 2019. ‘Poorer countries, which broadly speaking are the least to blame for the climate crisis, will suffer most.’ Photograph: Suman Paul/AFP/Getty Images We tend to learn better from experience than from what we have simply been told. So for many in Europe, sleepless nights and suffocating buses or workplaces have helped to make real the threat posed by global heating.
Now statistics are reinforcing the message. Last week the UK had the hottest day on record: 38.7C in Cambridge. New records were set in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands in July, and June was the hottest month in US history. The Met Office says that the UK’s 10 hottest years on record have all been since 2002.
Heatwaves naturally occur in summer, but they did not used to be so hot, or so frequent. Experts say that the UK’s sweltering weather last summer was made 30 times more likely by global heating. That link has sunk in: in a new survey, 77% believed the recent heatwave was partially or wholly caused by the climate crisis. As temperatures reach unprecedented levels, so does public concern about the environment.
Yet while global heating is just that, its impact varies even within countries. Most people surveyed in July considered the weather too hot. But, while 73% of people in the east of England judged it too hot, in chillier Scotland only 47% of people agreed – and a slightly larger proportion thought it just right or not warm enough. Some may look forward to warmer staycations and the chance to grow grapes in their back garden.
Even those alarmed by July’s heat may not envision the full scale of the climate crisis. The connection between global heating and heatwaves seems self-evident. It’s intuitively harder to link it to other extreme weather events, and to take in experts’ warnings that Britain seems to be getting wetter as well as warmer. It’s more difficult still to fully comprehend how harsh its impact will be elsewhere.
For many people, even a small rise in temperatures will be catastrophic. A new report from Monash University in Melbourne warns that the climate crisis is already causing deaths; one of its authors said almost 400 people died from heat stress and heatstroke during fires in Victoria 10 years ago. It predicts climate-related stunting, malnutrition and lower IQ in children within the coming decades; a 2018 report from the World Health Organisation predicted that an additional 250,000 deaths a year will occur between 2030 and 2050 due to global heating.
Some places will experience more severe temperature shifts or will find it harder to adapt than others, often through lack of resources. Poorer countries, which broadly speaking are the least to blame for the climate crisis – emitting less carbon dioxide per capita – will suffer most. A hurricane or wildfire is deadlier when there is little capacity to prepare for it or to speed recovery. Families that spend most of their income on food struggle to eat when crops suffer.
A recent study found that global heating has already increased global inequality: in most poor countries, higher temperatures are very likely to have resulted in lower economic output than they would otherwise have enjoyed, while richer nations were not harmed to the same degree, and some were potentially able to actually benefit.
Bangladesh and sub-Saharan African nations are among those hit. The research ties in with previous projections that by 2100 the average income in the poorest countries will be 75% lower than it would be without climate change, and that some wealthy countries might even see higher incomes.
Yet none of these problems will be fully contained within national borders. Drought and famine are already forcing families from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to attempt to migrate to the United States when they are unable to feed themselves. A World Food Programme study of Central American migrants found that almost half were food insecure.
A 4C rise this century, which is now considered a realistic prospect, would produce at least 300 million refugees and drown cities in the US and China. It is the duty of richer nations to do all they can to hold back the soaring temperatures which they did most to produce, and to take what action they can to mitigate their impact – abroad as well as at home. It is also in their self-interest.
Links
- Adani Decision Must Not Be Last Word In Climate Fight
- Coalition Is To Blame For Uncertainty Over Climate Costs
- Both Parties Still In Climate Policy Black Hole
- The Guardian View On Greta Thunberg: Seizing The Future
- Electric Vehicles Are The Road To The Future
- ALP Climate Policy Requires Serious Scrutiny
- Young Climate Strikers Can Win Their Fight. We Must All Help
- Climate Change: Young People Striking From School See It For The Life-Threatening Issue It Is
- Morrison Must Break With Climate Denialists
- The Truth About Big Oil And Climate Change
- The Guardian View On Teenage Activists: Protesters Not Puppets
Categories: External websites
Murray-Darling Basin Inspector-General To Oversee Water Efficiency, Compliance And Allegations Of Theft
ABC Rural - Kath Sullivan
Key points
"This is a new, tough cop on the beat across the Murray-Darling with the powers needed to ensure integrity in the delivery of the basin plan," Mr Littleproud said.The new role is expected to be established by 2020 and have powers under the Water Act 2007. (ABC Rural: Brett Worthington, file photo)
"We want to maintain confidence in the basin plan and this role will be pivotal to achieve that, and deliver the plan by 2024," he said.
The new role is expected to be established by 2020 and have powers under the Water Act 2007.
Mr Littleproud said the inspector-general would have the ability to refer issues to the Commonwealth Integrity Commission and would be supported with offices and staff in the northern and southern basins."The public needs to know the basin plan is delivering the water it was intended to, and farmers need to know the plan is working as it should," he said.
The appointment of the inspector-general for the Murray-Darling Basin would be a matter for the Federal Cabinet, but Mr Littleproud hoped former
AFP commissioner Mick Keelty would fill the
Mr Littleproud hoped former AFP commissioner Mick Keelty would fill the position in the interim. (AAP: Daniel Munoz, file photo)
position in the interim.
Mr Keelty began a three-year term as Northern Basin Commissioner, with similar responsibilities to the inspector-general role, last September.
"It is in respect of what he has achieved. It has meant we have been able try to roll that position out across the basin and ensure it has more teeth," Mr Littleproud said.The proposal will be put to a meeting of basin state water ministers in Canberra on Sunday.
It is expected to be the first meeting of the ministers following mass fish kills in the lower Darling, and the completion of a Productivity Commission report and South Australian Royal Commission into the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.
Links
Key points
- A new, basin-wide inspector-general is to be appointed to enforce the Water Act 2007
- The role must investigate suspected water theft and monitor water recovery and efficiency projects
- The inspector-general is to hold the MDBA, states and the Commonwealth to account on delivering the basin plan
"This is a new, tough cop on the beat across the Murray-Darling with the powers needed to ensure integrity in the delivery of the basin plan," Mr Littleproud said.The new role is expected to be established by 2020 and have powers under the Water Act 2007. (ABC Rural: Brett Worthington, file photo)
"We want to maintain confidence in the basin plan and this role will be pivotal to achieve that, and deliver the plan by 2024," he said.
The new role is expected to be established by 2020 and have powers under the Water Act 2007.
Mr Littleproud said the inspector-general would have the ability to refer issues to the Commonwealth Integrity Commission and would be supported with offices and staff in the northern and southern basins."The public needs to know the basin plan is delivering the water it was intended to, and farmers need to know the plan is working as it should," he said.
The appointment of the inspector-general for the Murray-Darling Basin would be a matter for the Federal Cabinet, but Mr Littleproud hoped former
AFP commissioner Mick Keelty would fill the
Mr Littleproud hoped former AFP commissioner Mick Keelty would fill the position in the interim. (AAP: Daniel Munoz, file photo)
position in the interim.
Mr Keelty began a three-year term as Northern Basin Commissioner, with similar responsibilities to the inspector-general role, last September.
"It is in respect of what he has achieved. It has meant we have been able try to roll that position out across the basin and ensure it has more teeth," Mr Littleproud said.The proposal will be put to a meeting of basin state water ministers in Canberra on Sunday.
It is expected to be the first meeting of the ministers following mass fish kills in the lower Darling, and the completion of a Productivity Commission report and South Australian Royal Commission into the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.
Links
- What is the Murray-Darling Basin Plan and why are we still talking about it?
- Confused by the Murray Darling controversy? Here's your simple guide
- How taxpayers are funding a huge corporate expansion in the Murray-Darling
- Billions of litres of water 'missing' from Murray-Darling Basin, study claims
- The cotton grower, the water minister and the broken meter
- 'People have to be named': Scientists say broken Murray-Darling system can be fixed
- Murray-Darling Basin Royal Commission slams authority for 'maladministration'
- Murray-Darling report lays bare that 'the system is sick', say the people it affects
- What will the Murray-Darling Basin Royal Commission reveal?
- Productivity Commission calls out governance failings in Murray-Darling Basin Plan roll-out
- Murray-Darling royal commission won't cross-examine federal bureaucrats
- Cotton farm execs face court over $20m federal funding 'fraud'
- How the iconic sites of the Murray-Darling Basin are doing under the plan
- Watch Pumped: Who is benefitting from the Murray-Darling?
- Federal Government and Labor strike deal on future of Murray-Darling Basin Plan
- Advisory group pens unprecedented letter to try save Murray-Darling Basin Plan
- How to kill a river system three times as salty as the sea
- Major Murray-Darling Basin water-saving plan questioned
Categories: External websites
Students Want International Court Of Justice To Rule On Climate Change
ABC Pacific Beat - Evan Wasuka
Image: ABC TVA group of Pacific law students are campaigning to take the issue of climate change and human rights to the International Court of Justice to determine if states have a duty of care to protect its citizens.
The Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change are lobbying Pacific leaders and the public to raise the matter at the UN General Assembly, so it can be heard by the International Court of Justice.
The group's president, Solomon Yeo, said they want the court to issue an "advisory opinion".
Dr Matthew Scott of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Sweden said the timing for the campaign was good, given the international focus on climate change.
"It offers a unique opportunity to obtain definitive guidance from an internationally recognised authority on the international legal obligations of states," Dr Scott said.
Law student Belinda Rikimani said Pacific governments must act with urgency, and support the campaign.
An online petition has gathered several thousand signatures and the group is lobbying Pacific Island countries.
They'll be participating at a regional meeting this week and Mr Yeo plans to be at the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders meeting in Tuvalu in August.
Dr Scott said the while the International Court of Justice can deliver an authoritative legal judgement it can't compel states to act.
"So its power doesn't lie in its enforce ability but in its legal weight as the opinion of the highest court in the international community," said Dr Scott.
PACIFIC BEAT AUDIO: Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change 4m 24secs Links
Image: ABC TVA group of Pacific law students are campaigning to take the issue of climate change and human rights to the International Court of Justice to determine if states have a duty of care to protect its citizens.
The Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change are lobbying Pacific leaders and the public to raise the matter at the UN General Assembly, so it can be heard by the International Court of Justice.
The group's president, Solomon Yeo, said they want the court to issue an "advisory opinion".
Dr Matthew Scott of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Sweden said the timing for the campaign was good, given the international focus on climate change.
"It offers a unique opportunity to obtain definitive guidance from an internationally recognised authority on the international legal obligations of states," Dr Scott said.
Law student Belinda Rikimani said Pacific governments must act with urgency, and support the campaign.
An online petition has gathered several thousand signatures and the group is lobbying Pacific Island countries.
They'll be participating at a regional meeting this week and Mr Yeo plans to be at the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders meeting in Tuvalu in August.
Dr Scott said the while the International Court of Justice can deliver an authoritative legal judgement it can't compel states to act.
"So its power doesn't lie in its enforce ability but in its legal weight as the opinion of the highest court in the international community," said Dr Scott.
PACIFIC BEAT AUDIO: Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change 4m 24secs Links
- Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change
- Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law
- Are Countries of the Asia Pacific Considering Human Rights When Combating Climate Change?
- Background Brief: Key International Standards and Guidelines Relating to Displacement in the Context of Disasters and Climate Change
- The Integration of Human Rights in the Nationally Determined Contributions in Asia-Pacific to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change
- Food, Sexual Violence and Climate Change
- Sparking Action on Human Rights and Climate Change in Southeast Asia
- Climate Change is Not Just an Environmental Issue
Categories: External websites
A Brief Introduction To Climate Change And National Security
Yale Climate Connections - Bruce Lieberman
Extreme weather, rising seas, and a melting Arctic could worsen global tensions.
A series of punishing droughts set the stage for the Syrian civil war in 2011. A drying East Africa fuels ongoing conflicts over natural resources in Somalia and Kenya. Rising seas threaten future refugee crises in Southeast Asia. Melting sea ice in the Arctic is opening new shipping lanes, creating new potential for tensions among competing powers at the top of the world.
These are among the many worries – some already realized and some forecast in the near future – that concern experts studying the convergence of climate change and national security.
The idea that a warming planet threatens stability around the globe is not a new one. The U.S. Naval War College began studying the topic as early as the late 1980s, and over the past three decades a steady stream of analyses from the U.S. Defense Department, private think tanks, and other organizations have pointed to threats that climate change poses to peace and stability. Climate change is rarely viewed as a direct cause of instability and conflict, but experts generally regard it as a “threat multiplier” – a phenomenon that can worsen or exacerbate other sources of instability and conflict, such as competition for natural resources and ethnic tensions.
Discussions generally fall into two areas: the impacts of warming on conflicts between nations and among ethnic groups within nations, and the impacts of warming on U.S. military infrastructure and operations.
Threats to global security
The Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, an annual report on security threats to U.S. interests, concludes that “global environmental and ecological degradation, as well as climate change, are likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond.”
“Climate hazards such as extreme weather, higher temperatures, droughts, floods, wildfires, storms, sea-level rise, soil degradation, and acidifying oceans are intensifying, threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security,” the authors of the January 2019 report wrote.
Extreme weather events, worsened by accelerated sea-level rise, will hit some areas particularly hard – including South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Western Hemisphere. Water and food insecurity made worse by heat waves, droughts, and floods are already increasing the risk of conflict in Egypt, Ethiopia, Iraq, and Jordan, according to the report.
The Worldwide Threat Assessment also highlighted the risk of tensions between Russia and China as sea routes open up in the Arctic and the rush for natural resources at the top of the world increases.
Threats to military infrastructure & operations
Responding to a Congressional order in late 2017, the Defense Department issued a report in January of 2019 that outlined impacts of climate change on Defense Department missions, operational plans, and installations. It offers an authoritative overview of past, present, and future concerns.
Among them: In the United States Africa Command, rainy season flooding and drought and desertification can complicate the execution of missions. At Naval Base Guam, flooding driven by sea-level rise can negatively affect submarine squadron operations, telecommunications, and other support activities for naval operations.
Meanwhile, a warming climate is significantly impeding military testing and training, with an increased number of suspended, delayed, or canceled outdoor events – particularly at installations in the United States’ Southeast and Southwest.
Increased maintenance and repair of installations has been required: The report cites wildfires in the Western U.S. impacting Vandenberg Air Force Base and the Point Mugu Sea Range, hurricanes causing damage and delays at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, permafrost thawing impacting operations at Fort Greely in Alaska, and rising seas contaminating freshwater supplies at atoll installations in the Pacific.
While these two key government reports summarize some of the latest thinking on climate change and national security, they are backed up by a deep well of information on the topic. Climate scientist and author Peter Gleick has compiled a list of important assessments (updated regularly) at his blog.
Links
Coverage of the 2019 release of the Worldwide Threat Assessment:
Extreme weather, rising seas, and a melting Arctic could worsen global tensions.
A series of punishing droughts set the stage for the Syrian civil war in 2011. A drying East Africa fuels ongoing conflicts over natural resources in Somalia and Kenya. Rising seas threaten future refugee crises in Southeast Asia. Melting sea ice in the Arctic is opening new shipping lanes, creating new potential for tensions among competing powers at the top of the world.
These are among the many worries – some already realized and some forecast in the near future – that concern experts studying the convergence of climate change and national security.
The idea that a warming planet threatens stability around the globe is not a new one. The U.S. Naval War College began studying the topic as early as the late 1980s, and over the past three decades a steady stream of analyses from the U.S. Defense Department, private think tanks, and other organizations have pointed to threats that climate change poses to peace and stability. Climate change is rarely viewed as a direct cause of instability and conflict, but experts generally regard it as a “threat multiplier” – a phenomenon that can worsen or exacerbate other sources of instability and conflict, such as competition for natural resources and ethnic tensions.
Discussions generally fall into two areas: the impacts of warming on conflicts between nations and among ethnic groups within nations, and the impacts of warming on U.S. military infrastructure and operations.
Threats to global security
The Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, an annual report on security threats to U.S. interests, concludes that “global environmental and ecological degradation, as well as climate change, are likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond.”
“Climate hazards such as extreme weather, higher temperatures, droughts, floods, wildfires, storms, sea-level rise, soil degradation, and acidifying oceans are intensifying, threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security,” the authors of the January 2019 report wrote.
Extreme weather events, worsened by accelerated sea-level rise, will hit some areas particularly hard – including South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Western Hemisphere. Water and food insecurity made worse by heat waves, droughts, and floods are already increasing the risk of conflict in Egypt, Ethiopia, Iraq, and Jordan, according to the report.
The Worldwide Threat Assessment also highlighted the risk of tensions between Russia and China as sea routes open up in the Arctic and the rush for natural resources at the top of the world increases.
Threats to military infrastructure & operations
Responding to a Congressional order in late 2017, the Defense Department issued a report in January of 2019 that outlined impacts of climate change on Defense Department missions, operational plans, and installations. It offers an authoritative overview of past, present, and future concerns.
Among them: In the United States Africa Command, rainy season flooding and drought and desertification can complicate the execution of missions. At Naval Base Guam, flooding driven by sea-level rise can negatively affect submarine squadron operations, telecommunications, and other support activities for naval operations.
Meanwhile, a warming climate is significantly impeding military testing and training, with an increased number of suspended, delayed, or canceled outdoor events – particularly at installations in the United States’ Southeast and Southwest.
Increased maintenance and repair of installations has been required: The report cites wildfires in the Western U.S. impacting Vandenberg Air Force Base and the Point Mugu Sea Range, hurricanes causing damage and delays at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, permafrost thawing impacting operations at Fort Greely in Alaska, and rising seas contaminating freshwater supplies at atoll installations in the Pacific.
While these two key government reports summarize some of the latest thinking on climate change and national security, they are backed up by a deep well of information on the topic. Climate scientist and author Peter Gleick has compiled a list of important assessments (updated regularly) at his blog.
Links
Coverage of the 2019 release of the Worldwide Threat Assessment:
- U.S. Intelligence Officials Warn Climate Change Is a Worldwide Threat: Their annual assessment says climate hazards such as extreme weather, droughts, floods, wildfires and sea level rise threaten infrastructure, health and security.
- Pentagon Confirms Climate Change Is A National Security Threat, Contradicting Trump: The military walks a fine line between the White House’s official climate denialism and the stark realities of a warming planet.
- Chapter 16 of the National Climate Assessment: Climate Effects on U.S. International Interests
- The Impact of Sea-Level Rise and Climate Change on Department of Defense Installations on Atolls in the Pacific Ocean, 2017
- Department of Defense Climate Change Adaptation Road Map, 2014
- Department of Defense Quadrennial Defense Review, 2014
- Why climate change is a ‘threat multiplier’: Extreme weather and water shortages increase the risk of political instability and terrorism. (June 20, 2019)
- Climate change poses security risks, according to decades of intelligence reports: Intelligence analysts have agreed since the late 80s that climate change poses serious security risks. (April 8, 2019).
- Retired Navy rear admiral calls extreme weather a national security threat. (November 12, 2018)
- New monthly video explores climate, drought, and national security: A number of current and likely future “geopolitical hotspots” are facing increased climate-related stresses, heightening concerns among military experts and policy makers. (November 10, 2015)
- Trump skepticism: Pompeo ‘can’t rank’ climate change on list of national security threats (May 5, 2019)
- Hearing on climate change and national security becomes an angry partisan clash (April 9, 2019)
- Germany pushes climate change as security risk (April 6, 2019)
- White House climate panel to include a climate denialist (February 20, 2019)
- U.N. warns climate change impacts security, U.S. ignores link (January 26, 2019)
- The Pentagon calls climate change a national security threat (January 18, 2019)
- 106 Lawmakers urge Trump: Restore climate change in national security strategy (January 16, 2018)
- The Center for Climate & Security
- Climate change and national security, Part I: What is the threat, when’s it coming, and how bad will it be? (The Lawfare Institute) (November 19, 2018)
- Climate change and national security, Part II: How big a threat is the climate? (The Lawfare Institute) (January 7, 2019)
- The national security impacts of climate change (Journal of National Security Law & Policy) (December 19, 2018)
- Why climate change is a national security issue (JSTOR Daily) (October 25, 2018)
Categories: External websites
The Terrible Truth Of Climate Change
The Monthly - Joëlle Gergis
The latest science is alarming, even for climate scientists
Joëlle Gergis
Dr Joëlle Gergis is an award-winning climate scientist and writer from the Australian National University.
She is an internationally recognised expert in Australian and Southern Hemisphere climate variability and change based in the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes.
Her research focuses on providing a long-term historical context for assessing recently observed climate variability and extremes.
In August 2018 she was appointed to the Climate Council, Australia's leading independent body providing expert advice to the Australian public on climate change and policy.
Her book, Sunburnt Country: The future and history of climate change in Australia, is now available through Melbourne University Publishing. In June, I delivered a keynote presentation on Australia’s vulnerability to climate change and our policy challenges at the annual meeting of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, the main conference for those working in the climate science community. I saw it as an opportunity to summarise the post-election political and scientific reality we now face.
