Lethal Heating: 04/17/18

17/04/2018

40 Degrees In April: Why This Autumn Has Felt More Like Summer

ABC Weather - Ben Deacon

Sydneysiders are still waiting for a cool change after a hot summer. (AAP: Dean Lewins)

The southern states of Australia have been experiencing unseasonably hot weather this autumn.

Instead of enjoying a cool change after a harsh summer, in the first two months of autumn we have seen record-breaking temperatures, bushfires, and blistering days equivalent to those endured in the height of summer.
"I would bet my house on it, that there's a climate change signal in this most recent heatwave," University of New South Wales climate scientist Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick said.
Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick has not hedged her bets on what she believes is influencing March and April's record-breaking heatwave, but said the occurrence of this type of weather event was increasing.
"There's no other way of slicing and dicing or sugar-coating it," she said.
"We've seen quite a significant increase in heatwave frequency, particularly in southern Australia."

Maximum temperature anomalies March 29 to April 12

Last month Australia recorded temperatures of 45 degrees Celsius in late March for the first time in history.
Sydney, Adelaide and many other locations had their hottest or equal-hottest April days on record, as did the states of South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales.
Bushfires have raged across the outskirts of Sydney, country Victoria, and in Tathra on the far south coast of NSW, weeks after the end of the usual fire season.

Sydney is experiencing severe bushfires weeks after the fire season ended. (ABC News)

In a special climate statement, senior climatologist Blair Trewin from the Bureau of Meteorology said the conditions had been more like mid-summer than mid-autumn.
"A lot of those averages for the first 10 days of April were reasonably close to, or even slightly above January averages," Dr Trewin said.
The autumn heatwave was exceptional not only in extremes of temperature, but also in the extent of the country affected and the persistence of the heat.
Almost the entire continent had maximum temperatures above average on most of the first 10 days of April.

Heatwave started in the desert
The Pilbara in north-west Western Australia endured more than two weeks over 40 degrees in mid-March, ending with several days over 45 degrees — temperatures never before seen in Australia at that time of year.
Then at the start of April, a high pressure ridge and a cold front pushed that warm air east, bringing the first wave of record temperatures to New South Wales.
In an ordinary heatwave, the passing front would bring cooler temperatures and end the event.
But instead, temperatures started building up in WA again in early April before a new front sent a second blast of hot, West Australian air across southern Australia.
On April 9, temperatures reached 35 degrees in the Sydney region. This was the latest date into the first half of the year that temperatures had ever reached 35 degrees in Sydney.

The autumn heatwave started in the Pilbara. (Supplied: Annabelle Coppin)

On April 11, the heat shifted south, breaking records in almost a third of Victorian locations, smashing the Victorian state temperature record by one and a half degrees.

"When you're breaking a record over a whole state by that sort of margin, that's a significant event," Dr Trewin said.

Dr Trewin, who has an uncanny memory for weather, said this heatwave resembled one in April 1986, which he remembered because it was the day of his school cross country race.
"I remember one of the race winners finished in a state not too dissimilar to the Scottish guy in the [Commonwealth Games] marathon this weekend."
Dr Trewin said this April heatwave was hotter and farther reaching than the 1986 event.

Heatwaves becoming more common outside summer
Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said Australia was seeing more heatwaves in the cooler months.
"Extreme temperature events in the shoulder seasons are actually warming faster than extreme temperature events in summer," she said.
"And April's heatwave fits exactly with that trend."

Spring heatwaves are increasing, researchers say. (Supplied: Sue Belperio)

Dr Trewin agreed, pointing out that spring heatwaves were increasing faster than events in autumn.
"In the past five years, we've seen two particularly significant heatwaves in September in 2013 and 2017," Dr Trewin said.
"We've seen a major one in October 2015. We haven't seen quite the same clustering in autumn."
Dr Trewin and Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said this year's autumn heatwave was consistent with climate change.
"The influence of climate change is that it shifts beyond," Dr Trewin said.
"So the types of events you might have seen once in 50 or 100 years in the climate of the mid-20th century, you might see once in five years or once in 10 years in what we have now."

