05/05/2017

As Rising Seas Erode Shorelines, Tasmania Shows What Can Be Lost

New York Times - Justin Gillis

Graves on Isle of the Dead in Tasmania. The island on which the graveyard lies, part of the Port Arthur Historic Sites, is being chewed away by the sea. Credit Matthew Abbott for The New York Times
ISLE OF THE DEAD, Tasmania — Maybe the hardened convicts who carved the 19th-century gravestones dotting this tiny island were barely literate, or perhaps one of them just had a wicked sense of humor. The schoolmaster Benjamin Horne went to his repose in 1843 with this sentence chiseled above his head: “Sincerely regretted by all who knew him.”
If he ever managed to sleep peacefully beneath that pungent epitaph, Mr. Horne can rest no longer.
The very island on which he lies is being chewed away by the sea. The roots of trees that have stood for decades now dangle perilously over a fast-eroding shore. A few miles away, a seaside coal mine once worked by the convicts is under similar assault by the waves.
The ruin of the former penitentiary at Port Arthur. Built in 1843 as a flour mill and granary, it was converted in 1857 into a prison. It has become one of Australia’s premier tourist attractions. Matthew Abbott for The New York Times
The ocean is rising in large part, of course, because people the world over have burned so much coal, pumping planet-warming carbon dioxide into the air. Perhaps a new stone marker ought to be planted above the eroding mine: Cause, Meet Effect.
Chris Sharples, a coastal consultant, has lately been spotting such problems all over southern Tasmania, including once-sturdy electric poles in danger of falling over as the ocean strips the land away. Under a brilliant sky, he walked the shoreline near the historic mine one recent day and pointed to a steep scarp cut by the waves, a bellwether of recent damage.
New York Times
“It’s a smoking gun for sea-level rise causing an acceleration of erosion,” he said. “And it’s coal! Mined for burning!”
Both the imperiled island cemetery and the coal mine are part of the Port Arthur Historic Sites, in the far southeastern corner of Tasmania, the Australian island state. Convict ancestry was once a badge of shame in Australia, but now it is bragged about, and Port Arthur, a 19th-century prison that received some of the most incorrigible criminals in the British Empire, has become one of the country’s premier tourist attractions.
It is also under costly siege by a rising sea, and Port Arthur is but one example of a looming global problem.
In country after country, managers of national parks and other historic sites are realizing that climate change, with its coastal flooding and erosion, rising temperatures and more intense rainstorms, represents a profound risk to the heritage they are trying to preserve.
From left, the Statue of Liberty after Hurricane Sandy; the Great Barrier Reef in Australia; and a Neolithic standing stone circle and henge in the Orkney Islands of Scotland. Credit From left, Ángel Franco/The New York Times; Greg Torda/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Getty Images
Venice, home of architectural and artistic masterpieces, is under such grave threat that $6 billion worth of sea gates are being installed to protect against increased tidal flooding. Rising temperatures seem to be on the verge of wiping out large sections of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Coastal erosion threatens scores of treasured sites in Scotland, including the spectacular Neolithic ruins of the Orkney Islands. The famed statues of Easter Island are in danger.
In the United States, most of the glaciers that in the 19th century dotted what is now Glacier National Park have already melted, and the rest are expected to be gone within this century. Archaeological sites on the Alaska coast are being lost. The very symbol of America, the Statue of Liberty, cannot be considered safe: Flooding from Hurricane Sandy, made worse by a century of sea-level rise, destroyed much of the infrastructure on Liberty Island in 2012 and closed the monument to visitors for months.
Like so many other problems associated with climate change, this was a crisis foretold.
