South Australian Storm A Preview Of Climate Change: Climate Council

Fairfax - AAP

The lights were hardly out in South Australia before politicians and lobby groups were staking out their ground in the argument over climate change and renewable energy.
Within hours of a massive storm that triggered a statewide power blackout, the Climate Council was blaming global warming for the wild weather.

A satellite image shows the storm over South Australia on Wednesday. Photo: Supplied

It was a "disturbing preview of what's likely to come if Australia fails to act on climate change", council member Will Steffen claimed.
Renewable energy sceptics inside the federal government didn't quite say "We told you so," but the message was none too subtle.
South Australia's aggressive pursuit of renewable energy that supplies about 40 per cent of the state's power had put at risk the stability not only of its own energy network but that of the rest of Australia as it pursues a low carbon emissions future.
"There are serious questions for the future of the energy system about how do we combine energy policy and climate policy," Josh Frydenberg, the federal minister responsible for energy and the environment, said.
"How do we keep the lights on?"
Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce queried whether there was an over-reliance on renewable energy in South Australia.

Professor Will Steffen from the Climate Council. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

How it and other states and territories manage an increasing reliance on renewable energy will be the focus of a special COAG meeting Mr Frydenberg intends holding within weeks.
"There are real questions for the future of the national electricity network as to how we make this transition effectively," he said.
"You can't have a situation like last night."
South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill insists the lengthy outage was caused by bad weather and renewable energy was not to blame.

This is unprecedented: Weatherill. The blame game has begun after South Australia's state wide blackout with the Premier attributing it to storms, others an over reliance on renewable energy. Courtesy ABC News 24.

Independent senator Nick Xenophon is not convinced, calling for an inquiry into his state's power supply.
He wants the Australian Energy Market Commission to carry out a robust independent analysis to learn lessons from the incident and ascertain whether South Australia's energy mix made it more vulnerable to an outage.
Energy expert Andrew Stock, a member of the Climate Council, dismissed attempts to blame renewables for the blackout as opportunistic and irresponsible.
"Storms can knock out electricity networks no matter where the power supply is coming from," he said.
At the time of the blackout, 1000MW of wind power was being fed into the South Australian system.
The council warns the South Australia storm event is a sign of weather to come.
"The atmosphere is packing much more energy than 70 years ago, which contributes to the increasing intensity of such storms, " Professor Steffen said.
Intense rainfall was projected to increase in Australia and had already increased at a global level.
"This is a prelude to a disturbing future, and it's only going to get worse if we don't address climate change."

Sydney wakes up to grey rainy weather.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce said the power outage was a wake-up call for policymakers.
"We will need to ask serious questions about how an entire state lost access to power, which is unacceptable for business and the rest of the community," chief executive James Pearson said.

Links

• No, Renewable Energy Didn't Cause South Australia's Blackout
• Climate change is driving storms like South Australia's
• South Australia blackout: storms set to move to NSW
• The 'perfect storm' on the renewables debate

The World Passes 400 PPM Threshold. Permanently

Climate Central - Brian Kahn

In the centuries to come, history books will likely look back on September 2016 as a major milestone for the world’s climate. At a time when atmospheric carbon dioxide is usually at its minimum, the monthly value failed to drop below 400 parts per million.

That all but ensures that 2016 will be the year that carbon dioxide officially passed the symbolic 400 ppm mark, never to return below it in our lifetimes, according to scientists.

Because carbon pollution has been increasing since the start of the Industrial Revolution and has shown no signs of abating, it was more a question of “when” rather than “if” we would cross this threshold. The inevitability doesn’t make it any less significant, though.
September is usually the month when carbon dioxide is at its lowest after a summer of plants growing and sucking it up in the northern hemisphere. As fall wears on, those plants lose their leaves, which in turn decompose, releasing the stored carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. At Mauna Loa Observatory, the world’s marquee site for monitoring carbon dioxide, there are signs that the process has begun but levels have remained above 400 ppm.
Since the industrial revolution, humans have been altering this process by adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than plants can take up. That’s driven carbon dioxide levels higher and with it, global temperatures, along with a host of other climate change impacts.
“Is it possible that October 2016 will yield a lower monthly value than September and dip below 400 ppm? Almost impossible,” Ralph Keeling, the scientist who runs the Scripps Institute for Oceanography’s carbon dioxide monitoring program, wrote in a blog post. “Brief excursions toward lower values are still possible, but it already seems safe to conclude that we won’t be seeing a monthly value below 400 ppm this year – or ever again for the indefinite future.”
We may get a day or two reprieve in the next month, similar to August when Tropical Storm Madeline blew by Hawaii and knocked carbon dioxide below 400 ppm for a day. But otherwise, we’re living in a 400 ppm world. Even if the world stopped emitting carbon dioxide tomorrow, what has already put in the atmosphere will linger for many decades to come.