As one of the dozen or so Australian lead authors on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) sixth assessment report, currently underway, I have a deep appreciation of the speed and severity of climate change unfolding across the planet. Last year I was also appointed as one of the scientific advisers to the Climate Council, Australia’s leading independent body providing expert advice to the public on climate science and policy. In short, I am in the confronting position of being one of the few Australians who sees the terrifying reality of the climate crisis.
Preparing for this talk I experienced something gut-wrenching. It was the realisation that there is now nowhere to hide from the terrible truth.
The last time this happened to me, I was visiting my father in hospital following emergency surgery for a massive brain haemorrhage. As he lay unconscious in intensive care, I examined his CT scan with one of the attending surgeons who gently explained that the dark patch covering nearly a quarter of the image of his brain was a pool of blood. Although they had done their best to drain the area and stem the bleeding, the catastrophic nature of the damage was undeniable. The brutality of the evidence was clear – the full weight of it sent my stomach into freefall.
The results coming out of the climate science community at the moment are, even for experts, similarly alarming.
One common metric used to investigate the effects of global warming is known as “equilibrium climate sensitivity”, defined as the full amount of global surface warming that will eventually occur in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations compared to pre-industrial times. It’s sometimes referred to as the holy grail of climate science because it helps quantify the specific risks posed to human society as the planet continues to warm.
We know that CO2 concentrations have risen from pre-industrial levels of 280 parts per million (ppm) to approximately 410 ppm today, the highest recorded in at least three million years. Without major mitigation efforts, we are likely to reach 560 ppm by around 2060.
When the IPCC’s fifth assessment report was published in 2013, it estimated that such a doubling of CO2 was likely to produce warming within the range of 1.5 to 4.5°C as the Earth reaches a new equilibrium. However, preliminary estimates calculated from the latest global climate models (being used in the current IPCC assessment, due out in 2021) are far higher than with the previous generation of models. Early reports are predicting that a doubling of CO2 may in fact produce between 2.8 and 5.8°C of warming. Incredibly, at least eight of the latest models produced by leading research centres in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and France are showing climate sensitivity of 5°C or warmer.
When these results were first released at a climate modelling workshop in March this year, a flurry of panicked emails from my IPCC colleagues flooded my inbox. What if the models are right? Has the Earth already crossed some kind of tipping point? Are we experiencing abrupt climate change right now?
The model runs aren’t all available yet, but when many of the most advanced models in the world are independently reproducing the same disturbing results, it’s hard not to worry.
When the UN’s Paris Agreement was adopted in December 2015, it defined a specific goal: to keep global warming to well below 2°C and as close as possible to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels (defined as the climate conditions experienced during the 1850–1900 period). While admirable in intent, the agreement did not impose legally binding limits on signatory nations and contained no enforcement mechanisms. Instead, each country committed to publicly disclosed Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to reduce emissions. In essence, it is up to each nation to act in the public interest.
Even achieving the most ambitious goal of 1.5°C will see the further destruction of between 70 and 90 per cent of reef-building corals compared to today, according to the IPCC’s “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C”, released last October. With 2°C of warming, a staggering 99 per cent of tropical coral reefs disappear. An entire component of the Earth’s biosphere – our planetary life support system – would be eliminated. The knock-on effects on the 25 per cent of all marine life that depends on coral reefs would be profound and immeasurable.
So how is the Paris Agreement actually panning out?
In 2017, we reached 1°C of warming above global pre-industrial conditions. According to the UN Environment Programme’s “Emissions Gap Report”, released in November 2018, current unconditional NDCs will see global average temperature rise by 2.9 to 3.4°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century.
To restrict warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, the world needs to triple its current emission reduction pledges. If that’s not bad enough, to restrict global warming to 1.5°C, global ambition needs to increase fivefold.
Meanwhile, the Australian federal government has a target of reducing emissions by 26 to 28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, which experts believe is more aligned with global warming of 3 to 4°C. Despite Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s claim that we will meet our Paris Agreement commitments “in a canter”, the UNEP report clearly identifies Australia as one of the G20 nations that will fall short of achieving its already inadequate NDCs by 2030.
Even with the 1°C of warming we’ve already experienced, 50 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef is dead. We are witnessing catastrophic ecosystem collapse of the largest living organism on the planet. As I share this horrifying information with audiences around the country, I often pause to allow people to try and really take that information in.
Increasingly after my speaking events, I catch myself unexpectedly weeping in my hotel room or on flights home. Every now and then, the reality of what the science is saying manages to thaw the emotionally frozen part of myself I need to maintain to do my job. In those moments, what surfaces is pure grief. It’s the only feeling that comes close to the pain I felt processing the severity of my dad’s brain injury. Being willing to acknowledge the arrival of the point of no return is an act of bravery.
But these days my grief is rapidly being superseded by rage. Volcanically explosive rage. Because in the very same IPCC report that outlines the details of the impending apocalypse, the climate science community clearly stated that limiting warming to 1.5°C is geophysically possible.
Past emissions alone are unlikely to raise global average temperatures to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The IPCC report states that any further warming beyond the 1°C already recorded would likely be less than 0.5°C over the next 20 to 30 years, if all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions were reduced to zero immediately. That is, if we act urgently, it is technically feasible to turn things around. The only thing missing is strong global policy.
Although the very foundation of human civilisation is at stake, the world is on track to seriously overshoot our UN targets. Worse still, global carbon emissions are still rising. In response, scientists are prioritising research on how the planet has responded during other warm periods in the Earth’s history.
The most comprehensive summary of conditions experienced during past warm periods in the Earth’s recent history was published in June 2018 in one of our leading journals, Nature Geoscience, by 59 leading experts from 17 countries. The report concluded that warming of between 1.5 and 2°C in the past was enough to see significant shifts in climate zones, and land and aquatic ecosystems “spatially reorganize”.
These changes triggered substantial long-term melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica, unleashing 6 to 13 metres of global sea-level rise lasting thousands of years.
Examining the Earth’s climatic past tells us that even between 1.5 and 2°C of warming sees the world reconfigure in ways that people don’t yet appreciate. All bets are off between 3 and 4°C, where we are currently headed. Parts of Australia will become uninhabitable, as other areas of our country become increasingly ravaged by extreme weather events.
This year the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society’s annual conference was held in Darwin, where the infamous Cyclone Tracy struck on Christmas Day in 1974, virtually demolishing the entire city. More than 70 per cent of the city’s buildings, including 80 per cent of its houses, were destroyed. Seventy-one people were killed and most of the 48,000 residents made homeless. Conditions were so dire that around 36,000 people were evacuated, many by military aircraft. It was a disaster of monumental proportions.
As I collated this information for my presentation, it became clear to me that Cyclone Tracy is a warning. Without major action, we will see tropical cyclones drifting into areas on the southern edge of current cyclone zones, into places such as south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales, where infrastructure is not ready to cope with cyclonic conditions.
These areas currently house more than 3.6 million people; we simply aren’t prepared for what is upon us.
There is a very rational reason why Australian schoolkids are now taking to the streets – the immensity of what is at stake is truly staggering. Staying silent about this planetary emergency no longer feels like an option for me either. Given how disconnected policy is from scientific reality in this country, an urgent and pragmatic national conversation is now essential. Other-wise, living on a destabilised planet is the terrible truth that we will all face.
As a climate scientist at this fraught point in our history, the most helpful thing I can offer is the same professionalism that the doctor displayed late that night in Dad’s intensive-care ward. A clear-eyed and compassionate look at the facts.
We still have time to try and avert the scale of the disaster, but we must respond as we would in an emergency. The question is, can we muster the best of our humanity in time?
Links
The latest science is alarming, even for climate scientists
Joëlle Gergis
Dr Joëlle Gergis is an award-winning climate scientist and writer from the Australian National University.
She is an internationally recognised expert in Australian and Southern Hemisphere climate variability and change based in the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes.
Her research focuses on providing a long-term historical context for assessing recently observed climate variability and extremes.
In August 2018 she was appointed to the Climate Council, Australia's leading independent body providing expert advice to the Australian public on climate change and policy.
Her book, Sunburnt Country: The future and history of climate change in Australia, is now available through Melbourne University Publishing. In June, I delivered a keynote presentation on Australia’s vulnerability to climate change and our policy challenges at the annual meeting of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, the main conference for those working in the climate science community. I saw it as an opportunity to summarise the post-election political and scientific reality we now face.
As one of the dozen or so Australian lead authors on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) sixth assessment report, currently underway, I have a deep appreciation of the speed and severity of climate change unfolding across the planet. Last year I was also appointed as one of the scientific advisers to the Climate Council, Australia’s leading independent body providing expert advice to the public on climate science and policy. In short, I am in the confronting position of being one of the few Australians who sees the terrifying reality of the climate crisis.
Preparing for this talk I experienced something gut-wrenching. It was the realisation that there is now nowhere to hide from the terrible truth.
The last time this happened to me, I was visiting my father in hospital following emergency surgery for a massive brain haemorrhage. As he lay unconscious in intensive care, I examined his CT scan with one of the attending surgeons who gently explained that the dark patch covering nearly a quarter of the image of his brain was a pool of blood. Although they had done their best to drain the area and stem the bleeding, the catastrophic nature of the damage was undeniable. The brutality of the evidence was clear – the full weight of it sent my stomach into freefall.
The results coming out of the climate science community at the moment are, even for experts, similarly alarming.
One common metric used to investigate the effects of global warming is known as “equilibrium climate sensitivity”, defined as the full amount of global surface warming that will eventually occur in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations compared to pre-industrial times. It’s sometimes referred to as the holy grail of climate science because it helps quantify the specific risks posed to human society as the planet continues to warm.
We know that CO2 concentrations have risen from pre-industrial levels of 280 parts per million (ppm) to approximately 410 ppm today, the highest recorded in at least three million years. Without major mitigation efforts, we are likely to reach 560 ppm by around 2060.
When the IPCC’s fifth assessment report was published in 2013, it estimated that such a doubling of CO2 was likely to produce warming within the range of 1.5 to 4.5°C as the Earth reaches a new equilibrium. However, preliminary estimates calculated from the latest global climate models (being used in the current IPCC assessment, due out in 2021) are far higher than with the previous generation of models. Early reports are predicting that a doubling of CO2 may in fact produce between 2.8 and 5.8°C of warming. Incredibly, at least eight of the latest models produced by leading research centres in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and France are showing climate sensitivity of 5°C or warmer.
When these results were first released at a climate modelling workshop in March this year, a flurry of panicked emails from my IPCC colleagues flooded my inbox. What if the models are right? Has the Earth already crossed some kind of tipping point? Are we experiencing abrupt climate change right now?
The model runs aren’t all available yet, but when many of the most advanced models in the world are independently reproducing the same disturbing results, it’s hard not to worry.
When the UN’s Paris Agreement was adopted in December 2015, it defined a specific goal: to keep global warming to well below 2°C and as close as possible to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels (defined as the climate conditions experienced during the 1850–1900 period). While admirable in intent, the agreement did not impose legally binding limits on signatory nations and contained no enforcement mechanisms. Instead, each country committed to publicly disclosed Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to reduce emissions. In essence, it is up to each nation to act in the public interest.
Even achieving the most ambitious goal of 1.5°C will see the further destruction of between 70 and 90 per cent of reef-building corals compared to today, according to the IPCC’s “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C”, released last October. With 2°C of warming, a staggering 99 per cent of tropical coral reefs disappear. An entire component of the Earth’s biosphere – our planetary life support system – would be eliminated. The knock-on effects on the 25 per cent of all marine life that depends on coral reefs would be profound and immeasurable.
So how is the Paris Agreement actually panning out?
In 2017, we reached 1°C of warming above global pre-industrial conditions. According to the UN Environment Programme’s “Emissions Gap Report”, released in November 2018, current unconditional NDCs will see global average temperature rise by 2.9 to 3.4°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century.
To restrict warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, the world needs to triple its current emission reduction pledges. If that’s not bad enough, to restrict global warming to 1.5°C, global ambition needs to increase fivefold.
Meanwhile, the Australian federal government has a target of reducing emissions by 26 to 28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, which experts believe is more aligned with global warming of 3 to 4°C. Despite Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s claim that we will meet our Paris Agreement commitments “in a canter”, the UNEP report clearly identifies Australia as one of the G20 nations that will fall short of achieving its already inadequate NDCs by 2030.
Even with the 1°C of warming we’ve already experienced, 50 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef is dead. We are witnessing catastrophic ecosystem collapse of the largest living organism on the planet. As I share this horrifying information with audiences around the country, I often pause to allow people to try and really take that information in.
Increasingly after my speaking events, I catch myself unexpectedly weeping in my hotel room or on flights home. Every now and then, the reality of what the science is saying manages to thaw the emotionally frozen part of myself I need to maintain to do my job. In those moments, what surfaces is pure grief. It’s the only feeling that comes close to the pain I felt processing the severity of my dad’s brain injury. Being willing to acknowledge the arrival of the point of no return is an act of bravery.
But these days my grief is rapidly being superseded by rage. Volcanically explosive rage. Because in the very same IPCC report that outlines the details of the impending apocalypse, the climate science community clearly stated that limiting warming to 1.5°C is geophysically possible.
Past emissions alone are unlikely to raise global average temperatures to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The IPCC report states that any further warming beyond the 1°C already recorded would likely be less than 0.5°C over the next 20 to 30 years, if all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions were reduced to zero immediately. That is, if we act urgently, it is technically feasible to turn things around. The only thing missing is strong global policy.
Although the very foundation of human civilisation is at stake, the world is on track to seriously overshoot our UN targets. Worse still, global carbon emissions are still rising. In response, scientists are prioritising research on how the planet has responded during other warm periods in the Earth’s history.
The most comprehensive summary of conditions experienced during past warm periods in the Earth’s recent history was published in June 2018 in one of our leading journals, Nature Geoscience, by 59 leading experts from 17 countries. The report concluded that warming of between 1.5 and 2°C in the past was enough to see significant shifts in climate zones, and land and aquatic ecosystems “spatially reorganize”.
These changes triggered substantial long-term melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica, unleashing 6 to 13 metres of global sea-level rise lasting thousands of years.
Examining the Earth’s climatic past tells us that even between 1.5 and 2°C of warming sees the world reconfigure in ways that people don’t yet appreciate. All bets are off between 3 and 4°C, where we are currently headed. Parts of Australia will become uninhabitable, as other areas of our country become increasingly ravaged by extreme weather events.
This year the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society’s annual conference was held in Darwin, where the infamous Cyclone Tracy struck on Christmas Day in 1974, virtually demolishing the entire city. More than 70 per cent of the city’s buildings, including 80 per cent of its houses, were destroyed. Seventy-one people were killed and most of the 48,000 residents made homeless. Conditions were so dire that around 36,000 people were evacuated, many by military aircraft. It was a disaster of monumental proportions.
As I collated this information for my presentation, it became clear to me that Cyclone Tracy is a warning. Without major action, we will see tropical cyclones drifting into areas on the southern edge of current cyclone zones, into places such as south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales, where infrastructure is not ready to cope with cyclonic conditions.
These areas currently house more than 3.6 million people; we simply aren’t prepared for what is upon us.
There is a very rational reason why Australian schoolkids are now taking to the streets – the immensity of what is at stake is truly staggering. Staying silent about this planetary emergency no longer feels like an option for me either. Given how disconnected policy is from scientific reality in this country, an urgent and pragmatic national conversation is now essential. Other-wise, living on a destabilised planet is the terrible truth that we will all face.
As a climate scientist at this fraught point in our history, the most helpful thing I can offer is the same professionalism that the doctor displayed late that night in Dad’s intensive-care ward. A clear-eyed and compassionate look at the facts.
We still have time to try and avert the scale of the disaster, but we must respond as we would in an emergency. The question is, can we muster the best of our humanity in time?
Links
- Global Paris pledges need to triple to stay within 2C of global warming
- The First Fleet and Australia's unforgiving weather
- In the hot seat: Joelle's journey from the dole to a global role
- The Industrial Revolution kick-started global warming much earlier than we realised
- Northern NSW is no stranger to floods, but this one was different
- Can art put us in touch with our feelings about climate change?
- Post-1950s warming in region unmatched in 1,000 years
Categories: External websites
Cities Need Trees, But Which Ones Will Survive Climate Change?
ABC tripleJ - Nkayla Afshariyan
So we've got less than 12 years to save the planet.
Actually, we've got less than that, depending on which scientific research you believe more and how much of an existential crisis you want to have today.
Either way, there's no denying the planet is warming at alarming rates, it's never been hotter, and we need to start thinking of ways to help.
Thankfully, Australian researchers are doing just that.
The Which Plant Where project is currently looking at what Australian plant species will be able to survive the oncoming changes in climate.
The project is a collaborative effort between Macquarie University, Western Sydney University, Hort Innovation and the NSW Department of Environment and Heritage.
The team is looking at what plants, in particular what type of common trees, can be planted in different urban spaces across Australia.
Leigh Staas, project manager for Which Plant Where, told Hack the project will span the next five years and look at three different time slices.
"We're looking at 2030, 2050 and 2070. At the end of the project, we're developing an online plant selector tool that will help growers and practitioners choose particular species that will survive in urban landscapes," she said.
Stress testing trees
The team recently published a study which analysed 176 of the most common tree species planted across our cities. The research found more than 70 per cent of those trees will experience harsher climate conditions by 2070.
Although the project is looking at what trees will survive in urban areas, Leigh said the research can be applied to what trees you can plant in your backyard.
The team are testing what plants will survive in different environments using a range of techniques, so they can be confident in which trees will survive in the future.
"We're using bioclimatic models, so climate modeling, to see how species will survive," Leigh said.
Rows of native trees being tested for the Which Plant Where project. Supplied: Which Plant Where"We're also using glasshouse modules, where we test species in a glasshouse by putting them under drought and high temperatures to see if they survive.
"And we're putting some of the plants in the field."
Leigh said the multiple approaches will allow future planning for which trees will be fine, which will need extra care, and which will absolutely not survive.
Location, location location
Location plays an important role in what trees can be planted too.
"Different plants have different bioclimatic ranges - what that means is some plants like cooler temperatures, some like hotter temperatures, and they live within a bioclimatic envelope," Leigh said.
Essentially, trees are picky, and knowing where they'll thrive the best is important for future environmental planning.
Leigh says the bioclimatic envelope trees live in is shifting southwards, meaning "our areas are getting hotter by one kilometre each year".
Trees are "long-term assets", so while they can live up to 120 years, rising temperatures may mean "those trees might not survive in increasing temperatures in the next 20 to 50 years".
The researchers say some trees, like the golden wattle or the prickly paperbark, might not make it in northern, warmer cities.
Species like the native frangipani or the tuckeroo will probably be suited in southern cities
It goes without saying that trees are vital. And in urban spaces, they provide shade and cool suburbs during heatwaves.
"It's a much better shade provider than a sail or man-made structure," Leigh said.
Now is a really good time to plant trees, giving them enough time to become established before summer.
Check in with your local council to see if there are any community activities planned or free trees you can pick up to plant at home.
And if you're not sure what you can plant or where to plant it, local nurseries are usually a good place to start.
Links
So we've got less than 12 years to save the planet.
Actually, we've got less than that, depending on which scientific research you believe more and how much of an existential crisis you want to have today.
Either way, there's no denying the planet is warming at alarming rates, it's never been hotter, and we need to start thinking of ways to help.
Thankfully, Australian researchers are doing just that.
The Which Plant Where project is currently looking at what Australian plant species will be able to survive the oncoming changes in climate.
The project is a collaborative effort between Macquarie University, Western Sydney University, Hort Innovation and the NSW Department of Environment and Heritage.
The team is looking at what plants, in particular what type of common trees, can be planted in different urban spaces across Australia.
Leigh Staas, project manager for Which Plant Where, told Hack the project will span the next five years and look at three different time slices.
"We're looking at 2030, 2050 and 2070. At the end of the project, we're developing an online plant selector tool that will help growers and practitioners choose particular species that will survive in urban landscapes," she said.
Stress testing trees
The team recently published a study which analysed 176 of the most common tree species planted across our cities. The research found more than 70 per cent of those trees will experience harsher climate conditions by 2070.
Although the project is looking at what trees will survive in urban areas, Leigh said the research can be applied to what trees you can plant in your backyard.
The team are testing what plants will survive in different environments using a range of techniques, so they can be confident in which trees will survive in the future.
"We're using bioclimatic models, so climate modeling, to see how species will survive," Leigh said.
Rows of native trees being tested for the Which Plant Where project. Supplied: Which Plant Where"We're also using glasshouse modules, where we test species in a glasshouse by putting them under drought and high temperatures to see if they survive.
"And we're putting some of the plants in the field."
Leigh said the multiple approaches will allow future planning for which trees will be fine, which will need extra care, and which will absolutely not survive.
Location, location location
Location plays an important role in what trees can be planted too.