In a report in 2007, the staff of the World Heritage Convention, an arm of the United Nations that oversees listings of heritage sites, warned of the peril from human-caused climate change. It specifically pointed out the risk to coral reefs, including the Great Barrier Reef.
When the group wanted to update its report in 2016, the conservative government of Australia, under fierce attack at home for the perceived weakness of its climate policies, demanded that any mention of the Great Barrier Reef be stripped out of the new version. The United Nations complied, though the suppressed material quickly leaked.
Part of the Coal Mines Historic Site in Port Arthur. Erosion has begun to damage the site. Matthew Abbott for The New York Times
In the very year that controversy played out, the reef suffered profound damage from high water temperatures, fulfilling the prophecy of a decade earlier. And the same sort of damage is occurring again this year, part of an unprecedented back-to-back die-off that may leave large segments of the reef in ruins.
Rising ocean temperatures and rising sea levels are two sides of a coin: Most of the excess heat trapped by human emissions of greenhouse gases is absorbed by the ocean, and the water expands as it warms, accounting for much of the rise in the sea over the past century. It has gone up about eight inches since 1880, which sounds small, but has been enough in some places to cause extensive erosion, forcing governments to spend billions to cope. The problem is worse in places where the land is also sinking, as in Venice and along much of the East Coast of the United States.
A sea-level benchmark, bottom right, on Isle of the Dead in Tasmania. Carved into the stone in 1841, the benchmark has been compared to modern measurements to show that the sea level in Tasmania is rising. Matthew Abbott for The New York Times
Over the long term, the rise of the sea appears to be accelerating because of runaway growth in greenhouse emissions, and scientists fear much bigger effects this century, perhaps so large they could ultimately force the abandonment of entire coastlines.
Though awareness of the risk to historic sites and natural wonders is growing, the effort to tackle the problem is in its infancy. In most places, discussion and report-writing have yet to give way to concrete action. “We’re a long way from managing this issue well,” said Adam Markham, who is deputy director for climate and energy with the Union of Concerned Scientists, an American group, and who was the lead author of the most recent report on world heritage sites.
Much could be done to shore up old buildings, but that is invariably expensive — and most park services and heritage agencies are badly underfunded. Beyond money, the agencies face deep philosophical issues. How far will they ultimately be willing to go to salvage buildings or parks at risk? Should they, for instance, build sea walls that would forever alter the character of old forts or other coastal sites?
In Tasmania, the archaeology manager of the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority, David Roe, wrestles with such questions. The historic site has spent $5 million reinforcing old prison buildings, which are under attack by the rising salt water in the soil and also vulnerable to wind damage. But Dr. Roe is reluctant to consider more aggressive solutions, like a sea wall that would isolate the site from the ocean that connected it to a once-mighty empire.
As he sees the matter, to build such a thing would be to undermine the cultural value that made the place worth preserving.
“We can’t retreat” from the rising sea, Dr. Roe said. “We can’t elevate. We can’t rebuild. Perhaps all we can do is manage loss.”
David Luchsinger was in charge of the Statue of Liberty for the National Park Service when Hurricane Sandy ravaged Liberty Island in 2012, and he led the team that brought the park back to life on July 4 the following year. Mr. Luchsinger, retired and living in New Hampshire, said the issue with historic sites was not just finding the money to make them more resilient, but also slowing the emissions that are putting them at risk in the first place.
“To turn a blind eye on how sea-level rise and climate change are going to affect preserving our history is just, to me, unacceptable,” he said. “That’s where we come from. That is who we are.”

