Why Climate Change Is An Education Issue

The Japan Times - Felipe Calderon*



NEW YORK – Climate change affects us all, but we still are not acting as quickly as we should to address its causes, mitigate the damage and adapt to its effects. Many people don't understand the risks climate change poses to global economic and social structures. And, sadly, many who do understand are dismissive of the far-reaching benefits a global shift to sustainability and clean energy would bring about.
According to a recent Pew study, seven out of 10 Americans classified as political independents were not very concerned that climate change would hurt them. Worse still, Yale University researchers recently found that 40 percent of adults worldwide have never even heard of climate change. In some developing countries, such as India, that figure climbs to 65 percent.
These figures are discouraging, but they can be improved. The Yale study concluded that "educational attainment tends to be the single strongest predictor of public awareness of climate change." By investing in quality education, we can set the next generation on the right path to addressing this global problem.
Education and climate action work together in three ways. For starters, education fills knowledge gaps. Understanding how climate change is already having an impact on one's life can have practical benefits. This is especially true for poor populations that are most vulnerable to crop failures and natural disasters, such as landslides and floods, caused by climate change. Populations that must rebuild from scratch after each new catastrophe miss out on opportunities for rapid development. By understanding that their world is changing — and that the likelihood of future disasters is increasing — these populations can build resilience and learn to adapt to the sudden and slow stresses of a changing climate.
Second, education challenges apathy. Knowing the measures available to address climate change can open up vast opportunities for economic growth. Global investors should be made to understand that sustainable solutions can increase wellbeing and create additional economic opportunities. To take one example, in Niger, education and improved farming techniques helped double real farm incomes for more than one million people, while restoring huge tracts of severely degraded land. In the United States, as of 2014, there were more jobs that depended on solar energy than on coal mining.
Still, many people insist that implementing measures to mitigate the effects of climate change is too costly to our current way of life. According to the Pew study, almost seven out of 10 people believe that, given the limitations of technology, they would have to make major lifestyle changes. This does not have to be the case, and education can challenge the kind of skepticism that forecloses opportunities for climate-smart living.
Finally, education furnishes the technical knowledge needed to build a better future through innovation — one that includes clean and safe energy, sustainable agriculture and smarter cities. Broadening access to education would lead to more homegrown innovation — entrepreneurs spotting opportunities to address local problems. Globally, we cannot rely on knowledge centers such as Silicon Valley or Oxford to develop a silver bullet to the climate problem. Solutions may come from tech hubs, but they will also come from villages and developing cities, from farmers and manufactures with vastly different perspectives on the world around them. And this will create a virtuous cycle. It is easier for educated people to migrate and integrate into new societies, sharing the knowledge they've brought with them.
Fortunately, younger generations today are better educated and more committed to reducing their own carbon footprint than previous generations were. They are leading the way and forcing us all to reconsider our own actions. But we must broaden the availability of education worldwide to ensure that their efforts are not in vain.
In recognition of education's importance, the government of Norway, under the visionary leadership of Prime Minister Erna Solberg, has established the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity, of which I am a member. We will meet this week in Oslo, and it's my hope that we will confront the challenges of our time and act on the knowledge that education is our best problem-solving asset.
Addressing the dangers of climate change is not only an existential imperative; it is also an opportunity to move toward a cleaner, more productive and fairer path of development. Only an educated global society can take the decisive action needed to get us there.

*Felipe Calderon, former president of Mexico, is chair of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate.

Links

• Climate change implicated in France floods
• Warmer waters due to climate change are altering South Asian monsoons and East Asian rains, study finds
• 'Cause for alarm' as May temperatures break global records in Earth's hottest spring yet: NASA
• Scientists blame El Nino, man-made warming for turning vibrant U.S. marine reserve into coral graveyard

'Climate-Aligned' Investments Tipped To Soar But Australia's Role Remains Hazy

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Sunrise or sunset?: Green investments face an uncertain future in Australia. Photo: Bloomberg

