11/10/2017

After The Storm: How Political Attacks On Renewables Elevates Attention Paid To Climate Change

The Conversation - 

AAP/David Mariuz
This time last year, Australia was getting over a media storm about renewables, energy policy and climate change. The media storm was caused by a physical storm: a mid-latitude cyclone that hit South Australia on September 29 and set in train a series of events that is still playing itself out.
The events include:
In one sense, the Finkel Review was a response to the government’s concerns about “energy security”. But it also managed to successfully respond to the way energy policy had become a political plaything, as exemplified by the attacks on South Australia.
New research on the media coverage that framed the energy debate that has ensued over the past year reveals some interesting turning points in how Australia’s media report on climate change.
While extreme weather events are the best time to communicate climate change – the additional energy humans are adding to the climate is on full display – the South Australian event was used to attack renewables rather than the carbonisation of the atmosphere. Federal MPs hijacked people’s need to understand the reason for the blackout “by simply swapping climate change with renewables”.
However, the research shows that, ironically, MPs who invited us to “look over here” at the recalcitrant renewables – and not at climate-change-fuelled super-storms – managed to make climate change reappear.
The study searched for all Australian newspaper articles that mentioned either a storm or a cyclone in relation to South Australia that had been published in the ten days either side of the event. This returned 591 articles. Most of the relevant articles were published after the storm, with warnings of the cyclone beforehand.
Some of the standout findings include:
  • 51% of articles were about the power outage and 38% were about renewables, but 12% of all articles connected these two.
  • 20% of articles focused on the event being politicised by politicians.
  • 9% of articles raised climate change as a force in the event and the blackouts.
  • 10% of articles blamed the blackouts on renewables.
  • Of all of the articles linking power outages to renewables 46% were published in News Corp and 14% were published in Fairfax.
  • Narratives that typically substituted any possibility of a link to climate change, included the “unstoppable power of nature” (18%), failure of planning (5.25%), and triumph of humanity (5.6%).
Only 9% of articles discussed climate change. Of these, 73% presented climate change positively, 21% were neutral, and 6% negative. But, for the most part, climate change was linked to the conversation around renewables: there was a 74% overlap. 36% of articles discussing climate change linked it to the intensification of extreme weather events.
There was also a strong correlation between the positive and negative discussion of climate change and the ownership of newspapers.
The starkest contrast was between the two largest Australian newspaper groups. Of all the sampled articles that mentioned climate change, News Corp was the only group to has a negative stance on climate change (at 50% of articles), but still with 38% positive. Fairfax was 90% positive and 10% neutral about climate change.
Positive/negative stance of articles covering climate change by percentage.
Given that more than half of all articles discussed power outages, the cyclone in a sense competed with renewables as a news item. Both have a bearing on power supply and distribution. But, ironically, it was renewables that put climate change on the news agenda – not the cyclone.
Of the articles discussing renewables, 67% were positive about renewables with only 33% “negative” and blaming them for the power outages.
In this way, the negative frame that politicians put on renewable energy may have sparked debate that was used to highlight the positives of renewable energy and what’s driving it: reduced emissions.
But perhaps the most interesting finding is the backlash by news media against MPs’ attempts to politicise renewables.
19.63% of all articles in the sample had called out (mainly federal) MPs for politicising the issue and using South Australians’ misfortune as a political opportunity. This in turn was related to the fact that, of all the articles discussing renewables, 67% were positive about renewables with only 33% supporting MPs’ attempts to blame them for the power outages.
In this way, while many MPs had put renewables on the agenda by denigrating them, most journalists were eager to cover the positive side of renewables.
Nevertheless, the way MPs sought to dominate the news agenda over the storm did take away from discussion of climate science and the causes of the cyclone. Less than 4% of articles referred to extreme weather intensifying as a trend.
This is problematic. It means that, with a few exceptions, Australia’s climate scientists are not able to engage with the public in key periods after extreme weather events.
When MPs, with co-ordinated media campaigns, enjoy monopoly holdings in the attention economy of news cycles, science communication and the stories of climate that could be told are often relegated to other media.

