Climate Change Stealing Rain From Australia By Shifting Winds Towards Antarctica

Fairfax - Clare Sibthorpe

When much of southeast Australia faced abnormally hot and dry weather last summer, forecasters put it down to a high-pressure system blocking clouds from forming. But rising greenhouse gases were also to blame, researchers have found.

Human-caused climate change is robbing crucial rain from southern parts of Australia by shifting Southern Ocean westerly winds towards Antarctica, according to a new study. Photo: supplied

An ice core in a drill that researchers used to study the climate of Antarctica. Photo: supplied

A new study by the ANU and 16 other institutions revealed human-caused climate change is already harming parts of Australia by robbing vital rain and pushing south westerly winds towards Antarctica.
The ANU's lead researcher associate professor Nerilie Abram said the hijacking of rain combined with 2015 being Australia's fifth-warmest year on record and 2016 on track to be the hottest was an ominous mix.
"The findings confirm that climate change is already having an impact on parts of Australia."
When looking at rainfall in southeast Australia, particularly the ACT and NSW, Professor Abram said it was important to consider other weather events such as El Nino phenomenons, which cause hot and dry conditions.
"But certainly in terms of the very long heat wave we saw in February and March, that was associated with the very strong winds heading south towards Antarctica," she said.
Professor Abram said the study, published in Nature Climate Change, showed southwest Australia was hurting the most from the change, where it had lost one fifth of its rainfall since the 1970s.

Humans have caused climate change for 180 years.

But she said more research was needed to understand the long term impacts on that region and the rest of Australia.
"Antarctica and the Southern Ocean experience extreme fluctuations in climate year to year," she said.
"What this research shows shows us is that we need to keep putting money into research to find out how Antarctica's climate is being affected because it directly affects our lives in Australia."
A 2015 study between CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology found climate change would hit Australia harder than other countries, predicting a rise in temperature of more than five degrees within 80 years.
They forecast reduced rain in southern Australia over the next few decades as well as harsher fire seasons for southern and eastern parts of the country.
This August, Germany-based researchers Climate Analytics found the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees of warming – the two goals included in the Paris climate deal – would be much greater in terms of extreme events and disasters than previously believed.
It found that within just 10 - 20 years, southern Australia would face heatwaves on average 13 days longer at 1.5 degrees and 20 days longer at 2 degrees, while dry spells would be 3.5 days longer at 1.5 degrees and six days at 2 degrees.

Links

• Assessing recent trends in high-latitude Southern Hemisphere surface climate
• Science says climate change is sucking crucial rain from southern parts of Australia
• Climate change jigsaw puzzle: Antarctic pieces missing
• Climate change is drying out parts of southern Australia, study warns

Can You Spot The Reason South Australia Doesn’t Have Power?

BuzzFeed - Brad Esposito | Mark Di Stefano

Around 75,000 homes in South Australia were left without power overnight, after huge storms smashed through the state. Photos emerged of the transmission towers bent and twisted by the weather.

Facebook: aaron.lee.baxter

Despite the images of towers turned into licorice, people quickly blamed the fact that South Australia gets 40% of its energy from renewables. Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said SA's blackout was a "real wake-up call" about renewable energy, One Nation was blaming Labor and the Greens for the blackout and senator Nick Xenophon called the situation a "disgrace" and said he wants an independent inquiry into renewable energy. The storm was the worst South Australia has experienced in more than 50 years and while renewable energy became the cool thing to blame, here's another photo of a transmission tower looking like a cow eating in a paddock.

facebook.com

Many critics of South Australia's energy market seized on a Grattan Institute report published earlier this week that suggested the state's speed in shifting to renewables could "threaten" the power supply.
BuzzFeed News spoke to the author of the report, Tony Wood, on Thursday. He laughed when asked whether South Australia's renewable energy was to blame for the statewide blackout.
"Unless there's something I've missed, [yesterday has] got nothing to do with renewable energy, it's got everything to do with wild weather," said Wood.
Wood pointed to the fact 22 transmission towers were felled during the storm, littering South Australia's usually picturesque countryside with dozens of metal carcasses.
"You can have a coal powered power station in Port Augusta producing power, but it wouldn't have mattered if the power lines go down," he said.
"If that happens you can't get the power to the people."
The Climate Council's John Connor has also been aggressive in pushing back on people blaming renewable energy, calling it "irresponsible and misleading".
"Blaming this extraordinary outage on the state's renewable energy generators, as some people jumped to do well before any facts were known, is both irresponsible and misleading," said Connor.

Links

• blackout 'nothing to do with renewable energy'
• No, Renewable Energy Didn't Cause South Australia's Blackout
• Malcolm Turnbull wants new national renewable energy target
• SA storms: Rushing to renewable energy targets puts sector's reputation at risk

Officials Admit No Modelling Shows How Australia Will Meet Paris Climate Pledge

The Guardian - Michael Slezak

Environment officials tell parliamentary inquiry there is no modelling on how current policies will affect emissions beyond 2020, or when emissions will peak

Australia has no climate modelling showing when its greenhouse gas emissions will peak, government officials have said. Photograph: Stefan Postles/EPA

