Lethal Heating: 06/20/17

20/06/2017

'Retrograde': Emissions On Wrong Trajectory To Hit Paris Goal, Report Finds

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Australia's greenhouse gas emissions could return to 2005 levels by 2030 without new government action, contrary to the scenario modelled by the Finkel review, according to a new report by respected analyst Hugh Saddler.
Under Australia's Paris climate commitments, total emissions are to drop 26-28 per cent on 2005 by the end of the next decade, a pace the Chief Scientist Alan Finkel has modelled for the electricity sector in this review.

Another headache for Turnbull

Questions have been raised about Malcolm Turnbull's leadership amid backbench angst over the Finkel report into energy security and prices.

While the reductions since 2005 have achieved about half of the annual reductions needed to hit the 2030 goal of 430-442 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, they have come mostly from reduced land clearing in Queensland and NSW. Both states, though, are likely to see emissions rebound from 2013 lows as restrictions ease.
"In the absence of further policy action, Australia's total emissions will increase from the [2015 level] of 525.6 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent to between 571 and 616 million tonnes by 2030," Dr Saddler said in the first National Energy Emissions Audit report prepared for The Australia Institute.

Coal's role in the electricity mix points to an increase before a later drop, according to the Finkel review. Photo: Glen McCurtayne

Transport emissions, in particular, had risen to 95 million tonnes by 2015, compared to 82 million in 2005. "Does anyone believe that in the next 13 years they can be reduced to 59 million tonnes?" the report said.
"The inescapable conclusion is that much – if not most – of the required emissions must come from electricity generation," Dr Saddler, an honorary associate professor at the Australian National University, said.
The Finkel review, though, only modelled a "par" reduction in emissions, tracking the overall 28 per cent drop pledged to 2030.
Dr Finkel forecast renewable energy to rise to a 42 per cent share of electricity by 2030 from about 17 per cent now. He also recommended such energy sources come with back-up "dispatchable" capacity to enable supply when the wind isn't blowing or the sun shining.

Chief Scientist Alan Finkel forecast renewable energy to rise to a 42 per cent share of electricity by 2030 from about 17 per cent now. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

That move, though, would make renewable projects more costly and complex, slowing their uptake, Dr Saddler said. The big three "gentailers" – EnergyAustralia, AGL and Origin – would also be better placed to increase their market share of generation and retailing.
"It's a very retrograde step," Dr Saddler said.
(See chart below of fossil fuel emissions trajectory in Australia since 2011.)

Fossil fuel emissions trajectory in Australia since 2011 Illustration: Supplied

For its part, the government remains confident it can meet its 2030 targets.
"We beat our first Kyoto target by 128 million tonnes and we're on track to meet and beat our 2020 target by 224 million tonnes," Josh Frydenberg, the environment and energy minister, said.
"We are on track to meet our 2030 target given the level of progress we have made to date and when you compare it to how these targets have been met in the past," he said.

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Why Did An Enormous Chunk Of West Antarctica Suddenly Start Melting?