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March 2018 Was One Of Six Warmest Marches On Record

NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies

A global map of the March 2018 LOTI (land-ocean temperature index) anomaly, relative to the 1951-1980 March average. View larger image.

March 2018 was +0.89 °C warmer than the average March of the 1951-1980 period.
This value is lower than the two hottest years of the record — March 2016 (+1.30 °C) and March 2017 (+1.12 °C) — and is comparable with the years 2002, 2010, and 2015, which cluster tightly around +0.9 °C.
The corresponding number for all other years in our 138 years of modern record-keeping is at or below +0.77 °C.

The GISTEMP monthly temperature anomalies superimposed on a 1980-2015 mean seasonal cycle. View larger image or PDF.

The monthly analysis by the GISS team is assembled from publicly available data acquired by about 6,300 meteorological stations around the world, ship- and buoy-based instruments measuring sea surface temperature, and Antarctic research stations.
The modern global temperature record begins around 1880 because previous observations didn't cover enough of the planet. Monthly analyses are sometimes updated when additional data becomes available, and the results are subject to change.

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Florida Kids Sue Gov. Scott Over Climate Change: You Have 'Moral Obligation' To Protect Us

InsideClimate News - Georgina Gustin

The case, connected to the federal Our Children’s Trust climate lawsuit, is one of nine pressuring states to take action on global warming and fossil fuels.

Warming ocean water contributes to sea level rise and can strengthen hurricanes. Hurricane Irma's storm surge last year was the latest to flood Jacksonville, Florida. Credit: Sean Rayford/Getty Images

Eight young Floridians, ages 10 to 19, sued their state and its climate-policy-averse governor on Monday for failing to protect residents from the impacts of a warming climate.
They say they already see signs of climate change around them—from powerful hurricanes to extreme heat waves to tidal flooding that now regularly washes into coastal roads and parks as sea level rises—and they want the state to do something about it.
The lawsuit filed Monday is the latest in a wave of legal cases filed by children against states and the federal government that accuse government of depriving them of the fundamental right to a stable climate.
The Florida plaintiffs accuse the state of violating their constitutional rights by "perpetuating an energy system that is based on fossil fuels."
"The plaintiffs are asking the state of Florida to adhere to its legal and moral obligation to protect current and future generations from the intensifying impacts of climate change," the group said in a statement.
Their lawsuit asks that state officials "prepare and implement an enforceable comprehensive" plan to phase out fossil fuel use and "draw down excess atmospheric CO2 through forest and soil protection so as to stabilize the climate system."

Gov. Rick Scott and Climate Change
The lawsuit names the state, Republican Gov. Rick Scott, state agencies and the heads of those agencies as defendants.
In 2015, journalists in Florida reported that Scott had placed a gag order on the terms "climate change" and "global warming" within state's Department of Environmental Protection—an especially notable move, given the state is among the most vulnerable to climate change, with 1,000 miles of coastline and millions of people living in low-lying areas.
Scott has also ducked questions about climate change, using the response: "I'm not a scientist."
The governor's office responded to questions about the lawsuit in an emailed statement: "The Governor signed one of the largest environmental protection budgets in Florida's history last month—investing $4 billion into Florida's environment," said McKinley Lewis, a spokesperson for Scott. "The Governor is focused on real solutions to protect our environment—not political theater or a lawsuit orchestrated by a group based in Eugene, Oregon."

Florida Teens Fight for Their Future
Delaney Reynolds, 18, a fourth-generation Floridian who has become a prominent advocate and is a plaintiff in the lawsuit, wrote to the state's environmental regulators in 2014, asking what the department was doing to address climate change.
She said the agency response was: not much.
In a blog post Monday, Reynolds wrote that the response was "unacceptable" and a reason she decided to sue the state.
"Our climate change crisis is the biggest issue that my generation will ever face, and it's up to us, today's children, to fix this problem," Reynolds wrote. "It is my hope that the court will rule to require that Florida enact and enforce laws to reduce and eliminate carbon emissions so that our state and citizens can have a future here."

