Climate Change Fuels Bushfire Risk As Australia Heats Up

France 24 - Glenda Kwek, Agence-France Presse

SYDNEY (AFP) - "A sunburnt country... with a pitiless blue sky", so the famous poem goes, but where once Australia could rely on "steady, soaking rain", a trend of hotter and drier weather as the climate warms is making it more vulnerable to severe bushfires.
Climate experts warn that with rising temperatures, as well as decreasing rainfall in the south, parts of Australia are so dry the risk of bushfires is rising.
Since November huge swathes of the country have been scorched by ferocious blazes, leaving a total of nine dead and hundreds of homes destroyed. In South Australia, locals told of an "Armageddon-like" inferno sweeping through some areas, while in Western Australia bushfires raged out of control in a situation residents described as "like hell".
Already this year there have been scores more bushfires -- a recent incident at Yarloop, 110 kilometres (70 miles) south of Perth, left two dead.

A Department of Fire and Emergency Services photo shows a bushfire burning near Waroona, south of Perth, Australia on January 7, 2016. © Department of Fire and Emergency/AFP/File / by Glenda Kwek |

Firefighters warn they are facing more intense, erratic blazes.
"From my experience, fires appear to be getting more intense, harder to fight, harder to plan for... and this is having an impact on firefighting strategies," Darin Sullivan, a 25-year veteran New South Wales state firefighter, told AFP.
Three of the five hottest years on record in Australia have occurred in the last three years, according to data compiled by the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM).
In 2013, Australia experienced its warmest year on record, 2014 was the third-hottest while last year was the fifth-warmest.
"Studies have shown an increase in the number of days with high levels of fire danger in southern and eastern Australia," BOM climatologist Blair Trewin told AFP.
"One of the things that is apparent is a lengthening of the fire season, so we're seeing more high fire danger days in spring and autumn, as well as in the core of summer."

'Catastrophic fires'
Bushfires are common in Australia's arid summer, which usually begins in December. Former prime minister Tony Abbott, a long-time climate change sceptic, said during the sweltering 2013-14 summer season that the heat was "just part and parcel of life in Australia".
"Australia is, to use the famous phrase, a land of droughts and flooding rains," he added, recalling the well-known Dorothea Mackellar poem "My Country".
But firefighter Sullivan said he and his colleagues were witnessing deteriorating conditions, including an apparent increase in the number of the most severe fires in recent years.
The "catastrophic" category in fire ratings was introduced after Victoria state endured the devastating "Black Saturday" bushfires in 2009 that left 173 dead in Australia's worst natural disaster.
Another issue exacerbating the impact of bushfires is that more and bigger buildings are being built in disaster-prone areas, with Campbell Fuller of Insurance Council Australia adding that often the properties being constructed were not resilient to extreme weather events.
An increase in the number and intensity of blazes is predicted to have a serious economic impact. Bushfires were estimated to have cost Australia US$247 million in 2014, but this is forecast to soar to US$548 million by 2050, according to Deloitte Access Economics, which cited population growth and infrastructure density as factors.

'Increasing danger'
Ken Mansbridge, whose family home was burnt down in the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires that killed more than 70 people in Victoria and adjacent South Australia, continues to live in the same region and has noticed a stark difference in weather patterns.
"There's definitely a noticeable change in the weather patterns and in the actual vegetation... I've never seen the local area look as dry as it does," the 70-year-old retiree, who has lived in the Macedon Ranges about 70 kilometres northwest of Melbourne for more than four decades, told AFP.
"The trees are all flowering at different times, the vegetables this year were all wind and sun burnt," he explained.
A November report by the independent Climate Council pointed to longer bushfire seasons across the globe.
"What climate change is doing is loading the dice towards having the sort of conditions that are conducive to fires spreading and being very hot and more uncontrollable," said lead author Lesley Hughes, a Macquarie University biologist and ecologist.
With the BOM and national science body CSIRO expecting Australia to "warm substantially" this century, having already seen temperatures rise approximately 1.0 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1950, Sullivan said strategies for fighting fires needed to be overhauled and climate change addressed.
"If this type of intensity and increase continues, then our resources are very close to being overrun at times," he said.
"This is our workplace. When we go to work to fight fires, our workplace is now more dangerous because of climate change as well."

Sea Level Rise From Ocean Warming Underestimated, Scientists Say

The Guardian - Agence-France Presse

Thermal expansion of the oceans as they warm is likely to be twice as large as previously thought, according to German researchers

Sea levels can rise due to melting ice and the expansion of water as it warms. Photograph: Alamy

The amount of sea level rise that comes from the oceans warming and expanding has been underestimated, and could be about twice as much as previously calculated, German researchers have said.
The findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed US journal, suggest that increasingly severe storm surges could be anticipated as a result.
Sea level can mount due to two factors – melting ice and the thermal expansion of water as it warms.
Until now, researchers have believed the oceans rose between 0.7 to 1mm per year due to thermal expansion.
But a fresh look at the latest satellite data from 2002 to 2014 shows the seas are expanding about 1.4mm a year, said the study.
"To date, we have underestimated how much the heat-related expansion of the water mass in the oceans contributes to a global rise in sea level," said co-author Jurgen Kusche, a professor at the University of Bonn.
The overall sea level rise rate is about 2.74mm per year, combining both thermal expansion and melting ice.
Sea level rise was also found to vary substantially from place to place, with the rate around the Philippines "five times the global rate."
Meanwhile, sea level on the US west coast is largely stable because there is hardly any ocean warming in that area, said the findings.

