Feed aggregator
How 34,500 Tonnes Of Food Waste Is Powering Melbourne Homes
Herald Sun
Less than two years after Victoria’s first waste-to-energy facility opened in Wollert, the plant is proving the system of transforming food to power is a sustainable way to address climate change and food waste.
Sitting next to Yarra Valley Water’s Aurora sewage treatment plant, the ReWaste factory receives about 140 tonnes of waste from 20 food manufacturers, supermarkets, shopping centres, and fruit and vegetable wholesalers each day.
The plant converts everything from fruit to airline catering waste into energy.ReWaste services manager Damien Bassett said among the rotting apple cores and expired products, the four full-time staff members at the facility also converted airline catering waste, dehydrated egg waste and vaccine by-products into energy.
“ReWaste treats food waste via a biological process called anaerobic digestion,” waste to energy services manager Damien Bassett said.
“This process produces biogas, mainly made up of methane, which is converted to electricity via our combined heat and power engines.
“This electricity is then used to power our facility and our neighbouring treatment plant with the remainder being exported to the grid.”
Second Facility
The 34,500 tonnes of waste processed since the plant opened produced 7.8 million kWh of energy, 70 per cent of which has been fed back to the grid.
The amount of waste diverted from the landfill equated to growing over 1.2 million tree seedlings across 10 years, Mr Bassett said.
Yarra Valley Water managing director Pat McCafferty said the facility was proving so efficient plans had already begun for a second facility, about 1.5 times bigger than the current one, to be operational within “the next couple of years”.
ReWaste services manager Damien Bassett at the Wollert plant.When both facilities run at full capacity, they would generate 50 per cent of YVW’s energy needs.
Combined with large scale solar projects, the Wollert plants would enable YVW to operate on 100 per cent renewable energy by 2025, Mr McCafferty said.
Links
Less than two years after Victoria’s first waste-to-energy facility opened in Wollert, the plant is proving the system of transforming food to power is a sustainable way to address climate change and food waste.
Sitting next to Yarra Valley Water’s Aurora sewage treatment plant, the ReWaste factory receives about 140 tonnes of waste from 20 food manufacturers, supermarkets, shopping centres, and fruit and vegetable wholesalers each day.
The plant converts everything from fruit to airline catering waste into energy.ReWaste services manager Damien Bassett said among the rotting apple cores and expired products, the four full-time staff members at the facility also converted airline catering waste, dehydrated egg waste and vaccine by-products into energy.
“ReWaste treats food waste via a biological process called anaerobic digestion,” waste to energy services manager Damien Bassett said.
“This process produces biogas, mainly made up of methane, which is converted to electricity via our combined heat and power engines.
“This electricity is then used to power our facility and our neighbouring treatment plant with the remainder being exported to the grid.”
Second Facility
The 34,500 tonnes of waste processed since the plant opened produced 7.8 million kWh of energy, 70 per cent of which has been fed back to the grid.
The amount of waste diverted from the landfill equated to growing over 1.2 million tree seedlings across 10 years, Mr Bassett said.
Yarra Valley Water managing director Pat McCafferty said the facility was proving so efficient plans had already begun for a second facility, about 1.5 times bigger than the current one, to be operational within “the next couple of years”.
ReWaste services manager Damien Bassett at the Wollert plant.When both facilities run at full capacity, they would generate 50 per cent of YVW’s energy needs.
Combined with large scale solar projects, the Wollert plants would enable YVW to operate on 100 per cent renewable energy by 2025, Mr McCafferty said.
Links
- Waste to Energy
- Norwegian Waste-to-Energy: Climate change, circular economy and carbon capture and storage
- Waste to energy for a low emissions future
- Climate Change and the Resource Recovery and Waste Sectors
- Waste-to-energy - Wikipedia
Categories: External websites
Climate Change Could Make Insurance Too Expensive For Most People – Report
The Guardian - Arthur Neslen
Munich Re, world’s largest reinsurance firm, warns premium rises could become social issue
An aerial view of a neighbourhood destroyed by the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Insurers have warned that climate change could make cover for ordinary people unaffordable after the world’s largest reinsurance firm blamed global warming for $24bn (£18bn) of losses in the Californian wildfires.
Ernst Rauch, Munich Re’s chief climatologist, told the Guardian that the costs could soon be widely felt, with premium rises already under discussion with clients holding asset concentrations in vulnerable parts of the state.
“If the risk from wildfires, flooding, storms or hail is increasing then the only sustainable option we have is to adjust our risk prices accordingly. In the long run it might become a social issue,” he said after Munich Re published a report into climate change’s impact on wildfires. “Affordability is so critical [because] some people on low and average incomes in some regions will no longer be able to buy insurance.”
The lion’s share of California’s 20 worst forest blazes since the 1930s have occurred this millennium, in years characterised by abnormally high summer temperatures and “exceptional dryness” between May and October, according to a new analysis by Munich Re.
Wetter and more humid winters spurred new forest growth which became tinder dry in heatwave conditions that preceded the wildfires, the report’s authors said.
After comparing observational data spanning several decades with climate models, the report concluded that the wildfires, which killed 85 people, were “broadly consistent with climate change”.
Nicolas Jeanmart, the head of personal insurance, general insurance and macroeconomics at Insurance Europe, which speaks for 34 national insurance associations, said the knock-on effects from rising premiums could pose a threat to social order.
“The sector is concerned that continuing global increases in temperature could make it increasingly difficult to offer the affordable financial protection that people deserve, and that modern society requires to function properly,” he said.
Munich Re’s insurance cover in hurricane-prone regions such as Florida is already higher than in northern Europe, by an order of magnitude.
Premiums are also being adjusted in regions facing an increased threat from severe convective storms which hold an energy and severity primed by global warming. These include parts of Germany, Austria, France, south-west Italy and the US midwest.
Increases in the intensity and frequency of California’s wildfire season are predicted by climate models, and the Munich Re analysis combines monthly meteorological data with financial losses to graph the trend’s rise since 2001.
Average annual wildfire losses trailed well below $5bn even within this millennium, until 2017 and 2018, when they leapt to more than $20bn. Munich Re believes that global warming made a “significant contribution” to this.
No insurer has linked wildfires to climate change before, although a Lloyds report into Superstorm Sandy in 2014 found that global warming-linked sea level rises had increased surge losses around Manhattan by 30%.
Climate scientists say that linking extreme weather events to climate change is akin to attributing the performance of a steroid-taking sportsman to drug use – the connections are clearer in patterns than in individual disasters.
Paul Fisher, the Bank of England’s former coordinator on climate change, and a fellow at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, said: “In general, one can’t prove that a single event is the result of climate change but it is likely to cause more such events of greater severity.”
“It is very interesting if insurers conclude that climate change was a significant contributory factor to the event and will make the insurance companies think carefully about the pricing and availability of similar insurance policies.”
It may also influence several court cases testing the liability of fossil fuel companies for the effects of global warming.
Dr Ben Caldecott, the director of Oxford University’s sustainable finance programme, said: “Company directors and fiduciaries will ultimately be held responsible for avoidable climate-related damages and losses and urgently need to up their game to avoid litigation and liability.”
Munich Re has divested its large thermal coal holdings. However, it maintains some gas and oil investments.
Links
Munich Re, world’s largest reinsurance firm, warns premium rises could become social issue
An aerial view of a neighbourhood destroyed by the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Insurers have warned that climate change could make cover for ordinary people unaffordable after the world’s largest reinsurance firm blamed global warming for $24bn (£18bn) of losses in the Californian wildfires.
Ernst Rauch, Munich Re’s chief climatologist, told the Guardian that the costs could soon be widely felt, with premium rises already under discussion with clients holding asset concentrations in vulnerable parts of the state.
“If the risk from wildfires, flooding, storms or hail is increasing then the only sustainable option we have is to adjust our risk prices accordingly. In the long run it might become a social issue,” he said after Munich Re published a report into climate change’s impact on wildfires. “Affordability is so critical [because] some people on low and average incomes in some regions will no longer be able to buy insurance.”
The lion’s share of California’s 20 worst forest blazes since the 1930s have occurred this millennium, in years characterised by abnormally high summer temperatures and “exceptional dryness” between May and October, according to a new analysis by Munich Re.
Wetter and more humid winters spurred new forest growth which became tinder dry in heatwave conditions that preceded the wildfires, the report’s authors said.
After comparing observational data spanning several decades with climate models, the report concluded that the wildfires, which killed 85 people, were “broadly consistent with climate change”.
Nicolas Jeanmart, the head of personal insurance, general insurance and macroeconomics at Insurance Europe, which speaks for 34 national insurance associations, said the knock-on effects from rising premiums could pose a threat to social order.
“The sector is concerned that continuing global increases in temperature could make it increasingly difficult to offer the affordable financial protection that people deserve, and that modern society requires to function properly,” he said.
Munich Re’s insurance cover in hurricane-prone regions such as Florida is already higher than in northern Europe, by an order of magnitude.
Premiums are also being adjusted in regions facing an increased threat from severe convective storms which hold an energy and severity primed by global warming. These include parts of Germany, Austria, France, south-west Italy and the US midwest.
Increases in the intensity and frequency of California’s wildfire season are predicted by climate models, and the Munich Re analysis combines monthly meteorological data with financial losses to graph the trend’s rise since 2001.
Average annual wildfire losses trailed well below $5bn even within this millennium, until 2017 and 2018, when they leapt to more than $20bn. Munich Re believes that global warming made a “significant contribution” to this.
No insurer has linked wildfires to climate change before, although a Lloyds report into Superstorm Sandy in 2014 found that global warming-linked sea level rises had increased surge losses around Manhattan by 30%.
Climate scientists say that linking extreme weather events to climate change is akin to attributing the performance of a steroid-taking sportsman to drug use – the connections are clearer in patterns than in individual disasters.
Paul Fisher, the Bank of England’s former coordinator on climate change, and a fellow at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, said: “In general, one can’t prove that a single event is the result of climate change but it is likely to cause more such events of greater severity.”
“It is very interesting if insurers conclude that climate change was a significant contributory factor to the event and will make the insurance companies think carefully about the pricing and availability of similar insurance policies.”
It may also influence several court cases testing the liability of fossil fuel companies for the effects of global warming.
Dr Ben Caldecott, the director of Oxford University’s sustainable finance programme, said: “Company directors and fiduciaries will ultimately be held responsible for avoidable climate-related damages and losses and urgently need to up their game to avoid litigation and liability.”
Munich Re has divested its large thermal coal holdings. However, it maintains some gas and oil investments.
Links
- Climate change threatens ability of insurers to manage risk
- Rising insurance costs may convince Americans that climate change risks are real
- Fossil Fuels on Trial: Where the Major Climate Change Lawsuits Stand Today
- 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
- Mark Carney Warns Of Climate Change Threat To Financial System
- 'Vulnerable': Climate Change Threatens Wollongong Homes, WIN Stadium
- Properties Could Become Harder To Insure And Prices Could Fall As Climate Change Takes Hold, Experts Warn
- Shareholders Target QBE Over Climate Change 'Failure'
Categories: External websites
Australia Has Enough Solar, Wind Storage In Pipeline To Go 100% Renewables
RenewEconomy - Giles Parkinson
On March 15, tens of thousands of school students went on “strike”, imploring politicians to finally Get Serious about climate change policies, and urging a switch to 100 per cent renewable energy by 2030.
Can’t be done, they were told.
Readers may remember, however, that ANU researchers Andrew Blakers and Matt Stocks in February said that if Australia continued at its current rate of wind and solar deployment, then enough to meet the equivalent of 100 per cent of the country’s electricity needs could be delivered by 2030.
Now, new research from the Norway-based research company Rystad says the pipeline of wind, solar and storage projects in Australia will likely reach 100GW before the upcoming federal election in May, including those in “concept” stage, and those seeking development approvals, already have DAs, have won contracts, are under construction, or are already built.
Of course, not all these projects will be built at the scale envisaged. There may be local issues, connection hurdles, financing challenges and market headwinds. But if they were, they would deliver enough megawatt-hours to deliver Australia’s current demand.
Of course, getting to 100 per cent renewables for electricity is not simply a matter of building lots of solar and wind farms. As Blakers and Stocks noted, it needs a plan, and it depends on where this capacity is built, and how it is connected. It also depends on how much storage there is, in both capacity and duration.
And such a dramatic switch would require a wholesale review of market rules and practices to deal with the new technology, and fast-response batteries in particular. Given that many developers could probably construct a small solar farm in the time it takes for regulators to agree on the change of a paragraph in the National Electricity Rules, this looms as a major hurdle.
And, it should be noted, even though nearly every utility and energy expert accepts that the energy transition is inevitable, there is still great debate about how quickly it could or should be done.
Still, the existence of such a huge pipeline of projects underlines the global and national interest in what is happening in Australia, and the depth of resources that can be exploited if the other issues are resolved.
Rystad describes the 100GW level as a “symbolic milestone” and says it follows a “blistering start” to the new year in which 6.65GW of new capacity from 62 assets were added to its data-base in January and February – more than double the capacity and number of assets that were added in the same period last year.
“This clearly shows the confidence investors have in Australia’s renewable future and possibly where the renewables sector sees the election outcome going,” says senior analyst David Dixon.
These new projects include an additional 2.9GW (AC) of large-scale solar, and another 1.4GW of wind. But it is the 2.4GW of storage (a rise of 25 per cent) that catches the eye.
The breakdown of the Rystad data base is as follows, and is also illustrated in the graph above. There is just over 40GW of solar in the pipeline, including 9.6GW of “concept”, 11.4GW awaiting DA approval, and 19.2GW approved. And about 5GW already built or under construction.
There is just under 30GW of wind in the pipeline, with 19.4GW in “concept”, 1.8GW in DA application and 8.5GW in DA approved. The difference in numbers shows the switch to solar technologies as it matches wind in price, and usually has less DA issues.
Storage is the big new player and is split between pumped hydro (PHES) and lithium-ion batteries. For PHES, there is 3.5GW in concept (which includes Snowy 2.0 because it has yet to get DA approval), another 500MW awaiting DA, and 500MW if DA approved.
Lithium-ion batteries have 1.2GW in the “concept” stage, another 2.3GW awaiting DA approval, and another 2.9GW with DA approval. “The battery pipeline has grown exponentially,” Dixon says.
The state break down clearly demonstrates that NSW is leading the way in aggregated totals, Queensland is dominated by solar projects, and South Australia – even though it is already at more than 50 per cent wind and solar – also matches Victoria and W.A.
South Australia is predicted, by the market operator, to install another wind and solar capacity to deliver the equivalent of 100 per cent of its demand as early as 2026 or 2027.
The concept projects include what might be described by some as thought bubbles and land and network prospecting.
But it also includes mostly serious ventures such as the giant Asia Renewable Energy Hub project in the Pilbara, backed by Vestas, Macquarie Group and CWP – which aims for some 11GW of wind and solar that could be exported to Asia, either directly via a sub-sea cable, or via a transportable fuel such as ammonia.
Other projects include the 4GW Walcha project in NSW, proposed by Energy Estate and Mirus Wind, which aims to combine huge amounts of wind, solar and storage for the biggest project proposed so far for the main grid, and the 2GW Star of the South offshore wind project in Bass Strait.
Would all of this be enough for 100 per cent renewables energy for Australia’s electricity needs?
“Easily,” says Ben Elliston, a co-author of one report into 100 per cent renewable energy options published by the UNSW three years ago.
Elliston says, however, there are a lot of different answers to what 100 per cent renewables might look like, and the work of his team has possibly been over-run by unexpectedly quick cost reductions in solar. “I would expect to see less wind and more PV if (the study) was repeated today.”
The ANU’s Blakers and Stocks say that 100GW should be sufficient, but reaching 100 per cent renewables will ultimately depend on the mix and the location, and to the amount of storage, and transmission available.
“The amount of storage we need to support this is well short at present,” Blakers says. “We need an additional 450GWh of energy with 20GW of power, which can come from a combination of pumped hydro, batteries and demand management.
“We also need quite a lot more transmission. However, the cost of this additional storage (+ associated transmission) is only about $25/MWh (considerably less than the cost of the PV & wind that it supports).”
And, there will also likely to be a need for more electricity, as electric cars become the main form of transport and as heat pumps and other technologies push oil and gas heating our of buildings.
Links
On March 15, tens of thousands of school students went on “strike”, imploring politicians to finally Get Serious about climate change policies, and urging a switch to 100 per cent renewable energy by 2030.
Can’t be done, they were told.
Readers may remember, however, that ANU researchers Andrew Blakers and Matt Stocks in February said that if Australia continued at its current rate of wind and solar deployment, then enough to meet the equivalent of 100 per cent of the country’s electricity needs could be delivered by 2030.
Now, new research from the Norway-based research company Rystad says the pipeline of wind, solar and storage projects in Australia will likely reach 100GW before the upcoming federal election in May, including those in “concept” stage, and those seeking development approvals, already have DAs, have won contracts, are under construction, or are already built.
Of course, not all these projects will be built at the scale envisaged. There may be local issues, connection hurdles, financing challenges and market headwinds. But if they were, they would deliver enough megawatt-hours to deliver Australia’s current demand.
Of course, getting to 100 per cent renewables for electricity is not simply a matter of building lots of solar and wind farms. As Blakers and Stocks noted, it needs a plan, and it depends on where this capacity is built, and how it is connected. It also depends on how much storage there is, in both capacity and duration.
And such a dramatic switch would require a wholesale review of market rules and practices to deal with the new technology, and fast-response batteries in particular. Given that many developers could probably construct a small solar farm in the time it takes for regulators to agree on the change of a paragraph in the National Electricity Rules, this looms as a major hurdle.
And, it should be noted, even though nearly every utility and energy expert accepts that the energy transition is inevitable, there is still great debate about how quickly it could or should be done.
Still, the existence of such a huge pipeline of projects underlines the global and national interest in what is happening in Australia, and the depth of resources that can be exploited if the other issues are resolved.
Rystad describes the 100GW level as a “symbolic milestone” and says it follows a “blistering start” to the new year in which 6.65GW of new capacity from 62 assets were added to its data-base in January and February – more than double the capacity and number of assets that were added in the same period last year.
“This clearly shows the confidence investors have in Australia’s renewable future and possibly where the renewables sector sees the election outcome going,” says senior analyst David Dixon.
These new projects include an additional 2.9GW (AC) of large-scale solar, and another 1.4GW of wind. But it is the 2.4GW of storage (a rise of 25 per cent) that catches the eye.
The breakdown of the Rystad data base is as follows, and is also illustrated in the graph above. There is just over 40GW of solar in the pipeline, including 9.6GW of “concept”, 11.4GW awaiting DA approval, and 19.2GW approved. And about 5GW already built or under construction.
There is just under 30GW of wind in the pipeline, with 19.4GW in “concept”, 1.8GW in DA application and 8.5GW in DA approved. The difference in numbers shows the switch to solar technologies as it matches wind in price, and usually has less DA issues.
Storage is the big new player and is split between pumped hydro (PHES) and lithium-ion batteries. For PHES, there is 3.5GW in concept (which includes Snowy 2.0 because it has yet to get DA approval), another 500MW awaiting DA, and 500MW if DA approved.
Lithium-ion batteries have 1.2GW in the “concept” stage, another 2.3GW awaiting DA approval, and another 2.9GW with DA approval. “The battery pipeline has grown exponentially,” Dixon says.
The state break down clearly demonstrates that NSW is leading the way in aggregated totals, Queensland is dominated by solar projects, and South Australia – even though it is already at more than 50 per cent wind and solar – also matches Victoria and W.A.
South Australia is predicted, by the market operator, to install another wind and solar capacity to deliver the equivalent of 100 per cent of its demand as early as 2026 or 2027.
The concept projects include what might be described by some as thought bubbles and land and network prospecting.
But it also includes mostly serious ventures such as the giant Asia Renewable Energy Hub project in the Pilbara, backed by Vestas, Macquarie Group and CWP – which aims for some 11GW of wind and solar that could be exported to Asia, either directly via a sub-sea cable, or via a transportable fuel such as ammonia.
Other projects include the 4GW Walcha project in NSW, proposed by Energy Estate and Mirus Wind, which aims to combine huge amounts of wind, solar and storage for the biggest project proposed so far for the main grid, and the 2GW Star of the South offshore wind project in Bass Strait.
Would all of this be enough for 100 per cent renewables energy for Australia’s electricity needs?
“Easily,” says Ben Elliston, a co-author of one report into 100 per cent renewable energy options published by the UNSW three years ago.
Elliston says, however, there are a lot of different answers to what 100 per cent renewables might look like, and the work of his team has possibly been over-run by unexpectedly quick cost reductions in solar. “I would expect to see less wind and more PV if (the study) was repeated today.”
The ANU’s Blakers and Stocks say that 100GW should be sufficient, but reaching 100 per cent renewables will ultimately depend on the mix and the location, and to the amount of storage, and transmission available.
“The amount of storage we need to support this is well short at present,” Blakers says. “We need an additional 450GWh of energy with 20GW of power, which can come from a combination of pumped hydro, batteries and demand management.
“We also need quite a lot more transmission. However, the cost of this additional storage (+ associated transmission) is only about $25/MWh (considerably less than the cost of the PV & wind that it supports).”
And, there will also likely to be a need for more electricity, as electric cars become the main form of transport and as heat pumps and other technologies push oil and gas heating our of buildings.
Links
- NSW goes to the polls as major parties go quiet on climate, renewables
- It’s time Australia got serious about shift to 100% renewables
- Renewable thermal solution provides green alternative for gas-hungry industries
- UNSW says home hydrogen storage for rooftop solar could be real by 2020
- The world may be nursing a gas bomb
- Telstra flags plans to underwrite 300MW of new solar, wind
- Old Toyota car plant to become green hydrogen hub, with backing of ARENA
Categories: External websites
Expanding Gas Mining Threatens Our Climate, Water And Health
The Conversation - Melissa Haswell | David Shearman
Unconventional gas wells are being approved in their thousands across Australia. AAP Image/Dean LewinsAustralia, like its competitors Qatar, Canada and the United States, aspires to become the world’s largest exporter of gas, arguing this helps importing nations reduce their greenhouse emissions by replacing coal.
Yes, burning gas emits less carbon dioxide than burning coal. Yet the “fugitive emissions” – the methane that escapes, often unmeasured, during production, distribution and combustion of gas – is a much more potent short-term greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
A special report issued by the World Health Organisation after the 2018 Katowice climate summit urged governments to take “specific commitments to reduce emissions of short-lived climate pollutants” such as methane, so as to boost the chances of staying with the Paris Agreement’s ambitious 1.5℃ global warming limit.
Current gas expansion plans in Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland, where another 2,500 coal seam gas wells have been approved, reveal little impetus to deliver on this. Harvesting all of WA’s gas reserves would emit about 4.4 times more carbon dioxide equivalent than Australia’s total domestic energy-related emissions budget.
Gas as a cause of local ill-health
There are not only global, but also significant local and regional risks to health and well-being associated with unconventional gas mining. Our comprehensive review examines the current state of the evidence.
Since our previous reviews (see here, here and here), more than 1,400 further peer-reviewed articles have been published, helping to clarify how expanding unconventional gas production across Australia risks our health, well-being, climate, water and food security.
This research has been possible because, since 2010, 17.6 million US citizens’ homes have been within a mile (1.6km) of gas wells and fracking operations. Furthermore, some US research funding is independent of the gas industry, whereas much of Australia’s comparatively small budget for research in this area is channelled through an industry-funded CSIRO research hub.
Key medical findings
There is evidence that living close to unconventional gas mining activities is linked to a wide range of health conditions, including psychological and social problems.
The US literature now consistently reports higher frequencies of low birth weight, extreme premature births, higher-risk pregnancies and some birth defects, in pregnancies spent closer to unconventional gas mining activities, compared with pregnancies further away. No parallel studies have so far been published in Australia.
US studies have found increased indicators of cardiovascular disease, higher rates of sinus disorders, fatigue and migraines, and hospitalisations for asthma, heart, neurological, kidney and urinary tract conditions, and childhood blood cancer near shale gas operations.
Exploratory studies in Queensland found higher rates of hospitalisation for circulatory, immune system and respiratory disorders in children and adults in the Darling Downs region where coal seam gas mining is concentrated.
Water exposure
Chemicals found in gas mining wastewater include volatile organic compounds such as benzene, phenols and polyaromatic hydrocarbons, as well as heavy metals, radioactive materials, and endocrine-disrupting substances – compounds that can affect the body’s hormones.