Kids' Federal Climate Case Gets a Court Date
Our Children's Trust, a group that advocates for science-based climate policy, is supporting the federal case and other youth-led legal efforts across the country.
In 2015, Our Children's Trust and 21 young people from across the country sued the federal government on the same legal grounds, saying the government was violating the public trust by failing to protect a common resource. The fossil fuel industry has repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, attempted to keep the case from advancing. (Levi Draheim, a 10-year-old Floridian, is a co-plaintiff in that case, as well as in the lawsuit filed Monday.)
Last week, a federal magistrate judge set a trial date for the federal case: Oct. 29, 2018, in federal district court in Oregon.

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The Courts Are Deciding Who's To Blame For Climate Change

The Guardian - Dana Nuccitelli

Oil companies? The government? The public? All of the above share the blame.

An ice sculpture fashioned by protesters, to demonstrate their view of how the company’s policies are affecting the environment, slowly melts outside an Exxon Mobil shareholders meeting in Dallas in 2006. Photograph: LM Otero/AP

There are numerous ongoing legal challenges in an effort to determine who’s responsible for climate change. Exxon is under investigation by state attorneys general, cities are suing oil companies over sea level rise costs, and Our Children’s Trust is suing the federal government for failing to protect their generation from climate change. At the heart of these legal challenges lies the question – who bears culpability for climate change and liability for its costs and consequences?

Like Exxon, Shell Knew
Exxon has been a prime target of these investigations and lawsuits since Inside Climate News’ investigative journalism revealed that the company’s internal climate science research warned of the dangers posed by human-caused global warming since the late 1970s.
Recently, Dutch journalist Jelmer Mommers of De Correspondent unearthed internal documents from Shell that began warning of the dangers associated with human-caused climate change 30 years ago. The company’s 1988 report titled “The Greenhouse Effect” warned,

by the time the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even stabilise the situation.

And, particularly relevant to Our Children’s Trust’s lawsuits, Shell’s 1988 report warned of the climate consequences for future generations.

Quote from 1988 Shell report ‘The Greenhouse Effect’.

Similarly, in a 1991 film called Climate of Concern, Shell warned,

Global warming is not yet certain, but many think that to wait for final proof would be irresponsible. Action now is seen as the only safe insurance.

Royal Dutch Shell’s 1991 film ‘Climate of Concern’

The case against Exxon and Shell is similar to the case against the tobacco companies – that they engaged in fraud to deceive the American public about the health effects of their products. However, the oil companies modified the tobacco playbook. Rather than directly misinform the public, they funneled money to conservative think tanks who did the dirty work as Merchants of Doubt. By both outsourcing the misinformation campaign and allowing their scientists to publish research in peer-reviewed journals – where it was available to but largely unseen by the public – the oil companies tried to buffer themselves against the legal liability that took down the tobacco industry.