Political uncertainty after the weekend's indecisive federal elections could further hinder Australia's development of business tools needed to tackle climate change, leaving it lagging further behind other nations, analysts say.
Investors are stepping up funding for so-called "climate-aligned" or green bonds, with the tally rising 16 per cent compared with 2015 to $US694 billion ($924 billion), according to the fifth annual report, Bonds and Climate Change: The State of the Market in 2016 compiled by HSBC.
The tally, which counts bonds explicitly labelled green or those whose main target is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or build resilience to climate impacts, must multiply if economies are to finance their decarbonisation in time to avoid dangerous warming.
"Some $US2.5-3 trillion of capital is needed each year in climate change-related investments, with 60-70 per cent of that going to emerging markets," the report said, adding an "adequate" level of such bond issuance should be in the order of $US1 trillion a year by 2020.
The report noted Australian issuance of unlabelled climate-aligned bonds is still small – in the order of $2.5 billion – and dominated by rail operator Aurizon.
"With finalisation of the historic Paris Agreement in late 2015, more investors are realising the need to align their portfolios to the goal of limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees,"  said Emma Herd, chief executive of the  Investor Group on Climate Change.
Three of the big four banks will join the Australian launch of the bonds report in Sydney on Monday, with Treasury Corporation Victoria and Flexigroup joining the discussion on climate finance.
However, analysis by climate finance campaign group Market Forces has found lending by the big four to renewable energy projects has dropped so far this year – and fallen short of their declared intensions.
In the first half of 2016, ANZ and Commonwealth Bank made no new loans to the sector, while NAB lent $88 million and Westpac $73 million. The half-year total of about $162 million compared with $516 million a year earlier, Market Forces said, citing public details of the deals.
The CBA lagged the other three, lending $904 million to the renewables sector since 2008 out of a total of $6.014 billion by the big four.
"While renewable energy is a boom industry globally, here in Australia the sector has been starved of the support and certainty it has needed for far too long," Julian Vincent, Market Forces' executive director, said.
"But at the same time, if the banks are seriously behind the goal of cleaning up our energy sector, they can't credibly hide behind policy."
John Connor, chair of The Climate Institute, called on the Turnbull government if it retains office to bring forward its planned 2017 review of climate policies to bolster investor confidence in the sector.
Mr Connor noted the UK government, even amid the chaos of the Brexit vote on Britain leaving the European Union, last week agreed to adopt a goal of cutting 1990-level carbon emissions 57 per cent by 2030.
Much work needs to be done.
A paper published in Nature last week, including by some Australian-based researchers,  found that national emissions targets as pledged in Paris would fall far short of the sub-2 degree warming goal. Instead, they imply a median warming of 2.6-3.1 degrees by 2100 compared with pre-industrial levels.

Links

• Investors in world's top coal shipper Glencore pass climate-change motion
• Climate change slams global economy, study from Stanford and Berkeley shows
• Climate change response must include slower population growth
• Apple, Google, Microsoft among companies with biggest climate change credentials
• 'We need a miracle': Bill Gates Q&A on climate change
• Disaster resilience key to managing climate change, say insurers
• Climate change a 'huge' financial risk, warns Bank of England

This New Antarctica Study Is Bad News For Climate Change Doubters

Washington Post - Chris Mooney


On Sept. 19, 2014, the five-day average of Antarctic sea ice extent exceeded 20 million square kilometers for the first time since 1979, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The red line shows the average maximum extent from 1979 to 2014. (NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio/Cindy Starr)

