This Is The Climate Change Election, Despite What Turnbull Or Shorten Say

New Matilda - Costa Avgoustinos*

Both parties are ignoring the big, coal-coloured elephant in the room. With the world speeding towards a tipping point, action can not wait for the next election cycle to begin, writes Costa Avgoustinos.

Climate change is the number one issue this election, whether Turnbull or Shorten are willing to frame it that way or not. This is not only because averting climate disaster is important. It's because our ability to do so is time-sensitive – after decades of delay the window for effective climate action is closing rapidly and will soon shut forever.
Here is a quick and dirty summary of the climate science: If the world heats up 1.5°C, we're screwed.
Why? Because it is expected at this "tipping point", how hot things get begins to significantly fall from our control. A series of events we have no power over are triggered once 1.5°C is breached – for example, the ability of oceans and forests to absorb our carbon emissions are substantially exhausted and greenhouse gases currently trapped under ice start being released.
We may soon be placed in a position where all we can do is powerlessly watch as temperatures climb to Mad Max levels; where sea rises will gobble at our coasts (where 85 per cent of Australians live), food and water sources are devastated, heat-thriving diseases are incubated, and conflicts and a meaner streak of politics are inevitable.
Because politicians are not taking the task of staying below the Paris Agreement target of 1.5°C seriously, many predict we are "locking in" temperature rises of 4°C, which Professor John Schellnhuber, one of the world's most influential climate scientists, bluntly stated at a conference in Australia would threaten nothing less than "human civilisation".
The World Bank, hardly an organisation of tree huggers, stated "all our work, all our thinking, is designed with the threat of a 4°C degree world in mind" with the unnerving warning that there is "no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible".
Temperature rises of 4°C are not expected in some distant future, either. Many predict 4°C will be reached by 2100, but some suggest it could be as early as the 2050s. That is, if not in your lifetime, then the lifetime of your children.
This is why the 2010s are called the "critical decade". We have delayed reducing carbon emissions for 25 years and now we are dangerously close to 1.5°C – in fact, NASA confirmed the 1.5°C mark was breached for the first time in February 2016. There is no time left for delay. The decisions made by our leaders (in Australia and elsewhere) in the next few months and years will have a significant impact on determining if catastrophic levels of climate change are averted or rendered irreversible.
This is not like any other issue where, if Party X gets in, their policies can be undone the next time Party Y gain power. Our window for effective climate action is only open for a brief amount of time. What is done in the next three years is crucial.
So why isn't this the number one issue on everyone's lips this election?

Cartoon: Costa A.

There are genuine psychological and cultural reasons why we look away from climate change to our own misfortune. But a powerful reason why Australians are not taking climate change seriously is because it is not in the interests of our two major parties to take it seriously, and so they position the issue in a lesser category of concern. Climate action means not only saying yes to renewables (which, at least, Labor is willing to do) but no to coal (which neither are willing to do).
Australia needs to keep 90 per cent of its coal in the ground for the planet to have any hope of staying below 2°C (and of course, even more to stay below 1.5°C). That is Australia's share of the carbon budget – the calculation of how many gigatonnes of fossil fuels in reserves worldwide must stay unearthed and unburned for us to remain under the "tipping point". This isn't even science at this point. Just maths.
The good news, however, is this: Australia is economically better off keeping this coal in the ground. The mining boom is over. We can't just bung a hole in the desert and get the easy-access coal anymore. Coal mines now are on farms (to the devastation of traditional Nationals and Labor voters) and near the fragile Great Barrier Reef (to the devastation of all voters who want their kids to see it one day).
The coal industry is in structural decline, prices are unlikely to bounce back. Adani put their own Reef-neighbouring coal mine on hold because the economic case for the enterprise has disintegrated. Whether you care about climate change, a strong economy, farmers, or the Reef, saying no to new coal mines is a no-brainer.
The only losers from coal mine closures that deserve sympathy are the coal industry workers. They face the reality workers in any economically unfeasible industry face and deserve a realistic transition plan – a plan neither major party is willing to provide as they stubbornly pretend the industry is fine and won't unceremoniously haemorrhage workers as its structural decline deepens.
One might be generous and suggest the Coalition and Labor's willingness to temporarily prop up the coal industry derives from concerns for the small minority of Australians employed by it, but let's call a dog a dog. Their interests lie with the coal industry's bosses, not its workers. Their motivation is a complex mix of fear (of the Coal Lobby's power) and gratitude (for the Coal Lobby's generous donations and the cushy jobs they routinely offer to politicians for their post-political life as board-members, and lobbyists to the next generation of politicians).
Climate change is not like a tiger attacking your kids, where the danger is clear and obvious, but it is a danger all the same. Both the Coalition and Labor stoke and exploit our psychological blindspot, the difficulty we all have in seeing the climate crisis for the danger that it is, to get us talking about what they want us to consider an emergency. Don't let them do it. This election, vote for climate action and against new coal mines. It is literally the most critical issue on the table, and its time is now.

