Lethal Heating: 05/29/18

29/05/2018

Dutch Government Appeals Against Court Ruling Over Emissions Cuts

The Guardian - Arthur Neslen

Judges ordered a 25% carbon emissions cut by 2020 in the first successful lawsuit against a government’s climate policy

Marjan Minnesma, director of the environmental group Urgenda, arrives at court in The Hague prior to the appeal from the Dutch government. Photograph: Jerry Lampen/AFP/Getty Images

The Dutch government has launched a bid to overturn a landmark climate ruling, arguing that judges in The Hague “sidelined democracy” when they ordered a 25% cut in carbon emissions by 2020.
Government plans for a lesser 17% cut in CO2 pollution were deemed unlawful three years ago, in the first successful lawsuit against a government’s climate policy.
The case inspired a wave of climate lawsuits against governments in Belgium, Colombia, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland, the UK, Uganda and the US.
But Mark Rutte’s government on Monday put the ball back in the plaintiffs’ court, arguing that judges in The Hague had overstepped their authority and were in danger of outflanking public opinion.
Climate minister Eric Wiebes told Dutch media: “We also believe that renewable energy should be increased and CO2 emissions should be reduced, so this is really about something else: it’s about how the judge has intervened in something that’s [called] democracy, and actually democracy has been sidelined.”
After the original ruling, the Dutch government announced ambitious plans to phase out all coal plants and cut emissions by 49% by 2030, as measured against 1990 levels.
But the plans have not yet been implemented and Urgenda, the citizens’ alliance that brought the original case, said Dutch greenhouse gas emissions were currently only 13% below 1990 levels while CO2 output was largely unchanged.
Lawyers representing the group’s 886 Dutch plaintiffs told the court: “The Netherlands is 34th in the world when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. But when it comes to per capita emissions the Netherlands ranks ninth – the highest of any EU country. A Dutch person emits twice as much as the global average and 1.5 times more than the average EU citizen.
“If we are not to reduce our emissions as quickly as possible, who is?”
With Urgenda’s legal battle becoming a litmus test for the effectiveness of climate litigation, the judges’ verdict – expected on 9 October – will be closely watched.
Christiana Figueres, the former head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said: “Urgenda’s bold action against the government of the Netherlands created an important new incentive for all governments to act expeditiously.
“Governments must act boldly and urgently. The Urgenda climate case is evidence that this is not just what should be done, it’s what must be done.”
The World Meteorological Organization reported that last month was the third warmest April on record after 2016 and 2017, while Bering Sea ice cover fell to lowest level ever and a new CO2 ppm (parts per million) record was set.
In a sign of increased urgency in Brussels, the EU’s climate commissioner, Miguel Arias Cañete, called this month for member states “to accelerate our efforts considerably and raise our ambition”.
A UN dialogue to begin the process of “ratcheting up” climate pledges made at the Paris climate conference is under way, and seven EU states have called for the bloc to raise its ambitions.
The Netherlands was one of them, and Wiebes reportedly proposed a 55% cut in Europe’s planet-warming emissions by 2030, describing the Dutch government as “one of the frontrunners on climate policy”.
Domestically though, frustration with the slow pace of climate mitigation helped the Dutch Green party to more than triple its count of MPs in elections last year.
Jesse Klaver, the Greens’ leader, told the Guardian: “The main reason for that is that citizens are fed up with a government that chooses the interests of fossil companies over the environment.
“The Urgenda case made it possible to call the government to account. The tragedy of Dutch climate policy is that our governments always had goals, but were never able to fulfil them. The verdict showed that when they fail to act on climate change a court can tell a government: you have a responsibility to protect your people and to keep your commitments.”
Climate actions have often been hostage to the changing composition of national governments, and the Dutch parliament is currently working on a climate change bill to ensure policy continuity. Anne van Pinxteren, a government spokeswoman, said that while Rutte’s administration expected to cut emissions by between 19-27% by 2020, the court judges had “set a major legal precedent” in altering its plans.
“There is a chance that with current policy the emission reduction goal of the court will not be met,” she said. “If that is the case, the state will have to take additional measures which will need to have an effect in the very short term. These will most likely not be cost-effective and/or have big consequences on society.”
Environmentalists, though, counter that the cost of the toughest climate action now pales by comparison to the estimated $30tn of damages that not meeting it could bring.
Marjan Minnesma, Urgenda co-founder and director, told the Guardian: “Today in court we showed that it would cost around 0.5% of our GDP to meet the climate measures that have been proposed. If it is necessary and we are an extremely rich country and we can avoid extremely high risks, we think it should be done.”