Government officials have acknowledged that Australia's 2030 greenhouse gas emissions reductions pledged at Paris in 2015 were made without any modelling to show whether existing policies could achieve those targets.
They also admitted the government did not have any modelling revealing when Australia's emissions would peak.
The admissions, made in a parliamentary committee under questioning from Labor Senator for New South Wales Jenny McAllister, fly in the face of advice from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, telling the government it had "existing legislation, policies and measures to enable it to achieve" the the reductions.
They also follow a string of independent modelling exercises showing current policies will not achieve the emissions reductions committed to in Paris. Last week energy advisory firm RepuTex released modelling showing Australia's emissions wouldn't fall much at all between now and 2030, under current policies.
When asked about whether Australia would meet targets laid out in the Paris agreement, Patrick Suckling, the Australian ambassador for the environment, responded that the government had said it would meet those targets and its track record showed it met internationally agreed targets.
"On the basis of past performance, where we've met and exceeded Kyoto 1 and Kyoto 2, that's the track record," Suckling said.
When pushed on the issue by the committee, Suckling referred further questions to Brad Archer from the international climate change and energy innovation division in the Department of Environment and Energy.
Under extended questioning, Archer pointed to various analyses of individual policies but wasn't able cite any modelling that would have informed government if the current set of policies would achieve the 2030 targets.
He said the government was paying polluters to pollute less under the Emissions Reduction Fund. "So we can take into account what is being achieved under the Emissions Reduction Fund." But he couldn't identify any analysis that looked at the overall impact of current policies.
Archer said: "It's not the case that we have modelling capacity available on-tap to continually undertake analyses." At another point he added: "There are inherent challenges in making projections over long periods of time."
Kushla Munro from the international branch of the Department of Environment and Energy later told the committee that the government's "latest emissions projections go to 2020" and that 2030 projections were being prepared.
When asked by McAllister when Australia's emissions would peak, Archer said "that's a very interesting question," and that modelling done so far didn't include analysis of current policies.
McAllister told Guardian Australia the Turnbull government needed to "own up and admit that their climate policies just aren't credible".
"These officials have confirmed Australia's worst kept secret – that the Turnbull government has no idea how it will meet our 2030 emission reduction targets," she said.
"They can't say when Australia's emissions will peak and begin to decline, and they wouldn't confirm that the government's current policy settings will see us meet the target without adjustment."

Links

• Two-thirds of Australia's emissions fund spent for just 7% of 2030 target
• Business and academic leaders urge new conversation about coal-free future
• Australia needs two emissions trading schemes, Climate Change Authority says
• Investors controlling $13tn call on G20 leaders to ratify Paris climate agreement
• Paris agreement is a strong signal that 'we will solve climate crisis', Al Gore says
• Carbon price needed to avoid economic disruption from Paris climate goals – analysis
• CSIRO climate cuts will breach Paris agreement and cost economy – report
• Paris climate talks: Bishop hails 'historic' day as nearly 200 countries sign deal
• Paris climate deal might just be enough to start turning the tide on global warming

South Australian Storm A Preview Of Climate Change: Climate Council

Fairfax - AAP

The lights were hardly out in South Australia before politicians and lobby groups were staking out their ground in the argument over climate change and renewable energy.
Within hours of a massive storm that triggered a statewide power blackout, the Climate Council was blaming global warming for the wild weather.

A satellite image shows the storm over South Australia on Wednesday. Photo: Supplied

It was a "disturbing preview of what's likely to come if Australia fails to act on climate change", council member Will Steffen claimed.
Renewable energy sceptics inside the federal government didn't quite say "We told you so," but the message was none too subtle.
South Australia's aggressive pursuit of renewable energy that supplies about 40 per cent of the state's power had put at risk the stability not only of its own energy network but that of the rest of Australia as it pursues a low carbon emissions future.
"There are serious questions for the future of the energy system about how do we combine energy policy and climate policy," Josh Frydenberg, the federal minister responsible for energy and the environment, said.
"How do we keep the lights on?"
Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce queried whether there was an over-reliance on renewable energy in South Australia.

Professor Will Steffen from the Climate Council. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

How it and other states and territories manage an increasing reliance on renewable energy will be the focus of a special COAG meeting Mr Frydenberg intends holding within weeks.
"There are real questions for the future of the national electricity network as to how we make this transition effectively," he said.
"You can't have a situation like last night."
South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill insists the lengthy outage was caused by bad weather and renewable energy was not to blame.

This is unprecedented: Weatherill. The blame game has begun after South Australia's state wide blackout with the Premier attributing it to storms, others an over reliance on renewable energy. Courtesy ABC News 24.

Independent senator Nick Xenophon is not convinced, calling for an inquiry into his state's power supply.
He wants the Australian Energy Market Commission to carry out a robust independent analysis to learn lessons from the incident and ascertain whether South Australia's energy mix made it more vulnerable to an outage.
Energy expert Andrew Stock, a member of the Climate Council, dismissed attempts to blame renewables for the blackout as opportunistic and irresponsible.
"Storms can knock out electricity networks no matter where the power supply is coming from," he said.
At the time of the blackout, 1000MW of wind power was being fed into the South Australian system.
The council warns the South Australia storm event is a sign of weather to come.
"The atmosphere is packing much more energy than 70 years ago, which contributes to the increasing intensity of such storms, " Professor Steffen said.
Intense rainfall was projected to increase in Australia and had already increased at a global level.
"This is a prelude to a disturbing future, and it's only going to get worse if we don't address climate change."

Sydney wakes up to grey rainy weather.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce said the power outage was a wake-up call for policymakers.
"We will need to ask serious questions about how an entire state lost access to power, which is unacceptable for business and the rest of the community," chief executive James Pearson said.

Links

• No, Renewable Energy Didn't Cause South Australia's Blackout
• Climate change is driving storms like South Australia's
• South Australia blackout: storms set to move to NSW
• The 'perfect storm' on the renewables debate

The World Passes 400 PPM Threshold. Permanently

Climate Central - Brian Kahn

In the centuries to come, history books will likely look back on September 2016 as a major milestone for the world’s climate. At a time when atmospheric carbon dioxide is usually at its minimum, the monthly value failed to drop below 400 parts per million.

That all but ensures that 2016 will be the year that carbon dioxide officially passed the symbolic 400 ppm mark, never to return below it in our lifetimes, according to scientists.