*Costa is a PhD candidate on the issue of climate change and its legal ramifications.

Links

• Victorian Labor Government Gunning For Net-Zero Carbon By 2050
• Coast And Country Leads Court Challenge To Coal Industry's 'Drug Dealers Defence'
• Did Climate Change Play A Part In The Sydney Storm?

New Technology Offers Hope For Storing Carbon Dioxide Underground

The Conversation - Dom Wolff-Boenisch

Iceland's geothermal power plants are an ideal place to test pumping carbon dioxide underground. Dom Wolff-Boenisch, Author provided

To halt climate change and prevent dangerous warming, we ultimately have to stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. While the world is making slow progress on reducing emissions, there are more radical options, such as removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and storing them underground.
In a paper published today in Science my colleagues and I report on a successful trial converting carbon dioxide (CO₂) to rock and storing it underground in Iceland. Although we trialled only a small amount of CO₂, this method has enormous potential.
Here's how it works.

Turning CO₂ to rock
Our paper is the culmination of a decade of scientific field and laboratory work known as CarbFix in Iceland, working with a group of international scientists, among them Wallace Broecker who coined the expression "global warming" in the 1970s. We also worked with the Icelandic geothermal energy company Reykjavik Energy.
The idea itself to convert CO₂ into carbonate minerals, the basis of limestone, is not new. In fact, Earth itself has been using this conversion technique for aeons to control atmospheric CO₂ levels.
However, scientific opinion had it up to now that converting CO₂ from a gas to a solid (known as mineralisation) would take thousands (or tens of thousands) of years, and would be too slow to be used on an industrial scale.
To settle this question, we prepared a field trial using Reykjavik Energy's injection and monitoring wells. In 2012, after many years of preparation, we injected 248 tonnes of CO₂ in two separate phases into basalt rocks around 550m underground.
Most CO₂ sequestration projects inject and store "supercritical CO₂", which is CO₂ gas that has been compressed under pressure to reduce considerably its density. However, supercritical CO₂ is buoyant, like a gas, and this approach has thus proved controversial due to the possibility of leaks from the storage reservoir upwards into groundwater and eventually back to the atmosphere.
In fact, some European countries such as the Netherlands have stopped their efforts to store supercritical CO₂ on land because of lack of public acceptance, driven by the fear of possible leaks in the unforeseeable future. Austria went even so far as to ban underground storage of carbon dioxide outright.

The injection well with monitoring station in the background. Dom Wolff-Boenisch, Author provided

Our Icelandic trial worked in a different way. We first dissolved CO₂ in water to create sparkling water. This carbonated water has two advantages over supercritical CO₂ gas.
First, it is acidic, and attacks basalt which is prone to dissolve under acidic conditions.
Second, the CO₂ cannot escape because it is dissolved and will not rise to the surface. As long as it remains under pressure it will not rise to the surface (you can see the same effect when you crack open a soda can; only then is the dissolved CO₂ released back into the air).
Dissolving basalt means elements such as calcium, magnesium, and iron are released into pore water. Basaltic rocks are rich in these metals that team up with the dissolved CO₂ and form solid carbonate minerals.
Through observations and tracer studies at the monitoring well, we found that over 95% of the injected CO₂ (around 235 tonnes) was converted to carbonate minerals in less than two years. While the initial amount of injected CO₂ was small, the Icelandic field trial clearly shows that mineralisation of CO₂ is feasible and more importantly, fast.