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Government Urged To Stop Great Barrier Reef Tree-Clearing 'Frenzy'

Fairfax - Nicole Hasham

Forest covering an area more than 50 times the size of the combined central business districts of Sydney and Melbourne is set to be bulldozed near the Great Barrier Reef, official data shows, triggering claims the Turnbull government is thwarting its $500 million reef survival package.
Figures provided to Fairfax Media by Queensland’s Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy show that 36,600 hectares of land in Great Barrier Reef water catchments has been approved for tree clearing and is awaiting destruction.

Corals in the Great Barrier Reef have a lower tolerance to heat stress than expected.

The approvals were granted by the Queensland government over the past five years. About 9000 hectares under those approvals has already been cleared.
Despite the dire consequences of land clearing for the Great Barrier Reef – and billions of dollars of public money spent over the years to tackle the problem – neither Labor nor the government would commit to intervening to stop the mass deforestation.

Land clearing can allow sediment, fertiliser and pesticides to run into rivers that flow into the Great Barrier Reef. Photo: Jason South

The office of Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg did not say if his government was comfortable with the extent of land clearing approved in Queensland, or if it would use its powers to cancel permits.
Federal Labor environment spokesman Tony Burke said land clearing “can hit the environment from every angle”.

Labor environment spokesman Tony Burke. Photo: Andrew Meares

“It attacks native habitat, can put further pressure on threatened species, adds to the causes of climate change and contributes to increased nutrient and sediment run-off directly into the Great Barrier Reef,” he said.
“It makes no sense that this federal government has been so willing to turn a blind eye to large-scale land clearing in Queensland.”
However, he also did not say whether Labor would review, and potentially cancel, approvals for land clearing in Queensland if it won government.
The federal government last month pledged more than $500 million to protect the reef. It included $201 million for water quality improvements through changed farming practices, such as repairing damage caused by land clearing.
Land clearing can allow sediment, fertiliser and pesticides to run into rivers that flow into the Great Barrier Reef. This causes poor water quality – the second biggest threat to the reef’s health after climate change – which leads to more algae and less coral diversity.

Old growth forest in the vicinity of Kingvale Station, where 2000 hectares is set to be cleared. Photo: Australian Conservation Foundation

The vast majority of the clearing in reef catchments was approved by the former Newman government to allow for “high value” agriculture. The Palaszczuk government tightened the laws this month to disallow such approvals.
Proponents of land clearing in Queensland say large areas of the state's vegetation would remain untouched and that farmers have a right to make their land more productive. They also argue some clearing is required to maintain the health of other vegetation.
However, the Wilderness Society, which conducted its own separate analysis of the land to be cleared, described the pending destruction as a "frenzy".
The group’s nature campaigner, Jessica Panegyres, said the clearing across 58 properties “severely undercuts” the federal government’s reef rescue plan.
“The Turnbull government has powers under national environmental laws to halt the clearing, particularly given the big threat to the reef. But they simply refuse to act,” she said.
About 30,000 hectares of the planned clearing is slated for Olive Vale Station on Cape York, which was previously owned by federal Liberal MP Warren Entsch.
Mr Entsch has reportedly dismissed as “emotional claptrap” concerns that the clearing would harm the reef, and said the property had some of the best agriculture potential in the region.
The clearing also includes almost 2000 hectares at Kingvale Station. The federal government used its powers to assess that proposal under Commonwealth laws, a move opposed by some Coalition MPs including Matt Canavan, Barnaby Joyce and Mr Entsch. Federal officials have since given preliminary support to that clearing.
The federal government has the power to call in projects for assessment under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act if it believes the development may affect “matters of national environmental significance”. The work cannot proceed until the approval is granted.
Following a decision last year by the United Nations body UNESCO not to list the reef as "in danger", a listing the government fought hard against, Mr Frydenberg talked up the Commonwealth's powers on land clearing, saying "we'll continue to implement those".

