Lethal Heating: 05/22/17

22/05/2017

Australia’s Rural Youth, In Split From Elders, Seek To Limit Emissions

New York Times - Ariel Bogle

A wind farm in Warrnambool, Australia. In a country as economically reliant on coal as Australia, alternative forms of energy and climate change debates are deeply divisive topics. Credit Mark Dadswell/Getty Images

SPRING RIDGE, Australia — Mark Coulton and his daughter, Claire, both believe there is a future in rural living. They are both active members of Australia’s National Party, which traditionally represents farmers and voters outside the main cities who lean conservative, and they agree on most things — but not on how to deal with climate change.

Mr. Coulton, 59, thinks measures like carbon trading are “symbolic things that really won’t have any impact.” Claire Coulton, 33, supports carbon trading as a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and worries that Australia’s economic dependence on coal could undermine her future.

“I think it’s something all young people should be looking at with real interest,” she said, “because if there are negative effects of opening up that coal mine, our generation will be the one to bear the brunt of it.”

The elder Coulton is a lawmaker in the Australian Parliament, representing the electoral division of Parkes in New South Wales, and his daughter belongs to the party’s youth wing, but their disagreement is not limited to family debate. Last month, the regional youth wing, the NSW Young Nationals, including Ms. Coulton, went against party leaders at an annual meeting and voted to endorse a plan that would place a cost on emissions, known as an emissions intensity plan.

Their vote is provocative. After being passed by the young party members, the plan has been added to the agenda at the state party’s annual conference, which starts Thursday. If it is debated and put to a vote, it could become National Party policy in the state.

The Young Nationals’ push for an emissions plan is one way the issue of climate change is contributing to generational clashes in Australia, the United States and elsewhere.

In the United States, where attitudes on carbon pricing and other measures are divided mostly along party lines, age still matters. A 2015 Pew report found 52 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 considered global warming a very serious problem, compared with 38 percent of those 50 and older. The younger group was also more likely to support United States participation in efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Conservatives globally have been the party of doubt when it comes to global warming, but the debate playing out at the Coulton kitchen table suggests the younger generation may shift direction.

Claire Coulton and her father, Mark Coulton, are both members of Australia’s conservative National Party. But they have differing views on climate change. Credit David Maurice Smith for The New York Times

Many of the NSW Young Nationals’ more than 300 members, ages 16 to 35, see their role as pushing their leaders even as they support whatever the party ultimately decides.

Ms. Coulton, a former high school English teacher and political staff member, grew up on a farm between Warialda and Gravesend, about 300 miles north of Sydney. She now works in Sydney for a rural charity, though she says she does not plan to stay in the city long.

Her vote for the emissions intensity plan, she said, was born of her belief in the resilience of rural life — a life she hopes to return to. “Young regional people are really concerned about climate change,” she said. “It’s not just inner-city students.”

An emissions intensity plan sets an electricity industry baseline for how much carbon dioxide can be emitted per unit of electricity. Coal-power generators emitting above that benchmark can buy credits from passive emission providers like wind farms.

In Australia, one of the world’s biggest coal exporters, the mention of any such plan is politically explosive. In 2011, Tony Abbott, then the conservative opposition leader of the Liberal Party, waged a relentless campaign against a carbon pricing plan by the Labor Party, which passed. He continued to fight against the plan after becoming prime minister in 2013, warning of skyrocketing energy bills, and with assistance from the National Party his government repealed it in 2014.

And their success at framing the initiative as a “great big new tax” has left Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull unable to even whisper the idea without political cost.

History suggests the broader National Party, which is part of Mr. Turnbull’s governing coalition, will also be hard to shift.

Ms. Coulton’s father boasts of blocking a previous carbon pricing plan by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2008, and his party is generally supportive of the coal industry. His electoral division of Parkes is bigger than Arizona and is one of the country’s poorest areas. He said he spent about 800 hours driving around the area last year, visiting with voters and talking about their concerns.

They worried about water, education and disadvantage, he said. If global warming did come up, most proposed solutions were seen as leading to higher power bills. “Representing a lot of poor people, they don’t have the luxury of just paying more,” Mr. Coulton said. He added that members of the Young Nationals, who were likely to be better educated and higher paid, might not feel the same financial pinch.

Coal terminals in Mackay, Australia, last month. Some younger Australians worry that the country’s dependence on coal could undermine their futures. Credit Daryl Wright/Reuters

Some young farmers in his district disagree. Anika Molesworth, 29, whose family has a 10,000-acre sheep farm near Broken Hill, said she had raised the issue of global warming with Mr. Coulton. “As a young farmer, climate change is the issue of our generation,” she said in an email. “I don’t support any party that discounts science and jeopardizes the rights and well-being of future generations.”

Generational disagreements also emerge when the party’s youth wing pushes other socially progressive issues. In 2015, it voted in favor of same-sex marriage, but Mr. Coulton said his constituents largely opposed it. “I’ve got a lot of faith in the young ones coming through, but I think they get influenced a lot by the schools, universities and TV,” he said.

