Lethal Heating: 03/17/17

17/03/2017

Year-On-Year Bleaching Threatens Great Barrier Reef’s World Heritage Status

The Conversation - Terry Hughes | Barry Hart | Karen Hussey

The Great Barrier Reef is bleaching again, in its first back-to-back mass bleaching event. AAP/WWF Australia

The Great Barrier Reef has already been badly damaged by global warming during three extreme heatwaves, in 1998, 2002 and 2016. A new bleaching event is under way now.
As shown in a study published in Nature today, climate change is not some distant future threat. It has already degraded large tracts of the Great Barrier Reef over the past two decades.
The extreme marine heatwave in 2016 killed two-thirds of the corals along a 700km stretch of the northern Great Barrier Reef, from Port Douglas to Papua New Guinea. It was a game-changer for the reef and for how we manage it.

Bleaching caused by extreme heat in summer 2016, based on extensive aerial surveys. Category 4 in red: 60-100% of colonies were bleached; Category 3 in orange: 30-60% bleached. Author provided

Our study shows that we cannot climate-proof coral reefs by improving water quality or reducing fishing pressure. Reefs in clear water were damaged as much as muddy ones, and the hot water didn’t stop at the boundaries of no-fishing zones. There is nowhere to hide from global warming. The process of replacement of dead corals in the northern third of the reef will take at least 10-15 years for the fastest-growing species.
The Great Barrier Reef is internationally recognised as a World Heritage Area. In 2015 UNESCO, the world body with oversight of World Heritage Areas, considered listing the reef as a site “in danger” in light of declines in its health.

Australia’s response falling short
In response to concerns from UNESCO, Australia devised a plan, called the Reef 2050 Long-term Sustainability Plan. Its ultimate goal is to improve the “Outstanding Universal Value” of the reef: the attributes of the Great Barrier Reef that led to its inscription as a World Heritage Area in 1981.
We have written an independent analysis, delivered to UNESCO, which concludes that to date the implementation of the plan is far too slow and has not been adequately funded to prevent further degradation and loss of the reef’s values. A major shortcoming of the plan is that it virtually ignores the greatest current impact on the Great Barrier Reef: human-caused climate change.
The unprecedented loss of corals in 2016 has substantially diminished the condition of the World Heritage Area, reducing its biodiversity and aesthetic values. Key ecological processes are under threat, such as providing habitat, calcification (the formation of corals’ reef-building stony skeletons) and predation (creatures eating and being eaten by corals). Global warming means that Australia’s aim of ensuring the Great Barrier Reef’s values improve every decade between now and 2050 is no longer attainable for at least the next two decades.

What needs to change
Our report makes 27 recommendations for getting the Reef 2050 Plan back on track. The following are critical:

Address climate change and reduce emissions, both nationally and globally. The current lack of action on climate is a major policy failure for the Great Barrier Reef. Local action on water quality (the focus of the Reef 2050 Plan) does not prevent bleaching, or “buy time” for future action on emissions. Importantly, though, it does contribute to the recovery of coral reefs after major bleaching.
Reduce run-off of sediment, nutrients and pollutants from our towns and farms. To date the progress towards achieving the water quality targets and uptake of best management practice by farmers is very poor. Improving water quality can help recovery of corals, even if it doesn’t prevent mortality during extreme heatwaves.
Provide adequate funding for reaching net zero carbon emissions, for achieving the Reef 2050 Plan targets for improved water quality, and limiting other direct pressures on the reef.

At this stage, we do not recommend that the reef be listed as “in danger”. But if we see more die-backs of corals in the next few years, little if any action on emissions and inadequate progress on water quality, then an “in danger” listing in 2020, when UNESCO will reconsider the Great Barrier Reef’s status, seems inevitable.

This article was co-authored by Diane Tarte, co-director of Marine Ecosystem Policy Advisors Pty Ltd. She was a co-author of the independent report to UNESCO on the Great Barrier Reef.

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Trump’s Budget Cuts To EPA, NOAA, NASA, And Energy Would Cripple US Climate Programs

Vox - Brad Plumer

Last one out turn off the lights. Photo by David McNew/Getty Images

President Donald Trump's new budget outline for fiscal year 2018 can be read as a political document, a statement of his administration's policy priorities. Many of these cuts won't be enacted by Congress, but it's a look at what Trump values.
And what's clear is that Trump wants the US government to pull back sharply from any effort to stop global warming, adapt to its impacts — or even study it further. Under the proposal, a wide variety of Obama-era climate programs across multiple agencies would be scaled back or slashed entirely.
That includes eliminating much of the work the Environmental Protection Agency is doing to research climate impacts and limit emissions.
It includes scaling back the Department of Energy's efforts to accelerate low-carbon energy. It includes cuts to NASA's Earth-monitoring programs. The proposal would also eliminate the Sea Grant program at NOAA, which helps coastal communities adapt to a warmer world. The document dubs this a "lower priority."
Today's budget proposal mainly offers top-line numbers for each agency; in May, the White House will offer line-by-line detail on how it would like to fund or cut specific programs. Ultimately Congress will have the final say — and lawmakers may reject many of these proposals. But here's what we know about Trump's wishes:

1) Many of the EPA's climate programs would be terminated. Trump is proposing a sweeping 31 percent cut to the EPA's budget — from $8.2 billion down to $5.7 billion — shrinking funding to the lowest levels in 40 years. That includes zeroing out funding for many of the agency's climate programs. Currently, the EPA is the main US entity working to monitor and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
So there's no more money for work on the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era regulation to control CO2 emissions from power plants, which Trump aims to repeal. (By law, the EPA would still have to work on emission rules for vehicles.)
There are cuts to "international climate change programs, climate change research and partnership programs, and related efforts" — totaling $100 million.
We don't have line-by-line numbers, but that could include killing EPA programs like the Climate Resilience Evaluation Awareness Tool, which helps utilities adapt to extreme weather events.
The budget also proposes eliminating Energy Star, a voluntary certification program that helps companies release energy-efficient products, helping prevent more than 300 million tons of CO2 emissions per year.
It proposes axing climate research funding for the EPA's Office of Research and Development, the agency's scientific research arm, whose overall budget would be cut in half.
One EPA climate program that would likely survive is the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, which measures emissions from industries around the country.
Congress has mandated this monitoring, and getting rid of it would require legislative changes. So the EPA could still quantify US greenhouse gas emissions — it just couldn't very much about it.

2) The Department of Energy's R&D programs would be reoriented and scaled back. Trump is proposing a 5.6 percent cut to the Department of Energy, bringing its budget down to $28 billion. And, to do that, he would impose a steep 17.9 percent cut on core energy/science programs intended to accelerate the transition to new (and cleaner) energy technologies.
DOE has a variety of offices that direct early-stage research into solar, wind, nuclear, biofuels, batteries, carbon capture for coal, and other technologies. But these offices also partner with the private sector to deploy new energy tech that's closer to fruition — the sort of partnership that helped bring about the fracking boom.
Trump's budget proposes shrinking back from deployment and focusing solely on early-stage research, which many conservatives see as the only proper role of government. (Deployment, they argue, is vulnerable to cronyism and amounts to picking winners and losers.)
While we don't have specifics, this proposal might mean ditching things like DOE's Sunshot Initiative, which helps solar companies look for ways to cut costs. It also might mean DOE's Office of Fossil Energy will no longer help utilities build carbon capture and sequestration technology for coal (as DOE did with the Petra Nova plant in Texas). The latter would be a striking change, since Trump has long promised to help bring about "clean coal."
Trump's budget also proposes eliminating ARPA-E, which funds early research into long-shot energy technologies too risky for the private sector, like biofuels from algae or flying wind turbines. And the proposal eliminates the loan programs like the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, which gave early support to Tesla. The proposal argues that "the private sector is better positioned to finance disruptive energy research."
Some energy experts argue that government-backed deployment is absolutely essential if the US hopes to cut emissions quickly and shift to low-carbon energy. And new Secretary of Energy Rick Perry seems to agree with this view. Here was Perry just the other day praising ARPA-E, which is now on the chopping block:

IMAGE

The White House, clearly, has other ideas.

3) State Department funding for climate change is axed. As part of the Paris climate deal in 2015, the United States pledged not just to cut emissions, but also to offer $3 billion in aid to poorer countries to help them adapt to climate change and build clean energy. So far, the Obama administration has chipped in $1 billion. This was seen as crucial for bringing these countries into the deal.
Trump would end all that. In his budget, he's proposing to "cease payments to the United Nations' (UN) climate change programs by eliminating U.S. funding related to the Green Climate Fund and its two precursor Climate Investment Funds."
This doesn't mean that the United States is leaving the Paris climate deal altogether — the White House is apparently still debating that. But it means they don't plan on contributing any funds toward making the deal work.

4) NASA's Earth-monitoring programs are shrunk. One reason we know so much about climate change is that NASA has deployed a fleet of Earth-observing satellites since 1999. They collect data on everything from temperature and precipitation to underground aquifers and ocean currents to wildfires, soil moisture, and storms.
But NASA's Earth Science Division has come under attack from conservatives who don't appreciate the agency's forays into climate science and think NASA should focus on space exploration instead. As such, Trump's budget would trim the agency's Earth science budget to $1.8 billion — a $102 million cut.
That'd include terminating "four Earth science missions (PACE, OCO-3, DSCOVR Earth-viewing instruments, and CLARREO Pathfinder) and reduc[ing] funding for Earth science research grants."
The proposal derides these programs as too "Earth-centric."
For context, NASA's PACE mission was meant to help climate scientists better understand how aerosol particles and clouds influence climate change — still a key source of uncertainty — and to monitor ocean ecosystems more closely.
DSCOVR, meanwhile, will still monitor solar storms that could harm the grid, but it will no longer use its Earth-facing cameras to monitor things like ozone levels, weather patterns, or deforestation.