"Different plants have different bioclimatic ranges - what that means is some plants like cooler temperatures, some like hotter temperatures, and they live within a bioclimatic envelope," Leigh said.
Essentially, trees are picky, and knowing where they'll thrive the best is important for future environmental planning.
Leigh says the bioclimatic envelope trees live in is shifting southwards, meaning "our areas are getting hotter by one kilometre each year".
Trees are "long-term assets", so while they can live up to 120 years, rising temperatures may mean "those trees might not survive in increasing temperatures in the next 20 to 50 years".
The researchers say some trees, like the golden wattle or the prickly paperbark, might not make it in northern, warmer cities.
Species like the native frangipani or the tuckeroo will probably be suited in southern cities
It goes without saying that trees are vital. And in urban spaces, they provide shade and cool suburbs during heatwaves.
"It's a much better shade provider than a sail or man-made structure," Leigh said.
Now is a really good time to plant trees, giving them enough time to become established before summer.
Check in with your local council to see if there are any community activities planned or free trees you can pick up to plant at home.
And if you're not sure what you can plant or where to plant it, local nurseries are usually a good place to start.
Links
- Which Plant Where
- Substantial declines in urban tree habitat predicted under climate change
- Our cities need more trees, but some commonly planted ones won’t survive climate change
- Substantial declines in urban tree suitability as climates warm
- The Right Plant In The Right Place - Now and Tomorrow (pdf)
Categories: External websites
Australian Insurance Companies Abandon Thermal Coal Industry
RenewEconomy - Michael Mazengarb
The coal industry will no longer be able to obtain investment or insurance from any Australian-based insurance providers, following confirmation by Brisbane-based Suncorp Group that from 2025 it will no longer do business with the coal industry,.
and that it will phase-out its investments and insurance exposure to the coal industry by 2025.
Suncorp’s announcement that it will phase out its investments and insurance exposure to thermal coal by 2025 means that all of the Australian based insurance companies have now effectively committed to removing coal from their investment portfolios.
It also represents a complete exclusion on the offer of insurance or underwriting products to the coal sector, an achievement welcomed by fossil fuel divestment campaigners Market Forces. “Suncorp’s dumping of coal means there is now not one single major Australian insurer willing to provide insurance for new, climate-wrecking thermal coal projects,” Market Forces campaigner Pablo Brait said.The exclusion comes at a crucial moment for the future of Australia’s coal sector, with the mammoth Adani Carmichael coal mine on the verge of commencing construction and with at least six additional projects in the pipeline, threatening an explosion in coal extraction, and greenhouse gas emissions, in the Galilee Basin.
Suncorp’s commitment follows the filling of two shareholder resolutions by Market Forces, which is seeking to compel the Queensland insurance firm to establish a set of targets for reducing the company’s exposure to fossil fuel projects, including coal, gas and oil extraction projects and fossil-fuelled power stations.
The motions would require the company to publish a set of short, medium and long term targets to reduce the company’s investments and underwriting exposure to oil, gas and coal assets and the company would need to ensure these targets are in line with international commitments under the Paris Agreement.
A spokesperson for Suncorp confirmed the company would no longer do business with the coal sector, saying that the coal industry does not represent a significant portion of Suncorp’s business. Not only will Suncorp not enter into any new deals with coal projects but that it will also divest itself of its existing investments and deals with coal projects by 2025.
“Suncorp’s exposure to the fossil fuels industry is not material, being less than 0.5% in the insurance business and investment portfolio, and a negligible proportion of our commercial lending portfolio. Suncorp doesn’t finance fossil fuel projects as it doesn’t have an institutional bank,” a Suncorp spokesperson said. “Through our Responsible Investment Policy, which was implemented in 2017, we apply a shadow carbon price to reduce financial risk, which we review annually. The practical outcome of this is that we have materially reduced our investment in fossil fuels including thermal coal.”“As a result of these policies, we do not directly invest in, finance or underwrite new thermal coal mining extraction projects, or new thermal coal electricity generation, and we will phase out of these exposures by 2025. We will seek to increase exposure to businesses that have a positive environmental impact, including renewable energy generation and technology.”
Suncorp’s coal exclusion follows a similar commitment by QBE insurance, with the company announcing in May that it would also no longer do business with coal projects and would seek to divest its existing business with coal projects by 2030.
Multi-national insurance company Allianz, which has a strong presence in the Australian market, has also committed to limit its involvement in the fossil fuel sector, having previously announced it would not invest in companies that derive more than 30% of their revenues through the production or use of coal.
The Insurance Australia Group (IAG) is not currently providing any insurance products to the coal sector.
Between the firms, there are no longer any Australian based insurance firms willing to do new business with the thermal coal industry.
Banks and insurance companies have come under mounting pressure to reduce their exposure to fossil projects and stop the financing of new fossil fuel projects, both from climate change campaigners, as well as investors concerned about the impacts that climate change poses to companies that are heavily involved in fossil fuel industries.
The ability to secure finance and insurance is a crucial step in the development of large-scale resources projects, helping to de-risk the project for developers, and failure to secure insurance can often cripple a project.
Campaigners have targeted Australian insurance companies to make commitments not to underwrite new fossil fuel projects, and by depriving projects of access to insurance products, campaigners can raise the potential that new fossil fuel projects may not progress at all. Investors have also called on insurance firms to assess and disclose their level of exposure to climate-related risks, seeing investments in fossil fuels as not just a risk to the environment, but also represents a substantial risk to their investments.“Any company wanting to run a coal-burning power station past 2030 will now be unable to get an Australian insurer to back it. AGL and Origin might want to take note,” Brait added.
“While Suncorp’s progress on thermal coal is exciting, the fossil fuel sector is far broader and without action on oil and gas, there is a risk that Suncorp ends up trading one massive climate risk for another over time.”
“The impacts of climate change pose severe risks to humanity and those risks are already showing up on the balance sheets of insurance companies. Shareholders and investors need assurance that Suncorp is doing everything possible to minimise the risks of climate change,” Brait added.
Market Forces last week lodged a shareholder resolution with AGL, calling on the company to set targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement, and would necessitate AGL bringing forward the retirement all of its coal power plants as early as 2030.
In light of the confirmation it will exit the coal industry, Market Forces will still progress the shareholder resolutions at the Suncorp AGM, believing it is crucial that Suncorp set targets to withdraw from all fossil fuel industries, including gas and oil.
Links
The coal industry will no longer be able to obtain investment or insurance from any Australian-based insurance providers, following confirmation by Brisbane-based Suncorp Group that from 2025 it will no longer do business with the coal industry,.
and that it will phase-out its investments and insurance exposure to the coal industry by 2025.
Suncorp’s announcement that it will phase out its investments and insurance exposure to thermal coal by 2025 means that all of the Australian based insurance companies have now effectively committed to removing coal from their investment portfolios.
It also represents a complete exclusion on the offer of insurance or underwriting products to the coal sector, an achievement welcomed by fossil fuel divestment campaigners Market Forces. “Suncorp’s dumping of coal means there is now not one single major Australian insurer willing to provide insurance for new, climate-wrecking thermal coal projects,” Market Forces campaigner Pablo Brait said.The exclusion comes at a crucial moment for the future of Australia’s coal sector, with the mammoth Adani Carmichael coal mine on the verge of commencing construction and with at least six additional projects in the pipeline, threatening an explosion in coal extraction, and greenhouse gas emissions, in the Galilee Basin.
Suncorp’s commitment follows the filling of two shareholder resolutions by Market Forces, which is seeking to compel the Queensland insurance firm to establish a set of targets for reducing the company’s exposure to fossil fuel projects, including coal, gas and oil extraction projects and fossil-fuelled power stations.
The motions would require the company to publish a set of short, medium and long term targets to reduce the company’s investments and underwriting exposure to oil, gas and coal assets and the company would need to ensure these targets are in line with international commitments under the Paris Agreement.
A spokesperson for Suncorp confirmed the company would no longer do business with the coal sector, saying that the coal industry does not represent a significant portion of Suncorp’s business. Not only will Suncorp not enter into any new deals with coal projects but that it will also divest itself of its existing investments and deals with coal projects by 2025.
“Suncorp’s exposure to the fossil fuels industry is not material, being less than 0.5% in the insurance business and investment portfolio, and a negligible proportion of our commercial lending portfolio. Suncorp doesn’t finance fossil fuel projects as it doesn’t have an institutional bank,” a Suncorp spokesperson said. “Through our Responsible Investment Policy, which was implemented in 2017, we apply a shadow carbon price to reduce financial risk, which we review annually. The practical outcome of this is that we have materially reduced our investment in fossil fuels including thermal coal.”“As a result of these policies, we do not directly invest in, finance or underwrite new thermal coal mining extraction projects, or new thermal coal electricity generation, and we will phase out of these exposures by 2025. We will seek to increase exposure to businesses that have a positive environmental impact, including renewable energy generation and technology.”
Suncorp’s coal exclusion follows a similar commitment by QBE insurance, with the company announcing in May that it would also no longer do business with coal projects and would seek to divest its existing business with coal projects by 2030.
Multi-national insurance company Allianz, which has a strong presence in the Australian market, has also committed to limit its involvement in the fossil fuel sector, having previously announced it would not invest in companies that derive more than 30% of their revenues through the production or use of coal.
The Insurance Australia Group (IAG) is not currently providing any insurance products to the coal sector.
Between the firms, there are no longer any Australian based insurance firms willing to do new business with the thermal coal industry.
Banks and insurance companies have come under mounting pressure to reduce their exposure to fossil projects and stop the financing of new fossil fuel projects, both from climate change campaigners, as well as investors concerned about the impacts that climate change poses to companies that are heavily involved in fossil fuel industries.
The ability to secure finance and insurance is a crucial step in the development of large-scale resources projects, helping to de-risk the project for developers, and failure to secure insurance can often cripple a project.
Campaigners have targeted Australian insurance companies to make commitments not to underwrite new fossil fuel projects, and by depriving projects of access to insurance products, campaigners can raise the potential that new fossil fuel projects may not progress at all. Investors have also called on insurance firms to assess and disclose their level of exposure to climate-related risks, seeing investments in fossil fuels as not just a risk to the environment, but also represents a substantial risk to their investments.“Any company wanting to run a coal-burning power station past 2030 will now be unable to get an Australian insurer to back it. AGL and Origin might want to take note,” Brait added.
“While Suncorp’s progress on thermal coal is exciting, the fossil fuel sector is far broader and without action on oil and gas, there is a risk that Suncorp ends up trading one massive climate risk for another over time.”
“The impacts of climate change pose severe risks to humanity and those risks are already showing up on the balance sheets of insurance companies. Shareholders and investors need assurance that Suncorp is doing everything possible to minimise the risks of climate change,” Brait added.
Market Forces last week lodged a shareholder resolution with AGL, calling on the company to set targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement, and would necessitate AGL bringing forward the retirement all of its coal power plants as early as 2030.
In light of the confirmation it will exit the coal industry, Market Forces will still progress the shareholder resolutions at the Suncorp AGM, believing it is crucial that Suncorp set targets to withdraw from all fossil fuel industries, including gas and oil.
Links
- Insurers Urge Morrison To Take On Climate Action
- Climate Change Predicted To Wipe $571 Billion Off Property Values
- Australian Insurer QBE To Exit Thermal Coal Over Climate Change
- Climate Change Could Make Insurance Too Expensive For Most People – Report
- Australian Insurers Say 'Act Now' On Climate Change
- Business, Insurers At Odds With Coalition's 'Problematic' Climate Policy
- Climate Change-Induced Disasters Cost Nations At Least $100 Billion In 2018, Says Watchdog
- Climate Change On Track To Make World 'Uninsurable': IAG
- Insurance Premiums To Rise As Extreme Weather Conditions Become More Common
- Investors With $26 Trillion In Assets Urge G7 Leaders To Act On Climate Change
- Insurers Will Be Hard-Hit By Climate Change But They're Not Investing In The Low-Carbon Economy
Categories: External websites
Australia Must Help Protect Pacific From Climate Change, PNG Prime Minister Says
The Guardian - Helen Davidson
James Marape says Australia, with New Zealand and PNG, has a moral obligation to listen to the voices of smaller island nations
Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape says a prosperous PNG is a ‘win-win’ for Australia. Photograph: Joel Carrett/AAPAustralia has a responsibility to protect the Pacific region from the impacts of climate change, PNG’s newly appointed prime minister has said.
James Marape told the Guardian Australia had “a moral responsibility … to the upkeep of the planet”, particularly given the extreme effect it was having on smaller Pacific nations.
“I don’t intend to speak from Canberra’s perspective, they have their own policy mindset, but as human beings I know they will respond to the moral obligation that is prevalent amidst us, that we are environmentally sensitive to the needs of others.”
He said the voices of smaller island nations must be listened to.“As big countries in the Pacific – Papua New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand – we have a sense of responsibility to the smaller island countries, because displacement of these smaller communities will first and foremost be our neighbourhood responsibility,” Marape said.
In a wide-ranging interview, Marape outlined a vision for his country, to leave behind a history of wasted opportunities and squandered resources, and move towards a healthy and educated nation free of violence.
In May, after Scott Morrison led the Coalition to an election victory , Pacific leaders urged him to do more on climate change, saying Australia was “lagging behind”.
Marape, who is completing his first official visit to Australia this week, said he would “not be silenced” on environmental responsibility.
“We can have our resources but we must have it in an environmentally-friendly manner, so that we leave planet earth to the next generation not in the form we’ve inherited but a better form.
He said he believed Australia, New Zealand, and PNG should lead the Pacific as a “bloc” of nations reconstructing their economies to handle resource productions in a more environmentally and socially sensitive way.
On Thursday Marape warned foreign companies already in PNG that he intended to crack down on regulatory compliance, and also shake up revenue processing to ensure PNG drew at least 50% in taxes and royalties.
He also wanted to see a shift towards an agricultural exports economy, as a “food bowl for Asia” rather than the current dependence on mining.
“For the amount of wealth the lord has blessed us with ... the actual translation of this resource into improving peoples life hasn’t happened well in 44 years,” he told Guardian Australia.
“I don’t blame the past they lived at the time. They wrote the history, I’m going to write the future for our country.”
He said if his government didn’t get the balance right, future generations would blame them.
His comments followed an ambitious declaration on Thursday that the impoverished nation would be free of its dependence on Australian aid – more than half a billion dollars a year – within the decade.
He told Guardian Australia a prosperous PNG was a “win-win” for Australia.
“If we are independent economically, if we are solid and sustaining our own life, your taxes don’t need to come to us,” he said.
“We’ll keep the borders up north safe, we’ll have a better, friendly region up there, so the entire region is safe. If we disintegrate up there it affects Australia too.”
Marape won the leadership in May after several months of political chaos which ousted his predecessor, Peter O’Neill.
O’Neill’s legacy includes numerous crises and controversies, including allegations of corruption and mishandled public policies. In recent years a growing health crisis has been exacerbated by corruption scandals, medication shortages, mishandled medication contracts, and outbreaks of polio and drug-resistant TB.
Marape pledged investigations into corruption around the medication supply, and announcements by September of new health interventions. He said he and Morrison had negotiated Australia’s assistance in improving health care.
PNG also continues to have some of the world’s worst rates of family and sexual violence, and last week 18 people were massacred in the highlands village of Karida. The murders of mainly women and children were an escalation of worsening tribal violence which shocked the country.
Marape denied there was a cultural tolerance of violence in PNG, warningperpetrators they would face prosecution, and said revenge attacks and traditional systems of compensation as a response to violence had to end.
“I’ve made it absolutely clear on every occasion I’m asked this question, that whether it’s domestic violence or violence generally in society, culture and custom will not be a place to hide,” he said.
PNG police have historically been underresourced, with investigative officers and specialised family violence units effectively grounded because they can’t pay for petrol to attend a crime.
Marape said his government would target “hot spots” around the country to improve police resources where they are needed most.
Links
James Marape says Australia, with New Zealand and PNG, has a moral obligation to listen to the voices of smaller island nations
Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape says a prosperous PNG is a ‘win-win’ for Australia. Photograph: Joel Carrett/AAPAustralia has a responsibility to protect the Pacific region from the impacts of climate change, PNG’s newly appointed prime minister has said.
James Marape told the Guardian Australia had “a moral responsibility … to the upkeep of the planet”, particularly given the extreme effect it was having on smaller Pacific nations.
“I don’t intend to speak from Canberra’s perspective, they have their own policy mindset, but as human beings I know they will respond to the moral obligation that is prevalent amidst us, that we are environmentally sensitive to the needs of others.”
He said the voices of smaller island nations must be listened to.“As big countries in the Pacific – Papua New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand – we have a sense of responsibility to the smaller island countries, because displacement of these smaller communities will first and foremost be our neighbourhood responsibility,” Marape said.
In a wide-ranging interview, Marape outlined a vision for his country, to leave behind a history of wasted opportunities and squandered resources, and move towards a healthy and educated nation free of violence.
In May, after Scott Morrison led the Coalition to an election victory , Pacific leaders urged him to do more on climate change, saying Australia was “lagging behind”.
Marape, who is completing his first official visit to Australia this week, said he would “not be silenced” on environmental responsibility.
“We can have our resources but we must have it in an environmentally-friendly manner, so that we leave planet earth to the next generation not in the form we’ve inherited but a better form.
He said he believed Australia, New Zealand, and PNG should lead the Pacific as a “bloc” of nations reconstructing their economies to handle resource productions in a more environmentally and socially sensitive way.
On Thursday Marape warned foreign companies already in PNG that he intended to crack down on regulatory compliance, and also shake up revenue processing to ensure PNG drew at least 50% in taxes and royalties.
He also wanted to see a shift towards an agricultural exports economy, as a “food bowl for Asia” rather than the current dependence on mining.
“For the amount of wealth the lord has blessed us with ... the actual translation of this resource into improving peoples life hasn’t happened well in 44 years,” he told Guardian Australia.
“I don’t blame the past they lived at the time. They wrote the history, I’m going to write the future for our country.”
He said if his government didn’t get the balance right, future generations would blame them.
His comments followed an ambitious declaration on Thursday that the impoverished nation would be free of its dependence on Australian aid – more than half a billion dollars a year – within the decade.
He told Guardian Australia a prosperous PNG was a “win-win” for Australia.
“If we are independent economically, if we are solid and sustaining our own life, your taxes don’t need to come to us,” he said.
“We’ll keep the borders up north safe, we’ll have a better, friendly region up there, so the entire region is safe. If we disintegrate up there it affects Australia too.”
Marape won the leadership in May after several months of political chaos which ousted his predecessor, Peter O’Neill.
O’Neill’s legacy includes numerous crises and controversies, including allegations of corruption and mishandled public policies. In recent years a growing health crisis has been exacerbated by corruption scandals, medication shortages, mishandled medication contracts, and outbreaks of polio and drug-resistant TB.
Marape pledged investigations into corruption around the medication supply, and announcements by September of new health interventions. He said he and Morrison had negotiated Australia’s assistance in improving health care.
PNG also continues to have some of the world’s worst rates of family and sexual violence, and last week 18 people were massacred in the highlands village of Karida. The murders of mainly women and children were an escalation of worsening tribal violence which shocked the country.
Marape denied there was a cultural tolerance of violence in PNG, warningperpetrators they would face prosecution, and said revenge attacks and traditional systems of compensation as a response to violence had to end.
“I’ve made it absolutely clear on every occasion I’m asked this question, that whether it’s domestic violence or violence generally in society, culture and custom will not be a place to hide,” he said.
PNG police have historically been underresourced, with investigative officers and specialised family violence units effectively grounded because they can’t pay for petrol to attend a crime.
Marape said his government would target “hot spots” around the country to improve police resources where they are needed most.
Links
- Pacific leaders urge Scott Morrison to act on climate emergency following election win
- Pacific nations under climate threat urge Australia to abandon coal within 12 years
- Australia tried to water down climate change resolution at Pacific Islands Forum: leader
- Australia relationship with Pacific on climate change 'dysfunctional' and 'abusive'
- Climate change an 'existential security risk' to Australia, Senate inquiry says
- Asylum and climate change are back in the news – and the response has been pathetic
- Labor champions plan to resettle Pacific climate change migrants
- Australia must help Pacific islands at Paris climate summit, says PNG leader
Categories: External websites
Human-Caused Global Heating Breaks Clear From Nature, Studies Find
Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam
Global heating in recent decades is of a pace and magnitude that's unique in at least the past two millennia, with human-caused climate change now "overwhelming" natural variability, new research has found.
According to three papers published in Nature and Nature Geoscience on Thursday, international teams of scientists used seven different statistical techniques to reconstruct global temperature during the so-called Common Era starting 2000 years ago.
A new report claims that Earth's rapid warming in the late 20th century was far more widespread than any temperature variations during the previous 2,000 years.
The scientists studied variability over decades and centuries, including well-known periods of shifting temperatures such as the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age. They found no era had the spatial extent or intensity of the heating over recent decades.