An animation showing how carbon dioxide moves around the planet. Credit: NASA/YouTube

“At best (in that scenario), one might expect a balance in the near term and so CO2 levels probably wouldn't change much — but would start to fall off in a decade or so,” Gavin Schmidt, NASA’s chief climate scientist, said in an email. “In my opinion, we won’t ever see a month below 400 ppm.”
The carbon dioxide we’ve already committed to the atmosphere has warmed the world about 1.8°F since the start of the industrial revolution. This year, in addition to marking the start of our new 400 ppm world, is also set to be the hottest year on record. The planet has edged right up against the 1.5°C (2.7°F) warming threshold, a key metric in last year’s Paris climate agreement.
Even though there are some hopeful signs that world leaders will take actions to reduce emissions, those actions will have to happen on an accelerating timetable in order to avoid 2°C (3.6°F) of warming. That’s the level outlined by policymakers as a safe threshold for climate change. And even if the world limits warming to that benchmark, it will still likely spell doom for low-lying small island states and have serious repercussions around the world, from more extreme heat waves to droughts, coastal flooding and the extinction of many coral reefs.
It’s against this backdrop that the measurements on top of Mauna Loa take on added importance. They’re a reminder that with each passing day, we’re moving further from the climate humans have known and thrived in and closer to a more unstable future.

Links

• CO2 Nears Peak: Are We Permanently Above 400 PPM?
• Flirting with the 1.5°C Threshold
• Antarctic CO2 Hit 400 PPM For First Time in 4 Million Years
• What 2 Million Years of Temps Say About the Future

The World Just Hit This Disturbing Climate Change Metric

Fortune - Katie Fehrenbacher

Cities like Miami (pictured) will now have access to real-time climate change data thanks to a new website powered by the White House. Photograph by Joe Raedle—Getty Images 

Earth has seemingly passed a worrisome threshold for the changing climate this week, according to scientists.
The last week in September is often the time of the year when the planet’s carbon emissions are at their lowest as summer turns to fall and plants and leaves start to decay, releasing carbon. However, this year the amount of carbon emissions in the atmosphere this week has remained above 400 parts per million, reports Climate Central.
That means that even with the fluctuating of the seasons, which pushes the levels of carbon emissions up and down, the planet is likely now officially at 400 parts per million for the foreseeable future. While that could change decades into the future—if society worked hard to reverse the carbon emissions in the atmosphere or if there was a large catastrophic climate event—but the metric for now is likely here to stay.

With four hundred parts of carbon emissions in the Earth’s atmosphere, the climate is changing including rising global temperatures, rising sea levels, ocean acidification and increased intensity of storms. Global temperatures have already risen by almost 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to about a century ago, and world leaders are trying to enact commitments and policies to keep rising temperatures under two degrees Celsius.
This disturbing data point is the backdrop to the current U.S. political environment. This week, climate change was only brought up briefly during the first Presidential debate. Republican candidate Donald Trump denied calling climate change a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese (but he actually did do that) and also bizarrely referred to solar company Solyndra, which went bankrupt five years ago and lost a loan from the U.S. government.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard oral arguments on Tuesday for President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which seeks to push power plant companies to lower greenhouse gas emissions. If the policy stands, mostly it would accelerate shutting down old coal plants and adding in new natural gas plants, as well as solar and wind farms.
But if the Clean Power Plan is shot down, the U.S. will lose its chief way to meet its commitments to lower carbon emissions and meet the pledges to the international Paris climate agreement. For the first time in history, the U.S. and China ratified the Paris agreement this weekend.
Perhaps billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has the best strategy. On Tuesday, he showed off how his space company SpaceX plans to get human beings off of Earth and onto Mars in an effort to enable humans to be an “interplanetary species.”
Humans will inevitably face an extinction event, said Musk at a astronautical conference on Tuesday in Mexico. Perhaps this week the Earth hit that metric which will put start it on a path to meet that fate.

Links

• The World Passes 400 PPM Threshold. Permanently
• CO2 Nears Peak: Are We Permanently Above 400 PPM?
• Flirting with the 1.5°C Threshold
• Antarctic CO2 Hit 400 PPM For First Time in 4 Million Years
• What 2 Million Years of Temps Say About the Future

Sydney Company Taking CSIRO Developed UltraBattery To Off-Grid And Renewable Energy Projects

ABC Rural - Babs McHugh

Dr Lan Lam, CSIRO, the primary inventor of the UltraBattery. (Supplied: CSIRO)

A new lead acid battery developed by a consortium with the CSIRO is being trialled on off-grid conditions, including as storage for intermittent renewable energy. Called the UltraBattery, it takes the 150-year-old lead-acid battery technology, like those used to start cars, and adds a super-capacitor.
The consortium was an international one, with CSIRO in Australia, the battery was built by Furukawa Battery Company in Japan and tested in the United Kingdom through American based Advanced Lead-Acid Battery Consortium.
Now an Australian company, Ecoult in Sydney, has been commercialising it in a system it calls UltraFlex.
That uses the UItraBattery as a system for off-grid and dual-purpose applications.
Ecoult CEO John Wood said efficient and commercial energy storage could be expensive as it requires many different parts.

