07/05/2018

Malcolm Turnbull Has Become A De-Facto Climate Denier

RenewEconomy - 

President of France, Emmanuel Macron, delivers "thinly disguised lecture" to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. AAP Image/Getty Images Pool, Jason McCawley
Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has been delivered two home truths this week about his failure to act on climate change, and his refusal to tackle his party’s right-wing ideologues.
The first was a speech, more a thinly disguised lecture, from visiting France president Emmanuel Macron, who eviscerated Turnbull in front of a big audience at the Sydney Opera House on Tuesday night:
“I am fully aware of the political and economic debate surrounding this issue in your country, and I respect this,” Macron said.
“But I think that actual leaders are those that can respect those existing interests, but at the same time decide to participate to something broader, to something more strategic.”
“Actual leaders”? It seems Turnbull’s capitulation to the far right has not gone unnoticed on the international stage. And bravo to Macron for telling him so.
The second moment came the next day, at Kirribilli House, and again in the company of Macron, at the signing of a deal between Sanjeev Gupta, arguably one of the country’s leading industrialists, and the head of French renewable group Neoen.
The deal was for a solar farm to supply Gupta’s steel plant in Victoria, and so dramatically reduce its costs, and the message to Turnbull could not have been any clearer.
“The switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy is the revolution of this century, transforming our economics and our impact on the environment,” said Neoen president Xavier Barbaro.
“We believe renewable energy is a game-changer and (these) agreements reflect a shared commitment to deliver low-cost sustainable energy solutions to the market.”
Gupta intends to embrace renewables, to slash electricity costs not just in Victoria, but across his entire steel industry portfolio in Whyalla and NSW, and use this to make Australia great again in manufacturing and industry.
Yet here we are, with the leader who promised never to lead a political party that didn’t take climate change seriously … doing exactly that. And at the same time deliberately ignoring one of the greatest technology transitions in the world, just to placate a handful of vested coal interests.
There is now no doubt that Turnbull’s refusal to act on climate change, and his refusal to embrace Australia’s renewable energy riches, is driven by his Faustian bargain with the far right that both denies the science of climate change, and is sworn to defend coal.
According to the Institute of Public Affairs, a right wing think tank that rejects climate science, more than half of the Coalition’s parliamentarians are climate skeptics. The IPA should know, it has provided a few of those MPs from its own ranks.
Yet what were the major policy initiatives of the Turnbull government in the days before the Macron visit? Two programs that highlight its willingness to spend money to “adapt” to the impacts of the climate change that much of the government insists is not happening.
First was the $500 million to be spent on the Great Barrier Reef, an Australian and international treasure to be sure, with a fair chunk of this money aimed at developing new coral species that are more resistant to warmer waters.
Why do they need new species of coral to be able to cope with warmer waters? Climate change of course. What are we doing about climate change? Not much.
Ditto the announcement a day earlier from agriculture minister David Littleproud about an agreement with state ministers to help farmers adapt to climate change.
Why was this needed? Because the climate is changing. What are we doing about it? Not much.
As environmental groups, the Labor Party and The Greens have pointed out, there is little sense spending money on trying to adapt to climate change if you haven’t made much of an effort to tackle it first, and still refuse to do so. It becomes a never-ending pit.
Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, an environmental organisation that wants to hold the world to account on its Paris ambition to limit average global warming to 1.5°C, visited the reef last weekend as part of his latest tour of Australia.
