Lethal Heating: 05/11/16

11/05/2016

In Novel Tactic on Climate Change, Citizens Sue Their Governments

New York Times - John Schwartz

Victoria Barrett, 17, is a New York high school student and a plaintiff in a climate change lawsuit brought by Our Children's Trust. Credit Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Global warming is already disrupting the planet's weather. Now it is having an impact on the courts, as well, as adults and children around the world try to enlist the judiciary in their efforts to blunt climate change.
In the United States, an environmental law nonprofit is suing the federal government on behalf of 21 young plaintiffs. Individuals in Pakistan and New Zealand have sued to force their governments to take stronger action to fight climate change. A farmer in Peru has sued a giant German energy utility over its part in causing global warming.
And while the arguments can be unconventional and surprising, some of the suits are making progress.
Last month, a federal magistrate judge in Oregon startled many legal experts by allowing the lawsuit filed on behalf of 21 teenagers and children to go forward, despite motions from the Obama administration and fossil fuel companies to dismiss it; the suit would force the government to take more aggressive action against climate change. The ruling by the magistrate judge, Thomas M. Coffin, now goes to Federal District Court to be accepted or rejected.
Michael B. Gerrard, the director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, called the ruling a potential landmark.
"It is the first time a federal court has suggested that government may have a constitutional duty to combat climate change, and that individuals can sue to enforce that right," he said.

Saul Luciano Lliuya, a farmer in Peru, sued a German utility for its proportional contribution to global climate change. Credit Germanwatch

But other legal scholars were skeptical that the case would progress much further.
"The constitutional claims are novel, to say the least," said David M. Uhlmann, a former federal prosecutor of environmental crimes who teaches law at the University of Michigan. "I have a hard time seeing the case succeeding in the Supreme Court, if it gets that far, and it may not even survive review in the Ninth Circuit."
The young plaintiffs, led by the environmental law nonprofit Our Children's Trust, argued that the Obama administration and the administrations before it had ample evidence of the risks of climate change and "willfully ignored this impending harm."
Victoria Barrett, one of the plaintiffs, from Westchester County, N.Y., said that older generations had ignored the threat to the planet even as the scientific evidence of warming became undeniable.
The current plans and efforts to battle climate change are not enough, Ms. Barrett, 17, said, adding that her generation, with its passion and social media tools, would make a difference.
"We want our children to look back in the textbooks and say, 'Oh, our parents' generation — they really fought for us,' " she said.
The lawsuit calls for the courts to order the government to stop the "permitting, authorizing and subsidizing of fossil fuels" — by, for example, canceling plans for projects like a liquefied natural gas export terminal in Oregon — and "to develop a national plan to restore Earth's energy balance, and implement that national plan so as to stabilize the climate system."

Sarah Lorraine Thomson, a law student at the University of Waikato, has filed a lawsuit against New Zealand's climate change minister. Credit Mike Scott/Waikato Times, via Fairfax Media NZ

Julia Olson, the executive director and chief legal counsel for Our Children's Trust, helped form the organization in 2010 in collaboration with the iMatter Youth Movement, then known as Kids vs. Global Warming.
In an interview, Ms. Olson said the goal was to pursue action against climate change in the courts as a human rights issue, and in the name of young people. "Most of them can't vote," she said, "and they don't have the money to lobby."
Youth-oriented climate groups put out calls for volunteers, and Ms. Olson found herself with more than enough enthusiastic young activists willing to be plaintiffs. The organization is financed in part by individual contributions and institutional funding from groups like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which contributes heavily to environmental causes.
An earlier federal suit from Our Children's Trust failed in 2012; the organization is also pursuing several lawsuits at the state level and collaborating on a number of international suits.
It scored a victory in Washington State recently, when Judge Hollis R. Hill of King County Superior Court ordered the State Department of Ecology to develop an emissions reduction rule in response to a legal challenge from Our Children's Trust.
As for the federal case, Ms. Olson said, "We are optimistic that the decision will affirm the findings and the recommendations and put us on a track to a trial."
The Our Children's Trust suit is part of a wave of citizen actions to take on climate change.
In Pakistan, Ashgar Leghari, a law student, sued the government last year over delays in carrying out a national climate change policy that could help reduce the heavy floods and droughts that threaten the country's food and energy security, as well as the Leghari family's farm.
A court ordered the Pakistani government in September to form a climate change commission to address what Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah said "appears to be the most serious threat facing Pakistan."
In November, the farmer in Peru, Saul Luciano Lliuya, sued the German utility RWE for its proportional contribution to global climate change. The effects of increasingly extreme weather such as drought can make farming a more precarious proposition, but Mr. Luciano's fears are focused on Palcacocha Lake, which sits above his town and farm and is being filled to overflowing, he said, by meltwater from nearby glaciers.
"We could see the glaciers melting," he said. "They were disappearing year by year. Somebody has to be made responsible."
An engineer he knew put him in touch with the environmental group Germanwatch, which found him a German lawyer. While it might seem bizarre for a farmer in Peru to sue a utility in Germany, Noah Walker-Crawford, an adviser to the group, said Germany's laws seemed auspicious for such a suit.
"It would be quite difficult to sue in the U.S. or Saudi Arabia," he said.
The German courts have accepted the case, but a representative of the company, Klaus-Peter Kress, said, "RWE does not see a legal basis for this type of claim."

Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, 15, at home in Boulder, Colo., last month. He is a plaintiff in an Oregon case against the federal government over climate change. Credit Nick Cote for The New York Times

In New Zealand, a law student, Sarah Lorraine Thomson, said she had been inspired to take legal action by the Our Children's Trust suit and a 2015 decision by a court in the Netherlands that ordered the Dutch government to take more forceful action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
"Hearing about those cases was a kick in the butt — they were just ordinary people, too — I felt that I really had no excuse," Ms. Thomson wrote in an email.
Her lawsuit against the New Zealand government has been filed, and she has received affidavits from lawyers from the crown, but no hearing date has been set.
Ms. Olson of Our Children's Trust said that the cases in the United States and abroad "build on one another."
Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, a 16-year-old high school student and hip-hop artist from Boulder, Colo., who became a plaintiff in the Oregon case after getting involved in one of the state lawsuits sponsored by Our Children's Trust, said that because "climate change is really the defining issue of our time, there is no lawsuit of greater importance happening anywhere in the country."
If this suit fails, he said, he expects new ones will be filed. "The evidence will only get stronger," he added.
Some of the arguments in the Oregon lawsuit surprised legal experts, and cases that extend rights in innovative ways tend to be long shots. A lawsuit brought against fossil fuel companies and utilities by the citizens of Kivalina, Alaska, a coastal town battered by climate forces, was dismissed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 2009.
But courts do blaze new paths, establishing rights to, for example, same-sex marriage.
"Most novel arguments crash and burn, but some soar," Professor Gerrard said. "It's often hard to predict in advance which is which."

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Raging Seas: Going Local To Understand Ocean Extremes Of The Future

The Conversation - Mikis Tsimplis

The world's sea level is expected to rise by up to 82cm by the end of the century. Some areas of the world, such as the north-east coast of North America and the Western Pacific, will be more affected than others. But in many places this will mean floods are more likely, the cost of coastal protection will rise, and coastal ecosystems will be put in danger.
Yet it isn't just the average sea level that will rise. The biggest risks will come from the fact that the highest sea levels (caused by high tides and weather) will also increase by at least as much as the mean. This is what are seeing so far in many parts of the world. A potential increase in the frequency and severity of storms could make higher sea-level extremes and their impact even worse. More violent storms could also produce more energetic and higher waves, testing the resilience of ships and offshore structures like oil rigs and disrupting trade. But how serious will these problems be?
Computer models of climate change caused by greenhouse warming indicate that the most devastating tropical cyclones will be between 2% and 11% more intense by 2100. The same models also indicate there will be fewer tropical cyclones overall but more high-intensity cyclones. This leaves us with a rather unclear picture that is further complicated because scientists disagree on whether and how tropical cyclones have been changing over the past 30 or 40 years.
The role of regional climate patterns like the El Niño cycle of wind and sea temperature changes in the Pacific and the monsoons in the Indian Ocean also add to this complexity. Although we expect climate change to influence these phenomena, they also vary significantly from year to year naturally, making it very challenging to say if any particular extreme event is driven by climate change.

Research we conduct with several collaborators involves examining changes in extreme waves and sea-level records to identify factors that contribute to changes in extremes. This information can then be used to improve computer models of sea level in the hope of making this picture clearer.
As mentioned, sea level extremes have generally been found to change in line with the observed mean sea level trends. But changes in extremes are also caused by changes in the tides, in the seasonal cycle, in currents in the ocean, and the number of the typhoons impacting on land.