This wastewater can find its way into aquifers and surface water through spillage, injection procedures, and leakage from wastewater ponds.
The environmental safety of treated wastewater and the vast quantities of crystalline salt produced is unclear, raising questions about cumulative long-term impacts on soil productivity and drinking water security.
Concern about the unconventional gas industry’s use of large quantities of water has increased since 2013. Particularly relevant to Australian agriculture and remote communities is research showing an unexpected but consistent increase in the “water footprint” of gas wells across all six major shale oil and gas mining regions of the US from 2011 to 2016. Maximum increases in water use per well (7.7-fold higher, Permian deposits, New Mexico and Texas) and wastewater production per well (14-fold, Eagle Ford deposits, Texas) occurred where water stress is very high. The drop in water efficiency was tied to a drop in gas prices.
Air exposure
Research on the potentially harmful substances emitted into the atmosphere during water removal, gas production and processing, wastewater handling and transport has expanded. These substances include fine particulate pollutants, ground-level ozone, volatile organic compounds, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, hydrogen sulfide, formaldehyde, diesel exhaust and endocrine-disrupting chemicals.
Measuring concentrations and human exposures to these pollutants is complicated, as they vary widely and unpredictably in both time and location. This makes it difficult to prove a definitive causal link to human health impacts, despite the mounting circumstantial evidence.
Our review found substantially more evidence of what we suspected in 2013: that gas mining poses significant threats to the global climate, to food and water supplies, and to health and well-being.
On this basis, Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA) has reinforced its position that no new gas developments should occur in Australia, and that governments should increase monitoring, regulation and management of existing wells and gas production and transport infrastructure.
Links
Unconventional gas wells are being approved in their thousands across Australia. AAP Image/Dean LewinsAustralia, like its competitors Qatar, Canada and the United States, aspires to become the world’s largest exporter of gas, arguing this helps importing nations reduce their greenhouse emissions by replacing coal.
Yes, burning gas emits less carbon dioxide than burning coal. Yet the “fugitive emissions” – the methane that escapes, often unmeasured, during production, distribution and combustion of gas – is a much more potent short-term greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
A special report issued by the World Health Organisation after the 2018 Katowice climate summit urged governments to take “specific commitments to reduce emissions of short-lived climate pollutants” such as methane, so as to boost the chances of staying with the Paris Agreement’s ambitious 1.5℃ global warming limit.
Current gas expansion plans in Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland, where another 2,500 coal seam gas wells have been approved, reveal little impetus to deliver on this. Harvesting all of WA’s gas reserves would emit about 4.4 times more carbon dioxide equivalent than Australia’s total domestic energy-related emissions budget.
Gas as a cause of local ill-health
There are not only global, but also significant local and regional risks to health and well-being associated with unconventional gas mining. Our comprehensive review examines the current state of the evidence.
Since our previous reviews (see here, here and here), more than 1,400 further peer-reviewed articles have been published, helping to clarify how expanding unconventional gas production across Australia risks our health, well-being, climate, water and food security.
This research has been possible because, since 2010, 17.6 million US citizens’ homes have been within a mile (1.6km) of gas wells and fracking operations. Furthermore, some US research funding is independent of the gas industry, whereas much of Australia’s comparatively small budget for research in this area is channelled through an industry-funded CSIRO research hub.
Key medical findings
There is evidence that living close to unconventional gas mining activities is linked to a wide range of health conditions, including psychological and social problems.
The US literature now consistently reports higher frequencies of low birth weight, extreme premature births, higher-risk pregnancies and some birth defects, in pregnancies spent closer to unconventional gas mining activities, compared with pregnancies further away. No parallel studies have so far been published in Australia.
US studies have found increased indicators of cardiovascular disease, higher rates of sinus disorders, fatigue and migraines, and hospitalisations for asthma, heart, neurological, kidney and urinary tract conditions, and childhood blood cancer near shale gas operations.
Exploratory studies in Queensland found higher rates of hospitalisation for circulatory, immune system and respiratory disorders in children and adults in the Darling Downs region where coal seam gas mining is concentrated.
Water exposure
Chemicals found in gas mining wastewater include volatile organic compounds such as benzene, phenols and polyaromatic hydrocarbons, as well as heavy metals, radioactive materials, and endocrine-disrupting substances – compounds that can affect the body’s hormones.
This wastewater can find its way into aquifers and surface water through spillage, injection procedures, and leakage from wastewater ponds.
The environmental safety of treated wastewater and the vast quantities of crystalline salt produced is unclear, raising questions about cumulative long-term impacts on soil productivity and drinking water security.
Concern about the unconventional gas industry’s use of large quantities of water has increased since 2013. Particularly relevant to Australian agriculture and remote communities is research showing an unexpected but consistent increase in the “water footprint” of gas wells across all six major shale oil and gas mining regions of the US from 2011 to 2016. Maximum increases in water use per well (7.7-fold higher, Permian deposits, New Mexico and Texas) and wastewater production per well (14-fold, Eagle Ford deposits, Texas) occurred where water stress is very high. The drop in water efficiency was tied to a drop in gas prices.
Air exposure
Research on the potentially harmful substances emitted into the atmosphere during water removal, gas production and processing, wastewater handling and transport has expanded. These substances include fine particulate pollutants, ground-level ozone, volatile organic compounds, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, hydrogen sulfide, formaldehyde, diesel exhaust and endocrine-disrupting chemicals.
Measuring concentrations and human exposures to these pollutants is complicated, as they vary widely and unpredictably in both time and location. This makes it difficult to prove a definitive causal link to human health impacts, despite the mounting circumstantial evidence.
Our review found substantially more evidence of what we suspected in 2013: that gas mining poses significant threats to the global climate, to food and water supplies, and to health and well-being.
On this basis, Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA) has reinforced its position that no new gas developments should occur in Australia, and that governments should increase monitoring, regulation and management of existing wells and gas production and transport infrastructure.
Links
- Who gets to decide whether we dig up coal and gas?
- Chief Scientist CSG report leaves health concerns unanswered
- Why Australians need a national environment protection agency to safeguard their health
- Norwegian Waste-to-Energy: Climate change, circular economy and carbon capture and storage
- Waste to energy for a low emissions future
- Climate Change and the Resource Recovery and Waste Sectors
- Waste-to-energy - Wikipedia
Categories: External websites
Journey to Antarctica: Is This What a Climate Catastrophe Looks Like in Real Time?
Rolling Stone - Jeff Goodell
Scientists aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer watch a 25-mile-wide section of ice crumble into the sea
View from the deck of an ice strengthened ship on an expedition cruise to Antarctica, 2013.
Global Warming Images/REX/ShutterstockThe Nathaniel B. Palmer has left Antarctica behind and made the turn toward home. The last science experiments were completed, and the ship headed north, toward Punta Arenas, Chile, where our two-month journey will end. Scientists on board are packing up equipment and writing rough drafts of papers based on discoveries they made during our adventure into uncharted waters around Thwaites glacier. But an almost existential question looms above it all: Did we just witness what amounts to a climate catastrophe playing out in real time?
On March 3rd, Bastien Queste, an oceanographer at the University of East Anglia who is a key member of the science team aboard the ship, got a WhatsApp message from a colleague back in the UK. She had sent him a satellite image of Thwaites glacier and the surrounding region in West Antarctica. At the time, we had just completed our own close encounter with the awesome craggy blue glacier and were only a few miles away, mapping the seabed in front of the glacier with the ship’s sonar device.On this trip, satellite images have been indispensable in helping scientists track the ever-changing ice in the regions we’ve been exploring. But the map Queste received that morning was different. He noticed dark cracks in parts of the ice shelf, which floats out over the sea like a huge fingernail from the glacier itself. They had not been there before. The ice shelf was clearly starting to break up. Queste’s first thought: “Oh, shit.”
Queste knew as well as anyone, the whole point of this research trip is to better understand the risk of collapse of Thwaites glacier, one of the most consequential tipping points in the Earth’s climate system. It’s not just that Thwaites is big, although it is (imagine a glacier the size of Florida). But because of how the glacier terminates in deep water, as well as the reverse slope of the ground beneath it, Thwaites is vulnerable to particularly rapid collapse. Even more troubling, Thwaites is like the cork in the wine bottle for the rest of the West Antarctica ice sheet. If Thwaites were to fall apart, scientists fear the entire ice sheet could begin to collapse, eventually raising sea levels more than 10 feet.
That’s what Queste’s “oh, shit” was about. It was non-scientific-but-very-human-shorthand for, “Is Thwaites falling apart in real time, right before our eyes?”
Queste showed the image to Rob Larter, the chief scientist on the Palmer. Larter was not entirely surprised by what he saw. A few days earlier, as we cruised along the front of Thwaites, Larter had remarked on how chaotic and jumbled the ice shelf looked. “I thought something like this might happen because of how broken up the ice on the shelf appeared,” he says.
Over the next few days, Queste and Larter — as well as nearly every other scientist and student on the ship — watched the disintegration of the Thwaites ice shelf. It was a spooky sensation, looking at the satellite images then looking out the window as a parade of icebergs floated right by us on their way out to sea. In a matter of 48 hours or so, a mélange of ice about 25 miles wide and 15 miles deep cracked up and scattered into the sea. As Queste says, “A part of the glacier that is as big as the city I live in — it was just gone.”
Here are satellite images of Thwaites before and after the blowout. The red dot shows where the ship was located on those days.
For scientists both on and off the ship, the big question is, was the blowout a sign that Thwaites is collapsing before our eyes, or was it a more or less ordinary event in the lifecycle of a big glacier? These are not easy questions to answer. Glaciers are practically alive, in flux all the time, exquisitely sensitive to small changes in atmospheric and ocean temperatures. Sometimes changes that look dramatic to non-scientists, like the breakup of the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica a few years ago, have an inconsequential impact on sea level rise (unlike the Thwaites ice shelf, the Larsen B is not holding back a massive city-drowning glacier).
And it’s important to point out that the Thwaites blowout is not the same thing as what scientists typically call a “calving event,” which you often see in movies and documentaries, where big slabs of ice fall off glaciers into the sea. What we witnessed was the sudden disintegration of an ice shelf, which is a very different thing. Unlike the calving of land-based ice into the sea, the break-up of an ice shelf does not itself contribute to sea level rise, because the ice is already floating — just as when the ice in your whiskey melts, the level of whiskey in your drink doesn’t rise.
Nevertheless, ice shelves are important. They buttress the glacier itself, providing stability and in effect holding it back from slipping faster into the sea. The ice shelf that blew out at Thwaites was particularly messy and chaotic — it’s a bunch of bergs glued together with seasonal sea ice rather than a solid shelf. So maybe it wasn’t doing much to stabilize Thwaites, and the blowout wasn’t a big deal.
But given the larger fragility of Thwaites, and the consequences of a sudden collapse, any dramatic change in the structure of the glacier is hardly an encouraging sign.
When it comes to melting glaciers and sea level rise, climate scientists have traditionally been far more concerned about Greenland than Antarctica. In our warming world, Antarctica was viewed as a stable place: very big, very cold, very distant.
Then, in the early 1990s, improved satellite observations proved those assumptions were wrong. Of special concern was West Antarctica, which is particularly vulnerable to warm Circumpolar Deep Water attacking the glaciers from below. A recent paper co-authored by scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California noted that the main trunk of Thwaites accelerated 33 percent between 2006 and 2013 — it’s now sliding into the sea at a rate of about two miles per year. In addition, parts of the glacier are thinning by as much as 13 feet each year.
Here’s a GIF that captures how much Thwaites has changed in just the past five years. The orange and red sections are the fastest flowing parts of the glacier.
And here’s a graph that shows how quickly the ice flow on Thwaites has accelerated — it’s almost doubled in the last five years.
So what does all this mean? Nobody can say for sure. “I’m holding my breath to see what happens next,” says Larter. “The blowout could be the start of a new phase of the evolution of Thwaites glacier. But I’m wary, because sometimes you see things that you think are going to be the start of something big, and then things settle down. I think it’s too early to say which way this is going to go.”
In an email, Eric Rignot, a senior scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who has co-authored recent papers suggesting the collapse of Thwaites is already past the point of no return, told me that he wouldn’t view the blowout as particularly alarming unless he saw retreat of the front of the glacier itself during the process (which, in the most recent satellite images, he hasn’t). But Rignot ended his email to me with an important note: “This sort of event is a good reminder that changes can happen fast in these environments, even though it may seem that nothing much is happening when you are staring at the glacier from a ship deck, right?”
Richard Alley, a highly respected glaciologist at Penn State, had a more nuanced view of it all. Alley (who, like Rignot, is not on the ship) pointed out that because the ice shelf that blew out was already pretty chaotic, it was likely not providing much stability to the glacier. “So its loss is not a huge issue for the still-grounded ice,” Alley emailed. “But the chaotic ice was still doing something.” He compared Thwaites to glaciers in Greenland, where the blowout of similar mélanges are often followed by calving of ice from the glacier itself, which is far more troubling. Alley also pointed out that the loss of ice shelves leaves glaciers vulnerable to stress from what he called “remote forcing” — storms across the Pacific, or tsunamis from an earthquake. “To stretch the analogy a little bit,” Alley said, “if Thwaites were a car, you could say that it has lost part of its bumper. And, while that’s not hugely important, it is part of a pattern that is pointing toward larger changes to come.”
This is, in short, what makes climate change so alarming, and so unlike other threats that humans have faced. By loading the atmosphere with carbon, we are messing with a system that even the best scientists in the world don’t fully understand. Individual events are hard to interpret in real time. “In the history of human civilization, we’ve never seen the rapid collapse of a glacier like Thwaites,” Larter points out. “So we don’t know how exactly it starts, or what it looks like while it’s happening.”
But in the long run, the arc of uncertainty bends toward catastrophe. It may be that this blowout at Thwaites was driven by wind or a shift in ocean temperature that, in the big picture, means little. Or it may be further evidence that the collapse of Thwaites is already underway, and it’s only a matter of time — perhaps even during the lifetimes of kids alive today — before virtually every coastal city from Miami to Jakarta is under six, seven, eight or more feet of water.
If that’s the case, then big parts of the world we live in today may already be doomed. We just don’t know yet.
Links
Scientists aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer watch a 25-mile-wide section of ice crumble into the sea
View from the deck of an ice strengthened ship on an expedition cruise to Antarctica, 2013.
Global Warming Images/REX/ShutterstockThe Nathaniel B. Palmer has left Antarctica behind and made the turn toward home. The last science experiments were completed, and the ship headed north, toward Punta Arenas, Chile, where our two-month journey will end. Scientists on board are packing up equipment and writing rough drafts of papers based on discoveries they made during our adventure into uncharted waters around Thwaites glacier. But an almost existential question looms above it all: Did we just witness what amounts to a climate catastrophe playing out in real time?
On March 3rd, Bastien Queste, an oceanographer at the University of East Anglia who is a key member of the science team aboard the ship, got a WhatsApp message from a colleague back in the UK. She had sent him a satellite image of Thwaites glacier and the surrounding region in West Antarctica. At the time, we had just completed our own close encounter with the awesome craggy blue glacier and were only a few miles away, mapping the seabed in front of the glacier with the ship’s sonar device.On this trip, satellite images have been indispensable in helping scientists track the ever-changing ice in the regions we’ve been exploring. But the map Queste received that morning was different. He noticed dark cracks in parts of the ice shelf, which floats out over the sea like a huge fingernail from the glacier itself. They had not been there before. The ice shelf was clearly starting to break up. Queste’s first thought: “Oh, shit.”
Queste knew as well as anyone, the whole point of this research trip is to better understand the risk of collapse of Thwaites glacier, one of the most consequential tipping points in the Earth’s climate system. It’s not just that Thwaites is big, although it is (imagine a glacier the size of Florida). But because of how the glacier terminates in deep water, as well as the reverse slope of the ground beneath it, Thwaites is vulnerable to particularly rapid collapse. Even more troubling, Thwaites is like the cork in the wine bottle for the rest of the West Antarctica ice sheet. If Thwaites were to fall apart, scientists fear the entire ice sheet could begin to collapse, eventually raising sea levels more than 10 feet.
That’s what Queste’s “oh, shit” was about. It was non-scientific-but-very-human-shorthand for, “Is Thwaites falling apart in real time, right before our eyes?”
Queste showed the image to Rob Larter, the chief scientist on the Palmer. Larter was not entirely surprised by what he saw. A few days earlier, as we cruised along the front of Thwaites, Larter had remarked on how chaotic and jumbled the ice shelf looked. “I thought something like this might happen because of how broken up the ice on the shelf appeared,” he says.
Over the next few days, Queste and Larter — as well as nearly every other scientist and student on the ship — watched the disintegration of the Thwaites ice shelf. It was a spooky sensation, looking at the satellite images then looking out the window as a parade of icebergs floated right by us on their way out to sea. In a matter of 48 hours or so, a mélange of ice about 25 miles wide and 15 miles deep cracked up and scattered into the sea. As Queste says, “A part of the glacier that is as big as the city I live in — it was just gone.”
Here are satellite images of Thwaites before and after the blowout. The red dot shows where the ship was located on those days.
For scientists both on and off the ship, the big question is, was the blowout a sign that Thwaites is collapsing before our eyes, or was it a more or less ordinary event in the lifecycle of a big glacier? These are not easy questions to answer. Glaciers are practically alive, in flux all the time, exquisitely sensitive to small changes in atmospheric and ocean temperatures. Sometimes changes that look dramatic to non-scientists, like the breakup of the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica a few years ago, have an inconsequential impact on sea level rise (unlike the Thwaites ice shelf, the Larsen B is not holding back a massive city-drowning glacier).
And it’s important to point out that the Thwaites blowout is not the same thing as what scientists typically call a “calving event,” which you often see in movies and documentaries, where big slabs of ice fall off glaciers into the sea. What we witnessed was the sudden disintegration of an ice shelf, which is a very different thing. Unlike the calving of land-based ice into the sea, the break-up of an ice shelf does not itself contribute to sea level rise, because the ice is already floating — just as when the ice in your whiskey melts, the level of whiskey in your drink doesn’t rise.
Nevertheless, ice shelves are important. They buttress the glacier itself, providing stability and in effect holding it back from slipping faster into the sea. The ice shelf that blew out at Thwaites was particularly messy and chaotic — it’s a bunch of bergs glued together with seasonal sea ice rather than a solid shelf. So maybe it wasn’t doing much to stabilize Thwaites, and the blowout wasn’t a big deal.
But given the larger fragility of Thwaites, and the consequences of a sudden collapse, any dramatic change in the structure of the glacier is hardly an encouraging sign.
When it comes to melting glaciers and sea level rise, climate scientists have traditionally been far more concerned about Greenland than Antarctica. In our warming world, Antarctica was viewed as a stable place: very big, very cold, very distant.
Then, in the early 1990s, improved satellite observations proved those assumptions were wrong. Of special concern was West Antarctica, which is particularly vulnerable to warm Circumpolar Deep Water attacking the glaciers from below. A recent paper co-authored by scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California noted that the main trunk of Thwaites accelerated 33 percent between 2006 and 2013 — it’s now sliding into the sea at a rate of about two miles per year. In addition, parts of the glacier are thinning by as much as 13 feet each year.
Here’s a GIF that captures how much Thwaites has changed in just the past five years. The orange and red sections are the fastest flowing parts of the glacier.
And here’s a graph that shows how quickly the ice flow on Thwaites has accelerated — it’s almost doubled in the last five years.
So what does all this mean? Nobody can say for sure. “I’m holding my breath to see what happens next,” says Larter. “The blowout could be the start of a new phase of the evolution of Thwaites glacier. But I’m wary, because sometimes you see things that you think are going to be the start of something big, and then things settle down. I think it’s too early to say which way this is going to go.”
In an email, Eric Rignot, a senior scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who has co-authored recent papers suggesting the collapse of Thwaites is already past the point of no return, told me that he wouldn’t view the blowout as particularly alarming unless he saw retreat of the front of the glacier itself during the process (which, in the most recent satellite images, he hasn’t). But Rignot ended his email to me with an important note: “This sort of event is a good reminder that changes can happen fast in these environments, even though it may seem that nothing much is happening when you are staring at the glacier from a ship deck, right?”
Richard Alley, a highly respected glaciologist at Penn State, had a more nuanced view of it all. Alley (who, like Rignot, is not on the ship) pointed out that because the ice shelf that blew out was already pretty chaotic, it was likely not providing much stability to the glacier. “So its loss is not a huge issue for the still-grounded ice,” Alley emailed. “But the chaotic ice was still doing something.” He compared Thwaites to glaciers in Greenland, where the blowout of similar mélanges are often followed by calving of ice from the glacier itself, which is far more troubling. Alley also pointed out that the loss of ice shelves leaves glaciers vulnerable to stress from what he called “remote forcing” — storms across the Pacific, or tsunamis from an earthquake. “To stretch the analogy a little bit,” Alley said, “if Thwaites were a car, you could say that it has lost part of its bumper. And, while that’s not hugely important, it is part of a pattern that is pointing toward larger changes to come.”
This is, in short, what makes climate change so alarming, and so unlike other threats that humans have faced. By loading the atmosphere with carbon, we are messing with a system that even the best scientists in the world don’t fully understand. Individual events are hard to interpret in real time. “In the history of human civilization, we’ve never seen the rapid collapse of a glacier like Thwaites,” Larter points out. “So we don’t know how exactly it starts, or what it looks like while it’s happening.”
But in the long run, the arc of uncertainty bends toward catastrophe. It may be that this blowout at Thwaites was driven by wind or a shift in ocean temperature that, in the big picture, means little. Or it may be further evidence that the collapse of Thwaites is already underway, and it’s only a matter of time — perhaps even during the lifetimes of kids alive today — before virtually every coastal city from Miami to Jakarta is under six, seven, eight or more feet of water.
If that’s the case, then big parts of the world we live in today may already be doomed. We just don’t know yet.
Links
- Journey to Antarctica: What Scientists Think of Trump’s Latest Climate Tweet
- Journey to Antarctica: The Dark Art of Coring
- Journey to Antarctica: Icy Subterranean Homesick Blues
- Journey to Antarctica: Mapping Thwaites
- Journey to Antarctica: Face-to-Face With the Doomsday Glacier
- Journey to Antarctica: Reckoning With Uncertainty
- Journey to Antarctica: When the Best Laid Plans Go Awry
- Journey to Antarctica: An Emergency at Sea
- Journey to Antarctica: How Scientists Are Using Seals to Measure the Warming Ocean
- These Women Are Changing The Landscape Of Antarctic Research
- Huge Cavity In Antarctic Glacier Signals Rapid Decay
- Australia's Heard Island: A Mysterious Land Of Fire And Ice
- 'Terrifying': Scientists Dig Deep For Missing Piece Of Climate Puzzle
- Ice Loss From Antarctica Has Sextupled Since The 1970s, New Research Finds
- One Of Antartica's Biggest Glaciers Has A Giant Hole Under It. What Would Happen If It Collapsed?
Categories: External websites
Study Shows IPCC Is Underselling Climate Change
Phys.org - University of Adelaide
Credit: CC0 Public Domain
A new study has revealed that the language used by the global climate change watchdog, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is overly conservative – and therefore the threats are much greater than the Panel's reports suggest.
Published in the journal BioScience, the team of scientists from the University of Adelaide, Flinders University, the University of Bristol (UK), and the Spanish National Research Council has analysed the language used in the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (from 2014).
"We found that the main message from the reports—that our society is in climate emergency—is lost by overstatement of uncertainty and gets confused among the gigabytes of information," says lead author Dr. Salvador Herrando-Pérez, from the University of Adelaide's Environment Institute and Australian Centre for Ancient DNA.
"The IPCC supports the overwhelming scientific consensus about human impact on climate change, so we would expect the reports' vocabulary to be dominated by greater certainty on the state of climate science—but this is not the case."
The IPCC assigns a level of certainty to climate findings using five categories of confidence and ten categories of probability. The team found the categories of intermediate certainty predominated, with those of highest certainty barely reaching 8% of the climate findings evaluated.
"The accumulation of uncertainty across all elements of the climate-change complexity means that the IPCC tends to be conservative," says co-author Professor Corey Bradshaw, Matthew Flinders Fellow in Global Ecology at Flinders University. "The certainty is in reality much higher than even the IPCC implies, and the threats are much worse."
"Uncertainty is to science what the score is to music—but it's a two-edged sword: what the IPCC and the majority of the scientific community regard as a paradigm of rigour and transparency is exactly what the 'merchants of doubt' put forward as a weakness," says Dr. Herrando-Pérez.
