Extreme Heatwave Days Already Hitting Poorer Nations More Than Rich

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

When Nicholas Herold was hunting for data on how much climate change was affecting the world's poorest nations, he was surprised when he couldn't find answers in the published research.
"Everyone's spoken for years about how poor countries are going to suffer more  - or are suffering  more - and I couldn't find one figure actually showing this," the research fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW said.

Dehydration: extreme heat in mid-2015 killed at least 800 people in Pakistan. Photo: Shakil Adil

While lots of models were in use, nobody had crunched the observations. One reason was that until recent decades, large regions particularly in Africa had only limited instrumental monitoring.
Using World Bank wealth definitions and targeting the number of days and nights that fell in the top 10 per cent of temperatures for any date, Dr Herold and fellow researchers found extreme heat readings have increased much faster in low-income nations than richer ones since at least the 1980s.
"We expected it to be a lot worse since the [low-income] countries are near the equator but the difference of more than double is quite shocking," he said.
In a paper published in the Environmental Research Letters journal, the researchers noted poorer nations were often located in the tropics and therefore already "close to the upper threshold for human comfort".
Based on an average of three data reanalyses, the researchers found the percentage of hot days each year in low-income countries rose from a base of 10 per cent - or 37 days - during the 1961-90 base period to 22 per cent - or 80 days - by 2010.
By contrast, rich nations had the percentage of hot days rise much slower, from 10 per cent to 15 per cent, or 37 to 55 days.


What drives heatwaves in Australia
The ins and outs of this sweltering weather phenomenon, as explained by Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick. Produced in association with UNSWTV.

Warm nights have increased at even a faster pace, in line with global trends, with the pace of increase in poorer nations almost triple that of the rich. (See chart below, showing the number of hot days on the left, and hot nights on the right.)

Pre-monsoonal heat in India has been severe in many regions in recent years. Photo: AFP

"It's not good for low-income or high-income countries but it's particularly worse for the low-income countries as they are the ones which can least afford to adapt," Dr Herold said.
Poorer nations typically have far smaller accumulated or annual per-capita greenhouse gas emissions than industrialised ones. With the uneven warming trends likely to continue, poor nations have a case for demanding rich world assistance to cope with climate change, he said: Poor countries have "contributed the least, but in terms of temperature effects, they will suffer the most".

Failed corn crop in Malawi in 2016: drought and heatwaves left some 60 million people in southern Africa dependent on food aid. Photo: Andrew Renneisen, Getty Images

"Our findings also lend support to calls for explicit loss and damage compensation," the paper concludes.

The scale of the threats posed by global warming were outlined at length in a recently published book, Climate Change and the Health of Nations, by the late Australian National University academic, Anthony McMichael.
Europe's severe heatwave killed 70,000 in 2003 and 55,000 died in 2010 in Russia, demonstrating more developed nations were also home to vulnerable people when temperatures spike.
The extreme heatwave just prior to Victoria's Black Saturday bushfires in 2009 also killed more people than the fires themselves, buckled railroads and overloaded the electricity grid, Professor McMichael noted. (Last month's record heatwave triggered power cuts in South Australia and pushed NSW's power sector to the limit too.)
While history offers many examples of how past climate change affected societies - usually detrimentally - the prospect of more rapid shifts will likely stretch rich and poor nations alike.
"We cannot predict the consequences for human populations but they may be dire - especially if runaway climate change occurs, Professor McMichael wrote.

Links

• Australia's carbon emissions jump as coal-fired power ramps up
• The continent that climate change has not forgotten
• Climate Change and the Health of Nations
• Sydney summer smashes 157-year record

Watch Bill McKibben Talk Climate Change Battle On 'Real Time'

Rolling Stone - Daniel Kreps

"The level of complete corruption from the fossil fuel industry that marks this administration is like nothing we've ever seen," environmentalist says

On a bad news day for Earth's climate, environmentalist Bill McKibben appeared on 'Real Time' to discuss the dire situation and how to fight back.