Because carbon pollution has been increasing since the start of the Industrial Revolution and has shown no signs of abating, it was more a question of “when” rather than “if” we would cross this threshold. The inevitability doesn’t make it any less significant, though.
September is usually the month when carbon dioxide is at its lowest after a summer of plants growing and sucking it up in the northern hemisphere. As fall wears on, those plants lose their leaves, which in turn decompose, releasing the stored carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. At Mauna Loa Observatory, the world’s marquee site for monitoring carbon dioxide, there are signs that the process has begun but levels have remained above 400 ppm.
Since the industrial revolution, humans have been altering this process by adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than plants can take up. That’s driven carbon dioxide levels higher and with it, global temperatures, along with a host of other climate change impacts.
“Is it possible that October 2016 will yield a lower monthly value than September and dip below 400 ppm? Almost impossible,” Ralph Keeling, the scientist who runs the Scripps Institute for Oceanography’s carbon dioxide monitoring program, wrote in a blog post. “Brief excursions toward lower values are still possible, but it already seems safe to conclude that we won’t be seeing a monthly value below 400 ppm this year – or ever again for the indefinite future.”
We may get a day or two reprieve in the next month, similar to August when Tropical Storm Madeline blew by Hawaii and knocked carbon dioxide below 400 ppm for a day. But otherwise, we’re living in a 400 ppm world. Even if the world stopped emitting carbon dioxide tomorrow, what has already put in the atmosphere will linger for many decades to come.

An animation showing how carbon dioxide moves around the planet. Credit: NASA/YouTube

“At best (in that scenario), one might expect a balance in the near term and so CO2 levels probably wouldn't change much — but would start to fall off in a decade or so,” Gavin Schmidt, NASA’s chief climate scientist, said in an email. “In my opinion, we won’t ever see a month below 400 ppm.”
The carbon dioxide we’ve already committed to the atmosphere has warmed the world about 1.8°F since the start of the industrial revolution. This year, in addition to marking the start of our new 400 ppm world, is also set to be the hottest year on record. The planet has edged right up against the 1.5°C (2.7°F) warming threshold, a key metric in last year’s Paris climate agreement.
Even though there are some hopeful signs that world leaders will take actions to reduce emissions, those actions will have to happen on an accelerating timetable in order to avoid 2°C (3.6°F) of warming. That’s the level outlined by policymakers as a safe threshold for climate change. And even if the world limits warming to that benchmark, it will still likely spell doom for low-lying small island states and have serious repercussions around the world, from more extreme heat waves to droughts, coastal flooding and the extinction of many coral reefs.
It’s against this backdrop that the measurements on top of Mauna Loa take on added importance. They’re a reminder that with each passing day, we’re moving further from the climate humans have known and thrived in and closer to a more unstable future.

Links

• CO2 Nears Peak: Are We Permanently Above 400 PPM?
• Flirting with the 1.5°C Threshold
• Antarctic CO2 Hit 400 PPM For First Time in 4 Million Years
• What 2 Million Years of Temps Say About the Future

The World Just Hit This Disturbing Climate Change Metric

Fortune - Katie Fehrenbacher

Cities like Miami (pictured) will now have access to real-time climate change data thanks to a new website powered by the White House. Photograph by Joe Raedle—Getty Images 

Earth has seemingly passed a worrisome threshold for the changing climate this week, according to scientists.
The last week in September is often the time of the year when the planet’s carbon emissions are at their lowest as summer turns to fall and plants and leaves start to decay, releasing carbon. However, this year the amount of carbon emissions in the atmosphere this week has remained above 400 parts per million, reports Climate Central.
That means that even with the fluctuating of the seasons, which pushes the levels of carbon emissions up and down, the planet is likely now officially at 400 parts per million for the foreseeable future. While that could change decades into the future—if society worked hard to reverse the carbon emissions in the atmosphere or if there was a large catastrophic climate event—but the metric for now is likely here to stay.

With four hundred parts of carbon emissions in the Earth’s atmosphere, the climate is changing including rising global temperatures, rising sea levels, ocean acidification and increased intensity of storms. Global temperatures have already risen by almost 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to about a century ago, and world leaders are trying to enact commitments and policies to keep rising temperatures under two degrees Celsius.
This disturbing data point is the backdrop to the current U.S. political environment. This week, climate change was only brought up briefly during the first Presidential debate. Republican candidate Donald Trump denied calling climate change a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese (but he actually did do that) and also bizarrely referred to solar company Solyndra, which went bankrupt five years ago and lost a loan from the U.S. government.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard oral arguments on Tuesday for President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which seeks to push power plant companies to lower greenhouse gas emissions. If the policy stands, mostly it would accelerate shutting down old coal plants and adding in new natural gas plants, as well as solar and wind farms.
But if the Clean Power Plan is shot down, the U.S. will lose its chief way to meet its commitments to lower carbon emissions and meet the pledges to the international Paris climate agreement. For the first time in history, the U.S. and China ratified the Paris agreement this weekend.
Perhaps billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has the best strategy. On Tuesday, he showed off how his space company SpaceX plans to get human beings off of Earth and onto Mars in an effort to enable humans to be an “interplanetary species.”
Humans will inevitably face an extinction event, said Musk at a astronautical conference on Tuesday in Mexico. Perhaps this week the Earth hit that metric which will put start it on a path to meet that fate.