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Our Changing Climate Mind-Set

New York Times - Robert Jay Lifton*

A scene in eastern Puerto Rico after the passage of Hurricane Maria. Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
Climate images have never been able to convey our full planetary danger until now.
The extraordinary recent four-punch sequence of hurricanes — Harvey, Irma, Jose and Maria — threatened the lives of millions of people, obliterated their homes and has raised doubts that some places will ever recover. The rest of us have a newly immediate sense of catastrophes of biblical proportions. As meaning-hungry creatures we search for explanations.
No wonder some have embraced the apocalyptic narrative of total destruction by an angry deity. And no wonder that climate-change rejecters like President Trump have increasing difficulty defending their position.
Even before the hurricanes we had experienced a drumbeat of storms, floods, droughts and wildfires that rendered global warming not just a remote future danger but an immediate one. This fear was reinforced by the recent hurricanes, which provided imagery equivalent to the danger, imagery equivalent to nuclear disaster.
When we viewed photographs and film of the annihilated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we sensed that the world could be ended by nuclear weapons. Now these hurricanes have conveyed a similar feeling of world-ending, having left whole islands, once alive in their beauty and commerce, in ruin.
But does this mean that we attribute this menace to global warming and to human contributions to that warming? My answer here is yes and no and yes again.
Yes: Scientists warn that hurricanes are made worse by the warming of the atmosphere and the oceans and by the increased storm surge caused by higher sea levels. Climate change can thus amplify disasters into catastrophes.
No: There are still voices ridiculing this conclusion. About the record-breaking intensity of Hurricane Irma, Mr. Trump said that “we’ve had bigger storms than this.” And Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, took righteous exception to discussing the “cause and effect of these storms” as “very, very insensitive to the people in Florida.”
Both were engaging in climate rejection rather than denial. Because with climate truths so widely disseminated and accepted, both know in some part of their minds that global warming is real and threatening.
But there is good reason to believe that climate rejecters, including the president and Mr. Pruitt, are fighting a losing battle. The apocalyptic fear aroused by the recent destructive hurricanes is the latest manifestation of the mounting dread that has taken hold in the American mind-set about the implications of our steadily warming planet.
So yes again, hurricanes have now become a central component of what I call the climate swerve: the powerful shift in our awareness of climate truths. The swerve is a change in collective consciousness that includes a coherent narrative of global warming, of cause and effect and of steps necessary for mitigation. The swerve forces us to look upon ourselves as members of a single species in deep trouble.
This mind-set is evident in public opinion surveys, in the reporting of catastrophes that regularly invoke the influence of global warming, in growing doubts about a carbon economy and in challenges to the morality of extracting and burning underground fossil fuel resources.
The Paris climate conference of December 2015 was a stunning demonstration of the reach and force of the climate swerve. Virtually every nation in the world joined in what could be called a species-wide recognition of global warming and its dangers, each putting forward a promised goal of reduced carbon emissions. True, Paris was more a demonstration of universal climate awareness than an enforceable treaty. But the mind-set it expressed is crucial for all subsequent climate action.
And that mind-set could not be readily defied, as President Trump has learned. His determination to withdraw from the agreement was no surprise, since he had long rejected the idea of climate change as nonexistent, not human-caused or a hoax.
What was perhaps surprising was the immediate and overwhelming reaction to his announcement of the American withdrawal. The decision was widely denounced in this country by governors who declared that their states would hold to the Paris protocols, and by mayors who said the same of their cities. It was also condemned abroad. France, Germany and Italy insisted that the Paris momentum was “irreversible,” and China asserted that it would follow the protocols no matter what the United States did.
What followed were clarifications by the White House having to do with renegotiation and continuing to attend climate meetings — all amounting to equivocation and leaving the whole issue of withdrawal confused.
It would seem that the climate swerve is greater than any individual person, even one as dangerous to the world as Donald Trump. And while the climate swerve may ebb and flow, it is gathering momentum and will have to be reckoned with for generations.
The string of hurricanes we experienced recently and can expect again in the future raises a crucial question about the kind of adaptation we make to climate change. Of course we must prepare for extreme climate conditions, with special attention to coastal areas and flood plains, and to restrictions on what and how we build or rebuild in those areas.
But to do only that would neglect the primary cause of our danger, and would do nothing to prevent ever more lethal expressions of global warming. The climate swerve moves us to focus on the adaptation of our entire species.
That would require meeting the Paris pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and going further in making renewable energies a dominant force in national and world economies. In that inclusive form of adaptation, the human species becomes our operative group, and we do all we can to bring our historical and psychological imagination to the task.
We have squandered opportunities to reduce global warming and there has already been more suffering from climate change than we have allowed ourselves to recognize. But we can still avert civilization-ending catastrophe, and even achieve a modest new beginning for our species. Yes, it is very late in the game, but at the same time far from too late.

*Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist, is the author, most recently, of “The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival.”

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Five Charts That Show Tony Abbott Is The One Who Has Lost Sight Of The Science

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Tony Abbott's speech to the Global Warming Policy Foundation provides a mix of partial truths that are designed to create a plausible whole.
As one leading climate change scientist noted in private on Tuesday, "most statements have the classic element of truth but once confronted by the balance of evidence the statements are true but irrelevant, or true to a point and then misleading - classic sceptics' stuff".

Turnbull: "working intensely" towards affordable power
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, responds whether his government is backing away from the Clean Energy Target.

Still, there are enough clangers to suggest Abbott either can't read a chart or is tapping some data source that has somehow escaped the attention of the many global climate monitoring bodies from NASA to the UK Met Office or Australia's Bureau of Meteorology.
Here are some of Abbott's standout claims, and the charts that counter them.

'Only 0.3 degrees'
"Temperatures in Australia have only increased by 0.3 degrees over the past century, not the 1 degree usually claimed," is one of Abbott's statements.
According to the bureau and CSIRO's State of the Climate 2016, here's what we're seeing in Australia:

The only pockets of Australia to have warmed less than 0.5 degrees since 1910 are located in a couple of places in NSW (though not Manly, as it happens) and Western Australia.

'Photos show no sealevel rise'
Staying local, Abbott has this to say about sea-level rise: "More than 100 years of photography at Manly Beach in my electorate does not suggest that sea levels have risen despite frequent reports from climate alarmists that this is imminent."
Global warming is obvious to the overwhelming majority of scientists, despite what a few deniers would tell us. Photo: Daniel Munoz
Consider, first, the lean likelihood of avid snappers catching the same point of the tide at the same place over the years.
Imagine, too, the future lawsuits when owners of coastal developments that have been washed away submit to the court grainy, faded photographs explaining they had no idea what they were buying into.
Tony Abbott has made another pitch declining the significance to climate change. Photo: Daniel Munoz
Coastal sea-level rise can be quirky, but for those wanting to project future development, Geoscience Australia provides projections, even for Manly.
In the meantime, this readily available information from CSIRO showing global sea-level rise is accelerating:

Abbott might want to acquaint himself with the reasons for that rise in sea levels, including the well-understood fact 93 per cent of the extra heat being trapped by extra greenhouse gases ends up in the ocean.
A warmer ocean, not surprisingly expands. The melting ice caps, glaciers and sea ice absorb about 2 per cent of that extra heat and most of that ice melt ends up in the ocean, lifting their levels.
While just 2.3 per cent of the extra warming ends up in the atmosphere and 2.1 per cent in the land, that happens to be where most of the temperature readings are made and where our own lives are lived out.

