16/05/2018

Worst-Case Climate Change Scenario Could Be More Extreme Than Thought, Scientists Warn

The Independent - Harry Cockburn

Economic growth could prompt greater greenhouse gas emissions than previously forecast, study says
Even our best efforts at limiting emissions may not be enough to avert disaster Shutterstock
Scientists may have to recalibrate their projections of what a “worst case” climate change scenario is, as new studies take into account greater global economic growth than previously forecast.
Climate scientists forecasting how the earth’s climate will change over time examine trends in greenhouse gas emissions, which are largely dependent on how the global economy behaves.
As countries get richer, the amount they consume goes up, and so too do greenhouse gas emissions.
Scientists use four scenarios called representative concentration pathways (RCPs) that attempt to depict possible futures for our planet.
The standard worst case scenario, RCP 8.5, assumes rapid and unrestricted economic growth which will see rampant burning of fossil fuels. In addition, it also assumes no further action will be taken to limit warming than the policies countries are already pursuing.
However, scientists at the University of Illinois say there is a one-in-three chance that by the end of the century emissions will have exceeded those estimated in the RCP 8.5 scenario.
“Our estimates indicate that, due to higher than assumed economic growth rates, there is a greater than 35 per cent probability that year 2100 emissions concentrations will exceed those given by RCP8.5,” Peter Christensen told the New Scientist.
Glen Peters of the Centre for International Climate Research in Norway points to the rise in carbon emissions in Europe over the past four years as economic growth has sped up. In 2017, EU emissions rose by 1.8 per cent.
However, the worst case scenario remains unlikely as economic growth does not rule out environmentally-beneficial policy.
“We’ve already locked in a certain amount of climate policy,” Mr Peters said.
Nonetheless, the latest research also means higher levels of emissions may now have to be factored in to the other climate scenarios.
A group of emperor penguins face a crack in the sea ice, near McMurdo Station, Antarctica Kira Morris
Numerous climate models have previously predicted an apocalyptic future for existence on earth. From rapid icecap melt and catastrophic sea level rise, to rising temperatures making some areas uninhabitable, and mass extinctions of species in affected areas.
But even our best efforts may not be enough to avert disaster.
The Paris climate agreement commits the world’s countries to preventing global warming to no more than 2C above pre-industrial temperatures by the end of the century.
However, even if all countries meet their non-binding targets, some projections estimate global temperatures could still rise by more than 3C, and possibly by over 4C.
This would have a devastating effect on the planet, raising sea levels as much as 1.5 metres, putting cities like Amsterdam and New York under water and causing widespread famine.

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Climate Change Is A Security Threat – So Where Is The UN Security Council?

The Conversation - 

Piyaset / shutterstock
Climate change is one of the great security challenges of the 21st century.
As the world warms, conflicts over water, food or energy will become more common and many people will be forced from their homes.
 Scientists, think-tanks, NGOs, militaries and even the White House (albeit under President Obama) all agree that climate change threatens human safety and well-being. Yet the organisation charged with global security has remained relatively silent.
The UN Security Council, responsible for maintaining international peace and security, is comprised of 15 countries.
Five seats are reserved for permanent members with veto powers (China, France, Russia, the UK and the US) while the other ten members are elected to represent their region (“Africa”, “Asia-Pacific” etc) for two year terms.
The ten current elected members (Italy and the Netherlands split one two year term between them). wiki, CC BY-SA
Together, this semi-rotating group of 15 takes binding decisions for all 193 UN members. This alone makes the Security Council a very powerful institution, but combined with its capacity to sanction, and intervene in the affairs of states it has an influence far exceeding that of any other international body. It is, in many respects, the executive of the international system.
For this reason the council has considered contemporary security challenges such as international terrorism, nuclear weapon proliferation, and transnational crime. Positive results include an international crackdown on the financing of terrorism, the sharing of information to tackle various criminal problems, stronger border controls for nuclear materials, and the global mobilisation of experts to address a health epidemic.
The fact the Security Council has helped combat these varied and largely unrelated challenges shows its potential to do good. Yet these interventions also pose the critical question of why it has yet to engage climate change in any meaningful way. Article 41 sanctions would be available to the council in the event of states not meeting their Paris Agreement obligations. Economic sanctions could also be placed upon corporations, that currently operate with relatively little international scrutiny. What the council brings is an ability to coerce – something that is currently lacking throughout international climate law.

