Scholar: Dumping Fossil Fuels By 2050 Needed To Save Climate

Washington Post - Menelaos Hadjicostis Associated Press



NICOSIA, Cyprus — Getting rid of fossil fuels by mid-century and making the switch to large-scale renewable energy sources and nuclear power offers the best chance of meeting the climate change targets set out by the Paris accord, a prominent American economist said Friday.
Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs said the world’s ways of producing and using energy need to change “much faster, much more dramatically” than political leaders looking to tap hydrocarbon reserves understand.
“So, if we want to move to zero emissions we better get the idea to move away from fossil fuels faster than Shell oil company thinks we can,” Sachs told a conference in the Cypriot capital on the climate change challenges faced by Mediterranean countries and the Middle East.
Sachs said climate change bringing desertification, drought, crop failures and rising sea levels are putting the region’s agriculture “in dire threat.”
“It’s worked well for the last 8,000 years and we’re going to ruin it in this generation, and that’s crazy,” said Sachs, who also serves as an adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on sustainable development.
“This is the tinder of conflict, of mass migration, or all the things we don’t handle decently,” he added.
Sachs says the best approach is to set up interconnected power grids where emissions-free electricity from renewable energy sources in one region could be transmitted elsewhere.
For instance, an interconnected grid would enable North African and the Middle Eastern countries harnessing their ample solar power potential to transmit generated electricity to colder and less sunny northern Europe.
Sachs hailed China as the current world leader in the energy interconnection project and urged Europe to draw up similar plans.
Although opposing exploitation of east Mediterranean gas deposits, he urged countries moving ahead with such projects to take steps and steeply curb carbon emissions while preparing their economies for carbon-free electricity generation to fire up everything from cars, to ships and factories.
Sachs, who also heads Columbia University’s Earth Institute, said Mediterranean countries could work together to draw up proposals on mitigating the challenges they face and submit them to a high-level U.N. climate summit set for September, 2019.

Links

• Utah teens convince lawmakers to recognize climate change
• Scholar: Dumping fossil fuels by 2050 needed to save climate
• Lawsuit contends energy lease sales will affect environment
• County sues top oil companies for downplaying global warming
• Talks on climate rules inch on, despite lack of leadership
• France's Macron backs European unity amid US tensions
• Stronger fuel standards make sense, even when gas prices are low
• Climate change may scuttle Caribbean's post-hurricane plans for a renewable energy boom
• Wanted: Leaders to lead on climate change
• Shell takes its turn in the climate change spotlight
• UN body reaches agreement to cut global shipping emissions
• Court rules Exxon must provide documents in climate probe
• Eugene climate trial date set
• October trial date set for 'climate kids' lawsuit
• Half of Earth's satellites restrict use of climate data
• Fiji damaged by cyclone, PM sees 'frightening' weather ahead

'Going Backwards': A Third Of Protected Land At Risk As Australia Lags

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Almost a third of the world's protected lands face intense pressure from humans with even rich nations such as Australia failing to conserve key biodiversity, a new study by Australian scientists has found.
The research, published in Science on Friday, found that while declared protected zones had quadrupled in size in the past quarter century, much of that land enjoyed little protection from farming, logging or other human intervention.
“One third of that land is in a terrible state, doing nothing for biodiversity conservation," said James Watson, interim director of the University of Queensland's Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science and an author of the report.
"Nations across the world are exaggerating in an incredible way their contribution to solving the biodiversity crisis.”

Threats from expanding slash and burn agriculture are placing pressure on many national parks around the world, even the better managed ones such as Niassa Reserve in Mozambique. Photo: World Conservation Society/UQ

The study claims to be first to examine in high resolution - using satellite imagery and other data - the world's 202,000 protected areas that account for almost 15 per cent of land.
"We couldn't have done this study 10 years ago," Professor Watson said. "Nations need to realise they're going to be held more and more to account."

