13/06/2018

Power Sector Emissions Dip Stalls, While Transport Revs Up

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Diesel's carbon emissions have matched petrol for the first time in Australia's transport sector. Photo: Dmitry Panchenko
Cuts in power sector emissions are unlikely to be maintained, while those from the transport sector will continue to climb in the absence of mandatory standards, according to analysis by The Australia Institute.
A separate report by the institute also found Australia's Paris climate goals to be "grossly inadequate".
At the end of March, carbon emissions from electricity generation were down more than 12 per cent compared with mid-2011, with almost the entire drop made up by brown coal-fired power stations.
The closure of Victoria's Hazelwood power plant in March 2017 removed Australia's most carbon-intensive power station.
"From now on ... electricity emissions will fall much more slowly" if not remain flat, Hugh Saddler, an energy analyst and author of the report, said.
"Total energy combustion emissions may well start to increase, as they were doing up to the beginning of 2017 [prior to the Hazelwood closure]."
In the most recent government greenhouse gas data, electricity generation emissions fell 3.1 per cent in 2017, the only sector to record a drop.
Total emissions rose 1.5 per cent last year and are on course to notch a fourth consecutive year of growth. That's a trend at odds with Australia's pledge to cut carbon pollution 26-28 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030,  particularly in the absence of policies to curb fossil-fuel use and looser curbs on land clearing.
In the transport sector – Australia's second-largest source of emissions after power generation – diesel now accounts for more than half the pollution, and is responsible for all its continuing growth, Dr Saddler said in the National Energy Emissions Audit.
Burning diesel typically emits 17 per cent more greenhouse gas than the same amount of petrol, offsetting its higher efficiency.
"Unless the Australian government takes action on emissions standards, we will continue to drive up emissions in the transport sector with one of the least efficient, highest-emission motor vehicle fleets in the world," said Dr Saddler.
"Australia's average fleet efficiency hasn't changed for years and years," he said. Most other wealthy nations had such controls, while emerging giants India and China had them.

Changes in fossil fuel combustion emissions since 2011

Fairfax Media approached Josh Frydenberg, environment and energy minister, for comment.
Mr Frydenberg has said previously Australia's per capita reduction targets were among the highest for any nation, that the country would likely easily achieve its climate targets.
Australia's emissions pledge to Paris was less than the country's fair share, The Australia Institute says. Photo: Paul Crock
'Unfair'
In a separate report out Tuesday, however, The Australia Institute took aim at Australia's international commitments, saying the country was not doing its "fair share" to combat climate change.
Applying several approaches used widely to assess nations' contribution, the institute found the government's Paris pledge to be "grossly inadequate".

How they compare
Average greenhouse gas emissions (including land use change and forestry) per capita 1990-2014
Source: The Australia Institute


“Whether you assess the fairness of a country’s emissions reduction target by population, economic cost, or a combination, our analysis shows Australia’s reduction target is unambitious, unfair and irresponsible,” Richie Merzian, director of the institute’s Climate & Energy Program, said.
Given Australia's per capita emissions are among the highest in the world, its ambitions should also be high, with a national 2030 reduction target of 45-63 per cent to be fair, the report said.  Labor's target is 45 per cent.
To have a mid-probability of meeting the Paris goal of keeping global warming to well below 2 degrees – compared with about 1 degree to date since pre-industrial times – the world can emit only a further 1040 gigatonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent, the report noted.
According to Australia's population, the country's fair share of that total would be about 3392 million tonnes – an amount that would be taken up in about six years of current annual emissions.
Getting international co-operation on emissions, though, may be come more difficult in the short term, at least.
US President Donald Trump exited the G7 leaders summit over the weekend in Canada early, avoiding discussions on tackling climate change.  The US signalled a year ago that it would pull out of the Paris accord.
The other six nations – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Britain – all pledged to implement the climate agreement, but the US only promised to "work closely with other countries to help them access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently", according to a report by Inside Climate News.

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Antarctic Ocean Discovery Warns Of Faster Global Warming