"Periods of warming and cooling have happened in the past but they were nowhere near the magnitude or the speed of the current warming," said Benjamin Henley, a University of Melbourne researcher and co-author of one of the papers. "The main, overwhelming impact on the climate has been in the recent decades, since about 1950."
The papers build on a major global effort to reconstruct past climate using a range of data sources, such as tree rings and coral cores, that was published in 2017.
Dr Henley said the new research revealed "incredible consistency" across different methods, adding to the confidence that current models can predict the future climate as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.
Global warming/cooling rates over the past 2,000 years
Source: Benjamin Henley/NatureThe work also further debunks the claims of climate change deniers who often point to periods such as the Little Ice Age as evidence the climate is in constant flux. Rather, unusual conditions were typically confined to regions.
For example, while north-western Europe experienced a cold spell in the 17th century - as widely depicted in paintings of frozen rivers such as England's Thames - the central and eastern Pacific experienced the chill in the 15th century.
"By contrast, we find that the warmest period of the past two millennia occurred during the 20th century for more than 98 per cent of the world," another of the papers said.
German police find a new use for their water cannons amid record-breaking heat in that country on Wednesday. Those heat records, though, may last just one day. Credit: DPA
Volcanic influence
Interestingly, volcanoes were found to be the dominant influence for most of the Common Era, potentially masking the start of the impact of the Industrial Revolution on global conditions.
Volcanic particles pumped high into the atmosphere typically cause widespread cooling followed by a warming rebound as they dispersed over time.
Several large tropical volcanic eruptions within three decades of the first half of the 19th century triggered "substantial drops of summer temperatures over the Northern Hemisphere land areas", the third paper found.
"Only after the 1850s did the transition into the period of anthropogenic warming start," it stated.
For Michael Mann, the director of Penn State University's Earth System Science Centre, the papers offer fresh vindication of work he led two decades ago in the so-called "Hockey Stick" studies. These revealed the relatively recent ramping up of global temperatures.
"We’re pleased that decades after our original work, independent, international teams of scientists using entirely different approaches, and more widespread now-available paleoclimate data, have come to virtually identical conclusions to those we offered in our original work," Professor Mann told the Herald and The Age.
These included that past climate episodes such as the Medieval Warm Period of about three centuries after 950 CE and the Little Ice Age "were far more regional in nature than the globally-pervasive warming of the past century", he said.
A second conclusion reaffirmed was that the current warmth at global and hemispheric scales "is unprecedented as far back as the estimates go - now more than 2000 years", Professor Mann said.
Heatwaves are just one of the extreme weather events that getting worse with climate change. Credit: Cole Bennetts
Heatwaves only part of the problem
The papers' release coincided recent heatwaves that have baked Europe - including setting records on Wednesday in several countries, with more expected on Thursday - and North America during their current summers.
Global temperatures in June were the hottest in more than a century of data, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported last month. July is on course to set global records too.
Incredible 'warmth' in northern Alaska over the last few years. [In Kotzebue] "They even managed a daily minimum of 69°F on July 9 this year, which is an all-time record high value and more typical of the tropics than the Arctic."
[Graph and analysis by https://t.co/FMHJqtoKrW] pic.twitter.com/rf477fqZnY
— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) July 25, 2019For Dr Henley, though, heatwaves are temporary and, while among the clearest signals of global warming, are still weather-related.
"The far bigger concern is the long term and the far bigger changes we are making to the climate system," he said, noting effects ranging from more severe flooding and droughts, and rising sea levels.
"It’s more the cumulative impacts on the human system and the natural system," Dr Henley said. "Many of the ecosystems we have on earth won’t be able to handle the pace of change."
Links
Global heating in recent decades is of a pace and magnitude that's unique in at least the past two millennia, with human-caused climate change now "overwhelming" natural variability, new research has found.
According to three papers published in Nature and Nature Geoscience on Thursday, international teams of scientists used seven different statistical techniques to reconstruct global temperature during the so-called Common Era starting 2000 years ago.
A new report claims that Earth's rapid warming in the late 20th century was far more widespread than any temperature variations during the previous 2,000 years.
The scientists studied variability over decades and centuries, including well-known periods of shifting temperatures such as the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age. They found no era had the spatial extent or intensity of the heating over recent decades.
"Periods of warming and cooling have happened in the past but they were nowhere near the magnitude or the speed of the current warming," said Benjamin Henley, a University of Melbourne researcher and co-author of one of the papers. "The main, overwhelming impact on the climate has been in the recent decades, since about 1950."
The papers build on a major global effort to reconstruct past climate using a range of data sources, such as tree rings and coral cores, that was published in 2017.
Dr Henley said the new research revealed "incredible consistency" across different methods, adding to the confidence that current models can predict the future climate as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.
Global warming/cooling rates over the past 2,000 years
Source: Benjamin Henley/NatureThe work also further debunks the claims of climate change deniers who often point to periods such as the Little Ice Age as evidence the climate is in constant flux. Rather, unusual conditions were typically confined to regions.
For example, while north-western Europe experienced a cold spell in the 17th century - as widely depicted in paintings of frozen rivers such as England's Thames - the central and eastern Pacific experienced the chill in the 15th century.
"By contrast, we find that the warmest period of the past two millennia occurred during the 20th century for more than 98 per cent of the world," another of the papers said.
German police find a new use for their water cannons amid record-breaking heat in that country on Wednesday. Those heat records, though, may last just one day. Credit: DPA
Volcanic influence
Interestingly, volcanoes were found to be the dominant influence for most of the Common Era, potentially masking the start of the impact of the Industrial Revolution on global conditions.
Volcanic particles pumped high into the atmosphere typically cause widespread cooling followed by a warming rebound as they dispersed over time.
Several large tropical volcanic eruptions within three decades of the first half of the 19th century triggered "substantial drops of summer temperatures over the Northern Hemisphere land areas", the third paper found.
"Only after the 1850s did the transition into the period of anthropogenic warming start," it stated.
For Michael Mann, the director of Penn State University's Earth System Science Centre, the papers offer fresh vindication of work he led two decades ago in the so-called "Hockey Stick" studies. These revealed the relatively recent ramping up of global temperatures.
"We’re pleased that decades after our original work, independent, international teams of scientists using entirely different approaches, and more widespread now-available paleoclimate data, have come to virtually identical conclusions to those we offered in our original work," Professor Mann told the Herald and The Age.
These included that past climate episodes such as the Medieval Warm Period of about three centuries after 950 CE and the Little Ice Age "were far more regional in nature than the globally-pervasive warming of the past century", he said.
A second conclusion reaffirmed was that the current warmth at global and hemispheric scales "is unprecedented as far back as the estimates go - now more than 2000 years", Professor Mann said.
Heatwaves are just one of the extreme weather events that getting worse with climate change. Credit: Cole Bennetts
Heatwaves only part of the problem
The papers' release coincided recent heatwaves that have baked Europe - including setting records on Wednesday in several countries, with more expected on Thursday - and North America during their current summers.
Global temperatures in June were the hottest in more than a century of data, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported last month. July is on course to set global records too.
Incredible 'warmth' in northern Alaska over the last few years. [In Kotzebue] "They even managed a daily minimum of 69°F on July 9 this year, which is an all-time record high value and more typical of the tropics than the Arctic."
[Graph and analysis by https://t.co/FMHJqtoKrW] pic.twitter.com/rf477fqZnY
— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) July 25, 2019For Dr Henley, though, heatwaves are temporary and, while among the clearest signals of global warming, are still weather-related.
"The far bigger concern is the long term and the far bigger changes we are making to the climate system," he said, noting effects ranging from more severe flooding and droughts, and rising sea levels.
"It’s more the cumulative impacts on the human system and the natural system," Dr Henley said. "Many of the ecosystems we have on earth won’t be able to handle the pace of change."
Links
- Paris scorches in historic drought as heatwave fries Europe
- Recent Warming ‘Unmatched In The Past 2000 Years’
- 2,000 Years Of Records Show It’s Getting Hotter, Faster
- 40 years ago, scientists predicted climate change. And hey, they were right
- Two centuries of continuous volcanic eruption may have triggered the end of the ice age
- Climate Change Probably Added 4C To Europe's June Heatwave: Study
- Europe Heatwave Sees Temperatures Soar To Record Highs As Wildfires Take Hold In Spain
- Europe battling heatwave so hot it's causing chicken manure to combust and spark bushfires
- In pictures: Europe swelters through early summer heatwave
- Europe's hellish heatwave is caused by a high-pressure weather system unlike any ever seen before
- European heatwave could be the norm in a climate change affected world
- Europe is cooking in yet another heatwave. Our attempts to outrun climate change are futile
- Mont Blanc is melting and is a warning of our future as climate change sees the world's temperature rise
- Europe heatwave: Temperatures to hit 45C in France as death toll grows from 'enormous' bubble of Saharan air sweeping continent
- Record-breaking heat wave cooks Europe
- Michael E Mann: ‘The most villainous act in the history of human civilisation’
Categories: External websites
The Guardian Joins A Major Media Initiative To Combat The Climate Crisis
The Guardian
More than 60 news outlets worldwide have signed on to Covering Climate Now, a project to improve coverage of the emergency
Student protestors march during a ‘Fridays for Future’ demonstration against climate change in Berlin, Germany, 19 July 2019. Photograph: Felipe Trueba/EPA For a week this September, dozens of news organizations in the US and around the world will join forces to devote their front pages and airwaves to a critical but under-covered story: the global climate emergency.
This unique media collaboration, timed to coincide with landmark UN Climate Action Summit in New York, is the first initiative of Covering Climate Now, a project co-founded by The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review, in partnership with The Guardian, which aims to kickstart a conversation among journalists about how news outlets can improve their coverage of the climate crisis.
The project, which is still welcoming additional media partners, announced an initial list of more than 60 partners today, representing every corner of the media landscape, all of whom have pledged to dedicate resources to climate coverage for the week starting 16 September and leading up to the UN Summit on 23 September. The partners include major TV networks (CBS News) , digital players (HuffPost, Vox, the Intercept, Slate), local newspapers (the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Minneapolis Star Tribune), public radio programs (Marketplace, The World) and many others.
Covering Climate Now launched in May at an event at Columbia Journalism School with dozens of newsroom leaders, including the legendary TV journalist Bill Moyers, who delivered the keynote. At the time, the co-founders of Covering Climate Now, Mark Hertsgaard of the Nation and Kyle Pope, editor-in-chief of Columbia Journalism Review, wrote an impassioned oped calling for change in how the media covers the climate crisis.
“At a time when civilization is accelerating toward disaster, climate silence continues to reign across the bulk of the US news media,” Hertsgaard and Pope wrote. “Especially on television, where most Americans still get their news, the brutal demands of ratings and money work against adequate coverage of the biggest story of our time.”
Partners in the September week of coverage will make their own editorial decisions about what stories to feature. All that’s required is for each outlet to make a good faith effort to increase the amount and the visibility of its climate coverage – to make it clear to their audiences that climate change is not just one more story but the overriding story of our time. The point is to give the climate story the attention and prominence that scientists have long said it demands so that the public and policymakers can make wise choices.
You can read more about the initiative here.
Links
More than 60 news outlets worldwide have signed on to Covering Climate Now, a project to improve coverage of the emergency
Student protestors march during a ‘Fridays for Future’ demonstration against climate change in Berlin, Germany, 19 July 2019. Photograph: Felipe Trueba/EPA For a week this September, dozens of news organizations in the US and around the world will join forces to devote their front pages and airwaves to a critical but under-covered story: the global climate emergency.
This unique media collaboration, timed to coincide with landmark UN Climate Action Summit in New York, is the first initiative of Covering Climate Now, a project co-founded by The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review, in partnership with The Guardian, which aims to kickstart a conversation among journalists about how news outlets can improve their coverage of the climate crisis.
The project, which is still welcoming additional media partners, announced an initial list of more than 60 partners today, representing every corner of the media landscape, all of whom have pledged to dedicate resources to climate coverage for the week starting 16 September and leading up to the UN Summit on 23 September. The partners include major TV networks (CBS News) , digital players (HuffPost, Vox, the Intercept, Slate), local newspapers (the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Minneapolis Star Tribune), public radio programs (Marketplace, The World) and many others.
Covering Climate Now launched in May at an event at Columbia Journalism School with dozens of newsroom leaders, including the legendary TV journalist Bill Moyers, who delivered the keynote. At the time, the co-founders of Covering Climate Now, Mark Hertsgaard of the Nation and Kyle Pope, editor-in-chief of Columbia Journalism Review, wrote an impassioned oped calling for change in how the media covers the climate crisis.
“At a time when civilization is accelerating toward disaster, climate silence continues to reign across the bulk of the US news media,” Hertsgaard and Pope wrote. “Especially on television, where most Americans still get their news, the brutal demands of ratings and money work against adequate coverage of the biggest story of our time.”
Partners in the September week of coverage will make their own editorial decisions about what stories to feature. All that’s required is for each outlet to make a good faith effort to increase the amount and the visibility of its climate coverage – to make it clear to their audiences that climate change is not just one more story but the overriding story of our time. The point is to give the climate story the attention and prominence that scientists have long said it demands so that the public and policymakers can make wise choices.
You can read more about the initiative here.
Links
- A new commitment to covering the climate story
- Why the Guardian is changing the language it uses about the environment
- United Nations Climate Action Summit, 23 September 2019
- Why the Guardian is changing the language it uses about the environment
- Why I’m climate striking against Fox News on Friday
- War all the time? Climate reporters weigh coverage quantity against quality
- Transforming the media’s coverage of the climate crisis
- What if reporters covered the climate crisis like Edward R. Murrow covered the start of World War II?
Categories: External websites
In Not At All Intimidating News: Adani Wants The Names Of Scientists Investigating It
The Guardian - First Dog On The Moon
In not at all intimidating news:Adani wants the names of scientists investigating it Cartoon by First Dog on the MoonLARGE IMAGE
Links
In not at all intimidating news:Adani wants the names of scientists investigating it Cartoon by First Dog on the MoonLARGE IMAGE
Links
- What Did You Do In The Climate Wars Daddy?
- How Do You Hug A Climate Scientist? Follow These Simple Rules And Don't Make It Weird
- Adani: It All Looks Dodgy As Hell And None Of It Has Been Explained Properly
- As We Struggle To Save The Planet From Climate Collapse, Let's Dance (Dramatic Glockenspiel)
- The Billionaire's Guide To Surviving Global Warming – With Ian The Climate Denialist Potato
- 'Last Year I Gave The Kids Briquettes And Everyone Yelled At Me!' Christmas With Ian
- The Children Are Rioting In The Streets! They Are Deadly Serious And Perhaps Our Last Hope
- This Is A Call To Arms On Climate Change. And By Arms I Mean Flippers!
Categories: External websites
Extreme Weather Caused By Climate Change Has Damaged 45% Of Australia’s Coastal Habitat
The Conversation - Russ Babcock | Anthony Richardson | Beth Fulton | Eva Plaganyi | Rodrigo Bustamante
Bleached staghorn coral on the Great Barrier Reef. Many species are dependent on corals for food and shelter. Damian Thomson, Author providedIf you think climate change is only gradually affecting our natural systems, think again.
Our research, published yesterday in Frontiers in Marine Science, looked at the large-scale impacts of a series of extreme climate events on coastal marine habitats around Australia.
We found more than 45% of the coastline was already affected by extreme weather events caused by climate change. What’s more, these ecosystems are struggling to recover as extreme events are expected to get worse.
There is growing scientific evidence that heatwaves, floods, droughts and cyclones are increasing in frequency and intensity, and that this is caused by climate change.
Life on the coastline
Corals, seagrass, mangroves and kelp are some of the key habitat-forming species of our coastline, as they all support a host of marine invertebrates, fish, sea turtles and marine mammals.
Our team decided to look at the cumulative impacts of recently reported extreme climate events on marine habitats around Australia. We reviewed the period between 2011 and 2017 and found these events have had devastating impacts on key marine habitats.
Healthy kelp (left) in Western Australia is an important part of the food chain but it is vulnerable to even small changes in temperature and particularly slow to recover from disturbances such as the marine heatwave of 2011. Even small patches or gaps (right) where kelp has died can take many years to recover. Russ Babcock, Author provided
These include kelp and mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, and coral reefs, some of which have not yet recovered, and may never do so. These findings paint a bleak picture, underscoring the need for urgent action.
During this period, which spanned both El Niño and La Niña conditions, scientists around Australia reported the following events:
Extreme climate events impact on marine habitats in Australia
Heritage areas affected
Many of the impacted areas are globally significant for their size and biodiversity, and because until now they have been relatively undisturbed by climate change. Some of the areas affected are also World Heritage Areas (Great Barrier Reef, Shark Bay, Ningaloo Coast).
Seagrass meadows in Shark Bay are among the world’s most lush and extensive and help lock large amounts of carbon into sediments. The left image shows healthy seagrass but the right image shows damage from extreme climate events in 2011. Mat Vanderklift, Author provided
The habitats affected are “foundational”: they provide food and shelter to a huge range of species. Many of the animals affected – such as large fish and turtles – support commercial industries such as tourism and fishing, as well as being culturally important to Australians.Recovery across these impacted habitats has begun, but it’s likely some areas will never return to their previous condition.
We have used ecosystem models to evaluate the likely long-term outcomes from extreme climate events predicted to become more frequent and more intense.
This work suggests that even in places where recovery starts, the average time for full recovery may be around 15 years. Large slow-growing species such as sharks and dugongs could take even longer, up to 60 years.
But extreme climate events are predicted to occur less than 15 years apart. This will result in a step-by-step decline in the condition of these ecosystems, as it leaves too little time between events for full recovery.
This already appears to be happening with the corals of the Great Barrier Reef.
Gradual decline as things get warmer
Damage from extreme climate events occurs on top of more gradual changes driven by increases in average temperature, such as loss of kelp forests on the southeast coasts of Australia due to the spread of sea urchins and tropical grazing fish species.
Ultimately, we need to slow down and stop the heating of our planet due to the release of greenhouse gases. But even with immediate and effective emissions reduction, the planet will remain warmer, and extreme climatic events more prevalent, for decades to come.
Recovery might still be possible, but we need to know more about recovery rates and what factors promote recovery. This information will allow us to give the ecosystems a helping hand through active restoration and rehabilitation efforts.
We will need new ways to help ecosystems function and to deliver the services that we all depend on. This will likely include decreasing (or ideally, stopping) direct human impacts, and actively assisting recovery and restoring damaged ecosystems.
Several such programs are active around Australia and internationally, attempting to boost the ability of corals, seagrass, mangroves and kelp to recover.
But they will need to be massively scaled up to be effective in the context of the large scale disturbances seen in this decade.
Mangroves at the Flinders River near Karumba in the Gulf of Carpentaria. The healthy mangrove forest (left) is near the river while the dead mangroves (right) are at higher levels where they were much more stressed by conditions in 2016. Some small surviving mangroves are seen beginning to recover by 2017. Robert Kenyon, Author provided
Links
Bleached staghorn coral on the Great Barrier Reef. Many species are dependent on corals for food and shelter. Damian Thomson, Author providedIf you think climate change is only gradually affecting our natural systems, think again.
Our research, published yesterday in Frontiers in Marine Science, looked at the large-scale impacts of a series of extreme climate events on coastal marine habitats around Australia.
We found more than 45% of the coastline was already affected by extreme weather events caused by climate change. What’s more, these ecosystems are struggling to recover as extreme events are expected to get worse.
There is growing scientific evidence that heatwaves, floods, droughts and cyclones are increasing in frequency and intensity, and that this is caused by climate change.
Life on the coastline
Corals, seagrass, mangroves and kelp are some of the key habitat-forming species of our coastline, as they all support a host of marine invertebrates, fish, sea turtles and marine mammals.
Our team decided to look at the cumulative impacts of recently reported extreme climate events on marine habitats around Australia. We reviewed the period between 2011 and 2017 and found these events have had devastating impacts on key marine habitats.
Healthy kelp (left) in Western Australia is an important part of the food chain but it is vulnerable to even small changes in temperature and particularly slow to recover from disturbances such as the marine heatwave of 2011. Even small patches or gaps (right) where kelp has died can take many years to recover. Russ Babcock, Author provided
These include kelp and mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, and coral reefs, some of which have not yet recovered, and may never do so. These findings paint a bleak picture, underscoring the need for urgent action.
During this period, which spanned both El Niño and La Niña conditions, scientists around Australia reported the following events:
- 2011: The most extreme marine heatwave ever occurred off the west coast of Australia. Temperatures were as much as 2-4℃ above average for extended periods and there was coral bleaching along more than 1,000km of coast and loss of kelp forest along hundreds of kilometres.
Seagrasses in Shark Bay and along the entire east coast of Queensland were also severely affected by extreme flooding and cyclones. The loss of seagrasses in Queensland may have led to a spike in deaths of turtles and dugongs. - 2013: Extensive coral bleaching took place along more than 300km of the Pilbara coast of northwestern Australia.