Global challenge vs state sovereignty
The council hasn’t entirely ignored climate change, of course. In 2007 the first open debate on the matter took place, though this was based on the unofficial proviso that no binding output would follow. Similar discussions were held in 2011 and 2013 but again stark divides among the members prevented any meaningful outputs.
The Security Council, like the UN itself, was formed after World War II. Golden Brown / shutterstock
What this represents is a lack of unity over whether climate change really belongs on the agenda. While most states now agree climate change is a priority – as exhibited by the success of the Paris conference in 2015 – there is no consensus on what role, if any, the Security Council should play.
From one perspective, countries like New Zealand and Germany view climate change as a security issue of immense proportions and worthy of the council’s attention. On the other hand, states such as China and South Africa argue that if the council engages with climate change it will undermine the sovereignty of states, fracturing the international system.
These positions are entrenched, reflecting vastly opposing ideologies in relation to both climate change and international relations, thus precluding any meaningful intervention. Yet this does not necessarily mean that the Security Council is frozen indefinitely.

Climate change slowly moving onto the agenda
The council has a history of taking tentative steps when moving into new territory, and climate change will not be an exception. In 2011 a statement made by then-president of the Security Council (a position that rotates between member states each month) loosely linked climate change and traditional security challenges. In 2017, the council unanimously adopted Resolution 2349, which hinted that climate change had contributed to conflict and instability around Lake Chad and the wider Sahel region. And in January 2018 a second presidential statement twice referenced climate change in the context of instability in the Sahel region.
Drought and desertification worsened conflict around Lake Chad, Security Council resolution suggested. Deji Yako / EPA
These statements fall short of finding climate change an explicit security threat, but do they show the council is steadily becoming more comfortable with the subject. And without that degree of comfort we would likely not have seen the passing of Resolution 2408 on March 27, 2018.
This resolution, again adopted unanimously, extended the mandate of the UN mission in Somalia for another year and became the latest council resolution to include reference to climate change. The language remains speculative and the council is careful to only recall its 2011 statement instead of making a bolder standalone declaration on climate security.
However, inclusion of the expression “grave concern” in regard to the drought and famine engulfing Somalia is proof that the council is experiencing a change of perspective. It is beginning to make discursive links between environmental realities and security, using the language often reserved for terrorism or nuclear weapon proliferation.
The resolution fails to indict climate change as the cause of these problems yet it is nonetheless progress. After years of dispute council members are starting to agree on the inclusion of the words “climate change” in a resolution – a big step forward for the world’s most powerful but politically polarised body.
So where are we? The Security Council has access to the tools the world so desperately needs to enforce state and private action on climate change, and although it is taking its time there is some advancement. That does not mean climate change is about to be recognised as a security concern in its own right, but each step taken is valuable and the council is certainly on the right path to identifying climate change as the security threat it so clearly is.

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It's No Surprise Emissions Keep Going Up. There's No Price On Carbon