"However, climatic uncertainties are nothing but an expression of the climate risks we face, and should inspire action rather than indifference."
The team says the IPCC reports should incorporate a clear connection between the certainty of thousands of scientific findings and the certainty that humans are vastly altering the Earth's climate. The team recommends a new IPCC working group of communication specialists to oversee the language and effective dissemination, and convey the message accurately.
"Our evolutionary history tells us Earth will ultimately survive more aridity, more hurricanes, more floods, more sea-level rise, more extinctions and degraded ecosystems, but our society as we know it today might not unless we clearly articulate the magnitude of the threat it poses," says Dr. Herrando-Pérez.
Links
Credit: CC0 Public Domain
A new study has revealed that the language used by the global climate change watchdog, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is overly conservative – and therefore the threats are much greater than the Panel's reports suggest.
Published in the journal BioScience, the team of scientists from the University of Adelaide, Flinders University, the University of Bristol (UK), and the Spanish National Research Council has analysed the language used in the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (from 2014).
"We found that the main message from the reports—that our society is in climate emergency—is lost by overstatement of uncertainty and gets confused among the gigabytes of information," says lead author Dr. Salvador Herrando-Pérez, from the University of Adelaide's Environment Institute and Australian Centre for Ancient DNA.
"The IPCC supports the overwhelming scientific consensus about human impact on climate change, so we would expect the reports' vocabulary to be dominated by greater certainty on the state of climate science—but this is not the case."
The IPCC assigns a level of certainty to climate findings using five categories of confidence and ten categories of probability. The team found the categories of intermediate certainty predominated, with those of highest certainty barely reaching 8% of the climate findings evaluated.
"The accumulation of uncertainty across all elements of the climate-change complexity means that the IPCC tends to be conservative," says co-author Professor Corey Bradshaw, Matthew Flinders Fellow in Global Ecology at Flinders University. "The certainty is in reality much higher than even the IPCC implies, and the threats are much worse."
"Uncertainty is to science what the score is to music—but it's a two-edged sword: what the IPCC and the majority of the scientific community regard as a paradigm of rigour and transparency is exactly what the 'merchants of doubt' put forward as a weakness," says Dr. Herrando-Pérez.
"However, climatic uncertainties are nothing but an expression of the climate risks we face, and should inspire action rather than indifference."
The team says the IPCC reports should incorporate a clear connection between the certainty of thousands of scientific findings and the certainty that humans are vastly altering the Earth's climate. The team recommends a new IPCC working group of communication specialists to oversee the language and effective dissemination, and convey the message accurately.
"Our evolutionary history tells us Earth will ultimately survive more aridity, more hurricanes, more floods, more sea-level rise, more extinctions and degraded ecosystems, but our society as we know it today might not unless we clearly articulate the magnitude of the threat it poses," says Dr. Herrando-Pérez.
Links
- Statistical Language Backs Conservatism in Climate-Change Assessments
- Language about climate change differs between proponents and skeptics
- 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
- Katharine Hayhoe: 'A Thermometer Is Not Liberal Or Conservative'
- Climate Change: Using Satire To Communicate Science
- Is Sarah Silverman Comedy’s New Climate Champion?
- Scientists Urged To 'Speak The Same Language' As Public On Climate
- Is Climate Change Really Too Hard To Understand?
- How To Change The Climate Story: Paul Hawken
- Why Some Conservatives Are Blind To Climate Change
- Need To Explain To People What Climate Change Means In Daily Life: UN Environ Chief
- David Wallace-Wells On Climate: ‘People Should Be Scared – I'm Scared’
- IPCC, the world's top authority on climate science
- A difficult climate: New study examines the media's response to the IPCC
- Researchers create hydrogen fuel from seawater
Categories: External websites
Tim Flannery: People Are Shocked About Climate Change But They Should Be Angry
The Guardian - John Pickrell
The author and scientist, who has returned to his roots at the Australian Museum, says the world is about to see a major shift towards climate action
Tim Flannery: ‘We’re in a different world now, a world where people are living with climate change consequences’ Photograph: Carly Earl/The GuardianTim Flannery laments that young Australians today will never be able to experience in the same way the natural wonders he enjoyed in his youth.
He grew up in Melbourne on remnants of the sandplain flora, “one of the great floristic gems of Australia,” he says. Once smothered in flowers in springtime, it has now largely been lost through development and altered burning regimes. Flannery, 63, spent his youth swimming and scuba diving in northern Port Phillip bay, which he says is now also gravely deteriorated.
He further points to the Great Barrier Reef, which suffered unprecedented mass bleaching in 2016 and 2017 and the “serious questions” about whether it can now be saved. “Something like 70% of the reef that was there a century ago is now dead,” he says.
But without detailed records on species distributions, it’s impossible to map the losses due to climate change, explains Flannery, who recently returned to the 192-year-old Australian Museum in Sydney, where he was principal mammalogist from 1984–1999.
Rather than being “a fusty old relic” the museum is playing a vital role in this, he says. “The collections that say where things were, and when, are here – and that’s the most important asset we’ve got to understand the response of biodiversity to climate change … The people of New South Wales need to understand what a valuable asset they have.”
We can claw back some of the damage [from climate change]. We will go through 2C, but hopefully come out the other side
Tim FlanneryFlannery – who has named more than 30 new mammals over his career and was the Australian government’s climate commissioner from 2011–2013 – relocated to Sydney in January for the year-long role as a distinguished research fellow. This position, as the museum’s de facto climate change ambassador, was funded by anonymous private donors.
While species loss is heartbreaking, Flannery says what keeps him awake at night worrying are the human impacts.
“Global hunger has increased for the last three years because of extreme weather events, and that follows many decades of improvement,” he says. “To see that going backwards is terrifying, quite frankly. Nothing is more important than global food security.”
Bringing attention to the plight of those suffering the effects of climate change, such as Australia’s Pacific Islander neighbours, is one of a series of goals he has set for his time at the museum.
Tim Flannery: ‘The collections … are the most important asset we’ve got to understand the response of biodiversity to climate change.’ Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian In 2018, Flannery sailed from the Solomon Islands to Vanuatu and the story was the same nearly everywhere. “Village after village was going underwater,” he says. Impacts ranged from lost soccer fields and crops through to devastation of villages and coral reef resources.
Younger islanders understand “Australia is partly to blame because we have done so little, and they are quite angry”, says Flannery. The goal, he says, is “a better understanding in Australia of the often-catastrophic impacts that climate change is having on our near neighbours – and with government and individual awareness we can start doing something”.
Inadequate action by governments has been brought into focus by ever-more alarming reports about the rate of warming, such as the recent long-term forecast from the UK Met Office that we might temporarily exceed 1.5C of average warming over preindustrial levels in the next five years.
Preventing warming from exceeding 1.5C in the long term was one of the targets agreed by the world’s nations in the UN’s 2015 Paris agreement.
“Sadly, I’ve been aware of [the urgency of] this for a long time,” says Flannery, who believes that breaching that threshold is inevitable in the next few decades, and that we are probably already committed to 2C of warming, “which is towards the catastrophic end of things”.
Instead of getting “dismayed and depressed”, he suggests we focus on damage that’s still within our power to avoid. “We have to reduce emissions as hard and fast as possible … [and] develop technologies that will get gigatons of carbon dioxide out of the air by 2050.”
Technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – such as giant seaweed farms and processes to accelerate weathering of silicate rocks – have been a focus of his of late. “We can claw back some of the damage. We will go through 2C, but hopefully come out the other side.”
While the debate over the science of climate change is long settled in Europe, political inertia has dogged Australia and the US, which notably pulled out the Paris accord following the election of Donald Trump.
But Flannery sees a shift in the air – particularly in the wake of climate-linked disasters including the mass bleaching events; mass fish kills on the Darling River; and droughts, heatwaves and bushfire seasons that are all increasing in duration and intensity.
“The speed and scale of impacts have been something that is really shocking,” says Flannery, who was on the Australian Academy of Science’s expert panel investigating the Darling River fish kills, and which this week laid the blame on the Murray-Darling Basin Authority for ignoring scientific advice and the threat from climate change.
“People are shocked, but … they should be angry,” he adds. “The consequences will grow year by year, and stuff we were warning people about 20 years ago is now coming to fruition and is impossible to deny, unless you are wilfully blind.
“Bullshit baffles brains, but only temporarily and we’ve gone through a period in Australia and the US where people have been able to lie … But we’re in a different world now, a world where people are living with climate change consequences, and bullshit is no longer baffling brains, and so we are about to see a big shift.”
One transformation he’s seen is farmers changing from being deniers to advocates for action. “People see extreme weather events and don’t just think this is an odd occurrence, they see it as part of the longer-term trajectory of change that’s going to bring about more and more adverse consequences unless something is done,” he says.
Earlier this year the Australian government formally noted the world’s first species to suffer extinction at the hands of climate change – the Bramble Cay melomys, a Torres Strait rodent that washed away in a storm surge caused by rising sea levels.
‘Something like 70% of the reef that was there a century ago is now dead,’ Tim Flannery says. Photograph: Climate Counciil Australia’s museums have a critical role to play in research and keeping collections and records that inform us about species such as this, so we can map changes and losses.
Despite this, a lack of investment has plagued many of our museums, including the Australian Museum, which put a freeze on capital expenditure in December to help cover costs of renovations to take larger touring exhibits, including one on Tutankhamun, slated for 2021.
Research staff numbers have fallen here and at other museums in recent decades “but the sort of skills that museums specialise in have never been more needed”, says Flannery, who was also previously the director of the South Australian Museum.
Examples of crucial records held at the Australian Museum include that there were once “rock wallabies on Middle Head, rufous bettongs at Rose Bay and – until the 1970s – eastern quolls at Vaucluse, the last colony on mainland Australia”, Flannery says.
He now hopes to muster the power of citizen scientists to gather data on the effects of climate change on the New South Wales environment. “Looking at the timing of when things happen – when plants bloom and when insects pupate … is one of the best ways of measuring climate change, and people can do it in their gardens,” he says.
Links
The author and scientist, who has returned to his roots at the Australian Museum, says the world is about to see a major shift towards climate action
Tim Flannery: ‘We’re in a different world now, a world where people are living with climate change consequences’ Photograph: Carly Earl/The GuardianTim Flannery laments that young Australians today will never be able to experience in the same way the natural wonders he enjoyed in his youth.
He grew up in Melbourne on remnants of the sandplain flora, “one of the great floristic gems of Australia,” he says. Once smothered in flowers in springtime, it has now largely been lost through development and altered burning regimes. Flannery, 63, spent his youth swimming and scuba diving in northern Port Phillip bay, which he says is now also gravely deteriorated.
He further points to the Great Barrier Reef, which suffered unprecedented mass bleaching in 2016 and 2017 and the “serious questions” about whether it can now be saved. “Something like 70% of the reef that was there a century ago is now dead,” he says.
But without detailed records on species distributions, it’s impossible to map the losses due to climate change, explains Flannery, who recently returned to the 192-year-old Australian Museum in Sydney, where he was principal mammalogist from 1984–1999.
Rather than being “a fusty old relic” the museum is playing a vital role in this, he says. “The collections that say where things were, and when, are here – and that’s the most important asset we’ve got to understand the response of biodiversity to climate change … The people of New South Wales need to understand what a valuable asset they have.”
We can claw back some of the damage [from climate change]. We will go through 2C, but hopefully come out the other side
Tim FlanneryFlannery – who has named more than 30 new mammals over his career and was the Australian government’s climate commissioner from 2011–2013 – relocated to Sydney in January for the year-long role as a distinguished research fellow. This position, as the museum’s de facto climate change ambassador, was funded by anonymous private donors.
While species loss is heartbreaking, Flannery says what keeps him awake at night worrying are the human impacts.
“Global hunger has increased for the last three years because of extreme weather events, and that follows many decades of improvement,” he says. “To see that going backwards is terrifying, quite frankly. Nothing is more important than global food security.”
Bringing attention to the plight of those suffering the effects of climate change, such as Australia’s Pacific Islander neighbours, is one of a series of goals he has set for his time at the museum.
Tim Flannery: ‘The collections … are the most important asset we’ve got to understand the response of biodiversity to climate change.’ Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian In 2018, Flannery sailed from the Solomon Islands to Vanuatu and the story was the same nearly everywhere. “Village after village was going underwater,” he says. Impacts ranged from lost soccer fields and crops through to devastation of villages and coral reef resources.
Younger islanders understand “Australia is partly to blame because we have done so little, and they are quite angry”, says Flannery. The goal, he says, is “a better understanding in Australia of the often-catastrophic impacts that climate change is having on our near neighbours – and with government and individual awareness we can start doing something”.
Inadequate action by governments has been brought into focus by ever-more alarming reports about the rate of warming, such as the recent long-term forecast from the UK Met Office that we might temporarily exceed 1.5C of average warming over preindustrial levels in the next five years.
Preventing warming from exceeding 1.5C in the long term was one of the targets agreed by the world’s nations in the UN’s 2015 Paris agreement.
“Sadly, I’ve been aware of [the urgency of] this for a long time,” says Flannery, who believes that breaching that threshold is inevitable in the next few decades, and that we are probably already committed to 2C of warming, “which is towards the catastrophic end of things”.
Instead of getting “dismayed and depressed”, he suggests we focus on damage that’s still within our power to avoid. “We have to reduce emissions as hard and fast as possible … [and] develop technologies that will get gigatons of carbon dioxide out of the air by 2050.”
Technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – such as giant seaweed farms and processes to accelerate weathering of silicate rocks – have been a focus of his of late. “We can claw back some of the damage. We will go through 2C, but hopefully come out the other side.”
While the debate over the science of climate change is long settled in Europe, political inertia has dogged Australia and the US, which notably pulled out the Paris accord following the election of Donald Trump.
But Flannery sees a shift in the air – particularly in the wake of climate-linked disasters including the mass bleaching events; mass fish kills on the Darling River; and droughts, heatwaves and bushfire seasons that are all increasing in duration and intensity.
“The speed and scale of impacts have been something that is really shocking,” says Flannery, who was on the Australian Academy of Science’s expert panel investigating the Darling River fish kills, and which this week laid the blame on the Murray-Darling Basin Authority for ignoring scientific advice and the threat from climate change.
“People are shocked, but … they should be angry,” he adds. “The consequences will grow year by year, and stuff we were warning people about 20 years ago is now coming to fruition and is impossible to deny, unless you are wilfully blind.
“Bullshit baffles brains, but only temporarily and we’ve gone through a period in Australia and the US where people have been able to lie … But we’re in a different world now, a world where people are living with climate change consequences, and bullshit is no longer baffling brains, and so we are about to see a big shift.”
One transformation he’s seen is farmers changing from being deniers to advocates for action. “People see extreme weather events and don’t just think this is an odd occurrence, they see it as part of the longer-term trajectory of change that’s going to bring about more and more adverse consequences unless something is done,” he says.
Earlier this year the Australian government formally noted the world’s first species to suffer extinction at the hands of climate change – the Bramble Cay melomys, a Torres Strait rodent that washed away in a storm surge caused by rising sea levels.
‘Something like 70% of the reef that was there a century ago is now dead,’ Tim Flannery says. Photograph: Climate Counciil Australia’s museums have a critical role to play in research and keeping collections and records that inform us about species such as this, so we can map changes and losses.
Despite this, a lack of investment has plagued many of our museums, including the Australian Museum, which put a freeze on capital expenditure in December to help cover costs of renovations to take larger touring exhibits, including one on Tutankhamun, slated for 2021.
Research staff numbers have fallen here and at other museums in recent decades “but the sort of skills that museums specialise in have never been more needed”, says Flannery, who was also previously the director of the South Australian Museum.
Examples of crucial records held at the Australian Museum include that there were once “rock wallabies on Middle Head, rufous bettongs at Rose Bay and – until the 1970s – eastern quolls at Vaucluse, the last colony on mainland Australia”, Flannery says.
He now hopes to muster the power of citizen scientists to gather data on the effects of climate change on the New South Wales environment. “Looking at the timing of when things happen – when plants bloom and when insects pupate … is one of the best ways of measuring climate change, and people can do it in their gardens,” he says.
Links
- Energy policy captive to lobbyists and 'mad ideologues', Tim Flannery says
- Out on its own: Australia the only country to use climate funding to upgrade coal-fired plants
- Energy policy captive to lobbyists and 'mad ideologues', Tim Flannery says
- 'Alarming' rise in Queensland tree clearing as 400,000 hectares stripped
- Climate change impact on Australia may be irreversible, five-yearly report says
- Australia being 'left behind' by global momentum on climate change
- Climate change tipping points are not just symbolic
- Australia’s rarest tortoises get new home to save them from climate change
- Saving Great Barrier Reef from climate change should be central election issue, says Tim Flannery
Categories: External websites
APRA Demands Banks, Insurers Act On Climate Risk
AFR - James Fernyhough
It is no longer good enough for banks, insurers and superannuation funds to disclose climate risks, they must take action to address them, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority has warned.
APRA, the regulator charged with overseeing the soundness of Australia's financial system, said on Wednesday it would "increase its scrutiny" on how financial services companies were changing their businesses to protect themselves against the physical, regulatory and economic effects of climate change.
"The world is rapidly transitioning to a low carbon economy, driven principally by the decisions of governments, business leaders, investors and consumers. Companies that fail to respond to these forces risk being left behind," APRA's head of insurance Geoff Summerhayes said.
"Gaining an understanding of the risks is an important first step for entities, but APRA wants to see continuous improvement in how organisations disclose and manage these risks over coming years."
APRA's head of insurance Geoff Summerhayes said financial services companies must start acting to mitigate climate risk. Chris PavlichMr Summerhayes' warning followed a survey of of financial services companies' attitudes to climate change. APRA probed 38 large banks, insurers and super funds on the issue. A third of respondents cited climate change as a material risk to their business, with reputational damage, flooding, regulatory changes and cyclones the top concerns.
It also closely followed a landmark speech by Reserve Bank of Australia's deputy governor Guy Debelle, in which he warned that a failure to act on climate climate change would lead to an "abrupt, disorderly" transition, with implications for monetary policy.
Links
It is no longer good enough for banks, insurers and superannuation funds to disclose climate risks, they must take action to address them, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority has warned.
APRA, the regulator charged with overseeing the soundness of Australia's financial system, said on Wednesday it would "increase its scrutiny" on how financial services companies were changing their businesses to protect themselves against the physical, regulatory and economic effects of climate change.
"The world is rapidly transitioning to a low carbon economy, driven principally by the decisions of governments, business leaders, investors and consumers. Companies that fail to respond to these forces risk being left behind," APRA's head of insurance Geoff Summerhayes said.
"Gaining an understanding of the risks is an important first step for entities, but APRA wants to see continuous improvement in how organisations disclose and manage these risks over coming years."
APRA's head of insurance Geoff Summerhayes said financial services companies must start acting to mitigate climate risk. Chris PavlichMr Summerhayes' warning followed a survey of of financial services companies' attitudes to climate change. APRA probed 38 large banks, insurers and super funds on the issue. A third of respondents cited climate change as a material risk to their business, with reputational damage, flooding, regulatory changes and cyclones the top concerns.
It also closely followed a landmark speech by Reserve Bank of Australia's deputy governor Guy Debelle, in which he warned that a failure to act on climate climate change would lead to an "abrupt, disorderly" transition, with implications for monetary policy.
Links
- Banks need to mitigate climate risk: ARPA
- APRA to banks, insurers: Act on climate risk
- Fin services needs to walk the walk on climate risk
- 'Change Now Or Pay Later': RBA's Stark Warning On Climate Change
- Climate Change Poses Financial Stability Risk – RBA
- Climate change-related litigation was once seen as a joke, but it could soon become business reality
Categories: External websites
Labor To Tell Business It Won't Let Energy Policy Be Held 'Hostage'
The Guardian - Katharine Murphy
Pat Conroy will tell energy summit that Labor won’t delay action endlessly in a fruitless quest for bipartisanship
Bill Shorten unveiled a 10-year plan to boost the share of renewable energy in the grid and retire coal generation.Photograph: David Crosling/AAP Labor will use an energy summit convened by small business to declare it will not “be hostage to repeal politics” if it wins the coming federal election, warning it will press ahead with emissions reduction in the electricity sector even if the Liberal party won’t reconcile itself to the national energy guarantee.
Pat Conroy, the shadow assistant minister for climate and energy, will tell Wednesday’s summit Labor wants bipartisan agreement post-election, and will pursue the national energy guarantee developed by Malcolm Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg – a policy that remains popular with a number of stakeholders, including business groups, despite being dumped by Scott Morrison.
But Conroy will also use Wednesday’s outing to put business on notice, telling them an incoming Labor government will not delay policy action endlessly in a fruitless quest for bipartisanship.
“We will not allow the energy sector to be hostage to the repeal politics we saw at the turn of the decade,” Conroy will tell the summit. “Instead we will progress a 10-year energy investment plan that will deliver certainty to the energy sector through long-term contracts – contracts that will enable massive investment in new generation at the cheapest possible cost.”
Bill Shorten last November outlined Labor’s plan B in the event Labor wins the May election and the Coalition can’t be persuaded, post-election, to back its own policy with a higher emissions reduction target of 45%.
Pat Conroy will warn that Labor will press ahead with emissions reduction in the electricity sector even if the Liberal party won’t reconcile itself to the national energy guarantee. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The GuardianShorten committed to topping up the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to the tune of $10bn and unveiled a new $5bn fund to modernise ageing transmission infrastructure – the ramparts of a 10-year plan to boost the share of renewable energy in the grid and retire coal generation.
The Labor leader said he would use the Australian Energy Market Operator’s integrated system plan as the basis for transforming the energy system, with a Shorten government playing a hands-on role creating renewable energy zones, investing in new generation and transmission infrastructure and also in firming technologies, like batteries and gas peaking plants.
Moving away from the national energy guarantee, even though Labor has clearly telegraphed that possibility, will likely generate pushback in the business community which rallied in support of the policy which became a casualty of the conservative-led push against Turnbull’s leadership of the Liberal party.
While the Morrison government has been attempting to increase political pressure over Labor’s higher emissions reduction target, warning of the costs associated with a more rapid transition to low emissions technologies, Conroy will insist on Wednesday that Labor’s policies will deliver lower energy prices.
He says there has been an increase in wholesale electricity costs principally because of “the failure of the current government to establish and implement a stable and coherent climate and energy policy”.
“We have had nearly 5,200 megawatts of capacity retire in the last seven years, in fact nearly 4,000 megawatts of capacity has retired since August 2014,” Conroy will say.
“This has led to a tightening of the wholesale energy market as insufficient supply has been added, and this has led to black coal and gas generators increasing their share of time as the marginal generator, thereby setting the price.
“Beyond being more expensive forms of generation, the cost of black coal and gas has risen at the same time leading to higher wholesale prices.”
Conroy says Labor’s commitment to achieving 50% renewable energy and the associated investment in transmission infrastructure to make the renewable energy reliable, “will actually deliver lower power prices than what would otherwise be”.
Links
Pat Conroy will tell energy summit that Labor won’t delay action endlessly in a fruitless quest for bipartisanship
Bill Shorten unveiled a 10-year plan to boost the share of renewable energy in the grid and retire coal generation.Photograph: David Crosling/AAP Labor will use an energy summit convened by small business to declare it will not “be hostage to repeal politics” if it wins the coming federal election, warning it will press ahead with emissions reduction in the electricity sector even if the Liberal party won’t reconcile itself to the national energy guarantee.
Pat Conroy, the shadow assistant minister for climate and energy, will tell Wednesday’s summit Labor wants bipartisan agreement post-election, and will pursue the national energy guarantee developed by Malcolm Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg – a policy that remains popular with a number of stakeholders, including business groups, despite being dumped by Scott Morrison.
But Conroy will also use Wednesday’s outing to put business on notice, telling them an incoming Labor government will not delay policy action endlessly in a fruitless quest for bipartisanship.
“We will not allow the energy sector to be hostage to the repeal politics we saw at the turn of the decade,” Conroy will tell the summit. “Instead we will progress a 10-year energy investment plan that will deliver certainty to the energy sector through long-term contracts – contracts that will enable massive investment in new generation at the cheapest possible cost.”
Bill Shorten last November outlined Labor’s plan B in the event Labor wins the May election and the Coalition can’t be persuaded, post-election, to back its own policy with a higher emissions reduction target of 45%.
