Lethal Heating: 09/28/16

28/09/2016

Farmers Asked To Share Their Climate Change Experience

Australian Geographic - Gemma Chilton

Farmers around Australia are being asked to share their experiences of climate change in a new national survey

Peter Holding is a third-generation grain, wool and lamb farmer from southern NSW. Image Credit: Holly Bradford

IF THERE'S ANY group of Australians who are likely to see and fully appreciate the impacts of climate change first-hand, it's our farmers, who rely on the patterns and moods of the weather to make a living.
Farmers like Peter Holding, who is a third-generation mixed-operation farmer (wheat, canola, wool and lamb) from southern NSW. Peter's family has been farming their land on the south-west slopes of Harden since 1929.
He says he first really started to be impacted by the changing climate with the big, late-season frost event of 1998, followed by the unprecedented drought period of the first decade of the 2000s.
Today, Peter is vocal about the need to do something about climate change.
He is also a member of the newly formed Farmers For Climate Action, which is asking farmers around Australia to share their experiences of, and attitudes towards, climate change in a nation-wide survey.
This is the first Australia-wide survey of its kind and was launched last week at a large, annual NSW agribusiness event called Henty Field Days.

Volunteers from Farmers for Climate Action prepare to survey farmers at Henty Field Days, NSW. (Source: Farmers for Climate Action)

Peter says farmers are at the "frontline" of climate change, and he thinks attitudes among farmers are changing - however the survey, which has already received hundreds of entries, will paint a clearer picture.
Cattle farmer and businesswoman Lucinda Corrigan, who has already completed the survey, is now encouraging other farmers to do the same.
"We already know agriculture is Australia's most climate-exposed industry, but precise impacts vary between regions and sectors. For me, in southern NSW, we're seeing increasing temperatures and our rainfall patterns significantly alter, and this makes short and long-term planning for our agribusiness more challenging," she says.
"It's critical that as many farmers as possible get involved in this conversation because the decisions made today and tomorrow will affect us long into the future. We want to make sure we can keep farming into not just the next season, but for generations to come."
Farmers For Climate Action will use the survey results to inform their practices and areas of focus. Farmers who complete the five-minute survey will also go in the draw to win a solar system and battery storage worth $15,000.

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Climate Change Study Accused Of Erring On Rising Temperature Predictions

ABC World Today - Colin Cosier

Photo: A study published in the journal Nature reconstructed 2 million years of global average temperatures. (Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems CRC and Australian Antarctic Division)

Key points:

Study found Earth's temperature could rise by between 3 and 7 degrees Celsius over next thousand years
But prominent climate scientists argue there is a logical error with the calculation
However, they welcomed the temperature history provided by the study

Prominent climate scientists have issued a warning that a paper published in the influential journal Nature sensationalised climate change predictions and used an "incorrect calculation".
The Evolution of Global Temperature over the Past Two Million Years paper reconstructed 2 million years of global average temperatures.
It found temperatures gradually cooled until about 1.2 million years ago and then stalled after that, and concluded that Earth's temperature could rise by between 3 and 7 degrees Celsius over the next thousand years.
But that prediction has come under fire from prominent climate scientists, including Dr Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
He said he did not think the conclusion was correct.
"In fact, I'm pretty certain that is an incorrect calculation," he said."The ratio that gave that, which was the very high sensitivity that she calculates, comes from a correlation between temperature and the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the ice cores, but as we all know, correlation does not equal causation.
"And in this case, the causation is the orbital wobbles of the Earth's climate that are controlling both the temperature and the carbon dioxide at the same time and so that's giving you an exaggerated view of how carbon dioxide affects temperature directly."
However, Dr Schmidt welcomed the temperature history provided by the study, which analysed about 60 different sediment cores.
"The meat of this study is really a synthesis of deep sea ocean sediment cores that come from all around the world but put together in a way that allows you to say something about the global temperatures at every point between recently and 2 million years ago," he said.
"And so that's a really impressive synthesis."
But he said that would likely be outweighed by the temperature increase error.
"I think it's unfortunate both for the journal which is going to be accused of hyping sensational results without being scientific rigorous," he said.
"I think it's unfortunate for the author whose really good work is being overshadowed by this particular error, and it is unfortunate for the public because what you're seeing is a very confused message that people are going to take away all sorts of different messages from."

'A very confused message'
Professor Jeffrey Severinghaus, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of San Diego, also found a problem with the study.
"She made a very, very basic logical error," he said."Climate sensitivity is essentially the change in temperature divided by the change in CO2.
"The important part about that is that if you want to infer that from an actual situation in the Earth, you know, what the Earth did in the past, you have to make sure that temperature change is only due to an increase in CO2, whereas the ice ages, we know very well the temperature change was due to a combination of increasing CO2 and changes in the Earth's orbit around the sun.
"In fact, it's probably something like two-thirds of the temperature change is due to the orbit and only one-third to the CO2.
"So that's probably why she got a factor of three larger."
The study's author Carolyn Snyder was not available for an interview.

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Global Warming 'Troubling' For Grasses

SBS - AAP

Global warming could outstrip the ability of grasses, including wheat, corn and rice to adapt, leading to crop failures and mass starvation, say scientists.