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Land-Clearing Wipes Out $1bn Taxpayer-Funded Emissions Gains

The Guardian - Adam Morton

Official data shows forest-clearing released 160m tonnes of carbon dioxide since 2015

Emissions projections data estimates more than 60.3m tonnes will be emitted this year – equivalent to more than 10% of national emissions.

More than $1bn of public money being spent on cutting greenhouse gas emissions by planting trees and restoring habitat under the Coalition’s Direct Action climate policy will have effectively been wiped out by little more than two years of forest-clearing elsewhere in the country, official government data suggests.
The $2.55bn emissions reduction fund pays landowners and companies to avoid emissions or store carbon dioxide using a reverse auction – the cheapest credible bids win. The government says it has signed contracts to prevent 124m tonnes of emissions through vegetation projects – mostly repairing degraded habitat, planting trees and ensuring existing forest on private land is not cleared.
Based on the average price paid by the government for a tonne of carbon dioxide, the projects will receive about $1.48bn from taxpayers as they deliver their cuts over the next decade.
Meanwhile, forest-clearing elsewhere in the country has released more than 160m tonnes of carbon dioxide since the emissions reduction fund began in 2015. Emissions projections data estimates another 60.3m tonnes will be emitted this year – equivalent to more than 10% of national emissions.
An analysis by the Wilderness Society suggests the official figures underestimate the rate of land-clearing, and in reality the projects paid for from the Direct Action emissions reductions fund would have had their work nullified in even less time.
The Wilderness Society climate campaign manager, Glenn Walker, said other data sources suggested the projections data was almost certainly an underestimate.
He said the government’s forest-clearing emissions counted areas felled for farming, mining and other industry, but not those from native forest logging for timber, which are absorbed into another category. Australian National University scientists have estimated native forest logging may contribute another 38m tonnes a year.
Walker said the official forest-clearing figures also underplayed the amount of mostly agricultural land-clearing in Queensland. State data showed that 395,000 hectares were felled in 2015-16, releasing 45m tonnes of emissions from that state alone.
The Wilderness Society estimates suggest 600,000ha of land were cleared across the country in 2016, an area equivalent to about half of greater suburban Sydney, and the most in a decade.
Walker said the government had shown it wanted mass land-clearing to continue, pointing to evidence that federal environment department notices asking Queensland landholders to explain suspected illegal clear-felling on their land had been withdrawn after lobbying by Liberal National MPs and senators.
“It’s a disgrace that there is a massive public investment going into tree planting while the government sits back and not only watches but encourages the mass destruction of forests,” Walker said.
The environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, did not directly respond to questions about how the rate of land-clearing squared with the government’s emissions goals. He said a departmental review of climate policies last year confirmed that Australia had a comprehensive set of emissions reduction policies, and that the emissions reduction fund was internationally recognised as one of the world’s largest domestic carbon offset markets.
Land-clearing spiked in Queensland after the former Liberal National premier Campbell Newman relaxed laws preventing mass deforestation. The Palaszczuk Labor government has repealed the changes to restore earlier protections but legacy clearing permits remain for about 115,000ha.
The federal government is resisting calls that it should use national environmental laws to stop land-clearing that threatens endangered species, saying it is a state responsibility. Frydenberg is currently considering a draft department of environment recommendation that a Queensland farmer be allowed to clear most of a 2000ha block of Cape York forest that is home to endangered species. Scientific advice suggests allowing it would likely increase sediment runoff on to the Great Barrier Reef.
The government is also facing calls that it make changes to the emissions fund. It has committed $2.28bn on what it says is 191m tonnes of abatement, but questions remain over whether some types of projects backed by the fund – such as capturing methane from decomposing rubbish at landfill sites to convert into electricity – are actually limiting emissions or just being rewarded for what they would have done anyway. “Avoided deforestation” projects – paying farmers to not clear land – are also contentious.
Habitat restoration and tree-planting projects have broader support. In a recent paper in the journal Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, University of Queensland research fellow Dr Megan Evans found that well-designed incentives could encourage landowners to back reforestation on otherwise agricultural land, with broad benefits for the environment and community.
But she found that Australia’s reforestation program was being undermined by land-clearing elsewhere on the continent.
She said people were likely being held back from signing up for reforestation projects by inconsistent messages from government.
“If, as a society, we have a goal to reduce emissions, we need to ideally point all the policy messages towards that goal,” she said. “Unfortunately this hasn’t been happening.”
Australia’s total national emissions continue to rise. The most recent national greenhouse accounts showed a 1.5% increase last year. The government has pledged to cut emissions by 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2030.
Emissions from what is known as “land use, land use change and forestry” – a vast category that takes in forest-clearing, native logging, tree planting and the natural impact of and recovery from disasters such as fire, flood and drought – rose by 0.5%. The 60m tonnes from forest-clearing cancelled out what would have otherwise been an emissions sink.
The next emissions reduction fund auction is scheduled for 6 and 7 June.