Pat Conroy will warn that Labor will press ahead with emissions reduction in the electricity sector even if the Liberal party won’t reconcile itself to the national energy guarantee. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The GuardianShorten committed to topping up the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to the tune of $10bn and unveiled a new $5bn fund to modernise ageing transmission infrastructure – the ramparts of a 10-year plan to boost the share of renewable energy in the grid and retire coal generation.
The Labor leader said he would use the Australian Energy Market Operator’s integrated system plan as the basis for transforming the energy system, with a Shorten government playing a hands-on role creating renewable energy zones, investing in new generation and transmission infrastructure and also in firming technologies, like batteries and gas peaking plants.
Moving away from the national energy guarantee, even though Labor has clearly telegraphed that possibility, will likely generate pushback in the business community which rallied in support of the policy which became a casualty of the conservative-led push against Turnbull’s leadership of the Liberal party.
While the Morrison government has been attempting to increase political pressure over Labor’s higher emissions reduction target, warning of the costs associated with a more rapid transition to low emissions technologies, Conroy will insist on Wednesday that Labor’s policies will deliver lower energy prices.
He says there has been an increase in wholesale electricity costs principally because of “the failure of the current government to establish and implement a stable and coherent climate and energy policy”.
“We have had nearly 5,200 megawatts of capacity retire in the last seven years, in fact nearly 4,000 megawatts of capacity has retired since August 2014,” Conroy will say.
“This has led to a tightening of the wholesale energy market as insufficient supply has been added, and this has led to black coal and gas generators increasing their share of time as the marginal generator, thereby setting the price.
“Beyond being more expensive forms of generation, the cost of black coal and gas has risen at the same time leading to higher wholesale prices.”
Conroy says Labor’s commitment to achieving 50% renewable energy and the associated investment in transmission infrastructure to make the renewable energy reliable, “will actually deliver lower power prices than what would otherwise be”.
Links
- Labor signals it won't use Kyoto credits in final emissions policy
- Energy impasse is Australia's 'largest failure in public policy', Business Council says
- Business Council excoriates Coalition's 'ad hoc and extreme' energy policies
- Business Council attacks Coalition's 'ad hoc' energy policy – as it happened
- As The Climate Warms, Heat Is Building On Politicians To Respond
- Malcolm Farr: ‘The Public Debate On The Existence Of Climate Change Is Over And We Are Owed An Apology’
- Remember Morrison's Black-Rock Stunt? Well, Look Who's Scared Now
- Climate Change Top Of Voters' Minds In NSW Election
- Victoria Can, And Should, Lead The Country On Climate Change
- Even In Its Dying Days, The Government Denies The Need For Climate Action
- Enough Scandalous Time-Wasting On Climate Change. Let's Get Back To The Facts
- Scientists Slap Down Australia Government Over Fake Climate Claims
- Angus Taylor Again Falsely Claims Australia's Greenhouse Emissions Are Falling
Categories: External websites
Indian Summer Monsoon Amplified Global Warming 130,000 Years Ago, Helping End Ice Age
The Conversation - Katrina Nilsson-Kerr | Pallavi Anand
Monsoon clouds approach in India.
Manoj Felix/Shutterstock Katrina Nilsson-Kerr PhD Researcher in ClimatologyThe Open UniversityPallavi AnandLecturer in Ocean BiogeochemistryThe Open University The past may be a surprisingly useful guide for predicting responses to future climate change. This is especially important for places where extreme weather has been the norm for a long time, such as the Indian subcontinent. Being able to reliably predict summer monsoon rainfall is critical to plan for the devastating impact it can have on the 1.7 billion people who live in the region.
The onset of India’s summer monsoon is linked to heat differences between the warmer land and cooler ocean, which causes a shift in prevailing wind direction. Winds blow over the Indian Ocean, picking up moisture, which falls as rain over the subcontinent from June to September.
The monsoon season can bring drought and food shortages or severe flooding, depending on how much rain falls and in what duration. Understanding how the monsoon responded to an abrupt climate transition in the past can therefore help scientists better understand its behaviour in the future.
Maharashtra, India on May 28 2010, during the dry season.
Arne Hückelheim/Wikipedia, CC BYWhen we researched this weather system’s ancient past, we found it was highly sensitive to climate warming 130,000 years ago. Our new study published in Nature Geoscience showed that the Indian summer monsoon pulled heat and moisture into the northern hemisphere when Earth was entering a warmer climate around 130,000 years ago. This caused tropical wetlands to expand northwards – habitats that act as sources of methane, a greenhouse gas. This amplified global warming further and helped end the ice age.The rate at which today’s climate is changing is unprecedented in the geological record, but our study shows how sensitive the Indian summer monsoon was during a global transition into warming in the past and may still be.
The same view in Maharashtra, India on August 28 2010, during the monsoon season.
Arne Hückelheim/Wikipedia, CC BYThe monsoon rains of yesteryear
Over the last one million years, the climate fluctuated between a cold glacial – known as an ice age – and a warm interglacial as the Earth’s position relative to the sun wobbled in its orbit. The last transition from an ice age into the warm climate of the present interglacial – known as the Holocene – occurred around 18,000 years ago. This period of Earth’s history is relatively well understood, but how Earth system processes responded to these climate changes deeper in time is still something of a mystery.
A recent expedition to drill deep into the ocean floor of the Bay of Bengal gave an opportunity to reconstruct past Indian monsoon behaviour over hundreds of years before the last ice age.
Globigerinoides ruber – a species of microscopic foraminifera from the Indian Ocean.Pallavi Anand, Author provided (No reuse)Our study used these deep sea sediments from the northern Bay of Bengal to capture a direct signal of the Indian summer monsoon from 140,000 to 128,000 years ago, hidden in the fossilised shells of tiny microscopic creatures called foraminifera. These plankton species once lived in the upper ocean water column and captured the environmental conditions of the surrounding seawater in the chemical make up of their shells.
We detected the ocean surface water freshening from river discharge induced by the rains of the Indian summer monsoon from 140,000 to 128,000 years ago – a sign of the strengthening monsoon system. This occurred when the Earth was coming out of a glacial state and into the interglacial which occurred before the one we live in, separated by a single ice age. During this period – which we’ll refer to as the penultimate deglaciation – sea levels rose from six to nine metres worldwide.
Ice-core records show that Antarctica began to warm first during the penultimate deglaciation. Southern Hemisphere warming provided a source of heat and moisture which fuelled the strengthening of the Indian summer monsoon, as seen in our records of surface freshening and river runoff from the northern Bay of Bengal.
Wetland in Leh Ladakh, India.
The expansion of tropical wetlands further north released more methane to the atmosphere,
accelerating global warming.
WATHIT H/ShutterstockDuring this warming period around 130,000 years ago, the Indian summer monsoon responded to southern hemisphere warming while the northern hemisphere and other monsoon systems, such as the East Asian summer monsoon – which affects modern day China, Japan and the Far East – remained in a glacial state.
The Indian summer monsoon pulled heat and moisture northwards, driving glacial melting in the northern hemisphere and helping tropical wetlands expand their range. These expanding tropical wetlands resulted in more methane release into the atmosphere which caused even more warming, setting changes in motion which ended the global ice age.
The Indian summer monsoon is an incredibly dynamic system. Though confined to the tropics, the system is sensitive to climatic conditions in both hemispheres. Due to its role in contributing to methane emissions, the Indian summer monsoon also has an outsize impact on the global climate. Monsoons should not be viewed in isolation, just as the polar ice sheets shouldn’t. Earth’s internal climate system is intrinsically linked and abrupt changes at one place can have significant consequences over time elsewhere.
Links
Monsoon clouds approach in India.
Manoj Felix/Shutterstock Katrina Nilsson-Kerr PhD Researcher in ClimatologyThe Open UniversityPallavi AnandLecturer in Ocean BiogeochemistryThe Open University The past may be a surprisingly useful guide for predicting responses to future climate change. This is especially important for places where extreme weather has been the norm for a long time, such as the Indian subcontinent. Being able to reliably predict summer monsoon rainfall is critical to plan for the devastating impact it can have on the 1.7 billion people who live in the region.
The onset of India’s summer monsoon is linked to heat differences between the warmer land and cooler ocean, which causes a shift in prevailing wind direction. Winds blow over the Indian Ocean, picking up moisture, which falls as rain over the subcontinent from June to September.
The monsoon season can bring drought and food shortages or severe flooding, depending on how much rain falls and in what duration. Understanding how the monsoon responded to an abrupt climate transition in the past can therefore help scientists better understand its behaviour in the future.
Maharashtra, India on May 28 2010, during the dry season.
Arne Hückelheim/Wikipedia, CC BYWhen we researched this weather system’s ancient past, we found it was highly sensitive to climate warming 130,000 years ago. Our new study published in Nature Geoscience showed that the Indian summer monsoon pulled heat and moisture into the northern hemisphere when Earth was entering a warmer climate around 130,000 years ago. This caused tropical wetlands to expand northwards – habitats that act as sources of methane, a greenhouse gas. This amplified global warming further and helped end the ice age.The rate at which today’s climate is changing is unprecedented in the geological record, but our study shows how sensitive the Indian summer monsoon was during a global transition into warming in the past and may still be.
The same view in Maharashtra, India on August 28 2010, during the monsoon season.
Arne Hückelheim/Wikipedia, CC BYThe monsoon rains of yesteryear
Over the last one million years, the climate fluctuated between a cold glacial – known as an ice age – and a warm interglacial as the Earth’s position relative to the sun wobbled in its orbit. The last transition from an ice age into the warm climate of the present interglacial – known as the Holocene – occurred around 18,000 years ago. This period of Earth’s history is relatively well understood, but how Earth system processes responded to these climate changes deeper in time is still something of a mystery.
A recent expedition to drill deep into the ocean floor of the Bay of Bengal gave an opportunity to reconstruct past Indian monsoon behaviour over hundreds of years before the last ice age.
Globigerinoides ruber – a species of microscopic foraminifera from the Indian Ocean.Pallavi Anand, Author provided (No reuse)Our study used these deep sea sediments from the northern Bay of Bengal to capture a direct signal of the Indian summer monsoon from 140,000 to 128,000 years ago, hidden in the fossilised shells of tiny microscopic creatures called foraminifera. These plankton species once lived in the upper ocean water column and captured the environmental conditions of the surrounding seawater in the chemical make up of their shells.
We detected the ocean surface water freshening from river discharge induced by the rains of the Indian summer monsoon from 140,000 to 128,000 years ago – a sign of the strengthening monsoon system. This occurred when the Earth was coming out of a glacial state and into the interglacial which occurred before the one we live in, separated by a single ice age. During this period – which we’ll refer to as the penultimate deglaciation – sea levels rose from six to nine metres worldwide.
Ice-core records show that Antarctica began to warm first during the penultimate deglaciation. Southern Hemisphere warming provided a source of heat and moisture which fuelled the strengthening of the Indian summer monsoon, as seen in our records of surface freshening and river runoff from the northern Bay of Bengal.
Wetland in Leh Ladakh, India.
The expansion of tropical wetlands further north released more methane to the atmosphere,
accelerating global warming.
WATHIT H/ShutterstockDuring this warming period around 130,000 years ago, the Indian summer monsoon responded to southern hemisphere warming while the northern hemisphere and other monsoon systems, such as the East Asian summer monsoon – which affects modern day China, Japan and the Far East – remained in a glacial state.
The Indian summer monsoon pulled heat and moisture northwards, driving glacial melting in the northern hemisphere and helping tropical wetlands expand their range. These expanding tropical wetlands resulted in more methane release into the atmosphere which caused even more warming, setting changes in motion which ended the global ice age.
The Indian summer monsoon is an incredibly dynamic system. Though confined to the tropics, the system is sensitive to climatic conditions in both hemispheres. Due to its role in contributing to methane emissions, the Indian summer monsoon also has an outsize impact on the global climate. Monsoons should not be viewed in isolation, just as the polar ice sheets shouldn’t. Earth’s internal climate system is intrinsically linked and abrupt changes at one place can have significant consequences over time elsewhere.
Links
- India is missing its monsoon, and El Niño could be the culprit
- Why it’s so hard to detect the fingerprints of global warming on monsoon rains
- Droughts and floods: India’s water crises demand more than grand projects
- India’s tea capital can recover from devastating floods – if the government gets its act together
- Deadly Tensions Rise As India’s Water Supply Runs Dangerously Low
- India Taps Solar, Storage To Ensure All Homes Have Power In 2018
- 12-Step Climate Change & Global Warming Action Plan For India
- World's Biggest Coal Company Closes 37 Mines As Solar Power's Influence Grows
- India Will Sell Only Electric Cars Within The Next 13 Years
- To Slow Climate Change, India Joins The Renewable Energy Revolution
- Macron Says France, India To Work Together On Climate Change
- India, Once A Coal Goliath, Is Fast Turning Green
Categories: External websites
Climate Change To Blame For Mass Jindabyne Fish Death: Water Ecologist
Fairfax - Finbar O'Mallon
A trout hatchery in the Snowy Mountains has lost 30,000 fish due to high river temperatures and low rainfall, which a water ecologist has blamed on the effects of climate change.
The NSW Department of Primary Industries, which oversees the Gaden Trout Hatchery outside of Jindabyne, confirmed the loss occurred when the Thredbo River hit temperatures of 28.5 degrees around January 26.
A Brown Trout in Lake Eildon. Credit: Justin McManus
Trout are a northern hemisphere fish and begin to stress and die at 24 to 26 degrees, a department spokeswoman said.
"Fish deaths on this scale at Gaden have not been experienced in the last 20 years," she said.
The department also blamed a lack of rainfall on the loss of the 30,000 fingerlings - baby fish - and 1000 broodstock fish, which are used for breeding.
University of Canberra Associate Professor Ben Kefford said it could be good news for native fish in the rivers who get eaten by the non-native trout.
"It will mean they have far less predation from the trout and competition for that matter," Dr Kefford said.
Dr Kefford said he had also witnessed dead trout in the Wellington River in the Victorian alps in January.
"It certainly doesn't surprise me," he said.
"It will be a consequence of a hot summer which is due to climate change and we've currently got very low flows in most of our rivers."
The low river flows were themselves attributable to a lack of rainfall.
He explained that less water meant it was easier for the heat in the air to warm that body of water up.
"If temperatures get hotter and we have increased periods of dry spells this is probably what's going to happen," he said.
Dr Kefford said trout were more susceptible to heat stress hence why they were placed out in mountain alpine streams.
While native fish had higher heat tolerances Dr Kefford said it wasn't well known what their limit was.
The department said the fingerlings lost in January represented three per cent of the entire department's annual stocking production.
"The fingerlings currently at the Gaden Hatchery are in good health and [the department's] fish stockings have continued across impoundments and streams across the state," the spokeswoman said.
"Gaden Hatchery staff did a fantastic job saving the remaining fingerlings by getting them into cooler water as soon as possible."
This summer was Australia's hottest on record with January beating previous heat records as Australians sweated through multiple heatwaves.
Links
A trout hatchery in the Snowy Mountains has lost 30,000 fish due to high river temperatures and low rainfall, which a water ecologist has blamed on the effects of climate change.
The NSW Department of Primary Industries, which oversees the Gaden Trout Hatchery outside of Jindabyne, confirmed the loss occurred when the Thredbo River hit temperatures of 28.5 degrees around January 26.
A Brown Trout in Lake Eildon. Credit: Justin McManus
Trout are a northern hemisphere fish and begin to stress and die at 24 to 26 degrees, a department spokeswoman said.
"Fish deaths on this scale at Gaden have not been experienced in the last 20 years," she said.
The department also blamed a lack of rainfall on the loss of the 30,000 fingerlings - baby fish - and 1000 broodstock fish, which are used for breeding.
University of Canberra Associate Professor Ben Kefford said it could be good news for native fish in the rivers who get eaten by the non-native trout.
"It will mean they have far less predation from the trout and competition for that matter," Dr Kefford said.
Dr Kefford said he had also witnessed dead trout in the Wellington River in the Victorian alps in January.
"It certainly doesn't surprise me," he said.
"It will be a consequence of a hot summer which is due to climate change and we've currently got very low flows in most of our rivers."
The low river flows were themselves attributable to a lack of rainfall.
He explained that less water meant it was easier for the heat in the air to warm that body of water up.
"If temperatures get hotter and we have increased periods of dry spells this is probably what's going to happen," he said.
Dr Kefford said trout were more susceptible to heat stress hence why they were placed out in mountain alpine streams.
While native fish had higher heat tolerances Dr Kefford said it wasn't well known what their limit was.
The department said the fingerlings lost in January represented three per cent of the entire department's annual stocking production.
"The fingerlings currently at the Gaden Hatchery are in good health and [the department's] fish stockings have continued across impoundments and streams across the state," the spokeswoman said.
"Gaden Hatchery staff did a fantastic job saving the remaining fingerlings by getting them into cooler water as soon as possible."
This summer was Australia's hottest on record with January beating previous heat records as Australians sweated through multiple heatwaves.
Links
- 'The Darling Will Die': Scientists Say Mass Fish Kill Due To Over-Extraction And Drought
- Fish Kill In The Murrumbidgee River Leaves 'Thousands' More Dead
- Thousands Of Australian Animals Die In Unprecedented Heatwave
- Dead Stinking Fish Send A Message
- 'Drought, Climate Change And Mismanagement': What Experts Think Caused The Death Of A Million Menindee Fish
- Queensland flying foxes travel hundreds of kilometres for finest flowers
- 'We Have Death And Devastation At Every Turn': The Flood Massacre Of Queensland Cattle
- Climate Change Is Killing Off Earth’s Little Creatures
- When Extreme Weather Wipes Out Wildlife, The Fallout Can Last For Years
- Australia Heatwave: Mass Animal Deaths And Roads Melting As Temperatures Reach Record High'
- Our Little Brown Rat': First Climate Change-Caused Mammal Extinction
- The Biggest Issues For Wildlife And Endangered Species In 2019
- Worst Mass Extinction Event In Earth’s History Was Caused By Global Warming Analogous To Current Climate Crisis
- Climate Change Also Wiped Out Life On Earth 252 Million Years Ago
- Extinction Toll May Be Far Worse Than Thought
- The 'Great Dying': Rapid Warming Caused Largest Extinction Event Ever, Report Says
- How Plants And Animals Are Teaching Scientists To Fight Climate Change
- Climate Change Sparks Fears For Flying Foxes After 23,000 Deaths
Categories: External websites
Climate Strike: Greta Thunberg Calls For ‘System Change Not Climate Change’ – Here’s What That Could Look Like
The Conversation - Sheila M. Cannon
Greta Thunberg leading a march in Hamburg, Germany. EPA-EFE/FOCKE STRANGMANN Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, is calling for system change.
At a press conference in Brussels, she told the European Commission that in order to fight climate change we need to change our political and economic systems – a message that has been repeated on signs and in chants in the student climate strikes around the world.
The school climate strikes, which she started alone in August 2018, have become a social movement with 1,659 strikes planned for March 15 in 105 countries.
But what is system change? How do entire systems change? When we see “save the planet” initiatives, they often look like individual decisions that don’t cost much, like switching to a bamboo toothbrush or washing containers before you recycle them. By all means, do these things, but don’t confuse them with system change.
"If solutions within this system are so difficult to find then maybe we should change the system itself" - Greta Thunberg addresses the COP24 climate conference in Poland. @GretaThunberg @ExtinctionR pic.twitter.com/ICl3BC9qUz— Real Media (@RealMediaGB) December 17, 2018
Most people don’t know how to change political, economic and social systems. They end up making token gestures instead that may even perpetuate the problem. There’s also the question of how to overcome powerful vested interests that benefit from the current system. But there is research that can help us understand system change.
Neo-institutional theory is one approach to understanding how and why people organise collectively. People create meaning, follow rules and reproduce structures – such as classrooms, businesses, offices and community halls – based on assumptions of what is right and proper. Classrooms look similar, not because each time we set one up we rationally decide how to do so, but because we make assumptions about what a classroom is supposed to look like.
Because we are part of these meaning structures, we reproduce existing norms and beliefs and resist change. System change happens when we don’t take our assumptions for granted, which allows more and more people to question the status quo.
Scanning the horizon
Thunberg is telling us that our current political and economic systems are no longer fit for purpose. She is pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.
Changing a system takes time. My research on the LGBT movement in Ireland documented efforts and achievements over 40 years. Homosexuality went from being a crime, to being celebrated in a progressive movement. While the referendum on marriage equality took one day in 2015, the efforts of many to change the system took decades.
The Three Horizons Framework can help explain the different factors that lead to changing systems. Horizon one is business as usual – the status quo – and the outgoing institution in times of change. Horizon three is the new institution – with newly legitimised structures and beliefs. The space between them is horizon two, which is occupied by people focused on social change – who lead the transition from an old system to the new.
Change can seem sudden, but usually it follows many years of changing beliefs. Sheila Cannon, Author provided
Most people recognise the problems with the present system and want to help society move to something more sustainable. Products like bamboo toothbrushes exist to monetise that concern, but because they’re sold in plastic and shipped around the world, their production and distribution still consumes fossil fuel and does nothing to change the existing economic or political system that is fuelling climate change. A collective challenge to political and economic elites is likely to be more effective in forcing this transition.
When aspects of horizon three appear – glimpses of a more sustainable system – they are usually rejected as illegitimate or too radical. When Rosa Parks sat down at the front of the bus in a move to promote civil rights in America in 1955, she was condemned. Looking back after system change has happened, these people are seen as leaders.
The end of capitalism?
The system that needs to be changed to avert climate disaster is capitalism, which is losing its legitimacy largely due to the system’s failure to respond effectively to climate change.
Applying all I’ve learned about how systems change, it’s possible to imagine that the current system which sustains business-as-usual capitalism – horizon one in the framework – is occupied by those who continue to produce, sell and consume products and services that rely on fossil fuels. That’s most of us, but horizon one is also maintained by climate deniers and investors in fossil energy, who, despite the scientific evidence, keep chugging along.
A more sustainable system could include policies we might currently consider “extreme”, like universal basic income. This is a guaranteed payment for all people regardless of their wealth which could help break the cycle of production and consumption that pollutes the atmosphere and fills the ocean with discarded plastic. Evidence suggests there is growing support for this, particularly among young people.
School students strike in Brisbane, Australia on March 15 2019. EPA-EFE/DAN PELEDExtending human rights to non-humans and even to ecosystems is another idea that seems radical today but is gaining traction and could define an alternative system in future. One thing is for sure, we’ll look back in horror one day at how humans treated the natural world, as many already do in the present.
If the climate strikers can continue to grow their movement and sustain momentum, their leadership could be an important part of society’s transition to a more sustainable system in horizon three.
Capitalism may seem permanent, but research shows that systems inevitably change over time, and are ultimately created and reinforced by us. But in order to change anything, people must question their own role in the system first.
Links
Greta Thunberg leading a march in Hamburg, Germany. EPA-EFE/FOCKE STRANGMANN Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, is calling for system change.
At a press conference in Brussels, she told the European Commission that in order to fight climate change we need to change our political and economic systems – a message that has been repeated on signs and in chants in the student climate strikes around the world.
The school climate strikes, which she started alone in August 2018, have become a social movement with 1,659 strikes planned for March 15 in 105 countries.
But what is system change? How do entire systems change? When we see “save the planet” initiatives, they often look like individual decisions that don’t cost much, like switching to a bamboo toothbrush or washing containers before you recycle them. By all means, do these things, but don’t confuse them with system change.
"If solutions within this system are so difficult to find then maybe we should change the system itself" - Greta Thunberg addresses the COP24 climate conference in Poland. @GretaThunberg @ExtinctionR pic.twitter.com/ICl3BC9qUz— Real Media (@RealMediaGB) December 17, 2018
Most people don’t know how to change political, economic and social systems. They end up making token gestures instead that may even perpetuate the problem. There’s also the question of how to overcome powerful vested interests that benefit from the current system. But there is research that can help us understand system change.
Neo-institutional theory is one approach to understanding how and why people organise collectively. People create meaning, follow rules and reproduce structures – such as classrooms, businesses, offices and community halls – based on assumptions of what is right and proper. Classrooms look similar, not because each time we set one up we rationally decide how to do so, but because we make assumptions about what a classroom is supposed to look like.
Because we are part of these meaning structures, we reproduce existing norms and beliefs and resist change. System change happens when we don’t take our assumptions for granted, which allows more and more people to question the status quo.
Scanning the horizon
Thunberg is telling us that our current political and economic systems are no longer fit for purpose. She is pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.
Changing a system takes time. My research on the LGBT movement in Ireland documented efforts and achievements over 40 years. Homosexuality went from being a crime, to being celebrated in a progressive movement. While the referendum on marriage equality took one day in 2015, the efforts of many to change the system took decades.
