Lethal Heating: 03/23/16

23/03/2016

Malcolm Turnbull's Green Shift Another Blow To Tony Abbott

Fairfax - Mark Kenny

In happier times: Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

Malcolm Turnbull has added to the growing differences between his administration and the previous Abbott government by reversing Coalition hostility to forward-leaning climate change policy through the creation of a new $1 billion clean energy innovation fund.
And he has bolstered that move with a formal commitment to keep the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, both of which had been set for abolition under Mr Abbott's leadership.
"Clean energy is central to the government's strategy to address climate change and meet our emissions reduction targets," Mr Turnbull said.
The policy is the culmination of extensive background work by Environment Minister Greg Hunt over a period of two months.
The green shift marks a significant policy departure from the minimalist climate platform of the Abbott government and came as tensions between the two figures reached Rudd-Gillard levels on Tuesday, playing directly into the opposition's hands.
On what was the first day of an extended quasi-election campaign, which could yet end with a Senate deadlock and a double dissolution election on July 2, Cabinet resolved to overturn the longstanding Abbott government antipathy to the CEFC - sometimes referred to as the "green bank" - and to add another body to the nation's climate change architecture in the form of the entirely new Clean Energy Innovation Fund.
The government says the $1 billion CEIF will "drive innovation and create the jobs of the future, while delivering a financial benefit from the investment of public money".
It will be financed with an annual allocation of $100 million from the CEFC over each of the next 10 years.
But it will not disburse grants. Instead it will offer a mix of "innovative equity and debt products" - code for buying shares in and lending money to, new technology renewable energy ventures.
It is intended that the CEIF will target everything from smart grids, and bio fuels to large-scale solar energy projects with storage capacity.
The new body will commence operations as soon as July. It will sit between the existing $10 billion green bank, and draw expertise from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency - another body which had been on political death-row under the Abbott government.
The government believes the new CEIF will "fill a gap", providing equity and debt financing to projects that are designed to return a profit and which have not been eligible for funding under the models of the two parent bodies to this point.
It coincided with a dangerous tit-for-tat exchange with Mr Abbott conducted via duelling broadcast interviews, which has government MPs warning it must not be allowed to continue during an election year.
The spat saw Mr Turnbull slap down the Abbott claim that the government was merely running on the Abbott record.
Government MPs are under no illusion as to the electoral risks arising from having a leader and ex-leader at war, citing the recent bitter divisions between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard on the Labor side, to argue Mr Abbott must now desist in the interests of the party.
However, there are no signs of peace breaking out any time soon.
Mr Abbott used a Sky News interview from London, apparently calculated to steal the headlines on the very same day as Mr Turnbull's daring double-dissolution ultimatum to the Senate, to declare: "It's very easy for me to campaign for the election of the Turnbull government because the Turnbull government is running on the Abbott government's record and it's a very strong record."
The comments angered the Prime Minister, prompting him to dismiss Mr Abbott's signature achievement of stopping asylum-seeker boats during his time in office.
"This is not something that was invented by Tony Abbott, this has been a continuum," Mr Turnbull said on Melbourne radio, reminding voters that the policy of mandatory off-shore detention had been in place in the Howard years, and had remained as core Coalition policy during 2008-09, when Mr Turnbull had been leader of the opposition.
MPs, many of whom are sitting on small margins in their electorates, believe the government can ill afford distractions, with even committed Abbott loyalists calling on him to desist as an election approaches.
"You can't be seen to help Labor," said one former Abbott loyalist. "It's battle-faces on now, and this thing is getting silly.
"There is a commonly held view that enough is enough," the MP said.
"He (Mr Abbott) is regarded very fondly but he is not going to endear himself with these kinds of comments."
Another source said Mr Abbott "would not be doing this to help Labor, but that is the result".
As if to validate that assessment, opposition leader Bill Shorten surprised few by immediately agreeing with the Abbott assessment.
"The legislation Mr Turnbull has in the Parliament, 80 per cent of it was designed, dreamed up, and driven by Tony Abbott when he was leader," Mr Shorten said.
"Now, under Mr Turnbull's leadership, we still see the same cuts to Medicare, we still see the same cuts to schools and hospitals, we see the same inaction on renewable energy and climate change.
"It doesn't matter who's running the Liberal Party, Tony Abbott or Malcolm Turnbull, it's all continuity, no change."
But having Labor and the former prime minister running the same criticism, did not appear to worry Finance Minister Mathias Cormann.
The unflappable conservative, who has successfully straddled the leadership ructions to remain highly influential in both cabinets, argues the election will be based on voters' assessment of what the government has planned for the nation, buttressed by an established record of delivery.
"As the Prime Minister said, there is inevitably a lot of continuity; from the Prime Minister down, a whole number of us were senior members of the Abbott government.
Inevitably, there is a level of continuity but, what people across Australia will be interested in when they pass judgement on who to support in the lead-up to the next election is obviously assessing the plans of the respective teams about the next three years," he said.