- 2016: The most extreme coral bleaching ever recorded on the Great Barrier Reef affected more than 1,000km of the northern Great Barrier Reef. Mangrove forests across northern Australia were killed by a combination of drought, heat and abnormally low sea levels along the coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria across the Northern Territory and into Western Australia.
- 2017: An unprecedented second consecutive summer of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef affects northern Great Barrier Reef again, as well as parts of the reef further to the south.
Extreme climate events impact on marine habitats in Australia
Heritage areas affected
Many of the impacted areas are globally significant for their size and biodiversity, and because until now they have been relatively undisturbed by climate change. Some of the areas affected are also World Heritage Areas (Great Barrier Reef, Shark Bay, Ningaloo Coast).
Seagrass meadows in Shark Bay are among the world’s most lush and extensive and help lock large amounts of carbon into sediments. The left image shows healthy seagrass but the right image shows damage from extreme climate events in 2011. Mat Vanderklift, Author provided
The habitats affected are “foundational”: they provide food and shelter to a huge range of species. Many of the animals affected – such as large fish and turtles – support commercial industries such as tourism and fishing, as well as being culturally important to Australians.Recovery across these impacted habitats has begun, but it’s likely some areas will never return to their previous condition.
We have used ecosystem models to evaluate the likely long-term outcomes from extreme climate events predicted to become more frequent and more intense.
This work suggests that even in places where recovery starts, the average time for full recovery may be around 15 years. Large slow-growing species such as sharks and dugongs could take even longer, up to 60 years.
But extreme climate events are predicted to occur less than 15 years apart. This will result in a step-by-step decline in the condition of these ecosystems, as it leaves too little time between events for full recovery.
This already appears to be happening with the corals of the Great Barrier Reef.
Gradual decline as things get warmer
Damage from extreme climate events occurs on top of more gradual changes driven by increases in average temperature, such as loss of kelp forests on the southeast coasts of Australia due to the spread of sea urchins and tropical grazing fish species.
Ultimately, we need to slow down and stop the heating of our planet due to the release of greenhouse gases. But even with immediate and effective emissions reduction, the planet will remain warmer, and extreme climatic events more prevalent, for decades to come.
Recovery might still be possible, but we need to know more about recovery rates and what factors promote recovery. This information will allow us to give the ecosystems a helping hand through active restoration and rehabilitation efforts.
We will need new ways to help ecosystems function and to deliver the services that we all depend on. This will likely include decreasing (or ideally, stopping) direct human impacts, and actively assisting recovery and restoring damaged ecosystems.
Several such programs are active around Australia and internationally, attempting to boost the ability of corals, seagrass, mangroves and kelp to recover.
But they will need to be massively scaled up to be effective in the context of the large scale disturbances seen in this decade.
Mangroves at the Flinders River near Karumba in the Gulf of Carpentaria. The healthy mangrove forest (left) is near the river while the dead mangroves (right) are at higher levels where they were much more stressed by conditions in 2016. Some small surviving mangroves are seen beginning to recover by 2017. Robert Kenyon, Author provided
Links
- 40 years ago, scientists predicted climate change. And hey, they were right
- More than 28,000 species are officially threatened, with more likely to come
- On the move: corals migrate south into NSW's warming waters
- Marine heatwaves are getting hotter, lasting longer and doing more damage
- A marine heatwave has wiped out a swathe of WA’s undersea kelp forest
- Severe Continental-Scale Impacts of Climate Change Are Happening Now: Extreme Climate Events Impact Marine Habitat Forming Communities Along 45% of Australia’s Coast
- How are extreme events changing? Australia has a variable climate with many extremes
- Longer and more frequent marine heatwaves over the past century
Categories: External websites
'I’m Seeing It Disappear Before My Eyes': Crisis Point In Australia's Wet Tropics
Sydney Morning Herald - Deborah Snow
Last summer, in November, Queensland biologist Professor Stephen Williams was at a workshop in Vietnam when he received an urgent email from home. It was from a ranger he knew who worked for the World Heritage-listed wet tropics area around Cairns.
Something unprecedented was happening at the top of Mount Bartle Frere, North Queensland’s highest peak. At 1611 meters high, the mountain’s upper reaches are in what is meant to be a cool temperate zone.
Upland rainforest on Mount Windsor, part of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area. Credit: Kerry Trapnell But instead of normal summer readings at the peak, which rarely top 25, temperatures had soared past 35 degrees for six days in a row, culminating in one scorcher of 39.
“This is on a mountain where the average temperature for the year is usually 12 degrees, a nice warm day is around 18, and a hot day is 25,” Williams tells me, as we sit in a cafe high up on the nearby Atherton tableland. “I was shocked, and very worried about the impact. Temperatures like this were unheard of.
”Williams, 57, is Professor of Global Change Biology at James Cook University and a long-time expert on many of the unique animal species which inhabit the ancient rainforests of North Queensland. Along with the spectacular landscape, those animals together with the nearly 700 unique plant species growing in the forests are a fundamental reason why the 900,000 hectare area received much sought-after World Heritage listing in the late 1980s.
"Temperatures like this were unheard of”: Professor Stephen Williams. Credit: Kerry Trapnell In March, worried about the impact of the November heat wave, Williams carried out a spot check on one of the area’s most iconic and vulnerable creatures, the lemuroid ringtail possum, which he’d been studying for nearly two decades. These creatures are endemic, meaning they live nowhere else except in these high wet tropics pockets. The results were another shock.
At sites where he used to reliably record some 20 individuals an hour, he was now finding only three or four. It was a similar story elsewhere on the mountain slopes and on the higher sections of the tableland. Williams alerted the Wet Tropics Management Authority (an agency jointly reporting to the federal and Queensland governments) which called an emergency board meeting a week later. Within days, in late April, the board had issued its most chilling warning yet about the impact of climate change on the iconic area.
“The Board … has now become aware that, following the hottest summer ever recorded, some of the key species for which the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area was listed are at imminent risk of extinction,” it warned.
“Professor Williams’ recent monitoring has identified that the declines in possum and bird species … are now reaching alarming levels. If the trends continue, populations at sites that previously had the highest density of lemuroid ringtail possums could become locally extinct as early as 2022.”
'The canary in the coal mine'
Searching for possums at Mount Hypipamee National Park. Credit: Kerry TrapnellOn a chilly Monday evening this week, the Herald and The Age accompanied Williams to a site at Mount Hypipamee National Park, 950 meters above sea level up behind Cairns, to track down some of the nocturnal creatures.
We tramped in darkness along a track lined with dense rainforest, swinging torches and spotlights up into the tracery of branches overhead, seeking the tell-tale reflection of possum eyes. In an hour or more of searching, Williams had picked out four lemuroids, two Herbert River ringtails and two Green ringtails (also highly vulnerable endemic species). At this site, the numbers were 50 per cent down on what he would expect to find. Elsewhere, he says, numbers are down closer to 70 per cent.
The ringtails, which have evolved to thrive in the cooler upland areas, cannot handle temperatures in excess of 29 or 30 degrees, so the species is drifting ever higher up the mountains, Williams explains. They are disappearing from an elevation of 800 metres which used to be the “sweet spot” for biodiversity. Now they are starting to decline even at 1000 metres. Once they reach the peaks there will be nowhere else for them to go.
Bird species unique to the region are being similarly affected. “It’s distressing,” he says. “This is what I have spent my life working on, and I’m seeing it disappear before my eyes.”
The Wet Tropics world heritage area runs for some 450 kilometres down the coast between Cooktown and Townsville and includes the oldest continuously surviving tropical rainforests on earth. They are, says Leslie Shirreffs, the chair of the Wet Tropics Management Authority, a “living museum”, containing plant ancestors of the great Gondwana forests that covered the continent and parts of Antarctica 50 to 100 million years ago, among them rare species that show how the earliest flowers evolved.
The Wet Tropics (which includes the Daintree in its northern reaches) abuts another globally famous world-heritage site, the Great Barrier Reef.
But while efforts to save the reef – ravaged in some sections by widespread coral bleaching - have drawn the bulk of the funding and the attention, the rainforest remains something of the poor cousin, Shirreffs says. “We had predicted that the loss [of the cool adapted mountain species] would happen on current trajectories by the end of the century. But we are seeing it now,” she says.
Williams says both the reef and the rainforest are being heavily impacted by climate change, but “my problem is that we don’t have such obvious signs that the rainforest is in trouble – we don’t have ‘canopy bleaching’.”
The Australian Conservation Foundation says that makes it harder to galvanise more action for wet tropics protection. “It looks like a beautiful place and it is a beautiful place, but that’s actually one of the problems. It hides pretty well the damage that's being done to it,” explains ACF’s chief executive, Kelly O’Shanassy, who accompanied a small group of journalists to the world heritage site.
The Wet Tropics Authority receives $2.7 million annually from the federal government for its baseline operating costs, but that figure has not increased since 2004 (though funding for specific projects has waxed and waned).
Williams had an extensive monitoring program set up over several years where he was tracking climate change impacts at some 40 sites, taking localised temperature readings. But then, he says, “the money stopped … we left the data loggers out there until they died. Especially in the rainforest that sort of instrument only lasts a few years. We kept them running as long as we could.”
O’Shanassy says people sometimes ask her why they should worry about the threatened disappearance of these highly specialised possum species. “They are the canary in the coal mine, just as much as the reef,” she says. “They are showing us what our future holds …. If we don’t move from burning coal to renewables in the next 10 years, we can’t stop runaway climate change and we will see this vast damage everywhere, including things we humans rely on. We lose the beauty - but we might also lose our life support systems.”
Temperatures soar, with devastating effect
More than 400 orphaned juvenile spectacled flying foxes were brought in for care over the space of just a few days. Credit: Kerry TrapnellJenny McLean at her bat hospital. Credit: Kerry TrapnellDown near the coast, Cairns also suffered record temperatures in November, with a devastating effect on another creature which is iconic for the region: the spectacled flying fox. Thousands were discovered dead or dying as temperatures soared to 42 degrees.
At the bat hospital which Jenny McLean runs at Tolga, on the Atherton tableland above Cairns, more than 400 orphaned juveniles were brought in for care by volunteers over the space of just a few days.
McLean, a small, wiry woman whose been caring for injured bats since 1990 and runs the place on the lean earnings from a modest visitor’s centre, knows as much about the flying foxes as the scientists who regularly visit her. Those bats she can save she nurses back to health in a large enclosure where bright strings of apples hang beneath the open mesh roof like bunting, and nectar bottles hang invitingly for her patients to sip from.
“We are giving them another chance at life,” she says, as she cradles a tiny microbat weighing no more than 8 grams.
Among the scientists who are regular visitors to McLean’s bat refuge is the CSIRO’s flying fox expert, Dr David Westcott.
With McLean’s help, researchers have worked out how to place transmitters on the bats to locate the more remote flying fox camps in the forest, and thus ascertain their numbers more accurately. Westcott says a recent analysis of his data shows that the population has declined dramatically – by an order of around 70 per cent – over the last 14 years.
Dr David Westcott. Credit: Kerry Trapnell“It looks like the initial declines were driven by cyclones and then the heat stress event [in November] has given them a good whack while they’re already down,” he says. “Our most recent estimate prior to that heat stress event was 80 to 90,000 animals. There is some debate about how many died but it's a significant proportion, 20-plus per cent of the known population.”
It was, he says, the first report of mass die-offs among the creatures because of heat stress. “At 42 degrees they cease to be able to thermo-regulate. They can’t shed the heat.”
The impact of climate change is also being noticed by Aboriginal groups that have traditional ties to the wet tropics.
Among them are the Djabugay people, who have native title over parts of the Barron Gorge National Park, north-west of Cairns. Barry Hunter, project officer for the local Aboriginal corporation, says he’s noticed many changes since he was a boy scrambling up and down the spectacular Barron Gorge waterfall.
“Over the last 20 years, I have seen distinct change, particularly in the birds, some of which have a totemic meaning for family groups.”
Barry Hunter says he’s noticed many changes over the last 20 years. Credit: Kerry TrapnellClimate change is also disrupting his community’s traditional methods of fire management. “We have not had a dry season this year, which indicates changing weather patterns,” Hunter says. “We should be well and truly into our traditional burning season,” he adds, explaining that setting small mosaic fires helps minimise the risk of massive blazes in areas adjacent to the heritage-listed forests.
The ACF and the federal government remain at loggerheads over whether funding for environmental protection is anywhere near adequate. ACF’s O’Shanassy says since the Coalition came to office in 2013, the environment budget has been cut by nearly 40 per cent, to around $900 million a year.
A spokesman for Scott Morrison’s new Environment Minister, Sussan Ley, flatly rejects that claim, saying ACF ignores programs which are not directed through the department but are environmentally significant. He cites the $190 million National Landcare program, a $137.5 million "practical environment restoration package" and $250 million over the next five years to support management of federal environmental water holdings as examples. This week, a $1.9 million grant under the Landcare program was awarded to an NGO in the wet tropics area.
But the Wet Tropic Authority’s board said in April that investment was “not commensurate with the urgency for mitigating climate change impacts”.
One area where the two sides have reached agreement is over ridding the wet tropics and adjacent rich agricultural land of yellow crazy ants, an introduced species that wreaks devastation on local ecosystems and farmers alike.
This year’s budget set aside $9 million to keep eradication programs going, with the Wet Tropics Authority overseeing much of that spend. It’s painstaking work, as rangers and community volunteers fan out in grid patterns, laying down a paste to lure the ants (cat food mixed with apricot jam works a treat), then coming back to set poison baits at infestation hot spots.
A team works on the eradication of yellow crazy ants, an introduced species. Credit: Kerry TrapnellShirreffs says the success of the program is a model for what could be achieved in the bigger battle against climate change. “It has worked by bringing together industry, the community, science and government - they all have an interest in the survivability and integrity of the world heritage area, which is worth $5.2 billion a year to the local economy.”
O’Shanassy, speaking more bluntly, says ACF will try to work around Canberra and partner with business and state governments on climate change because “the Coalition government is not signalling that it’s going to be serious on climate action”.
“The government says we are going to reach our Paris [emissions reduction targets] in a canter? Every bit of evidence says we are not. There are flat-out lies being told which is very distressing because this is a fundamental issue that affects all Australians.”
In a week in which heat records have tumbled in Europe – a week when even mining giant BHP’s boss Andrew Mackenzie has declared climate change to be an “existential” threat – Williams says he wants to see Australia at the forefront of the issue globally.
“Fiddling around at the edges is not going to cut it. We have to tackle the root causes. What most people don’t understand is that this is not something that might happen in the future, it's already happening. All over the word. I’m talking about thousands of studies that demonstrate [the damage] in every ecosystem, from the Artic to the Antarctic.”
Links
Last summer, in November, Queensland biologist Professor Stephen Williams was at a workshop in Vietnam when he received an urgent email from home. It was from a ranger he knew who worked for the World Heritage-listed wet tropics area around Cairns.
Something unprecedented was happening at the top of Mount Bartle Frere, North Queensland’s highest peak. At 1611 meters high, the mountain’s upper reaches are in what is meant to be a cool temperate zone.
Upland rainforest on Mount Windsor, part of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area. Credit: Kerry Trapnell But instead of normal summer readings at the peak, which rarely top 25, temperatures had soared past 35 degrees for six days in a row, culminating in one scorcher of 39.
“This is on a mountain where the average temperature for the year is usually 12 degrees, a nice warm day is around 18, and a hot day is 25,” Williams tells me, as we sit in a cafe high up on the nearby Atherton tableland. “I was shocked, and very worried about the impact. Temperatures like this were unheard of.
”Williams, 57, is Professor of Global Change Biology at James Cook University and a long-time expert on many of the unique animal species which inhabit the ancient rainforests of North Queensland. Along with the spectacular landscape, those animals together with the nearly 700 unique plant species growing in the forests are a fundamental reason why the 900,000 hectare area received much sought-after World Heritage listing in the late 1980s.
"Temperatures like this were unheard of”: Professor Stephen Williams. Credit: Kerry Trapnell In March, worried about the impact of the November heat wave, Williams carried out a spot check on one of the area’s most iconic and vulnerable creatures, the lemuroid ringtail possum, which he’d been studying for nearly two decades. These creatures are endemic, meaning they live nowhere else except in these high wet tropics pockets. The results were another shock.
At sites where he used to reliably record some 20 individuals an hour, he was now finding only three or four. It was a similar story elsewhere on the mountain slopes and on the higher sections of the tableland. Williams alerted the Wet Tropics Management Authority (an agency jointly reporting to the federal and Queensland governments) which called an emergency board meeting a week later. Within days, in late April, the board had issued its most chilling warning yet about the impact of climate change on the iconic area.
“The Board … has now become aware that, following the hottest summer ever recorded, some of the key species for which the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area was listed are at imminent risk of extinction,” it warned.
“Professor Williams’ recent monitoring has identified that the declines in possum and bird species … are now reaching alarming levels. If the trends continue, populations at sites that previously had the highest density of lemuroid ringtail possums could become locally extinct as early as 2022.”
'The canary in the coal mine'
Searching for possums at Mount Hypipamee National Park. Credit: Kerry TrapnellOn a chilly Monday evening this week, the Herald and The Age accompanied Williams to a site at Mount Hypipamee National Park, 950 meters above sea level up behind Cairns, to track down some of the nocturnal creatures.
We tramped in darkness along a track lined with dense rainforest, swinging torches and spotlights up into the tracery of branches overhead, seeking the tell-tale reflection of possum eyes. In an hour or more of searching, Williams had picked out four lemuroids, two Herbert River ringtails and two Green ringtails (also highly vulnerable endemic species). At this site, the numbers were 50 per cent down on what he would expect to find. Elsewhere, he says, numbers are down closer to 70 per cent.
The ringtails, which have evolved to thrive in the cooler upland areas, cannot handle temperatures in excess of 29 or 30 degrees, so the species is drifting ever higher up the mountains, Williams explains. They are disappearing from an elevation of 800 metres which used to be the “sweet spot” for biodiversity. Now they are starting to decline even at 1000 metres. Once they reach the peaks there will be nowhere else for them to go.
Bird species unique to the region are being similarly affected. “It’s distressing,” he says. “This is what I have spent my life working on, and I’m seeing it disappear before my eyes.”
The Wet Tropics world heritage area runs for some 450 kilometres down the coast between Cooktown and Townsville and includes the oldest continuously surviving tropical rainforests on earth. They are, says Leslie Shirreffs, the chair of the Wet Tropics Management Authority, a “living museum”, containing plant ancestors of the great Gondwana forests that covered the continent and parts of Antarctica 50 to 100 million years ago, among them rare species that show how the earliest flowers evolved.
The Wet Tropics (which includes the Daintree in its northern reaches) abuts another globally famous world-heritage site, the Great Barrier Reef.
But while efforts to save the reef – ravaged in some sections by widespread coral bleaching - have drawn the bulk of the funding and the attention, the rainforest remains something of the poor cousin, Shirreffs says. “We had predicted that the loss [of the cool adapted mountain species] would happen on current trajectories by the end of the century. But we are seeing it now,” she says.
Williams says both the reef and the rainforest are being heavily impacted by climate change, but “my problem is that we don’t have such obvious signs that the rainforest is in trouble – we don’t have ‘canopy bleaching’.”
The Australian Conservation Foundation says that makes it harder to galvanise more action for wet tropics protection. “It looks like a beautiful place and it is a beautiful place, but that’s actually one of the problems. It hides pretty well the damage that's being done to it,” explains ACF’s chief executive, Kelly O’Shanassy, who accompanied a small group of journalists to the world heritage site.
The Wet Tropics Authority receives $2.7 million annually from the federal government for its baseline operating costs, but that figure has not increased since 2004 (though funding for specific projects has waxed and waned).
Williams had an extensive monitoring program set up over several years where he was tracking climate change impacts at some 40 sites, taking localised temperature readings. But then, he says, “the money stopped … we left the data loggers out there until they died. Especially in the rainforest that sort of instrument only lasts a few years. We kept them running as long as we could.”
O’Shanassy says people sometimes ask her why they should worry about the threatened disappearance of these highly specialised possum species. “They are the canary in the coal mine, just as much as the reef,” she says. “They are showing us what our future holds …. If we don’t move from burning coal to renewables in the next 10 years, we can’t stop runaway climate change and we will see this vast damage everywhere, including things we humans rely on. We lose the beauty - but we might also lose our life support systems.”
Temperatures soar, with devastating effect
More than 400 orphaned juvenile spectacled flying foxes were brought in for care over the space of just a few days. Credit: Kerry TrapnellJenny McLean at her bat hospital. Credit: Kerry TrapnellDown near the coast, Cairns also suffered record temperatures in November, with a devastating effect on another creature which is iconic for the region: the spectacled flying fox. Thousands were discovered dead or dying as temperatures soared to 42 degrees.