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Dear Media: We Need More Stories About Resilience To Climate Change

Los Angeles Times - Elizabeth Arnold*

The village of Newtok, Alaska is shown in this May 24 2006. (Al Grillo / Associated Press)

Overwhelmed by climate change? It's not your fault.
Actually, you are to blame for climate change. But it's the media's fault for making you feel completely hopeless about it.
That includes me. As a correspondent for NPR 10 years ago, I did a story on Newtok, a remote Yupik community in northwest Alaska that was both sinking and eroding because of the effects of global warming. In the decade since the report aired, hundreds of national and international reporters have visited Newtok, and a dozen other Alaskan communities like it, to document the effects of climate change.
The stories all fit the same narrative. With somber music, images of houses and schools tipping precariously off cliffs and phrases like "impending doom," the reports paint a picture of tragedy and hopelessness and frame the residents as victims, climate change "refugees" whose communities are one bad storm away from ceasing to exist.
The repetition of this narrative over the last 10 years has done little to help. There is still no dedicated agency or funding at the federal level to address climate-induced relocation. And while the public is slowly accepting the reality of warming, even those identified as the most alarmed say they don't really know what to do about it.

The threats posed to humans, polar bears and entire ecosystems are recounted on a daily basis, leading to what researchers call a 'hope gap.'