More than just climate change
We found that each of these factors affected the areas studied (the Mediterranean Sea, the Caribbean Sea, and the North Sea) by a different degree. We also found that these factors were not all related to climate change or natural variability. For example, significant changes in the extremes at the Chinese coasts are linked to changes in regional tides thought to be related to the extensive land reclamation going on to create more space for building. This kind of human influence is distinct from climate change but just as important to the local environment.
Other partners worked on improving the parameters of models of tropical cyclones. This confirmed that previous models underestimated sea level extremes. But what this also means is that climate models that are much less detailed aren't good enough to produce firm conclusions on whether climate change will increase extreme ocean activity.

Cyclones could become less frequent but more intense. Shutterstock

For example, we know that wave heights in the North Atlantic have increased, partly due to changes in regional atmospheric patterns. But for the Norwegian Sea, the increase has been much smaller since 2000 than previously recorded.
If we want to understand how marine extremes will change in the future, we need to look at each location individually and take into account the specific factors that will affect its extreme ocean activity. We also need more detailed global and regional climate models and a clearer understanding of cyclonic systems to be able to predict changes in the severity and the pathways of cyclones and how they affect extreme activity.
Other environmental factors that could become more extreme, such as temperature, salt levels, oxygen content, acidity and current speeds will also be important in determining the impacts of climate change on the marine environment. But the data we have now doesn't allow us to do such comprehensive analyses. Until we have a clearer picture, we won't know just how extreme our oceans will become as the climate changes.

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Global Warming Milestone About To Be Passed And There's No Going Back

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Within the next couple of weeks, a remote part of north-western Tasmania is likely to grab headlines around the world as a major climate change marker is passed.
The aptly named Cape Grim monitoring site jointly run by CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology will witness the first baseline reading of 400 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, researchers predict.

Watching the world at it changes at Cape Grim. Photo: John Woudstra

"Once it's over [400 ppm], it won't go back," said Paul Fraser, dubbed by CSIRO as the Air Man of Cape Grim, and now a retired CSIRO fellow. "It could be within 10 days."
The most recent reading on May 6 was 399.9 ppm, according to readings compiled by the CSIRO team led by Paul Krummel that strip out influences from land, including cities such as Melbourne to the north. (See chart below, with the red line showing the baseline CO2.)

David Etheridge, from CSIRO's Oceans & Atmosphere division, at work in a research hut near the Antarctic base of Casey. Photo: Colin Cosier

Political heat
The approaching global CO2 threshold comes as climate change looks like becoming one of the key issues in Australia's election campaign.
The Turnbull government has made clear it will oppose Labor's proposals for an emissions trading scheme that will again put a price on carbon pollution.

The Cape Grim greenhouse gas station in Tasmania, run in partnership by CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology, tracks some of the cleanest air in the world.

New data out on Tuesday show that emissions from the country's main electricity grid covering the eastern states have risen 5.7 per cent - or 8.7 million tonnes - in the year to April compared with the final 12 months of the carbon tax that the Abbott government scrapped in July 2014, according to energy consultants Pitt & Sherry.
The share of coal in the National Electricity Market has risen to 76.2 per cent - its highest level since September 2012 - from 72.3 per cent during the period since June 2014, the consultants' latest Cedex report said.
Mark Butler, Labor's shadow environment minister, said the Cape Grim landmark reading was "deeply concerning".
"While the Coalition fights about whether or not the science of climate change is real, pollution is rising. And it's rising on their watch," Mr Butler said.
Greens deputy leader Larissa Waters said the Cape Grim result "should act as a global wake-up call and must shock both Australian big political parties out of their blind coal-obsession which is literally cooking our planet and our Great Barrier Reef".
"Our atmosphere cannot take any new coal mines – both the old parties must stop approving them and revoke their approval of the Adani coal mine [in Queensland] at both the state and federal level," Senator Waters said.
A spokesman for Environment Minister Greg Hunt defended the government's climate policies."There is now absolutely no doubt that we will beat our 2020 target" of cutting 2000-level emissions by 5 per cent by then, the spokesman said. "We are playing our part to tackle climate change and our 2030 target [of cutting 2000-level emissions about 19 per cent] is ambitious and significant," he said. "Labor has nothing more than a plan to bring back the carbon tax and hike electricity prices."

