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Business, Insurers At Odds With Coalition's 'Problematic' Climate Policy

Lethal Heating - 21 January, 2019 - 20:22
AFR - Ben Potter

Last week global business leaders warned the World Economic Forum in a survey organised by insurance giants that climate change was the gravest risk facing the plant, eclipsing short term risks of political and economic instability.
"Of all risks, it is in relation to the environment that the world is most clearly sleepwalking into catastrophe," the survey of 1000 business people, policymakers and academics conducted by Zurich Insurance Group and Marsh & McLennan warned ahead of the forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
If that reflects the views of Australian business leaders, the Morrison government - which downgraded climate targets as a priority in August - could become the second Coalition government in little more than a decade to be wrong-footed by the politics of climate change during a bout of extreme weather.Wrongfooted on climate change, 12 years apart: Former Prime Minister John Howard (left) and Prime Minister Scott Morrison (right).  Alex Ellinghausen In late 2006, the Howard government took its cue from Business Council president Michael Chaney, who redefined climate change as a business risk, and from Coalition polling showing voters were being "catalysed by the drought", said Mark Triffitt, a political scientist who worked for the BCA at the time.
But it was too little too late, raising questions about whether it was a credible policy switch or a political bandaid in the face of Labor leader Kevin Rudd's climate policy onslaught, said political scientist Paul Strangio, of Monash University. Labor won the 2007 election so easily that Howard lost his seat.
"It became one of the issues [suggesting] that the Howard government was losing touch with the contemporary concerns of the electorate," Mr Strangio said.
Now there's another big dry and last week brought five of Australia's 10 highest mean maximum temperatures, a record 45.3 degrees Celsius for Albury, and record overnight minimums in Noona and Borrona Downs in NSW.
There's also an environmental disaster on the Murray Darling River with the deaths of a million fish being blamed on government mismanagement.
Government not doing enough
The Morrison government elevated cheap power over climate change as a priority when it ousted former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in August, and faces a Labor Opposition arguing voters don't have to choose between lower prices and emissions cuts because of falling clean energy costs.
Polling by Essential Media shows voters are more than twice as likely to think the government isn't doing enough on climate change than to think it is doing enough. Essential MediaAn Ipsos poll for The Australian Financial Review in November found 47 per cent of voters prioritised lower energy prices, ahead of 39 per cent prioritising emissions reductions.
But MPs from prosperous heartland Liberal seats in the inner eastern and southeastern suburbs of Melbourne - such as outgoing member for Higgins Kelly O'Dwyer, Goldstein MP Tim Wilson and beaten MP for the state seat of Hawthorn John Pesutto - didn't mention prices when they said the lack of a credible climate change policy was a big problem for the Coalition in the Victorian election.
Polling by Essential Media also shows that for at least three years, voters have been more than twice as likely to think that the government isn't doing enough on climate change than they are to think it is doing enough.
What can change is where climate change sits in voters' priorities, and its impact shouldn't be exaggerated, Mr Strangio said.
Climate change, which will likely cause more bushfires and extreme weather events, is increasingly considered the major long-term risk by business. Dean Sewell"If concerns about climate change intensify I don't think there is any doubt that it will be problematic for the Coalition government," Mr Strangio said.
But Nick Economou, also from Monash University, said that while it was true the Coalition was struggling to reconcile the attitudes of its inner city "elites" to climate change with those of its rural and regional constituents, "the appalling treatment of Malcolm Turnbull" was far more important in recent elections than climate change.
In Australia, Sean Walker, Zurich's chief underwriting officer in the general insurance division, warned the effects of climate change would have real impacts on business.
"Australian businesses should be building climate-change resilience and adaptation strategies into their broader business plans. These plans need to be real and tangible, not treated as some 'horizon three' or 'black swan' conceptual event but as something to be addressed as part of a new operating environment," he said.
The insurance industry has spoken out with increased urgency on the issue. In November, IAG's Jacki Johnson warned that if global temperatures rise 4 degrees on pre-industrial levels – as some models suggest they are on track to do – then the world could become "pretty much uninsurable".
Back in November 2006, after Chaney had said that business needed to tackle climate change, Howard told the BCA's annual dinner that the government now accepted the science of climate change and would set up an inquiry into a carbon emissions trading system.

Links
  • World Economics Forum: World ‘Sleepwalking Into Catastrophe’ Over Climate Risk
  • World Economics Forum 2018 Global Risks Report
  • Climate and tech pose the biggest risks to our world in 2018
  • Accelerating climate action
  • Australia's record heatwave: From fainting tennis players to dead fish
  • These 79 CEOs believe in global climate action
  • A deep dive into environmental risks
  • How climate change caused the world’s first ever empire to collapse
  • An unexpected weapon in the fight against climate change? Seagrass
  • How sustainable infrastructure can help us fight climate change
Categories: External websites

Immediate Fossil Fuel Phaseout Could Arrest Climate Change – Study

Lethal Heating - 21 January, 2019 - 14:29
The Guardian - 

The study found there is a 66% chance of staying below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels if immediate action is taken. Photograph: AlamyClimate change could be kept in check if a phaseout of all fossil fuel infrastructure were to begin immediately, according to research.
It shows that meeting the internationally agreed aspiration of keeping global warming to less than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels is still possible. The scientists say it is therefore the choices being made by global society, not physics, which is the obstacle to meeting the goal.
The study found that if all fossil fuel infrastructure – power plants, factories, vehicles, ships and planes – from now on are replaced by zero-carbon alternatives at the end of their useful lives, there is a 64% chance of staying under 1.5C.
In October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the difference between 1.5C of warming and the earlier international target of 2C was a significantly lower risk of drought, floods, heatwaves and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.
Christopher Smith, of the University of Leeds, who led the research, said: “It’s good news from a geophysical point of view. But on the other side of the coin, the [immediate fossil fuel phaseout] is really at the limit of what we could we possibly do. We are basically saying we can’t build anything now that emits fossil fuels.”
Nicholas Stern, of the London School of Economics, who was not part of the research team, said: “We are rapidly approaching the end of the age of fossil fuels. This study confirms that all new energy infrastructure must be sustainable from now on if we are to avoid locking in commitments to emissions that would lead to the world exceeding the goals of the Paris agreement.”
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, used computer models to estimate by how much global temperatures would rise if a fossil fuel infrastructure phaseout began immediately. The lifespan for power plants was set at 40 years, cars an average of 15 years and planes 26 years. The work also assumes a rapid end to beef and dairy consumption, which is responsible for significant global emissions.
In this scenario, the models suggest carbon emissions would decline to zero over the next four decades and there would be a 66% chance of the global temperature rise remaining below 1.5C. If the phaseout does not begin until 2030, the chance is 33%.
The analysis did not include the possibility of tipping points such as the sudden release of huge volumes of methane from permafrost, which could spark runaway global warming.
The scientists accept their scenario is at the extreme end of ambition, but said it was important to know that meeting the 1.5C target was still physically possible and dependent on the choices made now and in the coming years. “The climate system is not stopping you [hitting the target], global society is stopping you,” Smith said.
Other work, using a different approach, has also shown that keeping within the 1.5C limit is possible if radical action is taken immediately. In some sectors, zero-carbon technology already exists, such as renewable energy. But in others, such as aviation, it does not. “Maybe the solution here is flying less,” Smith said.
Prof Dave Reay, of the University of Edinburgh, who also was not part of the research team, said: “Whether it’s drilling a new gas well, keeping an old coal power station open, or even buying a diesel car, the choices we make today will largely determine the climate pathways of tomorrow. The message of this new study is loud and clear: act now or see the last chance for a safer climate future ebb away.”
Smith’s personal belief is that global heating will surpass 1.5C. “We are going the right way, but I don’t think we will do enough, quickly enough. I think we are heading for 2C to 2.5C.”
But he added: “If you don’t have a goal, you are not going to get anywhere. If you have a target that is really hard to achieve and you miss it slightly, that is better than wandering aimlessly into a future climate that is no good for anybody.”

