Lethal Heating: 12/19/16

19/12/2016

Climate Change And The NSW & ACT Bushfire Threat

Climate Council - Lesley Hughes

NSW and the ACT are bracing for another severe bushfire season, as climate change continues to drive extreme conditions, our new report has revealed.
The ‘Climate Change and the NSW and ACT Bushfire Threat’ report finds the economic cost of bushfires in the NSW and ACT is approximately $100m this year, with annual bushfire costs projected to more than double by 2050.

KEY FINDINGS

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1. Climate change is already increasing the risk of bushfires in New South Wales (NSW) and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT).

Since the 1970s, extreme fire weather has increased across large parts of Australia, including NSW and the ACT.
Hot, dry conditions have a major influence on bushfires. Climate change is making hot days hotter, and heatwaves longer and more frequent, with increasing drought conditions in Australia’s southeast.
The 2015/16 summer was Australia’s sixth hottest on record and in NSW and the ACT the mean maximum temperatures were 1.4°C and 1.9°C above average, respectively. February 2016 was also the driest that NSW has experienced since 1978. Hot and dry conditions are driving up the likelihood of dangerous fire weather in NSW and the ACT.

2. In NSW and the ACT the fire season is starting earlier and lasting longer. Dangerous fire weather has been extending into Spring and Autumn.

'Above normal' fire potential is expected in most of NSW for the 2016-17 bushfire season, because of high grass growth experienced during spring and predicted above average temperatures during summer.
In the ACT, predicted hotter and drier weather during summer will produce conditions conducive to bushfire development.

3. Recent severe fires in NSW and the ACT have been influenced by record hot, dry conditions.

Record-breaking heat and hotter weather over the long term in NSW and the ACT has worsened fire weather and contributed to an increase in the frequency and severity of bushfires.
In October 2013, exceptionally dry conditions contributed to severe bushfires on the Central Coast and in the Blue Mountains of NSW, which caused over $180 million in damages.
At the beginning of August in 2014, volunteers were fighting 90 fires simultaneously and properties were destroyed.

4. The total economic costs of NSW and ACT bushfires are estimated to be approximately $100 million per year. By around the middle of the century these costs will more than double.

Bushfires cost an estimated $375 million per year in Australia. With a forecast growth in costs of 2.2% annually between 2016 and 2050, the total economic cost of bushfires is expected to reach $800 million annually by mid-century.
These state and national projections do not incorporate increased bushfire incident rates due to climate change and could potentially be much higher.
In 2003, abnormally high temperatures and below-average rainfall in and around the ACT preceded bushfires that devastated several suburbs, destroyed over 500 properties and claimed five lives. This also had serious economic implications for the ACT with insured losses of $660 million.

5. In the future, NSW and the ACT are very likely to experience an increased number of days with dangerous fire weather. Communities, emergency services and health services must keep preparing.

Fire severity and intensity is expected to increase substantially in coming decades, especially in those regions currently most affected by bushfires, and where a substantial proportion of the Australian population lives.
Increased resources for our emergency services and fire management agencies will be required as fire risk increases.

6. This is the critical decade to protect Australians.

Australia must strive to cut emissions rapidly and deeply to join global efforts to stabilise the world’s climate and to reduce the impact of extreme weather events, including bushfires.
Australia’s very weak target of a 26-28% reduction in emissions by 2030 compared to 2005 levels – and we are on track to miss even this target – leaves Australia lagging well behind other OECD countries.

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Scientists Confirm That Warm Ocean Water Is Melting The Biggest Glacier In East Antarctica

Washington Post - Chris Mooney

A Conductivity-Temperature-Depth profiler being deployed near the front of the Totten Glacier. (Credit: Steve Rintoul CSIRO and ACE CRC)