At the bat hospital which Jenny McLean runs at Tolga, on the Atherton tableland above Cairns, more than 400 orphaned juveniles were brought in for care by volunteers over the space of just a few days.
McLean, a small, wiry woman whose been caring for injured bats since 1990 and runs the place on the lean earnings from a modest visitor’s centre, knows as much about the flying foxes as the scientists who regularly visit her. Those bats she can save she nurses back to health in a large enclosure where bright strings of apples hang beneath the open mesh roof like bunting, and nectar bottles hang invitingly for her patients to sip from.
“We are giving them another chance at life,” she says, as she cradles a tiny microbat weighing no more than 8 grams.
Among the scientists who are regular visitors to McLean’s bat refuge is the CSIRO’s flying fox expert, Dr David Westcott.
With McLean’s help, researchers have worked out how to place transmitters on the bats to locate the more remote flying fox camps in the forest, and thus ascertain their numbers more accurately. Westcott says a recent analysis of his data shows that the population has declined dramatically – by an order of around 70 per cent – over the last 14 years.
Dr David Westcott. Credit: Kerry Trapnell“It looks like the initial declines were driven by cyclones and then the heat stress event [in November] has given them a good whack while they’re already down,” he says. “Our most recent estimate prior to that heat stress event was 80 to 90,000 animals. There is some debate about how many died but it's a significant proportion, 20-plus per cent of the known population.”
It was, he says, the first report of mass die-offs among the creatures because of heat stress. “At 42 degrees they cease to be able to thermo-regulate. They can’t shed the heat.”
The impact of climate change is also being noticed by Aboriginal groups that have traditional ties to the wet tropics.
Among them are the Djabugay people, who have native title over parts of the Barron Gorge National Park, north-west of Cairns. Barry Hunter, project officer for the local Aboriginal corporation, says he’s noticed many changes since he was a boy scrambling up and down the spectacular Barron Gorge waterfall.
“Over the last 20 years, I have seen distinct change, particularly in the birds, some of which have a totemic meaning for family groups.”
Barry Hunter says he’s noticed many changes over the last 20 years. Credit: Kerry TrapnellClimate change is also disrupting his community’s traditional methods of fire management. “We have not had a dry season this year, which indicates changing weather patterns,” Hunter says. “We should be well and truly into our traditional burning season,” he adds, explaining that setting small mosaic fires helps minimise the risk of massive blazes in areas adjacent to the heritage-listed forests.
The ACF and the federal government remain at loggerheads over whether funding for environmental protection is anywhere near adequate. ACF’s O’Shanassy says since the Coalition came to office in 2013, the environment budget has been cut by nearly 40 per cent, to around $900 million a year.
A spokesman for Scott Morrison’s new Environment Minister, Sussan Ley, flatly rejects that claim, saying ACF ignores programs which are not directed through the department but are environmentally significant. He cites the $190 million National Landcare program, a $137.5 million "practical environment restoration package" and $250 million over the next five years to support management of federal environmental water holdings as examples. This week, a $1.9 million grant under the Landcare program was awarded to an NGO in the wet tropics area.
But the Wet Tropic Authority’s board said in April that investment was “not commensurate with the urgency for mitigating climate change impacts”.
One area where the two sides have reached agreement is over ridding the wet tropics and adjacent rich agricultural land of yellow crazy ants, an introduced species that wreaks devastation on local ecosystems and farmers alike.
This year’s budget set aside $9 million to keep eradication programs going, with the Wet Tropics Authority overseeing much of that spend. It’s painstaking work, as rangers and community volunteers fan out in grid patterns, laying down a paste to lure the ants (cat food mixed with apricot jam works a treat), then coming back to set poison baits at infestation hot spots.
A team works on the eradication of yellow crazy ants, an introduced species. Credit: Kerry TrapnellShirreffs says the success of the program is a model for what could be achieved in the bigger battle against climate change. “It has worked by bringing together industry, the community, science and government - they all have an interest in the survivability and integrity of the world heritage area, which is worth $5.2 billion a year to the local economy.”
O’Shanassy, speaking more bluntly, says ACF will try to work around Canberra and partner with business and state governments on climate change because “the Coalition government is not signalling that it’s going to be serious on climate action”.
“The government says we are going to reach our Paris [emissions reduction targets] in a canter? Every bit of evidence says we are not. There are flat-out lies being told which is very distressing because this is a fundamental issue that affects all Australians.”
In a week in which heat records have tumbled in Europe – a week when even mining giant BHP’s boss Andrew Mackenzie has declared climate change to be an “existential” threat – Williams says he wants to see Australia at the forefront of the issue globally.
“Fiddling around at the edges is not going to cut it. We have to tackle the root causes. What most people don’t understand is that this is not something that might happen in the future, it's already happening. All over the word. I’m talking about thousands of studies that demonstrate [the damage] in every ecosystem, from the Artic to the Antarctic.”
Links
- Human-caused global heating breaks clear from nature, studies find
- How Germany closed its coal industry without sacking a single miner
- BHP sets emissions cuts for customers in major carbon push
- Spring arrives early as Sydney set to break heat records
- Barwon-Darling River faces 'collapse' from government mistakes: report
Categories: External websites
How Much Has Tasmania's Climate Changed In The 100 Years To Now?
ABC News - Erin Cooper
Scientists say sea levels in Tasmania are rising by 3mm a year. (Facebook: Discover Tasmania) Key points:
Scientists and international organisations have been issuing the climate change warnings for decades, saying the future of Earth as we know it is under threat.
Tasmania — renowned for its natural beauty — is not immune, suffering its fair share of natural disasters and slowly-eroding land, all attributed — at least in part — to the changing climate. But if we know a bit of how bad it is going to be, do we know how bad it already is?
The ABC investigated how much the island state's climate has changed in the past 100 years.
Usually wet rainforest wilderness areas have been scorched in the past few years. (Instagram: Fire Rescue Tasmania)Feeling hot, hot, hot
Climate change 'unparalleled' on global scale
Scientists find global warming is being felt (almost) everywhere at the same time and the warming is unprecedented over the past 2,000 years.
Climatologist with the Bureau of Meteorology in Tasmania, Ian Barnes-Keoghan, said the bureau had been collecting temperature observations since the late 1800s — and the data paints a very clear picture.
"It doesn't matter how you cut it up, you still get the same message that temperatures over Tasmania have risen over the last century, particularly since the 1950s," he said."It's such a clear-cut story."
Averaged over the entire state, Mr Barnes-Keoghan said Tasmania is now about a degree warmer than it was a century ago.
But hot temperatures are also now more extreme than they used to be, with fewer very cold days.
"We're not saying that the temperature everyday is now a degree warmer than it was, but the average has moved up and we're seeing more of those extremely high temperatures, so your 35 and 40-degree days," Mr Barnes-Keoghan said.
Ian Barnes-Keoghan says a graph showing average temperatures shows the general increase of about a degree over the past 100 years, and especially since the 1950s. (Supplied: Bureau of Meteorology)
"Since 1910, there's been 12 days where somewhere in Tasmania has reported a temperature of 40 degrees or more. Four of those occurred in the first 93 years, the other eight only occurred in the last 17, and two of those were this year.""It's often those extremes that people really notice."
As for the argument that the warming of the climate is cyclical, Mr Barnes-Keoghan said there was no reason why people should expect average temperatures will cool down again.
In fact, Scientists writing in the journal Nature this week said there was no evidence for "globally coherent warm and cold periods" over the past 2,000 years prior to industrialisation.
"We have a very good understanding of the mechanisms behind this warming, so the significant cause has been an increase in the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere," Mr Barnes-Keoghan said.
"So just by simple physics that leads to an increase in the average temperature because more warmth is trapped close to the surface."
Tasmania is known for its freezing temperatures. (Supplied: Pat Fasnacht)When it rains, it pours
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is now also drier in Tasmania, with average rainfall across the state decreasing.
Ian Barnes-Keoghan says since the 1970s there have been fewer "wet" years, but 2016 was the second wettest on record. (Supplied: Bureau of Meteorology )"There is less rain, on average, now than there was 40, 50 years ago, but there's a couple of things mixed in there," Mr Barnes-Keoghan said.
"One is that we still get wet years, like it rained a lot in 2016 — but the wet years have become less common and the dry years have become more common," he said.
He said the decline is strongest in late Autumn, heading into early winter.
Mr Barnes-Keoghan explained rainfall now behaves differently than it did in the past.
"[In the past,] you'd get a couple of dry years, then a couple of wet years to make up for it," he said.
"But sometime around the mid-70s, that pattern seems to have changed.
"Instead of having a mixture, it went to getting several dry years in a row, then a wettish year but not really that exciting, then a couple of dry years and just not getting those recharge years."But explaining why is a bit more complex.
"Rainfall is complicated, but one of the reasons there's been less rainfall is there are less rain-bearing systems," Mr Barnes-Keoghan said.
"That partly comes about because of an increase in high-pressure systems — that's a known and expected consequence of increasing greenhouse gases.
"Rainfall is hugely variable from year to year, much more variable than temperature, so picking out trends in rainfall is much harder."
Mr Barnes-Keoghan also said the warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, so when it does rain, it's now often in quicker and heavier bursts.
But what about wind and snow?
No data is kept on snowfall but many believe it's not as prevalent as in the past. (Supplied: Cam Blake Photography)So if Tasmania's drier, is it also getting less snow?
Mr Barnes-Keoghan said while it certainly seemed that way, there was no available data to back that up.
Ian Barnes-Keoghan says average temperatures are not expected to cool down again. (ABC Radio Hobart: Carol Rääbus)
"The bureau does not have a good long-term collection of snow data," he said.
That's because it doesn't snow that often over most of Tasmania and in particular, it doesn't snow that often in populated areas.
Mr Barnes-Keoghan said a lot of the historical observations really relied on somebody being there to take the measurement, which didn't always happen.
"I've been here for a long time and I get the impression that snow is less common than it was, but that's completely an anecdote," he said.
Wind is also hard to measure, though Mr Barnes-Keoghan said average windspeeds were decreasing, albeit not by much.
He said the bureau had only really collected data on wind since the 1990s, and even then, it might be skewed because equipment had been positioned in locations known to be particularly windy.
"To measure rainfall you basically need a jam jar, I mean we have very sophisticated jam jars which are calibrated, but measuring wind speed is really difficult," he said.
"The instruments we've got now were really only developed during the 1950s and only became widespread in Australia during the 80s and 90s. [They] only became really important around the 90s so we've really only got measurements since then."Is Tasmania going under (the sea)?
Not quite yet, but sea levels are estimated to be rising 3 millimetres each year.
Retired oceanographer and sea-level-rise expert John Hunter said sea levels had risen by about 16 centimetres since 1841 — when the first sea-level benchmark was put in place at Port Arthur, on Tasmania's south-east coast, adding levels had risen by about the same amount "pretty much everywhere".
John Hunter kneels next to the 1841 sea level gauge which is carved into rock at Port Arthur. (Supplied: Frederique Olivier)
He explained that was due to two factors: the warming climate heating up water, causing it to expand "like liquid in a thermometer", and melting ice on land.
Mr Hunter said that while 3 millimetres a year might not sound like much, it had big consequences.
"The rule of thumb I use is that if you have about 10 centimetres of sea-level rise, which we've already seen last century, [the] frequency of flooding events goes up by a factor of three. So 10 centimetres trebles the amount of flooding events."He said people tended not to notice the changes because they occurred over decades and coastal infrastructure was built accordingly, so "people just build sea walls a bit higher".
But people may see shorelines receding, which is one of the results of rising seas.
"For every metre of sea-level rise, you lose between 100 and 200 metres of shoreline," he said.
Wet years such as 2016, which saw heavy flooding, are becoming less common, according to the Bureau of Meteorology. (Copyright Neil Hargreaves)
NOTE: The ABC investigated changes in the island state's climate as part of our Curious Climate series. Curious Climate Tasmania is a public-powered science project, bridging the gap between experts and audiences with credible, relevant information about climate change. The project is a collaboration between ABC Hobart, UTAS Centre for Marine Socioecology, the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS), the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture (TIA), and the CSIRO.
Links
Scientists say sea levels in Tasmania are rising by 3mm a year. (Facebook: Discover Tasmania) Key points:
- Tasmania's average temperatures are now a degree warmer than a century ago
- Rainfall has also decreased as climate change results in less low-pressure systems
- Sea levels are rising by three millimetres a year
Scientists and international organisations have been issuing the climate change warnings for decades, saying the future of Earth as we know it is under threat.
Tasmania — renowned for its natural beauty — is not immune, suffering its fair share of natural disasters and slowly-eroding land, all attributed — at least in part — to the changing climate. But if we know a bit of how bad it is going to be, do we know how bad it already is?
The ABC investigated how much the island state's climate has changed in the past 100 years.
Usually wet rainforest wilderness areas have been scorched in the past few years. (Instagram: Fire Rescue Tasmania)Feeling hot, hot, hot
Climate change 'unparalleled' on global scale
Scientists find global warming is being felt (almost) everywhere at the same time and the warming is unprecedented over the past 2,000 years.
Climatologist with the Bureau of Meteorology in Tasmania, Ian Barnes-Keoghan, said the bureau had been collecting temperature observations since the late 1800s — and the data paints a very clear picture.
"It doesn't matter how you cut it up, you still get the same message that temperatures over Tasmania have risen over the last century, particularly since the 1950s," he said."It's such a clear-cut story."
Averaged over the entire state, Mr Barnes-Keoghan said Tasmania is now about a degree warmer than it was a century ago.
But hot temperatures are also now more extreme than they used to be, with fewer very cold days.
"We're not saying that the temperature everyday is now a degree warmer than it was, but the average has moved up and we're seeing more of those extremely high temperatures, so your 35 and 40-degree days," Mr Barnes-Keoghan said.
Ian Barnes-Keoghan says a graph showing average temperatures shows the general increase of about a degree over the past 100 years, and especially since the 1950s. (Supplied: Bureau of Meteorology)
"Since 1910, there's been 12 days where somewhere in Tasmania has reported a temperature of 40 degrees or more. Four of those occurred in the first 93 years, the other eight only occurred in the last 17, and two of those were this year.""It's often those extremes that people really notice."
As for the argument that the warming of the climate is cyclical, Mr Barnes-Keoghan said there was no reason why people should expect average temperatures will cool down again.
In fact, Scientists writing in the journal Nature this week said there was no evidence for "globally coherent warm and cold periods" over the past 2,000 years prior to industrialisation.
"We have a very good understanding of the mechanisms behind this warming, so the significant cause has been an increase in the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere," Mr Barnes-Keoghan said.
"So just by simple physics that leads to an increase in the average temperature because more warmth is trapped close to the surface."
Tasmania is known for its freezing temperatures. (Supplied: Pat Fasnacht)When it rains, it pours
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is now also drier in Tasmania, with average rainfall across the state decreasing.
Ian Barnes-Keoghan says since the 1970s there have been fewer "wet" years, but 2016 was the second wettest on record. (Supplied: Bureau of Meteorology )"There is less rain, on average, now than there was 40, 50 years ago, but there's a couple of things mixed in there," Mr Barnes-Keoghan said.
"One is that we still get wet years, like it rained a lot in 2016 — but the wet years have become less common and the dry years have become more common," he said.
He said the decline is strongest in late Autumn, heading into early winter.
Mr Barnes-Keoghan explained rainfall now behaves differently than it did in the past.
"[In the past,] you'd get a couple of dry years, then a couple of wet years to make up for it," he said.
"But sometime around the mid-70s, that pattern seems to have changed.
"Instead of having a mixture, it went to getting several dry years in a row, then a wettish year but not really that exciting, then a couple of dry years and just not getting those recharge years."But explaining why is a bit more complex.
"Rainfall is complicated, but one of the reasons there's been less rainfall is there are less rain-bearing systems," Mr Barnes-Keoghan said.
"That partly comes about because of an increase in high-pressure systems — that's a known and expected consequence of increasing greenhouse gases.
"Rainfall is hugely variable from year to year, much more variable than temperature, so picking out trends in rainfall is much harder."
Mr Barnes-Keoghan also said the warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, so when it does rain, it's now often in quicker and heavier bursts.
But what about wind and snow?
No data is kept on snowfall but many believe it's not as prevalent as in the past. (Supplied: Cam Blake Photography)So if Tasmania's drier, is it also getting less snow?
Mr Barnes-Keoghan said while it certainly seemed that way, there was no available data to back that up.
Ian Barnes-Keoghan says average temperatures are not expected to cool down again. (ABC Radio Hobart: Carol Rääbus)
"The bureau does not have a good long-term collection of snow data," he said.
That's because it doesn't snow that often over most of Tasmania and in particular, it doesn't snow that often in populated areas.
Mr Barnes-Keoghan said a lot of the historical observations really relied on somebody being there to take the measurement, which didn't always happen.
"I've been here for a long time and I get the impression that snow is less common than it was, but that's completely an anecdote," he said.
Wind is also hard to measure, though Mr Barnes-Keoghan said average windspeeds were decreasing, albeit not by much.
He said the bureau had only really collected data on wind since the 1990s, and even then, it might be skewed because equipment had been positioned in locations known to be particularly windy.
"To measure rainfall you basically need a jam jar, I mean we have very sophisticated jam jars which are calibrated, but measuring wind speed is really difficult," he said.
"The instruments we've got now were really only developed during the 1950s and only became widespread in Australia during the 80s and 90s. [They] only became really important around the 90s so we've really only got measurements since then."Is Tasmania going under (the sea)?
Not quite yet, but sea levels are estimated to be rising 3 millimetres each year.
Retired oceanographer and sea-level-rise expert John Hunter said sea levels had risen by about 16 centimetres since 1841 — when the first sea-level benchmark was put in place at Port Arthur, on Tasmania's south-east coast, adding levels had risen by about the same amount "pretty much everywhere".
John Hunter kneels next to the 1841 sea level gauge which is carved into rock at Port Arthur. (Supplied: Frederique Olivier)
He explained that was due to two factors: the warming climate heating up water, causing it to expand "like liquid in a thermometer", and melting ice on land.
Mr Hunter said that while 3 millimetres a year might not sound like much, it had big consequences.
"The rule of thumb I use is that if you have about 10 centimetres of sea-level rise, which we've already seen last century, [the] frequency of flooding events goes up by a factor of three. So 10 centimetres trebles the amount of flooding events."He said people tended not to notice the changes because they occurred over decades and coastal infrastructure was built accordingly, so "people just build sea walls a bit higher".
But people may see shorelines receding, which is one of the results of rising seas.
"For every metre of sea-level rise, you lose between 100 and 200 metres of shoreline," he said.
Wet years such as 2016, which saw heavy flooding, are becoming less common, according to the Bureau of Meteorology. (Copyright Neil Hargreaves)
NOTE: The ABC investigated changes in the island state's climate as part of our Curious Climate series. Curious Climate Tasmania is a public-powered science project, bridging the gap between experts and audiences with credible, relevant information about climate change. The project is a collaboration between ABC Hobart, UTAS Centre for Marine Socioecology, the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS), the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture (TIA), and the CSIRO.
Links
- 'Is 2 degrees warmer really that bad?': Scientists answer your questions
- 'We're seeing metres lost': This is what climate change looks like
- No, we haven't experienced anything like this global warming in the past 2,000 years
- I debunked undying climate change myths so you don't have to
- Europe hit by heatwave and hailstorms, experts warn Greenland ice could melt
- Three hours to impact: Tsunami modelling shows how Queensland’s coast would cope
Categories: External websites
How To Talk Effectively About Climate Change
Scientific American - Max Boykoff
Our conversations have been stuck, but a new book lays out a number of ways to get them flowing productively
Credit: Getty ImagesLately, climate change has imposed itself on the public sphere. Through extreme events linked to changes in the climate, new scientific reports and studies, and rejuvenated youth movements (along with many other political, economic, scientific, ecological, meteorological and cultural events and issues) climate change has been increasingly difficult to ignore.
But you wouldn't really have picked up on that in the first round of the U.S. Democratic party primary debates that took place in Miami, Florida. As 20 candidates made their case to the American people, it was striking how minimally and shallowly they discussed climate change.
Sadly, this illustrates a contradiction we have been living with for some time. That is this: amid extensive research into the causes and consequences of climate change, climate communications—and thus, conversations about climate change in our lives—have remained stuck.
There are many reasons. Among them:
So, in making these connections, we can more effectively get to the heart of how we live, work, play, find happiness and relax in modern life, shaping our everyday lives, lifestyles, relationships and livelihoods.
There has been an urgent need to improve communications about climate change at the intersections of science, policy and society. With that in mind, I wrote Creative (Climate) Communications. It is essentially a handbook that bridges sectors and audiences to meet people where they are on this critical 21st-century challenge. In the book I integrate research from the social sciences and humanities that has provided insights into better understanding what communications work, where, when, why and under what conditions.