Search for funds
Among the examples are the Tsavo east and west national parks in Kenya.
The reserve was established in 1948 and now has a railway built through it, with plans to establish a six-lane highway to parallel it. Animals at risk include the eastern black rhinoceros and Tsavo lions, whose adult males often lack manes.
The Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve in Honduras had lost about 300 square kilometres to illegal agriculture and infrastructure. The area includes some of Central America's last surviving areas of undisturbed rainforest, and is home to king vultures, jaguar and mantled howler and spider monkeys.
Nations should address rising human pressures - including from climate change - not by defunding national parks but stepping up support for regions that were important for economic and social wellbeing, and the natural capital they contain, the paper said.
"Funding could also be increased through mechanisms that allow nations to trade or offset conservation funding and commitments, so wealthy nations can support conservation in poorer nations," it said.

'Massively degraded'
Australia's track record was notably poor, with mining permitted in national parks - such as Kakadu - and cattle allowed into conservation areas in places such as the Carnarvon Gorge in Western Australia and alpine reserves in Victoria.
"At least 15 per cent of Australia’s protected areas are massively degraded," Professor Watson said.
“Australia, unless a miracle occurs, will always be going backwards, because there’s no injection of cash to get the objectives we need.”
Recent federal budgets have included deep cuts to conservation spending with at least 60 officers involved in biodiversity cut in the 2017 budget, said James Trezise, healthy ecosystems policy co-ordinator for Australian Conservation Foundation.
"Some places that we think are safe and free from development are quite clearly at significant exposure," Mr Trezise said.

Australia's track record on biodiversity conservation is poor, even in some protected areas. Photo: Goongerah Environment Centre, Gippsland

Those cutbacks extend to marine areas too, with the Turnbull government responsible for the largest reversal of such protections in the world in changes announced in April, he said.
The Murray Valley National Park in NSW is also at risk of being de-gazetted, with the local Nationals MP Austin Evans campaigning to turn the area into a state forest open to logging.
Oisin Sweeney, science officer for the National Parks Association, said that as a wealthy nation, Australia "could be doing a hell of a lot better" in preserving its rich biodiversity.
"Massive" budget cuts to the National Reserve System had also weakened "the biggest single tool to acquire national park land", while states such as NSW had deliberately been reducing the numbers of experienced park rangers, Dr Sweeney said.
Mr Trezise said NSW, Victoria and Tasmania had also been accelerating efforts to open up national parks to development such as resorts and projects such as a cable car up Mt Wellington near Hobart.

Links

• Australia's biodiversity and climate change - A strategic assessment of the vulnerability of Australia's biodiversity to climate change
• Climate change impacts on biodiversity in Australia
• Implications of climate change for Australia's biodiversity - CSIRO
• Climate change impacts on biodiversity | NSW Environment & Heritage
• Ecosystems and biodiversity - Climate Adaptation - CSIRO Research
• Climate change impact on Australia may be irreversible, five-yearly report says
• Meet the Australian wildlife most threatened by climate change
• Government winds back marine protections to support fishing industry

What Is Climate Change? The Definition, Causes And Effects

Wired

Climate change is one of the biggest crises facing humanity. Let's all get a grip on exactly what it is

Getty Images / David McNew / Stringer

Climate change is the catch-all term for the shift in worldwide weather phenomena associated with an increase in global average temperatures. It's real and temperatures have been going up around the world for many decades.
Reliable temperature records began in 1850 and our world is now about one degree Celcius hotter than it was in the period between 1850 and 1900 – commonly referred to as the "pre-industrial" average.
The change is even more visible over a shorter time period – compared to average temperatures between 1961 and 1990, 2017 was 0.68 degrees warmer, while 2016 was 0.8 degrees warmer, thanks to an extra boost from the naturally-occurring El Niño weather system.
While this temperature increase is more specifically referred to as global warming, climate change is the term currently favoured by science communicators, as it explicitly includes not only Earth's increasing global average temperature, but also the climate effects caused by this increase.
Global efforts are now focussed on keeping temperatures from increasing more than two degrees above that pre-industrial average, and ideally no more than 1.5 degrees. That goal may still be possible if the international community pulls together.