Climate Central - Mikayla Mace, Arizona Daily Star

A group of scientists, including one from the University of Arizona, has new findings suggesting Antarctica's Southern Ocean — long known to play an integral role in climate change — may not be absorbing as much pollution as previously thought.
The old belief was the ocean pulled about 13 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide — a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change — out of the atmosphere, helping put the brakes on rising global temperatures.
To reach their contradictory conclusion, the team used state-of-the-art sensors to collect more data on the Southern Ocean than ever before, including during the perilous winter months that previously made the research difficult if not impossible.
Some oceanographers suspect that less CO2 is being absorbed because the westerlies — the winds that ring the southernmost continent — are tightening like a noose. As these powerful winds get more concentrated, they dig at the water, pushing it out and away.
The crew of the N.B. Palmer used satellite imagery to avoid large fields of sea ice during a mission to deploy and recover floats, which remotely monitor ocean conditions, but sometimes encounters were unavoidable. The research vessel can break through ice three feet thick while traveling at three knots. Credit: Greta Shum/Climate Central
Water from below rises to take its place, dragging up decaying muck made of carbon from deep in the ocean that can then either be released into the atmosphere in the form of CO2 or slow the rate that CO2 is absorbed by the water. Either way, it's not good.
The Southern Ocean is far away, but “for Arizona, this is what matters,” said Joellen Russell, the University of Arizona oceanographer and co-author on the paper revealing these findings. “We don’t see the Southern Ocean, and yet it has reached out the icy hand.”
Joellen Russell, associate professor of geoscience at the University of Arizona, with a climate model of sea surface temperatures. Credit: Kelly Presnell/Arizona Daily Star 
Oceans, rivers, lakes and vegetation can moderate extreme changes in temperature. Southern Arizona has no such buffers, leaving us vulnerable as average global temperatures march upward.
“Everybody asks, ‘Why are you at the UA?’” Russell said about studying the Southern Ocean from the desert at the University of Arizona. She said the research is important to Arizona and the university supports her work.

Making measurements
The Southern Ocean is a formidable place, especially in winter. Winds can howl at nearly 100 mph, churning waves that can surge 80 feet high. The temperature dips below freezing for prolonged periods.
“Very few people who have a sane view of the world go down there in winter,” said Rik Wanninkhof, an oceanographer from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and one of the paper’s co-authors.
For this reason, scientists know less about the Southern Ocean than the rest of the world’s oceans. What they do know is mostly limited to surface CO2 levels in the summer, when it’s safer to take measurements by ships with researchers aboard. Shipboard sensors that directly measure CO2 are the accepted scientific standard in these types of studies.
Understanding CO2 levels within the air, land and sea and how it is exchanged between the three is necessary for making more accurate future climate predictions.
To fill the gap in knowledge, Russell and her team have deployed an array of cylindrical tanks, called floats, that collect data on carbon and more in the Southern Ocean year-round. Russell leads the modeling component of this project called Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling, or SOCCOM.
Aboard the N.B. Palmer research vessel, marine technician MacKenzie Haberman assisted with the launch of a profiling float in the Southern Ocean, which remotely monitors ocean conditions. Credit: Greta Shum/Climate Central
The floats drift 1,000 meters below the surface. Every 10 days, they plunge a thousand meters deeper, then bob up to the surface before returning to their original depth.
For three years, 35 floats equipped with state-of-the-art sensors the size of a coffee cup have been collecting data along the way and beaming it back to the researchers, like Russell in Tucson. Within hours, the data is freely available online.
They measure ocean acidity, or pH, and other metrics to understand the biogeochemistry of the elusive ocean, but not without controversy.

Making a splash
Alison Gray, an oceanographer at the University of Washington, is the lead author on the study. She said there are two reasons the study may contradict what has previously been thought of about the Southern Ocean: The lack of winter-time observations at the ocean by other researchers and the fact that ocean carbon levels might vary throughout the year.
So while SOCCOM is making it possible to get more data than ever before, others question her nontraditional methods. They suggest that Gray’s alarming results are derived from error.
“Whether the Southern Ocean is absorbing a large quantity of CO2 from the atmosphere is a hot topic for environmental science and global policy making,” said Taro Takahashi, a geochemist from Columbia University, in an email. He is not involved with SOCCOM.
Takahashi is not entirely convinced the measurements reported by the authors are scientifically reliable enough to support their conclusions.
The issue with the findings is that researchers are not directly measuring CO2 but rather calculating it from the measurements taken with the new sensors, he said. The standard shipboard sensors don’t work at the depth the floats operate, and the traditional sensors are too large to fit on a float.

Pushback
Publishing the paper has been laborious as well, Russell said.
SOCCOM is like the disruptive startup in the carbon counting industry.
“(Reviewers) kept saying, ‘It’s a new sensor, so if you want us to trust it, we want more time and more of them,’ which is legitimate and annoying,” she said.
Additionally, while the floats are convenient year-round tools, some worry the floats will render measurements made by shipboard crews with the older, larger sensors obsolete. But Russell wants to reassure them: "We don’t think we should ever replace the ships because that together actually gets us this transformational science.”
The N.B. Palmer research vessel carried scientists across the Southern Ocean as they collected samples and launched floats, which remotely monitor ocean conditions. Credit: Ted Blanco/Climate Central
What’s next
Gray remains confident in her findings, "but we need to keep making measurements to verify our results," she said.
“Even assuming large uncertainty, our results are still significantly different than previous estimates," Gray said. "So even if we are off, the take-home message is the same."
The team only wants to improve the models with more data so that future climate predictions can bet more accurate, Gray said.
“If the Southern Ocean is not taking up as much carbon as we believed, it could be that things are changing more rapidly,” Wanninkhof said.
And that matters, even in a desert thousands of miles from the Antarctica since climate change will make extreme weather events more extreme in Arizona, he said.

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It's Hooray For Climate Scientists Day (Formerly Hug A Climate Scientist Day)

The Guardian - 



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