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Ice Loss From Antarctica Has Sextupled Since The 1970s, New Research Finds

Lethal Heating - 21 January, 2019 - 14:29
Washington Post - Chris Mooney | Brady Dennis

An alarming study shows massive East Antarctic ice sheet already is a significant contributor to sea-level rise


Scientists say global warming nears an irreversible level, President Trump has been promoting business growth instead of climate change. (Jenny Starrs /The Washington Post)

Antarctic glaciers have been melting at an accelerating pace over the past four decades thanks to an influx of warm ocean water — a startling new finding that researchers say could mean sea levels are poised to rise more quickly than predicted in coming decades.
The Antarctic lost 40 billion tons of melting ice to the ocean each year from 1979 to 1989. That figure rose to 252 billion tons lost per year beginning in 2009, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That means the region is losing six times as much ice as it was four decades ago, an unprecedented pace in the era of modern measurements. (It takes about 360 billion tons of ice to produce one millimeter of global sea-level rise.)
“I don’t want to be alarmist,” said Eric Rignot, an Earth-systems scientist for the University of California at Irvine and NASA who led the work. But he said the weaknesses that researchers have detected in East Antarctica — home to the largest ice sheet on the planet — deserve deeper study.
“The places undergoing changes in Antarctica are not limited to just a couple places,” Rignot said. “They seem to be more extensive than what we thought. That, to me, seems to be reason for concern.”
The findings are the latest sign that the world could face catastrophic consequences if climate change continues unabated. In addition to more-frequent droughts, heat waves, severe storms and other extreme weather that could come with a continually warming Earth, scientists already have predicted that seas could rise nearly three feet globally by 2100 if the world does not sharply decrease its carbon output. But in recent years, there has been growing concern that the Antarctic could push that even higher.
That kind of sea-level rise would result in the inundation of island communities around the globe, devastating wildlife habitats and threatening drinking-water supplies. Global sea levels have already risen seven to eight inches since 1900.



The ice of Antarctica contains 57.2 meters, or 187.66 feet, of potential sea-level rise. This massive body of ice flows out into the ocean through a complex array of partially submerged glaciers and thick floating expanses of ice called ice shelves. The glaciers themselves, as well as the ice shelves, can be as large as American states or entire countries.
The outward ice flow is normal and natural, and it is typically offset by some 2 trillion tons of snowfall atop Antarctica each year, a process that on its own would leave Earth’s sea level relatively unchanged. However, if the ice flow speeds up, the ice sheet’s losses can outpace snowfall volume. When that happens, seas rise.
That’s what the new research says is happening. Scientists came to that conclusion after systematically computing gains and losses across 65 sectors of Antarctica where large glaciers — or glaciers flowing into an ice shelf — reach the sea.
West Antarctica is the continent’s major ice loser. Monday’s research affirms that finding, detailing how a single glacier, Pine Island, has lost more than a trillion tons of ice since 1979. Thwaites Glacier, the biggest and potentially most vulnerable in the region, has lost 634 billion. The entire West Antarctic ice sheet is capable of driving a sea-level rise of 5.28 meters, or 17.32 feet, and is now losing 159 billion tons every year.
The most striking finding in Monday’s study is the assertion that East Antarctica, which contains by far the continent’s most ice — a vast sheet capable of nearly 170 feet of potential sea-level rise — is also experiencing serious melting.
The new research highlights how some massive glaciers, ones that to this point have been studied relatively little, are losing significant amounts of ice. That includes Cook and Ninnis, which are the gateway to the massive Wilkes Subglacial Basin, and other glaciers known as Dibble, Frost, Holmes and Denman.
Denman, for instance, contains nearly five feet of potential sea-level rise alone and has lost almost 200 billion tons of ice, the study finds. And it remains alarmingly vulnerable. The study notes that the glacier is “grounded on a ridge with a steep retrograde slope immediately upstream,” meaning additional losses could cause the glacier to rapidly retreat.
“It has been known for some time that the West Antarctic and Antarctic Peninsula have been losing mass, but discovering that significant mass loss is also occurring in the East Antarctic is really important because there’s such a large volume of sea-level equivalent contained in those basins,” said Christine Dow, a glacier expert at the University of Waterloo in Canada. “It shows that we can’t ignore the East Antarctic and need to focus in on the areas that are losing mass most quickly, particularly those with reverse bed slopes that could result in rapid ice disintegration and sea-level rise.”
The new research is consistent in some ways with a major study published last year by a team of 80 scientists finding that Antarctic ice losses have tripled in a decade and now total 219 billion tons annually. That research did not find similarly large losses from East Antarctica, though it noted that there is a high amount of uncertainty about what is happening there.
“More work is needed to reconcile these new estimates,” said Beata Csatho, an Antarctic expert at the University at Buffalo who was an author of the prior study.
The bottom line is that Antarctica is losing a lot of ice and that vulnerable areas exist across the East and West Antarctic, with few signs of slowing as oceans grow warmer. In particular, Rignot says, key parts of East Antarctica, the subject of less focus from researchers in the past, need a much closer look, and fast.
“The traditional view from many decades ago is that nothing much is happening in East Antarctica,” Rignot said, adding, “It’s a little bit like wishful thinking.”
Icebergs and sea ice, seen from NASA's Operation IceBridge aircraft, off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula in November 2017. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)Links
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10 Climate Change Books To Help You Understand Our Environment

Lethal Heating - 21 January, 2019 - 14:27
Book Riot - 

In case you haven’t heard, a climate disaster is looming. The effects of climate change—like rising seas and intensifying weather patterns—are already here. Even though the worst is yet to come, there are still things that we can do to fight for our planet. One thing you can do right now is to educate yourself by reading climate change books.