Gizmodo - Maddie Stone

300,000 square miles is nearly twice the area of California. It's difficult to visualise a space that vast, but go ahead and give it a try.
Now, imagine this California plus-sized chunk of land is covered in thousands of feet of ice. Then, all of a sudden, that frozen fortress becomes a wading pool.
In January 2016, over the course of just a few weeks, a 300,000 square mile chunk of the West Antarctic ice sheet started turning to slush, in one of the largest melt-outs ever recorded.
Scientists with the ARM West Antarctic Radiation Experiment (AWARE), who reported the epic defrost in Nature Communications last week, believe it was related to the 2015-2016 El Niño.
Troublingly, they think massive melts like this could be a harbinger of the future — but more research is needed before we can be sure.
The West Antarctic ice sheet has been called the "weak underbelly" of the Antarctic continent, and for good reason: Its glaciers, which contain enough frozen water to raise global sea levels by at least 3.05m, are shedding mass rapidly as the planet heats up.
The prevailing wisdom is that warm ocean waters are weakening West Antarctica's floating ice shelves from below, and causing inland ice sheets to detach from the underlying land surface at their so-called "grounding line." But a recent survey found evidence for ephemeral lakes and river networks across Antarctica, raising concerns that surface melting could also play a significant role in ice sheet disintegration.
Summertime melting has been observed across the West Antarctic ice sheet since satellite record-keeping began, but so far, such events have been infrequent and relatively small-scale.
That's why, when AWARE researchers examined satellite imagery and meteorological data collected in January 2016, they were kind of blown away by what they saw.
Over the course of two weeks, a vast swath of the Ross Ice shelf — the largest floating ice platform on Earth — started melting at its surface as temperatures hovered well above the freezing mark. Scientists stationed on the scene at the time even reported low-level clouds and rainfall, which probably helped trap heat near the ground.
The researchers think this unseasonably warm air was due primarily to the powerful 2015-2016 El Niño.
As they write in their paper, the El Niño climate pattern, which starts with high sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, tends to promote the advection of high pressure air masses over this part of Antarctica.
But they're not sure — after all, the comparably-strong 1997-98 El Niño event didn't cause widespread melting in West Antarctica.
And although the data points to a correlation between El Niño and melty ice in West Antarctica, that doesn't necessarily imply causation.
Regardless, the authors warn that the melt event, one of the largest ever recorded in the Ross Sea sector, could be a sign of what's to come as human carbon emissions continue to heat up the atmosphere.
"Given the role of El Niño-related atmospheric circulation in promoting warm air advection to the Ross sector, a greater number of extreme El Niño events," as are projected due to climate change, "could foster more frequent major melt events in this area," the researchers write.
Alison Banwell, a glaciologist who was involved in unrelated field work in the the far northwestern corner of the Ross Ice Shelf in January 2016, told Gizmodo she found the study "very interesting" but cautioned about jumping to conclusions.
"I agree with the authors that the predicted increase in the number of El Niño events may expose some parts of the WAIS to more frequent major melt events, but equally, other parts of WAIS may experience colder than usual spells of weather during these times," she said, noting that the region she was stationed in last January experienced cooler-than-average temperatures.
"I suggest that more research is required to investigate how El Niño influences regional variations in climate across Antarctica."
If nothing else, the findings point to yet another potential factor to keep an eye on as we watch Antarctica transform before our eyes.
From hundreds of miles above the Earth to computer screens thousands of miles away, scientists are monitoring this frozen landscape, and what they're seeing worries them.

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Trump's Climate Snub: Hold The Outrage, We're Just As Bad

Fairfax - Sarah Gill*

It's hard to put your finger on the most startling thing about Donald Trump's decision to give the one-finger salute to the Paris climate agreement, but one of its more incredible effects is that it finally knocks Australia off its perch as global climate pariah sans pareil. Which is quite extraordinary really, when you consider that the septuagenarian plutocrat currently passing for Leader of the Free World has only been officially meddling in global climate deals for 200-odd days, while we've been assiduously shirking our responsibilities and thwarting international negotiations for nigh on two decades.
If you can tear your gaze away, for a moment, from our woebegone chief scientist Alan Finkel – the singularly unfortunate fellow tasked with advising the Coalition on how to curb emissions without actually resorting to effective policies to do so – then think back to the heady days of Australia's first foray into disingenuous climate change negotiations: the Kyoto climate conference of 1997, where the Aussie delegation was 'stacked' with representatives of the fossil fuel industry and our negotiating tactics comprehensivelycheesed off the European Union. Was it because we wanted a free ride? Or was it that, after almost derailing the consensus in order to secure a special deal, we decided to stick it to the rest of the industrialised world by not ratifying the Kyoto Protocol after all? Hard to say.
Illustration: Trump flips the bird to the world

Though Australia's climate policies are woeful, we're still in the Paris Climate Accord, unlike the USA. Artist: Matt Davidson.