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Scientists Warn of Perilous Climate Shift Within Decades, Not Centuries

New York Times - Justin Gillis

A massive boulder on a coastal ridge in North Eleuthera, the Bahamas. A new research paper claims it was most likely moved there by powerful storms during the last warm period of Earth history, 120,000 years ago, and warns that such stormy conditions could recur because of human emissions of greenhouse gases. Credit Charles Ommanney/The Washington Post, via Getty Images

The nations of the world agreed years ago to try to limit global warming to a level they hoped would prove somewhat tolerable. But leading climate scientists warned on Tuesday that permitting a warming of that magnitude would actually be quite dangerous.
The likely consequences would include killer storms stronger than any in modern times, the disintegration of large parts of the polar ice sheets and a rise of the sea sufficient to begin drowning the world's coastal cities before the end of this century, the scientists declared.
"We're in danger of handing young people a situation that's out of their control," said James E. Hansen, the retired NASA climate scientist who led the new research. The findings were released Tuesday morning by a European science journal, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
A draft version of the paper was released last year, and it provoked a roiling debate among climate scientists. The main conclusions have not changed, and that debate seems likely to be replayed in the coming weeks.
The basic claim of the paper is that by burning fossil fuels at a prodigious pace and pouring heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, humanity is about to provoke an abrupt climate shift.
Specifically, the authors believe that fresh water pouring into the oceans from melting land ice will set off a feedback loop that will cause parts of the great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica to disintegrate rapidly.
That claim has intrigued some experts who say the paper may help explain puzzling episodes in Earth's past when geological evidence suggests the climate underwent drastic shifts. Yet many other scientists are unconvinced by some of the specific assertions the authors are making.
"Some of the claims in this paper are indeed extraordinary," said Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. "They conflict with the mainstream understanding of climate change to the point where the standard of proof is quite high."
Despite any reservations they might have about the new paper, virtually all climate scientists agree with Dr. Hansen's group that society is not moving fast enough to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, posing grave risks. An agreement reached late last year in Paris seeks to cut emissions, but it is not remotely ambitious enough to limit global warming to the degree Dr. Hansen regards as necessary.
Among Dr. Hansen's colleagues, some of the discomfiture about the new paper stems from his dual roles as a publishing climate scientist and, in recent years, as a political activist. He has been arrested at rallies, and he has joined with a group of young people who sued the federal government over what they said was its failure to limit global warming.
Dr. Hansen argues that society is in such grave peril that he feels morally compelled to go beyond the normal role played by a scientist and to sound a clear warning.
That stance has made him a hero to college students fighting climate change, but some fellow scientists fear he has opened himself to the charge that he is skewing his scientific research for political purposes.
In 2009, nations agreed to try to limit the planetary warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius, above the preindustrial level. The Earth has already warmed by about half that amount. The climate appears to be destabilizing, virtually all land ice on the planet has started to melt, and the oceans are rising at an accelerating pace.
The paper, written by Dr. Hansen and 18 other authors, dwells on the last time Earth warmed naturally, about 120,000 years ago, when the temperature reached a level estimated to have been only slightly higher than today. Large chunks of the polar ice disintegrated then, and scientists have established that the sea level rose 20 to 30 feet.
Climate scientists agree that humanity is about to cause an equal or greater rise in sea level, but they have tended to assume that such a large increase would take centuries, at least. The new paper argues that it could happen far more rapidly, with the worst case being several feet of sea-level rise over the next 50 years, followed by increases so precipitous that they would force humanity to beat a hasty retreat from the coasts.
"That would mean loss of all coastal cities, most of the world's large cities and all their history," Dr. Hansen said in a video statement that accompanied the new paper.
The paper identifies a specific mechanism that the scientists say they believe could help cause such an abrupt climate shift.
Their idea is that the initial melting of the great ice sheets will put a cap of relatively fresh water on the ocean surfaces near Antarctica and Greenland. That, they think, will slow or even shut down the system of ocean currents that redistributes heat around the planet and allows some of it to escape into space. Warmth will then accumulate in the deeper parts of the ocean, the scientists think, speeding the melting of parts of the ice sheets that sit below sea level.
In addition, a wider temperature difference between the tropics and the poles will encourage powerful storms, the researchers contend. The paper cites evidence, much of it contested, that immense storms happened during the warm period 120,000 years ago.
For instance, the paper says such storms might have thrown giant boulders onto coastal ridges in the Bahamas, though other experts think a tsunami might have been responsible.
The idea of a shutdown in the ocean circulation because of global warming was considered more than a decade ago, and while scientists concluded that a weakening of the currents was possible, they said a complete shutdown was unlikely to happen in this century.
That did not stop a distorted version of the idea from becoming the premise of the disaster movie "The Day After Tomorrow," released in 2004.
The new paper may reopen that debate, requiring scientists to re-examine the idea with the more sophisticated computer models of the climate that are available today. It could take several years for the experts to come to a consensus, though.
Dr. Hansen spent decades heading NASA's climate research unit in Manhattan, before retiring in 2013. He now heads a center created for him at Columbia University.
He gained fame in 1988 when he warned Congress that global warming had already begun. He was ahead of the scientific consensus at the time, but it became clear in retrospect that Earth had been in the midst of a period of rapid global warming at the time he testified.
Even scientists wary of the specific claims in the new paper point to Dr. Hansen's history to argue that his ideas need to be taken seriously.
"I think we ignore James Hansen at our peril," Dr. Mann said.