Links

• The World Passes 400 PPM Threshold. Permanently
• CO2 Nears Peak: Are We Permanently Above 400 PPM?
• Flirting with the 1.5°C Threshold
• Antarctic CO2 Hit 400 PPM For First Time in 4 Million Years
• What 2 Million Years of Temps Say About the Future

Sydney Company Taking CSIRO Developed UltraBattery To Off-Grid And Renewable Energy Projects

ABC Rural - Babs McHugh

Dr Lan Lam, CSIRO, the primary inventor of the UltraBattery. (Supplied: CSIRO)

A new lead acid battery developed by a consortium with the CSIRO is being trialled on off-grid conditions, including as storage for intermittent renewable energy. Called the UltraBattery, it takes the 150-year-old lead-acid battery technology, like those used to start cars, and adds a super-capacitor.
The consortium was an international one, with CSIRO in Australia, the battery was built by Furukawa Battery Company in Japan and tested in the United Kingdom through American based Advanced Lead-Acid Battery Consortium.
Now an Australian company, Ecoult in Sydney, has been commercialising it in a system it calls UltraFlex.
That uses the UItraBattery as a system for off-grid and dual-purpose applications.
Ecoult CEO John Wood said efficient and commercial energy storage could be expensive as it requires many different parts.

"When we look into energy storage, it's not only the cost of the battery," he said.

Audio: John Wood on Ecoult commercialising CSIRO developed lead-acid UltraBattery (ABC Rural)

"It's the cost of the battery, it's the cost of the grid interconnection, the cost of the power control systems, the room you put them in.
"These are all of the critical economic considerations when you're applying energy storage."
Battery storage is essential for managing renewable and off-grid systems, by smoothing out the peaks and the troughs of energy production.
For example at night when there is no sun for solar cells or when the wind is not blowing enough to turn wind power turbines.
Mr Wood said one of the challenges with the traditional lead-acid batteries, was its inability to sustain a partial state of charge, which the addition of the super-capacitor had changed.
"When we're doing things like integrating renewables into the grid or setting up micro-grids, what we're actually doing is cycling the battery so it's never quite full, never quite empty," he said.
"That's a partial state of charge. Continually charging and discharging the battery to take energy and moving it in time for use when its needed.
"All batteries in this competitive state, such as lithium ion and other types, are partial state of charge applications.

"Lead-acid is the largest source of chemical storage on the planet."

Mr Wood said there were applications for all types of different batteries but added the UltraBattery had significant advantages over alternate technologies in some cases.
"The lead-acid battery industry is fully sustainable. Most of the lead-acid batteries that are being used have been through the recycling phase several times," he said.
"It is the most recycled product on the planet: the batteries are manufactured, they come back to the factories where they're broken down to their components — plastic, lead and acid.
"They're put back through the production process and find their way back to the market place."

Links

• Renewable energy expert calls for greater investment in new technology beyond electricity production
• Traditional commodities still needed to support 'lifestyle' metals
• Growing demand for lithium batteries driving new mine technology

Australia's West, South Losing Vital Rain As Climate Change Shifts Winds, Study Finds

ABC News - Nicolas Perpitch

The study found storms are reducing rainfall in some areas. (Audience submitted: Hayley Grant)

Rising greenhouse gases and ozone depletion over the Antarctic are increasingly pushing rain-bearing storm fronts away from Australia's west and south, according to a new international study.

The research, which involved the Australian National University and 16 other institutions from around the world, has just been published in the Nature Climate Change journal.
It found Southern Ocean westerly winds and associated storms were shifting south, down towards Antarctica, and robbing southern parts of Australia of rain.
ANU Associate Professor Nerilie Abram, the lead Australian researcher, said this had contributed to a decline of more than 20 per cent in winter rainfall in southwestern Australia since the 1970s.
"That band of rainfall that comes in those westerly winds is shifting further south, so closer towards Antarctica," Dr Abram, from the ANU's Research School of Earth Sciences and ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, said.

"So the rain is still there, it's just fewer of those cold fronts make it far enough north to intersect with southern Australia," she said.

The study attributed this shift directly to human-induced climate change, primarily from rising greenhouse gases and ozone depletion.
Dr Abram said the loss of rain combined with "2016 being on track to smash the hottest-year record was ominous for communities and the environment".
"Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are remote but this region influences Australia's heatwaves, affects whether our crops get the winter rainfall they need and determines how quickly our ocean levels rise," she said.
The international research team examined how recent Antarctic climate trends compared to past climate fluctuations using natural archives such as ice cores drilled into the Antarctic ice sheet.
They found the bigger picture of the region's climate trends remained unclear because of Antarctica and the Southern ocean's "extreme fluctuations in climate year to year".
Dr Abram explained the climate measurements were not yet long enough "for the signal of anthropogenic climate change to be clearly separated from this large natural variability".
Lead author Dr Julie Jones, from the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, said there was still an enormous amount to learn about the Antarctic climate.
"At face value, many of the climate trends in Antarctica seem counter-intuitive for a warming world," Dr Jones said.
"Scientists have good theories for why, but these ideas are still difficult to prove with the short records we are working with."

Links

• Assessing recent trends in high-latitude Southern Hemisphere surface climate
• Science says climate change is sucking crucial rain from southern parts of Australia
• Climate change jigsaw puzzle: Antarctic pieces missing
• Climate change is drying out parts of southern Australia, study warns

Farmers Asked To Share Their Climate Change Experience

Australian Geographic - Gemma Chilton

Farmers around Australia are being asked to share their experiences of climate change in a new national survey

Peter Holding is a third-generation grain, wool and lamb farmer from southern NSW. Image Credit: Holly Bradford

IF THERE'S ANY group of Australians who are likely to see and fully appreciate the impacts of climate change first-hand, it's our farmers, who rely on the patterns and moods of the weather to make a living.
Farmers like Peter Holding, who is a third-generation mixed-operation farmer (wheat, canola, wool and lamb) from southern NSW. Peter's family has been farming their land on the south-west slopes of Harden since 1929.
He says he first really started to be impacted by the changing climate with the big, late-season frost event of 1998, followed by the unprecedented drought period of the first decade of the 2000s.
Today, Peter is vocal about the need to do something about climate change.
He is also a member of the newly formed Farmers For Climate Action, which is asking farmers around Australia to share their experiences of, and attitudes towards, climate change in a nation-wide survey.
 This is the first Australia-wide survey of its kind and was launched last week at a large, annual NSW agribusiness event called Henty Field Days.