The case against the government
The case against the fossil fuel industry largely relies on proving that these companies deceived the American public about the threats posed by consuming their products. The case against the federal government appears more straightforward. In their defense against the cities suing over sea level rise damages, the oil industry lawyers essentially argued that the blame lies not on the producers, but rather the consumers of fossil fuels, and that any economic issues should be addressed through policy rather than in the court system.
But of course, the American government has failed to implement climate policies over the past two decades. In 1998, the Senate refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. The Bush Administration censored government climate science reports and took no action to address climate change. Thanks to a Republican filibuster threat, a carbon cap and trade bill that had passed the House died in the Senate in 2009. The Obama administration finally took concrete steps to address climate change, for example by drafting the Clean Power Plan and signing the Paris climate accords, but the Trump administration has (at least temporarily) reversed all of those efforts.
In short, Our Children’s Trust is correct to allege that the American government has failed to protect the coming generations from the threats and damages of climate change.
The oil companies do make a valid point that consumers share the blame for causing climate change. The public has been aware of the climate threat for over a decade – the subject was popularized in An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. Yet 12 years later, Americans are still buying gas guzzling trucks and SUVs, while hybrid and electric vehicles account for just 3% of new car sales.
While the electrical grid has become cleaner due to the falling costs of wind, solar, and natural gas displacing coal power plants, Americans haven’t done much to demand or spark that sort of change in other energy sectors. That would take climate policy, which most Americans (including Trump voters) support, but their support is shallow. It’s not an issue that decides votes, so policymakers aren’t pressured to take action.
The fossil fuel industry certainly bears some responsibility for having funneled tens of millions of dollars to climate-denying think tanks that have worked hard to misinform the American public. Republican Party politicians and conservative media outlets have followed their lead in helping to convey that climate misinformation. A recent study found evidence that “Americans may have formed their attitudes [on climate change] by using party elite cues” delivered via the media. The history books will not reflect well on today’s American conservatives.
However, when hybrid cars have been mass produced for over 20 years and yet 97% of new cars sold in America are still powered exclusively by inefficient, polluting, 19^th Century internal combustion engine technology, Americans as a whole are also failing to do their part to curb climate change.
There’s plenty of blame to go around for the mounting climate costs, but so far, taxpayers are footing the whole bill. There may eventually be a court case in which the fossil fuel industry, like the tobacco industry before it, is held responsible for its role in deceiving the American public about the dangers of carbon pollution. And American voters will eventually punish the Republican Party for its decades of climate denial and policy obstruction. Accountability is coming.

Legal

Earth Will Start Becoming A Desert By 2050 If Global Warming Isn’t Stopped, Study Says

Newsweek - Leah Thomas

More than 25 percent of the Earth will experience serious drought and desertification by the year 2050 if global warming is not curbed, according to a new study by the journal Nature Climate Change. AFP

More than 25 percent of the Earth will experience serious drought and desertification by the year 2050 if the attempts made by the Paris climate agreement to curb global warming are not met, according to a new study by the journal Nature Climate Change.
The study, which was published on Monday, claims that if the Earth’s average yearly temperature is raised by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in the next 32 years, the areas of the world experiencing “aridification,” or drying of the planet, will increase.
“Our research predicts that aridification would emerge over about 20 to 30 percent of the world’s land surface by the time the global mean temperature change reaches 2 degrees Celsius,” said Manoj Joshi, the lead researcher of the study. “But two-thirds of the affected regions could avoid significant aridification if warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius [2.7 degrees Fahrenheit].”
Su-Jong Jeong, a participant in the study from China’s Southern University of Science and Technology, believes the prevention of aridification lies in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
“The world has already warmed by 1 degree Celsius [1.8 degrees Fahrenheit],” Jeong said in the study. “But by reducing greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere in order to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2 degrees Celsius could reduce the likelihood of significant aridification emerging in many parts of the world.”
The Paris climate accord–an agreement now signed by every country in the world except the United States–aims to do just that.
In June, President Donald Trump announced his plan to withdraw from the Paris pact, an Obama-era agreement. The accord, which Trump said would “undermine our economy” and put the United States “at a permanent disadvantage,” calls on countries to lower greenhouse gas emissions to prevent the average temperature increase from reaching the 2 degrees Celsius mark.
Trump has frequently expressed his disbelief in climate change, despite the overwhelming scientific consensus about its dangers to the planet and humanity.
In December, the president dropped climate change from the list of national security threats. Days later, he tweeted, “In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!”

IMAGE

The Nature Climate Change study predicts that the regions that will be most affected by an average temperature increase are those located in Central America, Southeast Asia, Southern Europe, Southern Africa and Southern Australia.

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