Lethal Heating: 03/07/17

07/03/2017

Big Australian Banks Invest $7bn More In Fossil Fuels Than Renewables, Says Report

The Guardian - Naaman Zhou

ANZ, NAB, Commonwealth Bank and Westpac provided three times more for non-renewable than clean energy projects in 2016, says Market Forces

Australian banks continued to fund coalmines in 2016 despite committing to support the Paris climate agreement pledge to keep global warming below 2C. Photograph: Viktor Drachev/Tass

Australia's big four banks invested three times as much in global fossil fuels as they did in clean energy in 2016, despite pledging to help Australia transition to a low carbon economy.
The banks provided a combined $10bn to projects around the world that expanded non-renewable energy, according to finance group Market Forces.
ANZ and the Commonwealth Bank were the worst offenders, investing over $3bn each in fossil fuels. In the same period, ANZ only lent $225m to renewables, giving it a 14:1 ratio.
Overall the banks invested $7bn more in fossil fuels than clean energy.
Only NAB approached parity, lending $1.35bn to non-renewables and $1.3bn to renewables. Commonwealth Bank and Westpac invested $846m and $426m in clean energy respectively, which was 3.5 and 4.6 times less than what they invested in fossil fuels.

Loans for renewable and fossil fuel energy projects from Australia's big four banks in 2016. Illustration: Market Forces

These figures come despite all four banks publicly supporting a 2C global warming limit laid out in the Paris climate agreement.
"The first step to back up that commitment is to stop expanding the carbon fuel economy," said the executive director of Market Forces, Julien Vincent. "We're not talking small projects, we're talking about opening up one of the largest offshore oil bases in Norway, or a new gas field in PNG."
The report cited, among others, investments in Norway's Johan Sverdup oil field, America's Creole Trail natural gas pipeline, and the Browse basin gas field off the coast of Western Australia.
The Commonwealth Bank environment policy states it should "actively seek opportunities to lend to, invest in, and support businesses that decrease dependence on fossil fuels".
"The updated policy expresses our commitment to support the transition to a low carbon economy", it said in a 2015 press release.
Greenpeace, which is launching a campaign to stop the Commonwealth supporting new coalmines, said the bank was risking the credibility of its brand through fossil fuel investment.
"The Commonwealth Bank claims to support the Paris Agreement's goal of keeping climate change to well below 2 degrees but it has lent more to fossil fuel projects since the Paris Agreement was signed than any other Australian bank," its climate campaigner, Nikola Casule, said.
"The Commonwealth Bank knows it has one of the most recognisable brands in Australia, it also knows that most Australians support stronger action on climate change. [Chief executive] Ian Narev ... needs to decide whether he wants that brand associated with dirty coal or a future powered by clean renewable energy."
ANZ's climate change statement notes that while "some of our stakeholders view our financing of fossil fuel industries as in direct conflict with our stated position on the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions", it supports a "gradual and orderly transition".
Vincent said the figures included loans made to coal and gas projects "across the entire supply chain – from extraction to transport and combustion". For companies with part-investments in fossil fuels, Market Forces apportioned the loan according to the percentage of the company's business in non-renewables.
However, he noted that 2016 saw less fossil fuel investment than 2015, and no loans to new coal projects, in what he described as an "important trend".
"I think it's definitely become a lot harder for banks to fund coal because it's so clearly connected to climate change and other environmental and social issues," he said. He called for Australian banks to put a blanket bans on funding new coalmines.
"I wouldn't ever take the kind of positive trends we see in the lending and assume the banks aren't going to fund the Adani coalmine, for example. Politically there is a lot of leaning on the banks to not cave in to environmental campaigns. We need them to show a little bit of courage and say no to the Carmichael coalmine and expansion."
An ANZ spokesperson said that "lending to the sector was relatively modest."
"The resources industry is a core part of the Australian economy. It remains essential for power generation … we consider that decarbonisation of the economy must be managed responsibly and over time," it said.