I also examine how to harness creativity for more effective engagement. I integrate these lessons by assembling what I call features on a "road map" along with "rules of the road." The guide is then meant to help as researchers and practitioners proceed with both ambition and caution into struggles to effectively address the many issues associated with climate change.
Through this guidance, I seek to help maximize effectiveness and opportunities and minimize mistakes and dead ends in a resource-, energy- and time-constrained environment. In putting this together, I also emphasize that successful and creative climate communications strategies must be tailored to perceived and intended audiences and can be most effective when pursued through relations of trust. And I underscore that context is critical; cultural, political, social, environmental, economic, ideological and psychological conditions matter.
From synthesizing this work, I distill these lessons into some important "rules of the road."
This approach can help to expand a spectrum of possibility for meaningful, substantive and sustained responses to contemporary climate challenges. Also, these "rules of the road" and the "road map" help make connections between climate change and other pressing issues that everyday people care about.
I also argue that an expanded approach involves processes of listening and adapting rather than winning and argument or talking people into something. Authentically considering other points of view fosters meaningful exchanges and enhances possibilities for finding common ground. Facts established through scientific ways of knowing about climate change are important, but they are not enough. We therefore need to enlarge considerations of how knowledge influences actions, through experiential, emotional, visceral, tactile, tangible, affective and aesthetic ways of learning and knowing about climate change.
Careful approaches informed by social sciences and humanities scholarship provide space and perspective for more authentic participatory engagement. They can overcome limited approaches and narrow mindsets that have blocked off these needed pathways. As a result, these approaches can then more effectively recapture what may be seen to be a "missing middle ground" on climate change in the public arena.
Through this systematic work, I hope we can better understand that a creative "silver buckshot" approach—in which different strategies are needed to reach different audiences in different contexts—will significantly improve creative climate communication efforts going forward. I hope my book catalyzes the ability of researchers, practitioners, decision-makers and everyday people to get more organized and steer our discussions and actions more productively.
As the Democratic primary debates illustrate all too well, we continue to miss opportunities to make deeper and more creative connections with climate change and related issues.
Links
Our conversations have been stuck, but a new book lays out a number of ways to get them flowing productively
Credit: Getty ImagesLately, climate change has imposed itself on the public sphere. Through extreme events linked to changes in the climate, new scientific reports and studies, and rejuvenated youth movements (along with many other political, economic, scientific, ecological, meteorological and cultural events and issues) climate change has been increasingly difficult to ignore.
But you wouldn't really have picked up on that in the first round of the U.S. Democratic party primary debates that took place in Miami, Florida. As 20 candidates made their case to the American people, it was striking how minimally and shallowly they discussed climate change.
Sadly, this illustrates a contradiction we have been living with for some time. That is this: amid extensive research into the causes and consequences of climate change, climate communications—and thus, conversations about climate change in our lives—have remained stuck.
There are many reasons. Among them:
- Climate change is still regularly treated as a single issue. This was clearly on display in the debates, and even during the paltry time devoted to surface-level discussions of climate change.
- There has continued to be inadequate funding provided to support sustained and coordinated social science and humanities research into what constitutes more effective climate communications.
- We have all been short on creativity, and we generally have stuck to ineffective climate communications approaches (e.g. merely scientific ways of knowing) as we muddle along.
So, in making these connections, we can more effectively get to the heart of how we live, work, play, find happiness and relax in modern life, shaping our everyday lives, lifestyles, relationships and livelihoods.
There has been an urgent need to improve communications about climate change at the intersections of science, policy and society. With that in mind, I wrote Creative (Climate) Communications. It is essentially a handbook that bridges sectors and audiences to meet people where they are on this critical 21st-century challenge. In the book I integrate research from the social sciences and humanities that has provided insights into better understanding what communications work, where, when, why and under what conditions.
I also examine how to harness creativity for more effective engagement. I integrate these lessons by assembling what I call features on a "road map" along with "rules of the road." The guide is then meant to help as researchers and practitioners proceed with both ambition and caution into struggles to effectively address the many issues associated with climate change.
Through this guidance, I seek to help maximize effectiveness and opportunities and minimize mistakes and dead ends in a resource-, energy- and time-constrained environment. In putting this together, I also emphasize that successful and creative climate communications strategies must be tailored to perceived and intended audiences and can be most effective when pursued through relations of trust. And I underscore that context is critical; cultural, political, social, environmental, economic, ideological and psychological conditions matter.
From synthesizing this work, I distill these lessons into some important "rules of the road."
- Be authentic.
- Be aware.
- Be accurate.
- Be imaginative.
- Be bold.
- Find common ground on climate change.
- Emphasize how climate change affects us here and now, in our everyday lives.
- Focus on benefits of climate change engagement.
- Creatively empower people to take meaningful and purposeful action.
- "Smarten up" communications about climate change to match the demands of a 21st-century communications environment.
This approach can help to expand a spectrum of possibility for meaningful, substantive and sustained responses to contemporary climate challenges. Also, these "rules of the road" and the "road map" help make connections between climate change and other pressing issues that everyday people care about.
I also argue that an expanded approach involves processes of listening and adapting rather than winning and argument or talking people into something. Authentically considering other points of view fosters meaningful exchanges and enhances possibilities for finding common ground. Facts established through scientific ways of knowing about climate change are important, but they are not enough. We therefore need to enlarge considerations of how knowledge influences actions, through experiential, emotional, visceral, tactile, tangible, affective and aesthetic ways of learning and knowing about climate change.
Careful approaches informed by social sciences and humanities scholarship provide space and perspective for more authentic participatory engagement. They can overcome limited approaches and narrow mindsets that have blocked off these needed pathways. As a result, these approaches can then more effectively recapture what may be seen to be a "missing middle ground" on climate change in the public arena.
Through this systematic work, I hope we can better understand that a creative "silver buckshot" approach—in which different strategies are needed to reach different audiences in different contexts—will significantly improve creative climate communication efforts going forward. I hope my book catalyzes the ability of researchers, practitioners, decision-makers and everyday people to get more organized and steer our discussions and actions more productively.
As the Democratic primary debates illustrate all too well, we continue to miss opportunities to make deeper and more creative connections with climate change and related issues.
Links
- The Counter-Intuitive Solution To Getting People To Care About Climate Change
- 'Hasn't Climate Change Always Happened?' Scientists Address The Big Questions
- Climate Change Is Scaring Kids. Here’s How To Talk To Them.
- It’s Time To Change The Climate Disaster Script. People Need Hope That Things Can Change
- Not Everyone Cares About Climate Change, But Reproach Won’t Change Their Minds
- Changing Minds: How Do You Communicate With Climate Change Skeptics?
- Graphic Design Could Be Holding Back Action On Climate Change – Here’s How
- Can Comedy Help Communicate Climate Change?
- It’s Time For Climate Change Communicators To Listen To Social Science
- How The Weather Gets Weaponized In Climate Change Messaging
- Vaccinate Public Against Science Misinformation, Researchers Urge
- Climate Change: Using Satire To Communicate Science
Categories: External websites
Want To Do Something About Global Warming? Talk About It With Your Family And Friends
Los Angeles Times - Julia Rosen
Simply increasing the frequency of climate-related discussions shifted people’s perceptions of the scientific consensus around human-caused global warming, as well as their own attitudes on the matter, new research suggests. (Dreamstime)There’s the old saying that you should never discuss politics or religion in polite company. Nowadays, it seems climate change has joined that list.
Barely more than a third of Americans broach the subject often or even occasionally, according to a recent survey by researchers at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
All this not talking about climate change has given Americans a rather skewed perception of what the rest of the country thinks about the issue.
The average person estimates that only 54% of her fellow Americans believe climate change is happening. In reality, 69% do, according to the same Yale survey.
The more we talk about global warming, the more we might move the needle on public opinion, the Yale team reported Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers found that simply increasing the frequency of climate-related discussions shifted people’s perceptions of the scientific consensus around human-caused warming as well as their own attitudes on the matter.
“These findings suggest that climate conversations with friends and family enter people into a proclimate social feedback loop,” the researchers wrote.
Matthew Goldberg is a social psychologist at Yale University and lead author of the new study. He spoke with The Times about climate silence and how to break it.
What is climate silence?
Our most recent nationally representative survey shows that 69% of people find climate change to be at least somewhat important to them. But only 37% discuss it at least occasionally. So most people think it’s important yet most people don’t talk about it. This discrepancy is often referred to as climate silence.
Why don’t Americans talk about climate change more?
There are a lot of reasons. For some, the issue just isn’t salient to them. But there’s also a lot of research on perceptions about what others think. People are hesitant to talk about something that they see as contested or potentially controversial in their social network, so they remain silent.
But you found that people are often wrong when it comes to judging what others think about climate change. Does that help suppress conversation?
If you think everyone disagrees with you, or most people disagree with you, then you are not going to want to speak up. It starts this spiral of silence where people misjudge the beliefs of others, and then they remain quiet about this important issue.
Is everyone equally mistaken, or do misperceptions vary across groups?
In general, you tend to think that people around you share the beliefs that you have. So the most accurate folks were liberal Democrats. They were off by just 6 percentage points, guessing 63% instead of 69%. That’s likely because liberal Democrats know a lot of other Democrats, so they correctly believe that a lot of people around them believe climate change is happening.
Where we see the biggest discrepancy is at the opposite end of the political spectrum: conservative Republicans. If you’re only hearing from elite Republicans who are largely dismissive of climate science, then you are going to infer that a lot of people around you don’t believe it’s happening. So they were way off. They estimated the percentage was 48%.
Whether old or young, male or female, urban or rural, Americans tend to underestimate the extent to which other Americans think global warming is happening. (Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication)
It seems like this 69% must encompass a broader swath of society than just liberal Democrats. Who are the others?
There’s no doubt that it’s not just a liberal phenomenon, and I think that needs to be part of our messaging strategy.
We've been highlighting prominent Republican voices, to the best extent we can, to show that there are people across the spectrum that believe this is an important issue. It’s just that their voices aren’t loud enough.
Can you describe your new study?
We dug into data that we collected back in 2015, when Pope Francis was giving speeches across the United States talking about the importance of climate change, and there was a lot of change in public opinion because people heard about it more in the media.
In the surveys, which were taken seven months apart, people reported how frequently they talked about climate change with family and friends. We wanted to know whether talking more about it altered people’s perceptions of the scientific agreement around human-caused global warming, and we found that it did.
Why did you focus on the scientific consensus?
One reason is that past research coming out of our center has shown that it’s very influential. There’s still work to be done on why, but what I suspect it's because it's easy to communicate and it’s very powerful.
And what is the scientific consensus?
Studies show that 97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused global warming is happening.
When you looked at the numbers, what did you find?
We found that an increase in discussion — from rarely to occasionally, or occasionally to often — predicted a 2 to 3 percentage-point increase in the belief in the scientific consensus.
It’s a modest effect, but it matters a lot when you’re hovering around 50%, which is the most common estimate of scientific agreement. People have this false dichotomy that some scientists believe it’s happening and some scientists don’t.
What else happened when people talked more about this?
Changes in the perception of scientific consensus led to significant changes in people’s own beliefs that climate change is happening, that it’s human-caused, and in their worry about the issue. So those small changes can lead to big practical differences.
Why are family and friends so powerful?
Messengers matter very much. If a message comes from a credible communicator or one that has moral authority, then that will be very persuasive. And family and friends are the most important messengers. For one thing, they have closest proximity. They also are not easily ignored.
Your results suggest there's a kind of feedback loop. What's going on there?
We found that discussion leads to increased belief in the scientific consensus around human-caused warming and that belief in scientific consensus leads to more discussion. That could potentially start this positive cycle toward belief change.
It’s hard to say why that is. I speculate that once you have more certainty in a belief, it’s easier to go and share your belief rather than your ambivalence.
How do you suggest starting a conversation about climate change?
Start with common ground. To the extent that you can overlap the issue of climate change with the values of whoever you are talking to, the more effective your message will be.
For many people, climate change is really low on the list of issue priorities. But it’s so far-reaching that it can wrap into most other important issues. So you could take a healthcare angle, you could take a national security angle, an economic angle, or a campaign finance one. A lot of people care about these issues.
I find that taking a pollution perspective makes it very easy to talk to people about climate change. Because who is not against pollution?
What's another example?
We have a new study coming out where we engaged Christians on the issue of climate change. And we found that, of people that believe it’s happening, 19% cited protecting God’s creation as the single most important motivation for wanting to reduce global warming. That’s one in five.
We followed that study up with two experiments. We wrote messages that tried to convey that other Christians clearly care about this issue, and that it is our moral and religious obligation to deal with it. Basically, we said, "If you believe that God created this Earth, then this is something that you should want to protect and not allow to be degraded." And we found that that was a very influential message.
Isn't that kind of manipulative?
I see it more as understanding what’s most important to people. I’m trying to speak to what you care about.
Got any ice-breakers?
It’s almost comical how often weather is used for small talk. But that’s a good entry point. For instance, you could mention that there are temperature records being broken all over the world. Weather is also a good way to not touch on the buzzwords for potentially skeptical audiences.
Another approach is to weave in climate change if you’re already talking about another issue, like extreme weather or natural disasters. There’s a way to ease into it by saying something like, "Did you know that a warming climate will make hurricanes worse?"
In the big picture, how important is it that we start talking more about climate change?
I think it’s massively important, particularly because we are not doing it enough. A lot of the time, we assume that we are always going to be having these conversations with a skeptical audience. But in many cases, the other person cares about it just as much as you do.
There is the potential for it to backfire when you have people that are very strongly on the other end of this, but they are in the minority. This is why I emphasize the role of friends and family, because they are not relationships you can easily ignore.
Links
Simply increasing the frequency of climate-related discussions shifted people’s perceptions of the scientific consensus around human-caused global warming, as well as their own attitudes on the matter, new research suggests. (Dreamstime)There’s the old saying that you should never discuss politics or religion in polite company. Nowadays, it seems climate change has joined that list.
Barely more than a third of Americans broach the subject often or even occasionally, according to a recent survey by researchers at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
All this not talking about climate change has given Americans a rather skewed perception of what the rest of the country thinks about the issue.
The average person estimates that only 54% of her fellow Americans believe climate change is happening. In reality, 69% do, according to the same Yale survey.
The more we talk about global warming, the more we might move the needle on public opinion, the Yale team reported Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers found that simply increasing the frequency of climate-related discussions shifted people’s perceptions of the scientific consensus around human-caused warming as well as their own attitudes on the matter.
“These findings suggest that climate conversations with friends and family enter people into a proclimate social feedback loop,” the researchers wrote.
Matthew Goldberg is a social psychologist at Yale University and lead author of the new study. He spoke with The Times about climate silence and how to break it.
What is climate silence?
Our most recent nationally representative survey shows that 69% of people find climate change to be at least somewhat important to them. But only 37% discuss it at least occasionally. So most people think it’s important yet most people don’t talk about it. This discrepancy is often referred to as climate silence.
Why don’t Americans talk about climate change more?
There are a lot of reasons. For some, the issue just isn’t salient to them. But there’s also a lot of research on perceptions about what others think. People are hesitant to talk about something that they see as contested or potentially controversial in their social network, so they remain silent.
But you found that people are often wrong when it comes to judging what others think about climate change. Does that help suppress conversation?
If you think everyone disagrees with you, or most people disagree with you, then you are not going to want to speak up. It starts this spiral of silence where people misjudge the beliefs of others, and then they remain quiet about this important issue.
Is everyone equally mistaken, or do misperceptions vary across groups?
In general, you tend to think that people around you share the beliefs that you have. So the most accurate folks were liberal Democrats. They were off by just 6 percentage points, guessing 63% instead of 69%. That’s likely because liberal Democrats know a lot of other Democrats, so they correctly believe that a lot of people around them believe climate change is happening.
Where we see the biggest discrepancy is at the opposite end of the political spectrum: conservative Republicans. If you’re only hearing from elite Republicans who are largely dismissive of climate science, then you are going to infer that a lot of people around you don’t believe it’s happening. So they were way off. They estimated the percentage was 48%.
Whether old or young, male or female, urban or rural, Americans tend to underestimate the extent to which other Americans think global warming is happening. (Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication)
It seems like this 69% must encompass a broader swath of society than just liberal Democrats. Who are the others?
There’s no doubt that it’s not just a liberal phenomenon, and I think that needs to be part of our messaging strategy.
We've been highlighting prominent Republican voices, to the best extent we can, to show that there are people across the spectrum that believe this is an important issue. It’s just that their voices aren’t loud enough.
Can you describe your new study?
We dug into data that we collected back in 2015, when Pope Francis was giving speeches across the United States talking about the importance of climate change, and there was a lot of change in public opinion because people heard about it more in the media.
In the surveys, which were taken seven months apart, people reported how frequently they talked about climate change with family and friends. We wanted to know whether talking more about it altered people’s perceptions of the scientific agreement around human-caused global warming, and we found that it did.
Why did you focus on the scientific consensus?
One reason is that past research coming out of our center has shown that it’s very influential. There’s still work to be done on why, but what I suspect it's because it's easy to communicate and it’s very powerful.
And what is the scientific consensus?
Studies show that 97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused global warming is happening.
When you looked at the numbers, what did you find?
We found that an increase in discussion — from rarely to occasionally, or occasionally to often — predicted a 2 to 3 percentage-point increase in the belief in the scientific consensus.
It’s a modest effect, but it matters a lot when you’re hovering around 50%, which is the most common estimate of scientific agreement. People have this false dichotomy that some scientists believe it’s happening and some scientists don’t.
What else happened when people talked more about this?
Changes in the perception of scientific consensus led to significant changes in people’s own beliefs that climate change is happening, that it’s human-caused, and in their worry about the issue. So those small changes can lead to big practical differences.
Why are family and friends so powerful?
Messengers matter very much. If a message comes from a credible communicator or one that has moral authority, then that will be very persuasive. And family and friends are the most important messengers. For one thing, they have closest proximity. They also are not easily ignored.
Your results suggest there's a kind of feedback loop. What's going on there?
We found that discussion leads to increased belief in the scientific consensus around human-caused warming and that belief in scientific consensus leads to more discussion. That could potentially start this positive cycle toward belief change.
It’s hard to say why that is. I speculate that once you have more certainty in a belief, it’s easier to go and share your belief rather than your ambivalence.
How do you suggest starting a conversation about climate change?
Start with common ground. To the extent that you can overlap the issue of climate change with the values of whoever you are talking to, the more effective your message will be.
For many people, climate change is really low on the list of issue priorities. But it’s so far-reaching that it can wrap into most other important issues. So you could take a healthcare angle, you could take a national security angle, an economic angle, or a campaign finance one. A lot of people care about these issues.
I find that taking a pollution perspective makes it very easy to talk to people about climate change. Because who is not against pollution?
What's another example?
We have a new study coming out where we engaged Christians on the issue of climate change. And we found that, of people that believe it’s happening, 19% cited protecting God’s creation as the single most important motivation for wanting to reduce global warming. That’s one in five.
We followed that study up with two experiments. We wrote messages that tried to convey that other Christians clearly care about this issue, and that it is our moral and religious obligation to deal with it. Basically, we said, "If you believe that God created this Earth, then this is something that you should want to protect and not allow to be degraded." And we found that that was a very influential message.
Isn't that kind of manipulative?
I see it more as understanding what’s most important to people. I’m trying to speak to what you care about.
Got any ice-breakers?
It’s almost comical how often weather is used for small talk. But that’s a good entry point. For instance, you could mention that there are temperature records being broken all over the world. Weather is also a good way to not touch on the buzzwords for potentially skeptical audiences.
Another approach is to weave in climate change if you’re already talking about another issue, like extreme weather or natural disasters. There’s a way to ease into it by saying something like, "Did you know that a warming climate will make hurricanes worse?"
In the big picture, how important is it that we start talking more about climate change?
I think it’s massively important, particularly because we are not doing it enough. A lot of the time, we assume that we are always going to be having these conversations with a skeptical audience. But in many cases, the other person cares about it just as much as you do.
There is the potential for it to backfire when you have people that are very strongly on the other end of this, but they are in the minority. This is why I emphasize the role of friends and family, because they are not relationships you can easily ignore.
Links
- The Counter-Intuitive Solution To Getting People To Care About Climate Change
- Discussing global warming leads to greater acceptance of climate science
- Climate Access: Balancing Hope and Threat
- How do I know it's Solutions Journalism?
- How journalists can rebut Trump's 'fake news' claims
- Why some conservatives are blind to climate change
- Which works better: climate fear, or climate hope? Well, it's complicated
- What we know (and don’t) about the impact of solutions journalism
- World of Change: Global Temperatures
- Engaging climate communication: Audiences, frames, values and norms
- The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks
- Building Bridges: Speaking to Shared Values and Collective Purpose (pdf)
Categories: External websites
Recent Warming ‘Unmatched In The Past 2000 Years’
Cosmos - Richard A Lovett
Events are happening globally and simultaneously, research shows.