Rising 'pretty much all of the time'
Cape Grim's readings are significant because they capture the most accurate reading of the atmospheric conditions in the southern hemisphere and have records going back 40 years.
With less land in the south, there is also a much smaller fluctuation according to the seasonal cycle than in northern hemisphere sites. That's because the north has more trees and other vegetation, which take up carbon from the atmosphere in the spring and give it back in the autumn.
So while 400 ppm has been temporarily exceeded at the other two main global stations since 2013 - in Hawaii and Alaska - they have dropped back below that level once spring has arrived because of that greater seasonal variation.
David Etheridge, a CSIRO principal research scientist, said atmospheric CO2 levels had fluctuated around 280 ppm until humans' burning of fossil fuels and clearing of forests set in process rising levels of greenhouse gases almost without pause since about 1800.
"It's been upwards pretty much all of the time," Dr Etheridge told Fairfax Media. "This is a significant change, and it's the primary greenhouse gas which is leading to the warming of the atmosphere."
The following chart, compiled by CSIRO researchers using atmosphere and ice core readings, show how CO2 levels have risen over the past 2000 years.

While the 400 figure is in itself of no particular note, compared with 399 or 401, it was a marker likely to carry important symbolism. "People react to these things when they see thresholds crossed," Dr Etheridge said.
While the fraction may seem small, it is 0.04 per cent of the atmosphere. By comparison, a similar level of alcohol would be close to the legal driving limit in Australia.
"These things act at low concentrations," he said, noting that ozone-destroying chemicals at levels of parts per trillion were enough to damage that important component of the atmosphere.

CSIRO cuts
The impending 400 ppm reading at Cape Grim comes at an awkward timing for CSIRO, which is the midst of cutting 275 jobs, many of them in climate science.

While CSIRO has not confirmed the number of researchers it will cut from the 30 or so involved in analysing CO2 levels in ice and the atmosphere, Fairfax Media understands about one-third will go.
"CSIRO is again producing world-leading climate science, and it's reprehensible that the Turnbull Government is allowing the slashing of CSIRO's capacity to ring the alarm bells the world needs to hear," Greens Senator Waters said.Fairfax Media sought comment from CSIRO on the size of the job cuts.
In justifying the cuts to climate modelling and monitoring programs, CSIRO chief executive Larry Marshall said that as climate change had been proved, resources could be diverted to climate mitigations and adaptation.
But Dr Etheridge said monitoring would continue to be vital.
"It's like going on a diet and not measuring yourself," he said, noting the world's nations had committed to cut back emissions of greenhouse gases that are helping to drive up global temperatures.
Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the UK's University of Reading, has constructed the following animation showing how the world has warmed in the past 166 years.

Going negative
Dr Etheridge said that while a reduction in emissions could slow the increase of temperatures, it would likely take many years of net-negative emissions - effectively removing the gas from the atmosphere - to push CO2 levels back below 400 ppm.
"It would take a lot of emissions reductions - and probably negative emissions for some period, decades - before we see CO2 reduce in concentration," he said.
Research to be published soon by CSIRO has shown the ocean would act against any drop in atmospheric CO2.
The seas would likely give back some of the extra CO2 it has absorbed - as it did during the "Little Ice Age" during the middle ages - delaying any drop in levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, he said.
Dr Fraser, who helped set up the Tasmanian site in the 1970s, said CO2 levels were rising fast, at about 3 ppm a year. The precise timing of the 400-ppm mark at Cape Grim would probably take some time to confirm.
"On the day it happens, we won't recognise it," he said. "It will take a few weeks to verify."
The Cape Grim data show a steadier rise than at the Alaskan Alert Observatory site and Hawaii's Mauna Loa, as seen in the following chart:

'Cleanest in the world'
Sam Cleland, manager of Cape Grim, said the site was in "the teeth of the Roaring Forties", the band of powerful winds in latitudes of about 40 degrees south of the equator.
"Our job is to find the cleanest air in the world and measure the pollution in it," Mr Cleland said.
The baseline data draws on winds reaching Cape Grim from the south-west. "Three days ago, they were coming from an area not far off the Antarctic coast," he said.
A year ago, Cape Grim's CO2 readings were about 396.7 ppm, implying a jump of more than 3ppm since.
Part of that increase would have been influenced by the El Nino weather event in the Pacific. During such years, ocean take-up of both heat and CO2 from the atmosphere is reduced.
Since Cape Grim was set up in 1976, CO2 readings have increased from 330 ppm to the brink of 400 ppm.
That implies an average increase of less than 2 ppm per year during that period - but quickening in the more recent past towards 3 ppm or more.

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