Some Nationals share his view. Don Hubbard, 57, a cattle and crop farmer in the state’s fertile Liverpool Plains agricultural area, also disapproved of the influence of a so-called green agenda on rural youth. Both Mr. Hubbard and his 28-year-old daughter, Sarah, oppose an emissions intensity plan and don’t believe climate change is caused by human activity.

Mr. Hubbard said the Young Nationals would come around to his view once they had businesses of their own. “Call me a cynic if you like, but I think my generation, we’re the last ones to come out of the school system that didn’t have this stuff pumped into them, force-fed day after day, about climate change,” he said.

Not far from the Hubbards’ farm, train carriages rattle through the countryside carrying grain and coal. The rich black soil of these plains is covered in cotton and sorghum, but underneath run deep coal seams. A protest over fossil fuels mining is never far away in Australia, and the Hubbards are fighting new mines near their prime farming land.

In late March, an unexpected rainstorm tore through their 10,000-acre property, drowning valuable sunflower crops and leaving deep gashes in the earth. For the Hubbards, it was just the cruelty of weather, unpredictable as ever.

As they bulldozed the paddocks back into submission, Mr. Hubbard said he saw carbon trading, in a resource-rich country like Australia, like “tying both hands behind your back.”

Alex Fitzpatrick, 21, the policy officer who proposed the emissions plan at the Young Nationals’ conference last month, said that an emissions intensity plan could help Australia reach its Paris climate agreement target: an emissions reduction of 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Ms. Fitzpatrick said she was eager to make her case at the annual conference this month. “We will push this because it’s something we believe in.”

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'Maximum Damage': What's Going Wrong In Our Deep Blue And Warming Sea

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Taking a dip at Sydney's beaches remains an attractive option even this far into the autumn, and the projections of climate change mean you soon won't have to be an ice-berger to swim year round.
"Sydney will have tropical waters by between 2040-60," Adriana Verges, a marine ecologist at the University of NSW, said. "Summers [will be] above 25, winter 19 degrees."

Regions such as these 12-metre strands of giant kelp off Tasmania are under threat as waters warm. Photo: Craig Sanderson

Those celebrating the future demise of the wetsuit, though, might want to take a look beyond the shallows.
A paper published in Geophysical Research Letters this month highlighted the extent of warmth wasn't being captured by the readily available surface temperature measurements.
"Satellites are not getting the full picture," Moninya Roughan, an associate professor at UNSW's Coastal and Regional Oceanography Lab and co-author of the paper said. "They are missing the peak and intensity, and sometimes the duration [of marine heat waves]."
Professor Roughan and her colleague Amandine Schaeffer used data from two offshore moorings to create one of the first long-term assessments of temperatures from the surface to the seabed as deep as 100 metres.
Marine heatwaves off Sydney – based on at least five consecutive days when temperatures were in the top 10 per cent of readings – were found to last as long as a month. The average duration was between eight to 12 days.
The biggest average anomalies were at 50-metre depths and the most extreme temperatures were as much as 6 degrees above the norm, based on two data sets covering seven and 25 years.

Tropical fish such as rabbitfish help keep seaweed off coral reefs but shift the ecological balance when they move into kelp forests.

"Weeks [of heatwaves] are a long time when you're a marine organism, a small creature, at the bottom of the food chain," Professor Roughan said.
While the data periods were too short to identify longer term climate trends, an abundance of research suggested marine hot spots were likely to get hotter and there would be worsening impacts.
The Great Barrier Reef was an area of much-publicised concern, where two warm summers in a row had triggered unprecedented coral bleaching; about two-thirds of the reef was affected.
But the East Australian Current skirting the eastern seaboard including Victoria and Tasmania was also changing, extending southwards about 350 kilometres in 60 years.
"The predictions and the models all indicate that [the EAC] will only continue to intensify," Dr Verges said.
An impact of the so-called tropicalisation of temperate waters was that herbivorous species, such as rabbitfish, silver drummers and sea urchins, were moving into rich ecosystems such as kelp forests.
"They are essentially destroying the habitat that is the foundation for the entire ecological community," Dr Verges said.
Bursts of heat can also take their toll. The extreme event off Western Australia in the 2010-11 summer – the worst recorded in 160 years of records – killed about 150 kilometres of the kelp's range, which had not recovered, Dr Verges said.
"We should be as concerned about the loss of kelp as we are for the loss of corals," she said, adding the 8000-kilometre stretch of kelp forests in Australia's southern coastal waters, with its abalone, lobster and other industries, generated $10 billion a year in economic activity.
Knowing more about the extent of heatwaves –and how they are changing – will be important to coastal communities everywhere, Professor Roughan said.
"They are the most productive regions on earth … and so maximum ecosystems damage will also occur," she said.
Scientists said the research benefited from having long-term uninterrupted data sets supported by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy and the Integrated Marine Observing System, the type of programs the CSIRO sought to cut last year.