The Guardian - 

The only thing close to climate change policy is the national energy guarantee. It’s not enough.
‘Emissions from electricity have actually fallen but they haven’t fallen enough.’ Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images 
Late last Friday, the government quietly released the latest data on greenhouse gas emissions and, as has been the case since the ending of the carbon price, they show emissions are increasing.
But the figures also highlight that the government’s current plan to focus almost exclusively on electricity, through its national energy guarantee, means Australia will be unable to meet its commitment to reduce economy-wide emissions by 28% below 2005 levels by 2030.
The government is never all that excited about releasing the quarterly update on greenhouse gas emissions.
In December it released them the week before Christmas, and this time it released it late Friday afternoon – the end of budget week.
The minster for environment and energy, Josh Frydenberg, didn’t bother to even put out a media release which, given the importance of the figures to his portfolio, would be like the treasurer not bothering to note the release of the quarterly GDP figures.
The budget last week was not exactly replete with money and news about action on climate change.
There was $500m to go towards mitigating the impact of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef, which is often the government’s favoured way with climate change – do bugger all to prevent the harm, and then spend money to make it seem like they care after the damage has been done.
But as for actual efforts to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, for now the only thing close to a policy is related to electricity via the national energy guarantee.
​The latest emissions data, however, shows that will in no way be enough.
In 2017, Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are estimated to have been 533.7 Mt CO2 -e.
The report notes that this is 2.4% below emissions in 2000 and 11.7% below emissions in 2005.
But that rosiness is really a bit of a figleaf as it refers to total emissions including the emissions from the land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) sectors, which were very high in the early 2000s but which have been reduced due to less forest reduction and planting more trees.
Such activity was included in our Paris emissions targets because doing so made the cuts easier to achieve.
But the measurement of the LULUCF sector is subject to a fair degree of error, and if you really want to look at actual greenhouse gas emissions you exclude it – but doing so makes the job of reducing our emissions to 26% below 2005 levels by 2030 much harder:

Even including LULUCF, there was a 1.5% increase in emissions in 2017 compared with 2016.
The report notes that a big reason for this was “the expansion in LNG exports, which saw a 41.4% increase in LNG production in 2017 and a forecast increase in LNG production for 2018 of a further 18.1%.”
And certainly the report puts to bed any claims that we have some sort of a gas-supply crisis – production is at record levels – but most of the increase is going towards LNG exports rather than domestic gas:

Natural gas production
Chart: Greg Jericho Source: Dept of Environmnet
But let’s not be coy about the cause of these emissions.
There is one reason Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions have increased, and it is the same one that has been in place since July 2014 – we no longer have a carbon price:

In the three and half years since the carbon price was removed, total greenhouse gas emissions (excluding LULUCF) have grown on average by 1.3% each year – compared with an average annual fall of 1.1% during the carbon price period.
The somewhat good news is that since the end of the carbon price, emissions in the electricity sector, which accounts for just over a third of total emissions, have actually fallen:

The reason, however, is not due to any great work by the government in crafting an energy policy designed to encourage renewables or cleaner energy, but because the extremely dirty and inefficient Hazelwood power station has closed.
This has seen the use of brown coal to generate electricity in the national energy market fall from accounting for 25% in 2009 to now just 18%:

But while emissions from electricity have fallen, they have not fallen anywhere near enough to counter the rises in emissions in other sectors:
And with a focus on electricity set to remain, that means our ability to meet our emissions targets looks set to be impossible.
Consider that since June 2016, the increase in emissions from transport and stationary energy (emissions that come via manufacturing, mining and other commercial activities) have almost cancelled out the fall in electricity emissions in that period:

A one-sector-only approach to emissions reduction is not going to cut it (literally).
The government’s own projections last year for our path to 26% or 28% below 2005 levels highlight just how far we have to go, and how unlikely it is to be achieved with the current policy:

No one ever really believed Direct Action would work, and it clearly has not.
The data shows unequivocally that the government’s climate change policy has been a complete failure.And so long as this government remains beholden to climate change deniers within the partyroom and cabinet, who break out into spasms of lunacy at the mere suggestion of an emissions trading scheme or price on carbon, it will continue to be a failure and our emissions will continue to rise.