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Could Making Climate Change A 'Pro-Life' Issue Bring Conservatives On Board?

Christian Science Monitor - 

The message is targeted at evangelicals and other conservatives, but many Americans do not see climate change as a moral issue, at least not yet.
Polar Bear Liya is pictured with her two polar bear cubs at Sea World on Australia's Gold Coast in this screen grab taken off a remote monitoring camera taken April 27, 2017. The cubs were born the previous day and are Liya's second litter, according to Sea World. Sea World/Reuters
The terms "pro-life" and "pro-environment" are not normally linked, but a growing number of Christian leaders insist they should be.
Pope Francis said so in his 2015 encyclical on the environment and human ecology. Now, the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), a nondenominational organization committed to “creation care,” is promoting the argument that if you value life from its conception, you should value a clean Earth for the rest of a child’s life and for future children.
“When we talk about creation care in pro-life terms, in caring for our children, both born and unborn, 97 to 98 percent of people get it,” says Rev. Mitch Hescox, president and chief executive of the Pennsylvania-based Evangelical Environmental Network. “That’s one of the reasons that I believe our community is growing to take more action, to protect God’s creations and to protect children.”
Associating "pro-life" with "pro-environment" is just one branch of religious environmentalism, a movement that frames conservation in religious terms. The idea has been around for decades, but has only started to gain traction among evangelicals recently, especially among Millennials. Still, most Americans do not yet associate climate change with religion and morality, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
Groups like the Evangelical Environmentalism Network hope to change that. If they are successful, it could have a major impact on the way much of America views the issue, as evangelicals are estimated to make up nearly a third of the population. But some sociologists and historians doubt that reframing climate change as a moral responsibility can reverse deep-seated skepticism among some conservative Christians about environmentalism, especially among older generations of evangelicals who have associated it with the culture wars over abortion and same-sex rights.
“[The religious environmental movement] doesn’t appear to have gained a lot of traction,” says Stephen Ellingson, a sociologist at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., and author of “To Care for Creation: The Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement.” “For a small number, it is primarily a moral and religious issue, but for many it’s not seen that way. It’s not seen as important, I think, because the environment is so highly politicized ... in some ways, it’s framed really technically, as lobbying, litigation, and legislation.”
The Evangelical Environmental Network and other faith-based organizations do not try to separate climate change from politics. Both EEN and the San Francisco-based Interfaith Power & Light, which encourages environmental stewardship among religious groups, were on Capitol Hill the past two weeks. But the groups try to downplay partisanship by emphasizing a moral obligation for action.
For Mr. Hescox, religion provides the “biblical imperative” to act, while so-called market-based solutions are the answer on how to achieve results. Since EEN is anti-abortion, he says, it believes all lives must be cared for from the moment of conception. But the only way he believes he and other conservative Republicans can get on board is through solutions such as cap-and-trade programs or a carbon fee and fee dividend.
“It’s the only way we’re going to breach the chasm to conservatives,” he says.
Anti-abortionists have been highlighting the threats that pollution is thought to pose to unborn children for a dozen or so years, says Hescox. Rev. Jim Ball, the past president of the network, tied the rights of the unborn to the fight against mercury pollution.
Pope Francis also integrated environmentalism and abortion in his second encyclical, “Laudato si’,” when he wrote that environmental stewardship is simply “incompatible with the justification of abortion.” But the pope seemed to argue that people who care about endangered species and the melting of polar ice caps could not also support abortion, as Crux reported. The Evangelical Environmental Network’s argument appears to fit more into the religious environmental movement, linking morality to the environment, not the other way around.
Many Christian denominations have long supported the modern environmental movement, in the 1960s and 1970s. Not evangelicals, however, writes Mark Stoll, a historian at Texas Tech University who specializes on religion and environmentalism.
“In the late 1970s they seized on the notion of the ‘culture wars’ and lumped environmentalism together with abortion, feminism, gay and lesbian people’s rights, and secular humanism as contrary to Christianity,” he writes. “Hostile to environmentalism ever since, evangelicals cast even the solid science on global warming as a conspiracy against freedom and faith promulgated in schools and universities.”
This skepticism has continued until the present day. In 2014, The Pew Research Center found only 28 percent of white evangelicals said “climate change is occurring mostly because of human activity such as burning of fossil fuels,” the lowest of any religious group Pew surveyed.
Those attitudes have softened among some millennial evangelicals, led by the likes of Jonathan Merritt, author of “Green Like God: Unlocking the Divine Plan for Our Planet.”
A pro-life, pro-environment association, then, is about gaining a foothold among mainstream evangelicals and older generations, says Dr. Ellingson at Hamilton College.
“It’s almost like reasoning by analogy. ‘It’s like one of those issues for us. Then I can go ahead and support it,” he tells The Christian Science Monitor in a phone interview.
Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and political science professor at Texas Tech University in Lubbock and an evangelical Christian, says EEN’s argument makes more sense than the “cognitive dissonance” she describes among some conservatives.
“So often it seems like pro-life stops when you’re born. If you’re really pro-life, you should be pro-life from conception to death,” she says, mentioning United Nations efforts to calculate the human costs of climate change.
This strategy is being used in other conservative circles as well. Susan Bratton, an environmental science professor at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, says many conservative Protestants emphasize a humanitarian need to stop climate change. This includes helping communities under threat from natural disasters and food shortages. Rev. Canon Sally Bingham, president and founder of Interfaith Power & Light, says that when she visits conservative congregations in the South, she does not mention climate change. Instead, she focuses her message on clean air, clean water, and a clean environment.
Two years ago, in 2015, this moral framing of climate change had not yet resonated with most Americans, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. In the spring of that year, 10 percent of Americans viewed global warming as a religious issue, 13 percent viewed it as a spiritual issue, and about 36 percent viewed it as a moral issue. But if this reframing does take hold, it could have a widespread impact, according to the study’s authors. Americans tend to be more religious than citizens in many other industrialized nations, they write.