Links

• World's oceans warming at increasingly faster rate, new study finds
• Warming of oceans due to climate change is unstoppable, say US scientists
• Scientists predict huge sea level rise even if we limit climate change
• Thinning Antarctic ice shelf could contribute to sea level rise, says study
• Greenland ice melt underestimated, study says

Two Irrational Responses To Climate Change: Witch Hunts And Denial

Los Angeles Times - Cynthia Barnett*

A frontispiece to a tract by German legal scholar Ulrich Molitor in 1489 depicts witches brewing "weather magic."
(Los Angeles Times)

In late August 1589, a dozen of the fittest ships in the Danish fleet set across a tempestuous North Sea to carry a 14-year-old princess bride to her new husband and new home. King James VI of Scotland had seen Anna of Denmark only in a miniature portrait before arranging a marriage by proxy in her country. Following her wedding-sans-groom in a palace by the sea, Anna boarded the ship of Danish Admiral Peter Munch to travel to her Scottish kingdom.
They met typical storms until close to Scotland, when an extraordinary gale flew at them from the coast. Twice they came within sight of the cliffs of home, and twice a phalanx of rain and winds pushed them back, ultimately all the way to Norway. Munch found the conditions uncommonly fierce, even for the North Sea. So much so, he thought, "there must be more in the matter than the common perversity of winds and weather." Munch blamed witches for conjuring the storms.
As he attempted his third approach, a yet-worse squall roiled up, battering the ship that carried Anna. They limped to a Norwegian sound to await King James's rescue mission. James had been skeptical of the witch hysteria sweeping Europe. But as he tried to reach his bride, his ships, too, were tossed in freak storms. Once united, he and Anna had to wait out icy conditions for half a year before they could attempt a return journey, on which they faced more "unnatural weather." By the time they arrived in Edinburgh in May 1590, James was as convinced as Munch that witches had brewed the worst weather in memory to keep his queen from ascending her throne.

The resounding consensus is that human activities since the Industrial Revolution ... are responsible for rising global temperature.

An aging midwife would burn for the squalls. She was among thousands of accused witches executed for conjuring storms during the climate havoc known as the Little Ice Age. Between 1300 and 1850, deadly winters and alternating acute rains and droughts ruined crops for season upon season, contributing to famines and many other miseries. The extremes evoke our own time, as severe weather rises with global warming. But there's a cruelly poignant difference. Our irrational ancestors blamed innocent people for the crisis. Our irrational contemporaries pretend that people are blameless, our work on climate change futile. The two are equally dangerous.
Many assume that witch hunts were caused by religious and socio-political turmoil. German historian Wolfgang Behringer argues that they were born of climate turmoil too. He has tracked the rise of witchcraft prosecutions in the 14th century to the rise of the Little Ice Age, with criminal proceedings reaching their peak during the worst years of the climate extremes, in the decades before and after 1600.
Frequently suffering misfortune themselves, accused witches — around 80% women, and often poor and elderly — were scapegoated for the ills of the age, from infertility to the deaths of children. That they were also blamed for frightening weather is clear in artwork and news bulletins. A German woodcut from 1486 shows a sorceress conjuring enormous chunks of hail; a frontispiece from a 1489 pamphlet called Weather Magic depicts two hags at a tall caldron, as a storm bursts overhead; a German pamphlet from 1580 details 114 executions of witches who had mainly confessed to instigating crop-destroying thunderstorms.
Paranoia often rumbled from hungry stomachs: Villagers harangued reluctant local courts and prince-bishops to do something about the foul weather by rounding up storm-makers. But the events in Scotland debunk the notion that witch mania rose from the desperate and uneducated. There, the zeal for witch-hunting came straight from the top — from the same King James who gave us the King James Bible.
In the University of Glasgow's Special Collections, a 1591 pamphlet called Newes from Scotland tells the story, at least from James's point of view: The tract depicts a storm ravaging the King's ship, with women huddled around a boiling caldron on shore. It describes the torture of a maidservant, who endured graphic agonies before she finally named a ringleader, Agnes Sampson, a renowned midwife and healer.

What we have that King James lacked is the science to help us understand our changing climate and take action to protect all life.

