06/10/2018

Climate Scientists Are Struggling To Find The Right Words For Very Bad News

Washington Post - Chris Mooney | Brady Dennis

A much-awaited report from the U.N.'s top climate science panel will show an enormous gap between where we are and where we need to be to prevent dangerous levels of warming.
Higher ocean temperatures are responsible for coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef. Credit: Jason South
In Incheon, South Korea, this week, representatives of more than 130 countries and about 50 scientists have packed into a large conference centre going over every line of an all-important report: what chance does the planet have of keeping climate change to a moderate, controllable level?
When they can't agree, they form "contact groups" outside the hall, trying to strike an agreement and move the process along. They are trying to reach consensus on what it would mean - and what it would take - to limit the warming of the planet to just 1.5 degrees Celsius, when 1 degree  has already occurred and greenhouse gas emissions remain at record highs.
"It's the biggest peer-review exercise there is," says Jonathan Lynn, head of communications for the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "It involves hundreds or even thousands of people looking at it."


This climate visualization shows the temperature anomalies by country from 1880 through 2017, based on data from NASA. (Antti Lipponen)

The IPCC, the world’s definitive scientific body when it comes to climate change, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a decade ago and has been given what may rank as its hardest task yet.
It must not only tell governments what we know about climate change — but how close they have brought us to the edge. And by implication, how much those governments are failing to live up to their goals for the planet, set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
1.5 degrees is the most stringent and ambitious goal in that agreement, originally put there at the behest of small island nations and other highly vulnerable countries. But it is increasingly being regarded by all as a key guardrail, as severe climate change effects have been felt in just the past five years — raising concerns about what a little bit more warming would bring.
Delegates and experts attend the opening ceremony of the 48th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Incheon, South Korea, on Oct. 1, 2018. (Jung Yeon-je/AFP/Getty Images) (Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images)
“Half a degree doesn’t sound like much til you put it in the right context,” said Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development. “It’s 50 percent more than we have now.”
The idea of letting warming approach 2 degrees Celsius increasingly seems disastrous in this context.
Parts of the planet, like the Arctic, have already warmed beyond 1.5 degrees and are seeing alarming changes. Antarctica and Greenland, containing many feet of sea-level rise, are wobbling. Major die-offs have hit coral reefs around the globe, suggesting an irreplaceable planetary feature could soon be lost.
It is universally recognized that the pledges made in Paris would lead to a warming far beyond 1.5 degrees — more like 2.5 or 3 degrees Celsius, or even more. And that was before the United States, the world’s second-largest emitter, decided to try to back out.
“The pledges countries made during the Paris climate accord don’t get us anywhere close to what we have to do,” said Drew Shindell, a climate expert at Duke University and one of the authors of the IPCC report. “They haven’t really followed through with actions to reduce their emissions in any way commensurate with what they profess to be aiming for.”
The new 1.5 C report will feed into a process called the “Talanoa Dialogue,” in which parties to the Paris agreement begin to consider the large gap between what they say they want to achieve and what they are actually doing. The dialogue will unfold in December at an annual United Nations climate meeting in Katowice, Poland.
But it is unclear what concrete commitments may result.
At issue is what scientists call the ‘carbon budget’: Because carbon dioxide lives in the atmosphere for so long, there’s only a limited amount that can be emitted before it becomes impossible to avoid a given temperature, like 1.5 degrees Celsius. And since the world emits about 41 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, if the remaining budget is 410 billion tons (for example), then scientists can say we have 10 years until the budget is gone and 1.5 C is locked in.
Unless emissions start to decline — which gives more time. This is why scenarios for holding warming to 1.5 degrees C require rapid and deep changes to how we get energy.

