'Emphatic': Odds Point To Big Dry Expanding Across Eastern Australia

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Fire authorities, farmers and even water storage managers may be in for even more trying times as odds increase for the drier and hotter conditions across eastern Australia to continue deep into spring.
Places such as Sydney are already on track for record-breaking July temperatures amid the lowest rainfall in decades.
The Bureau of Meteorology's latest three-month outlook, updated on Thursday, points to more of the same for months to come.

There's no sign of a let-up for most of eastern Australia's drier and hotter than average weather. Photo: Johnathan Carroll

While the August-October forecast suggests odds favour a drier and hotter than normal stint for mainland south-eastern Australian, the chances are particularly strong for next month alone, Jonathan Pollock, a bureau climatologist, said.
"It's unusual to have such widespread emphatic odds," Mr Pollock said.

Chance of exceeding the median Rainfall for August

Source: Australian Bureau of Meteorology

"Everywhere south of Armidale [in north NSW] has a greater than 80 per cent chance of below-average rainfall," he said.
So far in July, rainfall totals in NSW have been less than half the norm for much of the state. For the first six months of the year, they were also half the average, marking the driest start to a year since 1986, the bureau has said.
For Sydney alone, this month is on track to being the driest July since 1995 on current forecasts, with just 9.8 millimetres so far collected at Observatory Hill. A typical July would have almost 10 times that, at 96.6 millimetres.

Record warmth
The standout for Sydney, though, may be its daytime temperatures. On Thursday, the mercury climbed above 20 degrees for the eighth day this month, with five more forecast by July 31.

Much of eastern Australia has experienced a very dry first half of the year, and the likelihood of an El Nino developing is around 50-50. Vision: Bureau of Meteorology.

The record number of such days is 12, in 2013. Even if the record is not broken, there's a fair chance the bar will be lifted for maximum temperatures, also set 2013 at 19.5 degrees. A typical July averages 16.4 degrees.
As Fairfax Media reported on Monday, authorities have already brought forward the start of the official fire season for parts of north-eastern NSW.  Some other regions, where the season would typically start in October, are likely to be brought forward to September.

Chance of exceeding the median Max Temp for August

Source: Australian Bureau of Meteorology

Farmers wilt
Mr Pollock said parts of the state had soil moisture levels down to 1 per cent of normal conditions, hammering farmers.

Sheep hunt for grass on a farm near Manilla, not far from Tamworth, in northern NSW. Photo: Peter Hardin

Among other things, it also means rainfall when it comes would likely be first soaked up in the soils rather than ending up in dams and rivers.
"That's bad news for water storage," Mr Pollock said.
The reason for the lifting of odds for poor rainfall and warmer-than-usual conditions is partly a cooling of waters off Western Australia of late. This shift tends to reduce moisture over the continent.
There have also been weaker and fewer rain-bearing cold fronts extending into south-eastern Australia amid generally relatively weak westerly winds, Mr Pollock said.

El Nino lurks
While the bureau's outlook only covers the coming three months, there are few signs the pattern will be breaking up soon. In fact, it could extend beyond spring, if an El Nino forms in the Pacific later this year.
The current odds for an El Nino - which typically means less rainfall than usual and higher temperatures across much of Australia - are about 50-50, Mr Pollock said.
Five of the bureau's eight main international models it analyses point to El Nino thresholds being crossed by the spring, and a sixth has it reached by December.

Links

• Overview - Summary for August to October - Climate Outlooks
• Temperature - Summary for August to October
• Rainfall - The chance of above median for August to October
• Rainfall - Totals that have a 75% chance of occurring for August to October
• Dry and warm weather set to continue

Federal Labor, Experts Call For Full Release Of Energy Plan Modelling

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

The Turnbull government and regulators must release the modelling underpinning the National Energy Guarantee to reassure the public that projected savings are real, Federal Labor and leading analysts said.
The call comes as discrepancies appear both with the policy's own figures - handed to state and territory governments this week by the Energy Security Board - and with those of one of the board's key members.

What are the underlying assumptions that have gone into the National Energy Guarantee's forecasts?

Labor-led state and territory governments are planning to caucus a range of demands on the energy plan for the federal government in coming days.
Seeking some form of external peer-review of the board's modelling for its full final design paper has been raised with at least one state government, Fairfax Media understands.
One complaint is governments are under excessive pressure to reach a decision by the next COAG energy ministers meeting set for August 10 in Sydney without all the information before them.
A key sales pitch by the board is the estimate, revealed this week, that the scheme will cut households' power bills by an average $150 a year - as part of $550 in overall savings - during the first decade of its operation, starting from 2020.
"Where is the modelling that proves this?" Mark Butler, federal Labor's climate spokesman said. "All modelling of the NEG should be made available so stakeholders and the public can properly assess its merits."
Josh Frydenberg, federal Environment and Energy Minister, declined to comment on any modelling release, but said: “The National Energy Guarantee will deliver a more affordable and reliable energy system. Modelling undertaken by the independent experts from the Energy Security Board shows households will be $550 a year better off under the Guarantee compared to today.”
A board spokeswoman said the body "is yet to publish the final detailed design [of the plan]," but had "real confidence that the design can deliver on the objectives of affordable, reliable and clean power for Australian households and businesses".
Liberal-led NSW is not among those pressing for additional data.
"The modelling is an internal matter of the Energy Security Board," a spokesman for Don Harwin, NSW's Energy Minister, said.
Bruce Mountain, director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre - set up recently by that state's Labor government - said the guarantee's projected cost savings were difficult to understand.
Since the emissions target of the plan - cutting 2005-level carbon pollution in the electricity sector by 2030 - will be achieved almost as soon as the scheme begins, the driver of falling prices was unclear, he said.
"How can a policy that is designed to do something that will happen anyway cause prices to be any lower than they would be anyway?" Mr Mountain said, adding that since state governments would sign off on the plan, they should be asked to demonstrate the savings were real.
Dylan McConnell, an energy expert at Melbourne University, noted assumptions contained in the version of the plan leaked to the public this week were at odds with those formally released a week earlier by the Australian Energy Market Operator in its Integrated System Plan.
For instance, the market operator included in its base case the state-run renewable energy plans for Victoria and Queensland. They would help lift clean energy's share of the electricity sector to 46 per cent by 2030 - not far shy of federal Labor's pledge of 50 per cent.
That additional generation, however, is absent in the board's modelling even though the market operator is one of its members and the Victorian target is legislated.
Similarly at odds is the board's modelling that assumes the multibillion-dollar Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme - a key Turnbull government proposal - will go ahead while the market operator does not have project in its base scenario, Mr McConnell said.
The board's modelling "is certainly not consistent" with the market operator's, he said.

Links

• Government's Energy Plan Would Guarantee A 'Nightmare' Of Complexity
• Electricity Plan Would All But Hit Emissions Goal Before It Starts
• Tender Will Allow Coalition To Dig Its Way Out Of Coal Hole
• Renewables Will Replace Ageing Coal Plants At Lowest Cost, AEMO Says
• Prolong The Life Of Coal-Fired Power Stations In The National Electricity Market, Says Australian Energy Market Operator
• Greenpeace And Getup Launch Campaign To Kill National Energy Guarantee
• National Energy Guarantee 'Clumsy, Inefficient', Says VEPC's Mountain
• Phony Peace? Challenges To Energy Plan Sent Back To Modelling Board
• 'Not A Big Drama' For Electricity Industry To Slash Emissions, Says Scheme Architect
• Victoria Demands New Detailed Analysis On NEG After COAG Meeting
• NEG: A Bipartisan Agreement To Disagree?

Heatwave Made More Than Twice As Likely By Climate Change, Scientists Find

The Guardian - Damian Carrington

Fingerprints of global warming clear, they say, after comparing northern Europe’s scorching summer with records and computer models

The dried-out riverbank of Elbe in Magdeburg, eastern Germany … climate change link to heatwave proven, scientists say. Photograph: Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images

The heatwave searing northern Europe was made more than twice as likely by climate change, according to a rapid assessment by scientists.
The result is preliminary but they say the signal of climate change is “unambiguous”. Scientists have long predicted that global warming is ramping up the number and intensity of heatwaves, with events even worse than current one set to strike every other year by the 2040s.
“The logic that climate change will do this is inescapable – the world is becoming warmer, and so heatwaves like this are becoming more common,” said Friederike Otto, at the University of Oxford and part of the World Weather Attribution (WWA) consortium that did the work.
“What was once regarded as unusually warm weather will become commonplace, and in some cases, it already has,” she said. “So this is something that society can and should prepare for. But equally there is no doubt that we can and should constrain the increasing likelihood of all kinds of extreme weather events by restricting greenhouse gas emissions as sharply as possible.”
The new analysis is a climate-change attribution study. By comparing extreme weather with historical measurements and with computer models of a climate unaltered by carbon emissions, researchers can find how much global warming is increasing the risk of dangerous weather.

The researchers analysed records of the hottest three-day period at seven weather stations in northern Europe, from Ireland to the Netherlands to Scandinavia, where data was easily accessible.


Why is it so hot? – video explainer 

“We found that for the weather station in the far north, in the Arctic Circle, the current heatwave is just extraordinary – unprecedented in the historical record,” said Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and also part of WWA.
Across northern Europe, the group found global warming more than doubled the risk of scorching temperatures. “We can can see the fingerprints of climate change on local extremes,” he said. “It is amazing now that it is something you can really see at a local level.”
“Most heatwave studies have been done on large scale averages, so European-wide temperatures,” said Otto. “In this study, we have looked at individual locations, where people live, to represent the heatwave people are actually experiencing.” The analysis is a preliminary study as a full study requires many climate models to be run on high-powered computers, which takes months.
Previous attribution analyses have shown very strong connections between climate change and extreme weather events. The scorching summer in New South Wales, Australia, in 2016-17 was made at least 50 times more likely by global warming, meaning it can be “linked directly to climate change”, said the scientists.
The “Lucifer” heatwave across Europe’s Mediterranean nations in 2017 summer was made at least 10 times more likely by climate change, while the unprecedented deluge delivered in the US by Hurricane Harvey also in 2017 was made three times more likely by climate change, new research has found. However, other events, such as storms Eleanor and Friederike, which hit western Europe in January, were not made more likely by climate change, according to the scientists.
In Europe, the heatwave has been caused by the stalling of the jet stream wind, which usually funnels cool Atlantic weather over the continent. This has left hot, dry air in place for two months – far longer than than usual. The stalling of the northern hemisphere jet stream is being increasingly firmly linked to global warming, in particular to the rapid heating of the Arctic and resulting loss of sea ice.
The role of climate change in driving extreme weather events may actually be underestimated by these attribution studies, according to Prof Michael E Mann at Penn State University in the US. The work is good, he said, but computer models cannot yet reliably account for the complex jet stream changes caused by global warming, making the attribution studies “inherently conservative”.
Serious climate change is “unfolding before our eyes”, said Prof Rowan Sutton, director of climate research at the University of Reading. “No one should be in the slightest surprised that we are seeing very serious heatwaves and associated impacts in many parts of the world.”
The wide geographical spread of the heatwave, right across four continents, points to global warming as the culprit, said Prof Peter Stott, a science fellow at the UK’s Met Office: “That pattern is something we wouldn’t be seeing without climate change.”
The heatwave across northern Europe has seen wildfires in the Arctic Circle and prolonged heat across the UK and the European continent. In the south, fierce blazes have devastated parts of Greece, with scores of people killed.
But extreme weather has struck across the globe. Severe floods killed at least 220 people in Japan in early July, with the nation then hit by an “unprecedented” heatwave that peaked at 41.1C and left 35,000 people in hospital. In the US, extreme heat in the west is feeding wildfires, with Yosemite national park being evacuated, while flooding is affecting the east.
Temperature records have also fallen in Taiwan, with a temperature of 40.3C in Tianxiang, and in Ouargla in Algeria’s Sahara desert, which reported a maximum temperature of 51.3C, the highest temperature ever reliably recorded in Africa. The first six months of the 2018 are the hottest recorded for any year without an El Niño event, a natural climate cycle that raises temperatures.

Links

• UK ‘woefully unprepared’ for deadly heatwaves, warn MPs
• London's long hot summer – in pictures
• Whinge on, Brits – even Australians can't take this heat
• Why is Europe going through a heatwave?
• Extreme global weather is 'the face of climate change' says leading scientist
• Global warming to blame for hundreds of heatwave deaths, scientists say
• Shattered records show climate change is an emergency today, scientists warn
• Brexit voters almost twice as likely to disbelieve in manmade climate change
• Paris floods made almost twice as likely by climate change, say scientists
• Europe's record hot year made at least 35 times more likely by climate change, say scientists