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We Had All Better Hope These Scientists Are Wrong About The Planet’s Future

Washington Post - Chris Mooney

Climatologist James Hansen on the Eleuthera coastal ridge on Nov. 22, 2015, in Eleuthera, Bahamas. (Charles Ommanney for The Washington Post)

An influential group of scientists led by James Hansen, the former NASA scientist often credited with having drawn the first major attention to climate change in 1988 congressional testimony, has published a dire climate study that suggests the impact of global warming will be quicker and more catastrophic than generally envisioned.
The research invokes collapsing ice sheets, violent megastorms and even the hurling of boulders by giant waves in its quest to suggest that even 2 degrees Celsius of global warming above pre-industrial levels would be far too much. Hansen has called it the most important work he has ever done.
The sweeping paper, 52 pages in length and with 19 authors, draws on evidence from ancient climate change or “paleo-climatology,” as well as climate experiments using computer models and some modern observations. Calling it a “paper” really isn’t quite right — it’s actually a synthesis of a wide range of old, and new, evidence.
“I think almost everybody who’s really familiar with both paleo and modern is now very concerned that we are approaching, if we have not passed, the points at which we have locked in really big changes for young people and future generations,” Hansen said in an interview.
The research, appearing Tuesday in the open-access journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, has had a long and controversial path to life, having first appeared as a “discussion paper” in the same journal, subject to live, online peer review — a novel but increasingly influential form of scientific publishing. Hansen first told the news media about the research last summer, before this process was completed, leading to criticism from some journalists and fellow scientists that he might be jumping the gun.

What ensued was a high-profile debate, both because of the dramatic claims and Hansen’s formidable reputation. And his numerous co-authors, including Greenland and Antarctic ice experts and a leader of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, were nothing to be sniffed at.
After record downloads for the study and an intense public review process, a revised version of the paper has now been accepted, according to both Hansen and Barbara Ferreira, media and communications manager for the European Geophysical Union, which publishes Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Indeed, the article is now freely readable on the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics website.
The paper, according to Ferreira, was subject to “major revisions in terms of organisation, title and conclusions.” Those came in response to criticisms that can all be read publicly at the journal’s website. The paper also now has two additional authors.
Most notably, perhaps, the editorial process led to the removal of the use of the phrase “highly dangerous,” in the paper’s title, to describe warming the planet by 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The original paper’s title was “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming is highly dangerous.” The final title is “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming could be dangerous.”
But nonetheless, James Hansen’s climate catastrophe scenario now takes its place in the official scientific literature relatively intact. So let’s rehearse that scenario, again, for the record.
Hansen and his colleagues think that major melting of Greenland and Antarctica can not only happen quite fast — leading to as much as several meters of sea level rise in the space of a century, depending on how quickly melt rates double — but that this melting will have dramatic climate change consequences, beyond merely raising sea levels.
That’s because, they postulate, melting will cause a “stratification” of the polar oceans. What this means is that it will trap a pool of cold, fresh meltwater atop the ocean surface, with a warmer ocean layer beneath. We have actually seen a possible hint of this with the anomalously cold “blob” of ocean water off the southern coast of Greenland, which some have attributed to Greenland’s melting.
Indeed, shortly before the new paper’s publication, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released new recent data on the globe’s temperature that certainly bears a resemblance to what Hansen is talking about. For not only was the globe at a record warmth overall over the last three months, but it also showed anomalous cool patches in regions that Hansen suspects are being caused by ice melt – below Greenland, and also off the tip of the Antarctic peninsula.

(National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.)

“My interpretation is that this is the beginning,” Hansen says of these cool patches in curious parts of the global ocean. “And it’s one or two decades sooner than in our model.”
However, when it comes to both the melt rates for Greenland and Antarctica, and also these cool ocean patches, we have a very limited time span of observations. It is far from clear, yet, that Hansen’s interpretation of them will prevail, and the new study also suggests closely observing these areas in coming years.
Stratification, the key idea in the new paper, means that warm ocean water would potentially reach the base of ice sheets that sit below sea level, melting them from below (and causing more ice melt and thus, stratification). It also means, in Hansen’s paper, a slowdown or even eventual shutdown of the overturning circulation in the Atlantic ocean, due to too much freshening in the North Atlantic off and around Greenland, and also a weakening of another overturning circulation in the Southern Ocean.
This, in turn, causes cooling in the North Atlantic region, even as global warming creates a warmer equatorial region. This growing north-south temperature differential, in the study, drives more intense mid-latitude cyclones, or storms. The study suggests such storms may kick up gigantic oceanic waves, which may even be capable of feats such as hurling boulders in some locations, not unlike the huge rocks seen on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera, which I visited with Hansen and his co-author, geologist Paul Hearty, in November.
These rocks play a key role in the new paper, just as they did in the original study draft. Indeed, long before the current paper, Hearty had documented, in peer-reviewed publications, that Eleuthera’s rocks appear to have come from the ocean and to have been lifted high up onto a coastal ridge. This appears to have happened during a past warm period, the Eemian, some 120,000 years ago, when the planet was only slightly warmer than today but seas were far higher — but the idea is that something like it could happen again.

The giant boulders of Eleuthera that have sparked a great debate among scientists about their origin. On the left is ‘The Bull’ (2,000 tons) and on the right is ‘The Cow’ (1,000 tons). (Charles Ommanney for The Washington Post)

The paper contains many ideas and departures, but the key one is its suggestion of the possibility of greater sea level rise in this century than forecast by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“The models that were run for the IPCC report did not include ice melt,” Hansen said at a news conference regarding the new paper Monday. “And we also conclude that most models, ours included, have excessive small scale mixing, and that tends to limit the effect of this freshwater lens on the ocean surface from melting of Greenland and Antarctica.”
There is a great deal at stake. Hansen has cited the paper in court proceedings in a case playing out in Oregon, where a series of young plaintiffs, including his granddaughter Sophie, are suing the United States for violating their constitutional rights by allowing fossil fuel burning. While scientists will have to digest the new version of the paper, when the initial draft paper was released, at the website of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions, it prompted both scientific praise and also major skepticism.
David Archer, a geoscientist at the University of Chicago and a reviewer for the first round of the paper, called it “another Hansen masterwork of scholarly synthesis, modeling virtuosity, and insight, with profound implications.” But Peter Thorne, another official reviewer and a climate researcher with the National University of Ireland Maynooth, wrote that “it is far from certain that the results contended shall match what will happen in the real-world.” Thorne also expressed his “personal discomfort at the paper being openly and actively publicized before the discussion period is complete.”
Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University climate scientist familiar with the original study, said: “Near as I can tell, the issues that caused me concern originally still remain in the revised manuscript. Namely, the projected amounts of meltwater seem unphysically large, and the ocean component of their model doesn’t resolve key wind-driven current systems (e.g. the Gulf Stream) which help transport heat poleward. That makes northern hemisphere temperatures in their study too sensitive to changes in the Atlantic meridional overturning ocean circulation,” the scientific name for the ocean circulation in the Atlantic that, the study suggests, could shut down.
However, another Penn State researcher, glaciologist Richard Alley, said by email that “though this is one paper, it usefully reminds us that large and rapid changes are possible, and it raises important research questions as to what those changes might mean if they were to occur. But, the paper does not include enough ice-sheet physics to tell us how much how rapidly is how likely.”

A new study by NASA scientists has revealed that climate change is increasing the temperature levels in lakes across the world. (Reuters)

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