This familiar narrative, about communities facing sea level rise and coastal erosion, fits into a larger pattern of climate change coverage. The threats posed to humans, polar bears and entire ecosystems are recounted on a daily basis, leading to what researchers call a "hope gap." With little offered in the way of action or response, people eventually tune out: "We're doomed. What's on Hulu?"
As someone who lives in Alaska and has been to the North Pole twice, I've got a pretty good idea of how bad it is. What I'd like to know more about is what people are doing to counter it. I want to know how cities are meeting emissions targets in spite of the Trump administration's environmental rollbacks. I want to know that the fastest-growing job in the country is solar panel installer.
I'm not alone, apparently. A surprising number of scholars are studying how the public responds to climate news. There's even a Media and Climate Change Observatory that keeps daily track of climate-related stories. In 2004, its founder, Max Boykoff, was among the first to identify a trend of "false balance" in the early reporting. That's the practice of pairing a contrarian view from an organization skeptical of climate change to "balance" the view of a reputable climate scientist. Several years later, Boykoff took another look and found that most news organizations had self-corrected. More recently, he called attention to a "trend of daily fear, misery and doom" that leaves audiences feeling powerless.
This doesn't mean we should stop reporting the terrifying realities. But it does mean we need to start telling stories about effective responses: practical, replicable examples of how individuals, businesses and governments are tackling climate change. It may smack of advocacy, but what self-respecting public health reporter would do a story about an epidemic without including information about an available vaccine or how to avoid infection?
Take Newtok, for example. That community is not waiting and watching helplessly as homes are erased by the sea. Quite the opposite is true: It's a place where indigenous people are adapting in order to stay in a region where they've managed to weather wrenching environmental and cultural change for thousands of years.
Newtok residents have spent the last decade raising money, navigating a bureaucratic morass and collaborating with everyone from the local Lions Club to the Department of Defense in order to move just nine and a half miles away. Their new community is taking shape on firm volcanic rock. It's called Mertarvik, which means "place to get water," because it has a fresh water spring, something the old site lacks. Community members have built seven energy-efficient homes. They're building another four this summer, and 13 refurbished military barracks are scheduled to arrive by barge. State agencies will soon be required to fund a new school, an airstrip and public utilities.
The process of relocating a community is painfully incremental, but it's one that should be documented for the same reason so many news organizations sent reporters to Newtok in the first place. Although Newtok's plight was broadcast as a harbinger of tragic things to come, its response might serve as a model for the coastal and island communities around the world facing the same threat.
If we journalists were able to self-correct for false balance, surely we can self-correct for an overly narrow narrative that amounts to a steady drip of catastrophic predictions. Newtok, a community "doomed" by climate change, has figured out how to adapt — one innovative idea, one grant, one barge load at a time. It will not cease to exist. In fact, life might even be a little bit better on higher, more solid ground and with fresh water. It's a story worth telling.

*Elizabeth Arnold is a Shorenstein fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School and a journalism professor at University of Alaska Anchorage. She was previously a correspondent for National Public Radio.

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Great Barrier Reef Survived Five Climate Change 'Death Events' But May Not Bounce Back This Time

ABC Science - Joanna Khan

The Great Barrier Reef survived five "death events" over the past 30,000 years, but might not be resilient enough to bounce back from current climate pressures, according to a new study.
By drilling into and extracting fossilised coral at the edge of the continental shelf, a team of scientists reconstructed how the reef shifted and evolved over the past 30,000 years.
In the journal Nature Geoscience today, they report that the reef migrated out to sea and landward again as sea levels rose and fell with changes in glaciation.
During these swings, the reef faced death events, but survived the ups and downs by shifting and growing at different depths.
Today, though, with a faster changing climate, the Great Barrier Reef simply might not be able to keep up.

Ice age left reefs exposed
Coral reefs might seem like stable, immobile systems, but they can shuffle around when conditions change (albeit slowly).
During ice ages, sea levels gradually fall. As the shoreline recedes, the reef follows suit, according to study co-author Jody Webster, a geoscientist at the University of Sydney.
"As the sea level fell in the last ice age, that exposed and killed the reef in some locations," Dr Webster said.
"What was underwater became the land, the shoreline migrated to the east, and a new reef started growing."

Dr Webster and his colleagues found the reef faced two of these exposure death events in the past 30,000 years.
One struck 30,000 years ago, and another 8,000 years later, right before the last glacial maximum, which is marked by the maximum extent of ice and the lowest sea level around the world.
On the Great Barrier Reef, the sea level was at its lowest about 21,000 years ago — 118 metres below the present sea level.
During exposure from falling sea levels, the reef migrated up to 1 kilometre seaward to stay underwater.