Storing CO₂ under the oceans
The good news is this technology need not be exclusive to Iceland. Mineralisation of CO₂ requires basaltic or peridotitic rocks because these types of rocks are rich in the metals required to form carbonates and bind the CO2.
As it turns out the entire vast ocean floor is made up of kilometre-thick oceanic basaltic crust, as are large areas on the continental margins. There are also vast land areas covered with basalt (so-called igneous provinces) or peridotite (so-called "ophiolitic complexes").
The overall potential storage capacity for CO₂ is much larger than the global CO₂ emissions of many centuries. The mineralisation process removes the crucial problem of buoyancy and the need for permanent monitoring of the injected CO₂ to stop and remedy potential leakage to the surface, an issue that supercritical CO₂ injection sites will face for centuries or even millennia to come.
On the downside, CO₂ mineralisation with carbonated water requires substantial amounts of water, meaning that this mineralisation technique can only succeed where vast supplies of water are available.
However, there is no shortage of seawater on the ocean floor or continental margins. Rather, the costs involved present a major hurdle to this kind of permanent storage option, for the time being at least.
In the case of our trial, a tonne of mineralised CO₂ via carbonated water cost about US$17, roughly twice that of using supercritical CO₂ for storage.
It means that as long as there are no financial incentives such as a carbon tax or higher price on carbon emissions, there is no real driving force for carbon storage, irrespective of the technique we use.

Links

• Explainer: what is carbon capture and storage?
• Carbon capture and storage – a vital part of our climate change response
• Carbon capture plant turns emissions into baking soda
• How exploring Mars could help us fight climate change on Earth

What If Global Warming Emptied India?

Scientific American - Gayathri Vaidyanathan

Climate change poses significant threats to the populous nation

Summer in Kerala, India. Credit: Vinoth Chandar/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

In an armchair experiment where humans are thought of as no wiser than animals, scientists have found that climate change could empty some nations by 2100.
A warming of 2 degrees Celsius would cause 34 percent of the world’s population to migrate more than 300 miles, to places on the fringes of the tropics where the temperatures are milder. Dramatic population declines might occur in Mexico, Central America, Africa and India. The results were published today in Scientific Reports.
The scientists are cautious about the predictive power of their thought experiment, particularly as it relates to humans. People, unlike animals, can adapt to higher temperatures through technologies such as air conditioning. They also face barriers to long-distance migration, such as land borders, language barriers or even buying an air ticket. The scientists stressed that they are only exploring a hypothetical response to rising temperatures.
“We’re not making specific predictions about migration patterns of individual species, but the geophysical constraint is that, as the tropics get hotter, you’ll have to go far, essentially leaving the tropics, to cool off,” Adam Sobel, a professor of applied physics and math at Columbia University and a co-author of the study, said in a statement.
Some of the regions that the study suggests would be worst affected currently have the lowest migration rates in the world, said Valerie Mueller, a senior research fellow who studies migration at the International Food Policy Research Institute.
“They try to cast this paper as a way of thinking about not just human, but the migration of other species,” she said. “For birds that have very little costs in moving 500 and 1,000 kilometers [300 to 620 miles], it might work. But this framework for monitoring human migration doesn’t recognize the formidable barriers we face in moving.”
To Mueller, the utility of this study lies in the attention it brings to the topic. The humanitarian community would like to get a better sense of population size in the future, she said.
“The international community basically wants to understand that, given the fact that the world is global and people are moving countries, how can they plan in terms of infrastructure and development, how can they plan the allocation of resources to accommodate this potentially growing population,” she said.
In the study, the scientists have used a simple climate model to say how far humans would have to migrate if they want to continue to experience the same temperatures. Since temperatures are similar near the equator, the climate model shows that people in the tropics would have to move large distances to offset a smaller increase in average temperature, said Andrew Solow, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
He also stressed that most people do not migrate to continue experiencing their current temperatures.
“My impression is that, in the U.S., populations have tended to shift toward warmer parts of the country over the past decades,” he said.

Links

• Apocalypse Soon: Has Civilization Passed the Environmental Point of No Return?
• Global Warming: Beyond the Tipping Point
• Did Ancient Climate Change Ignite Human Evolution?
• Scientists Turn Carbon Dioxide Emissions into Stone