The Three Horizons Framework can help explain the different factors that lead to changing systems. Horizon one is business as usual – the status quo – and the outgoing institution in times of change. Horizon three is the new institution – with newly legitimised structures and beliefs. The space between them is horizon two, which is occupied by people focused on social change – who lead the transition from an old system to the new.
Change can seem sudden, but usually it follows many years of changing beliefs. Sheila Cannon, Author provided
Most people recognise the problems with the present system and want to help society move to something more sustainable. Products like bamboo toothbrushes exist to monetise that concern, but because they’re sold in plastic and shipped around the world, their production and distribution still consumes fossil fuel and does nothing to change the existing economic or political system that is fuelling climate change. A collective challenge to political and economic elites is likely to be more effective in forcing this transition.
When aspects of horizon three appear – glimpses of a more sustainable system – they are usually rejected as illegitimate or too radical. When Rosa Parks sat down at the front of the bus in a move to promote civil rights in America in 1955, she was condemned. Looking back after system change has happened, these people are seen as leaders.
The end of capitalism?
The system that needs to be changed to avert climate disaster is capitalism, which is losing its legitimacy largely due to the system’s failure to respond effectively to climate change.
Applying all I’ve learned about how systems change, it’s possible to imagine that the current system which sustains business-as-usual capitalism – horizon one in the framework – is occupied by those who continue to produce, sell and consume products and services that rely on fossil fuels. That’s most of us, but horizon one is also maintained by climate deniers and investors in fossil energy, who, despite the scientific evidence, keep chugging along.
A more sustainable system could include policies we might currently consider “extreme”, like universal basic income. This is a guaranteed payment for all people regardless of their wealth which could help break the cycle of production and consumption that pollutes the atmosphere and fills the ocean with discarded plastic. Evidence suggests there is growing support for this, particularly among young people.
School students strike in Brisbane, Australia on March 15 2019. EPA-EFE/DAN PELEDExtending human rights to non-humans and even to ecosystems is another idea that seems radical today but is gaining traction and could define an alternative system in future. One thing is for sure, we’ll look back in horror one day at how humans treated the natural world, as many already do in the present.
If the climate strikers can continue to grow their movement and sustain momentum, their leadership could be an important part of society’s transition to a more sustainable system in horizon three.
Capitalism may seem permanent, but research shows that systems inevitably change over time, and are ultimately created and reinforced by us. But in order to change anything, people must question their own role in the system first.
Links
- Climate change: a climate scientist answers questions from teenagers
- Imagine newsletter: researchers think of a world with climate action
- School climate strikes: why adults no longer have the right to object to their children taking radical action
- School climate strikes: what next for the latest generation of activists?
- Students Worldwide Skip School To Demand Tough Action On Climate Change
- Climate Change Strikes Across Australia See Student Protesters Defy Calls To Stay In School
- Teenage Climate Activist Nominated For Nobel Peace Prize
- Amsterdam's First National Climate Change March Draws 40,000 People
- Climate Change And The Power Of One
Categories: External websites
As The Climate Warms, Heat Is Building On Politicians To Respond
Fairfax - Nicole Hasham
You don’t need to be a climate scientist to know that something was different this summer. Overheated flying foxes dropped from the sky. Fruit cooked on trees. Roads melted, moods changed. The weather was on the rampage, and Australians could no longer deny that humans have irretrievably warmed our world.
The freakish summer – Australia’s hottest on record – is burnt into the minds of voters as they head to the ballot box in May for what many believe will be a federal election decided on climate policy. Polls show that voter concern over climate change is the highest in more than a decade. And the window of time left to avert the worst disasters is fast closing.
Labor frontbencher Mark Butler, who on current polling will hold the climate change and energy portfolio come May, says voters are increasingly clear that global warming "is real and it's manifesting now".
School students attending a climate strike in Sydney. Credit: AAP"From a South Australian perspective, which is where I’m from, it was the hottest summer, we had the hottest month and the hottest day [on record]," he says.
"People are really seeing the evidence of climate change and the advice is just becoming clearer and more urgent."
After a punishing last two terms in government, Labor knows better than most that voter concern on climate change does not easily convert to a viable and enduring policy.
But Australian Industry Group principal national policy adviser Tennant Reed says the public broadly believes that "we have not done very well in Australia on climate policy over the past decade and we need to sort it out".
"There is a strong perception in industry that this is a matter of public concern, particularly among young people," says Mr Reed, whose organisation represents 60,000 businesses employing more than 1 million people.
"And there is an expectation that if governments are not seen to be addressing climate change they will pay an electoral price for that."
A Sydney Morning Herald poll this week that showed climate change and environmental protection will be top of mind for most voters at next weekend’s NSW election. Tens of thousands of students skipped half a day of school on Friday to demand more action on climate change, and internal party polling by the Nationals has also shown that the issue is a priority for voters in their federal seats.
But that public sentiment sits in staggering contrast to Australia’s contribution to global climate efforts. The nation’s carbon emissions are rising year on year. The collapse in 2018 of the National Energy Guarantee was the latest in a string of epic fails by Parliament on reaching climate consensus. And the Coalition this week continued to rip itself apart over funding new coal plants from the taxpayers’ purse.
Despite its internal divisions the government this month bent in the prevailing wind, injecting $2 billion into the emissions reduction fund and committing to a multibillion-dollar expansion of the Snowy Hydro project. Even Tony Abbott has reluctantly arrived at the party, backflipping on his insistence that Australia abandon the Paris climate accord.
Environment Minister Melissa Price said the government "understand[s] Australians are concerned by climate change, and we’ve been taking action since we came to government".
The Coalition would cut emissions by 26 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030 in line with the Paris treaty– a goal Ms Price says is "responsible and achievable".
Labor would go much further, setting targets of a 45 per cent emissions reduction and 50 per cent renewable energy by 2030.
Price said Labor was yet to release important details of its climate plans and repeated the government’s claim that the policies would "destroy whole sectors of the economy". She cited modelling released last month that suggested Labor’s policies would increase wholesale electricity prices by almost 60 per cent.
"This is not a scare campaign – it’s independent modelling which lays bare the cost of a 45 per cent target," she says.
Contradictory modelling cited by Labor has found its policies will push wholesale prices down.
Reed says modelling the economic impact of climate policies was notoriously difficult, and "we don’t think the evidence is terribly strong in any direction" on the effect of Labor’s policies. But the relative ease with which Australia met its Kyoto emissions targets were cause for hope, he says.
"We should be a little more optimistic about our capacity to make things work if we have a clear policy pathway that is ... plausibly going to be sustained," he says.
Labor remembers well the political punishment meted out to the Rudd-Gillard governments when the party walked away from an emissions trading scheme, then introduced a carbon price dubbed by Abbott as a "great big tax on everything".
But Butler believes Australians are increasingly cognisant that when it comes to climate action "the world is going in one direction and we are going in the other".
"[The government is trying] to pretend that everything is going fine and emissions are coming down and we are going to meet our Paris targets in a canter," he says.
"But an array of voices in the community – scientists, business, regulatory agencies, bodies who measure performance in this area - they are all saying Australia is underperforming."
A recent series of reports outlining the need for radical action, including sobering findings from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has helped galvanise voter concern.
The Reserve Bank of Australia this week became the latest major financial regulator to highlight the potential economic harm if businesses do not immediately address the climate change risk.
Many businesses have already cottoned on. Among them are Australia's largest coal miner Glencore, which last month announced it would cap coal production at 2019 levels due to climate change concerns.
In contrast to government predictions of a Labor-induced economic apocalypse, the Greens have decried Labor for running a "small target" strategy that fails to deal with the burning problem of coal, including its fence-sitting on the proposed Adani mine.
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has expressed scepticism over the economic and environmental credentials of the Adani project but has stopped short of committing to halt it should Labor win power.
On Thursday he said fossil fuels would be part of the Australia’s future energy mix and export industry, but emphasised that the nation "can't live in the past".
Labor must walk a politically risky line between appealing to voters in marginal Queensland seats who want the Adani mine to proceed, and not alienating progressive voters in inner-city seats who want serious action on climate change.
Greens climate and energy spokesman Adam Bandt says Labor "is trying their hardest not to talk about" coal.
"But I think over the next couple of months it will become increasingly impossible to either continue to promote coal or to be silent about it," he says.
Successive Newspolls suggest the Greens have not capitalised on voter concern on climate, showing their primary vote has not improved since their disappointing 10.2 per cent share in 2016. The party’s defeat in the Batman byelection did not augur well, and a public airing of divisions within the NSW Greens in recent months has not helped matters.
But Bandt does not believe the NSW issues will erode the federal Greens vote, and the Newspoll findings do not "gel" with his experience of talking to voters, who in particular recognised the need for a strong Greens presence in the Senate.
The Australian Conservation Foundation has been phoning and doorknocking voters in three marginal seats - Chisholm and Macnamara in Victoria, and Bonner in Queensland – to gauge the public mood on climate change.
The organisation’s chief executive Kelly O’Shanassy said people were more prepared than ever to "take action through their vote".
"People are looking at the cost of climate change in human terms and not just dollar terms," she says.
O’ Shanassy said of the policies announced so far, the Greens, predictably, had pledged the boldest climate action.
While Labor’s emissions targets and stance on coal were far from ideal, the party had "started to move into an area of having clearer climate policies" which may be thwarting a Greens resurgence, she says.
As Labor and the Greens tussle over the progressive vote, the Liberal Party is fending off challenges from pro-climate independents in a number of blue-ribbon electorates.
In the Melbourne seat of Kooyong, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is up against former Liberal Party stalwart and ex-Clean Energy Finance Corporation chief Oliver Yates.
Yates says the government is "too busy arguing internally to genuinely help people manage their own electricity needs". Among his election pledges is a bid to encourage rooftop solar uptake through environmental upgrade agreements, whereby households can obtain a low-cost loan to install the infrastructure and pay it back via council rates.
Yates, a former Macquarie banker, says moderate Liberal voters are dismayed at the Coalition's climate inaction after it was "body snatched by the far right".
"The market that you are pitching to in an electorate like this is not rusted on Labor voters, you are actually filling the gap that the Liberal Party has left behind," he says.
As the long days of summer recede and autumn takes hold, climate change advocates will be hoping that public pressure for change does not cool with the temperatures ahead of the May election.
Reed says despite not seeing eye-to-eye on everything, business, unions, environmentalists investors and the social welfare sector put aside their differences years ago to agree on the best way forward on climate change. Now politicians must do the same.
"We all agree on the need to address climate change, to do so in a trade-neutral way, and to bring everybody along in the process in terms of equity," he says.
"There is a lot more consensus outside Parliament than in it."
Links
You don’t need to be a climate scientist to know that something was different this summer. Overheated flying foxes dropped from the sky. Fruit cooked on trees. Roads melted, moods changed. The weather was on the rampage, and Australians could no longer deny that humans have irretrievably warmed our world.
The freakish summer – Australia’s hottest on record – is burnt into the minds of voters as they head to the ballot box in May for what many believe will be a federal election decided on climate policy. Polls show that voter concern over climate change is the highest in more than a decade. And the window of time left to avert the worst disasters is fast closing.
Labor frontbencher Mark Butler, who on current polling will hold the climate change and energy portfolio come May, says voters are increasingly clear that global warming "is real and it's manifesting now".
School students attending a climate strike in Sydney. Credit: AAP"From a South Australian perspective, which is where I’m from, it was the hottest summer, we had the hottest month and the hottest day [on record]," he says.
"People are really seeing the evidence of climate change and the advice is just becoming clearer and more urgent."
After a punishing last two terms in government, Labor knows better than most that voter concern on climate change does not easily convert to a viable and enduring policy.
But Australian Industry Group principal national policy adviser Tennant Reed says the public broadly believes that "we have not done very well in Australia on climate policy over the past decade and we need to sort it out".
"There is a strong perception in industry that this is a matter of public concern, particularly among young people," says Mr Reed, whose organisation represents 60,000 businesses employing more than 1 million people.
"And there is an expectation that if governments are not seen to be addressing climate change they will pay an electoral price for that."
A Sydney Morning Herald poll this week that showed climate change and environmental protection will be top of mind for most voters at next weekend’s NSW election. Tens of thousands of students skipped half a day of school on Friday to demand more action on climate change, and internal party polling by the Nationals has also shown that the issue is a priority for voters in their federal seats.
But that public sentiment sits in staggering contrast to Australia’s contribution to global climate efforts. The nation’s carbon emissions are rising year on year. The collapse in 2018 of the National Energy Guarantee was the latest in a string of epic fails by Parliament on reaching climate consensus. And the Coalition this week continued to rip itself apart over funding new coal plants from the taxpayers’ purse.
Despite its internal divisions the government this month bent in the prevailing wind, injecting $2 billion into the emissions reduction fund and committing to a multibillion-dollar expansion of the Snowy Hydro project. Even Tony Abbott has reluctantly arrived at the party, backflipping on his insistence that Australia abandon the Paris climate accord.
Environment Minister Melissa Price said the government "understand[s] Australians are concerned by climate change, and we’ve been taking action since we came to government".
The Coalition would cut emissions by 26 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030 in line with the Paris treaty– a goal Ms Price says is "responsible and achievable".
Labor would go much further, setting targets of a 45 per cent emissions reduction and 50 per cent renewable energy by 2030.
Price said Labor was yet to release important details of its climate plans and repeated the government’s claim that the policies would "destroy whole sectors of the economy". She cited modelling released last month that suggested Labor’s policies would increase wholesale electricity prices by almost 60 per cent.
"This is not a scare campaign – it’s independent modelling which lays bare the cost of a 45 per cent target," she says.
Contradictory modelling cited by Labor has found its policies will push wholesale prices down.
Reed says modelling the economic impact of climate policies was notoriously difficult, and "we don’t think the evidence is terribly strong in any direction" on the effect of Labor’s policies. But the relative ease with which Australia met its Kyoto emissions targets were cause for hope, he says.
"We should be a little more optimistic about our capacity to make things work if we have a clear policy pathway that is ... plausibly going to be sustained," he says.
Labor remembers well the political punishment meted out to the Rudd-Gillard governments when the party walked away from an emissions trading scheme, then introduced a carbon price dubbed by Abbott as a "great big tax on everything".
But Butler believes Australians are increasingly cognisant that when it comes to climate action "the world is going in one direction and we are going in the other".
"[The government is trying] to pretend that everything is going fine and emissions are coming down and we are going to meet our Paris targets in a canter," he says.
"But an array of voices in the community – scientists, business, regulatory agencies, bodies who measure performance in this area - they are all saying Australia is underperforming."
A recent series of reports outlining the need for radical action, including sobering findings from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has helped galvanise voter concern.
The Reserve Bank of Australia this week became the latest major financial regulator to highlight the potential economic harm if businesses do not immediately address the climate change risk.
Many businesses have already cottoned on. Among them are Australia's largest coal miner Glencore, which last month announced it would cap coal production at 2019 levels due to climate change concerns.
In contrast to government predictions of a Labor-induced economic apocalypse, the Greens have decried Labor for running a "small target" strategy that fails to deal with the burning problem of coal, including its fence-sitting on the proposed Adani mine.
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has expressed scepticism over the economic and environmental credentials of the Adani project but has stopped short of committing to halt it should Labor win power.
On Thursday he said fossil fuels would be part of the Australia’s future energy mix and export industry, but emphasised that the nation "can't live in the past".
Labor must walk a politically risky line between appealing to voters in marginal Queensland seats who want the Adani mine to proceed, and not alienating progressive voters in inner-city seats who want serious action on climate change.
Greens climate and energy spokesman Adam Bandt says Labor "is trying their hardest not to talk about" coal.
"But I think over the next couple of months it will become increasingly impossible to either continue to promote coal or to be silent about it," he says.
Successive Newspolls suggest the Greens have not capitalised on voter concern on climate, showing their primary vote has not improved since their disappointing 10.2 per cent share in 2016. The party’s defeat in the Batman byelection did not augur well, and a public airing of divisions within the NSW Greens in recent months has not helped matters.
But Bandt does not believe the NSW issues will erode the federal Greens vote, and the Newspoll findings do not "gel" with his experience of talking to voters, who in particular recognised the need for a strong Greens presence in the Senate.
The Australian Conservation Foundation has been phoning and doorknocking voters in three marginal seats - Chisholm and Macnamara in Victoria, and Bonner in Queensland – to gauge the public mood on climate change.
The organisation’s chief executive Kelly O’Shanassy said people were more prepared than ever to "take action through their vote".
"People are looking at the cost of climate change in human terms and not just dollar terms," she says.
O’ Shanassy said of the policies announced so far, the Greens, predictably, had pledged the boldest climate action.
While Labor’s emissions targets and stance on coal were far from ideal, the party had "started to move into an area of having clearer climate policies" which may be thwarting a Greens resurgence, she says.
As Labor and the Greens tussle over the progressive vote, the Liberal Party is fending off challenges from pro-climate independents in a number of blue-ribbon electorates.
In the Melbourne seat of Kooyong, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is up against former Liberal Party stalwart and ex-Clean Energy Finance Corporation chief Oliver Yates.
Yates says the government is "too busy arguing internally to genuinely help people manage their own electricity needs". Among his election pledges is a bid to encourage rooftop solar uptake through environmental upgrade agreements, whereby households can obtain a low-cost loan to install the infrastructure and pay it back via council rates.
Yates, a former Macquarie banker, says moderate Liberal voters are dismayed at the Coalition's climate inaction after it was "body snatched by the far right".
"The market that you are pitching to in an electorate like this is not rusted on Labor voters, you are actually filling the gap that the Liberal Party has left behind," he says.
As the long days of summer recede and autumn takes hold, climate change advocates will be hoping that public pressure for change does not cool with the temperatures ahead of the May election.
Reed says despite not seeing eye-to-eye on everything, business, unions, environmentalists investors and the social welfare sector put aside their differences years ago to agree on the best way forward on climate change. Now politicians must do the same.
"We all agree on the need to address climate change, to do so in a trade-neutral way, and to bring everybody along in the process in terms of equity," he says.
"There is a lot more consensus outside Parliament than in it."
Links
- Climate change top of voters' minds in NSW election
- Parts of Sydney CBD closed to traffic as school students protest climate inaction
- Nationals face climate change backlash, internal polling reveals
- 'Change now or pay later': RBA's stark warning on climate change
- Frydenberg faces climate fight in Kooyong
Categories: External websites
Taking Up The Slack: When Governments Don’t Act On Climate Change
UNSW - Jeremy Moss
The responsibility for reducing emissions flows from federal to state to local governments, as well as to individual cities.
Jeremy MossJeremy Moss is Professor of Political Philosophy and Co-Director of the Practical Justice Initiative, University of New South Wales. Every year the governments of the world meet to progress action on climate change. And every year, governments recommits to take some sort of action to prevent climate change. That governments should make these commitments and then implement them is beyond question.
But the results have been dismal. Most nations not only have commitments that are well below what is required, they are also failing miserably to implement even the minimal policies they have agreed to. A recent article in Nature noted that global emissions increased by 2% in 2018 despite record take up of renewable energy.
Australia is not much better. We have agreed to reduce our emissions by 26-28% by 2030 against a (generous) 2005 baseline. Even granting that this is our ‘fair share’ (and it is not), governments at the national level are simply not doing enough. A government report released in December 2018 estimated that Australia’s emissions in 2030 will only be 7% below 2005 levels.
But the climate won’t wait for the federal government. The risks of climate change are increasing and we require an effective response – someone needs to take up the slack. But who?
One response has come from a collection of cities and states that are trying to do what their federal governments refuse to do. The C40 coalition (90+ cities representing 650 million people) including New York, London and Sydney have agreed to reduce their emissions in line with the ambitious elements of the Paris Agreement.
While it is good that cities and state governments act in this way, their actions should not be seen as optional – they are morally required. Some of the same considerations that apply to federal governments also apply to cities and state governments. Like their federal counterparts, they are agents who have resources and legitimate authority. They can make policies and have them endorsed by voters.
These ‘sub national’ actors are also big emitters. In 2014, NSW emitted 130Mt of C02e – more than twice as much as Portugal. It also exports large quantities of coal through the world’s largest coal port at Newcastle.
Some might object that we can’t ask smaller cities or states to do what the federal government will not do. But this can’t be right. Just as we would be horrified if someone at a beach sees a drowning swimmer and refuses to rescue them, claiming ‘it’s the lifeguard’s job’, we should not accept state governments looking on as the climate worsens.
State governments and cities (where most Australians live) are under an obligation to take robust action on climate change because federal duties ‘devolve’ to them.
State and local governments taking this kind of unilateral action also increases the likelihood of others doing so. If Victoria introduces green energy policies, that makes it easier for NSW or Western Australia to do so because they will know what works and what doesn’t. The costs also decline as economies of scale kick in.
Cities taking unilateral action can also create new norms around climate change. With each city that adopts transport, housing or energy policies that make emission reduction central, it creates expectations on others to follow. Just as the establishment of one of the world’s first national parks, the Royal National Park in 1879, created norms about preserving nature, so being an early adopter of local climate-friendly policies will create norms. NSW also introduced one of the world’s first GHG emission reduction schemes in 2003.
It would undoubtedly be better if federal governments took action. But as the urgency around climate change increases, we should not wait for our federal laggards. So as local and state elections roll around, we should ask each layer of government whether its policies do take up the slack. We need more world firsts from our governments.
Links
The responsibility for reducing emissions flows from federal to state to local governments, as well as to individual cities.
Jeremy MossJeremy Moss is Professor of Political Philosophy and Co-Director of the Practical Justice Initiative, University of New South Wales. Every year the governments of the world meet to progress action on climate change. And every year, governments recommits to take some sort of action to prevent climate change. That governments should make these commitments and then implement them is beyond question.
But the results have been dismal. Most nations not only have commitments that are well below what is required, they are also failing miserably to implement even the minimal policies they have agreed to. A recent article in Nature noted that global emissions increased by 2% in 2018 despite record take up of renewable energy.
Australia is not much better. We have agreed to reduce our emissions by 26-28% by 2030 against a (generous) 2005 baseline. Even granting that this is our ‘fair share’ (and it is not), governments at the national level are simply not doing enough. A government report released in December 2018 estimated that Australia’s emissions in 2030 will only be 7% below 2005 levels.
But the climate won’t wait for the federal government. The risks of climate change are increasing and we require an effective response – someone needs to take up the slack. But who?
One response has come from a collection of cities and states that are trying to do what their federal governments refuse to do. The C40 coalition (90+ cities representing 650 million people) including New York, London and Sydney have agreed to reduce their emissions in line with the ambitious elements of the Paris Agreement.
While it is good that cities and state governments act in this way, their actions should not be seen as optional – they are morally required. Some of the same considerations that apply to federal governments also apply to cities and state governments. Like their federal counterparts, they are agents who have resources and legitimate authority. They can make policies and have them endorsed by voters.
These ‘sub national’ actors are also big emitters. In 2014, NSW emitted 130Mt of C02e – more than twice as much as Portugal. It also exports large quantities of coal through the world’s largest coal port at Newcastle.
Some might object that we can’t ask smaller cities or states to do what the federal government will not do. But this can’t be right. Just as we would be horrified if someone at a beach sees a drowning swimmer and refuses to rescue them, claiming ‘it’s the lifeguard’s job’, we should not accept state governments looking on as the climate worsens.
State governments and cities (where most Australians live) are under an obligation to take robust action on climate change because federal duties ‘devolve’ to them.
State and local governments taking this kind of unilateral action also increases the likelihood of others doing so. If Victoria introduces green energy policies, that makes it easier for NSW or Western Australia to do so because they will know what works and what doesn’t. The costs also decline as economies of scale kick in.
Cities taking unilateral action can also create new norms around climate change. With each city that adopts transport, housing or energy policies that make emission reduction central, it creates expectations on others to follow. Just as the establishment of one of the world’s first national parks, the Royal National Park in 1879, created norms about preserving nature, so being an early adopter of local climate-friendly policies will create norms. NSW also introduced one of the world’s first GHG emission reduction schemes in 2003.
It would undoubtedly be better if federal governments took action. But as the urgency around climate change increases, we should not wait for our federal laggards. So as local and state elections roll around, we should ask each layer of government whether its policies do take up the slack. We need more world firsts from our governments.