5) A key NOAA program to help coastal communities adapt to climate change would be gone. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Sea Grant program provides grants for research efforts intended to help coastal communities deal with a wide variety of challenges. Lately, that has included climate change.
As John Upton writes at Climate Central: "Sea Grant research has helped West Coast shellfish farmers cope with water acidification, provided advice to Maryland residents about coping with worsening floods, and promoted the use of grooved nails in roofs to secure panels during storms in the Northeast."
Trump's budget would zero out the $73 million program, calling it "a lower priority than core functions maintained in the Budget such as surveys, charting, and fisheries management."
It's unclear if Congress would agree to this: The Sea Grant program was established back in 1966 "to foster economic competitiveness" and has rarely been controversial in the past.

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Despair Is Not An Option When It Comes To Climate Change

Fairfax - Tim Winton*

We've heard a lot about warming oceans in the past couple of decades, and it's always sounded so distant and technical. Even to me a 2-degree jump in sea temperature sounded harmless. But that was before I saw what it meant. That's when it got personal, when it literally hit me where I live.
During the summer of 2010-11, Western Australia had an unprecedented marine heatwave. One morning not far from where I live, beach-walkers saw seabirds massed along the shoreline. Birds as far as the eye could see. When they got closer they saw the tide-line covered with dead and dying abalone – thousands of them. The sea had suddenly gotten too hot for these molluscs to endure. So they climbed out off the limestone reefs to escape, only to find themselves – out of the frying pan and into the fire – roasting to death on the sand. A mass stranding of abalone – no one had ever seen the like before.

Tim Winton. Photo: Louise Kennerley

Just think of it for a moment, a creature so desperate to escape its own intolerable world it casts itself ashore to die. The pathos of that. And consider what it might mean for all those other creatures, unseen and unnoticed, beneath the sunlit surface.
This event really shook me because abalone has been such an important part of my life. When I was a kid the shellfish was a local staple, growing in such abundance I could fill a string bag with them in 10 minutes before school. We called it muttonfish. On our honeymoon my wife and I dived for them. Abalone was our first meal as a married couple, and in time we showed our kids how to collect them and cook them, just as our parents had taught us. But now, in our part of the world, the population is decimated and the fishery closed.
For a sea lover and activist like me, this was a devastating development. For the scientists who'd been warning of an event like this for decades there was no sense of vindication, only sorrow. And for many Australians these events have been profoundly shocking. But the horror is compounded by the knowledge that all during this catastrophe the federal government has been ignoring global climate science and undermining renewable energy. To add to this folly, the Turnbull regime has done everything in its power to smooth the way for the world's biggest coal mine in the Galilee Basin just inland, effectively offering to subsidise the largest-known reservoir of carbon pollution and help unleash it into the atmosphere.
But despair is not an option. And cynicism is just cowardice in a mask. Who can afford either?
At moments like these, when our leaders traduce our interests, it's important to remember that the ordinary citizen has real power. When we share knowledge and passion, when we get organised and gain strength and momentum from one another, we make our will known. That's when we achieve mighty things, and no government or corporation can resist us. Australians asserted their will at the Franklin Blockade, in the old-growth forests of WA, at Fraser Island and the Daintree. I was there to see it up close at Ningaloo. This is what I remind myself of, steel myself with.

Great Barrier Reef's bleached coral up close
Parts of the Great Barrier Reef are enduring sustained periods of heat stress worse than at the same time during last year's record-breaking coral bleaching event, raising fears the natural wonder may suffer another hammering.Vision supplied: Biopixel.

We've reached a moment in history in which we're fighting for the Great Barrier Reef's very survival. The world's largest living structure, a marvel visible from space, is in desperate need of help. And if the reef dies then we're all in jeopardy because our survival depends on the health of the seas – 70 per cent of the earth's surface is water, and when the oceans die life on this planet is no longer viable.
Humans are a remarkable, unrepeatable species. In recognising our dependency on nature we've come a long way in such a short period – it's been a revolution in my own lifetime. But the natural world is now changing faster than our adaptive response. We need to think and act faster, more consistently and more concertedly. In good faith. In common cause. Because this is fast becoming a rescue mission, not just to spare the corals, but to save our own kind. If we can't save it, we've sealed our own fate. A planet that can't sustain its greatest reef will eventually become a place that won't support human life. Like the abalone, there's nowhere else for us to go.

Tim Winton woke one day to see the shoreline covered in dead or dying abalone. Photo: Department of Fisheries

Decisions made about the Carmichael coal mine will have an impact upon the reef, on our global atmosphere, on the state of our oceans. None of us can afford to get this wrong. We are creatures of the blue planet. If we cook ourselves here at home the only other option is a burning beach.

*Tim Winton is an author and patron of the Australian Marine Conservation Society.

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