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Adani May Face Fine Over Sediment Released In Floodwaters After Cyclone Debbie

The Guardian - 

Queensland environment department says it is considering action against mining giant with fines of up to $3.8m possible
Satellite imagery released by the Queensland government showing the Caley Valley wetlands, which adjoin Adani’s Abbot Point coal terminal, before and after the floodwater release. Photograph: Mackay Conservation Group
Adani faces a possible multimillion-dollar fine for environmental breaches over floodwaters released from its Queensland coal port after Cyclone Debbie.
The Queensland environment department said it would consider “compliance action” against Adani over discharges of water containing more than eight times the level of sediment allowed from Abbot Point terminal.
Under a four-day temporary emissions licence during and after the cyclone, Adani was authorised to release water containing up to 100mg of sediment per litre.
However, Adani’s own report to the department said on 30 March, the final day of its licence, it released water from the northern side of the port with 806mg per litre, the department’s director general, Jim Reeves, said.
Reeves said the department would “consider appropriate action in response to this non-compliance in accordance with its enforcement guidelines”.
Reeves said the “serious penalties” for corporations causing environmental harm through licence breaches included fines of up to $3.8m for deliberate breaches and $2.7m for accidents.
Adani has rejected claims by conservationists that coal-laden water has contaminated the nearby Caley Valley wetlands and possibly coastal waters near the Great Barrier Reef marine park. But the department is yet to rule out the contamination, ahead of its own test results expected next week.
Conservation groups said the breach showed Adani could not be trusted to operate Australia’s largest coalmine for export through Abbot Point and called on the government to seek the maximum penalty.
Peter McCallum, of Mackay Conservation Group, claimed his visit with government scientists to the site last week showed it was “evident Adani had allowed coal to pollute the sensitive Caley Valley wetlands”.
“We visited the site with department officials, a good month after the cyclone, and it was clear there was still coal present in the wetlands,” he said.
McCallum said sediments “which appear to be laden with coal have been identified within the Caley Valley wetlands adjacent to Adani’s stormwater system outlet”.
Imogen Zethoven, the campaign director for the Australian Marine Conservation Society, said: “In the wetland, we saw what looks like coal sediment.”
Reeves said Adani, which was obliged to report “non-compliant” water releases, had told the department it “did not enter the Caley Valley wetland”.
Adani had advised that further investigations by port management showed “no coal-laden water entered any marine environment”, he said.
The department “nonetheless” took sand samples on the beach below to see if coal was present, with test results expected from next Monday, Reeves said.
It was also continuing to investigate possible environmental contamination from the port after aerial imagery from the State Disaster Coordination Centre on 6 April suggested sediment-laden water was flowing from the port into the wetland.
The Queensland Resources Council’s chief executive, the former federal government minister Ian Macfarlane, has accused media of “fake news” by reporting contamination claims by conservationists.
Adani has previously said it believed it acted within its licence.
Tim Seelig, of the Queensland Conservation Council, said it was “a deeply troubling situation, which requires a full explanation and enforcement action”.
“For the Adani Abbot Point bulk coal facility itself to fess up to releasing heavily sediment-contaminated water shows how serious the matter is,” he said. “What we need to know is where did it go and was it released into the marine environment?”
Zethoven said an “urgent independent and transparent investigation into Adani’s coal discharge is critical”.
Reeves said: “I want to assure all Queenslanders that as the environmental regulator EHP takes these matters very seriously.
“EHP will prepare a full report on its investigations, which will provide the basis for decisions on what, if any, compliance action will occur.”
An Adani spokesman was contacted for comment.

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