Volunteers from Farmers for Climate Action prepare to survey farmers at Henty Field Days, NSW. (Source: Farmers for Climate Action)

Peter says farmers are at the "frontline" of climate change, and he thinks attitudes among farmers are changing - however the survey, which has already received hundreds of entries, will paint a clearer picture.
Cattle farmer and businesswoman Lucinda Corrigan, who has already completed the survey, is now encouraging other farmers to do the same.
"We already know agriculture is Australia's most climate-exposed industry, but precise impacts vary between regions and sectors. For me, in southern NSW, we're seeing increasing temperatures and our rainfall patterns significantly alter, and this makes short and long-term planning for our agribusiness more challenging," she says.
"It's critical that as many farmers as possible get involved in this conversation because the decisions made today and tomorrow will affect us long into the future. We want to make sure we can keep farming into not just the next season, but for generations to come."
Farmers For Climate Action will use the survey results to inform their practices and areas of focus. Farmers who complete the five-minute survey will also go in the draw to win a solar system and battery storage worth $15,000.

Links

• Current emissions could already warm the world to dangerous levels
• August 2016 world's hottest on record
• Moving Arctic solo raises climate awareness

Climate Change Study Accused Of Erring On Rising Temperature Predictions

ABC World Today - Colin Cosier

Photo: A study published in the journal Nature reconstructed 2 million years of global average temperatures. (Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems CRC and Australian Antarctic Division)

Key points: Study found Earth's temperature could rise by between 3 and 7 degrees Celsius over next thousand years But prominent climate scientists argue there is a logical error with the calculation However, they welcomed the temperature history provided by the study

Prominent climate scientists have issued a warning that a paper published in the influential journal Nature sensationalised climate change predictions and used an "incorrect calculation".
The Evolution of Global Temperature over the Past Two Million Years paper reconstructed 2 million years of global average temperatures.
It found temperatures gradually cooled until about 1.2 million years ago and then stalled after that, and concluded that Earth's temperature could rise by between 3 and 7 degrees Celsius over the next thousand years.
But that prediction has come under fire from prominent climate scientists, including Dr Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
He said he did not think the conclusion was correct.
"In fact, I'm pretty certain that is an incorrect calculation," he said."The ratio that gave that, which was the very high sensitivity that she calculates, comes from a correlation between temperature and the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the ice cores, but as we all know, correlation does not equal causation.
"And in this case, the causation is the orbital wobbles of the Earth's climate that are controlling both the temperature and the carbon dioxide at the same time and so that's giving you an exaggerated view of how carbon dioxide affects temperature directly."
However, Dr Schmidt welcomed the temperature history provided by the study, which analysed about 60 different sediment cores.
"The meat of this study is really a synthesis of deep sea ocean sediment cores that come from all around the world but put together in a way that allows you to say something about the global temperatures at every point between recently and 2 million years ago," he said.
"And so that's a really impressive synthesis."
But he said that would likely be outweighed by the temperature increase error.
"I think it's unfortunate both for the journal which is going to be accused of hyping sensational results without being scientific rigorous," he said.
"I think it's unfortunate for the author whose really good work is being overshadowed by this particular error, and it is unfortunate for the public because what you're seeing is a very confused message that people are going to take away all sorts of different messages from."

'A very confused message'
Professor Jeffrey Severinghaus, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of San Diego, also found a problem with the study.
"She made a very, very basic logical error," he said."Climate sensitivity is essentially the change in temperature divided by the change in CO2.
"The important part about that is that if you want to infer that from an actual situation in the Earth, you know, what the Earth did in the past, you have to make sure that temperature change is only due to an increase in CO2, whereas the ice ages, we know very well the temperature change was due to a combination of increasing CO2 and changes in the Earth's orbit around the sun.
"In fact, it's probably something like two-thirds of the temperature change is due to the orbit and only one-third to the CO2.
"So that's probably why she got a factor of three larger."
The study's author Carolyn Snyder was not available for an interview.

Links

• Evolution of global temperature over the past two million years
• Emissions could already warm world to dangerous levels
• Support for action on climate change continues to climb
• What do Aussies think about climate change? Belief in climate change has hit an all-time high, according to a new report

Global Warming 'Troubling' For Grasses

SBS - AAP

Global warming could outstrip the ability of grasses, including wheat, corn and rice to adapt, leading to crop failures and mass starvation, say scientists.

Global warming could rapidly threaten grasses including staple foods such as wheat and rice that provide half of all the calories consumed by humans, say scientists.
A new study looking ahead to 2070 found that climate change was occurring thousands of times faster than the ability of grasses to adapt.
While the research cannot predict what might happen to world food supplies as a result, the authors warn of "troubling implications".
Grass is food, both for many species of animals and humans.
Wheat, rice, maize, rye, barley and sorghum are all edible grasses that yield nutritious grains. In many parts of the world and throughout history, wheat or rice famines have led to widespread starvation.
The new research, published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, looked at the ability of 236 grass species to adapt to new climatic niches - the local environments on which they depend for survival.
Faced with rapid climate change, species wedded to a particular niche can survive if they move to another region where conditions are more suitable, or evolve to fit in with their altered surroundings.
The scientists found that the predicted rate of climate change was typically 5000 times faster than the estimated speed at which grasses could adapt to new niches.
Moving to more favourable geographical locations was not an option for a lot of grass species because of limits to their seed dispersal and obstacles such as mountains or human settlements.
The researchers, led by Dr John Wiens, from the University of Arizona in the US, wrote: "We show that past rates of climatic niche change in grasses are much slower than rates of future projected climate change, suggesting that extinctions might occur in many species and/or local populations.
"This has several troubling implications, for both global biodiversity and human welfare.
"Grasses are an important food source for humans (especially rice, wheat and corn). Evolutionary adaptation seems particularly unlikely for domesticated species ... and even local declines may be devastating for some human populations."