Links
- Stay in school or take to the streets? Climate change lessons
- Why we should go it alone on climate change
- Like it or not, morality dictates that we wean ourselves off coal
- How it pays to be philosophical about climate change
- We're morally responsible for fossil fuel exports
- US bugs Japan on trade and climate
Categories: External websites
Climate Change Sparks Fears For Flying Foxes After 23,000 Deaths
Fairfax - Felicity Caldwell
There are fears climate change will be devastating for flying foxes after a heatwave led to tens of thousands of animals perishing in Cairns.
In late November, wildlife carers reported about 23,000 spectacled flying foxes died – an estimated one-third of the total population – after temperatures rose above 42 degrees.
Thousands of spectacled flying foxes died in far north Queenslandafter temperatures soared above 42 degrees.Credit: David White
Volunteers and scientists believe it is the first time a major heat stress event has led to mass deaths of the spectacled flying fox, which is endemic to the north-eastern regions of Queensland.
Bats and Trees Society of Cairns president Maree Treadwell Kerr said it was "pretty catastrophic", with rescuers arriving at camps to find thousands of animals had dropped dead from trees.
Ms Treadwell Kerr said volunteers managed to rescue about 850 animals but were stretched thin as they already had more than 500 flying foxes in care.
"There had been a food shortage, which was probably due to the fact that it had been a very dry season and then they got the heatwave," she said.
"In one camp [at Edmonton], the whole camp was wiped out, and 11,000 animals, at least, died.
"And the flying foxes have not returned to that site yet even though since then we got a proper wet season for a change."
Ms Treadwell Kerr said flying foxes were good "indicators" for climate change and their deaths were more readily noticed than other animals which may also be affected by extreme heat.
"When they die, you see it, it's right there in front of them," she said.
"We were expecting it to happen at some stage – we weren't expecting it to happen in November."
At one camp alone, volunteers found 11,000 flying foxes dead.Credit: David WhiteIn February, federal Environment Minister Melissa Price upgraded the spectacled flying fox from vulnerable to endangered on the national threatened species list.
CSIRO research showed the population of the spectacled flying fox had more than halved from 214,750 in November 2005 to 92,880 in November 2014.
Macquarie University ecologist Tim Pearson said flying foxes were a keystone species, an important pollinator and seed disperser and vital for the health of forests.
"One of the reasons flying foxes are so important, and this doesn't just apply to speccies [spectacled flying foxes], but other species in Australia as well, is they fly huge distances," he said.
"So when they lick the nectar out of eucalyptus [trees], all that fur gets covered in pollen and then they fly 20 to 30 kilometres.
"They pollinate the tree next to it but they pollinate trees far away so they ensure genetic diversity."
Mr Pearson said the increased frequency of heatwaves had led to more mass die-offs elsewhere in Australia.
Almost 50,000 flying foxes perished during extreme heat in 2014 in south-east Queensland, while there have also been deaths in Adelaide and Victoria in recent months.
About 850 spectacled flying foxes were rescuedin far north Queensland, mostly pups.Credit: David WhiteThe Lab of Animal Ecology, led by Dr Justin Welbergen, reports mass casualties are occurring between zero to five times per year and the events are expected to escalate under climate change.
"Where they used to be very occasional events, now they're happening more and more often," Mr Pearson said.
"What was scary about the November instance in Cairns was that to the best of our knowledge, the spectacled flying fox, which just lives in north Queensland, has never been affected by heatwaves before ... They typically don't have heatwaves."
Mr Pearson said climate change meant days of extreme heat were becoming more frequent and more severe, which would lead to more flying fox deaths.
"Most of us who work with flying foxes ... are pretty convinced that their numbers are going to keep declining," he said.
"The pressures on them are climate change and habitat destruction - neither of those two pressures shows any signs of slowing down."
Official counts, revealed in Queensland open data, showed there were 1.4 million flying foxes of all species reported in the state in January to March 2016 and only 243,000 in January to March 2018.
However, a Queensland Department of Environment and Science spokesman said the data showed numbers from quarterly surveys of known roosts only and could not be used as an overall population estimate.
This is because of the nomadic nature of flying foxes.
Wildlife volunteers were stretched thin, as they were already caring
for 500 flying foxes in care when the mass die-off occurred.
Credit: David WhiteThe spokesman said the department recognised that recent heatwave events had significant impacts on flying fox populations.
"Cyclones in north Queensland have also had a serious impact on flying fox food trees," he said.
The spokesman said the department was providing support and advice to councils across the region on the impacts of heat stress on flying foxes, and how to safely evaluate and record sick or dead flying foxes, in addition to financial assistance to flying fox carer groups.
People are urged not to touch flying foxes but instead contact a bat rescue group or RSPCA Queensland for advice.
Links
There are fears climate change will be devastating for flying foxes after a heatwave led to tens of thousands of animals perishing in Cairns.
In late November, wildlife carers reported about 23,000 spectacled flying foxes died – an estimated one-third of the total population – after temperatures rose above 42 degrees.
Thousands of spectacled flying foxes died in far north Queenslandafter temperatures soared above 42 degrees.Credit: David White
Volunteers and scientists believe it is the first time a major heat stress event has led to mass deaths of the spectacled flying fox, which is endemic to the north-eastern regions of Queensland.
Bats and Trees Society of Cairns president Maree Treadwell Kerr said it was "pretty catastrophic", with rescuers arriving at camps to find thousands of animals had dropped dead from trees.
Ms Treadwell Kerr said volunteers managed to rescue about 850 animals but were stretched thin as they already had more than 500 flying foxes in care.
"There had been a food shortage, which was probably due to the fact that it had been a very dry season and then they got the heatwave," she said.
"In one camp [at Edmonton], the whole camp was wiped out, and 11,000 animals, at least, died.
"And the flying foxes have not returned to that site yet even though since then we got a proper wet season for a change."
Ms Treadwell Kerr said flying foxes were good "indicators" for climate change and their deaths were more readily noticed than other animals which may also be affected by extreme heat.
"When they die, you see it, it's right there in front of them," she said.
"We were expecting it to happen at some stage – we weren't expecting it to happen in November."
At one camp alone, volunteers found 11,000 flying foxes dead.Credit: David WhiteIn February, federal Environment Minister Melissa Price upgraded the spectacled flying fox from vulnerable to endangered on the national threatened species list.
CSIRO research showed the population of the spectacled flying fox had more than halved from 214,750 in November 2005 to 92,880 in November 2014.
Macquarie University ecologist Tim Pearson said flying foxes were a keystone species, an important pollinator and seed disperser and vital for the health of forests.
"One of the reasons flying foxes are so important, and this doesn't just apply to speccies [spectacled flying foxes], but other species in Australia as well, is they fly huge distances," he said.
"So when they lick the nectar out of eucalyptus [trees], all that fur gets covered in pollen and then they fly 20 to 30 kilometres.
"They pollinate the tree next to it but they pollinate trees far away so they ensure genetic diversity."
Mr Pearson said the increased frequency of heatwaves had led to more mass die-offs elsewhere in Australia.
Almost 50,000 flying foxes perished during extreme heat in 2014 in south-east Queensland, while there have also been deaths in Adelaide and Victoria in recent months.
About 850 spectacled flying foxes were rescuedin far north Queensland, mostly pups.Credit: David WhiteThe Lab of Animal Ecology, led by Dr Justin Welbergen, reports mass casualties are occurring between zero to five times per year and the events are expected to escalate under climate change.
"Where they used to be very occasional events, now they're happening more and more often," Mr Pearson said.
"What was scary about the November instance in Cairns was that to the best of our knowledge, the spectacled flying fox, which just lives in north Queensland, has never been affected by heatwaves before ... They typically don't have heatwaves."
Mr Pearson said climate change meant days of extreme heat were becoming more frequent and more severe, which would lead to more flying fox deaths.
"Most of us who work with flying foxes ... are pretty convinced that their numbers are going to keep declining," he said.
"The pressures on them are climate change and habitat destruction - neither of those two pressures shows any signs of slowing down."
Official counts, revealed in Queensland open data, showed there were 1.4 million flying foxes of all species reported in the state in January to March 2016 and only 243,000 in January to March 2018.
However, a Queensland Department of Environment and Science spokesman said the data showed numbers from quarterly surveys of known roosts only and could not be used as an overall population estimate.
This is because of the nomadic nature of flying foxes.
Wildlife volunteers were stretched thin, as they were already caring
for 500 flying foxes in care when the mass die-off occurred.
Credit: David WhiteThe spokesman said the department recognised that recent heatwave events had significant impacts on flying fox populations.
"Cyclones in north Queensland have also had a serious impact on flying fox food trees," he said.
The spokesman said the department was providing support and advice to councils across the region on the impacts of heat stress on flying foxes, and how to safely evaluate and record sick or dead flying foxes, in addition to financial assistance to flying fox carer groups.
People are urged not to touch flying foxes but instead contact a bat rescue group or RSPCA Queensland for advice.
Links
- Queensland flying foxes travel hundreds of kilometres for finest flowers
- Thousands Of Australian Animals Die In Unprecedented Heatwave
- 'We Have Death And Devastation At Every Turn': The Flood Massacre Of Queensland Cattle
- Climate Change Is Killing Off Earth’s Little Creatures
- When Extreme Weather Wipes Out Wildlife, The Fallout Can Last For Years
- Australia Heatwave: Mass Animal Deaths And Roads Melting As Temperatures Reach Record High
Categories: External websites
Here's A Running List Of All The Ways Climate Change Has Altered Earth In 2019
Mashable - Mark Kaufman
Global average temperatures compared to average. Yellows, oranges, and reds indicate warmer temps. Image: NASA Earth is now the warmest it's been in some 120,000 years. Eighteen of the last 19 years have been the warmest on record. And concentrations of carbon dioxide — a potent greenhouse gas — are likely the highest they've been in 15 million years.
The consequences of such a globally-disrupted climate are many, and it's understandably difficult to keep track. To help, here's a list of climate-relevant news that has transpired in 2019, from historically unprecedented disappearances of ice, to flood-ravaged cities. As more news comes out, the list will be updated.
1. Guess what? U.S. carbon emissions popped back up in a big way
Image: SHUTTERSTOCK / FRANK_PETERSIn early 2019, the Rhodium Group — a research institution that analyzes global economic and environmental trends — released a report finding that in 2018 carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. rose 3.4 percent from the prior year. That's the second largest gain in the last two decades.
"It’s trending in the wrong direction — it’s not encouraging," said Robert McGrath, the director of the University of Colorado Boulder's Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute who had no role in the report but reviewed it.
2. Antarctica’s once sleepy ice sheets have awoken. That's bad.
Image: GETTY IMAGES/FOTOSEARCH RFAntarctica — home to the greatest ice sheets on Earth — isn't just melting significantly faster than it was decades ago. Great masses of ice that scientists once presumed were largely immune to melting are losing ample ice into the sea.
"People are beginning to recognize that East Antarctica might be waking up," said Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that visits and measures Earth's melting glaciers.
"There’s growing evidence that eastern Antarctica is not just going to stay frozen and well-behaved in the next 50 to 100 years," he explained.
3. 60% of the planet's wild coffee species face extinction. What that means for your morning caffeine kick.
Image: SHUTTERSTOCK / AFRICA STUDIO A triple whammy of disease, climate change, and deforestation has threatened around 60 percent of the planet's wild coffee species. While this hasn't yet imperiled the world's coffee supply, it jeopardizes your favorite coffee's resiliency in the face of profound planetary change.
"As farmers are increasingly exposed to new climate conditions and changing pest pressures, the genetic diversity of wild crop relatives may be essential to breeding new coffee varieties that can withstand these pressures," Nathan Mueller, an assistant professor of earth system science at the University of California, Irvine who researches global food security, said over email.
4. Extreme weather — not politicians — convinces Americans that climate change is real
Reds, oranges, and yellows show 2017 global temperatures warmer than the average. Image: NASAAmericans find today's climate science increasingly convincing, and a damaging mix of exceptional drought, storms, and record-breaking heat is the reason why.
The results of a new survey — conducted in November 2018 by the University of Chicago's Energy Policy Institute and the research organization The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research — found that nearly half of Americans said today's climate science "is more convincing than five years ago, with extreme weather driving their views."
5. The polar vortex will return, this time with the coldest temps of the year
Temperature forecast for early February 2019. Image: UNIVERSITY OF MAINE/CLIMATE REANALYZERThe polar vortex has become a popular phenomenon for good reason: This weakening of the polar vortex and the subsequent spillover of frigid air has become more common over the last two decades.
"We are seeing these events occurring more frequently as of late," said Jeff Weber, a meteorologist with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.
Although this increase in polar vortex frequency is a hot area of study, one emerging theory blames significantly diminished Arctic sea ice. The Arctic is warming over twice as fast as the rest of the globe and sea ice cover is plummeting. As a result, recent climate research suggests that — without this ice cover — more heat escapes from the oceans. Ultimately, researchers found that this relatively warmer air interacts with and weakens the winds over the Arctic, allowing frigid polar air to more easily escape to southerly places like Cleveland and New York City.
6. It's damn cold, but heat records in the U.S. still dominate
Arctic air flowing south into the U.S. on January 31, 2019. Image: CLIMATE REANALYZER/UNIVERSITY OF MAINEWhile certain portions of the winter sure felt frigid, overall, the number of daily cold records set in the U.S. has been consistently dwarfed by the number of warm or high temperature records. The score isn't even close. High records over the last decade are outpacing low records by a rate of two to one.
In the past 10 years there have been 21,461 record daily highs and 11,466 lows.
"The trend is in exactly the direction we would expect as a result of a warming planet," said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University.
7. Don’t forget about the colossal Himalayan glaciers. They’re rapidly vanishing, too.
A weather station in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region. Image: JITENDRA BAJRACHARYA/ICIMODBeyond the continually grim news from the north and south poles is the melting of the "third pole," known as the Hindu Kush Himalaya region. Spreading over 2,000 miles across eight nations (from Afghanistan to Myanmar), these mountainous lands are home to the third-largest stores of ice on the planet and provide water to hundreds of millions of people.
Under the most optimistic conditions, a new report found that over a third of the ice will vanish by the century's end. But under more extreme climate scenarios — wherein global climate efforts fail — two-thirds of these mighty glaciers could disappear, with overall ice losses of a whopping 90 percent.
"Glacier-wise, it's not a great story," Joseph Shea, one of the report's lead authors and an assistant professor of environmental geomatics at the University of Northern British Columbia, said in an interview.
8. House lawmakers finally let climate scientists set the record straight
The U.S. Capitol Building in Washington D.C. Image: SHUTTERSTOCK / NICOLAS AGUIARThe U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology is no longer under the leadership of the Republican party, which is candidly opposed to globally-accepted climate science.
Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, a veteran Democratic lawmaker from Texas, has become Chairwoman and called a hearing for Feb. 13 entitled "The State of Climate Science and Why it Matters," inviting four scientists to give testimony about major U.S. climate reports and the significance of the latest climate science.
"Climate change is real, it's happening now, and humans are responsible for it," Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University and a coauthor of the congressionally mandated Fourth National Climate Assessment Kopp said in an interview, outlining critical points he planned to make to federal lawmakers.
9. Trump fails to block NASA's carbon sleuth from going to space
Half the Earth illuminated by the sun. Image: ESAIn early 2017, the Trump Administration tried to ax NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3, or OCO-3. It didn't work. Then, again in 2018, the White House sought to terminate the earth science instrument.
Again, the refrigerator-sized space machine persisted.
Now, SpaceX is set to launch OCO-3 to the International Space Station in the coming months, as early as April 25. Using a long robotic arm, astronauts will attach OCO-3 to the edge of the space station, allowing the instrument to peer down upon Earth and measure the planet's amassing concentrations of carbon dioxide — a potent greenhouse gas.
"Carbon dioxide is the most important gas humans are emitting into the atmosphere," said Annmarie Eldering, the project scientist for OCO-3 at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Understanding how it will play out in the future is critical."
10. Earth's coldest years on record all happened over 90 years ago
In 2017 Earth's temperatures were significantly warmer than compared to the average. Image: NASAHere's a statistic: On Earth, 18 of the last 19 years have been the warmest in recorded history.
The globe's 21st-century heating, however, becomes all the more stark when compared to the coldest years on record. As climate scientist Simon Donner, who researches human-induced climate change at The University of British Columbia, underscored via a list posted on Twitter, the planet's 20 coldest years all occurred nearly a century ago, between 1884 and 1929.
The coldest year on record occurred in 1904.
11. Earth is greener than it was 20 years ago, but not why you think
Green areas show increases in areas covered by green leaves. Image: NASATwo NASA satellites have watched Earth grow greener over the last 20 years — in large part because China is hellbent on planting millions of trees.
Earth's greening — meaning the increase in areas covered by green leaves — has made the greatest gains in China and India since the mid-1990s. "The effect comes mostly from ambitious tree-planting programs in China and intensive agriculture in both countries," NASA wrote as it released maps of the planet-wide changes.
China kickstarted its tree-planting mobilizations in the 1990s to combat erosion, climate change, and air pollution. This dedicated planting — sometimes done by soldiers — equated to over 40 percent of China's greening, so far.
12. The Green New Deal: Historians weigh in on the immense scale required to pull it off
A New Deal project: the Chickamauga Dam. Image: SHUTTERSTOCK / EVERETT HISTORICAL The scope of a Green New Deal — if such a program ever truly comes to match the scale of the original New Deal — wouldn’t just put millions of Americans to work, but could very well transform the mood, culture, and spirit of the United States in the 21st century.
The New Deal wasn’t just paying people to build things. People were doing fulfilling, nation-improving work. They planted three billion trees. They built many of the nation’s bridges and roads. Today, we drive under their tunnels and walk through their parks.
“Those men at the end of their lives would take their families back to show them what they had done — because they were quite proud of it,” said Gray Brechin, a historical geographer and New Deal scholar.
13. Trump's climate expert is wrong: The world's plants don't need more CO2
Higher CO2 concentrations swirling around Earth (shown by yellows and reds). Image: NASAPrinceton physicist and carbon dioxide-advocate William Happer has been selected to head the brand new Presidential Committee on Climate Security, reports The Washington Post. Happer maintains that the planet's atmosphere needs significantly more CO2, the potent greenhouse gas that U.S. government scientists — and a bevy of independent scientists — have repeatedly underscored is stoking accelerating climate change.
Because plants use carbon dioxide to live, Happer has said "more CO2 is actually a benefit to the Earth," asserted that Earth is experiencing a "CO2 famine," and concluded that "If plants could vote, they would vote for coal."
Earth and plant scientists disagree.
"The idea that increased CO2 is universally beneficial [to plants] is very misguided," said Jill Anderson, an evolutionary ecologist specializing in plant populations at the University of Georgia.
14. A powerful atmospheric river pummeled California, and the pictures look unreal
Rich Willson paddles through the miniature golf course after the flooding in in Guerneville, California. Image: KARL MONDON/MEDIANEWS GROUP/THE MERCURY NEWS VIA GETTY IMAGESA potent atmospheric river — a long band of water vapor that often transports ample amounts of moisture to the western U.S. like "rivers in the sky" — deluged portions of Northern California in late February. The Russian River, which winds through the Sonoma County town of Guerneville, reached over 45-feet high and swamped the area, prompting the Sheriff to announce on Twitter that the town had been surrounded by water — with no way in or out.
While California relies heavily on these wintertime atmospheric rivers for its water, scientists expect these storms to grow dramatically wetter as Earth's climate heats up.
"We're likely to see rain in increasingly intense bursts," said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
15. The Bering Strait should be covered in ice, but it's nearly all gone
Satellite imagery of the mostly ice-free Bering Strait on Feb. 28. 2019. Image: SENTINEL HUB EO BROWSER/SENTINEL 3During winter, the Bering Strait has historically been blanketed in ice. But this year, the ice has nearly vanished [by late February].
"The usually ice-covered Bering Strait is almost completely open water," said Zack Labe, a climate scientist and Ph.D. candidate at the University of California at Irvine.
"There should be ice here until May," added Lars Kaleschke, a climate scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research.
16. Geoengineering might not be as ludicrous if we gave Earth the right dose
Sunlight reflecting off the Earth. Image: NASASolar geoengineering is widely viewed as risky business.
The somewhat sci-fi concept — to use blimps, planes, or other means to load Earth's atmosphere with particles or droplets that reflect sunlight and cool the planet — has crept into the mainstream conversation as a means of reversing relentless climate change, should our efforts to slash carbon emissions fail or sputter. But geoengineering schemes come with a slew of hazards. A number of studies have cited the ill consequences of messing with Earth's sun intake, including big falls in crop production, the likelihood of unforeseen adverse side effects, and critically, a weakened water cycle that could trigger drops in precipitation and widespread drought.
Yet new research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, acknowledges these problems but finds a potential fix: only deploying enough reflective specks in the atmosphere to reduce about half of Earth's warming, rather than relying on geoengineering to completely return Earth to the cooler, milder climate of the 19th century. In other words, giving Earth a geoengineering dose that would reverse a significant portion of the warming, but not enough to stoke the problematic side effects.
"Solar engineering might not be a good choice in an emergency," said David Keith, a solar engineering researcher at Harvard University and study coauthor. "If it makes any sense at all, it makes sense to gradually ramp it up."
17. The ocean keeps gulping up a colossal amount of CO2 from the air, but will it last?
Image: Getty Images/WIN-Initiative RMWith no benefit to itself, Earth's vast sea has gulped up around 30 percent of the carbon dioxide humans emitted into Earth's atmosphere over the last century. Critically, scientists have now confirmed that the ocean in recent decades has continued its steadfast rate of CO2 absorption, rather than letting the potent greenhouse gas further saturate the skies.
But a weighty question still looms: How much longer can we rely on the ocean to so effectively store away carbon dioxide, and stave off considerably more global warming?
"At some point the ability of the ocean to absorb carbon will start to diminish," said Jeremy Mathis, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) climate scientist who coauthored the study. "It means atmospheric CO2 levels could go up faster than they already are."
"That's a big deal," Mathis emphasized.
Links
Global average temperatures compared to average. Yellows, oranges, and reds indicate warmer temps. Image: NASA Earth is now the warmest it's been in some 120,000 years. Eighteen of the last 19 years have been the warmest on record. And concentrations of carbon dioxide — a potent greenhouse gas — are likely the highest they've been in 15 million years.
The consequences of such a globally-disrupted climate are many, and it's understandably difficult to keep track. To help, here's a list of climate-relevant news that has transpired in 2019, from historically unprecedented disappearances of ice, to flood-ravaged cities. As more news comes out, the list will be updated.
1. Guess what? U.S. carbon emissions popped back up in a big way
Image: SHUTTERSTOCK / FRANK_PETERSIn early 2019, the Rhodium Group — a research institution that analyzes global economic and environmental trends — released a report finding that in 2018 carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. rose 3.4 percent from the prior year. That's the second largest gain in the last two decades.
"It’s trending in the wrong direction — it’s not encouraging," said Robert McGrath, the director of the University of Colorado Boulder's Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute who had no role in the report but reviewed it.
2. Antarctica’s once sleepy ice sheets have awoken. That's bad.
Image: GETTY IMAGES/FOTOSEARCH RFAntarctica — home to the greatest ice sheets on Earth — isn't just melting significantly faster than it was decades ago. Great masses of ice that scientists once presumed were largely immune to melting are losing ample ice into the sea.
"People are beginning to recognize that East Antarctica might be waking up," said Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that visits and measures Earth's melting glaciers.
"There’s growing evidence that eastern Antarctica is not just going to stay frozen and well-behaved in the next 50 to 100 years," he explained.
3. 60% of the planet's wild coffee species face extinction. What that means for your morning caffeine kick.
Image: SHUTTERSTOCK / AFRICA STUDIO A triple whammy of disease, climate change, and deforestation has threatened around 60 percent of the planet's wild coffee species. While this hasn't yet imperiled the world's coffee supply, it jeopardizes your favorite coffee's resiliency in the face of profound planetary change.
"As farmers are increasingly exposed to new climate conditions and changing pest pressures, the genetic diversity of wild crop relatives may be essential to breeding new coffee varieties that can withstand these pressures," Nathan Mueller, an assistant professor of earth system science at the University of California, Irvine who researches global food security, said over email.
4. Extreme weather — not politicians — convinces Americans that climate change is real
Reds, oranges, and yellows show 2017 global temperatures warmer than the average. Image: NASAAmericans find today's climate science increasingly convincing, and a damaging mix of exceptional drought, storms, and record-breaking heat is the reason why.
The results of a new survey — conducted in November 2018 by the University of Chicago's Energy Policy Institute and the research organization The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research — found that nearly half of Americans said today's climate science "is more convincing than five years ago, with extreme weather driving their views."