On a particularly bad day for Earth's wellbeing – the EPA revealed massive budgetary cuts while the Trump administration waffled on the Paris Agreement on climate change – environmentalist and 350.org founder Bill McKibben appeared on Real Time With Bill Maher to discuss the dire situation and how the American people can fight back.
"The level of complete corruption from the fossil fuel industry that marks this administration is like nothing we've ever seen," McKibben said, adding that new EPA chief Scott Pruitt frequently sued the EPA on behalf of energy companies while Attorney General of Oklahoma.
"Earlier this afternoon, the EPA under Mr. Pruitt… their budget cuts leaked out. Not only are they going to cut by 97 percent the amount of money they're spending to try and improve water quality in the Great Lakes – which finally begun to improve, same thing with San Francisco Bay, Puget Sound, Chesapeake Bay; good thing that no one lives in any of these places," McKibben said.
"They also said they're going to drastically cut the amount of money they spend on something called water quality compliance, the kind of things that helped alert us to things like Flint, the water crisis there. Of course, since they're zeroing out the environmental justice program at EPA, that probably won't be a big worry anymore."
After pointing out that the Keystone Pipeline would be built using Russian steel – the oligarch of that Russian steel mill gifted Vladimir Putin a $35 million yacht, McKibben noted – McKibben attacked the argument that state governments will handle the things the EPA doesn't by highlighting the crisis in Pruitt's own state of Oklahoma.
"For as long as this continent has been around, Oklahoma has been seismically inert, as stable as it was possible to be," McKibben said. "Now, it shakes a lot more than Oklahoma. It's the most seismically active place on the continent because we've done nothing but frack it for the last 10 years and force all this water underground into wells on the faults."
Even as the nation is divided into two halves – liberals who believe in climate change and conservatives who turn a blind eye toward it – McKibben warned, "In the end, these are not political questions. In the end, physics doesn't care what your skin is. It just does what it does."

Links

• Trump's EPA Pick Is the Fossil-Fuel Industry's Con Man
• Why Republicans Still Reject the Science of Global Warming
• Bill McKibben's New Battle Plan for the Planet's Climate Crisis
• Bill McKibben on Why Exxon Is the Next Big Climate Fight

How Disappearing Sea Ice Has Put Arctic Ecosystem Under Threat

The Guardian - Robin McKie

From algae to fish and polar bears, the loss of habitat caused by global warming is affecting the food chain

An adult polar bear hunting for seals on the melting pack ice in the Arctic. Photograph: Alamy