For a number of years now, climate change skeptics have argued that there’s a key part of the Earth’s climate system that upends our expectations about global warming, and that is showing trends that actually cut in the opposite direction.
This supposed contrary indicator is the sea ice that rings the Antarctic continent, and that reached a new all-time record extent of  7.78 million square miles in September 2014 (see above). As that record suggests, this vast field of ice has been expanding in recent years, rather than shrinking. That means it’s doing the opposite of what is happening in the Arctic, where sea ice is declining rapidly — and also that it’s doing the opposite of what we might expect in a warming world.
Scientists don’t fully understand why Antarctic sea ice is growing — suggested explanations have posited more glacial melt dumping cold fresh water into the surrounding seas, or the way the Antarctic ozone hole has changed the circulation of winds around the continent. In a new study in Nature Geoscience, though, researchers with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., along with colleagues from the University of Washington in Seattle and Australia, suggest that the phenomenon is simply the result of natural variability of the climate system — driven, in this case, by changes in the tropical Pacific Ocean that reverberate globally.
“When you get changes in [sea surface temperatures] in some areas of the tropics, you affect precipitation, that affects the amount of energy released in the atmosphere,” said Gerald Meehl, the study’s lead author and a climate scientist with NCAR. “That starts affecting, through this kind of chain reaction process, circulation at great distances away.”
The new study confirms that the ice floating around Antarctica has been expanding — indeed, the expansion has accelerated since around the turn of the century. But that’s also around the time that a cycle dubbed the “Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation,” or IPO, shifted into a negative phase, which is characterized by ocean surface cooling in the tropical Pacific, and particularly its eastern part around the equator.
This is the same phenomenon that, scientists such as Meehl believe, helped fuel a global warming “slowdown” or “hiatus” during the 2000s (see also here). Heat was in effect buried deep below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, rather than bursting forth and influencing the globe, during this period.
But what’s new in the latest study is the suggestion that this negative IPO phase had consequences that stretched all the way to the Southern Ocean waters surrounding Antarctica — and that this, in turn, explains why most climate models didn’t predict the observed growth of Antarctic sea ice.
Most of the state-of-the-art climate change model simulations run to help support the 2013 report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change did not capture the growth of Antarctic sea ice that has occurred of late. Rather, the average of these models suggested that this ice should decline. This shows that skeptics who have cited the growing ice are raising a serious concern — this anomaly really does cry out for an explanation.
But the new study finds that in the small minority of climate change simulations that do happen to correctly capture these natural changes in the Pacific, and the global warming “slowdown” to boot, there is also growth in Antarctic sea ice. These are the models, it appears, that happened to get the role of natural variability in the Pacific right — or more specifically, to get the timing right for a phase shift in this ocean.
Out of “262 realizations of 2oth century climate, 10 of those got this observed slowdown of global warming happening at about the same time as in the observations, at the same magnitude,” Meehl said. “And for those 10, there was the negative phase of the IPO, and it also has the signature of Antarctic sea ice.”
But how could a naturally occurring climate wobble in the tropical Pacific Ocean translate into more Antarctic sea ice?
Here, the research suggests the key factor is how the state of that ocean in turn influences an Antarctic atmospheric phenomenon called the Amundsen Sea Low, a low-pressure region off the Antarctic coast that lies more or less directly south of the tropical Pacific.
This low-pressure region deepens (or sees its pressure drop even further) in negative IPO conditions, the study finds, which drive cooler seas in the eastern tropical Pacific. As this shift reverberates across the globe, it in turn means that down in Antarctica, winds increase in force around the area of low pressure at the center of the Amundsen Sea Low (winds blow inward toward regions of lower pressure). These stronger winds, in turn, push sea ice outward and away from the Antarctic continent, which leaves room for more ice to form in the gaps that are created — and increases the extent of sea ice overall.
“The dramatic decrease in Arctic sea ice, which currently exceeds model predictions and could exhibit a record or near-record low this year, is fairly straightforward to understand in terms of the unprecedented warming in the Arctic,” Michael Mann, a climate researcher at Penn State University, said in an email in response to Meehl’s study.
“By contrast, Antarctic sea ice is more complicated. It is dominated by what we refer to as ‘dynamical effects,’ especially the strength and position of the westerly winds over the southern ocean. Those dynamical effects are governed to a large extent by natural, internal climate variability, and it is unsurprising that the very modest increase in Antarctic sea ice in recent decades can be explained in terms of them.”

Granted, the precise causes behind the recent growth in Antarctic sea ice probably will be debated for some time. After all, there is much that scientists still don’t understand about this enormous but exceedingly remote region. Recent research continues to make new discoveries about why ice floating atop the southern ocean behaves in the way it does, for instance, and even about how it helps drive the circulation of ocean waters in the region, and therefore, around the world.
As for the future, Meehl says he thinks that the IPO has now turned back, and doesn’t think Antarctic sea ice will keep expanding in the same way. Notably, the ice did not continue its streak of breaking records in 2015. “Averaged over the next 5 to 10 years, if this is all correct, this increase in Antarctic sea ice extent would stop growing, maybe start shrinking a little bit,” he said.
For now, though, the new research suggests that two phenomena that have furnished some of the most popular arguments among climate change skeptics and doubters in the past several years — growing Antarctic sea ice, and a global warming slowdown or “hiatus” during the 2000s — can perhaps both be chalked up to simple natural climate variability, superimposed on top of a global warming trend.
And if that’s right, it means that despite heated debate over both of these matters, neither manages to dent — at all — the main message about ongoing global warming.

Links

• Climate change skeptics may be about to lose one of their favorite arguments
• The Antarctic ozone hole has finally started to ‘heal,’ scientists report
• Antarctica’s penguins could be decimated by climate change
• Study: climate change warming Asian waters, altering monsoon
• The world has the right climate goals — but the wrong ambition levels to achieve them