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'Glaring inconsistency': National emissions jump may be underestimated

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Environmental groups, however, say the true emissions figure may be under – estimated because large-scale land clearing – particularly in Queensland and lately in NSW – is not being accurately represented.
The National Greenhouse Gas inventory for last year, released without fanfare at the end of last week, showed emissions were up 1.5 per cent compared with 2016 to 533.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent.
Land-clearing is on the increase in Queensland and NSW but national emissions are showing a decline, puzzling analysts. Photo: NSW Nature Conservation Council





After sinking during each year of the Labor-Gillard governments, emissions began to pick up with the end of the carbon price by the Abbott government in 2014.
Most economic sectors reported a rise in pollution in 2017, with so-called fugitive emissions – mostly from the liquefied gas industry – alone increasing 10.5 per cent, and transport 3.8 per cent.
The electricity industry was one sector to report an emissions reduction, cutting almost 6 million tonnes or 3.1 per cent. Hazelwood, Australia's most emissions-intensive coal-fired power plant closed last March.
Australia's emissions are "clearly going in the opposite direction" from what is needed to meet the Abbott-Turnbull government's Paris climate pledge, said Bill Hare, director of Climate Analytics. "To get to 2030 ... you need to be reducing emissions about 1.5 per cent a year."
Removing trees along the Newell Highway in the state's far north. Photo: Nick Moir
Challenges
One challenge is government efforts are being curtailed. Outlays for climate action are due to shrink from $3 billion in 2017-18 to $1.25 billion by 2021-22, according the 2018 budget released last week.
Questions, too, remain about the treatment of emissions from land use changes and forestry, a sector that continues to be counted at the federal level as a carbon sink.
Last year, this category was reported as absorbing a net 22.7 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent, little changed from a year earlier.That outcome, though, came despite as much as a five – fold increase in land-clearing in Queensland after Liberal Nationals' premier Campbell Newman loosened restrictions on native vegetation removal in late 2013.
In the most recent Queensland figures for 2015-16, the biggest land-clearing state was bulldozing at the rate of some 10-square-kilometres a day.
The 395,000 hectares cleared that year contributed 45 million tonnes of emissions, the Palaszczuk Labor government said last October.

'Question mark'
The result is a "glaring inconsistency" between federal and state land-use emissions figures, said Martin Taylor, a conservation scientist with WWF-Australia. "It puts a question mark over [carbon accounting] that we shouldn't have."
One issue is how to count forest change. The federal government uses grid analysis that doesn't treat land as being cleared if the forest canopy remains above 20 per cent, according to Glenn Walker, a campaigner for The Wilderness Society.
By contrast, the Queensland's Statewide Landcover and Trees Study (SLATS) is more thoroughly ground-proofed with a team of eight staff, and likely more accurate, he said.
Fairfax Media sought comment from Josh Frydenberg, the environment and energy minister.
"Each year, we update land clearing estimates based on latest satellite data," a spokesperson for the federal environment department told Fairfax Media last October. "Where applicable, we also revise estimates to reflect improvements in remote sensing and estimation methods."
Mark Butler, Labor's climate spokesman said the government’s land use emissions data "have for some time included seemingly inexplicable reductions in land sector emissions, and this is repeated in this last data release".
"It is crucially important that people have faith in government emission accounts, but the more I talk to the experts, the more questions are raised about the accuracy of the government’s land clearing data."
Adam Bandt, the Greens climate change spokesman, said the party would use Senate estimates "to find out why these unexpected figures are now cropping up in land use and forestry".

"The government appears to now be counting pollution in the land clearing and forestry sector differently, in ways that make it appear as if they’re cutting emissions," he said.

Emissions rise
National emissions in the last quarter of 2017 accelerated 0.8 per cent to 133.7 million tonnes – or about 2.5 per cent more than the equivalent quarter in 2013, just as the Abbott government came to power, according to the Australian Conservation Foundation.
Since the Coalition repealed the carbon prices at the end of June 2014, emissions have increased 3.6 per cent, reversing a fall of more than 11 per cent during the Rudd-Gillard Labor governments, ACF said.
The trajectory of rising emissions makes the 2030 target – of 435-441 million tonnes by that year – more difficult to reach, Gavan McFadzean, ACF's climate change program manager, said.
"We need a comprehensive national climate change plan that will rapidly cut pollution across our society and ensures Australia plays its fair role in halting global warming and ensuring we maintain our safe climate," he said.

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