Scientists at institutions in the United States and Australia on Friday published a set of unprecedented ocean observations near the largest glacier of the largest ice sheet in the world: Totten glacier, East Antarctica. And the result was a troubling confirmation of what scientists already feared — Totten is melting from below.
The measurements, sampling ocean temperatures in seas over a kilometer (0.62 miles) deep in some places right at the edge of Totten glacier’s floating ice shelf, affirmed that warm ocean water is flowing in towards the glacier at the rate of 220,000 cubic meters per second.
These waters, the paper asserts, are causing the ice shelf to lose between 63 and 80 billion tons of its mass to the ocean per year, and to lose about 10 meters (32 feet) of thickness annually, a reduction that has been previously noted based on satellite measurements.
This matters because more of East Antarctica flows out towards the sea through the Totten glacier region than for any other glacier in the entirety of the East Antarctic ice sheet. Its entire “catchment,” or the region of ice that slowly flows outward through Totten glacier and its ice shelf, is larger than California. If all of this ice were to end up in the ocean somehow, seas would raise by about 11.5 feet.
“This ice shelf is thinning, and it’s thinning because the ocean is delivering warm water to the ice shelf, just like in West Antarctica,” said Don Blankenship, a glaciologist at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the study’s co-authors. Blankenship was not on the research vessel, but he and his colleagues helped the Australia-based researchers with understanding the contours of the seafloor so they could plan their field investigations into where warm and deep waters could penetrate.
The lead author of the research, published Friday in Science Advances, was Stephen Rintoul, a researcher with the University of Tasmania in Hobart and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, or CSIRO. Totten glacier is, more or less, due south of Australia and relatively close to one of Australia’s bases of operations on the ice continent, Casey Station.
Rintoul and his colleagues, on board the government vessel Aurora Australis, were able to navigate extremely close to the Totten ice shelf edge in January of 2015, when an opening in the sea ice allowed the ship to get in closer than one ever has before. This is how they were able to gather the required ocean observations — and to detect the warm water.

A view of the Totten Glacier from RSV Aurora Australis in January 2015. (Australian Antarctic Division (Photo: Paul Brown, Australian Maritime College))

The researchers took ocean measurements at 10 separate points along the floating Totten ice shelf. And at two of the stations, they found that the ocean underneath was extremely deep. There was a six-mile-wide canyon at a depth of 600 meters (nearly 2000 feet) that then branched into two narrower canyons, each reaching greater depths. One of them was over 800 meters deep (more than 2,500 feet) the other was 1,097 meters deep (3,600 feet). Each was about one to two miles wide.
It was in these deep undersea canyons, and a few shallower areas as well, that warm ocean water, called modified circumpolar deep water, was flowing inward powerfully towards Totten glacier. And the previously measured loss of ice from the ice shelf matched closely with the amount of heat that the ocean was delivering, the paper found.
Granted, calling the waters reaching Totten at great depths “warm” is a bit of a misnomer —they are slightly below the freezing point. However, at the extreme pressures and depths involved, the freezing point of ice itself lowers, making these waters more than warm enough to melt ice.
Measuring the warm water reaching Totten was, until now, a missing puzzle piece in determining what’s happening with the glacier. Prior research, for instance, had shown the presence of cavities that warm water could enter, and scientists believed this was occurring because they had observed Totten thinning and lowering in the water. But as NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot put it to the Post at the time, “it is one thing to find potential pathways for warm water to intrude the cavity, it is another to show that this is actually happening.”
Now, scientists are showing that it’s actually happening.
The researchers are interested in Totten not only because of the massive global consequences were it to be destabilized, but also because it could help solve a riddle from the Earth’s past. Researchers have calculated that during previous warm eras, such as during the Pliocene, about 3 million years ago, global temperatures not too much higher than those that exist today led to radical amounts of sea level rise. It’s too much of an ocean surge for the loss of West Antarctica, alone, to explain — so they’ve been going looking to East Antarctica to close the sea-level budget from those eras.
And it turns out that like West Antarctica, East Antarctica features several regions — including Totten — where massive amounts of ice rise above the ocean level, but are grounded deep below it. In the case of Totten glacier, its so-called “grounding line,” which is where the glacier begins to lift off the seafloor and to float, forming an ice shelf with an ocean cavity beneath it, is nearly a mile and a half deep.
Granted, none of this means that Totten is contributing much to sea-level rise — yet. The large loss of ice from the ice shelf doesn’t raise seas because that ice is already afloat. But the weakening of the ice shelf is troubling because the shelf holds back Totten’s more dangerous ice, and when it goes it will allow that ice to flow more easily into the ocean.
For Blankenship, the new study, combined with past aircraft and satellite research on Totten, puts the remaining piece in place and suggests an increasingly clear picture of ocean-driven melt that could lead to growing instability.
“The whole process is here and going on,” he says. “This is the biggest potential contributor in East Antarctica. It needs to be understood.”