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The World's Poorest And Most Vulnerable Want Climate Action

I DN-InDepthNews* - Ramesh Jaura

A beach at Funafuti atoll, Tuvalu, on a sunny day. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

BONN (IDN) – The world's 48 poorest countries that are particularly vulnerable to climate change are profoundly concerned whether "substantive progress" will be made in the months ahead on implementing the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement in all its aspects.
This was emphasised by Chair of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) group, Gebru Jember Endalew of Ethiopia, as delegates from 140 countries closed the two-week session of the United Nations climate change negotiations on May 18 in Bonn.
The LDCs are a group of countries that have been classified by the UN as "least developed" in terms of their low gross national income (GNI), their weak human assets and their high degree of economic vulnerability.
"The LDCs are pleased that some valuable progress was made during this conference but we are not moving fast enough," Endalew said in a media release. "This November at COP23 we must make considerable progress towards finalising the 'rulebook' that will implement the Paris Agreement without a last minute rush."
COP23 is the 23rd session of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) scheduled for November 6-17 in Bonn, capital of post-war West Germany until re-unification of two German states in 1990. Meanwhile, the city hosts some 20 UN agencies and secretariats.
Significant progress in realising the Paris climate accord is inevitable because climate change impacts are already striking all corners of the world, and are anticipated to grow substantially over the next few decades, Endalew warned.
"The longer we wait, the more costly adaptation, loss and damage, and mitigation will become. We risk undermining our efforts to eradicate poverty and keep in line with our sustainable development goals," he added.
The LDCs are in fact concerned that the international community is still far from addressing actual finance needs of developing countries, whose Nationally Determined Contributions underline the need for "trillions not billions". Mobilising climate finance is crucial for LDCs and other developing countries to implement the Paris Agreement," the LDC Chair added.
Against this backdrop, Endalew emphasised that the global response to climate change must be consistent with the best available science. "We must limit warming to 1.5˚C to protect lives and livelihoods, and this means peaking global emissions in 2020. Less than three years remain to bend the emissions curve down."
With this in view, the LDCs are calling on all Parties "to redouble their efforts to tackle climate change with the urgency the climate crisis demands." Going a step further, they are warning that "the livelihoods of present and future generations hang in the balance and depend on all countries taking fair and ambitious action."
Closing the May conference that marked a staging-post for COP23, Fiji Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, the in-coming president of the November summit, pleaded for "a grand coalition to accelerate climate action before 2020 and beyond between civil society, the scientific community, the private sector and all levels of government, including cities and regions."
Among Bainimarama's priorities are: "building greater resilience for all vulnerable nations to the impacts of climate change, including extreme weather events and rising sea levels" and "boosting access to climate adaptation finance, renewable energy, clean water and affordable climate risk and disaster insurance and to promote sustainable agriculture."
The island state of Fiji belongs to the 79 countries that comprise the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group. Together they make up more than half of the signatories to the Paris Agreement. Nearly 40 states of the ACP Group are LDCs.
Despite prevailing uncertainty derived from the U.S. "reviewing" its climate change posture, the ACP Group and European Union have reaffirmed their strong and steadfast commitment to full implementation of the agreement, urging all partners to keep up the momentum created in 2015.
The ACP Group and EU have agreed common positions on the next steps to implement the Paris Agreement and strengthened cooperation to promote low-emission, climate-resilient development.
As an example of this increased cooperation, the EU has announced support of Euro 800 million for the Pacific region up to 2020, with around half earmarked for climate action. The EU will also provide Euro 3 million to support Fiji's COP23 Presidency.
European Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy Miguel Arias Cañete said: "Today more than ever, Europe stands by its long-term partners most vulnerable to climate change. We, developed and developing countries together, will defend the Paris Agreement. We are all in, and our joint commitment to this Agreement today is as in Paris: irreversible and non-negotiable."
The ACP Secretariat in Brussels quoted its Secretary General Patrick Gomes saying: "The longstanding, ongoing cooperation between the ACP Group and the EU shows we are serious about addressing the impacts of climate change. Implementing the Paris Agreement is not only about ensuring the very survival of the 79 ACP countries, but also about building sustainable, resilient and prosperous economies and societies worldwide."
In Bonn the ACP Group and EU stressed the need to finalise the Paris Agreement work programme by 2018. This will be vital to ensure all countries can swiftly put their national climate plans into action, in order to contribute to the global goals. They also underlined the importance of making detailed preparations for the Facilitative Dialogue to be held next year.
This dialogue will be a key moment to establish a shared understanding of the impact of all parties' contributions and the collective progress being made as well as to look into solutions that can allow us to achieve our collective goal.
The ACP countries and EU also gave their support to the consultations held by the outgoing Moroccan presidency and incoming Fijian presidency. The discussions aim at developing a clear proposal on the design of the 2018 Facilitative Dialogue, to be presented at the COP23 summit. [IDN-InDepthNews – 21 May 2017]

*IDN is the flagship agency of the International Press Syndicate.

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