An iceberg melts in Kulusuk, Greenland, near the Arctic Circle. Parts of the planet, like the Arctic, have already warmed beyond 1.5 degrees. Credit: AP
The window may now be as narrow as around 15 years of current emissions, but since we don’t know for sure, according to the researchers, that really depends on how much of a margin of error we’re willing to give ourselves.
And if we can’t cut other gases — such as methane — or if the Arctic permafrost starts emitting large volumes of additional gases, then the budget gets even narrower.
“It would be an enormous challenge to keep warming below a threshold” of 1.5 degrees Celsius, said Shindell, bluntly. “This would be a really enormous lift.”
So enormous, he said, that it would require a monumental shift toward decarbonization. By 2030 — barely a decade away — the world’s emissions would need to drop by about 40 percent. By the middle of the century, societies would need to have zero net emissions. What might that look like? In part, it would include things such as no more gas-powered vehicles, a phaseout of coal-fired power plants and airplanes running on biofuels, he said.
“It’s a drastic change,” he said. “These are huge, huge shifts … This would really be an unprecedented rate and magnitude of change.”
And that’s just the point — 1.5 degrees is still possible, but only if the world goes through a staggering transformation.
An early draft (leaked and published by the website Climate Home News) suggests that future scenarios of a 1.5 C warming limit would require the massive deployment of technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the air and bury it below the ground. Such technologies do not exist at anything close to the scale that would be required.
“There are now very small number of pathways [to 1.5C] that don’t involve carbon removal,” said Jim Skea, chair of the IPCC’s Working Group III and a professor at Imperial College London.
It’s not clear how scientists can best give the world’s governments this message — or to what extent governments are up for hearing it.
An early leaked draft of the report said there was a “very high risk” that the world would warm more than 1.5 degrees. But a later draft, also leaked to Climate Home News, appeared to back off, instead saying that “there is no simple answer to the question of whether it is feasible to limit warming to 1.5 C . . . feasibility has multiple dimensions that need to be considered simultaneously and systematically."
None of this language is final. That’s what this week in Incheon — intended to get the report ready for an official release on Monday — is all about.
“I think many people would be happy if we were further along than we are,” the IPCC’s Lynn said Wednesday morning in Incheon. “But in all the approval sessions that I’ve seen, I’ve seen five of them now, that has always been the case. It sort of gets there in the end.”

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Fact-Checking Morrison On Climate Change