Blame the sun
So here's Abbott's interpretation of what's been going on, temperature wise: "Certainly, no big change has accompanied the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration over the past century from roughly 300 to roughly 400 parts per million or from 0.03 to 0.04 per cent."
And if anything is going on, let's not blame it all on CO2, he would have us believe: "Evidence suggests that other factors such as sun spot cycles and oscillations in the Earth's orbit are at least as important for climate change as this trace gas."
Blaming the sun, as it happens, is one of the top two climate myths raised by deniers, according to the Skeptical Science website, and one of the first ruled out.
The following chart from that website helps to knock a few of Abbott's misleading interpretations on the head:
Solar radiation has in fact been on a cooling trend for the past three decades, and yet temperatures have continued to climb. And they are clearly much closer to 1 degree higher over the past century than 0.3 degrees.
This chart, also helps to put this claim by Abbott into perspective: "Even the high priests of climate change now seem to concede that there was a pause in warming between the 1990s and 2014."
News Corp commentators such as Andrew Bolt regularly play up that "no warming" has occurred in the past 10, 15, 18 or so years.
 Illustration: Matt Golding
By taking the top of the record-high El Nino year in 1998 it is possible to see warming slowed. But note Abbott conveniently ends in 2014, forgetting to include the fact that year - a record for warming - was then beaten by 2015 and 2016.
While examining a single month rarely tells us about longer-term trends, September surprisingly set global records according to preliminary data even without an El Nino influence.

'More good than harm'
Abbott would like to have it both ways. If there is warming, and if we were to be driving it, perhaps it's not a bad thing after all.
"At least so far, it's climate change policy that's doing harm; climate change itself is probably doing good; or at least, more good than harm," he said in his speech.
Australians happen to live in a nation with a highly variable climate, especially for rain.
There are ample signs of recent heatwaves, including in this spring, to have people worried with reason about the threat of worse bushfires, among other challenges.
Recent research pointing to Sydney and Melbourne likely to have 50-degree days in coming summers was dismissed as "groupthink" by Abbott on Fairfax Media's 2GB.
As the bureau and CSIRO note in their report, though, Australia has been reporting a big increase in the number of extreme heat events, with all the stresses on the health of humans (and other creatures) that they bring:

As the report notes, extreme days are defined as those above the 99th percentile of each month from the years 1910 to 2015.
"In 2013 there were 28 days over this threshold," the report said. "This compares to the period prior to 1950 when more than half the years had no extreme days."
Abbott's speech made little of the fact it was during his two-year stint as prime minister that Australia signed up to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 26-28 per cent by 2030 compared with 2005 levels.
The pledge "was a compromise based on the advice that we could achieve it largely through efficiencies, without additional environmental imposts, using the highly successful emissions reduction fund; because, as I said at the time, the last thing we want to do is strengthen the environment (but) damage our economy".

What's 'Herculean' in Chinese?
Quite apart from the ERF being "highly successful" (see here or here), Abbott goes on to say this: "Even if reducing emissions really is necessary to save the planet, our effort, however Herculean, is barely better than futile; because Australia's total annual emissions are exceeded by just the annual increase in China's."
Well, it turns out China's emissions have actually been flat for several years.
Whether the recent plateau holds or starts to climb again remains to be seen. Concern about urban pollution and the massive construction that has already filled many of the major cities with ample subway lines, highways and tower blocks suggest returning to the run-up of emissions during the 2000-2010 is unlikely.
Perhaps the following chart from Climate Change News, though, is a better pointer to the trends in China, the world's largest carbon emitter:
It shows annual growth of energy consumption. Fossil fuel use has a diminishing share of the extra energy needed to drive what will soon be the world's largest economy.
Giving the cost of solar and wind energy continues to decline at a rapid rate - while fossil fuel extraction is if anything getting more costly as easy to access resources disappear - it's a fair bet if China's energy demand does pick up, coal and oil aren't likely to provide the lion's share of extra supply.

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