In a few days the Arctic’s beleaguered sea ice cover is likely to set another grim record. Its coverage is on course to be the lowest winter maximum extent ever observed since satellite records began. These show that more than 2 million square kilometres of midwinter sea ice have disappeared from the Arctic in less than 40 years.
The ice’s disappearance – triggered by global warming caused by rising carbon emissions from cars and factories – is likely to have profound implications for the planet. A loss of sea ice means a loss of reflectivity of solar rays and further rises in global temperatures, warn researchers.
But there are other pressing concerns, they add. Sea ice loss is now posing serious threats to the Arctic’s indigenous species – its seals, fish, wolves, foxes and polar bears. “The Arctic food chain relies on a stable sea ice platform and that is now disappearing, putting the region’s wildlife at risk,” said marine ecologist Tom Brown, of the Scottish Association for Marine Science (Sams), in Oban.
Sea ice provides a platform from which polar bears can hunt, and it links communities of land animals such as foxes and wolves. “The sea ice cap has been retreating for decades, and as it does the animals who live on its edge have had to move north,” said Andrew Shepherd, professor of Earth observation at Leeds University.
“But that process takes them further and further away from land – and there is likely to be a limit about the distance they can tolerate.”
In fact, the erosion of sea ice strikes at the very root of the Arctic ecosystem, for it provides a surface on which algae – the basic material on which the entire food chain in the region depends – can grow. “Algae lingers on the underside of sea ice and as spring begins there is a major increase in its growth,” said Brown. “It is then eaten by tiny creatures called zooplankton, and they in turn are eaten by fish that are in turn eaten by seals, which are in turn consumed by polar bears. But if algae levels drop the whole food chain is disrupted.”
This point was backed by Professor Geraint Tarling, of the British Antarctic Survey. “The most important of the consumers of algae is a species of zooplankton called Calanus glacialis. It is rich in fats like omega-3 and is consumed by Arctic cod and baleen whales,” he said. “Crucially, in recent years levels of Calanus glacialis have been found to be declining and are retreating in their range. In its place a temperate species called Calanus finmarchicus has appeared, but it contains much less fat and that is of poorer quality. As a foodstuff it is simply inferior.”
The base of the Arctic food chain is being depleted, in other words. However, it is not the only threat to wildlife in the region. In 2015 the journal Science published a paper – by Professor Eric Post, of Penn State University and colleagues – that shows that populations of wolves and foxes are currently isolated only in summer. For most of the year these groups are connected by sea ice.
But as its sea ice coverage declines over the years, this is extending the length of time that packs are kept away from each other, which threatens to lead to diminished cross-breeding and genetic wellbeing.
Then there are the narwhals. These tusked whales – sometimes called the unicorns of the sea – are prized by Inuits who use their blubber and skin to make a traditional, chewy meal called muktuk. Narwhals can hide safely in sea ice and so avoid their natural predator, the killer whale. Robbed of that protection, narwhal numbers could dwindle dangerously, marine biologists warn.
To uncover greater details of these issues, the UK Natural Environment Research Council (Nerc) has launched a programme called PRIZE, productivity in the seasonal ice zone, which will use underwater robot craft to study how nutrient flow and other factors are changing as the Arctic sea ice retreats. It will probe variations that are occurring in zooplankton behaviour, the composition of the seabed and other factors that could influence wildlife disruption.
Other dangers facing the Arctic were highlighted by Professor Julienne Stroeve, of University College London. “Consider the example of harp seals,” she said. “They often give birth on snow mounds on sea ice. But if that sea ice is thin or formed late it breaks and the seal pups are dumped into the ocean and they drown.” In addition, Stroeve pointed to the problem of increasing numbers of warm spells during which rain falls instead of snow. “That rain then freezes on the ground and forms a hard coating that prevents reindeer and caribou from finding food under the snow,” she added.
Caribou face another danger posed by climate change. Normally they try to take advantage of a range of nutritious plants that bloom in the Arctic spring in order to help them recover from the fierce Arctic winter and to strengthen females before giving birth. But the plant species on which they rely are now blooming earlier and earlier as spring in the far north arrives sooner each year – while the caribou’s internal clock remains unchanged and locked into the wrong biological cycle. As a result, the plants on which they rely are past their best when caribou arrive and so there is less nutrition available when they give birth. As a result, fewer calves are born.
It is a problem of synchronicity. The alignment of different lifecycles is being disrupted by sea ice loss and it is affecting animals on both land and in the ocean. “It is a bit like having your breakfast time changed,” said Finlo Cottier, senior lecturer in polar oceanography , who is also based at Sams. “You are used to sleeping in to 8am, but one day breakfast is served at 6am but no one tells you. The result: you go hungry. That is what is beginning to happen all over the Arctic.”

UNDER THREAT
Caribou
As the Arctic warms, rain more frequently falls instead snow and then freezes over the ground preventing caribou and reindeer from finding food.

Harp Seals
Harp seals give birth on mounds of snow on sea ice. If this is weakened or thinned because it has formed late in the year, it can break apart, causing pups to drown.

Zooplankton
Zooplankton form a critical part of the food chain. They live off algae that form on the underside of sea ice and in turn they are eaten by fish such as Arctic cod and also be baleen whales.

Polar Bear
Polar bears use sea ice as platforms from which to hunt seals and other creatures. Male and female bears also meet on ice sheets to mate.

Narwhal
Slow swimming whales like the narwhal use sea ice to hide from predators like killer whales and could also be affected as shipping in the region increases as ice retreats.

Links

• Point-of-view camera shows how polar bears use sea ice to hunt
• Could a £400bn plan to refreeze the Arctic before the ice melts really work?
• Inuit fear they will be overwhelmed as ‘extinction tourism’ descends on Arctic
• River Dee's pearl mussels get a helping hand – or gill
• Polar bears face starvation as unlikely to adapt to a land-based diet, says report
• Call for DNA biologists to join fight against deadly new threats to wildlife
• Polar bear could be saved if emissions are cut, says new study
• Melting ice may slow global warming
• Thawing Arctic is turning oceans into graveyards
• Ice-melting temperatures forecast for Arctic midwinter