After unspeakable tortures, Sampson finally confessed to conjuring the storms that had hindered the union of James and Anna. She told James that Satan considered him "the greatest enemie hee hath in the world" and wanted to see him drowned by storm. No words could have rung so true to the self-important king. Sampson was only one of many innocents who paid the price. Seventy people were implicated in the case; not all their fates are known. She was among several burned at the stake.
Europe's witch hunts and trials did not trail off entirely until the 18th-century Enlightenment, which also gave rise to the notion of evidence — in both the courts and the pursuit of science.
Today, scientific evidence makes clear that Earth's current warming cannot be explained by a decrease in solar activity or other natural causes thought to have triggered the Little Ice Age. The resounding consensus is that human activities since the Industrial Revolution adding C02 and other heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere are responsible for rising global temperature. Climate models predict extreme weather events will surge with the thermostat. Super El Nino events like the one sending lashing rains to California could double. Meteorological research has found certain tropical cyclones, along with droughts and heat waves, substantially more likely in a warming world.
Yet many American leaders reject these predictions. The deniers include not only several of the presidential candidates now in the news, but governors of coastal Gulf states with the most to lose from tropical storms; governors of Great Plains states most vulnerable to drought; the chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works; the chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology; and many others in Congress and state capitols.
A study this month in the journal Global Environmental Change reveals not only that climate denial remains robust, but the extent to which our leaders are systematically influenced by a small number of think tanks that have upped their anti-science messaging — from policy papers to speeches to press releases — exponentially. The 19 industry-funded groups produced 16,028 of these contrarian documents between 1998 and 2013. (A content analysis found that in addition to disputing the science, they frequently questioned the integrity of specific climate scientists – modern-day witch hunts alleging mathematical and other "tricks.")
While we no longer burn people at the stake for outlier weather, there is little question that sowing scientific denial with the intent to halt progress on warming will condemn the most vulnerable. A new World Bank report predicts that climate change will push more than 100 million people in the poorest regions of the world back into poverty over the next 15 years. The poor will suffer the most from natural disasters and the health impacts of climate change, from famine to floods to Dengue Fever.
What we have that King James lacked is the science to help us understand our changing climate and take action to protect all life. If we fail to act on what we know, our descendants will one day look back at us with the same head-shaking disbelief we express for King James and his imaginary witches.

*Cynthia Barnett is the author of three books on water. She tells the King James story in her latest, "Rain: A Natural and Cultural History."

Record Hot Years Near Impossible Without Manmade Climate Change – Study

The Guardian - Damian Carrington

New calculations shows there is just a 0.01% chance that recent run of global heat records could have happened due to natural climate variations

Tourists ski on a thin layer of snow towards the resort of Leysin in the Swiss Alps in one of the warmest Decembers on record. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

The world's run of record-breaking hottest years is extremely unlikely to have happened without the global warming caused by human activities, according to new calculations.
Thirteen of the 15 hottest years in the 150-year-long record occurred between 2000-14 and the researchers found there is a just a 0.01% chance that this happened due to natural variations in the planet's climate.
2015 was revealed to have smashed all earlier records on Wednesday, after the new study had been completed, meaning the odds that the record run of heat is a fluke are now even lower.
"Natural climate variations just can't explain the observed recent global heat records, but manmade global warming can," said Prof Stefan Rahmstorf, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and one of the research team.
He said the record heat brought substantial impacts: "It has led to unprecedented local heatwaves across the world, sadly resulting in loss of life and aggravating droughts and wildfires. The risk of heat extremes has been multiplied due to our interference with the Earth system, as our analysis shows."
The UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed on Monday that the global average surface temperature in 2015 shattered all previous records and said 15 of the 16 hottest years on record have all occurred since 2000. "We have reached for the first time the threshold of 1C above pre-industrial temperatures. It is a sobering moment in the history of our planet," said WMO secretary-general Petteri Taalas.
The new research by Rahmstorf and colleagues, published in the journal Scientific Reports, is based on a statistical analysis that combines real-world measurements with comprehensive computer simulations of the climate system. This allowed natural climate variability to be better separated from human-caused climate change. The results did not vary significantly when UK Met Office temperature data was used instead of Nasa data.
The research was prompted by earlier claims that the run of record-breaking years was vanishing unlikely, a one in 650m shot, according to one report.
However, the average global surface temperature of the planet each year is influenced by the warmth of the previous year, meaning that a record broken one year is not independent of the year before. The UK Met Office expects 2016 to break the record set in 2015, partly because of the continuing El Niño weather phenomenon.
"Natural climate variability causes temperatures to wax and wane over a period of several years, rather than varying erratically from one year to the next," said Prof Michael Mann at Penn State university in the US, who led the new study. "That makes it more challenging to accurately assess the likelihood of temperature records. Given the press interest, it seemed important to do this right, and address the interesting and worthwhile question of how unlikely it is that the recent run of record temperatures might have arisen by chance alone."
The study concludes: "While considerably greater than cited in some media reports, the odds are low enough to suggest that recent observed runs of record temperatures are extremely unlikely to have occurred in the absence of human-caused global warming."
In 2013, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded with 95% certainty that humans are the main cause of global warming.

Links

• Climate change makes past five-year period the warmest on record: WMO
• 14 of the 15 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000, UN says