Links

Sydney’s Swelter Has A Climate Change Link, Scientists Say

New York Times - Henry Fountain

A wildfire in New South Wales in February. Australia has been hit by brutal heat waves in the last two months. Credit NSW Rural Fire Service, via Associated Press

South-eastern Australia has suffered through a series of brutal heat waves over the past two months, with temperatures reaching a scorching 113 degrees Fahrenheit in some parts of the state of New South Wales.
"It was nothing short of awful," said Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney. "In Australia, we're used to a little bit of heat. But this was at another level."
So Dr. Perkins-Kirkpatrick, who studies climate extremes, did what comes naturally: She looked to see whether there was a link between the heat and human-driven climate change.
Her analysis, conducted with a loose-knit group of researchers called World Weather Attribution, was made public on Thursday. Their conclusion was that climate change made maximum temperatures like those seen in January and February at least 10 times more likely than a century ago, before significant greenhouse gas emissions from human activity started warming the planet.
Looked at another way, that means that the kind of soaring temperatures expected to occur in New South Wales once every 500 years on average now may occur once every 50 years. What is more, the researchers found that if climate change continued unabated, such maximum temperatures may occur on average every five years.
For the overall 2016-17 summer in New South Wales, the researchers say, climate change made the hot average temperatures — which set records for the state — at least 50 times more likely than in the past.
The findings are the latest in what has become a growing field: studies that try to assess the influence of climate change on extreme weather as soon as possible. The idea is to offer scientific analyses of heat waves, floods and other events while people are still talking about them, and to counter the spread of misinformation, intentional or not, about the impact of global warming.
Climate scientists have long said that climate change should bring an increase in extreme events like dry spells and heat waves. Because warmth causes more evaporation and warmer air holds more moisture, climate change should also lead to more intense and frequent storms.
Studies have shown that these effects are occurring on a broad scale. But the natural variability of weather makes looking at individual events more difficult.
World Weather Attribution, which is coordinated by Climate Central, a research organization in Princeton, N.J., is one of a number of groups doing rapid analysis. Among other events, they have looked at flooding in Germany and France last May; high temperatures in the Arctic in November and December; and an usually strong storm that hit northern Britain in 2015.
Not all attribution studies have found a climate-change link. In general, studies of heat waves tend to produce the clearest signal of the influence, or not, of global warming.
Australian heat waves have been examined in the past, most recently in several studies that showed a clear link between climate change and a period of torrid weather in 2013. David Karoly, a scientist at the University of Melbourne, was involved in one of the studies, which took more than six months to produce.
"That was considered very rapid at the time," Dr. Karoly said.
As a member of World Weather Attribution, Dr. Karoly helped with the study of the recent heat waves, which took about two weeks.
A big difference between the two studies is in the use of computer climate models — both of the current atmosphere with its greenhouse gas emissions and of a hypothetical atmosphere as if those emissions had never occurred and climate change was not happening.
For the older study, as for most attribution studies in the recent past, the models were run over and over again, which took months. The newer, rapid studies use models that have already been run, extracting data as needed.

Links

New York 2140: A Novelist’s Vision Of A Drowned City That Still Never Sleeps

The Conversation - Robert Kopp

Climate fiction: A novel describes New Yorkers keeping on even after 50 feet of sea-level rise next century. www.shutterstock.com

Earth’s climate system is replete with potential surprises, and the climate science community tends to be conservative when projecting future changes. The world also suffers from a creative deficit in imagining the human response to climate change – a deficit that fiction is well-suited to help alleviate.
One focus of my research is on sea-level change, both in the past and in the future. In his new work of climate fiction, “New York 2140,” author Kim Stanley Robinson supposes that climate scientists like me will be surprised by how quickly the world’s ice sheets will shrink and sea levels will rise. His novel explores how civilization might nonetheless muddle through to remake this reshaped world.
In Robinson’s future, the First Pulse of Antarctic and Greenland ice sheet collapse in the 2050s led to 10 feet of global sea-level rise in the course of a decade. The First Pulse and the food crisis of the 2070s served as focusing events, leading the world to take greenhouse gas reductions more seriously. Electricity generation shifted to renewables; container ships were replaced with fleets of wind-powered clippers; lighter-than-air airships replaced airplanes.
Yet these efforts were not enough to avoid a Second Pulse at the end of the 21st century, driven first by melting at the Aurora Basin in East Antarctica but then cascading around the world’s ice sheets, leading to a further 40 feet of sea-level rise.
Current science suggests the speed of sea-level rise in Robinson’s future is implausible. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s 2013 report estimated that, under a future with high greenhouse gas emissions, global average sea level would likely rise by between about 1.5 and three feet over the course of this century. My research group’s projections generally agree with the IPCC’s assessment. But the IPCC assessed only what is “likely”; our group’s work also suggests that sea-level rise as high as about eight feet by 2100 and 18 feet by 2150 is physically plausible, though extremely unlikely.