Links

• Climate change could wipe out many food cereals by 2070
• Climate change is projected to outpace rates of niche change in grasses
• What spying on trees can teach us about the climate
• More support for climate change: report

Climate Change Challenge To Gina Rinehart’s Alpha Mine Dismissed By Court

The Guardian - Joshua Robertson

Queensland court of appeal finds 'proposed mining would not detrimentally affect global greenhouse gas emissions' because Asian power stations would buy coal elsewhere if Alpha blocked

Gina Rinehart's Alpha coal project in Queensland's Galilee basin. The proposed 30m tonne-a-year mine was challenged in Queensland's land court and the supreme court. Photograph: Andrew Quilty/AAP 

Miners could run afoul of Queensland's environmental protection laws if the burning of their export coal overseas were shown to negatively impact global carbon pollution, the state's highest court has ruled.
But the court of appeal has dismissed a challenge to Gina Rinehart's Alpha mine because of an earlier land court finding that it would "not detrimentally affect global greenhouse gas emissions" because Asian power stations would simply buy coal elsewhere if the mine were blocked.
The decision on Tuesday lumped conservation group Coast and Country with legal costs after escalating their fight against the proposed 30m tonne-a-year mine in the Galilee basin in the wake of unsuccessful challenges in the land court and the supreme court.
Coast and Country had applied for statutory review of the land court ruling upholding approval of an environmental authority for GVK Hancock.
The appeal court president, Margaret McMurdo, in a published judgment found that the land court "must consider" so-called scope 3 emissions from transporting and burning coal overseas when weighing up a mine's environmental authority.
However the land court "made findings of fact that the proposed mining would not detrimentally affect global greenhouse gas emissions" and these were "not amenable to statutory review", McMurdo said.
Jo-Anne Bragg, chief executive of the Queensland Environmental Defenders Office, which ran the case for Coast and Country, said their clients were disappointed.
"We all know that burning fossil fuels is contributing to global warming, extreme weather events and severe damage to our Great Barrier Reef. Every further approval locks in those impacts," Bragg said.
A GVK Hancock spokesman said the ruling brought "an end to four years of legal challenges from anti-mining protesters and allows us to continue developing a project that will create thousands of jobs for our state".
The miner in the land court had argued its contribution of 0.16% to global emissions through the burning of 30MT of coal a year was "negligible" but this was dismissed by the court.
Alpha is one of six Galilee basin mining proposals singled out last week in a climate advocacy report arguing they must be stopped if global warming is to be kept to 1.5C, the aspirational target of the Paris Agreement.
McMurdo said that under the "very broadly defined object of the Environmental Protection Act … environmental value and environmental harm are consistent with a desire to protect Queensland's environment from development, including mining development, which would cause harmful global greenhouse gas emissions".
The land court was obliged to consider criteria "consistent with a concern about harmful global greenhouse gas emissions which would not 'enhance individual and community wellbeing and welfare by following a path of economic development that safeguards the welfare of future generations'; would not 'provide for equity within and between generations'; could damage 'biological diversity' and 'essential ecological processes and life support systems'; or could raise 'threats of serious or irreversible environmental damage'", she said.
Fellow appeal court justice Hugh Fraser noted "expert evidence" before the land court that power stations primarily in India and China would "burn the same amount of thermal coal and produce the same amount of greenhouse gases whether or not the proposed Alpha mine proceeded".
"That was so because thermal coal was plentiful and cheaply available to the power stations from many sources," Fraser said.
"It was the designed power generating capacity of the power stations, rather than the availability of coal, which determined the amount of coal which would be burned in the power stations.
"Accordingly, global scope 3 emissions would not fall if the mine did not proceed."
That followed a supreme court ruling last September that the land court's consideration that "environmental harm that might be caused by another coal mine somewhere else in the world" was relevant under state environmental laws.

Links

• Galilee basin coal must be left in ground as a 'priority' – new report
• Dutch parliament votes to close down country's coal industry
• 'It's a depressing sight': climate change unleashes ghostly death on Great Barrier Reef
• Greg Hunt's approval of Adani's Queensland mine upheld by federal court
• Activists launch fresh court challenge over Carmichael coalmine
• Adani's Carmichael mine approval labelled 'economic stupidity'
• Adani's Carmichael coalmine leases approved by Queensland
• Carmichael coalmine plan would push climate to a dangerous state, court told
• Federal court asked to overturn Adani mine approval due to impact on Great Barrier Reef
• Australia accelerates coal mine projects in the face of study that finds it should stay buried

Scientists “Too Frightened” To Tell Truth On Climate Impacts

Climate Home - Paul Brown

Professor Peter Wadhams says peers are failing in their duty through timidity, and warns China is planning huge land grabs as warming hits crop production

Scientists "know" dangerous levels of climate change is happening, but they do not want to alarm people, says Wadhams. "It is bordering on the dishonest" (Pic: Pixabay)