What are the effects of climate change?

Worsening drought conditions are having a major impact on farmers in South Africa's Western Cape region. Morgana Wingard/Getty Images

The effects of anthropogenic – human-caused – climate change range from more frequent and severe droughts to snowstorms and extreme winter weather in temperate regions as a result of warming Arctic weather fronts.
It's not only humans that are affected. Warming ocean temperatures are increasing the frequency of coral reef bleaching; warmer, drier weather means that forests in some regions are no longer recovering from wildfires and wildlife habitats around the world are becoming less hospitable to animals.
Climate change is having economic and socio-political effects, too. Food security is already being impacted in a number of African countries and researchers are studying suggestive links between climate change and an increased likelihood of military conflict.
We're already seeing the first climate refugees as people are displaced by rising sea levels, melting Arctic permafrost and other extreme weather.

What are the causes of climate change?
We are. While a wide range of natural phenomena can radically affect the climate, publishing climate scientists overwhelmingly agree that global warming and resultant climate effects that we're witnessing are the result of human activity.
Life on Earth is dependent on an atmospheric "greenhouse" – a layer of gasses, primarily water vapour, in the lower atmosphere that trap heat from the sun as it's reflected back from the Earth, radiating it back and keeping our planet at a temperature capable of supporting life.
Human activity is currently generating an excess of long-lived greenhouse gasses that – unlike water vapour – don't dissipate in response to temperature increases, resulting in a continuing buildup of heat.
Key greenhouse gasses include carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Carbon dioxide is the best-known, with natural sources including decomposition and animal respiration. The main source of excess carbon dioxide emissions is the burning of fossil fuels, while deforestation has reduced the amount of plant life available to turn CO2 into oxygen.
Methane, a more potent but less abundant greenhouse gas, enters the atmosphere from farming – both from animals such as cattle and arable farming methods including traditional rice paddies – and from fossil fuel exploration and abandoned oil and gas wells.
Chlorofluorocarbons and hydrofluorocarbons – once widely used in industrial applications and home appliances such as refrigerators – were key greenhouse gasses released during the 20th century, but are now heavily regulated due to their severe impact on the atmosphere, which includes ozone depletion, as well as trapping heat in the lower atmosphere.
Our warming climate is also creating a feedback loop as greenhouse gasses trapped in Arctic permafrost are released.

Why is climate denial a thing?

August 29 2017: People wade along a flooded street as cars become stuck during heavy rain in Mumbai. Imtiyaz Shaikh /Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

For many years, oil companies were heavily invested in pushing the narrative that fossil fuels did not have an impact on climate change. To this end, they bought advertising and funded organisations to cast doubt on climate change, even while their own research conclusively showed that fossil fuels are a major contributing cause of climate change.
This is still playing out in ongoing lawsuits against oil companies, but even giants such as Chevron now publicly acknowledge the role that fossil fuel use has played in changing our climate. Now, their key defence is that it's the fault of fossil fuel consumers for using it, rather than of the companies that extracted, marketed and profited from oil.

Definition of Climate Change
Nasa defines climate change as: "a broad range of global phenomena created predominantly by burning fossil fuels, which add heat-trapping gases to Earth’s atmosphere. These phenomena include the increased temperature trends described by global warming, but also encompass changes such as sea level rise; ice mass loss in Greenland, Antarctica, the Arctic and mountain glaciers worldwide; shifts in flower/plant blooming; and extreme weather events."

Links

• What is climate change? | Australian Academy of Science
• What Is Climate Change? | NASA
• Climate change - Wikipedia
• What is climate change: facts for kids | National Geographic Kids
• What is climate change? - Met Office
• Anthropogenic Climate Change - Potsdam Institute (pdf)