▶ CLIMATE CHANGE BOOKS ABOUT SCIENCE

By the year 2050, Earth’s population will be closing in on 10 billion people. That’s a lot of mouths to feed. Journalist Lisa Palmer’s book Hot Hungry Planet digs into the possibilities of famine and food scarcity and the innovations that might save us all from hunger.
What will the future look like? The past may have a clue. Over the ages of our planet’s history, there have been five mass extinction events, one of which all but wiped out the dinosaurs. In the Anthropocene period, the next casualty may be us. In The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a closer look at the past to tell us more about our future.

▶ CLIMATE CHANGE BOOKS ABOUT HEALTH

We’re getting more used seeing images of stranded polar bears and hearing about our dwindling bee population, but most reporting on climate change leaves out what it can do to our own health. Linda Marsa’s Fevered delves into the increasing rate of illnesses associated with global warming, like asthma, allergies, and mosquito-borne diseases, just to name a few.
The past few generations have taken advantage of the planet, polluting the oceans, ravaging the land, and filling our skies with smoke. What were we thinking? In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh argues that we weren’t, we have been deliberately blind to the disasters looming in our future—until now.

▶ CLIMATE CHANGE BOOKS ABOUT PEOPLE

One of the scariest things about plastic is that it’s kind of immortal. It can churn in the ocean for hundreds of years before it finally breaks down. Humans fell in love with this toxic material in 1950s, and since then, it has managed to work its way into almost everything we touch. Susan Freinkel recounts this love story in Plastic by digging deeper into the ways plastic affects our lives and the life of the planet.
Originally published in 1988, activist Vandana Shiva’s seminal work, Staying Alive, explores the relationship between women and our natural world. In many places, the freedom of the women is directly related to a country’s outlook. More recent research has shown that women’s rights directly impacts sustainability. You could say that Shiva is the mother of that idea.

▶ CLIMATE CHANGE BOOKS ABOUT POLITICS

Research has shown that climate denialists do, in fact, have brains. It’s just that they haven’t been using them. We have been manipulated, and logic has been twisted to distort the truth. In The Madhouse Effect, climate scientist Michael E. Mann comes together with cartoonist Tom Toles to create a funny, sad portrait of the mad world we’re living in.
From the author of The Shock Doctrine, this book delves into the war between capitalism and the planet. In This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein argues something that many of us already know: we have to change our destructive habits that are rooted in capitalism. It may be the only way we can save our environment before it’s too late.

▶ CLIMATE CHANGE BOOKS ABOUT RACISM

Not everyone will experience climate change equally. The poor and working class are already disproportionately affected by the problems of climate change. In Dumping in Dixie, Robert D. Bullard, a professor and environmental justice activist, asserts that living in a healthy environment is a right for all Americans, regardless of their race, class, or social standing.
For years, poor and minority communities have found themselves becoming the dumping ground for businesses hoping to get rid of waste on the path of least resistance. Shockingly, entrenched segregation and zoning laws have paved the way to make this possible, making communities of color sick for years—literally.

▶ FURTHER READING ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Vince travels the world to see what extraordinary things ordinary people are doing to adapt and innovate to a changing climate. Part science, part travelogue.
Journalist Simran Sethi explores the cultural importance of certain foods and how we are in danger of losing them. About monocultures and the dangers of an increasingly standardized diet.
Squarzoni offers an explanation of global warming and climate change in graphic novel form. An accessible approach to learning about the science.
An explanation of why people reject the science behind climate change and why even when they accept it, they do nothing about it. An exploration of psychology and science both.
Check out all of McKibben’s many books on the environment and climate change. Eaarth describes what climate change will do to us and the ways we will need to radically change our lives to adapt.
On the dangers of fracking to the environment and to human health. The book also explores the history of fracking and the technologies that make it possible.
On the environmental impact of corporate globalization. Shiva argues for a shift in our thinking toward an earth-centered politics and economics.
On how a group of scientists and advisors spread misinformation and doubt about a range of scientific subjects. A good explanation of how we got to where we are today.
A religious and spiritual call for a closer connection with the earth. Maathai writes about helping women in Kenya plant and sustain trees and find a sense of empowerment and how we can find our own commitment to the environment.
Suzuki asks what humans really need to find fulfilling, meaningful lives. He offers concrete suggestions for creating an ecologically sustainable future and meeting humans’ most fundamental needs.
A description of what we should expect to happen to the planet as the temperatures rise.
Stephenson argues that what we need to deal with the climate crisis is not so much environmentalism but a struggle for human rights and social justice. He tells his own story and the stories of those on the front lines of that struggle.

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Pentagon Warns Of Dire Risk To Bases, Troops From Climate Change

Lethal Heating - 21 January, 2019 - 09:28
Bloomberg - Anthony Capaccio | Jennifer A Dlouhy | Ari Natter

▶ ‘Effects of a changing climate are a national security issue’
▶  The report to Congress is at odds with Trump’s position
Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Hampton, Virginia. Photographer: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty ImagesThe U.S. Defense Department has issued a dire report on how climate change could affect the nation’s armed forces and security, warning that rising seas could inundate coastal bases and drought-fueled wildfires could endanger those that are inland.
The 22-page assessment delivered to Congress on Thursday says about two-thirds of 79 mission-essential military installations in the U.S. that were reviewed are vulnerable now or in the future to flooding and more than half are at risk from drought. About half also are at risk from wildfires, including the threat of mudslides and erosion from rains after the blazes.
“The effects of a changing climate are a national security issue with potential impacts to DOD missions, operational plans and installations,” Defense Department spokeswoman Heather Babb said Friday in an email.
The report contradicts the view of President Donald Trump, who has rejected the scientific consensus that climate change is real and man-made. The report’s premise echoes the findings of the National Climate Assessment, written by 13 federal agencies and released in November. It concluded that the effects of global warming are accelerating and will cause widespread disruption.
Trump rejected those findings. “I don’t believe it,” he said at the time.
The new Defense Department report, which was mandated by Congress, describes widespread impacts, dispersed across the U.S., with more coastal flooding along the East coast and Hawaii.
U.S. military facilities are already encountering some of the effects, the Pentagon says, noting that Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia has experienced 14 inches of sea-level rise since 1930. And Navy Base Coronado in California already is subject to flooding during tropical storms.
In the Washington area, several Defense Department sites -- including Joint Base Andrews, home of Air Force One -- are experiencing drought conditions that have been severe in the past 16 years, the report says. Those conditions can lead to ruptured utility lines and cracked roads, the Pentagon warns, as moisture disappears from soil.
The Defense Department stresses in its report that it is working with nations around the world “to understand and plan for future potential mission impacts” from climate change, describing it as “a global issue.”
But Democratic lawmakers said the Defense Department pulled its punches by listing what Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, called a “phone book” of threats without offering a plan of action.
“It fails to even minimally discuss a mitigation plan to address the vulnerabilities,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith said in a statement. Committee member Jim Langevin said the Defense Department “for no apparent reason” omitted the threat to U.S. bases abroad.

