28/09/2018

Deep-Water Corals Also Bleaching Badly

Cosmos - Kimberly Riskas

Almost a quarter of corals at 40-metres down damaged by ocean heat spikes.
Being in deep water, researchers find, confers only limited protection against bleaching for corals. LYNNEBECLU / Getty Images
Even the deep-water corals of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef are not safe from the damaging effects of rising ocean temperatures, a new study finds.
Living at depths of between 30 and 150 metres below the surface, these “mesophotic” reefs were thought to be protected from severe bleaching events, like those that devastated the reef’s shallow-water corals in 2016 and 2017.
Now, an international team of marine scientists has discovered that the 2016 heat spike caused coral death up to 40 metres down.
“It was a shock to see that the impacts extended to these dimly-lit reefs,” said Pedro Frade of Portugal’s University of Algarve, lead author of the study published in Nature Communications.
Using remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to place sensors up to 100 metres deep, the researchers recorded water temperatures before and after the bleaching occurred. They also scuba-dived to check the reefs for signs of damage once the bleaching was underway.


Coral Bleaching Explained: The Story of Frank the Coral

By May 2016, water temperatures at the mesophotic reefs were a whopping 1.4 degrees Celsius higher than the monthly average for the previous three years. Major bleaching and mortality were reported for almost a quarter of these deep reefs.
The surveys also confirmed previous reports of damage to nearly half of shallow-water corals.
Remarkably, reefs at 40 metres deep experienced the same heat exposure as those at 10 metres – a testament to the strong effects of the late-season warming.
Local oceanographic conditions play a major role in regulating water temperature at mesophotic reefs, the researchers say. Deep-water currents bring cold water up the continental shelf, cooling them.
However, “when this upwelling stopped towards the end of summer, temperatures rose to record-high levels even at depth,” explains co-author Pim Bongaerts of the California Academy of Sciences in the US.
Temperatures at the deep-water reefs did not drop to 28 degrees Celsius until mid-April, nearly two months later than normal.
Despite the damage to the deep water reefs, the severity of coral bleaching was much greater in shallower ones — a sign that depth still does confer some protection from thermal extremes.
For coral species that are more susceptible to bleaching, the authors predict a shift in abundance and distribution as water temperatures continue to rise.
“There will be winners and losers as a result of long-term impacts of mass bleaching events on coral reefs, and in the Great Barrier Reef in particular,” they state.

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When We Look At The Crisis Rationally, The Only Logical Response Is To Declare A Climate Emergency

Post Carbon Institute - Paul Gilding*


People engaged in the climate debate are often bewildered by society’s lack of response. How can we ignore such overwhelming evidence of an existential threat to social and economic stability?
Given human history, we should never have expected anything else. Humans have a consistent tendency that when change is uncomfortable we delay action until a threat becomes a crisis. The scale of the threat or the existence of powerful evidence makes little difference.
There are countless examples – personal health issues, a business’ declining success, or global financial and credit risks. Historically, though, World War Two (WWII ) remains the best analogy.
The evidence of the threat posed by Hitler was overwhelming and the case for action crystal clear. However, many were still deeply resistant to acting. Only when the threat became overwhelming – until it was accepted as an imminent crisis – was Britain triggered into action. When it was, Winston Churchill led the critical shift in thinking, arguing that no matter how uncomfortable, expensive or challenging to the status quo, sometimes you just have to do what is necessary. Not your best, or what you can afford, or what’s “realistic” – but what is necessary. In his case, that was going to war and assuming victory was possible.
And so began one of the fastest and most dramatic economic mobilisations and industrial transformations in history. As a result, something that was rationally bordering on the impossible was achieved.
I would argue we are approaching a point where this same cycle will play out on climate change – and we will get to the transformational action stage.
Perhaps surprisingly given the global implications of what’s at stake, a good indicator of this is the council of Darebin, in Melbourne, where I am addressing a Climate Emergency conference this week.
Why is this an indicator? When we look back at history, like WWII, we tend to simplify cause and effect. We say it was the invasion of Poland, the arrival of Churchill, etc, that triggered the change. In reality, complex systems like human society move in a distributed way, reaching a critical mass or tipping point at a time that is hard to predict and sometimes even hard to identify afterwards.
Comparing WWII to climate change, we should first acknowledge that once again, the issue is not the evidence of the threat. That is clear and accepted – in fact with hindsight it will be seen as blindingly obvious.What is relatively new is that scientists and experts are increasingly acknowledging that nothing less than a massive global mobilisation on a WWII scale is required to address the catastrophic risks posed.
Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and a senior advisor to Pope Francis, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the European Union recently argued that “Climate change is now reaching the end-game, where very soon humanity must choose between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too late and bear the consequences.”
All around us examples of what these consequences might be are increasingly tangible. Whether it be wild fires in northern Sweden, refugee crises, extreme ice melt in the Arctic, submerged airports in Japan or severe droughts, people are feeling climate change live.
My key argument is that this process – identified threats, resistance and avoidance, stronger and stronger evidence, acceptance of crisis and then dramatic response – is pretty much how these things always unfold. And so it will most likely be on climate change.
Many argue we need a Churchill to lead us, that only a strong leader can take charge in a crisis and show us the way forward. Or maybe we need a climate “Pearl Harbour” – a major single event. This is not how systems usually change, but especially not in a globalised and connected world. Yes, we need leadership and across all sections of society. But the “Churchills” emerge from a context and the context shift we need is to accept we have a crisis. Critically, this acceptance is a distributed social phenomenon, not a technical question of science or evidence.
This brings me back to Darebin in Melbourne. This local council looked rationally at what the science told them – that we face a crisis and the only logical response is to declare a climate emergency. And so they did. In consultation with their community, they then developed the Darebin Climate Emergency Plan.
Why is this significant? Because this is how systems change. Ideas take hold and spread. Darebin has since been followed in the US with a small but growing list of elected bodies in regions and cities also declaring a climate emergency. First came Montgomery County, Maryland , since joined by Richmond, Berkeley and Los Angeles in California, and Hoboken, New Jersey. This is not emerging spontaneously, but through active organising by groups dedicated to the task like The Climate Mobilisation.
Yes, it’s frustrating that these things take time. Therefore, knowing we can still “win” is key. Towards this end I co-wrote nearly 10 years ago a journal paper, The One Degree War Plan, with Professor Jorgen Randers, showing how achieving 1 degree of warming was surprisingly realistic with a WWII style mobilisation. Recently along the same lines, The Climate Mobilisation developed a “Victory Plan” to show what a WWII style economic mobilisation across the USA could look like.
So on the surface, Darebin Council inviting a group of experts like myself to suburban Melbourne to discuss what a climate emergency means might not seem much. But it is a crucial part of a process whereby we first normalise the idea that we face an existential crisis. Next we will come to accept that the only rational response is a WWII-like economic mobilisation to eliminate global net carbon dioxide emissions within a decade or so.
Find this hard to imagine? It is. But as we learnt from Churchill in 1940, when we shift our thinking to “what is necessary”, what we can achieve is quite extraordinary. Or as Nelson Mandela said: “It always seems impossible, until it’s done.” 

 Breaking News: Moreland Council (Victoria) became the second local council, after Darebin (Victoria), to recognise the climate emergency crisis, and passed an acknowledgement we are in a state of climate emergency. This will be embedded in next Council plan and Zero Carbon Evolution framework.

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Climate Change Is A Global Injustice. A New Study Shows Why.

Vox - Umair Irfan

The US is second only to India when it comes to the economic cost of global warming.
The United States stands to pay the second-highest social cost of carbon in the world. Shutterstock
All efforts to fight climate change face the money test: Are the benefits of stopping global warming — and avoiding sea level rise, heat waves, and wildfires — greater than the costs?
The dollar balance we arrive at should be one of the biggest factors in deciding what we’re willing to do to tackle the problem, whether that’s shuttering all coal plants or building thousands of nuclear reactors.
Some groups have taken a stab at calculating what climate change will cost the world, or conversely, how much humanity would save by becoming more sustainable. Earlier this month, the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate tallied the number at a truly massive $26 trillion in savings by 2030.
Getting a slice of those savings requires figuring out which actors stand to lose the most as the climate changes, whether that’s countries, companies, or even individuals.
And this is where the idea of the social cost of carbon comes in. It’s a policy tool that attaches a price tag to the long-term economic damage caused by one ton of carbon dioxide, hence the cost to society. It’s related to a carbon tax (more on that below), and it serves as a way to distill the vast global consequences of climate change down to a practical metric.
Critically, it’s also the foundation of US climate policies, including the Clean Power Plan. Revising this number down has been a key part of the Trump administration’s strategy to roll back environmental rules. Under Obama, the social cost of carbon was set at $45 per ton of carbon dioxide; under Trump, it’s as little as $1.
A new study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change calculates the social cost of carbon down to individual countries. This adds an important bit of nuance because climate change is going to cost some countries more than others, a fact that’s lost when you try to tabulate a global average.
The team found a global social cost of carbon vastly higher than many previous estimates, drawing on more recent climate projections and more robust macroeconomic models. The results also highlighted the fundamental injustice of climate change: Many of those who contributed the least to the problem stand to suffer the most. And the study has a stark message for the United States: The economy stands to pay one of the highest prices in the world for its emissions.

We’re drastically underestimating how much climate change will cost the global economy
Even if you’ve just skimmed climate policy discussions in recent years, you’ve likely come across the idea of a carbon tax. In short, a carbon tax helps attach the consequences of climate change to the greenhouse gas sources that are driving it. Ideally, it would push economies toward sustainability by making dirtier energy sources and industries more costly relative to their alternatives.
Though a tax is just one way to price emissions, most economists and scientists agree that pricing in some form is the sine qua non of fighting climate change. (My colleague David Roberts has written extensively about the limits of a carbon tax and the recent Republican carbon tax proposals.)
How high you set your carbon tax is a function of how aggressively you want to clean up your act and how much damage you’re expecting if you don’t. The former is an objective that’s set by policymakers, but the latter, in theory, has an empirical value. This is the social cost of carbon.
The lead author of the Nature Climate Change study, Katharine Ricke, an assistant professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, explained that calculating the social cost of carbon requires coordinating several variables.
“You need to make assumptions about socioeconomic progress and changes in the world that are going to happen out a century in the future,” she said. “You need to contend with uncertainty about how climate change is going to look.”
The social cost of carbon is an imperfect measure: It focuses on broad changes in the economy rather than abrupt shifts from extreme weather or disasters. It also requires making many arguable assumptions. However, it’s still a useful tool in estimating the costs and benefits of different ways to fight climate change.
To account for this variability, Ricke and her team looked at a range of greenhouse gas emission scenarios, as well as several different economic damage models and multiple social discount rates.
The results showed that the world has been drastically undervaluing the potential economic damages from climate change. The median global social cost of carbon came out to $417 per ton, an order of magnitude more than prior estimates of $40 per ton.

India is poised to pay the highest social cost of carbon. Russia may not pay one at all.
Drilling down into individual countries, the researchers spotted disparities in the economic consequences of climate change.
The social cost of carbon for individual countries in dollars per ton of carbon dioxide emissions. Nature Climate Change
Countries at northern latitudes, like Russia, face a negative social cost of carbon. This implies that the warming wrought by climate change will actually boost the economies of these countries. Warming can improve agriculture or reduce heating demands in the far north, for example. However, Ricke cautioned that these costs were calculated based on macroeconomic factors within countries; they don’t account for things like international trade, which may suffer in a warming world.
The model also doesn’t account for direct consequences of climate change, like sea level rise flooding coastal areas or thawing permafrost causing roads to buckle. In fact, northern latitudes are among the fastest warming regions in the world. These effects will impact the economies of northern countries, but they aren’t baked into the economic model used in this study.
“We recommend taking the negative social cost of carbon values with a grain of salt,” Ricke said. “These estimates likely represent a lower bound.”
On the other hand, the findings are especially alarming for India. It has the highest social cost of carbon in the world, at $86 per ton. Coming in second is the United States at $48 per ton.
“The thing that drives the high social cost of carbon in the US to a great extent is the fact that we just have such a big economy, so we have a lot to lose,” Ricke said. This value coincidentally aligns with the number the Obama administration came up with, but there’s a crucial difference. Ricke explained that the government’s numbers included social costs to the rest of the world from US emissions; the number Ricke calculated does not. If the team were to include everything in the Obama formula, then the social cost of carbon for the United States would be even higher.
As journalist David Wallace-Wells pointed out on Twitter, this shows that fighting climate change makes sense for the United States, even for purely selfish reasons:

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Calculating the social cost of carbon is merely the starting point for climate policy
Suppose every country in the world suddenly wakes up tomorrow in ecstatic cahoots on climate change and decides to implement a carbon tax at the level of their respective social costs of carbon. Will that solve climate change?
Not even remotely.
“If countries were to price their own carbon emissions at their own [country-level social cost of carbon], approximately 5 [percent], a small amount, of the global climate externality would be internalized,” the researchers wrote.
That’s because there are some countries that emit very little and will be hit hard by climate change, while others emit a lot and won’t see as many damages. So for a country to set a meaningful carbon tax, or any other price on carbon, it has to include damages caused to other countries, as former Obama adviser Jason Bordoff wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
Unlike other regulated pollutants that have almost entirely domestic consequences, CO2 impacts are global, and climate change is a “tragedy of the commons” problem. A ton of CO2 contributes equally to climate change regardless of where it comes from. If all nations looked only at the impact of a ton of CO2 on their own nations, the collective response would be vastly inadequate to address the true damages from climate change.
This wonky chart (bear with me) from Ricke’s study explains the dilemma:
A figure comparing the social cost of carbon within a country to its share of global emissions. Nature Climate Change
The chart compares a country’s social cost of carbon to its share of global emissions. The radiating lines show the ratios of a country’s share of global emissions to its share of the damages.
The United States is almost balanced, with its high social cost of carbon roughly proportional to how much carbon dioxide it emits. But India pumps out just 6 percent of global greenhouse gases and will bear more than 20 percent of the global economic burden from climate change. In other words, India faces almost quadruple the damages of global warming compared to its contribution to the problem. Zoom in further and you’ll notice that many of the wealthiest countries in the world stand to bear the lowest costs of climate change.
This is part of why the global social cost of carbon, $417 per ton, is so much higher than it is for any individual country. The costs of climate change are greater than the sum of their parts. Yet it also shows that many of the wealthiest countries, which contributed the most greenhouse gases, stand to be the best insulated from its costs.
That makes climate change a global justice concern. In limiting global warming, wealthy countries face a moral imperative to look beyond their borders and GDPs, pushing even harder to cut their own emissions. The social costs of carbon also show why climate change really has to be tackled as a global problem rather than by individual nations. But as long as countries like Russia, the United Kingdom, and Germany face little financial fallout, that policy case becomes much harder to make.

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For The First Time, Scientists Prove Human Activity Is The Top Cause Of Warming Antarctic Waters

National Observer - Kelsey Litwin

Researchers take part in a 2006 sampling expedition around Antarctica on the SA Agulhas. Photo courtesy of Neil Swart 
Neil Swart had barely begun his master’s degree at the University of Cape Town when he embarked on a three-month voyage to the South Pole.While aboard a ship meant to resupply South Africa’s research facilities in Antarctica, enduring rocky waters and waves reaching 10 metres tall, Swart deployed instruments to record the Antarctic Ocean’s temperature.
"We have to get to zero emissions at some point in the future if we were to stabilize the climate,” said Environment Canada scientist @Neil_C_Swart #climateaction #climatechange #oceans
At the time, Swart thought of himself as a volunteer helping further “someone else’s science.” He didn’t expect that 13 years later, the data he collected would allow him and a team of researchers to identify human activity as the number one cause of rising water temperatures in the Antarctic Ocean, also known as the Southern Ocean.
“It’s kind of nice to see it come full circle,” Swart, now a researcher with Environment and Climate Change Canada, told National Observer in an interview.
Along with other scientists from the department, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, Swart found that changes seen in Southern Ocean temperature are directly tied to ozone depletion and human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, as opposed to regular temperature variations or responses to natural climate changes, such as volcanic eruptions or changes in the sun.
Their findings were published in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience on Monday.
Researchers on the SA agulhas (left to right) Mike Funke, Sebastian Swart, Natalie Burls and Neil Swart hold an "Argo float," which Swart says is an instrument that dives 2,000 metres down while measuring ocean temperature and salinity. Photo courtesy of Neil Swart on Facebook
Serious consequences for the ocean
While the connection between human-made greenhouse gas emissions and rising global ocean temperatures has long been understood, this is the first time it has been proven specifically for the waters that surround Antarctica, explained Swart.
Since industrialization, the ocean has absorbed nearly 40 per cent of human-made greenhouse gas emissions. The Southern Ocean, according to Swart, is responsible for absorbing the majority of those emissions.
“The Southern Ocean is the single most important region globally taking up the heat associated with global warming,” he said. As a result, it plays a huge role in mitigating the effects of climate change.
“If it weren’t providing these services, so to speak, we would be experiencing far more CO2 increases in the atmosphere. So understanding changes in this region is really critical.”
The consequences of human-induced warming in that region are not minor, he added.
"By driving an intense warming of these southern waters, we’re increasingly destabilizing the Antarctic ice sheet,” he said. That contributes to well-documented increases in sea level, affecting coastal populations, he explained, and “the warmer ocean water becomes, the less effective it becomes at absorbing CO2.”

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Link: Human Causes Only Plausible Source of Warming in Southern Ocean
Swart explained that as the ocean’s ability to absorb climate-warming carbon dioxide decreases, global temperatures stand to increase, all of which could lead to greater weather extremes, such as more heat waves and changes in or stronger precipitation events.
To attribute the rise in ocean water temperature in the region to human activity, Swart and his team used simulations based off historical data and recent observations. By removing contributing factors from their simulation, the researchers were able to pinpoint the the cause as being man-made greenhouse gas emissions and ozone depletion.
Fossil fuel production and consumption are some of the greatest emitters of greenhouse gases. In 2015, 26 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions came from the oil and gas industry.
In a 2012, Swart and Andrew Weaver – then a climate scientist, now an MLA in British Columbia and head of the province’s Green Party — published a controversial article in the journal Nature Climate Change. The pair suggested coal was a bigger threat to climate change than oilsands, while stressing that there was a need to move toward non-greenhouse gas emitting sources of energy and avoiding new fossil fuel infrastructure. After their research was used by pro-oilsands advocates to justify calls for expansion, the two scientists later reiterated that all fossil fuel use needs to be regulated to reduce global warming.
An Antarctic Ocean ice shelf is captured during a 2006 sampling expedition and resupply mission, during which Neil Swart and his colleagues collected the data that was eventually published in the Nature Geoscience report on Sept 24, 2018. Photo courtesy of Neil Swart
‘Zero emissions’ only way to stabilize climate
“It is very clear that to limit warming to any given (global temperature) target…there’s a finite amount of CO2 emissions that we’re allowed to make, kind of like a budget we’re allowed to spend,” said Swart.
“If we go above that, we will exceed that target threshold. We have to get to zero emissions at some point in the future if we were to stabilize the climate.”
While it’s a lofty goal, Swart said ozone depletion is a good example of a climate problem tackled by policy. The Montreal Protocol, which took effect in 1989, helped eliminate the production of chlorofluorcarbons, a chemical that contributed the depletion of the ozone layer and was once commonly found in refrigerators and aerosol sprays. In the decades since, there has been significant decrease in ozone depletion.
Last November, an amendment was added to the protocol to reduce production of hydrofluorocarbons, which are used similarly to chlorofluorcarbons. Titled the Kigali Amendment, it will come into effect on Jan. 1, 2019.
“As a result, the consequences of (ozone depletion) are not going to be as severe as they would have been if we hadn’t taken action,” said Swart.
“I think that provides a good model for the case with CO2 – that we also have to take some kind of similar action which ultimately deals with the problem.”

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Link: Recent Southern Ocean warming and freshening driven by greenhouse gas emissions and ozone depletion
The Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change is one of the federal government’s attempts to take such action. The strategy, which was introduced in December 2016, is meant to significantly reduce Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. It intends to do so, in part, through a carbon tax scheme, which Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta have all opposed.
Canada has also committed to the Paris Agreement, along with 194 other countries in December 2015. Though not legally binding, in doing so, Canada also pledged to take action to limit a global temperature increase of 2 degrees this century.

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World 'Nowhere Near On Track' To Avoid Warming Beyond 1.5c Target

The Guardian - 

Exclusive: Author of key UN climate report says limiting temperature rise would require enormous, immediate transformation in human activity
Avoiding a temperature increase of more than 1.5C will be ‘extraordinarily challenging’, says the report’s author. Photograph: Matt Brown/AP 
The world’s governments are “nowhere near on track” to meet their commitment to avoid global warming of more than 1.5C above the pre-industrial period, according to an author of a key UN report that will outline the dangers of breaching this limit.
A massive, immediate transformation in the way the world’s population generates energy, uses transportation and grows food will be required to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5C and the forthcoming analysis is set to lay bare how remote this possibility is.
“It’s extraordinarily challenging to get to the 1.5C target and we are nowhere near on track to doing that,” said Drew Shindell, a Duke University climate scientist and a co-author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which will be unveiled in South Korea next month.
“While it’s technically possible, it’s extremely improbable, absent a real sea change in the way we evaluate risk. We are nowhere near that.”
In the 2015 Paris climate pact, international leaders agreed to curb the global temperature rise to 2C above the era prior to mass industrialization, with an aspiration to limit this to 1.5C. The world has already warmed by around 1C over the past century, fueling sea level rises, heatwaves, storms and the decline of vulnerable ecosystems such as coral reefs.
Shindell would not share exact details of the IPCC report, but he said that the more ambitious 1.5C goal would require a precipitous drop in greenhouse emissions triggered by a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels, particularly coal, mass deployment of solar and wind energy and the eradication of emissions from cars, trucks and airplanes.
Even then, emerging technology will be required on a global scale to capture emissions at the source and bury them in the ground or remove carbon directly from the air.
“The penetration rate of new technology historically takes a long time,” Shindell said. “It’s not simple to change these things. There aren’t good examples in history of such rapid, far-reaching transitions.”
The fading prospect of keeping the global temperature rise to below 1.5C has provoked alarm among leaders of low-lying island nations that risk being inundated should the world warm beyond this point.
“Every country must increase the ambition of their existing targets,” said Hilda Heine, president of the Marshall Islands, which announced a plan to reach net zero emissions by 2050 at the UN general assembly in New York this week. “If we can do it, so can everyone else.”
The UN general assembly has again pitted the world’s countries against Donald Trump when it comes to climate change, with the US president using his keynote speech to praise “clean coal”. Trump has vowed to exit the Paris accord, a stance that Emmanuel Macron, the French president, told the UN should be met with consequences such as a refusal by countries to enter into trade deals with the US.
“It’s a lot more difficult without the US as a leader in climate change negotiations,” Ola Elvestuen, Norway’s environment minister, told the Guardian. “We have to find solutions even though the US isn’t there.”
Elvestuen said countries, including Norway, which is one of the world’s largest oil and gas producers, need to transition away from fossil fuels, embrace electric cars and halt deforestation.
He admitted these changes had not happened quickly enough since the Paris deal. Last year, global greenhouse gas emissions rose slightly again after a short period of stasis.
“We are moving way too slowly,” Elvestuen said. “We have to do more of everything, faster. We need to deliver on policies at every level. Governments normally move slowly but we don’t have the time.”
“The 1.5C target is difficult, but it’s possible. The next four to 12 years are crucial ones, where we will set the path to how the world will develop in the decades ahead. The responsibility in doing this is impossible to overestimate. To reach the goals of the Paris agreement we need large structural changes.”
A difference of 0.5C in temperature may appear small but the IPCC report, which is a summary of leading climate science, is expected to warn there will be major impacts if warming reaches 2C.
“Even 1.5C is no picnic, really,” said Dr Tabea Lissner, head of adaptation and vulnerability at Climate Analytics.
Lissner said a world beyond 1.5C warming meant the Arctic would be ice-free in summer, around half of land-based creatures would be severely affected and deadly heatwaves would become far more common. “0.5C makes quite a big difference,” she said.

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Will 2018 Be The Year Of Climate Action? Victorian London’s ‘Great Stink’ Sewer Crisis Might Tell Us

The Conversation - 

As extreme weather events, like Hurricane Florence, become more common it is time to ask what it will take for the world to finally tackle climate change. Encouragingly, there may be a historical precedent: Victoria London’s handling of the ‘Great Stink’, where growth had turned the River Thames into an open sewer. EPA/JIM LO SCALZO
In the late 19th century, the irrepressible Mark Twain is reputed to have said in a speech:
Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.
He’s said to have borrowed that quote from a friend, but if Twain were alive today he would no doubt have more to say on the subject. In a time when we are becoming increasingly accustomed to extremes in the climate system, the events of this year have risen above the background noise of political turmoil to dominate the global headlines.
While global leadership in dealing with climate change may be depressingly limited, I can’t help but wonder if 2018 will be the year our global tribe feels threatened enough to act.
Encouragingly, there may be a historical (and largely unknown) precedent for tackling climate change: Victoria London’s handling of the “Great Stink”, where growth had turned the River Thames into an open sewer.