“It was a weird feeling being up on the reef and reading news that the government was going to save the reef by not doing anything about the problem that the reef is actually facing. It was quite disorientating,” McKibben told RenewEconomy.
“It’s like coming across someone who has been mugged in a dark alley and you offer them a cholesterol test. It doesn’t address the problem.”
McKibben laments the fact that all around the world, nearly every leader – apart from Trump, who doesn’t care – wants to be perceived as doing something about the environmental problems we face.
“But they refuse to do the things that might actually help,” and this is despite the fact that right now – as Gupta and Neoen pointed out to Turnbull on Tuesday – it would actually be quite easy to achieve significant emissions reductions, given the falling cost of renewables and the emergence of battery storage.
“And that is infuriating,” McKibben says. “For years we listened to people saying (renewable energy) was too expensive, then it was too unreliable. Now it’s cheap, and Musk has built the biggest freaking battery in the world, and it’s working like a charm.
“They are running out of excuses, but the problem is they are still taking money from coal.”
McKibben has no doubt that the world will be running on the wind and the sun within 50 years, and for that matter neither do most energy institutions and forecasters.
The problem is that it needs to happen a lot quicker, and the small bump of momentum that occurred with the signing of the Paris climate treaty has been squashed by the election of Trump.
“One of the overlooked problems with Trump is that he sets the bar so low by being such a grotesque buffoon, and that makes it easier for others to look statesmanlike.”
As for Turnbull, McKibben is less forgiving.
“Turnbull knows everything there is not know about climate change, but doesn’t do anything about it. I don’t know if that if that makes him worse than Trump or better.”
It begs an interesting question. Has Malcolm Turnbull, he who crossed the floor to vote against his party’s bill to scrap the carbon price, become a de-facto climate denier?
Not a denier of the science, because it would seem he accepts that, but a denier of the need to act.
As Macron told him, it requires leadership to overcome dissent, and the “power of conviction”. But Turnbull has shown no inclination to argue his point.
Turnbull is a constant denier, too, of the march of renewable energy, and its undoubted benefits, which are now being embraced by many of Australia’s biggest corporates, as well as millions of households.
IMAGE
It was galling for many – and to the Victoria government – that Turnbull should be seeking to claim credit for a major solar farm that will be built as part of Victoria’s state-based target that Turnbull has often described as “waffle” and “left-wing ideology”.
Turnbull’s government is also a denier of the immense opportunity presented by the falling costs of renewables, and other actions, to be more ambitious on emissions, and to save money and reduce costs at the same time.
Analysis after analysis shows that his government’s weak emissions reduction targets for the electricity sector for 2030 will have already been met by 2020 – creating the prospect of yet another lost decade.
Energy minister Josh Frydenberg continues to label any higher targets as “reckless and extreme.” The government has no policy – nearly five years after it came to power – to address long-term emissions reductions in other sectors of the economy.
So how long will this climate denial last? For Turnbull, at least until the next election, because that is what his compact with the far right appears to demand.
At that poll, either he and his government will get turfed out, and be replaced by a Labor government that will hopefully deliver on its rhetoric, or Turnbull will sneak back in.
The question is whether he will still be cowed by the Far Right at that point – or will he take Macron’s advice on how to be a leader and show that power of conviction.
Cartoon by Mark David / @mdavidcartoons.
Links
at No comments:

How To Fight Climate Change: Figure Out Who's To Blame, And Sue Them

Wired - 

Joe Raedle/Getty Images
How it used to go was, after some extreme weather event, reporters would ask Climate McScientist, PhD whether the flood/drought/hurricane/disease outbreak/wildfire/superstorm happened because of climate change. Dr. McScientist would pat the reporter on the head and say: Well, of course, one can never ascribe any single weather event to a changing global climate. Granted, a horrifying, unprecedented natural disaster is, maybe, the sort of thing one would expect on a planet where humans have been burning hydrocarbon fuels for decades, putting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and raising the overall temperature on Earth. Maybe.
But Dr. McScientist and colleagues were working on being able to say more. Since at least 2004, they’ve been developing a science of attribution—how much of any given extreme weather event, within some degree of probabilistic certainty, was due to climate change? And it’s working.
At the end of 2017, three journal articles modeled Hurricane Harvey—the largest rainfall of any US hurricane on record, somewhere between 24 trillion and 34 trillion gallons of water—and concluded that human-caused climate change had made it about four times more likely than it would have been in the middle of the last century. Then, in January, an annual special edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society dedicated to event attribution included three papers asserting that without human-caused climate change, three recent meteorological anomalies simply would not have happened: 2016’s global heat wave, the 2016 Asia heat event, and a “blob” of weirdly warm ocean off Alaska.
“We tend to be conservative in how we communicate. Just as we’re finally getting onto the same page and the media starts saying what we’re saying, we say, ‘Oh, scrap that, we have something else we know,’” says Stephanie Herring, a climate scientist at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information and an editor on that BAMS issue. “This fall we kind of had to say, ‘Remember how we told you we could never say that? Well, we’re saying that.’”
Could Herring be more terrifying? Sure. All those far-off, maybe-someday signs of a climate apocalypse she and her colleagues used to hint at are all happening. “The future is here,” Herring says.
It’s a future of terrifying disasters—and a future where scientists know more about the underpinnings and mechanics of those disasters. But maybe most importantly, it’s a future where you can attribute a cause. It’s a future where you can ascribe fault.
And that means you can sue the people responsible.In 2003, with the waters of the flooding River Thames literally lapping at his front door, Oxford climate scientist Myles Allen wrote an op-ed for the scientific journal Nature titled “Liability for Climate Change.” Allen wondered if someday scientists might solve the “attribution problem,” as he called it, of linking specific events (like those floods) to a warming Earth.
Back then, Allen figured that no one would ever be able to blame some percentage of a given weather event on human influence. But he did think it might be possible to say that greenhouse gas emissions had increased the probability of an event. And if you could do that, Allen wondered, could you come up with a more rational insurance market … and hold greenhouse gas emitters liable for damage? “The prospect of a class action suit with up to 6 billion plaintiffs and an equal number of defendants may seem rather daunting,” Allen wrote, “but if we can overcome these problems in end-to-end attribution, everything else is (at least conceptually) rather straightforward.”
And indeed, the next year in Nature Allen and two colleagues published what’s regarded as the first climate event attribution paper. Looking at Europe's 2003 heatwave, they compared observed temperatures for the 20th century against temperatures as shown by computer models, with and without greenhouse gases. The result: a “fraction attributable risk.” “Human influence is to blame for 75 percent of the increased risk of such a heatwave,” they wrote.
The science has gotten even more robust. What used to require time on a supercomputer can now happen pretty much anywhere. And the methods have gotten better, too. “We can propose hypotheses of the probability of exceeding a given threshold with and without global warming, and we can propose hypotheses about the fraction of an anomaly contributed by the historical change,” says Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University.
Diffenbaugh’s group has done that math on California droughts. In 2015 they calculated that California was more likely to have a drought year when there was low precipitation—I know, duh, right? Except they further figured out that droughts were twice as likely if that low precipitation came in a warm year versus a cooler one, and that those low-precip years have been twice as likely to coincide with warm conditions in the last two decades. The risk of drought has essentially doubled, and the stats say that’s because of global warming.