Pentagon History
The Pentagon has long expressed concern over climate change and its military implications worldwide.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who resigned last month, had been at odds with Trump over climate change, telling Senate Armed Services during his confirmation process that “the Department of Defense must pay attention to potential adverse impacts generated by this phenomenon.”
“Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today," Mattis wrote in written responses to questions from the committee. “It is appropriate for the Combatant Commands to incorporate drivers of instability that impact the security environment in their areas into their planning.”
In 2013, Republican Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, who now is chairman of the Senate panel, pressed Admiral Samuel Locklear, who was head of U.S. Pacific Command, to say that his concerns about climate change were being misrepresented by “environmental extremists.”

Obama Administration
Instead, Locklear said about 280,000 people died in natural disasters in the Pacific region from 2008 to 2012. “Now, they weren’t all climate-change or weather-related, but a lot of them were,” the admiral said.
Under the Obama administration, responding to the effects of climate on the nation’s military was a top initiative, but the Trump administration has taken a different tack. Climate change was omitted in 2017 as a threat from the National Security Strategy, a list of the top dangers facing the nation.
“Given future global energy demand, much of the developing world will require fossil fuels, as well as other forms of energy, to power their economies and lift their people out of poverty,” the 2017 strategy said. “U.S. leadership is indispensable to countering an anti-growth energy agenda.”
Shortly after taking office, Trump revoked a memorandum that Obama signed in 2016, directing the Defense Department to account for climate change in its decisions about where to build new facilities and how it prepares for future threats.
Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking Democrat on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, responded by calling Trump’s decision to rescind the memorandum “a security disaster.”

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Australia Heatwave: Mass Animal Deaths And Roads Melting As Temperatures Reach Record High

Lethal Heating - 21 January, 2019 - 06:23
The Independent - Jane Dalton

One town endures the highest minimum night-time temperature ever recorded anywhere in the country


Flying foxes swoop into lake water to cool off during Australia heatwave 

Roads melted and doctors warned people about heat stress as Australia notched five of its 10 hottest days on record amid a searing heatwave.
One town in New South Wales recorded a night-time low temperature of 35.9C – the highest minimum temperature ever recorded anywhere in Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology said.
The extreme heat, which has hit the country for a week, has caused dozens of bushfires and bat deaths on a “biblical scale” in Adelaide, South Australia. More than a dozen people in that state have been taken to hospital due to heat, reports said.
Temperatures soared past 46C in parts of New South Wales on Friday, setting new records.
The state’s Bureau of Meteorology said a run of highest ever maximum temperatures were set in various places in the past few days.
The overnight minimum of 35.9C was recorded at Noona. “That’s an all time Australian record for the warmest night at any time of the year,” the bureau’s Ann Farrell said.
New South Wales Health warned in a statement: “Signs of heat-related illness include dizziness, tiredness, irritability, thirst, fainting, muscle pains or cramps, headache, changes in skin colour, rapid pulse, shallow breathing, vomiting and confusion.”
Officials have made an explicit link between climate change and the increasingly extreme weather being experienced by Australians.
The Bureau of Meteorology’s State of the Climate 2018 report warned of “further increases in sea and air temperatures, with more hot days and marine heatwaves, and fewer cool extremes” and blamed global warming for the change.
It also said Australia’s oceans were acidifying and sea levels rising.
An extreme heatwave affected the tropical Queensland coast just two months ago, in late November.
Forecasters have compared it to the nation’s worst heatwave in 2013, when temperatures reached 39C for seven consecutive days.
The hottest day on record for Australia is 7 January 2013, when the national average maximum temperature was 40.3C.
Meteorology chiefs also revealed this week that Australia had its hottest December day on record last month and that it was also the warmest December ever, as the heatwave got under way.
A slight reprieve is forecast over the weekend before the heat starts to build up again early next week.


Sir David Attenborough delivers The People’s Seat Address, COP24, Katowice, Poland

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‘It’s Like Hell Here’: Australia Bakes As Record Temperatures Nudge 50c

Lethal Heating - 20 January, 2019 - 14:06
The Guardian - 

Fears rise for homeless and vulnerable people as communities brace for another week of relentless hot weather
A sign warns bathers of the extreme heat on Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia.Photograph: Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty ImagesIt was 48.9C last Tuesday in Port Augusta, South Australia, an old harbour city that now harvests solar power. Michelle Coles, the owner of the local cinema, took off her shoes at night to test the concrete before letting the dogs out. “People tend to stay at home,” she said. “They don’t walk around when it’s like this.”
It’s easy to see why: in the middle of the day it takes seconds to blister a dog’s paw or child’s foot. In Mildura, in northern Victoria, last week gardeners burned their hands when they picked up their tools, which had been left in the sun at 46C. Fish were dying in the rivers.
Almost every day last week a new heat record was broken in Australia. They spread out, unrelenting, across the country, with records broken for all kinds of reasons – as if the statistics were finding an infinite series of ways to say that it was hot.
The community of Noona – population 14 – reached the highest minimum ever recorded overnight in Australia – 35.9C was the coldest it got, at 7am on Friday. It was 45C by noon.
A record fell on Tuesday in Meekatharra in Western Australia – the highest minimum there ever recorded (33C). Another fell on Wednesday, 2,000 miles away, in Albury, New South Wales – their hottest day (45.6C).
It was 45C or higher for four consecutive days in Broken Hill – another record – and more than 40C for the same time period in Canberra, the nation’s capital. Nine records fell across NSW on Wednesday alone. Back in Port Augusta, Tuesday was the highest temperature since records began in 1962.
Temperatures peak in towns across Australia
as heatwave shows no sign of letting up
Maximum daytime temperatures
Guardian graphic
In the Niagara Cafe in Gundagai, whose claim to fame is that the former Australian prime minister John Curtin once popped in during the second world war, Tina Loukissas turned off the deep fryer, then the grill.
“It feels like you’ve walked into a sauna,” she said. “When it’s getting up to 43C or 44C, because you have all these machines going, the air conditioning isn’t coping very well.
“We’ve got tables outside that nobody has sat at for the last couple of days … You’d be crazy to sit outside on a day like today.”
In Mildura, Tolga Ozkuzucu, owner of Top Notch Gardens, had the misfortune to be working outdoors.
“It’s been like hell,” he said. “You have to try to leave your tools in the shade. If you don’t, it burns your fingers. There’s not much you can do.
“I try to start as early as I can. I’m not going to risk my body and health. People here are very understanding of that because they know how hot it is … nobody wants to be outside when it’s 46C.”
In South Australia, they declared a “code red” across Adelaide, the state capital. Homelessness services were working overtime and the Red Cross started calling round a list of 750 people who were deemed especially vulnerable.
At the Australian Open in Melbourne, only the sea breeze kept the temperature below 40C. At Adelaide’s Tour Down Under, a bike race, it was 41C.
On Monday last week the hottest spot in New South Wales was Menindee, a river town that feeds the country’s largest water system, the Murray-Darling basin. It was 45C. It climbed to 47C on Wednesday, and by Thursday the fish were gasping.
Australia’s native Murray cod can live for decades under normal conditions, growing all the while. The oldest are a metre long, with heavy white bellies that have to be held with both hands. Last week, hundreds died, choked of oxygen due to an algal bloom that fed and grew in the heat, and collapsed when temperatures dipped.


'Bloody disgrace': '100-year-old' fish die in Darling River
Blue-green algae flourishes in hot, slow-moving water. Then, when temperatures inevitably drop, the algae dies and becomes a food source for bacteria, who multiply and starve the river of oxygen. The fish rise to the surface.
The mass fish death has reignited a debate over water management in the region, where cotton farmers upstream have been accused of taking more water than they should.
The heat is not the root cause, the locals stress. But the five punishing days settling over the river have not made it better. Last Thursday the cod were up near the surface and struggling. On Friday, it was 45C again. In Menindee, the locals believe the fish kill will happen again, with temperatures in the 40s expected to continue into this week. The water will be running hot.
But away from the Darling, Michelle Coles from Port Augusta says she is used to the heat.
“I didn’t think it was that hot yesterday, if you want an honest answer,” she said last Wednesday, the day after the temperature hit 48.9C.
“Yesterday at the cinema, it was very quiet. People tend to stay home. We’re quite used to it. Once it’s over 40, it’s hot.
“We’re conditioned to it. Honestly, I’d much rather be in 48C heat in Port Augusta than in the city. You’ve got so much concrete and it’s closed in, but here it’s quite open.
“You just don’t stand out in the sun though. That would be stupid.”

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2018 Was The Ocean's Hottest Year. We'll Feel It A Long Time.

Lethal Heating - 19 January, 2019 - 17:14
National Geographic - Alejandra Borunda

The ocean soaks up 93 percent of the heat of climate change. But that heat has a big and long-lasting impact.
The Arctic Ocean in Barrow, Alaska in June 2015, after the warmest winter on record in Alaska.Photograph by KATIE ORLINSKY, Nat Geo Image CollectionEarth’s oceans are warmer now than at any point since humans started systematically tracking their temperatures, according to research published on January 16 in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. The oceans have sopped up more than 90 percent of the heat trapped by human-emitted greenhouse gases, slowing the warming of the atmosphere—but causing many other unwelcome changes to the planet’s climate.
Even a slightly warmer ocean can have dramatic impacts. Other new research shows that warmer oceans make waves stronger. Warmer waters fuel stronger storms, increasing the damage that hurricanes and tropical storms inflict. The added warmth hurts coral habitats and stresses fisheries. Around Antarctica, yet another new study suggests, ice is melting about six times faster than it was in the 1980s—an increase due in part to the warmer waters lapping at the continent’s edge.
“The oceans are the best thermometer we have for the planet,” says Zeke Hausfather, an energy and climate scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who used the ocean heat data published today in an analysis published last week in Science. “We can really see global warming loud and clear in the ocean record.”


Antarctica Is Melting at a Dangerous Pace—Here's Why
Missing heat is now found
As early as the 1800s, scientists suspected that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere would cause air temperatures around the planet to rise. By the 1960s, once they started keeping careful track of both air temperatures and carbon dioxide levels around the world, their predictions were borne out.
The atmosphere didn’t seem to be warming quite as much as model calculations indicated it should, however. Where could the extra heat be going?
Some oceanographers suspected that the “missing” heat was being absorbed into the oceans—but measuring that heat was much harder than measuring air temperatures. Although research ships crossing the ocean would occasionally dip a probe into the water to test the temperature, those data were tiny blips in the wide expanse of the sea.
So scientists pulled together all data they could find, from observations from commercial ships to naval data to historical records. And when all that was compiled, the scientists realized that the oceans were, in fact, acting as an enormous buffer for the climate system, like a giant pillow softening the hard landing of climate change.
In the last decade, measurements of the ocean's heat content have been improved dramatically by a new tool: Some 3,000 autonomous sensors, called Argo floats, have been scattered around the ocean. They regularly record temperatures in the top 6,500 feet of the water column and have immensely improved the quality of the data scientists have to work with for these estimates.
Thanks to those measurements, it's now clear that the oceans are absorbing some 90 percent of the heat our carbon emissions have trapped in the atmosphere—the most recent estimate, published last week, pegs that number at 93 percent. If all the heat the ocean absorbed from 1955 onward were suddenly added to the atmosphere, air temperatures would rocket by more than 60 degrees.
In other words, the oceans are acting as a giant thermal buffer, protecting us from feeling all the heat of climate change directly. But the heat isn't going away.

The warming is speeding up
In 2018, the entire top slice of the ocean, from the surface down 6,500 feet, was warmer than ever before, just over one tenth of a degree Celsius warmer overall than the long-term average. Even that tiny bump was enough to nudge sea levels about an eight of an inch higher, simply because warmer water takes up more space.
But 2018 caps off nearly three decades of smooth, consistent warming, the cumulative results of which can be felt more keenly.
“The warming seems small on a day-to-day basis, but it adds up over time,” says Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and an author of today’s report. The extra energy pooling in the atmosphere slowly percolates into the ocean, and “and that’s why we keep breaking records year after year,” he says.
More alarmingly, over those last few decades, oceans warmed nearly 40 percent faster than they did in the middle of the last century, say the authors of the Science analysis from last week.
Since the Industrial Revolution, says Laure Zanna, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford who recently inventoried the ocean's growing absorption of extra heat, the amount of extra energy trapped in the ocean as a result of our greenhouse gas emissions is about 1,000 times as great as the amount of the energy humans use each year, worldwide.

What happens now lasts centuries
There’s essentially no limit to how much more heat from the atmosphere the oceans can absorb: they’re huge and deep. But the ocean has a long memory, and the heat it sucks up now will be stuck in the system for hundreds or even thousands of years: The ghost of a cold phase from a few hundred years ago in the North Atlantic is still floating through the world’s oceans, a study published in Science in early January showed.
So the decisions we make now will affect us far into the future, says Susan Wijffels, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod. “The ability of the deep ocean to take up heat on that very long timescale is great. But it's also locking in a commitment in the system,” she says. So even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, the ocean will continue to warm for centuries—and will take even longer to shed the extra heat.
The effects, say the authors of the new heat assessment, are likely to disrupt both marine physics and marine life. Warmer oceans hold less oxygen, which could hurt biota from plankton to whales. A warmer baseline temperature makes the likelihood of marine heat waves more likely, like the one that swept through the waters off northeast China last summer, ruining the sea cucumber harvest across the shallow seas. Zanna and her colleagues also see evidence that the major currents that carry heat and nutrients around the ocean are changing.
The full magnitude of the changes will take hundreds of years to play out, Wijffels says.
“Every molecule of CO2 that we don’t put into the atmosphere now is saving us from warming potential in the future,” she says. “This really drives home that we need to reduce emissions now, as much as we can.”

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Vaccinate Public Against Science Misinformation, Researchers Urge

Lethal Heating - 19 January, 2019 - 16:34
Cosmos - Andrew Masterson

If the battle for hearts and minds over climate change is to be won, simply being right is not enough.
The actions of then-EPA chief Scott Pruitt generated many protests, such as this one in New York in June 2018.Drew Angerer/Getty Images Setting up an information-based “inoculation” program may be an effective way of combating the deliberately misleading messages of the fossil fuel industry and its representatives, researchers say.
In a detailed essay in the journal Nature Climate Change, Justin Farrell and Kathryn McConnell from Yale University, and Robert Brulle from Brown University, both in the US, explore strategies that scientists and advocacy bodies can employ to ensure evidence, rather than ideology and financial self-interest, once more informs environmental and climate policy.
Key to this approach is the brutal realisation that there is no value in climate scientists and advocates simply repeating that the evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable, even though it is. It is not sufficient to have faith in the ultimate triumph of the good guys.
“It is not enough simply to communicate to the public over and again the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change,” the authors write.
“Nor is it ultimately effective to repeatedly engage in scientific debate with industry-funded scientists … or political pundits, hoping to debunk their spurious findings so that the public will finally see the light.
“Because, paradoxically, the partisan divide on climate change grew most rapidly at the very point at which the scientific community became virtually unanimous in its conclusions about the reality and risks of anthropogenic climate change.”
Climate change contrarians, and policy based on their industry-funded positions, at least in the US, are very much in the ascendant. Farrell and colleagues cite examples such as the decision by then-director of the Environmental Protection Authority Scott Pruitt to dramatically cut research – a position publicly advocated by coal industry lobbyist Steve Milloy, who called it “one of my proudest achievements”.
Milloy and Pruitt are just two of a host of people who in recent years have come to exert enormous influence on US policy – but dismissing them as hopelessly compromised buffoons, the authors caution, is a mistake.
“Many, especially climate scientists who have seen the evidence of warming first hand, wondered how we had reached this point,” they reflect.
“How had these once fringe actors, who tended to be overlooked and at times even laughed off as irrelevant bloggers, managed to embed their ideas so deeply into mainstream US politics?
“And how, over the course of the 1990s and 2000s, did half of the American public — and the large majority of the Republican Party and its supporters — increasingly lose trust in, and become so antagonistic towards, robust scientific facts with such dire consequences?”
Farrell and colleagues quickly answer their own question, taking two approaches.
First, they note a growing body of research that finds that evidence-integrity is only one of a range of factors that condition whether scientific studies are believed. Matters such as a person’s religious and political beliefs, ideas about the role of scientists, and trust – or absence thereof – in mainstream media outlets weigh heavily.
Second, they outline the careful and controlled strategies employed by the fossil fuel industry, the parliamentarians who accept funding therefrom, and the web of PR agencies and lobbyists paid by them to sow discord, division and uncertainty into the public discourse.
Much of this, they note, revolves around, pushing “scientific misinformation [that] can seem to be so accurate and reliable, or even part of a legitimate ‘grassroots’ movement”.
This is achieved, in large part, “via various communication channels, including academic journals, policy papers, press briefings, steering the media towards ‘false-balance’ coverage under the guise of presenting ‘both sides’ of an alleged ‘scientific debate’, personal attacks against prominent climate scientists and advertising to reach targeted audiences”.
Taking the need to counter this activity as self-evident, the writers explore four inter-related strategies.
Two of these, perhaps not surprisingly, involve using legal and political avenues – the first to expose, and thus devalue, the ties between industry and climate change contrarians, the second to better highlight positive developments such as large corporate and advocacy bodies divesting themselves of fossil fuel industry holdings, for either economic or ethical reasons.
The third approach, linked to the first two, revolves around financial transparency. It works on the assumption that exposing the complex financial arrangements between fuel companies and lobbyists will lessen the impact of the messages delivered.
The fourth, though, takes it start from public health policy and, if it works, has the potential to be self-sustaining. The writers term the strategy “public inoculation” or “vaccination”.
The idea – backed up, they say, by some small-scale studies – works “against misinformation by exposing people to a dose of refuted arguments before they hear them”.
“Similar to how a vaccine builds antibodies to resist a virus a person might encounter, attitudinal inoculation messages warn people that misinformation is coming, and arm them with a counter-argument to resist that misinformation.”
One approach to this, the writers suggest, involves making sure people hear that particular climate change contrarian messages – and messengers – are funded by coal corporations before they encounter them.
Early research, they note, has found that this method works on people from a wide range of backgrounds, and might thus be effective in breaking down political or religious opposition.
However, they add, these are early days in the attitudinal vaccination business.
“Inoculating the public may be an especially promising strategy for heading off misinformation campaigns before they take root, but future research on inoculation is needed to assess whether or not — and precisely how — this practice can be extended beyond experimental settings and applied more broadly to build up resistance to misinformation within large segments of the public,” they write.
Farrell and colleagues conclude that they are “hopeful” their suggested quartet of strategies “will prove to be successful in the long run”.
Many people, disheartened by current policy directions in the US, as well as in several other countries, including Australia, might feel that such hope is more quixotic than rational.
The writers, however, present their case with a sense of urgency, and a confidence that their approach will produce results “not only for turning the tide on the critical issue of climate change action, but also for preventing future cases of large-scale manipulation from taking root”.

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See You In Court, Citizens Tell Governments On Climate Change

Lethal Heating - 19 January, 2019 - 16:25
Reuters - Megan Rowling

Legal actions are based on the principle that governments must meet their obligations under human rights law and the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change
Environmental activists gather to urge world leaders to take action against climate change in Marseille, France, September 8, 2018. The placard reads No nature no future. REUTERS/Jean-Paul PelissierBARCELONA - Environmentalists in France and Ireland are pushing forward with legal cases aimed at forcing their governments to step up action on climate change, motivated by a 2018 flagship ruling that the Netherlands must cut emissions faster to keep its people safe.
In October, a Dutch appeals court said the government had "done too little to prevent the dangers of climate change and is doing too little to catch up", ordering it to ensure planet-warming emissions are at least 25 percent below 1990 levels by the end of 2020.
Tessa Khan, a lawyer with the Urgenda Foundation which brought the Dutch case on behalf of nearly 900 citizens, said this and other ongoing climate legal actions are based on the principle that governments must meet their obligations under human rights law and the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.
"(These cases) all spring from the same sort of inspiration and the broad notion that our governments have the duty to protect us from threats of this scale that they have contributed to knowingly," said Khan, who is co-director of the Climate Litigation Network.
In France, four non-governmental groups, including Greenpeace and Oxfam, fired the starting gun on Dec. 17.
They sent a "preliminary request for compensation" in a 41-page letter to the French prime minister and a dozen government ministers, denouncing the state for failing to take concrete and effective measures to combat climate change.
The government has two months to respond, and if it fails to give a satisfactory answer, the groups are preparing to file a full legal action with the Paris Administrative Court in March.
Armelle Le Comte, climate and energy advocacy manager at Oxfam France, said the ripple of lawsuits on climate action around the world - from Europe and North America to Pakistan and Colombia - reflected growing urgency as the impacts of extreme weather and rising seas become more visible.
Governments, including France, have talked a lot about tackling climate change, but have not done enough in practice, she noted.
"So I think it is not surprising that more citizens, charities and NGOs ... decide that legal action is maybe the answer," she said.