"When we look into energy storage, it's not only the cost of the battery," he said.

Audio: John Wood on Ecoult commercialising CSIRO developed lead-acid UltraBattery (ABC Rural)

"It's the cost of the battery, it's the cost of the grid interconnection, the cost of the power control systems, the room you put them in.
"These are all of the critical economic considerations when you're applying energy storage."
Battery storage is essential for managing renewable and off-grid systems, by smoothing out the peaks and the troughs of energy production.
For example at night when there is no sun for solar cells or when the wind is not blowing enough to turn wind power turbines.
Mr Wood said one of the challenges with the traditional lead-acid batteries, was its inability to sustain a partial state of charge, which the addition of the super-capacitor had changed.
"When we're doing things like integrating renewables into the grid or setting up micro-grids, what we're actually doing is cycling the battery so it's never quite full, never quite empty," he said.
"That's a partial state of charge. Continually charging and discharging the battery to take energy and moving it in time for use when its needed.
"All batteries in this competitive state, such as lithium ion and other types, are partial state of charge applications.

"Lead-acid is the largest source of chemical storage on the planet."

Mr Wood said there were applications for all types of different batteries but added the UltraBattery had significant advantages over alternate technologies in some cases.
"The lead-acid battery industry is fully sustainable. Most of the lead-acid batteries that are being used have been through the recycling phase several times," he said.
"It is the most recycled product on the planet: the batteries are manufactured, they come back to the factories where they're broken down to their components — plastic, lead and acid.
"They're put back through the production process and find their way back to the market place."

Links

• Renewable energy expert calls for greater investment in new technology beyond electricity production
• Traditional commodities still needed to support 'lifestyle' metals
• Growing demand for lithium batteries driving new mine technology

Australia's West, South Losing Vital Rain As Climate Change Shifts Winds, Study Finds

ABC News - Nicolas Perpitch

The study found storms are reducing rainfall in some areas. (Audience submitted: Hayley Grant)

Rising greenhouse gases and ozone depletion over the Antarctic are increasingly pushing rain-bearing storm fronts away from Australia's west and south, according to a new international study.

The research, which involved the Australian National University and 16 other institutions from around the world, has just been published in the Nature Climate Change journal.
It found Southern Ocean westerly winds and associated storms were shifting south, down towards Antarctica, and robbing southern parts of Australia of rain.
ANU Associate Professor Nerilie Abram, the lead Australian researcher, said this had contributed to a decline of more than 20 per cent in winter rainfall in southwestern Australia since the 1970s.
"That band of rainfall that comes in those westerly winds is shifting further south, so closer towards Antarctica," Dr Abram, from the ANU's Research School of Earth Sciences and ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, said.

"So the rain is still there, it's just fewer of those cold fronts make it far enough north to intersect with southern Australia," she said.

The study attributed this shift directly to human-induced climate change, primarily from rising greenhouse gases and ozone depletion.
Dr Abram said the loss of rain combined with "2016 being on track to smash the hottest-year record was ominous for communities and the environment".
"Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are remote but this region influences Australia's heatwaves, affects whether our crops get the winter rainfall they need and determines how quickly our ocean levels rise," she said.
The international research team examined how recent Antarctic climate trends compared to past climate fluctuations using natural archives such as ice cores drilled into the Antarctic ice sheet.
They found the bigger picture of the region's climate trends remained unclear because of Antarctica and the Southern ocean's "extreme fluctuations in climate year to year".
Dr Abram explained the climate measurements were not yet long enough "for the signal of anthropogenic climate change to be clearly separated from this large natural variability".
Lead author Dr Julie Jones, from the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, said there was still an enormous amount to learn about the Antarctic climate.
"At face value, many of the climate trends in Antarctica seem counter-intuitive for a warming world," Dr Jones said.
"Scientists have good theories for why, but these ideas are still difficult to prove with the short records we are working with."

Links

• Assessing recent trends in high-latitude Southern Hemisphere surface climate
• Science says climate change is sucking crucial rain from southern parts of Australia
• Climate change jigsaw puzzle: Antarctic pieces missing
• Climate change is drying out parts of southern Australia, study warns