Modern climate change is starkly different because more than 98% of the Earth is warming simultaneously, research shows. AUSCAPE / GETTY IMAGESClimate-change sceptics sometimes argue that there is no cause for concern from global warming because in the past 2000 years the world has already gone through several natural cycles of warming and cooling from which it has always rebounded on its own.
However, new research has found that rather than being global events, these natural cycles were actually regional changes that never affected more than part of the globe at any one time.
Furthermore, these warming and cooling patterns didn’t occur anywhere close to simultaneously in the parts of the world they did affect.
The findings are published in a suite of papers in the journals Nature and Nature Geoscience.
“Traditionally, the understanding is that there were globally coherent periods of climate variability,” says Nathan Steiger, a paleoclimatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, US, who was part of a study team led by Raphael Neukom, a climate researcher from the University of Bern, Switzerland.
“There was a cold period called the Little Ice Age [1300-1850 AD], a warm period called the Medieval Warm Period [800-1200 AD], and a couple of other periods as we go back further in time [the Dark Ages Cold Period, 400-800 AD, and the Roman Warm Period, 1-400 AD].
“But what we show is that these periods weren’t globally coherent, as previously thought.”
Modern climate change, on the other hand, is starkly different, not just because of the rapid rate of warming, but because more than 98% of the Earth is warming simultaneously.
“That very much stands out in contrast to the past 2000 years,” Steiger says.The reason this wasn’t discovered before appears to be that these multi-century warming and cooling epochs were best documented in Europe. So much so, that most of their names are tied to European history: Medieval Warming, Dark Ages Cooling, Roman Warming.
“It was easy to make the assumption that these changes were happening everywhere on the planet at the same time,” says Scott St. George, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Minnesota, US, who was not part of the study team, but wrote a supporting commentary in Nature.
“What this study has demonstrated is that less than half of the planet was being pushed in the same direction – whether warming or cooling – at the same time.”
Now, he says, “no matter where you go, everywhere is being pushed in the same direction at the same time”.
To prove this, Steiger, Neukom and colleagues turned to a newly created global database of climate records called PAGES 2k, which compiled nearly 700 measures of climate over the past 2000 years, based on such measures as tree rings, ice cores, growth patterns in coral reefs, cave deposits, and sediment records, from across the world.
From this, for example, they discovered that the coldest parts of the Little Ice Age hit the central and eastern Pacific in the fifteenth century, but didn’t hit major parts of Europe or North America until the seventeenth century – and were delayed in other parts of the world until the nineteenth.
Not that this means natural processes can’t produce simultaneous climate shifts.
But, unlike the multi-century shifts, these occur over time horizons of a decade or two, says Neukom, who led a separate study that used the same PAGES 2k dataset to look at shorter-term shifts in global climate.
What they found, Neukom says, is that in pre-industrial times these shifts were driven primarily by major volcanic eruptions, which blasted fine particles high into the atmosphere, producing a bright haze that reflects sunlight back into space, reducing the amount of heat reaching the Earth’s surface.
In yet another study, a team led by Stefan Brönnimann, also of the University of Bern, concluded that many of the impacts of even the Little Ice Age are the result of volcanic activity – specifically a cluster of five major eruptions that occurred between 1808 and 1835.
The most famous of these is the 1815 eruption of Indonesia’s Mt. Tambora – one of the most massive volcanic blasts in human history, and cause of what later became known in major parts of the Northern Hemisphere as “The Year Without a Summer”.
These blasts, Brönnimann, says, produced a “gear shift” in many parts of the world’s climate systems, producing, among other things, weak monsoons in Africa and India, and changes in ocean circulation that produced climate effects that reverberated all the way through the 1840s.
Among other things, these caused a southward shift in North Atlantic storms that dumped more snow in the Alps and contributed to advance of their glaciers, years after the last of the eruptions.
St. George adds that it’s also been suggested that the Medieval Warm Period might, in large part, have been created by a “long, quiet period” without major volcanic eruptions. “It sounds plausible,” he says.
As for the cause of the current warming period?
“We didn’t address the question of human causes,” Steiger says. “It’s implied, rather than explicit. There’s a lot of evidence that the contemporary period is human-caused. We don’t have to look at paleoclimate to look at that.”
Links
Events are happening globally and simultaneously, research shows.
Modern climate change is starkly different because more than 98% of the Earth is warming simultaneously, research shows. AUSCAPE / GETTY IMAGESClimate-change sceptics sometimes argue that there is no cause for concern from global warming because in the past 2000 years the world has already gone through several natural cycles of warming and cooling from which it has always rebounded on its own.
However, new research has found that rather than being global events, these natural cycles were actually regional changes that never affected more than part of the globe at any one time.
Furthermore, these warming and cooling patterns didn’t occur anywhere close to simultaneously in the parts of the world they did affect.
The findings are published in a suite of papers in the journals Nature and Nature Geoscience.
“Traditionally, the understanding is that there were globally coherent periods of climate variability,” says Nathan Steiger, a paleoclimatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, US, who was part of a study team led by Raphael Neukom, a climate researcher from the University of Bern, Switzerland.
“There was a cold period called the Little Ice Age [1300-1850 AD], a warm period called the Medieval Warm Period [800-1200 AD], and a couple of other periods as we go back further in time [the Dark Ages Cold Period, 400-800 AD, and the Roman Warm Period, 1-400 AD].
“But what we show is that these periods weren’t globally coherent, as previously thought.”
Modern climate change, on the other hand, is starkly different, not just because of the rapid rate of warming, but because more than 98% of the Earth is warming simultaneously.
“That very much stands out in contrast to the past 2000 years,” Steiger says.The reason this wasn’t discovered before appears to be that these multi-century warming and cooling epochs were best documented in Europe. So much so, that most of their names are tied to European history: Medieval Warming, Dark Ages Cooling, Roman Warming.
“It was easy to make the assumption that these changes were happening everywhere on the planet at the same time,” says Scott St. George, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Minnesota, US, who was not part of the study team, but wrote a supporting commentary in Nature.
“What this study has demonstrated is that less than half of the planet was being pushed in the same direction – whether warming or cooling – at the same time.”
Now, he says, “no matter where you go, everywhere is being pushed in the same direction at the same time”.
To prove this, Steiger, Neukom and colleagues turned to a newly created global database of climate records called PAGES 2k, which compiled nearly 700 measures of climate over the past 2000 years, based on such measures as tree rings, ice cores, growth patterns in coral reefs, cave deposits, and sediment records, from across the world.
From this, for example, they discovered that the coldest parts of the Little Ice Age hit the central and eastern Pacific in the fifteenth century, but didn’t hit major parts of Europe or North America until the seventeenth century – and were delayed in other parts of the world until the nineteenth.
Not that this means natural processes can’t produce simultaneous climate shifts.
But, unlike the multi-century shifts, these occur over time horizons of a decade or two, says Neukom, who led a separate study that used the same PAGES 2k dataset to look at shorter-term shifts in global climate.
What they found, Neukom says, is that in pre-industrial times these shifts were driven primarily by major volcanic eruptions, which blasted fine particles high into the atmosphere, producing a bright haze that reflects sunlight back into space, reducing the amount of heat reaching the Earth’s surface.
In yet another study, a team led by Stefan Brönnimann, also of the University of Bern, concluded that many of the impacts of even the Little Ice Age are the result of volcanic activity – specifically a cluster of five major eruptions that occurred between 1808 and 1835.
The most famous of these is the 1815 eruption of Indonesia’s Mt. Tambora – one of the most massive volcanic blasts in human history, and cause of what later became known in major parts of the Northern Hemisphere as “The Year Without a Summer”.
These blasts, Brönnimann, says, produced a “gear shift” in many parts of the world’s climate systems, producing, among other things, weak monsoons in Africa and India, and changes in ocean circulation that produced climate effects that reverberated all the way through the 1840s.
Among other things, these caused a southward shift in North Atlantic storms that dumped more snow in the Alps and contributed to advance of their glaciers, years after the last of the eruptions.
St. George adds that it’s also been suggested that the Medieval Warm Period might, in large part, have been created by a “long, quiet period” without major volcanic eruptions. “It sounds plausible,” he says.
As for the cause of the current warming period?
“We didn’t address the question of human causes,” Steiger says. “It’s implied, rather than explicit. There’s a lot of evidence that the contemporary period is human-caused. We don’t have to look at paleoclimate to look at that.”
Links
- 2,000 Years Of Records Show It’s Getting Hotter, Faster
- 40 years ago, scientists predicted climate change. And hey, they were right
- Two centuries of continuous volcanic eruption may have triggered the end of the ice age
- Climate Change Probably Added 4C To Europe's June Heatwave: Study
- Europe Heatwave Sees Temperatures Soar To Record Highs As Wildfires Take Hold In Spain
- Europe battling heatwave so hot it's causing chicken manure to combust and spark bushfires
- In pictures: Europe swelters through early summer heatwave
- Europe's hellish heatwave is caused by a high-pressure weather system unlike any ever seen before
- European heatwave could be the norm in a climate change affected world
- Europe is cooking in yet another heatwave. Our attempts to outrun climate change are futile
- Mont Blanc is melting and is a warning of our future as climate change sees the world's temperature rise
- Europe heatwave: Temperatures to hit 45C in France as death toll grows from 'enormous' bubble of Saharan air sweeping continent
- Record-breaking heat wave cooks Europe
- Michael E Mann: ‘The most villainous act in the history of human civilisation’
Categories: External websites
'Time To Rebel': Greta Thunberg Adds Voice To New Song By The 1975
The Guardian - Laura Snapes
On band’s latest single, 16-year-old activist urges young people to act on climate emergency
‘The rules have to be changed’ ... Greta Thunberg, left, with Matt Healy of the 1975 Greta Thunberg’s Speech
We are right now in the beginning of a climate and ecological crisis.
And we need to call it what it is. An emergency.
We must acknowledge that we do not have the situation under control and that we don’t have all the solutions yet. Unless those solutions mean that we simply stop doing certain things.
We admit that we are losing this battle.
We have to acknowledge that the older generations have failed. All political movements in their present form have failed.
But homo sapiens have not yet failed.
Yes, we are failing, but there is still time to turn everything around. We can still fix this. We still have everything in our own hands.
But unless we recognise the overall failures of our current systems, we most probably don’t stand a chance.
We are facing a disaster of unspoken sufferings for enormous amounts of people. And now is not the time for speaking politely or focusing on what we can or cannot say. Now is the time to speak clearly.
Solving the climate crisis is the greatest and most complex challenge that homo sapiens have ever faced. The main solution, however, is so simple that even a small child can understand it. We have to stop our emissions of greenhouse gases.
And either we do that, or we don’t.
You say that nothing in life is black or white.
But that is a lie. A very dangerous lie.
Either we prevent a 1.5 degree of warming, or we don’t.
Either we avoid setting off that irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, or we don’t.
Either we choose to go on as a civilisation or we don’t.
That is as black or white as it gets.
Because there are no grey areas when it comes to survival.
Now we all have a choice.
We can create transformational action that will safeguard the living conditions for future generations.
Or we can continue with our business as usual and fail.
That is up to you and me.
And yes, we need a system change rather than individual change. But you cannot have one without the other.
If you look through history, all the big changes in society have been started by people at the grassroots level. People like you and me.
So, I ask you to please wake up and make the changes required possible. To do your best is no longer good enough. We must all do the seemingly impossible.
Today, we use about 100 million barrels of oil every single day. There are no politics to change that. There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground.
So, we can no longer save the world by playing by the rules. Because the rules have to be changed.
Everything needs to change. And it has to start today.
So, everyone out there, it is now time for civil disobedience. It is time to rebel.Greta Thunberg has made her musical debut on a single by the 1975.
On a track called The 1975, a version of which traditionally opens each of the British band’s albums, the 16-year-old environmental activist restates her position on the need to act on the climate emergency.
Over minimal orchestral backing, Thunberg says: “We have to acknowledge that the older generations have failed.
"All political movements in their present form have failed. But homo sapiens have not yet failed. Yes, we are failing, but there is still time to turn everything around.”
She continues: “We are facing a disaster of unspoken sufferings for enormous amounts of people. And now is not the time for speaking politely or focusing on what we can or cannot say. Now is the time to speak clearly.”
Thunberg concludes: “So, everyone out there, it is now time for civil disobedience. It is time to rebel.” (Full text opposite.)
The proceeds from the track will go to Extinction Rebellion at Thunberg’s request. Thunberg is the first outside party to feature on a recording by the band.
The track was recorded in Stockholm in late June and is the first song to be released from the 1975’s forthcoming album, Notes on a Conditional Form.
The band manager and founder of the label Dirty Hit, Jamie Oborne, said the group and the label were making efforts to minimise their environmental impact.
Dirty Hit’s office has phased out all single-use plastic, will no longer produce plastic products including CD jewel cases and is working to minimise the impact of vinyl production.
“Rather than ignoring that it’s a pollutant, we’re minimising it by only doing lightweight vinyl from now on,” Oborne said.
“That isn’t very trendy, but one heavyweight LP is the equivalent of making two or three [standard thickness LPs].”
Dirty Hit’s CDs and vinyl are contained in paper packaging and not wrapped in non-degradable shrink wrap.
Oborne said they had sourced a biodegradable shrink wrap which they would integrate fully once their production plants had full access to it. The 1975’s next merchandise line will also be environmentally friendly, repurposing unsold merchandise into new garments.
Oborne dismissed peers’ suggestions that the organisation could be labelled hypocritical for taking a stance on the climate crisis before becoming 100% carbon efficient.
“That’s why we’re in this situation where everyone’s standing around and it takes a child to point out that we can make these changes,” he said, referring to Thunberg.
“We’re not going to have touring worked out in six weeks because everything’s working against you, but we are going to have it sorted out in a period of time, and 50% is better than nothing. If everyone pushes responsibility onto other people because they can’t completely solve [the issue], we’re already fucked.”
The track release follows Thunberg’s address to French politicians on 23 July, in which she urged them to “unite behind the science” of climate change.
After rightwing legislators said they would not attend her appearance at the National Assembly, she said youth climate activists have become “the bad guys” for stating “uncomfortable things”.
“Just for quoting or acting on these numbers, these scientific facts, we receive unimaginable amounts of hate and threats,” she said.
“We are being mocked and lied about by members of parliament and journalists.”
On 20 September, Thunberg and other young environmental activists will lead a climate strike around the world.
The 1975’s new album is the second in their Music for Cars series, which began in November 2018 with A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships.
The group will headline this year’s Reading and Leeds festivals in August.
Greta Thunberg addresses the French National Assembly in Paris on 23 July 2019.Photograph: JP Pariente/SIPA/Rex/Shutterstock
Links
On band’s latest single, 16-year-old activist urges young people to act on climate emergency
‘The rules have to be changed’ ... Greta Thunberg, left, with Matt Healy of the 1975 Greta Thunberg’s Speech
We are right now in the beginning of a climate and ecological crisis.
And we need to call it what it is. An emergency.
We must acknowledge that we do not have the situation under control and that we don’t have all the solutions yet. Unless those solutions mean that we simply stop doing certain things.
We admit that we are losing this battle.
We have to acknowledge that the older generations have failed. All political movements in their present form have failed.
But homo sapiens have not yet failed.
Yes, we are failing, but there is still time to turn everything around. We can still fix this. We still have everything in our own hands.
But unless we recognise the overall failures of our current systems, we most probably don’t stand a chance.
We are facing a disaster of unspoken sufferings for enormous amounts of people. And now is not the time for speaking politely or focusing on what we can or cannot say. Now is the time to speak clearly.
Solving the climate crisis is the greatest and most complex challenge that homo sapiens have ever faced. The main solution, however, is so simple that even a small child can understand it. We have to stop our emissions of greenhouse gases.
And either we do that, or we don’t.
You say that nothing in life is black or white.
But that is a lie. A very dangerous lie.
Either we prevent a 1.5 degree of warming, or we don’t.
Either we avoid setting off that irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, or we don’t.
Either we choose to go on as a civilisation or we don’t.
That is as black or white as it gets.
Because there are no grey areas when it comes to survival.
Now we all have a choice.
We can create transformational action that will safeguard the living conditions for future generations.
Or we can continue with our business as usual and fail.
That is up to you and me.
And yes, we need a system change rather than individual change. But you cannot have one without the other.
If you look through history, all the big changes in society have been started by people at the grassroots level. People like you and me.
So, I ask you to please wake up and make the changes required possible. To do your best is no longer good enough. We must all do the seemingly impossible.
Today, we use about 100 million barrels of oil every single day. There are no politics to change that. There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground.
So, we can no longer save the world by playing by the rules. Because the rules have to be changed.
Everything needs to change. And it has to start today.
So, everyone out there, it is now time for civil disobedience. It is time to rebel.Greta Thunberg has made her musical debut on a single by the 1975.
On a track called The 1975, a version of which traditionally opens each of the British band’s albums, the 16-year-old environmental activist restates her position on the need to act on the climate emergency.
Over minimal orchestral backing, Thunberg says: “We have to acknowledge that the older generations have failed.
"All political movements in their present form have failed. But homo sapiens have not yet failed. Yes, we are failing, but there is still time to turn everything around.”
She continues: “We are facing a disaster of unspoken sufferings for enormous amounts of people. And now is not the time for speaking politely or focusing on what we can or cannot say. Now is the time to speak clearly.”
Thunberg concludes: “So, everyone out there, it is now time for civil disobedience. It is time to rebel.” (Full text opposite.)
The proceeds from the track will go to Extinction Rebellion at Thunberg’s request. Thunberg is the first outside party to feature on a recording by the band.
The track was recorded in Stockholm in late June and is the first song to be released from the 1975’s forthcoming album, Notes on a Conditional Form.
The band manager and founder of the label Dirty Hit, Jamie Oborne, said the group and the label were making efforts to minimise their environmental impact.
Dirty Hit’s office has phased out all single-use plastic, will no longer produce plastic products including CD jewel cases and is working to minimise the impact of vinyl production.
“Rather than ignoring that it’s a pollutant, we’re minimising it by only doing lightweight vinyl from now on,” Oborne said.
“That isn’t very trendy, but one heavyweight LP is the equivalent of making two or three [standard thickness LPs].”
Dirty Hit’s CDs and vinyl are contained in paper packaging and not wrapped in non-degradable shrink wrap.
Oborne said they had sourced a biodegradable shrink wrap which they would integrate fully once their production plants had full access to it. The 1975’s next merchandise line will also be environmentally friendly, repurposing unsold merchandise into new garments.
Oborne dismissed peers’ suggestions that the organisation could be labelled hypocritical for taking a stance on the climate crisis before becoming 100% carbon efficient.
“That’s why we’re in this situation where everyone’s standing around and it takes a child to point out that we can make these changes,” he said, referring to Thunberg.
“We’re not going to have touring worked out in six weeks because everything’s working against you, but we are going to have it sorted out in a period of time, and 50% is better than nothing. If everyone pushes responsibility onto other people because they can’t completely solve [the issue], we’re already fucked.”
The track release follows Thunberg’s address to French politicians on 23 July, in which she urged them to “unite behind the science” of climate change.
After rightwing legislators said they would not attend her appearance at the National Assembly, she said youth climate activists have become “the bad guys” for stating “uncomfortable things”.
“Just for quoting or acting on these numbers, these scientific facts, we receive unimaginable amounts of hate and threats,” she said.
“We are being mocked and lied about by members of parliament and journalists.”
On 20 September, Thunberg and other young environmental activists will lead a climate strike around the world.
The 1975’s new album is the second in their Music for Cars series, which began in November 2018 with A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships.
The group will headline this year’s Reading and Leeds festivals in August.
Greta Thunberg addresses the French National Assembly in Paris on 23 July 2019.Photograph: JP Pariente/SIPA/Rex/Shutterstock
Links
- Teen Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Wins France's First Freedom Prize
- ‘They See Us As A Threat Because We’re Having An Impact’
- Greta Thunberg Thanks OPEC Chief For Complaining About ‘Threat’ Of Climate Activists
- When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Met Greta Thunberg: 'Hope Is Contagious'
- 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
- Greta Thunberg Became A Climate Activist Not In Spite Of Her Autism, But Because Of It
- The Uncanny Power Of Greta Thunberg’s Climate-Change Rhetoric
- The Guardian View On Greta Thunberg: Seizing The Future
- Greta Thunberg Backs Climate General Strike To Force Leaders To Act
- ‘We need everyone’: Greta Thunberg calls on adults to join climate strikes
- Germany’s AfD turns on Greta Thunberg as it embraces climate denial
- Greta Thunberg backs climate general strike to force leaders to act
- Humanity is at a crossroads, Greta Thunberg tells Extinction Rebellion
- Greta Thunberg hopes to join climate protests during London visit
- School climate strikes: 1.4 million people took part, say campaigners
- Additional Links
Categories: External websites
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