Trump, meanwhile, was still dithering about trashing Miss Universe Alicia Machado and honing his don't-bother-me-with-the-details management style. And if you want to talk about deal-making – the celebrated topic of Trump's The Art of the Deal, his favourite tome after the Bible with gems like "If you're going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big" – then consider this: Australia rocked up at a climate change conference aimed squarely at securing the agreement of developed countries to reduce emissions and walked away with a leave pass to crank them up by 8 per cent.
And that's not all, either. Because at the 11th hour, we also held out for a special clause to allow emissions from land clearing to be included in the agreement, which inflated our 1990 baseline by 30 per cent and guaranteed we'd hit our 2012 target even if emissions from other sectors went gangbusters – which they pretty much did. So when it comes to doing deals and putting one's short-term economic interests ahead of the greater good, The Donald could learn a thing or two from us right there.

Illustration: Matt Davidson

That, of course, was just the beginning of our stunning metamorphosis to international climate change persona non grata, and it's been a downhill run ever since. Just tally, for instance, the number of times our former environment minister crowed about how Australia didn't just meet, but indeed beat the aforesaid emissions reduction goal – a goal that didn't actually require us to reduce emissions as such, and in any case was set in a manner that gave us a dastardly handicap compared to everyone else in the running. You can just imagine the smug satisfaction in cabinet, and in industry boardrooms around the nation, the chest thumping – our second favourite national sport in the arena of international diplomacy after shirtfronting.
Greg Hunt's snazzy three word slogan – "meet and beat" – was more recently appropriated by the current minister, Josh Frydenberg, to drive home the fact that we'll also probably exceed our 2020 target of 5 per cent below 2000 levels; which is equivalent to a fantastically paltry half a per cent reduction on 1990 levels and in itself demonstrates conclusively that Australia has lost none of its chutzpah when it comes to short-changing the international community.
What Frydenberg fails to mention – a bit like Trump not mentioning the Jews in his Holocaust remembrance statement – is that Australia's absolute emissions in 2020 will actually be higher than they were in 2000. As a feat of creative accounting, not to mention a PR coup, it's the kind of nifty anecdote that would be right at home in Trump's scintillating 2007 offering Think Big and Kick Ass – in Business and Life.
Moving on. Australia doesn't limit itself to downgrading its own climate ideals; we also have a proud tradition of stomping on the ambitions of our Pacific Island neighbours – that group of states who are perennially, some would say obsessively, concerned with sea level rise. Not just stomping on them, come to think of it, but making fun of them into the bargain.

President Donald Trump announcing he is pulling the US out of the Paris climate accord. Photo: AP

Three months after Peter Dutton's crack about "water lapping at your door", our take-no-hostages style of diplomacy didn't go unnoticed at the Paris conference, where Australia had the singular honour of being excluded from the "high ambition coalition" because, as one astute observer noted, it's "difficult to be in a high ambition coalition if you're a low ambition country".
Do we care, though? Not greatly. Or only inasmuch as it limits our opportunities for white-anting – another of our unsung talents, and one we've deployed with gay abandon against the Pacific Island Forum to mute their calls for stronger global targets, the logical consequence of which is a moratorium on coal.

We have had a reputation as the world's most despised climate laggard. Photo: AP

Which brings us, at last, to Adani. We were bound to end up here eventually, weren't we? Because, the Carmichael coal mine, and its 4.7 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions that our former environment minister has essentially characterised as someone else's problem, must surely constitute one of our more spectacular attempts to turn our backs on global climate change. And as deals go, the Adani project – built on a narrative of jobs (wilfully overstated), addressing third world energy poverty (conclusively refuted), and a royalties revenue stream so spectacular that the Queensland Premier has elected to keep it under wraps – puts most of them in the shade.
So we'd better watch out. Because, two decades on from Kyoto, our lust for coal – underscored by Finkel's modeling which shows coal supplying one quarter of our electricity just when we ought to behitting net zero emissions - could firmly re-establish our reputation as the world's most contemptible climate laggard.

*Sarah Gill is a Fairfax Media columnist.

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