Not every researcher agrees that attribution science can pull off both magnitude and probability calculations. “The kind of statement that says y percent of x event was caused by climate change, or event x was made y percent worse—that’s controversial,” says Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at MIT and author of one of the three Harvey attribution papers. “I have been told by folks who specialize in communication that we need to be less equivocal. I don’t like that, because first of all it borders on being dishonest, and second it makes us sitting ducks for a sufficiently intelligent person who wants to show these changes aren’t happening.”
To be clear, Emanuel believes that human-caused climate change is having a major effect on the planet. He’s just more comfortable with talking about an elevated probability than carving out exactly how much global warming enhanced a specific hurricane. “The impact of the two statements is comparable,” Emanuel says. “If I say the probability of rains like Hurricane Harvey is elevated by a factor of four, that’s a pretty astounding statement, and it’s much more effective than saying Harvey’s rains were 10 percent worse.”
As a 2016 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report on attribution science said, the events easiest to study are ones for which researchers have a lot of observational data, that computational models can understand, and that aren’t complicated by other factors like infrastructure and resource management. Wildfires are a tough one. Heatwaves, they pretty much have figured out. “Hurricanes, we’ve really been working hard to get those error bars down and increase the confidence,” Herring says. “Tornadoes, we have no confidence. We’ve never seen an attribution paper on tornadoes and I don’t expect to see one in the future.”Meanwhile, improvements in attribution are leading to a whole new response to climate change: lawsuits. The future that Allen predicted is coming to pass. “It’s most likely that attribution science, given its state of development, will inform disputes relative to adaptation issues,” says Lindene Patton, an attorney at Earth and Water Law Group. “Has someone constructed a housing development in a way that has acceptable risk of harm? Have particular directors and corporate officers disclosed information reflective of climate-related risk to share price?”
Those cases will come down to what professionals know and what they should know—and what they have a duty to do about it. The courts understand this stuff.
A bigger question is whether courts could hold actual carbon emitters accountable for climate change-related damages. New York City, coastal cities in California, and cities in Colorado suing petrochemical companies for sea level rise and other climate change outcomes. It's a tough case to make. In a climate “tutorial” that was part of the California cities’ lawsuit in March, Chevron’s attorney Ted Boutrous didn’t attempt to deny a single thing about the physics and chemistry of climate change, or even that human activity caused it. He just said it didn’t make sense to blame oil companies. Burning hydrocarbons doesn’t kill people; people burning hydrocarbons kills people.
Part of the cases against the oil companies will be that they knew about the bad effects of their products and sold them anyway; that worked against tobacco companies. Another part might rely on the so-called Carbon Majors study, which in 2014 calculated the exact amounts of all carbon emissions any of the top 20 oil companies were directly responsible for having extracted. Whether that’ll hold up in court (alongside the NAS study affirming that attribution science as a whole is real and a generally accepted methodology) is the crux. “We don’t know what will happen, but no one thought tobacco litigation would succeed, and that completely changed public health policy,” says Sophie Marjanac, an attorney with ClimateEarth.
It can’t be an accident that the main expert the California cities brought to the climate tutorial was none other than Myles Allen, the scientist who started this whole idea 15 years ago when the flooding Thames was at his door. At the tutorial I wondered why, with climate scientists thick on the ground of Bay Area universities, those lawyers flew someone from Oxford. Seems like it was to bolster the case for attribution.
The International Energy Agency says that Earth can solve its climate problems with a $53 trillion. That money has to come from somewhere. Environmentally-minded investment practices might be one approach. So is using the courts to extract some money from the people responsible. “When people can’t get change made through other processes—dealing directly, a political process—the other branch of government is the judicial branch,” Patton says. “That’s where people go to resolve disputes.” And now science is walking in with relevant evidence.
Not a moment too soon. On Monday it was 122.4 degrees in Pakistan. And on Tuesday, atmospheric carbon dioxide reached 410 parts per million—the highest it has been since before humans existed.

