23/08/2018

Australia Is Devastated By Drought, Yet It Won't Budge On Climate Change

CNN - Angela Dewan

Farmer Ash Whitney cuts off branches to feed his cattle in a drought-affected paddock in Gunnedah, Australia.
Australia is suffering its worst drought in living memory, as dozens of bushfires are blazing out of control. It's hard to believe that it's winter "down under." Summer is yet to come.Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Sunday committed 1.8 billion Australian dollars ($1.3 billion) in relief funds for farmers, whose livelihoods are disappearing down the cracks of their dry, barren land. The very next day, he announced he was dropping a national policy to cut carbon emissions from the energy sector that was supposed to help Australia fulfill its obligations under the Paris climate change agreement.
The vast majority of Australians accept human-induced climate change is real and scientists have linked the current record-slashing drought to global warming, yet the subject is still highly controversial in Australian politics, and climate change skepticism is still given political space.
Australia is suffering from a record-breaking drought.
Turnbull is now facing a renewed leadership challenge from MP Peter Dutton. If Turnbull loses, he would be the third Australian prime minister to be ousted over climate policy in the past decade. A Dutton-led Australia would mean even less hope for those who want action on climate change.
It's difficult to comprehend why Australia -- a wealthy, developed nation that has long experienced crippling weather events -- has failed time and time again to get a coherent climate change plan together.
All the signs are there. The UNESCO heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef, a 2,300-kilometer stretch rich in biodiverse marine life, is under threat, having lost more than half its coral in two mass bleaching events in 2016 and 2017.
Australia's Great Barrier reef is under threat.
Australia clocked record heat in the first half of this year. The whole of New South Wales, the country's most populous state, is now 100% in drought, with some areas seeing less than 10mm of rain in July, right in the middle of winter.
It's so dry that animals are being forced to migrate -- a group of emus recently swarmed the town of Broken Hill, running down the street and gate crashing football matches in search of water and food, the Australian ABC reported.

Political survival
Political wrangling is one reason for the slow progress. Turnbull scrapped his climate policy in order to ensure his survival as prime minister.
"The history of Australian politics is that climate policy has proven in the past to be so controversial that it has resulted in prime ministers losing their jobs," said Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics.
"Australians can see for themselves what's going on at the moment. They're facing a series of weather events linked to climate change -- droughts, heatwaves, fires -- and Australia's scientific communities have been telling politicians for a long time what's going on."
Instead of talking about global warming, the ruling Liberal Party's conservative faction, that has long resisted climate action, has framed the debate around electricity prices. Dutton said Tuesday that should he became leader he would set up an inquiry exploring why power was so pricey.
Australia has long battled bushfires, but scientists say climate change has made them more severe.
A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change found that Australians who identify with the country's conservative party are more likely to be predisposed to climate change skepticism. Of all 25 nations studied, only the United States had a stronger correlation between political ideology and belief in global warming.
It also found that link between political leaning and climate change skepticism was typically present in countries with strong fossil fuel industries, including the US, Australia, Canada and Brazil, indicating the power of industry lobbying.
Much of that lobbying happens through think tanks funded by the mining and energy industries, said John Cook, from the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University.
"The broad picture in Australia is that in the '80s the issue was much less polarized. It was in the early 1990s that conservative think tanks began attacking climate science for ideological reasons, because the consequence of climate change meant regulating industry," Cook said.
That combination of ideology and climate change skepticism is most apparent in former prime minister Tony Abbott, now a backbench MP but the most vocal critic of Turnbull's carbon reduction policy.
Abbott pointed to the US President Donald Trump's announcement to withdraw the US from the Paris agreement as a reason for Australia to scrap its own emissions targets, saying last week, "it's time to get out of Paris."
Tony Abbott, right, during his time as prime minister, with Malcolm Turnbull, who ousted Abbott from the premiership.
Abbott gave a speech to a climate-skeptic think tank in London last year, in which he made the remarkable claim that climate change was "probably doing good, or at least, more good than harm," and likened climate change action to "primitive people" who killed goats to appease volcano gods.
He has even called for new coal power stations to be built by the federal government.

Australia's coal addiction
Turnbull's energy policy was aimed at bringing the country in line with its commitment to cut carbon emissions by 26% by 2030, from 2005 levels, as Australia pledged in the Paris climate change agreement.
Australians support the agreement and climate change action more broadly -- until it hits their wallets, polls show.
A Newspoll survey published in The Australian newspaper in October 2017, for example, found almost half of those polled would support dropping out of the Paris climate change agreement if it lowered energy prices.
"(Climate action) has taken too long because of the political influence of the coal industry, and as a result ... a significant rump of the current government either don't believe in climate change or don't believe Australia should do anything," Ian Lowe, Emeritus Professor at Griffith University's School of Science, told CNN.
Coal sits at the Hay Point and Dalrymple Bay Coal Terminals south of the Queensland town of Mackay in Australia.
Australia is regularly referred to at the world's biggest coal exporter, and it depends heavily on the fossil fuel in its own energy mix, as well as for jobs and economic prosperity. Mining has contributed significantly to the country's record-breaking 26 consecutive years of economic growth.
Much of Australia's coal is exported to China, to fuel the Asian powerhouse's rapid development. But even China is starting to wean itself off dirty fossil fuel and is looking increasingly to renewable energy.
Australia is getting a renewable energy program off the ground, but a lack of political will has meant progress has been incredibly slow, said Harald Heubaum, an energy and climate policy expert at the University of London. The huge potential in the sunny country for solar energy is still largely unrealized.
"So a question Australia could ask is, does it really just want to be a quarry for Asia? To take the coal and gas and iron ore, and whatever precious metals it can find and export them?" Heubaum said.
"Or does it want to diversify away from that?"

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Rising Seas Will Displace Millions Of People – And Australia Must Be Ready

The Conversation -  | 

MONIRUL ALAM/EPA
Sea-level rise is already threatening some communities around the world, particularly small island states, as it exacerbates disasters resulting from storm surges and flooding.
If greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, by 2100 the world could see sea-level rise of a metre – or even more if there is a larger contribution from the Antarctic ice sheet, as some recent findings suggest.
Even without a larger Antarctic response, the rate of rise at the end of the 21st century for unmitigated emissions is likely to be equivalent to the rate of rise during the last deglaciation of the Earth, when sea level rose at more than a metre per century for many millennia. For all scenarios, sea-level rise will continue for centuries to come.
Without significantly more effective mitigation than currently planned, the rise will ultimately be many metres, or even tens of metres – the question is not if there will be large rises, but how quickly they will happen.

Forcing people from their homes
As well as causing seas to rise, climate change may also increase the severity of events like cyclones and rainfall, which may force people from their homes in many regions.
Global statistics on the risk of disaster displacement were not systematically collected until 2008, but already they offer stark figures. In 2017, 18.8 million people were internally displaced by natural disasters, with floods accounting for 8.6 million. By contrast, 11.8 million were displaced by conflict. Many more people are displaced each year by disasters than by conflict. Climate change intensifies this risk.
Roughly 100 million people live within about a metre of current high tide level. (Double these numbers for a five-metre sea-level rise, and triple them for 10 metres.)
Many of the world’s megacities are on the coast and vulnerable to sea-level change. Without adaption, it is estimated that by 2100 some of these areas will flood, displacing in the order of 100 million people.
While the vast majority of those people will never cross an international border, some will – and their legal status will be precarious because they will not qualify as refugees under the UN Refugee Convention (people with a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a particular social group).
In the current political climate, governments are reticent to create a new legal status for such people, and it would be difficult to encapsulate the complexity of climate change and disaster-related movement in a treaty definition anyway. Many factors drive people to leave their homes – such as poverty, resource scarcity and lack of livelihood opportunities – but climate change becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Good policy is essential
The most effective way to reduce the number of displaced people is strong global mitigation of emissions. In Australia, a successful NEG policy that included emissions reduction would cover about a third of Australia’s emissions. Mitigation policies also need to be developed to cover all emission sectors.
However, even with strong mitigation, adaptation will be essential. The evidence tells us that most people want to remain in their homes for as long as they can, and to return as quickly as possible. We therefore need laws and policies that permit people to remain in their homes where possible and desirable; that enable them to move elsewhere, before disaster strikes, if they wish; and to receive assistance and protection if they are displaced.
Coastal communities could live more effectively with rising sea levels by developing infrastructure, adopting and enforcing appropriate planning and building codes, and controlling flooding to allow sediment deposition. Storm-surge shelters and storm-surge warnings have already saved thousands of lives in countries like Bangladesh.
Good policy is essential. Studies of floods in Bangladesh showed that when people received prompt and adequate assistance, they were more likely to stay and rebuild than to move on in search of work to survive. By contrast, a year after Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines, tens of thousands of people remained displaced because the authorities said it was unsafe to go home but could not offer any alternative. This is likely to be a growing challenge with on-going climate change.
We are going to see more and more climate related disasters. We can do better in the way we prepare for and respond to them. The nature and timing of policy interventions will be crucial in determining outcomes after a disaster, because together they affect people’s ability to cope and be resilient. We need a broad, complementary set of policy strategies to assist people and give them choices.