Celebs on camera
In the meantime, the NGOs have been raising awareness about the case and the need for stronger climate action in France through a YouTube video featuring celebrities such as actress Juliette Binoche, and writer and film director Cyril Dion.
They also launched an online petition in support of what they are calling the "Case of the Century" that has garnered nearly 2.1 million signatures in about a month.
Le Comte said wide public support for the legal action was important in providing a sense of legitimacy to the approach.
The case is particularly poignant in France, which has been rocked in recent months by "yellow vest" protests over social inequality and the high cost of living that were initially sparked by planned hikes in fuel tax.
French President Emmanuel Macron launched a national policy debate this week that includes how the country could shift to using more clean energy.
Urgenda's Khan said the court cases were aimed at ensuring emissions targets are met, not telling states how to do it.
"Then it's up to the governments and the public to make sure the policies that are put in place are ones that ensure a just (energy) transition and ... the poorest aren't the ones who bear the burden of that transition," she said.
Oxfam's Le Comte said the "Case of the Century" social media campaign was meant to provide more information, especially to young people, on the measures that could be taken.

Irish emissions rise
In Ireland, backers of the climate change case, scheduled to begin in the High Court on Jan. 22, are organising a children's rally in Dublin on Saturday to urge leaders that "2019 must be the year of ambitious climate action".
About 12,600 members of the public have backed "Climate Case Ireland" with online messages of support. Spokeswoman Sadhbh O Neill said awareness was growing in the country which has among the highest emissions per capita in the European Union.
"That helps us show the court that we have standing, that we're not doing it in a self-interested way and that we are trying to be representative of concerned citizens," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Friends of the Irish Environment, a company set up by environmental activists, will argue in the case that the government's approval of the National Mitigation Plan in 2017 violated national legislation on climate action, as well as its constitution and human rights obligations.
It will also claim the plan falls far short of the steps required by the Paris Agreement.
O Neill noted that Ireland's emissions had risen since 2014, as its economy recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, and its dairy industry expanded. They dropped back slightly in 2017, government figures show.
A spokesman for Ireland's Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment said by email that the government would defend the case, but noted the National Mitigation Plan recognised a detailed roadmap would be required to decarbonise the economy.
That is now being put in place, he added, and includes a government-wide climate action plan "intended to make Ireland a leader in responding to climate disruption".
The verdict in the Irish case, a judicial review, is expected to be issued in a few months, while the French legal process could last two to three years, Le Comte said.
In the Netherlands, it took three years for an initial ruling to be confirmed by the appeals court, and the government said in November it would request a review of the judgement.
Khan said one key advantage of pursuing states in court was judicial scrutiny of the evidence on climate change.
"Just by putting the facts on the record - that in itself is a really important communication tool, and helps to mobilise the public around climate change," she said.

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Dead Stinking Fish Send A Message

Lethal Heating - 19 January, 2019 - 11:19
Canberra Times - Jack Waterford

Any halfway decent political opportunist would use this week's images of dead and dying Murray cod and other fish in the Menindee Lakes to put the environment and climate change at the forefront of the election campaign. The fact that the weather has been warmish, even by Goodooga standards, doesn't do any harm either.
The images have an emotive energy often lacking in many of the impassioned debates about places we care about which are fairly far away, and which have become almost abstractions for the feeling that we ought to be doing something – at the very least, something more than we have been doing.


Thousands of fish have died at the Menindee Weir Pool.