To understand how much sea levels will rise in the decades ahead, scientists study the mechanics of the land, ice, air and water in Greenland and Antarctica. NASA, CC BY

But there’s a lot we don’t know about the behavior of ice sheets, particularly those – like the West Antarctic and parts of the East Antarctic including the Aurora Basin – that sit on ground that is below sea level. For example, warm water can attack submarine ice from beneath. If the ground underneath the ice sheet is sloping the wrong way, deepening toward the continent’s interior, the water’s advance will set up a self-sustaining cycle that exposes a growing cross-section of ice to erosion.
In addition, ice sheets can form unstable ice cliffs at their margins. A recent study that incorporated the collapse of ice cliffs found that, under a future of high emissions, it may be significantly easier to get to eight feet by 2100 and 18 feet by 2150 than previously thought. Still, even that study could not produce Robinson’s 50 feet until after 2200.

Venice on the Hudson
Robinson’s novel, however, is not a scientific projection: It is an exploration of human resilience in the face of extreme pressure. There are four basic ways coastal communities can respond to sea-level rise: suffering damage, developing protective infrastructure, finding ways of accommodating flooding and retreating from the coast. Robinson’s New Yorkers engage in all four – and Robinson’s vision of accommodation is profoundly richer than in the imaginings of adaptation strategies developed by national, state and local governments.
Despite the environmental apocalypse, life carries on in a flooded New York that has remade itself as a super-Venice. (See Climate Central’s Surging Seas maps to explore what Manhattan would look like with 10 meters (33 feet) or 20 meters (66 feet) of sea-level rise.) The submerged streets of Lower Manhattan have turned into canals, crisscrossed by pedestrian high lines. Vaporettos have replaced taxis. Skyscrapers whose bases have fallen beneath the waves are protected by nanodiamond coatings and powered by solar microgrids.

Hurricane Sandy as precursor? In the climate fiction novel ‘New York 2140’ New Yorkers adapt to sea-level rise by converting streets into canals. ruanon/flickr, CC BY-SA

Retreat has occurred mainly from the intertidal zone of Midtown Manhattan, where the forces of the daily tidal cycle wreak havoc on structural integrity. On the dry land surrounding the Cloisters, far uptown, carbon nanomaterials originally intended for space elevators allow new buildings on the shrunken island to reach hundreds of stories upward.
Technological progress focused on improving lives rather than accommodating the changed world has apparently slowed to a crawl – in some ways, not much has changed from today. Airships are steered by chatty but rule-bound AIs, and communications take place by tablet, with celebrities broadcasting live feeds of real-world adventures through the cloud.
Though this slow pace of progress may be literary license taken to make the world more relatable, it may also be a fair projection: If environmental crises consume the world’s R&D budget, there may be little left for innovations without a survival benefit.
Meanwhile, financial capitalism proceeds much as it did in the early 21st century, periodically growing and imploding bubbles and receiving government bailouts. As in most of Robinson’s works, the limits of the capitalist system serve as a motif: The book culminates in a democratic-socialist fantasy of an alternative political response to a bursting financial bubble that seems more rooted in 2008 than 2140.

Creative rethinking
In the real world, when climate change first entered the mainstream of civic discourse in the late 1980s, policy discussion focused almost entirely on limiting greenhouse gas emissions. While the world has made some progress, reflected in the United Nations’ Paris Agreement and in the recent near-stability of global carbon dioxide emissions, the pace has been slow. The planet is increasingly feeling the effects of climate change, and so adapting to these effects has become a growing part of both scientific research and public discourse.
But most work on climate change adaptation has focused on near-term, marginal changes: for instance, making communities more resilient in the face of ever more common weather extremes, or installing pumps and elevating infrastructure to deal with the rapid growth of minor “nuisance” flooding along the shore.
Climate change and sea-level projections usually end by 2100, and on that timescale, two to three feet of global sea-level rise is far more likely than Robinson’s 50 feet. But the world will not end in 2100, and many of the public works built today will still be around a century from now. In New Jersey, for example, many of the electric grid’s switching stations that flooded in 2012 during Superstorm Sandy were sited more than a century earlier, during the age of Thomas Alva Edison.
So climate fiction can play a critical role in the face of the large-scale experiment we humans are conducting with the world’s climate system: inspiring creative rethinks of the designs and technologies needed to reshape how we relate to our environment.
Science tells us that, by reshaping our global energy and agricultural systems, we can avoid the magnitude of planetary change that Robinson depicts. But to make those changes and to adapt to the changes we don’t avoid, the world’s best minds need to focus, not on new apps or financial innovations, but on the civilizational challenges at hand.
Works like Robinson’s – starkly beautiful and fundamentally optimistic visions of technological and social change in the face of some of the worst devastation we might bring upon ourselves – can inspire that focus in a way that myopic discussions of the near term or grim, apocalyptic tales cannot.

Links