China is protecting itself against future food supply problems caused by climate change by buying or leasing large tracts of land in Africa and South America, a leading UK climate scientist says.
Professor Peter Wadhams, an expert on the disappearing Arctic ice, says that while countries in North America and Europe are ignoring the threat that changing weather patterns are causing to the world food supply, China is taking "self-protective action".
He says that changes in the jet stream caused by the melting of the ice in the Arctic are threatening the most productive agricultural areas on the planet.
"The impact of extreme, often violent weather on crops in a world where the population continues to increase rapidly can only be disastrous," he warns.
"Sooner or later, there will be an unbridgeable gulf between global food needs and our capacity to grow food in an unstable climate. Inevitably, starvation will reduce the world's population."
Professor Wadhams, former head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge, says China has already realised this is a threat to its future stability and has been taking over large areas of land in other countries to grow crops to protect its food supply.
The drawback, he says, is that the Chinese are introducing industrial agricultural practices that damage the soil, the water supply and the rivers.
"But China is positioning itself for the struggle to come − the struggle to find enough to eat," he says. "By controlling land in other countries, they will control those countries' food supply."
Professor Wadhams, who is a former director of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, is the UK's most experienced sea ice expert.
In his new book, A Farewell to Ice, he describes a number of serious threats to the planet resulting from the loss of Arctic ice. These include much greater sea level rise than estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), resulting in the flooding of cities and of low-lying deltas where much of the world's food is grown.
He says China has seen the unrest in parts of the world caused by food price increases in 2011 during the Arab Spring, and has sought to guard against similar problems at home by buying land across the globe.
His warnings are echoed in Brazil, where there are concerns about Chinese plans to build a 3,300-mile (5,000km) railway to get soya, grain and timber to the coast to supply China's needs.
But fears over land grabs by China are only a small part of the changing world that will be created by the loss of ice in the Arctic discussed by Wadhams in his book.
He attacks the last four British prime ministers − John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron − for talking about climate change and doing little. And he says his fellow scientists on the IPCC are failing in their duty to speak out about the full dangers of climate change.
Professor Wadhams told Climate News Network that colleagues "were too frightened of their jobs or losing their grants to spell out what was really happening". He said it makes him very angry that they are failing in their duty through timidity.
Based on his own measurements and calculations, he believes that summer ice in the Arctic will disappear before 2020 – which is 30 years before the IPCC estimate.
He also believes that sea level rise has been badly underestimated because the loss of ice from Greenland and the Antarctic was not included in the IPCC's estimates.
"My estimates are based on real measurements of the ice in the Arctic – the IPCC rely on computer simulations. I know which I believe."
He is also concerned about the large escapes of methane from the Arctic tundra and the shallow seas north of Siberia – again, something that has not been fully taken into account in the IPCC's calculations on the speed of warming.

Bordering on dishonest
"They know it is happening, but they do not want to frighten the horses [alarm people]. It is bordering on the dishonest," he says.
Professor Wadhams has concluded that there is now so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that dangerous warming is inevitable unless more drastic action is taken. He says reducing emissions will help, along with planting forests, but it will never be enough.
"What is needed is something that has not been invented yet − a large-scale method of passing air through a machine and taking out the carbon dioxide," he says.
"In the long run, only by taking carbon out of the air can we hope to get the concentrations down enough to save us from dangerous climate change.
"It is a tall order, but if we spend enough money on research we can find a way. Our future depends on it."

Links

• The cost of inaction: who will fund loss and damage?
• The dangers of 'crying wolf' over Arctic sea ice melt 
• Arctic ice loss equivalent to 20 years of man-made CO2, says polar scientist 
• Arctic sea ice loss accelerated in July 
• Ocean acidfication impacts 'worse than thought' say scientists

US Emissions Set To Miss 2025 Target In Paris Climate Change Deal, Research Finds

The Guardian - Oliver Milman

Even if US implements emissions-cutting proposals it could still overshoot target by nearly 1bn tonnes of greenhouse gases, according to scientific study

A coal-fired power station on the Ohio river near Shippingport, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Alamy

The US is on course to miss its emissions reduction target agreed in the Paris climate accord nine months ago, with new research finding that the world's largest historical emitter doesn't currently have the policies in place to meet its pledge.
Even if the US implements a range of emissions-slashing proposals that have yet to be introduced, the nation could still overshoot its 2025 target by nearly 1bn tonnes of greenhouse gases. This failure would have profound consequences for the US's position as a climate leader, as well for the global effort to stave off the dangerous heatwaves, sea level rise and extreme weather associated with climate change.
"If the policies were locked today, there would be a low likelihood of meeting the target," said Jeffery Greenblatt, scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and lead author of the study, published in Nature.
"I wouldn't disparage the US's efforts so far, but we need to do more as a nation and globally to reduce emissions. However we splice it, that's hard to do. We can't make small alterations to our economy – we need fundamental changes in how we get and use energy."
The US pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 26% to 28% by 2025, based in 2005 levels, at last year's landmark Paris climate deal. At the time, Barack Obama hailed the US as "the global leader in fighting climate change".

Notes: Lighter colored bars indicate the full uncertainty ranges. *Starred items are proposed
Source: "Assessment of the climate commitments and additional mitigation policies of the United States," Jeffery B. Greenblatt and MaxWei | Graphic: Jan Diehm/The Guardian