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Australia Struggles With A Devastating Drought While The Government Ignores Climate Change

Washington Post - Richard Glover

A farmer feeds his sheep with a bale of hay because the land is too dry for grass to grow in New South Wales. (Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty Images)
It was the teenage girls of Trundle who opened up the hearts of Sydney. Their school principal was on the radio last week describing Australia’s devastating drought and the impact it was having on students in this small rural town in the state of New South Wales. Among his examples: Some farms no longer have enough water for showering.
The school is on town water, he explained to me on Sydney radio, so he has renovated the showers. Now he wants to provide some free shampoo and conditioner. Could any of our listeners help?
Australia’s drought has been building for some time. Last year was dry, so this year started with empty bank accounts and depleted dams. Farmers in the eastern states watched the horizon, hoping for clouds.
So far, that hoped-for rain hasn’t arrived. All of New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, has now been declared a drought zone. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has announced emergency-relief funding for farmers.
Of course, Australia has always had an extreme climate — destructive floods, heartbreaking droughts and deadly bush fires — all bringing their own harvest of misery.
During this drought, the prime minister has again cited a poem written more than a hundred years ago. “I love a sunburnt country,” runs the lyric by Dorothea Mackellar, “a land of sweeping plains, of ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains.”
The words are a way for Australians to say: “We love this place, despite all it throws at us.”
But this time around, though, there’s a whiff of politics. It seems to be a way of emphasizing that Australia has always been prone to drought. In other words: Don’t blame this one on climate change.
Science counsels us against confusing climate and weather. A particular drought cannot be blamed on man-made climate change. That’s true. All the same: In Australia, right now, the droughts are coming faster and harsher.
Some say the current drought is worse than the infamous Federation Drought, so-named because it gripped the nation just as it came into being. The years leading up to Federation had been difficult. Australia’s great 19th century poet, Henry Lawson, went walking through the drought-crippled landscape in the early 1890s. Lawson’s eye was both melancholic and humorous, as captured in a poem in which two travelers try to find the Paroo River, a waterway that, during floods, is many miles wide.
They walk, peer ahead, then walk some more, before realizing they had stepped over the river without noticing — drought having reduced the mighty Paroo to a trickle.
Certainly, scientists say, climate change is making droughts more frequent in southern Australia, with hotter temperatures and reduced soil moisture.
You would think the current government coalition — partly reliant on rural voters — would be enthusiastically joining the global effort to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. But the opposite is the case. Climate skeptics within the government continue to frustrate attempts to develop a coherent policy. Australia is on track to miss even the modest commitments made under the Paris accord.
The country’s treasurer, Scott Morrison, last year brought a lump of coal into Parliament, brandishing it as he sang the praises of coal-fired power plants.
Odder still, the government criticized a private power provider over its plans to shut an aging coal-fired plant. The company, AGL, believed it could produce energy that was cheaper, greener and more reliable using other means.
Tony Abbott, a former prime minister, believed he knew better. Despite a lifetime of opposing government intervention in private enterprise, Abbott suggested the government forcibly acquire the plant, just to keep the coal-fires burning.
“Coal at any cost” appears to be the policy of some government members. Meanwhile, the world heats up — and so does Australia.
And farming communities such as Trundle face more uncertainty and more anxiety.

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