5. The polar vortex will return, this time with the coldest temps of the year
Temperature forecast for early February 2019. Image: UNIVERSITY OF MAINE/CLIMATE REANALYZERThe polar vortex has become a popular phenomenon for good reason: This weakening of the polar vortex and the subsequent spillover of frigid air has become more common over the last two decades.
"We are seeing these events occurring more frequently as of late," said Jeff Weber, a meteorologist with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.
Although this increase in polar vortex frequency is a hot area of study, one emerging theory blames significantly diminished Arctic sea ice. The Arctic is warming over twice as fast as the rest of the globe and sea ice cover is plummeting. As a result, recent climate research suggests that — without this ice cover — more heat escapes from the oceans. Ultimately, researchers found that this relatively warmer air interacts with and weakens the winds over the Arctic, allowing frigid polar air to more easily escape to southerly places like Cleveland and New York City.
6. It's damn cold, but heat records in the U.S. still dominate
Arctic air flowing south into the U.S. on January 31, 2019. Image: CLIMATE REANALYZER/UNIVERSITY OF MAINEWhile certain portions of the winter sure felt frigid, overall, the number of daily cold records set in the U.S. has been consistently dwarfed by the number of warm or high temperature records. The score isn't even close. High records over the last decade are outpacing low records by a rate of two to one.
In the past 10 years there have been 21,461 record daily highs and 11,466 lows.
"The trend is in exactly the direction we would expect as a result of a warming planet," said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University.
7. Don’t forget about the colossal Himalayan glaciers. They’re rapidly vanishing, too.
A weather station in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region. Image: JITENDRA BAJRACHARYA/ICIMODBeyond the continually grim news from the north and south poles is the melting of the "third pole," known as the Hindu Kush Himalaya region. Spreading over 2,000 miles across eight nations (from Afghanistan to Myanmar), these mountainous lands are home to the third-largest stores of ice on the planet and provide water to hundreds of millions of people.
Under the most optimistic conditions, a new report found that over a third of the ice will vanish by the century's end. But under more extreme climate scenarios — wherein global climate efforts fail — two-thirds of these mighty glaciers could disappear, with overall ice losses of a whopping 90 percent.
"Glacier-wise, it's not a great story," Joseph Shea, one of the report's lead authors and an assistant professor of environmental geomatics at the University of Northern British Columbia, said in an interview.
8. House lawmakers finally let climate scientists set the record straight
The U.S. Capitol Building in Washington D.C. Image: SHUTTERSTOCK / NICOLAS AGUIARThe U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology is no longer under the leadership of the Republican party, which is candidly opposed to globally-accepted climate science.
Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, a veteran Democratic lawmaker from Texas, has become Chairwoman and called a hearing for Feb. 13 entitled "The State of Climate Science and Why it Matters," inviting four scientists to give testimony about major U.S. climate reports and the significance of the latest climate science.
"Climate change is real, it's happening now, and humans are responsible for it," Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University and a coauthor of the congressionally mandated Fourth National Climate Assessment Kopp said in an interview, outlining critical points he planned to make to federal lawmakers.
9. Trump fails to block NASA's carbon sleuth from going to space
Half the Earth illuminated by the sun. Image: ESAIn early 2017, the Trump Administration tried to ax NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3, or OCO-3. It didn't work. Then, again in 2018, the White House sought to terminate the earth science instrument.
Again, the refrigerator-sized space machine persisted.
Now, SpaceX is set to launch OCO-3 to the International Space Station in the coming months, as early as April 25. Using a long robotic arm, astronauts will attach OCO-3 to the edge of the space station, allowing the instrument to peer down upon Earth and measure the planet's amassing concentrations of carbon dioxide — a potent greenhouse gas.
"Carbon dioxide is the most important gas humans are emitting into the atmosphere," said Annmarie Eldering, the project scientist for OCO-3 at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Understanding how it will play out in the future is critical."
10. Earth's coldest years on record all happened over 90 years ago
In 2017 Earth's temperatures were significantly warmer than compared to the average. Image: NASAHere's a statistic: On Earth, 18 of the last 19 years have been the warmest in recorded history.
The globe's 21st-century heating, however, becomes all the more stark when compared to the coldest years on record. As climate scientist Simon Donner, who researches human-induced climate change at The University of British Columbia, underscored via a list posted on Twitter, the planet's 20 coldest years all occurred nearly a century ago, between 1884 and 1929.
The coldest year on record occurred in 1904.
11. Earth is greener than it was 20 years ago, but not why you think
Green areas show increases in areas covered by green leaves. Image: NASATwo NASA satellites have watched Earth grow greener over the last 20 years — in large part because China is hellbent on planting millions of trees.
Earth's greening — meaning the increase in areas covered by green leaves — has made the greatest gains in China and India since the mid-1990s. "The effect comes mostly from ambitious tree-planting programs in China and intensive agriculture in both countries," NASA wrote as it released maps of the planet-wide changes.
China kickstarted its tree-planting mobilizations in the 1990s to combat erosion, climate change, and air pollution. This dedicated planting — sometimes done by soldiers — equated to over 40 percent of China's greening, so far.
12. The Green New Deal: Historians weigh in on the immense scale required to pull it off
A New Deal project: the Chickamauga Dam. Image: SHUTTERSTOCK / EVERETT HISTORICAL The scope of a Green New Deal — if such a program ever truly comes to match the scale of the original New Deal — wouldn’t just put millions of Americans to work, but could very well transform the mood, culture, and spirit of the United States in the 21st century.
The New Deal wasn’t just paying people to build things. People were doing fulfilling, nation-improving work. They planted three billion trees. They built many of the nation’s bridges and roads. Today, we drive under their tunnels and walk through their parks.
“Those men at the end of their lives would take their families back to show them what they had done — because they were quite proud of it,” said Gray Brechin, a historical geographer and New Deal scholar.
13. Trump's climate expert is wrong: The world's plants don't need more CO2
Higher CO2 concentrations swirling around Earth (shown by yellows and reds). Image: NASAPrinceton physicist and carbon dioxide-advocate William Happer has been selected to head the brand new Presidential Committee on Climate Security, reports The Washington Post. Happer maintains that the planet's atmosphere needs significantly more CO2, the potent greenhouse gas that U.S. government scientists — and a bevy of independent scientists — have repeatedly underscored is stoking accelerating climate change.
Because plants use carbon dioxide to live, Happer has said "more CO2 is actually a benefit to the Earth," asserted that Earth is experiencing a "CO2 famine," and concluded that "If plants could vote, they would vote for coal."
Earth and plant scientists disagree.
"The idea that increased CO2 is universally beneficial [to plants] is very misguided," said Jill Anderson, an evolutionary ecologist specializing in plant populations at the University of Georgia.
14. A powerful atmospheric river pummeled California, and the pictures look unreal
Rich Willson paddles through the miniature golf course after the flooding in in Guerneville, California. Image: KARL MONDON/MEDIANEWS GROUP/THE MERCURY NEWS VIA GETTY IMAGESA potent atmospheric river — a long band of water vapor that often transports ample amounts of moisture to the western U.S. like "rivers in the sky" — deluged portions of Northern California in late February. The Russian River, which winds through the Sonoma County town of Guerneville, reached over 45-feet high and swamped the area, prompting the Sheriff to announce on Twitter that the town had been surrounded by water — with no way in or out.
While California relies heavily on these wintertime atmospheric rivers for its water, scientists expect these storms to grow dramatically wetter as Earth's climate heats up.
"We're likely to see rain in increasingly intense bursts," said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
15. The Bering Strait should be covered in ice, but it's nearly all gone
Satellite imagery of the mostly ice-free Bering Strait on Feb. 28. 2019. Image: SENTINEL HUB EO BROWSER/SENTINEL 3During winter, the Bering Strait has historically been blanketed in ice. But this year, the ice has nearly vanished [by late February].
"The usually ice-covered Bering Strait is almost completely open water," said Zack Labe, a climate scientist and Ph.D. candidate at the University of California at Irvine.
"There should be ice here until May," added Lars Kaleschke, a climate scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research.
16. Geoengineering might not be as ludicrous if we gave Earth the right dose
Sunlight reflecting off the Earth. Image: NASASolar geoengineering is widely viewed as risky business.
The somewhat sci-fi concept — to use blimps, planes, or other means to load Earth's atmosphere with particles or droplets that reflect sunlight and cool the planet — has crept into the mainstream conversation as a means of reversing relentless climate change, should our efforts to slash carbon emissions fail or sputter. But geoengineering schemes come with a slew of hazards. A number of studies have cited the ill consequences of messing with Earth's sun intake, including big falls in crop production, the likelihood of unforeseen adverse side effects, and critically, a weakened water cycle that could trigger drops in precipitation and widespread drought.
Yet new research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, acknowledges these problems but finds a potential fix: only deploying enough reflective specks in the atmosphere to reduce about half of Earth's warming, rather than relying on geoengineering to completely return Earth to the cooler, milder climate of the 19th century. In other words, giving Earth a geoengineering dose that would reverse a significant portion of the warming, but not enough to stoke the problematic side effects.
"Solar engineering might not be a good choice in an emergency," said David Keith, a solar engineering researcher at Harvard University and study coauthor. "If it makes any sense at all, it makes sense to gradually ramp it up."
17. The ocean keeps gulping up a colossal amount of CO2 from the air, but will it last?
Image: Getty Images/WIN-Initiative RMWith no benefit to itself, Earth's vast sea has gulped up around 30 percent of the carbon dioxide humans emitted into Earth's atmosphere over the last century. Critically, scientists have now confirmed that the ocean in recent decades has continued its steadfast rate of CO2 absorption, rather than letting the potent greenhouse gas further saturate the skies.
But a weighty question still looms: How much longer can we rely on the ocean to so effectively store away carbon dioxide, and stave off considerably more global warming?
"At some point the ability of the ocean to absorb carbon will start to diminish," said Jeremy Mathis, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) climate scientist who coauthored the study. "It means atmospheric CO2 levels could go up faster than they already are."
"That's a big deal," Mathis emphasized.
Links
- Guess what? U.S. carbon emissions popped back up in a big way
- Antarctica’s once sleepy ice sheets have awoken. That's bad.
- 60% of the planet's wild coffee species face extinction. What that means for your morning caffeine kick.
- Extreme weather — not politicians — convinces Americans that climate change is real
- The polar vortex will return, this time with the coldest temps of the year
- It's damn cold, but heat records in the U.S. still dominate
- Don’t forget about the colossal Himalayan glaciers. They’re rapidly vanishing, too.
- House lawmakers finally let climate scientists set the record straight
- Trump fails to block NASA's carbon sleuth from going to space
- Earth's coldest years on record all happened over 90 years ago
- Earth is greener than it was 20 years ago, but not why you think
- The Green New Deal: Historians weigh in on the immense scale required to pull it off
- Trump's climate expert is wrong: The world's plants don't need more CO2
- A powerful atmospheric river pummeled California, and the pictures look unreal
- The Bering Strait should be covered in ice, but it's nearly all gone
- Geoengineering might not be as ludicrous if we gave Earth the right dose
- The ocean keeps gulping up a colossal amount of CO2 from the air, but will it last?
Categories: External websites
It’s Time For Climate Change Communicators To Listen To Social Science
Grist - David Ropeik
Doom and gloom essays are more likely to offend skeptical readers than to convince them. Cognitive studies suggest there’s a better way.
Kelly Sillaste / Getty Images David Wallace-Wells’ recent climate change essay in the New York Times, published as part of the publicity for his new book “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming,” is, sadly, like a lot of writing on climate change these days: It’s right about the risk, but wrong about how it tries to accomplish the critical goal of raising public concern.
Like other essays that have sounded the alarms on global warming — pieces by Bill McKibben, James Hansen, and George Monbiot come to mind — Wallace-Wells’ offers a simple message: I’m scared. People should be scared. Here are the facts. You should be scared too.
To be sure, Wallace-Wells and these other writers are thoughtful, intelligent, and well-informed people. And that is precisely how they try to raise concern: with thought, intelligence, and information, couched in the most dramatic terms at the grandest possible scale. Wallace-Wells invokes sweeping concepts like “planet-warming,” “human history,” and global emissions; remote places like the Arctic; broad geographical and geopolitical terms like “coral reefs,” “ice sheet,” and “climate refugees;” and distant timeframes like 2030, 2050, and 2100.
It’s a common approach to communicating risk issues, known as the deficit model. Proceeding from the assumption that your audience lacks facts —that is, that they have a deficit —all you need to do it give them the facts, in clear and eloquent and dramatic enough terms, and you can make them feel like you want them to feel, how they ought to feel, how you feel. But research on the practice of risk communication has found that this approach usually fails, and often backfires. The deficit model may work fine in physics class, but it’s an ineffective way to try to change people’s attitudes. That’s because it appeals to reason, and reason is not what drives human behavior.
For more than 50 years, the cognitive sciences have amassed a mountainous body of insight into why we think and choose and act as we do. And what they have found is that facts alone are literally meaningless. We interpret every bit of cold objective information through a thick set of affective filters that determine how those facts feel — and how they feel is what determines what those facts mean and how we behave. As 17th century French mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal observed, “We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.”
Yet a large segment of the climate change commentariat dismisses these social science findings. In his piece for the New York Times, Wallace-Wells mentions a few cognitive biases that fall under the rubric of behavioral economics, including optimism bias (things will go better for me than the next guy) and status quo bias (it’s easier just to keep things as they are). But he describes them in language that drips with condescension and frustration:
How can we be this deluded? One answer comes from behavioral economics. The scroll of cognitive biases identified by psychologists and fellow travelers over the past half-century can seem, like a social media feed, bottomless. And they distort and distend our perception of a changing climate. These optimistic prejudices, prophylactic biases, and emotional reflexes form an entire library of climate delusion.Polls suggest that even people who are alarmed about climate change aren’t particularly alarmed about the threat to themselves. Visual: Pete Linforth / PixabayMoreover, behavioral economics is only one part of what shapes how we feel about risk. Another component of our cognition that has gotten far too little attention, but plays a more important part in how we feel about climate change, is the psychology of risk perception. Pioneering research by Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, Sarah Lichtenstein, and many others has identified more than a dozen discrete psychological characteristics that cause us to worry more than we need to about some threats and less than we need to about others, like climate change.
For example, we don’t worry as much about risks that don’t feel personally threatening. Surveys suggest that even people who are alarmed about climate change aren’t particularly alarmed about the threat to themselves. The most recent poll by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that while 70 percent of Americans believe climate change is happening, only around 40 percent think “it will harm me personally.”
We also worry more about risks that threaten us soon than risks that threaten us later. Evolution has endowed us with a risk-alert system designed to get us to tomorrow first — and only then, maybe, do we worry about what comes later. So even those who think climate change is already happening believe, accurately, that the worst is yet to come. Risk communication that talks about the havoc that climate change will wreak in 2030, in 2050, or “during this century” contributes to that “we don’t really have to worry about it now” feeling.
Risk perception research also suggests that we worry less about risky behaviors if those behaviors also carry tangible benefits. So far, that’s been the case for climate change: For many people living in the developed world, the harms of climate change are more than offset by the modern comforts of a carbon-intensive lifestyle. Even those who put solar panels on their roofs or make lifestyle changes in the name of reducing their carbon footprint often continue with other bad behaviors: shopping and buying unsustainably, flying, having their regular hamburger.
Interestingly Wallace-Wells admits this is even true for him:
I know the science is true, I know the threat is all-encompassing, and I know its effects, should emissions continue unabated, will be terrifying. And yet, when I imagine my life three decades from now, or the life of my daughter five decades from now, I have to admit that I am not imagining a world on fire but one similar to the one we have now.Yet he writes that “the age of climate panic is here,” and he expects that delivering all the facts and evidence in alarmist language will somehow move others to see things differently. This is perhaps Wallace-Wells’ biggest failure: By dramatizing the facts and suggesting that people who don’t share his level of concern are irrational and delusional, he is far more likely to offend readers than to convince them. Adopting the attitude that “my feelings are right and yours are wrong” — that “I can see the problem and something’s wrong with you if you can’t” — is a surefire way to turn a reader off, not on, to what you want them to believe.
Contrast all this deficit-model climate punditry with the effective messaging of the rising youth revolt against climate change. Last August, 16-year-old Swedish student Greta Thunberg skipped school and held a one-person protest outside her country’s parliament to demand action on climate change. In the six months since, there have been nationwide #FridaysforFuture school walkouts in at least nine countries, and more are planned.
Thunberg has spoken to the United Nations and the World Economic Forum in Davos, with an in-your-face and from-the-heart message that’s about not just facts but her very real and personal fear:
Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope… I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.By speaking to our hearts and not just our heads — and by framing the issue in terms of personal and immediate fear of a future that promises more harm than benefit — Thunberg has started an international protest movement.
The lesson is clear. Wallace-Wells’ New York Times essay will get lots of attention among the intelligentsia, but he is not likely to arouse serious new support for action against climate change. Risk communication that acknowledges and respects the emotions and psychology of the people it tries to reach is likely to have far greater impact — and that’s exactly what the effort to combat climate change needs right now.
Links
Doom and gloom essays are more likely to offend skeptical readers than to convince them. Cognitive studies suggest there’s a better way.
Kelly Sillaste / Getty Images David Wallace-Wells’ recent climate change essay in the New York Times, published as part of the publicity for his new book “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming,” is, sadly, like a lot of writing on climate change these days: It’s right about the risk, but wrong about how it tries to accomplish the critical goal of raising public concern.
Like other essays that have sounded the alarms on global warming — pieces by Bill McKibben, James Hansen, and George Monbiot come to mind — Wallace-Wells’ offers a simple message: I’m scared. People should be scared. Here are the facts. You should be scared too.
To be sure, Wallace-Wells and these other writers are thoughtful, intelligent, and well-informed people. And that is precisely how they try to raise concern: with thought, intelligence, and information, couched in the most dramatic terms at the grandest possible scale. Wallace-Wells invokes sweeping concepts like “planet-warming,” “human history,” and global emissions; remote places like the Arctic; broad geographical and geopolitical terms like “coral reefs,” “ice sheet,” and “climate refugees;” and distant timeframes like 2030, 2050, and 2100.
It’s a common approach to communicating risk issues, known as the deficit model. Proceeding from the assumption that your audience lacks facts —that is, that they have a deficit —all you need to do it give them the facts, in clear and eloquent and dramatic enough terms, and you can make them feel like you want them to feel, how they ought to feel, how you feel. But research on the practice of risk communication has found that this approach usually fails, and often backfires. The deficit model may work fine in physics class, but it’s an ineffective way to try to change people’s attitudes. That’s because it appeals to reason, and reason is not what drives human behavior.
For more than 50 years, the cognitive sciences have amassed a mountainous body of insight into why we think and choose and act as we do. And what they have found is that facts alone are literally meaningless. We interpret every bit of cold objective information through a thick set of affective filters that determine how those facts feel — and how they feel is what determines what those facts mean and how we behave. As 17th century French mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal observed, “We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.”
Yet a large segment of the climate change commentariat dismisses these social science findings. In his piece for the New York Times, Wallace-Wells mentions a few cognitive biases that fall under the rubric of behavioral economics, including optimism bias (things will go better for me than the next guy) and status quo bias (it’s easier just to keep things as they are). But he describes them in language that drips with condescension and frustration:
How can we be this deluded? One answer comes from behavioral economics. The scroll of cognitive biases identified by psychologists and fellow travelers over the past half-century can seem, like a social media feed, bottomless. And they distort and distend our perception of a changing climate. These optimistic prejudices, prophylactic biases, and emotional reflexes form an entire library of climate delusion.Polls suggest that even people who are alarmed about climate change aren’t particularly alarmed about the threat to themselves. Visual: Pete Linforth / PixabayMoreover, behavioral economics is only one part of what shapes how we feel about risk. Another component of our cognition that has gotten far too little attention, but plays a more important part in how we feel about climate change, is the psychology of risk perception. Pioneering research by Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, Sarah Lichtenstein, and many others has identified more than a dozen discrete psychological characteristics that cause us to worry more than we need to about some threats and less than we need to about others, like climate change.
For example, we don’t worry as much about risks that don’t feel personally threatening. Surveys suggest that even people who are alarmed about climate change aren’t particularly alarmed about the threat to themselves. The most recent poll by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that while 70 percent of Americans believe climate change is happening, only around 40 percent think “it will harm me personally.”
We also worry more about risks that threaten us soon than risks that threaten us later. Evolution has endowed us with a risk-alert system designed to get us to tomorrow first — and only then, maybe, do we worry about what comes later. So even those who think climate change is already happening believe, accurately, that the worst is yet to come. Risk communication that talks about the havoc that climate change will wreak in 2030, in 2050, or “during this century” contributes to that “we don’t really have to worry about it now” feeling.
Risk perception research also suggests that we worry less about risky behaviors if those behaviors also carry tangible benefits. So far, that’s been the case for climate change: For many people living in the developed world, the harms of climate change are more than offset by the modern comforts of a carbon-intensive lifestyle. Even those who put solar panels on their roofs or make lifestyle changes in the name of reducing their carbon footprint often continue with other bad behaviors: shopping and buying unsustainably, flying, having their regular hamburger.
Interestingly Wallace-Wells admits this is even true for him:
I know the science is true, I know the threat is all-encompassing, and I know its effects, should emissions continue unabated, will be terrifying. And yet, when I imagine my life three decades from now, or the life of my daughter five decades from now, I have to admit that I am not imagining a world on fire but one similar to the one we have now.Yet he writes that “the age of climate panic is here,” and he expects that delivering all the facts and evidence in alarmist language will somehow move others to see things differently. This is perhaps Wallace-Wells’ biggest failure: By dramatizing the facts and suggesting that people who don’t share his level of concern are irrational and delusional, he is far more likely to offend readers than to convince them. Adopting the attitude that “my feelings are right and yours are wrong” — that “I can see the problem and something’s wrong with you if you can’t” — is a surefire way to turn a reader off, not on, to what you want them to believe.
Contrast all this deficit-model climate punditry with the effective messaging of the rising youth revolt against climate change. Last August, 16-year-old Swedish student Greta Thunberg skipped school and held a one-person protest outside her country’s parliament to demand action on climate change. In the six months since, there have been nationwide #FridaysforFuture school walkouts in at least nine countries, and more are planned.
Thunberg has spoken to the United Nations and the World Economic Forum in Davos, with an in-your-face and from-the-heart message that’s about not just facts but her very real and personal fear:
Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope… I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.By speaking to our hearts and not just our heads — and by framing the issue in terms of personal and immediate fear of a future that promises more harm than benefit — Thunberg has started an international protest movement.
The lesson is clear. Wallace-Wells’ New York Times essay will get lots of attention among the intelligentsia, but he is not likely to arouse serious new support for action against climate change. Risk communication that acknowledges and respects the emotions and psychology of the people it tries to reach is likely to have far greater impact — and that’s exactly what the effort to combat climate change needs right now.
Links
- How The Weather Gets Weaponized In Climate Change Messaging
- Vaccinate Public Against Science Misinformation, Researchers Urge
- Katharine Hayhoe: 'A Thermometer Is Not Liberal Or Conservative'
- Climate Change: Using Satire To Communicate Science
- Is Sarah Silverman Comedy’s New Climate Champion?
- Scientists Urged To 'Speak The Same Language' As Public On Climate
- Is Climate Change Really Too Hard To Understand?
- How To Change The Climate Story: Paul Hawken
- Why Some Conservatives Are Blind To Climate Change
- Need To Explain To People What Climate Change Means In Daily Life: UN Environ Chief
- David Wallace-Wells On Climate: ‘People Should Be Scared – I'm Scared’
- ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ Puts Words To A Future You Don’t Want To Live In
- A Terrifying Look At The Consequences Of Climate Change
- Teenage Climate Activist Nominated For Nobel Peace Prize
- Climate Change And The Power Of One
- How Greta Thunberg’s Lone Strike Against Climate Change Became A Global Movement
- Greta Thunberg Dresses Down More Global Elites For Climate Inaction
- Teenage Activist Takes School Strikes 4 Climate Action To Davos
- ‘Grown-Ups Have Failed Us’
- 15-Year-Old Greta Thunberg Speaks Truth To Power In Katowice
- The Fifteen-Year-Old Climate Activist Who Is Demanding A New Kind Of Politics
- The Swedish 15-Year-Old Who's Cutting Class To Fight The Climate Crisis
Categories: External websites
Donald Trump’s Climate Denial Gets More Ridiculous By The Day
Newsweek - Michael E. Mann
Michael E. MannMichael E. Mann is Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Pennsylvania State University. His most recent book, with Tom Toles, is The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy (Columbia University Press, 2016.) Once upon a time, Donald Trump accepted the scientific reality that human activity, primarily burning fossil fuels, causes climate change.