But the new study used previous government projections combined with updated emissions data to forecast that even if the president's centerpiece Clean Power Plan was to go ahead, the US would fall short of its target by 551m to 1.8bn tonnes of greenhouse gases. Adding in all proposed reforms, to areas such as building codes, emissions standards for trucks and fertilizers, would still see a shortfall of 356m to 924m tonnes by 2025.
While the US still has time to close this gap, the study warns that additional measures will probably be required at a time when action on climate change is anathema to Republicans whose presidential candidate, Donald Trump, has called global warming a "hoax" and "bullshit".
Greenblatt said: "It's good to set ambitious targets, it pushes us to be creative and find ways to meet them. We won't get there with existing policies but it doesn't mean we are doomed. This is a call to action to ensure we close the remaining gap."
The US has been overtaken by China in recent years as the world's largest emitter but still expels more than 6.8bn tonnes of greenhouse gases a year from energy, transportation and agriculture. While US emissions have edged downwards over the past decade, Obama's linchpin climate policy, the Clean Power Plan, has been enmeshed in a legal battle waged by leaders of 27 American states. Court hearings over the legality of plan, which would place emissions limits upon each state, begin on Tuesday.
The Paris climate deal, which Trump has said the US will exit should he win the presidency, calls for emissions reductions from 195 signatory countries in order to prevent global temperatures rising more than 2C above pre-industrial levels.
However, a string of record-breaking months of heat in 2016 has raised concerns that a more aspirational target of a 1.5C limit is already out of reach. Soberingly, the 2C guardrail is also in jeopardy, with several analyses showing that nations' emissions reduction pledges are insufficient.
Calculations released this month by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that proposed emissions cuts would lead to a 3.5C increase in average global temperatures by 2100. This warming would probably trigger a range of dangerous environmental changes for humans and other species.
John Sterman, director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, said the new emissions projection study, which he wasn't involved in, was "sound" in its conclusions.
"The target is absolutely not beyond our reach, it's just not likely with current policy," he said. "We have the technology to dramatically cut emissions and economically we know it's affordable.
"The problem is a political problem and an implementation problem. The US, and the world, needs deeper and sooner cuts."
Sterman said cheap gasoline and natural gas prices in the US have led to overconsumption of fossil fuels and slowed efforts to improve energy efficiency. He added that putting a price on carbon, which has been done in California but fiercely resisted by Republicans nationally, would provide the largest single shove towards meeting the 2025 target.
"If you had to take one policy to a desert island, it would be a price on carbon," Sterman said. "But it's not the only one. There's no silver bullet to dealing with climate change, there's silver buckshot."

Links

• China ratifies Paris climate change agreement ahead of G20
• Lives in the balance: climate change and the Marshall Islands
• UK poorly prepared for climate change impacts, government advisers warn
• Paris climate deal: countries with about half of global emissions to join this year
• World leaders sign Paris agreement on climate change – video
• Leonardo DiCaprio and Fred Krupp: five ways to deliver on the Paris climate talks
• CSIRO climate cuts will breach Paris agreement and cost economy – report
• US clean power plan setback 'will not affect Paris climate change deal'
• Pentagon to lose emissions exemption under Paris climate deal
• Paris climate deal provides 'best chance we have' of saving the planet

Today's Greenhouse Gas Levels Could Result In Up To 7 Degrees Of Warming

Fairfax - Lucy Cormack


The longest continuous reconstruction of the Earth's surface climate suggests that current greenhouse gas levels could commit the planet to as much as 7 degrees of warming in the next 1000 years.
The study, Evolution of global temperature over the past 2 million years, was conducted by Stanford University then doctoral student Carolyn Snyder, and marks the longest continuous reconstruction of the Earth's surface climate to date.

Climate warming began 180 years ago. An international research project has found human-induced climate change is first detectable in the Arctic and tropical oceans around the 1830s, earlier than expected.

It comes as a national poll found public support for federal government-led action on climate change has bounced back, with increased support for renewable energy production.
The Climate Institute's Climate of the Nation poll found 65 per cent of Australians want their country to lead the world on climate change solutions, a marked increase since the time of divisive debates about the Gillard government's carbon tax.
Published in a report for the journal Nature, the study revealed that global temperatures were cooling until around 1.2 million years ago, before stalling until the present.
"This research was in response to a fair amount of great paleo-climate records that had been produced by a variety of researchers over long periods of time, but increasingly people were using different approximations for global temperature," she said.
"We didn't have a global temperature record that we could compare, so there seemed to be this gap."
Previously global average surface temperature has only been reconstructed for isolated periods, like the past 20,000 years.

Will Steffen, Emeritus Professor, Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, Radio National Breakfast with Fran Kelly.

However Dr Snyder's research applied a network of more than 20,000 sea surface temperature reconstructions from 59 ocean sediment cores, in order to recreate temperatures at 1,000-year intervals for the past two million years.
"One of the mysteries in the earth's past, is what the trigger was when the earth went in and out of ice ages and warmer periods like we have today," she said.
"What we've seen in the past is that in cold periods ice sheets expanded and they had an effect on the reflectivity of the earth's surface that made the earth get colder."
In contrast, she said, warmer climate states meant "less sea ice, more ocean water and varied ocean dynamics, which would in turn cause changes in the earth's temperature, because less would be reflected off the earth's surface".
"This study is not a forecast or a prediction, but it gives a ballpark context to the relationship between greenhouse gas levels and temperatures in the past ... to give as robust a picture that we can of the earth's dynamic."
In December last year Australia was among 174 signatories to the Paris Agreement, the world's first comprehensive climate agreement, setting out a global action plan to global warming to well below 2 degrees.
The Australian government has said it would seek to ratify the Paris Agreement on climate change by the end of the year. It has set a 2030 emissions reduction target of 26 to 28 per cent below 2005 levels.
A report released by a European think tank earlier this month said Australia had "a high level of responsibility for the greenhouse gases that have caused the climate problem", but acknowledged the country's wealth and technical capabilities gave it "a level of capacity to help solve it".


Professor Eelco Rohling of the Research School of Earth Science at the Australian National University, said Dr Synder's research was valuable for being the first statistically approached temperature reconstruction over 2 million years, from multiple locations, but said the emphasis on the potential warming of the planet acted as "a bit of a red herring in the discussion".
"It takes the carbon dioxide component and compares it to climate temperature responses. As a calculation that is not wrong, but it doesn't translate to what is happening in the future, unless you make significant corrections."
"The estimate obtained is just one of a whole range of estimates ... It happens to be a higher-end estimate, and as such catches attention ... but proper, deep analysis is needed before much hay can be made of that one specific value."

Links

• What two million years of climate history tells us about the future
• Evolution of global temperature over the past two million years - Nature
• New climate study published in high-profile journal is roundly criticized
• New study undercuts favorite climate myth 'more CO2 is good for plants'