Links
at No comments:

We Examined 885 European Cities’ Plans To Tackle Climate Change – Here’s What We Found

The Conversation -  | 

Shutterstock
Around the world, cities endeavour to cut greenhouse gas emissions, while adapting to the threats – and opportunities – presented by climate change. It’s no easy task, but the first step is to make a plan outlining how to meet the targets set out in the Paris Agreement, and help limit the world’s mean temperature rise to less than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
About 74% of Europe’s population lives in cities, and urban settlements account for 60-80% of carbon emissions – so it makes sense to plan at an urban level. Working to meet carbon reduction targets can also reduce local pollution and increase energy efficiency – which benefits both businesses and residents.
But it’s just as important for cities to adapt to climate change – even if the human race were to cut emissions entirely, we would still be facing the extreme effects of climate change for decades to come, because of the increased carbon input that has already taken place since the industrial revolution.
In the most comprehensive survey to date, we collaborated with 30 researchers across Europe to investigate the availability and content of local climate plans for 885 European cities, across all 28 EU member states. The inventory provides a big-picture overview of where EU cities stand, in terms of mitigating and adapting to climate change.

Map of cities with local climate plans (LPCs). The countries in dark orange make it compulsory to have local climate plans. Oliver Heidrich/University of Newcastle, Author provided
The leaderboard
The good news is that 66% of EU cities have a mitigation or adaptation plan in place. The top countries were Poland – where 97% of cities have mitigation plans – Germany (81%), Ireland (80%), Finland (78%) and Sweden (77%). In Finland, 78% of cities also had a plan for adapting to climate change.
But only a minority of EU countries – including Denmark, France, Slovakia and the UK – have made it compulsory for cities to develop local climate plans. In these countries, cities are nearly twice as likely to have a mitigation plan and five times as likely to have an adaptation plan. Throughout the rest of the EU, it is mainly large cities that have local climate plans.
There were some shortcomings worth noting: 33% of EU cities (that’s 288 cities) have no standalone climate plans whatsoever – including Athens (Greece), Salzburg (Austria), and Palma de Mallorca (Spain). And not one city in Bulgaria or Hungary has a standalone climate plan. Only 16% of cities – that’s a total of 144 – have joined-up mitigation and adaptation plans, and most of these were in France and the UK – though cities such as Brussels (Belgium), Helsinki (Finland) and Bonn (Germany) had joined-up plans as well.

Where’s the plan, Palma de Mallorca? Shutterstock
Some cities have made climate initiatives a common feature in planning activities, often aiming for broader environmental goals, such as resilience and sustainability. Some of these forward-looking cities – Rotterdam and Gouda in the Netherlands, for example – may not have standalone climate change mitigation or adaptation plans, per se. Instead, climate issues are integrated into broader development strategies, as also seen in Norwich, Swansea, Plymouth and Doncaster in the UK.

Mitigation, adaptation – or both?
Plans for mitigating the effects of climate change are generally straightforward: they look at ways to increase efficiency, transition to clean energy and improve heating, insulation and transport. In doing so, they are likely to result in financial savings or health benefits for the municipality, and the public. For example, more low-emission vehicles on the road doesn’t just mean less carbon emissions – it also means better air quality for the city’s residents.
Adapting to climate change is not always so simple. Each area will need to adapt in different ways. Some adaptations – such as flood defences – can require huge investment to build, and only rarely prove their effectiveness. Yet there are plans and measures that cities can take, to both mitigate the threats from climate change and adapt to the changes that are already coming.
One way for cities to become more resilient to climate change is to integrate infrastructures for energy, transport, water and food, and allow them to combine their resources. A sensors become more commonplace across European cities, it’s easier to monitor the impacts of local plans to reduce emissions and stay on top of extreme weather. The University of Newcastle in the UK is home to the Urban Observatory, which provides one of the largest open-source digital urban sensing networks in the world.

Spot the sensor. University of Newcastle, Author provided
Across the board, cities need to improve the way they manage water at the surface and below ground. Installing more green features in city centres or strategic locations can help urban areas adapt to heatwaves, extreme rainfall and droughts all at once. To find out what works and what doesn’t, it’s essential for cities to network and share knowledge, to create and improve on their local climate plans.
There is simply too much at stake for the world’s cities to go their separate ways when it comes to climate change. We have found that international climate networks make a big difference to countries and cities, as they develop and implement their climate plans. For instance, 333 EU cities of our sample are signatories of the Covenant of Mayors and through that are given support and encouragement as they engage in climate change planning and action.
Our study shows that cities are taking climate change threats seriously, but there is clearly more work to be done. It is a near certainty that if cities do not plan and act now to address climate change, they could find themselves in a far more precarious position in the future.
While there is plenty that cities can do, national governments must still take the lead – providing legal and regulatory frameworks and guidance. Our study has demonstrated that this is one of the most effective ways to make sure that cities – and their citizens – are well prepared for the threats and opportunities that climate change will bring.

Links
at No comments: