05/08/2018

Could The Heat And Extreme Weather Shift Climate Change Denial?

Fairfax - Nick Miller

London: Huge, deadly wildfires in Greece and California, forest fires out of control across Sweden, a record-setting heatwave in northern Europe, heatstroke deaths up fourfold in a baking Tokyo … and British academic Dr Rupert Read got a call.
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire wanted the Green House think tank chairman to debate climate change on air with a climate science denier.
People are silhouetted against parched grass from the lack of rain on Parliament Square, backdropped by the scaffolded Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, during what has been the driest summer for many years in London. Photo: AP
He's done it before. This time he got a bit hot under the collar.
"I said NO," Read said, in a Tweet that has since been retweeted tens of thousands of times.
"I told them it was a disgrace that they still give climate deniers airtime at a time like this. I won't be part of such charades any longer."
But as the tones of the Drifters' Save the Last Dance for Me faded, BBC Radio Cambridgeshire's presenter pondered, "The summer has [been] one of the hottest and driest on record … does this mean climate change is real?" And among his interviewees was Phillip Foster, who declared the rise in temperatures was a temporary trend due to the sun, not man-made carbon dioxide – an easily-debunked furphy.
A child cycles on parched grass from the lack of rain in Greenwich Park in Britain. Photo: AP
The next day, 11 weather stations in Germany broke or tied all-time highs. Finnmark, inside the Arctic Circle, recorded an unthinkable 31.2 degrees. In Norway they were warning drivers to watch out for reindeer sheltering in tunnels from the heat. The mercury threatened to set records in Spain and Portugal.
In July, Montreal recorded its highest temperature in 147 years of record-keeping, German farmers abandoned ruined grain crops, and the Ouargla weather station in the Algerian Sahara hit an African record: 51.3 degrees.
Read says the debate really needs to move on.
"It just doesn't make sense any more in 2018 and, in the middle of this summer, it just isn't good enough any more to just frame the debate 'is climate change real?' " he said.
"There are other debates we need to be having, like what are we going to do about it. Not this one any more. And there are many, many people out there who feel the same way."
The heatwave grips the UK - will it budge the thinking of climate change deniers? Photo: Supplied
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Dwelling on the old debate causes great damage, Read says.
"It gives people the impression that the scientific debate is still alive. It's like the 'merchants of doubt' idea." A tobacco executive said "doubt is our product" on the link between cigarettes and cancer.
"As long as the BBC and other media give the impression that there is any significant doubt about this … then people won't take action."
Read worries it's part of a bigger trend: extremists have weaponised free speech, insisting on platforms to publicly debate the absurd, to spread conspiracy theories and clog up sane debate. Any move to ignore them is branded censorship.
More extreme fires, more often. The Carr Fire burns near Redding, California. Photo: AP
"The free speech argument is completely bogus. We're not stopping anyone's free speech from going on Twitter. Plenty of fools have gone on Twitter to attack what I'm saying. But what does the BBC do, what do responsible media organisations do? That's a separate question."
Anyway, no one needs to listen to the radio to find out whether it's hot outside.
Author Michael McCarthy, one of Britain's leading writers on the environment, wrote in The Guardian last week that we are witnessing "a historic shift in the way that the threat of climate change is perceived by the world, from prediction to observation".
The science so far has been prophecy, hedged by uncertainty and variability, enough for deniers to sow doubt.
The heat takes its toll on sunflowers in Wehrheim near Frankfurt, Germany. Photo: AP
"Observation is different," wrote McCarthy. "Seeing things happening around you cannot be gainsaid."
And there's plenty to observe. Nine of Britain's 10 warmest years on record have been since 2002 – and the other was 1990. Seven of its 10 wettest years have come since 1998.
Britain has always been a place of crazy weather, perched between ocean and continent, but the climate change signal can now be seen and felt, not just calculated.
Science is also getting better at separating the climate change signal from the weather noise.
A massive bushfire burns near Redding, California. Photo: AP
A new area known as "detection and attribution" is able to – almost in real time – analyse an extreme weather-related event and – sometimes – tell you whether and by how much climate change is to blame.
It is cutting-edge science that requires a heap of computer power, but it's starting to show results.
For example, climate change made the heatwave in northern Europe in June and July more than twice as likely to happen, according to preliminary calculations by the World Weather Attribution Project, led by Oxford University's Dr Friederike Otto.
A heatwave and lack of rainfall is pummeling crops across Europe as far as the Black Sea. Photo: Bloomberg
"In Ireland, the Netherlands and Denmark there are clear trends towards more heat waves," the study, which was non-peer reviewed, found. The close to record-high temperatures in these areas were likely to recur within four to seven years.
"They have simply become more likely due to anthropogenic [man-made] climate change."
The same group looked at Cape Town in South Africa, and found climate change had made this year's drought three times more likely – and there would be more like it, more often.
They also had a look at extreme rainfall and flash floods in south-western Japan in early July, but found they were compatible with natural variability, without a clear signal of climate change influence.
A view from Primrose Hill shows burnt grass from the lack of rain during what has been the driest summer for many years in London. Photo: AP
The technique allows scientists to home in regionally and assess the effects of climate change in a very particular landscape, says Professor Corrinne Le Quere, director of the centre of climate change research at the University of East Anglia.
For example, floods can be caused by the heavier rain predicted by climate change, but also by land management.
"If you are able to say the climate change contribution is so much, land management is so much and natural variability is so much, then you can really put your efforts in the right place and plan for the long term," she says.
Rupert Read, tired of debating climate change.
Photo: Supplied
Le Quere says techniques such as these can help move the conversation on. She is constantly asked about the link between weather and climate change, and now she has the tools and the research to answer.
"It makes what I say about climate change much more powerful. I'm able to say, 'Look, in the very same summer, we have a heatwave here, in Japan and in America and it's indicative of a very strong signal in the background of climate change.'
"We can talk about it with more confidence. Attribution is so obvious in the heat-related events."
But what is even more helpful than that is people can tell for themselves now, she says.
"If you ask an adult of 30 years or older how was it like when you were young, they can tell the difference themselves. It's the same story all around the world."
Of course, climate change deniers are not surrendering; they are changing tactics.
The Global Warming Policy Forum in Britain has striven greatly to sow doubt on climate science and counted high-profile politicians in its ranks. It has hosted former prime ministers Tony Abbott and John Howard. The former said climate change, if it existed, was "probably doing good" and the latter dismissed global warming as a "religion" and the "latest progressive cause".
But the forum's recent newsletters have concentrated on reports that wildfires were causing less damage as a proportion of GDP than they used to, and that fewer people are dying from heat-related deaths, because there are more airconditioners.
"Warmer weather is a lifesaver," the forum's head Benny Peiser wrote for The Conservative Woman blog last week.
Nevertheless, Le Quere has some hope this wave of heat could lead to clearer thinking.
"It is one possible positive outcome of what's happening now," she says. "It's slowly starting to sink in that what was done in the past is done; the only thing we can do is what we will do in the future.
"For 20 years, maybe 30, I have worked in this field and I'm holding on to these little bits of hope, maybe this time around it's going to get better. I'd really like to see action – now."

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We Are All Climate Refugees Now

Project Syndicate - *

This summer's fires, droughts, and record-high temperatures should serve as a wake-up call. The longer a narrow and ignorant elite condemns Americans and the rest of humanity to wander aimlessly in the political desert, the more likely it is that we will all end up in a wasteland.
ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP/Getty Images
NEW YORK – Modern humans, born into one climate era, called the Holocene, have crossed the border into another, the Anthropocene. But instead of a Moses guiding humanity in this new and dangerous wilderness, a gang of science deniers and polluters currently misguides humanity to ever-greater danger. We are all climate refugees now and must chart a path to safety.
The Holocene was the geological age that started more than 10,000 years ago, with favorable climate conditions that supported human civilization as we know it. The Anthropocene is a new geological era with environmental conditions that humanity has never before experienced. Ominously, the Earth’s temperature is now higher than during the Holocene, owing to the carbon dioxide that humanity has emitted into the atmosphere by burning coal, oil, and gas, and by indiscriminately turning the world’s forests and grasslands into farms and pastures.
People are suffering and dying in the new environment, with much worse to come. Hurricane Maria is estimated to have taken more than 4,000 lives in Puerto Rico last September. High-intensity hurricanes are becoming more frequent, and major storms are causing more flooding, because of the increased heat transfer from the warming waters of the oceans, the greater moisture in warmer air, and the rise in sea levels – all made more extreme by human-induced climate change.
Just last month, more than 90 people perished in the suburbs of Athens from a devastating forest fire stoked by drought and high temperatures. Huge forest fires are similarly raging this summer in other hot and newly dry locales, including California, Sweden, Britain, and Australia. Last year, Portugal was devastated. Many record-high temperatures are being reached around the world this summer.
How utterly reckless of humanity to have rushed past the Holocene boundary, ignoring – like a character in a horror movie – all of the obvious warning signs. In 1972, the world’s governments assembled in Stockholm to address the growing environmental threats. In the lead-up to the conference, the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, which first introduced the idea of a “sustainable” growth trajectory and the risks of environmental overshooting. Twenty years later, the warning signs flashed brightly in Rio de Janeiro, where United Nations member states assembled at the Earth Summit to adopt the concept of “sustainable development” and to sign three major environmental treaties to halt human-induced global warming, protect biological diversity, and stop land degradation and desertification.
After 1992, the United States, the world’s most powerful country, ostentatiously ignored the three new treaties, signaling to other countries that they could slacken their efforts as well. The US Senate ratified the climate and desertification treaties but did nothing to implement them. And it refused even to ratify the treaty to protect biological diversity, in part because western-state Republicans insisted that landowners have the right to do what they want with their property without international meddling.
More recently, the world adopted the Sustainable Development Goals in September 2015 and the Paris climate agreement in December 2015. Yet, once again, the US government has willfully ignored the SDGs, ranking last among the G20 countries in terms of government implementation efforts. And President Donald Trump has declared his intention to pull the US out of the Paris climate agreement at the earliest possible moment, 2020, four years after the accord entered into force.
Worse is to come. The human-caused rise in CO2 hasn’t yet reached its full warming effect, owing to the considerable lag in its impact on ocean temperatures. There is still another 0.5º Celsius or so of warming to occur over the coming decades based on the current concentration of CO2 (408 parts per million) in the atmosphere, and far more warming beyond that if CO2 concentrations continue to soar with the business-as-usual burning of fossil fuels. To achieve the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting warming to “well below 2ºC” relative to the pre-industrial level, the world needs to shift decisively from coal, oil, and gas to renewable energy by around 2050, and from deforestation to reforestation and restoration of degraded lands.
So why does humanity keep plunging dumbly ahead, toward certain tragedy?
The main reason is that our political institutions and giant corporations willfully ignore the rising dangers and damage. Politics is about obtaining and holding power and the perks of office, not about solving problems, even life-and-death environmental problems. Managing a major company is about maximizing shareholder value, not about telling the truth or avoiding great harm to the planet. Profit-seeking investors own the major media, or at least influence it through their advertising purchases. Thus, a small yet very powerful group maintains the fossil-fuel-based energy system at growing peril to the rest of humanity today and in the future.
Trump is the latest useful fool doing the polluters’ bidding, abetted by congressional Republicans who finance their election campaigns with contributions from environmental culprits such as Koch Industries. Trump has filled the US government with industry lobbyists who are systematically dismantling every environmental regulation they can reach. Most recently, Trump has nominated a former lawyer for mega-polluter Dow Chemical to lead the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund toxic cleanup program. You can’t make this stuff up.
We need a new kind of politics that starts with a clear global goal: environmental safety for the planet’s people, by fulfilling the Paris climate agreement, protecting biodiversity, and cutting pollution, which kills millions each year. The new politics will listen to scientific and technological experts, not self-interested business leaders and narcissistic politicians. Climatologists enable us to gauge the rising dangers. Engineers inform us how to make the rapid transition, by 2050, to zero-carbon energy. Ecologists and agronomists show us how to grow more and better crops on less land while ending deforestation and restoring previously degraded land.
Such a politics is possible. In fact, the public yearns for it. A large majority of the American people, for example, want to fight global warming, stay in the Paris climate agreement, and embrace renewable energy. Yet, as long as a narrow and ignorant elite condemn Americans and the rest of humanity to wander aimlessly in the political desert, the more likely it is that we will all end up in a wasteland from which there will be no escape.

*Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development and of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. His books include The End of Poverty, Common Wealth, The Age of Sustainable Development, and, most recently, Building the New American Economy.

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Trump’s Clean Car Rollback Will Cost The U.S. $457 Billion

Fast Company - Adele Peters

It will also hasten the end of all life on Earth as we know it, in case the financial argument wasn’t enough.
[Photo: ablokhin/iStock]
The new Trump administration proposal to freeze rules to build more fuel-efficient cars–and revoke California’s long-standing right to set stronger standards for clean cars–would cost the American economy $457 billion by 2050, according to an analysis from the nonprofit Energy Innovation.
It would also push up greenhouse gas emissions 11% by 2035, or 139 million megatons, at a time when the world’s carbon budget is nearly depleted.
Under the current standards, set in a deal with automakers in 2012, cars were supposed to get significantly cleaner between 2022 and 2025, ending up at an average of around 54 miles per gallon and saving drivers gas costs and cutting pollution.
The new proposal would freeze standards at 2020 levels.
Most importantly, it also wants to strip California of its unique right to set more restrictive standards than the federal government–a deal written into the Clean Air Act because the state had been regulating smog long before the federal law existed.
If California chooses to set stricter standards, other states can follow; 14 states and D.C. have adopted California’s standards so far.
At the moment, the state standard and the national one are the same–but if they diverged, automakers could end up making multiple versions of each car to sell in different parts of the U.S. The Trump administration wants to take away California’s right to set higher standards.
[Image: Energy Innovation]

The administration argues that higher fuel economy standards are a safety risk, claiming that if cars that are more efficient are more expensive, people will be less likely the buy newer cars with improved safety features, and if they spend less on gas, they’d drive more and therefore be at greater risk of crashes.
An Obama-era analysis found no harm to safety from making cars more efficient.
Using an open-source, peer-reviewed digital tool called the Energy Policy Simulator, Energy Innovation modeled the impact of the proposed changes. In the first few years, there would be a small financial boost because less efficient cars are cheaper to build. But as consumers spend more on gas, the costs would start to balloon.
By 2040, the cost would be the equivalent of a 57 cent-per-gallon gas tax. Another analysis estimates that an average family would end up spending $200 more a year because of the changes, and perhaps as much as $500 more.
The greatest increase in greenhouse gas emissions would happen in the 2030s because electric cars will grow significantly by the 2040s, the Energy Innovation analysis found. But the growth in emissions is large, and comes at a point when the rest of the world will be trying to quickly cut climate pollution. The proposal would also push fuel consumption 20% higher in 2035 than it would have been otherwise.
All of this could be somewhat mitigated if California can set stronger standards; at the moment, the state and federal standard are the same. The state, and others that have adopted the standard, have vowed to fight in court. That could lead to a split market for automakers, who might end up making different versions of cars for different states, increasing cost.
“Everyone loses at the end,” says Simon Mui, a senior scientist at the environmental nonprofit NRDC and the California lead for the organizations’ clean vehicles and fuels, climate, and energy program. “From a consumer angle, from an environmental angle, from an industry angle, there’s just no great logic [for this proposal] outside of the administration really catering to extremist viewpoints. It’s unfortunate that one of the key drivers for all of this seems to really just be this idea that somebody doesn’t like regulations and therefore all regulation is bad, even ones that are actually very much helping the economy.”
Other countries are continuing to move forward with policy to promote more efficient cars, meaning that American automakers could become less competitive globally. EU regulations are much stricter. India is pushing hard to shift to electric cars. Chinese consumers are on track to buy a million electric cars this year, and policy is pushing that growth.
“The auto industry, longer-term, is going to be having China breathing down their neck with their auto industry having more fuel-efficient products and that global market now exceeding the U.S. market,” says Mui. Automakers have said that they don’t want to freeze the current standards.
“The only winners are the oil companies, who stand to sell more gasoline,” says the Energy Innovation analysis.

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