Global warming could rapidly threaten grasses including staple foods such as wheat and rice that provide half of all the calories consumed by humans, say scientists.
A new study looking ahead to 2070 found that climate change was occurring thousands of times faster than the ability of grasses to adapt.
While the research cannot predict what might happen to world food supplies as a result, the authors warn of "troubling implications".
Grass is food, both for many species of animals and humans.
Wheat, rice, maize, rye, barley and sorghum are all edible grasses that yield nutritious grains. In many parts of the world and throughout history, wheat or rice famines have led to widespread starvation.
The new research, published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, looked at the ability of 236 grass species to adapt to new climatic niches - the local environments on which they depend for survival.
Faced with rapid climate change, species wedded to a particular niche can survive if they move to another region where conditions are more suitable, or evolve to fit in with their altered surroundings.
The scientists found that the predicted rate of climate change was typically 5000 times faster than the estimated speed at which grasses could adapt to new niches.
Moving to more favourable geographical locations was not an option for a lot of grass species because of limits to their seed dispersal and obstacles such as mountains or human settlements.
The researchers, led by Dr John Wiens, from the University of Arizona in the US, wrote: "We show that past rates of climatic niche change in grasses are much slower than rates of future projected climate change, suggesting that extinctions might occur in many species and/or local populations.
"This has several troubling implications, for both global biodiversity and human welfare.
"Grasses are an important food source for humans (especially rice, wheat and corn). Evolutionary adaptation seems particularly unlikely for domesticated species ... and even local declines may be devastating for some human populations."

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Climate Change Challenge To Gina Rinehart’s Alpha Mine Dismissed By Court

The Guardian - Joshua Robertson

Queensland court of appeal finds 'proposed mining would not detrimentally affect global greenhouse gas emissions' because Asian power stations would buy coal elsewhere if Alpha blocked

Gina Rinehart's Alpha coal project in Queensland's Galilee basin. The proposed 30m tonne-a-year mine was challenged in Queensland's land court and the supreme court. Photograph: Andrew Quilty/AAP

Miners could run afoul of Queensland's environmental protection laws if the burning of their export coal overseas were shown to negatively impact global carbon pollution, the state's highest court has ruled.
But the court of appeal has dismissed a challenge to Gina Rinehart's Alpha mine because of an earlier land court finding that it would "not detrimentally affect global greenhouse gas emissions" because Asian power stations would simply buy coal elsewhere if the mine were blocked.
The decision on Tuesday lumped conservation group Coast and Country with legal costs after escalating their fight against the proposed 30m tonne-a-year mine in the Galilee basin in the wake of unsuccessful challenges in the land court and the supreme court.
Coast and Country had applied for statutory review of the land court ruling upholding approval of an environmental authority for GVK Hancock.
The appeal court president, Margaret McMurdo, in a published judgment found that the land court "must consider" so-called scope 3 emissions from transporting and burning coal overseas when weighing up a mine's environmental authority.
However the land court "made findings of fact that the proposed mining would not detrimentally affect global greenhouse gas emissions" and these were "not amenable to statutory review", McMurdo said.
Jo-Anne Bragg, chief executive of the Queensland Environmental Defenders Office, which ran the case for Coast and Country, said their clients were disappointed.
"We all know that burning fossil fuels is contributing to global warming, extreme weather events and severe damage to our Great Barrier Reef. Every further approval locks in those impacts," Bragg said.
A GVK Hancock spokesman said the ruling brought "an end to four years of legal challenges from anti-mining protesters and allows us to continue developing a project that will create thousands of jobs for our state".
The miner in the land court had argued its contribution of 0.16% to global emissions through the burning of 30MT of coal a year was "negligible" but this was dismissed by the court.
Alpha is one of six Galilee basin mining proposals singled out last week in a climate advocacy report arguing they must be stopped if global warming is to be kept to 1.5C, the aspirational target of the Paris Agreement.
McMurdo said that under the "very broadly defined object of the Environmental Protection Act … environmental value and environmental harm are consistent with a desire to protect Queensland's environment from development, including mining development, which would cause harmful global greenhouse gas emissions".
The land court was obliged to consider criteria "consistent with a concern about harmful global greenhouse gas emissions which would not 'enhance individual and community wellbeing and welfare by following a path of economic development that safeguards the welfare of future generations'; would not 'provide for equity within and between generations'; could damage 'biological diversity' and 'essential ecological processes and life support systems'; or could raise 'threats of serious or irreversible environmental damage'", she said.
Fellow appeal court justice Hugh Fraser noted "expert evidence" before the land court that power stations primarily in India and China would "burn the same amount of thermal coal and produce the same amount of greenhouse gases whether or not the proposed Alpha mine proceeded".
"That was so because thermal coal was plentiful and cheaply available to the power stations from many sources," Fraser said.
"It was the designed power generating capacity of the power stations, rather than the availability of coal, which determined the amount of coal which would be burned in the power stations.
"Accordingly, global scope 3 emissions would not fall if the mine did not proceed."
That followed a supreme court ruling last September that the land court's consideration that "environmental harm that might be caused by another coal mine somewhere else in the world" was relevant under state environmental laws.

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