 Climate system extremes
2018 is breaking all manner of records.
In January, the eastern USA and western Europe fell under persistent frigid Arctic conditions brought about by a weakening of the polar vortex.
Six months later, the north has been experiencing exceptional hemispheric-wide summer warming and drought, most likely amplified by a weakening of Atlantic Ocean circulation – the latter (ironically) being expressed by unusually cool surface ocean waters.
In recent weeks, Florence, Mangkhut and Helene have become the latest household names to mark a succession of storms battering the USA, Asia and Europe this year.
A pastoralist stands at the bottom of one of his empty dams on his property at Langawirra Station north of Broken Hill, New South Wales in 2018. AAP Image/David Mariuz
Closer to home, New South Wales is now suffering a state-wide drought, along with other regions in Australia. Early wildfires and the threat of more to come has resulted in the earliest government total fire ban on record.
As the crisis deepens, it’s worth reflecting on Victorian London’s “Great Stink” sewage problem - where things finally got so bad that authorities were forced to accept evidence, reject sceptics, and act.

A ‘deadly sewer’
In the Victorian age, London’s growth had turned the River Thames into an open sewer. Conditions were so bad they inspired many to write on the risks to public health.
‘The silent highwayman’, an 1858 cartoon from Punch magazine, commenting on the deadly levels of pollution in the River Thames. Wikimedia, CC BY
Charles Dickens provided a lurid description in Little Dorrit, describing the Thames as a “deadly sewer” while the scientist Michael Faraday wrote to The Times of London that:
if we neglect this subject, we cannot expect to do so with impunity; nor ought we to be surprised if, ere many years are over, a hot season give us sad proof of the folly of our carelessness.
An 1855 cartoon from Punch Magazine in which Michael Faraday gives his card to ‘Father Thames’, commenting on Faraday gauging the river’s ‘degree of opacity’. Wikimedia
In 1854, medic John Snow demonstrated the source of cholera in the London suburb of Soho was a local water pump. To test his ideas, officials removed the handle on the pump, and the number of cases all but disappeared.

Sewage sceptics
But there was an intransigence about meeting the threat. Ignoring scientific evidence, “sewage sceptics” held the view that poor air quality – so called “miasma”– was the cause of the frequent outbreaks of cholera and other diseases.
They convinced the government to reject the evidence, considering there to be “no reason to adopt this belief”. The scale of the sewage problem in London was considered too large to be solved, possibly encouraged by political pressure from the thriving water industry that delivered direct to those who could afford it. For several more years, this view persisted.
That was until the year of the “Great Stink”.

The ‘Great Stink’ arrives
In the summer heatwave of 1858, the Thames’ sewage turned noses across London. Conditions were so bad, teams of men were employed to shovel lime at the many sewage outlets into the capital’s river in a vain attempt to stop the smell.
Even the national legislators were not spared, with the windows of the Houses of Parliament covered in lime-soaked sack cloths. Serious thought was even given to relocating government outside London, at least until the air had cleared. The conditions created a heady stench that cut through the politically charged rhetoric of the day, and forced a rethink.
Within nine years of the “Great Stink”, the 900-kilometre London Sewage Network was constructed - an engineering marvel of the Victorian age. The politicians at the time weren’t immediately convinced the new infrastructure would help public health but the disappearance of disease accepted as the norm for the capital convinced even the most ardent of sceptics. No one talks about miasma as a real thing anymore.
The Great Stink of 1858 overturned beliefs founded on misinformation. A challenge considered impossible, was solved.

Our generation’s ‘Great Stink’
Fast forward 160 years and the recent spate of climate headlines is on the back of an increasing trend towards greater extremes, with all the associated human, environmental, and financial costs.
In August of this year, the Actuaries Climate Index – which monitors changes in sea level rise and climate extremes for the North American insurance industry since the 1960s – reported that the five-year moving average reached a new high in 2017. This year promises to continue the trend and is no single outlier.
Will 2018 be the year when the world does something about climate change?
Will 2018 be our generation’s “Great Stink”?

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