Straight off, the dead and stinking fish could symbolise the mismanagement, maladministration and corruption of water policy in Queensland, NSW and Victoria. It doesn't take a great deal of extension to work it into an argument about the National Party's intellectual and moral bankruptcy, particularly under former leader Barnaby Joyce, and its complete unfitness to govern. Rural folk increasingly feel that way, wondering how a party established to represent rural and regional Australians became instead available for rent to big mining interests, the coal industry, the fracking industry and large-scale agribusiness, particularly when these interests threaten their livelihoods.
But the Nationals are only the obvious culprits. Look, for example, at Malcolm Turnbull, who had a spell as minister in charge of saving the Murray and Darling river systems a bit more than a decade ago, and knew so much about the topic that he and John Howard were able to concoct a river water policy, costing billions of dollars, on the back of an envelope over a couple of afternoons, without even feeling the need to consult the Treasury, which, Turnbull said contemptuously, knew nothing about the subject.
One of the many things that Turnbull learned during his period as water flâneur in chief was the wisdom of successive conservative prime ministers in keeping water policy out of the hands of Nationals ministers. Not even Tony Abbott was tempted to hand it over – probably on the advice of former senator Bill Heffernan, a farmer with some tolerance for human weakness but never for waste or mismanagement of a scarce water supply. After Turnbull knifed Abbott, to general applause, Joyce popped around to remind him that Coalition agreements were between leaders, not parties, and that continuing the alliance would need to involve some Liberal concessions. When Turnbull announced his ministry, water was with Joyce at agriculture, and that department further refined its habit of looking away and doing nothing when policy became imperial, and when enforcement of the law, or even implementation of it, came to be regarded as a matter of discretion.
But one does not need to dwell long on the dead fish to think also of climate change, and the Morrison government's inertia on the subject, not least because a good proportion of the Coalition doesn't actually believe in it or, at least, in doing anything brave or courageous, or ahead of anybody else, about it. And also of drought, and extreme weather, neither in the least bit unusual in the Australian environment, but both seeming to come more regularly, and with solid evidence of increasing averages. Perhaps the population is not completely certain about what to do to ward off the effects of climate change, and how much of whatever it is is necessary, but opinion polls suggest that most Australians believe we should do a good deal more, and with a more explicit sense of urgency, than the present government.
Some of the thousands of dead fish in the Darling River near Menindee. Credit:Nick MoirOne does not have to segue far off the dead fish, the drought or climate change theme to think of the Great Barrier Reef, and the threat posed to it by rising temperatures, caused not least by coal. The government's response to this crisis appears to involve enabling (if not yet financing, though it may come to that) a large coal-mining project nearby, and giving nearly $500 million to a club of rich executives, chiefly from the mining industry, who think they can commission work, perhaps with some private sector help, that will tackle some of the evidences of the effects of climate change, if not actually do anything about it.
The power of the images is such that they could be harnessed for messages against the Coalition, or for the Labor Party, which is saying mostly the right things about climate change, if not necessarily about water policy or Adani, or for the Greens or environmental candidates. The fish don't need a detailed inquest: just by themselves, they show that something has gone very badly wrong.
It says something about the political ineptness of federal and state Nationals ministers, including Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack, that he insists that the fish deaths are the effects of drought rather than policy, or of drought accompanied by abrupt changes in temperature. No doubt these have played their part in the catastrophe but, as usual along the Darling system, the problem is much more complicated than that, and owes much to the overallocation of water to irrigation farmers, particularly along the Macquarie and Barwon rivers, to the failures of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, not least (from the start) in failing to prioritise the environment ahead of agricultural needs, and to rorting of the whole system, with the connivance of public service regulators, particularly in the NSW government. That federal ministers and some public servants in the primary industry department see their function as facilitating agriculture and maximising its export revenue has also led to the corruption of the public stewardship they were supposed to deliver to the whole community.
One reason the symbolism of the fish deaths has the power to sound in votes is that the division of scarce resources inevitably involves rationing, winners and losers, and people who argue about what should be rationed. The Four Corners report last year, which showed some big farmers stealing water, acquired some of its moral force from the fact that the rorters were dobbed in by neighbours as well as by folk nearby. They were angry and resentful not only because the rorters were taking water for free while they paid for it, but because the rorting of the supply meant a diminished total supply. That's quite apart from the fact that many farmers are keen fishers, well-versed in their local environments, and want to live sustainably in them, rather than by mining its water supplies and raping the soil.
But that's just in the immediate neighbourhood. In any river system, there are folk upstream and downstream, particularly downstream, who will gripe that their allocations have been reduced because too much water has been taken upstream. They are often right, even within a state. But there has been a long pattern of farmers within an upstream state taking more than they should, to the ultimate disadvantage of downstream states, particularly South Australia. That's a problem aggravated by physical constraints, including weirs that often prevent water flowing downstream, by very poor Commonwealth policy and management of efficiencies to save water, and by evaporation.
Given the original overallocations of water licences to irrigators, the Commonwealth began buying allocations (from "willing sellers" on the water market). But this was unpopular in some areas, with claims (by no means substantiated) that the sale of irrigation licences was depopulating communities and reducing their resources. The present government prefers to spend public money subsidising farmers to increase the efficiency of their water use, thus liberating some water for the environment. There are problems with this approach. First, the cost of the water "liberated" for the environment by such measures is nearly three times that of water liberated through buying allocations on the open market, the supposed ideal distributing mechanism. Second, the economic benefit from the subsidised infrastructure and efficiency mechanisms goes to the individual farmer, rather than to a district or the public at large. In a real sense, neighbours can be economically disadvantaged because they are unable to grow food or cotton at the cost of the neighbours whose "investment" in better methods was heavily subsidised.
That has also brought to light other inequities. Last year in NSW, the government announced measures to "borrow" water from the environmental reservation because of the dought's severity. Listening to the blather coming from the Nationals, one would have understood the announcement as suggesting that some water was being liberated so farmers and graziers could get minimal supplies for thirsty sheep, or to round off a crop almost ready for harvest.
But the extra water, better characterised as water stolen rather than borrowed, was not rationed out to the needy. It was auctioned out to the highest bidder – usually to better-off farmers not suffering as greatly from the drought and thus in a better position to bid high. Some water, indeed, went upstream to farmers not actually in drought at all. And some of the crops "topped off" were not crops planned and planted as possible from diminishing allocations as drought took hold, but extra speculative planting, just in case there was late rain.
The South Australian royal commission into the management of the Murray-Darling system, being conducted by Bret Walker, SC, should soon report. Set up in response to anger about its very junior status at the table, it has had minimal cooperation from the Commonwealth (which ordered that the basin authority, and its staff and board members, not give evidence). The commission has had only token cooperation from the states.
But that has not meant that it has been purely parochial, or that the evidence before it has been skewed to South Australian matters or interests. For starters, there are many players, including irrigators and farming interests from other states, who were keen to give evidence and to describe their problems. There have been retired basin workers and regulators, and former CSIRO staff still angry about how managers caved in to politicians and changed scientific calculations of water needs to suit political agendas. There has been abundant evidence showing the authority's setting and subsequent reduction of sustainable environmental allocations not in response to any scientific analysis but to calculations of what interest groups might accept. After the interests complained about the initial determination that a minimum 3000 gigalitres of water a year was needed to meet environmental water requirements, the authority was told to "pick a number with a '2' in front of it". It settled for 2750 gigalitres, but despite all of the fad words about science, accountability and transparency, has been unable, since its establishment, to show how it arrived at either figure. Expert advice from scientists is that the minimum environmental allocation should have been 6900 gigalitres in an average year, that there was Buckley's of satisfying the environmental needs with an allocation of 3000, let alone 2750.
It is typical of the mendacity of NSW's participation in the scheme that it came up with a rort to meet demands for a higher environmental flow. It wants to close up the Menindee Lakes, leaving only a narrow channel by which the water can go downstream. After all, it argues, the water in the lakes (when it is there) only evaporates. Would it be better if, instead, it was sent to those whingeing crow-eaters, without actually disturbing the standard of living of NSW agribusiness upstream. Local farmers, as well as the city of Broken Hill, which draws its water from the lakes, are furious, some insisting that the evaporation causes local weather in any event, but also speaking of the lakes' importance as a wetlands site, a sanctuary for birds, a breeding place for fish (if there are any left) and as a sieve settling some of the dirty water. The basin does not appear to be much of a player in the argument involved, even from its duty as the ultimate protector of the riverine environment.
But it seems certain that Bret Walker will hold that the then Commonwealth solicitor-general was wrong when he advised Tony Burke, when the authority was set up, that protecting the environment was only one aim in basin management. Equally important were social and economic considerations.
Walker, and the counsel assisting the royal commission, are certain that this interpretation is wrong. Indeed, they say that every senior constitutional lawyer consulted shares this view. The authority is first required to establish the basin's minimum environmental needs. Only after that can it set allocations for irrigation, or for domestic use in towns and elsewhere.
Walker plainly thinks the misinterpretation of the Water Act's clear instructions has led the authority to think it must perform some political juggling act, by which it ends up with some solution that causes all of the vested interests least trouble. As such, the authority has failed miserably, and compounded rather than alleviated the rivers' problems.
The counsel assisting, Richard Beasley, SC, has not been kind to the authority or its board. He quoted senior international scientists who said it was a fundamental tenet of good governance that scientists produced facts and that government decided on values and made choices. They were concerned that scientists in the authority felt pressured "to trim [the facts] so that the sustainable diversion limit will be one that is politically acceptable".
Beasley said that if all the Murray-Darling Basin Authority had done over the past eight years was to "trim the facts", it would be bad enough.
"But it's worse than that. The implementation of the basin plan has been marred by maladministration. By that I mean mismanagement by those in charge of the task at the basin authority, its executives and its board, and the consequent mismanagement of huge amounts of public funds. The responsibility for that ... falls on both past and present executives of the MDBA and its board."
There are many guilty parties, and few deserve to be spared. Fish rot from the top, it is said.

Links
  • Dead fish could stink up the election campaign
  • NSW Labor demands water management inquiry after massive fish kill'
  • Animal welfare crisis': The fate of creatures trapped in Menindee bog
  • Dead fish in Menindee are about mismanagement not drought
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