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Climate Scientists Fear Trump May Fatally Undermine Their Work

Time - Justin Worland

Scientists say some of the transition team's moves are unprecedented

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wears a coal miner's protective hat while addressing his supporters during a rally at the Charleston Civic Center on May 5, 2016 in Charleston, WV. Ricky Carioti—The Washington Post/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election shocked climate scientists and policymakers after a campaign in which Trump had suggested—falsely—that climate change was a hoax and vowed to largely undo federal and international measures aimed at addressing global warming.
Nonetheless, climate advocates took solace in the days following the election, noting that the market forces largely responsible for the shift away from coal and the incontrovertible science supporting climate regulations would remain true regardless of who was President. But in the six weeks since the election, Trump’s transition team has suggested that the incoming administration will not simply challenge the Obama administration’s policies but will also launch an attempt to undermine the years of science underpinning them. Such an effort could have major implications for the credibility of U.S. government data—and the ability of the world to fight global warming.
“It’s very damaging because it undermines the public confidence in scientists and government,” says Christine Todd Whitman, who served as EPA administrator under George W. Bush from 2001 to 2003, of Trump’s approach to science. “When you start to undermine that public confidence, it can have long-term damaging consequences.”
Trump is still more than a month from taking office, but his team has already sought to undermine basic facts on energy and environmental issues in a number of agencies using a variety of means. Senior Trump adviser Bob Walker said in November that the incoming administration would eliminate NASA’s Earth sciences division, calling its work “politicized.” That department operates satellites to monitor the Earth’s climate and provides data on the changing atmosphere.
The transition team sent a questionnaire to the Department of Energy asking for the names of individuals who worked to calculate the social toll carbon dioxide takes on the atmosphere or attended United Nations climate conferences, stoking fears that career staffers might lose their jobs for working on climate issues. Trump’s choice to lead the agency—former Texas Governor Rick Perry—has described the science of climate change as an open question. The Trump transition team told TIME that the questionnaire was “not authorized” and the sender had been “counseled.” (The transition team did not respond to other questions for this article).
Officials at the non-partisan Energy Information Administration (EIA) were asked if their data had been subject to political influence during the Obama years. That is, Trump’s team asked whether the EIA—a federal agency that tracks and makes forecasts in the energy industry—presented too a rosy view of the growth of renewable energy while discounting coal to encourage renewable investment. This accusation, described as “nonsense” by Rosenberg, was particularly surprising the high regard given to the agency across the aisle and in the energy industry with oil, gas, coal and renewable companies alike.
These steps by Trump’s team represent a dramatic escalation in fights over energy and environmental policy. Many Republicans—think President George W. Bush—have acknowledged the science climate change while arguing that certain demanded by environmentalists would damage the economy. That conclusion is still grounded in a belief and respect for science, no matter how much it might frustrate green advocates.
“People can come to different conclusions about what society should do in light of the evidence in front of them—natural sciences, social sciences, public sentiment and so on,” says Andrew Rosenberg, Director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “People here are saying, ‘we don’t care what that scientific evidence is, we know better’ or they’re trying to directly corrupt the scientific evidence by attacking the scientists.”
But in 2016 disputing the fundamentals of science may be the only way Trump can enact an agenda that disregards climate change. Policymaking—particularly with rules issued by agencies like the EPA—requires troves of evidence from a variety of disciplines to back it up. Reversing the slew of Obama-era policies will require agencies to come up with a scientific justification, something that is increasingly difficult as the science of climate change becomes more clear by the day. But if the Trump administration tosses decades of data and federal research or only seeks advice from industry the policy rationale for reversing regulations becomes legally defensible.
“Just as you have 97% of scientists who say climate change is real and humans have an impact on it, you can find the other 3% who say, ‘no it’s not happening,'” says Whitman, explaining how a Trump administration could enact its agenda. “You can find people who say no and then that’s all you listen to.”
Whitman, who quit the Bush administration because she felt that her agency had been hampered, said that indications from the incoming Trump administration suggest it will be far worse.
One of Trump’s first targets—and one of the most challenging ones—will likely be Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Obama described the measure, which pushes states to shift away from coal-fired power plants, as the most significant step the U.S. has taken to combat climate change. The rule, the product of years of study and litigation, is justified on the basis that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and, therefore, need to be regulated by the EPA. The so-called endangerment finding was upheld in federal court. If Trump were to get rid of the Clean Power Plan, he would need to replace it with something else—unless he gets rid of the endangerment finding. And the only way to do that we be to rethink years of scientific research.
Scientists have responded to Trump’s statements with increasing alarm. Some have begun downloading government data onto independent servers fearing that the incoming administration might remove it from the public domain. Others have begun to reframe crucial research as a matter of jobs rather than environmental concerns.
Of course, it remains early days. Trump is yet to take office and could yet offer a radical shift in direction. Maybe his daughter Ivanka or another meeting with Al Gore will change his mind. Or maybe he will just operate as a replica of Bush. “Anybody who says they know what’s going to happen is reading out of a broken crystal ball,” says Jonathan Levy, who served as deputy chief of staff in the Department of Energy.

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