He signed on to an ad calling on President Obama to take action on climate change.
That was 2009. In the decade since, Trump’s Fox News fixation has led him down a steep path of dangerous denial, culminating in his quoting of an industry PR flack who appeared on Fox and Friends to make some profoundly ridiculous claims.
Patrick Moore, who falsely claims to be a co-founder of Greenpeace, claimed that the “climate crisis” is “Fake Science” and that “carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.”
First off, the people who call Puerto Rico home, or Paradise, California, or any number of cities and towns across the country and indeed the planet who have felt the already devastating impacts of climate change would beg to differ. Climate change is already making the heat waves that cause heat strokes worse.
It’s already raised sea levels, making coastal flooding more common and problematic. It’s already doubled the area burned by wildfires in the past few decades. My own research, in fact, shows that state-of-the-art climate models, if anything, are underestimating the impact climate change is having on extreme weather events.
Unlike Moore, I’m actually a climate scientist. But even if I weren’t, these findings are readily apparent in even a cursory reading of the National Climate Assessment. That’s the major climate report Trump’s own administration released last year, and it goes into detail about how climate change is already hurting American communities from coast to coast.
Those details aren’t even necessary to point out how ludicrous Moore’s other suggestion is, that carbon dioxide is “the main building block of all life.” While we are certainly carbon-based lifeforms, it is proteins and nucleic acid, not carbon dioxide, that are the building blocks. In fact, it is classified as a deadly toxin at high concentrations. I’d challenge Moore to prove he believes what he’s saying by trying to survive on carbon dioxide.
It wouldn’t be the first time someone challenged Moore to prove he means what he says. Back in 2015 Moore told an interviewer that one of Monsanto’s pesticides (Roundup) is not only not cancer-causing, but in fact that “you could drink a whole quart of it and it won’t hurt you.” When the interviewer offered some to Moore to drink, and prove his point, Moore of course became agitated and angry and stormed out in a huff.
This is the sort of person Trump is apparently turning to for advice. A man who has spent decades doing the industry’s dirty work while trading off a youthful involvement in Greenpeace. A man who, in response to Trump, tweeted to indicate that he, too was in DC, attending a meeting of William Happer’s CO2 coalition, a fossil-fuel funded pro-pollution advocacy organization.
William Happer is also the man chosen by Trump to potentially lead a panel to conduct an “adversarial” review of climate science. Happer is a former physics professor who was caught in a sting in 2015 agreeing to take money from unknown oil and gas interests in exchange for writing a report full of climate denial.
As to the quality of Happer’s climate science, well that’s hard to speak to because he doesn’t actually do any climate science, and never has. What he has done, though, is say insane (and offensive) things, like comparing the treatment of carbon dioxide to the “demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.”
That’s the quality of advice Trump is seeking.
It’s one thing for Fox’s primary audience, with their failing faculties and dulled critical thinking skills, to be suckered in by their constant barrage of alternative facts and persuasive fictions. It’s quite another for the supposed leader of the free world, who has a thousand scientists at his disposal, to embrace such obviously unscientific claims with such conviction.
Fortunately, some in his party appear to now recognize that outright denial of human-caused climate change has no place in honest political discourse and they seem to be embracing a pivot to the more worthy debate over what we do to address it. Let us encourage this shift and allow climate change deniers to become increasingly isolated as the fringe, irrelevant relic that they are.
Links
Michael E. MannMichael E. Mann is Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Pennsylvania State University. His most recent book, with Tom Toles, is The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy (Columbia University Press, 2016.) Once upon a time, Donald Trump accepted the scientific reality that human activity, primarily burning fossil fuels, causes climate change.
He signed on to an ad calling on President Obama to take action on climate change.
That was 2009. In the decade since, Trump’s Fox News fixation has led him down a steep path of dangerous denial, culminating in his quoting of an industry PR flack who appeared on Fox and Friends to make some profoundly ridiculous claims.
Patrick Moore, who falsely claims to be a co-founder of Greenpeace, claimed that the “climate crisis” is “Fake Science” and that “carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.”
First off, the people who call Puerto Rico home, or Paradise, California, or any number of cities and towns across the country and indeed the planet who have felt the already devastating impacts of climate change would beg to differ. Climate change is already making the heat waves that cause heat strokes worse.
It’s already raised sea levels, making coastal flooding more common and problematic. It’s already doubled the area burned by wildfires in the past few decades. My own research, in fact, shows that state-of-the-art climate models, if anything, are underestimating the impact climate change is having on extreme weather events.
Unlike Moore, I’m actually a climate scientist. But even if I weren’t, these findings are readily apparent in even a cursory reading of the National Climate Assessment. That’s the major climate report Trump’s own administration released last year, and it goes into detail about how climate change is already hurting American communities from coast to coast.
Those details aren’t even necessary to point out how ludicrous Moore’s other suggestion is, that carbon dioxide is “the main building block of all life.” While we are certainly carbon-based lifeforms, it is proteins and nucleic acid, not carbon dioxide, that are the building blocks. In fact, it is classified as a deadly toxin at high concentrations. I’d challenge Moore to prove he believes what he’s saying by trying to survive on carbon dioxide.
It wouldn’t be the first time someone challenged Moore to prove he means what he says. Back in 2015 Moore told an interviewer that one of Monsanto’s pesticides (Roundup) is not only not cancer-causing, but in fact that “you could drink a whole quart of it and it won’t hurt you.” When the interviewer offered some to Moore to drink, and prove his point, Moore of course became agitated and angry and stormed out in a huff.
This is the sort of person Trump is apparently turning to for advice. A man who has spent decades doing the industry’s dirty work while trading off a youthful involvement in Greenpeace. A man who, in response to Trump, tweeted to indicate that he, too was in DC, attending a meeting of William Happer’s CO2 coalition, a fossil-fuel funded pro-pollution advocacy organization.
William Happer is also the man chosen by Trump to potentially lead a panel to conduct an “adversarial” review of climate science. Happer is a former physics professor who was caught in a sting in 2015 agreeing to take money from unknown oil and gas interests in exchange for writing a report full of climate denial.
As to the quality of Happer’s climate science, well that’s hard to speak to because he doesn’t actually do any climate science, and never has. What he has done, though, is say insane (and offensive) things, like comparing the treatment of carbon dioxide to the “demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.”
That’s the quality of advice Trump is seeking.
It’s one thing for Fox’s primary audience, with their failing faculties and dulled critical thinking skills, to be suckered in by their constant barrage of alternative facts and persuasive fictions. It’s quite another for the supposed leader of the free world, who has a thousand scientists at his disposal, to embrace such obviously unscientific claims with such conviction.
Fortunately, some in his party appear to now recognize that outright denial of human-caused climate change has no place in honest political discourse and they seem to be embracing a pivot to the more worthy debate over what we do to address it. Let us encourage this shift and allow climate change deniers to become increasingly isolated as the fringe, irrelevant relic that they are.
Links
- Fourth National Climate Assessment
- It’s not rocket science: Climate change was behind this summer’s extreme weather
- Trump tweets climate change skeptic in latest denial of science
- Greenpeace hits back at Trump tweet on climate change denial
- Donald Trump Still Doesn’t Understand Climate Change Science
Categories: External websites
Malcolm Farr: ‘The Public Debate On The Existence Of Climate Change Is Over And We Are Owed An Apology’
NEWS.com.au - Malcolm Farr
School Strike for Climate Change: Thousands of students skip school for protests
The public debate on the existence of climate change is over and we are owed an apology from those who prolonged it for self-serving political purposes.
They might acknowledge their disrespect for science, or for driving rejection as a vehicle for “brutal retail politics”.
Voices as varied as the schoolchildren who marched on Friday, the top ranks of Australia’s central bank, and federal department chiefs are warning of the consequences of those changes.
The debate continues, but it now is centred on measuring the urgency of a response to increasing climate instability, and the detail of that response.
Emergency services, diplomats and farmers are all seeking the best answers to climate change effects — effects which some of their flecked representatives for the better part of a decade said didn’t exist.
Military and intelligence agency leaders have warned climate change is a national security threat to Australia.
There still are holdouts, including a few reactionary MPs who continue to embrace Tony Abbott’s belief just over nine years ago that the science was “absolute crap”.
And there is a fringe which make cases which can only be resolved by outlandish conspiracy theories, often along the dubious lines of the United Nations and One World Government.
And there are credible sources moving in the other direction.
Deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia Guy Debelle last week made clear climate change is now a factor in tracking and guiding the economy; he gave no hint it was a UN plot.
But he did stress the need for an orderly transition to clean energy; a need for greater backing of renewable energy projects; preparing for new ways we work and the jobs available to us; and the broader task of readying the entire economy for change.
“Financial stability will be better served by an orderly transition rather than an abrupt disorderly one,” he said.
Last week, secretary of the Department of Home Affairs Mike Pezzullo mentioned climate change in a speech — Seven Gathering Storms — to a think tank.
Mr Pezzullo warned of states which might become ungovernable and a possibility of “mass displacement of people”.
Contributions to this displacement could be “poverty, hunger, water and resource scarcity, and a changing climate, which will have to be thought of as a systemic risk factor”.
These are just a few elements of government which have appreciated the existence and impact of climate change in ways some elected politicians have been too frightened or deliberately manipulative to acknowledge.
These are the folk who might consider an apology.
Tony Abbott is not the only denier in parliament but over a decade he has been the pacesetter if not the leader of that block of ignorance.
“The argument is absolute crap. However, the politics of this are tough for us,” he told a regional audience in December 2009.
“Eighty per cent of people believe climate change is a real and present danger.”
Just as Mr Abbott scorned majority views on same sex marriage, he early on resolved to ignore voters on climate change.
He used that rejection of evidence and local opinion to wreck the carbon price policy of Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard, his offensive from Opposition against the so-called “carbon tax”.
His chief adviser in Opposition and when he became prime minister, Peta Credlin, in 2017 put that campaign into context.
“That was brutal retail politics, and it took Abbott six months to cut through and when he did cut through Gillard was gone,” she told Sky News.
And, Ms Credlin said, “It wasn’t a carbon tax, as you know.”
However, Mr Abbott was “hugely unconvinced” in 2009 and continued to harness his rejection of climate change science in 2017 in a speech he made in along on.
“Primitive people once killed goats to appease the volcano gods. We are more sophisticated now but are still sacrificing our industries and our living standards to the climate gods to little more effect,” he said.
But something happened 10 days ago.
Mr Abbott abruptly endorsed the UN backed Paris agreement on emission reduction, a process aimed at limiting climate change.
A sudden convert, he has yet to say sorry for his past rejection.
We're not pleased with ScoMo's climate plan: striking students
Links
School Strike for Climate Change: Thousands of students skip school for protests
The public debate on the existence of climate change is over and we are owed an apology from those who prolonged it for self-serving political purposes.
They might acknowledge their disrespect for science, or for driving rejection as a vehicle for “brutal retail politics”.
Voices as varied as the schoolchildren who marched on Friday, the top ranks of Australia’s central bank, and federal department chiefs are warning of the consequences of those changes.
The debate continues, but it now is centred on measuring the urgency of a response to increasing climate instability, and the detail of that response.
Emergency services, diplomats and farmers are all seeking the best answers to climate change effects — effects which some of their flecked representatives for the better part of a decade said didn’t exist.
Military and intelligence agency leaders have warned climate change is a national security threat to Australia.
There still are holdouts, including a few reactionary MPs who continue to embrace Tony Abbott’s belief just over nine years ago that the science was “absolute crap”.
And there is a fringe which make cases which can only be resolved by outlandish conspiracy theories, often along the dubious lines of the United Nations and One World Government.
And there are credible sources moving in the other direction.
Deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia Guy Debelle last week made clear climate change is now a factor in tracking and guiding the economy; he gave no hint it was a UN plot.
But he did stress the need for an orderly transition to clean energy; a need for greater backing of renewable energy projects; preparing for new ways we work and the jobs available to us; and the broader task of readying the entire economy for change.
“Financial stability will be better served by an orderly transition rather than an abrupt disorderly one,” he said.
Last week, secretary of the Department of Home Affairs Mike Pezzullo mentioned climate change in a speech — Seven Gathering Storms — to a think tank.
Mr Pezzullo warned of states which might become ungovernable and a possibility of “mass displacement of people”.
Contributions to this displacement could be “poverty, hunger, water and resource scarcity, and a changing climate, which will have to be thought of as a systemic risk factor”.
These are just a few elements of government which have appreciated the existence and impact of climate change in ways some elected politicians have been too frightened or deliberately manipulative to acknowledge.
These are the folk who might consider an apology.
Tony Abbott is not the only denier in parliament but over a decade he has been the pacesetter if not the leader of that block of ignorance.
“The argument is absolute crap. However, the politics of this are tough for us,” he told a regional audience in December 2009.
“Eighty per cent of people believe climate change is a real and present danger.”
Just as Mr Abbott scorned majority views on same sex marriage, he early on resolved to ignore voters on climate change.
He used that rejection of evidence and local opinion to wreck the carbon price policy of Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard, his offensive from Opposition against the so-called “carbon tax”.
His chief adviser in Opposition and when he became prime minister, Peta Credlin, in 2017 put that campaign into context.
“That was brutal retail politics, and it took Abbott six months to cut through and when he did cut through Gillard was gone,” she told Sky News.
And, Ms Credlin said, “It wasn’t a carbon tax, as you know.”
However, Mr Abbott was “hugely unconvinced” in 2009 and continued to harness his rejection of climate change science in 2017 in a speech he made in along on.
“Primitive people once killed goats to appease the volcano gods. We are more sophisticated now but are still sacrificing our industries and our living standards to the climate gods to little more effect,” he said.
But something happened 10 days ago.
Mr Abbott abruptly endorsed the UN backed Paris agreement on emission reduction, a process aimed at limiting climate change.
A sudden convert, he has yet to say sorry for his past rejection.
We're not pleased with ScoMo's climate plan: striking students
Links
- The Australian's Continued Support Of Climate Change Denialism
- Why Some Conservatives Are Blind To Climate Change
- How The Weather Gets Weaponized In Climate Change Messaging
- 11 Things Climate Change 'Dismissive' People Say On Social Media
- This Summer Is Angry: Are You?
- Using The Big Freeze To Deny Climate Change... Stupidity Or Cynicism?
- Vaccinate Public Against Science Misinformation, Researchers Urge
- How Your Brain Stops You From Taking Climate Change Seriously
- How To Ignore Climate Change
- Could The Heat And Extreme Weather Shift Climate Change Denial?
- There Are Genuine Climate Alarmists, But They're Not In The Same League As Deniers
Categories: External websites
The RBA Has Sounded The Climate Change Alarm. Time To Sit Up And Take Notice
The Guardian - Greg Jericho
Students are striking, the central bank is warning of ‘damaging outcomes’ and denialism has to be met with scorn
RBA deputy governor Guy Debelle: ‘both the physical impact of climate change and the transition are likely to have first-order economic effects.’ Photograph: David Moir/AAP On Friday tens of thousands of school students around the country took to the streets to voice their anger over inaction on climate change. It came three days after the assistant governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia warned about the impact of climate change on our economy. This week really should mark the end of the line for anyone within politics or the media being able to spout climate-change denialism without being met with scorn and jeers. It also should mark the time when boldness and verve becomes the norm for any climate-change policy.
For most people with common sense, our current climate-change policy debate remains utterly frustrating. The problem is there are some in the conservative media and politics who, either due to gross stupidity or a willing desire to fake stupidity, are determined to continue that frustration.
Now one might wonder why someone would actively choose to peddle lies merely to get a gig in the Liberal party or on some unwatched show on Sky News, or to be paid to write poorly some column or blog for News Corp papers.
But at this point, who cares?
Those people have tied themselves to the rotting carcass of climate-change denialism for reasons of profit. We should not now pretend that their views are not redolent with the putrid stench of obtuse irrelevance – an irrelevance made abundantly clear when on Tuesday the deputy governor of the Reserve Bank, Guy Debelle, delivered a speech titled “Climate Change and the Economy”.
It was a landmark speech that sets a precise point from which you can say you are with reality or you have thrown in your lot with idiocy and avarice.
The RBA is not an institution given to radicalism, and so when one of its most senior members states that “both the physical impact of climate change and the transition are likely to have first-order economic effects” it’s a big deal.
Central bankers don’t talk about impacts on the economy lightly or just to please protesting school kids. They only address climate change because they have assessed it has and will continue to have real impacts on the economy.
What Debelle had to say was quite sobering.
He stated that “we need to reassess the frequency of climate events ... and our assumptions about the severity and longevity of the climatic events”.
This, he noted, is not news to the insurance industry. Those companies whose entire profit is based around risk have long been factoring in climate change, because unlike the denialist crew who get paid to be ignorant, insurers actually have to factor in reality when assessing risk.
The Reserve Bank also has to factor in risk and Debelle noted that there are many forces affecting our economy and financial stability, but “few of these forces have the scale, persistence and systemic risk of climate change”.
Debelle also noted the difficulties we face are not small.
He acknowledged the difficulties with the transition to a lower-carbon-intensity world will clearly depend upon “whether it is managed as a gradual process or is abrupt”. But he suggested “the trend changes aren’t likely to be smooth.
“There is likely to be volatility around the trend, with the potential for damaging outcomes from spikes above the trend,” he said.
Central bankers prefer to say 10 words of fudge than two of bluntness. So when a central banker starts talking about “damaging outcomes” that’s the time to sit up and take notice.
He also noted that, just in case you were thinking we only need to worry about more droughts and extreme heat events, there is also the problem “where two (or more) climatic events combine to produce an outcome that is worse than the effect of one of them occurring individually”.
And that is bad because “combined with the increased volatility, this increases the likelihood of non-linear impacts on the economy”.
That is, we can’t just say climate change could have a linear impact on our economy – where it reduces growth by a set percentage each year. Rather, the impact could get progressively worse over time.
Debelle acknowledged that we have always had to deal with droughts and cyclones. He noted that “the current drought has already reduced farm output by around 6% and total GDP by about 0.15%” and that even if we return to average rainfall it will continue to weigh on the economy through this year.
So we know weather affects the economy. But Debelle noted that climate change is a trend, not a cycle like weather, where you experience good and bad times.
“What if,” Debelle asked, “droughts are more frequent, or cyclones happen more often?” The shock to the economy “is no longer temporary but close to permanent”.
Permanent shocks to the economy, damaging outcomes, first-order economic events.
At this point anyone still spouting denialist bile in newspaper columns or on the campaign trail needs to be treated like an anti-vaccer at a healthcare expo.
It also means our major political parties need to step up. The Liberal party will most likely need a major defeat (or two) before facing reality, but the ALP also needs to realise that now is not the time for timidity – which Shorten displayed with his rather weak support of the student’s strike on Thursday.
Leadership requires boldness – a boldness now supported by very clear warnings from our most sober economic institution.
The RBA cannot do anything to limit climate change; it can only assess the risks and act appropriately. It is up to governments to take action and it is time to leave the lies and vindictive ignorance of climate change deniers, in the media and in politics, behind us.
Our central bank has warned of inaction. Our children this week took to the streets to demand action. It is time for our governments to deliver.
Links
Students are striking, the central bank is warning of ‘damaging outcomes’ and denialism has to be met with scorn
RBA deputy governor Guy Debelle: ‘both the physical impact of climate change and the transition are likely to have first-order economic effects.’ Photograph: David Moir/AAP On Friday tens of thousands of school students around the country took to the streets to voice their anger over inaction on climate change. It came three days after the assistant governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia warned about the impact of climate change on our economy. This week really should mark the end of the line for anyone within politics or the media being able to spout climate-change denialism without being met with scorn and jeers. It also should mark the time when boldness and verve becomes the norm for any climate-change policy.
For most people with common sense, our current climate-change policy debate remains utterly frustrating. The problem is there are some in the conservative media and politics who, either due to gross stupidity or a willing desire to fake stupidity, are determined to continue that frustration.
Now one might wonder why someone would actively choose to peddle lies merely to get a gig in the Liberal party or on some unwatched show on Sky News, or to be paid to write poorly some column or blog for News Corp papers.
But at this point, who cares?
Those people have tied themselves to the rotting carcass of climate-change denialism for reasons of profit. We should not now pretend that their views are not redolent with the putrid stench of obtuse irrelevance – an irrelevance made abundantly clear when on Tuesday the deputy governor of the Reserve Bank, Guy Debelle, delivered a speech titled “Climate Change and the Economy”.
It was a landmark speech that sets a precise point from which you can say you are with reality or you have thrown in your lot with idiocy and avarice.
The RBA is not an institution given to radicalism, and so when one of its most senior members states that “both the physical impact of climate change and the transition are likely to have first-order economic effects” it’s a big deal.
Central bankers don’t talk about impacts on the economy lightly or just to please protesting school kids. They only address climate change because they have assessed it has and will continue to have real impacts on the economy.
What Debelle had to say was quite sobering.
He stated that “we need to reassess the frequency of climate events ... and our assumptions about the severity and longevity of the climatic events”.
This, he noted, is not news to the insurance industry. Those companies whose entire profit is based around risk have long been factoring in climate change, because unlike the denialist crew who get paid to be ignorant, insurers actually have to factor in reality when assessing risk.
The Reserve Bank also has to factor in risk and Debelle noted that there are many forces affecting our economy and financial stability, but “few of these forces have the scale, persistence and systemic risk of climate change”.
Debelle also noted the difficulties we face are not small.
He acknowledged the difficulties with the transition to a lower-carbon-intensity world will clearly depend upon “whether it is managed as a gradual process or is abrupt”. But he suggested “the trend changes aren’t likely to be smooth.
“There is likely to be volatility around the trend, with the potential for damaging outcomes from spikes above the trend,” he said.
Central bankers prefer to say 10 words of fudge than two of bluntness. So when a central banker starts talking about “damaging outcomes” that’s the time to sit up and take notice.
He also noted that, just in case you were thinking we only need to worry about more droughts and extreme heat events, there is also the problem “where two (or more) climatic events combine to produce an outcome that is worse than the effect of one of them occurring individually”.
And that is bad because “combined with the increased volatility, this increases the likelihood of non-linear impacts on the economy”.
That is, we can’t just say climate change could have a linear impact on our economy – where it reduces growth by a set percentage each year. Rather, the impact could get progressively worse over time.
Debelle acknowledged that we have always had to deal with droughts and cyclones. He noted that “the current drought has already reduced farm output by around 6% and total GDP by about 0.15%” and that even if we return to average rainfall it will continue to weigh on the economy through this year.
So we know weather affects the economy. But Debelle noted that climate change is a trend, not a cycle like weather, where you experience good and bad times.
“What if,” Debelle asked, “droughts are more frequent, or cyclones happen more often?” The shock to the economy “is no longer temporary but close to permanent”.
Permanent shocks to the economy, damaging outcomes, first-order economic events.
At this point anyone still spouting denialist bile in newspaper columns or on the campaign trail needs to be treated like an anti-vaccer at a healthcare expo.
It also means our major political parties need to step up. The Liberal party will most likely need a major defeat (or two) before facing reality, but the ALP also needs to realise that now is not the time for timidity – which Shorten displayed with his rather weak support of the student’s strike on Thursday.
Leadership requires boldness – a boldness now supported by very clear warnings from our most sober economic institution.
The RBA cannot do anything to limit climate change; it can only assess the risks and act appropriately. It is up to governments to take action and it is time to leave the lies and vindictive ignorance of climate change deniers, in the media and in politics, behind us.
Our central bank has warned of inaction. Our children this week took to the streets to demand action. It is time for our governments to deliver.
Links
- 'Change Now Or Pay Later': RBA's Stark Warning On Climate Change
- Climate change poses risk to Australia's financial stability, warns RBA deputy governor
- 'It's our time to rise up': youth climate strikes held in 100 countries
- Climate Change and the Economy | Speeches | RBA
- Climate change costs will have knock-on effect on interest rates, Reserve Bank warns
- RBA deputy warns climate change a threat to Australian economy (audio)
- RBA warns of 'abrupt, disorderly' effects of climate change
- Climate change poses risk to Australia's financial stability, warns RBA
- Coal baron and LNP donor blasts RBA for sounding alarm on climate
- Fossil fuel 'special interests' putting Australian economy at risk, warns Stiglitz
Categories: External websites
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