Drowned reefs
The other type of reef death event is caused by sea level rise.
This occurred around 17,000 and 13,000 years ago as the world's ice sheets started to melt — a period known as the "deglaciation".
"The sea level started rising rapidly back across the shelf, and in a couple of instances the combination of sea level rise and we think increased sediment flux actually led to the decline of the reef," Dr Webster said.
By looking at the different corals and algae in the fossil cores, the researchers worked out that there had been a decline in reef growth rates.
"We could see the growth slowed to the point where the [coral] community changed and switched completely from shallow water fast-growing forms to now deeper water forms," Dr Webster said.

The cylindrical fossil reef cores are tested for density before being carbon-dated to determine their age. (Supplied: ECORD/IODP)

The most recent death event took place around 10,000 years ago and made way for what scientists call the "Holocene reef" — the modern Great Barrier Reef.
It wasn't just the sea level rise, but the potential influx of sediments from the land as the shelf flooded that led to the demise of this reef, Dr Webster said.
"It was once a fluvial plain — with grass and trees and rivers and probably mangroves — then started to flood, potentially mobilising massive amounts of sediment," he said.
University of Wollongong marine palaeoecologist Tara Clark was not involved in the study, but said that it was a significant and comprehensive look at how the reef developed over millennia — not only how the reef responded to changes in sea level, but also to the associated environmental changes.
"Looking at water quality, coral community changes and growth rates is an added benefit to show how these reefs have changed through time," she said.
"It's one of the first descriptions of this, which is crucial at this point in time with all the environmental changes and changes in land use that are taking place at the moment around the Great Barrier Reef."

Going deep into the past to understand the present
This study is the first to piece together what happened to the Great Barrier Reef during times of low sea level over the past 30,000 years, Dr Webster said.

The coral species present in the fossil cores can tell the scientists what type of reef they once lived on. (Supplied: ECORD/IODP)

By sonar mapping the seabed at the edge of the continental shelf, he and his team saw ridges and structures along the sea floor which they thought could be the remnants of drowned reef systems.
"We took the drill ship out to the edge of the continental shelf in front of the modern reef, and then drilled a whole series of cores through the seabed beneath which is the record of where the reef once grew," he said.
Once they collected fossil reef cores, the team scrutinised them for organisms to "paint a picture of what the environment was like when the coral reef was growing", Dr Webster said.
"Was it a shallow or a deep reef? Was it a sheltered reef?"
The coral and algae embedded in the cores were carbon-dated, and their chemical signatures let the team reconstruct the sea surface temperature and the water depth at the time they were alive.

Reef resilience not forever
Dr Webster said that understanding the reef's survival threshold over the past 30,000 years is important for predicting and protecting the reef's health down the track.
"There's strong evidence that since European colonisation there has been a massive increase in sediment and nutrient flux to the Great Barrier Reef lagoon, so that is an ongoing issue of concern," he said.
Dr Clark hopes that large baseline studies spanning huge spatial and time scales, like Dr Webster's research, will lead to improvements in reef management.
"The fact that they've shown a decline in coral, not only attributable to changes in sea level but also to poor water quality, could hopefully give management an idea of where they should target improvements," Dr Clark said.

Why land clearing is bad news for the reef

Land clearing approved on Cape York's Kingvale Station this month, as critics warn clearing would add to the Great Barrier Reef sediment load.

While the Great Barrier Reef has shown remarkable resilience to respond as an ecosystem to sea level changes and sea surface temperature rise, the changes the reef is currently facing are more extreme and faster than ever before, Dr Webster warned.
"From the last ice age to about 10,000 years ago, the temperature rose a couple of degrees over tens of thousands of years, and if we compare that with the sorts of rates we see now, the rate of temperature rise is much faster now," he said.

"It's a depressing state of affairs."

Dr Clark agrees that the past ability of the reef to bounce back cannot be taken as a sign it will recover from its current woes.
"The reefs may have been resilient in the past, but going into the future with the number of bleaching events we've had and the land-use change that's going on," she said.

"It's a bit worrying, I think."

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