Saturday Paper - Tim Flannery*

While Scott Morrison claims Australia will meet its Paris climate targets ‘in a canter’, his government’s own modelling predicts it will fall well short, and he has no climate plan past 2020.
Scott Morrison holds a lump of coal in Parliament. ABC
On his first official trip as prime minister Scott Morrison set off on a “drought tour” of south-western Queensland, where for five years communities have been devastated by dry conditions. With Coalition MPs David Littleproud, Michael McCormack and Bridget McKenzie in tow, the prime minister visited the Tully family outside Quilpie – fifth-generation farmers who are struggling to raise their five kids. Asked by reporters about climate change and the long-running drought, Morrison acknowledged “the climate is changing” – a step forward in comparison with some of his predecessors – but dodged any potential link between that fact and his tinder dry surrounds.
“I don’t think people out here care one way or the other,” he said. “I don’t think that’s the issue … I know what you’re trying to ask, okay? I don’t think that’s part of this debate. That’s my point. If people want to have a debate about that, fine … It’s not a debate I’ve participated a lot in, in the past, because I’m practically interested in the policies that will address what is going on here, right now. I’m interested in getting people’s electricity prices down, and I’m not terribly interested in engaging in those sorts of debates at this point.”
Australia’s emissions per capita remain among the highest on the planet.
A few days later, speaking at a Menzies Research Centre forum in Albury, New South Wales, Morrison suggested praying for rain. “I pray for that rain everywhere else around the country,” he said. “And I’d encourage others who believe in the power of prayer to pray for that rain and to pray for our farmers. Please do that.”
This year is shaping up as the driest on record in NSW. Last Friday, the Department of the Environment and Energy released its latest emissions report, which confirmed that Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are rising rather than falling. In the year to March 2018, Australia’s emissions were up 1.3 per cent, driven largely by gas production. This contradicts Morrison’s assertion that Australia is on track to hit its relatively unambitious 2030 target of cutting emissions by 26 to 28 per cent below 2005 levels.
When asked on the ABC’s Insiders program last weekend about Australia’s efforts to meet its Paris climate agreement targets, Morrison replied: “We’re going to meet those in a canter.” Yet even the government’s own modelling has us on track for a mere 5 per cent reduction by 2030. Perhaps Craig Kelly, a prominent Liberal backbencher, offered a more honest summary of his party’s stance on climate change when he said, “The climate was always dangerous. We didn’t make it dangerous, [and] it’s fossil fuels that protect us from that climate.”
The truth is that our emissions are increasing rather than decreasing, and there is no federal policy in place that seems capable of altering that. The Morrison government’s climate policy, or lack thereof, is stranding Australia as a global laggard. The Paris agreement on climate change takes a bottom-up approach in which nations pledge action, then increase their ambitions in subsequent negotiations. As things stand, the total impact of the existing pledges, if they are met, will see average global temperatures rise by about 3.3 degrees by 2100. This is far beyond the agreed target of 2 degrees or less, creating a world in which human life is severely threatened.
Almost everyone understands that without increased ambition we are headed towards catastrophe, which is why most economies are striving to deepen their emissions cuts. California, for example, has recently pledged to make its entire economy carbon neutral by 2045.
When asked further on Insiders about his climate policies, the prime minister pointed to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), which has been operating since 2012. He mentioned the Emissions Reduction Fund, Greg Hunt’s old “Direct Action” program, and the renewable energy target (RET), which John Howard introduced in 2001. All have long been in existence, or are about to end, or both. Some, particularly the CEFC and the RET, have achieved great things, but if they alone had the potential to turn things around, we would have seen the evidence by now. The truth is that since the repeal of the Gillard government’s carbon price, Australia’s emissions from burning fossil fuels have only increased.
Morrison boasted that “emissions per capita are at the lowest level in 28 years”, which is true. However, Australia’s emissions per capita remain among the highest on the planet. This drop has come about because Australia’s population has grown even more strongly than our emissions.
Despite Morrison’s attempts to cast climate change as a future problem, we are already seeing its effects. Global hunger has increased three years running – after previous sustained declines – because of extreme weather. Australians are becoming ever more aware of the impacts of climate change. Anyone who has dived on the Great Barrier Reef north of Townsville recently is likely to have seen the result of the first year-on-year coral bleaching events recorded: nearly 30 per cent of corals on the reef died as a result of the 2016 event, the worst the reef has ever experienced, and the bleaching event was at least 175 times more likely to occur due to intensifying climate change.
Polls show that most Australians want action on climate change, and many Australian industries want to clean up their act. Even the majority of politicians at council, state and federal levels seem to want more effective action on climate change. Many states and territories now have more ambitious targets than the federal government, including South Australia, Queensland, Victoria and the ACT (which is aiming for 100 per cent renewable energy by 2020). At the local level, more than 100 councils are now part of the Cities Power Partnership, a network of local governments and communities helping one another transition to clean power. Every farmer who hosts a wind turbine on their property receives about $10,000 of guaranteed income, regardless of drought, flood or fair season. And regional employment is being created by wind and solar farms.
But the truth is that we are acting very late in the day if we hope to avoid the worst of the looming climate impacts. The only way we can now avoid 1.5 degrees of warming, which on current trends will be felt by about 2040, is if we act immediately to develop means of sucking many gigatons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. There are several ambitious initiatives in their early stages, including carbon engineering and ocean permaculture. Avoiding even 2 degrees of warming looks unlikely without these yet-to-be-scaled-up technologies. And, of course, we must ruthlessly cut emissions – the carbon dioxide we’re emitting today will reach its full warming potential in a few decades, and half of it will linger in the atmosphere for a century, while a quarter will be there until geological processes remove it over many millennia.
Australia has long relied on dodgy accounting in its reports on emissions under global agreements. Under the Kyoto Protocol, we argued that a slowing in land clearing justified the ongoing burning of fossil fuels, and we continue to conflate tree-planting with cutting fossil fuel use. In order to have Australia in the tent, our fellow Kyoto signatories accepted this. But fossil fuels have been held securely underground for tens of millions of years and would have stayed there had we not dug them up, while the carbon in vegetation was recently in the air and will revert to the atmosphere when the vegetation dies.
To make matters worse, unlike buried fossil fuels, carbon stored on land is vulnerable to being returned to the atmosphere, for example through bushfires, insect plagues and changes in land-clearing policies. For these reasons, we should account for fossil fuel use separately from land use and focus on fossil fuel use reduction as the priority.
We don’t have to look far into the future to see how truly bleak things could become unless we change course. The greenhouse gas that will make the 2020s a decade of more severe impacts, and that will turn the 2030s into a decade of increasing climate crisis, is already in the air and oceans.
This week, representatives from 135 countries met in the South Korean capital of Seoul for the 48th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel considered a special report, three years in the making, about the impacts and challenges of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees in the next century. “This is one of the most important meetings in the IPCC’s history,” said IPCC chair Hoesung Lee. In a video message that opened the session, South Korean president Moon Jae-in said climate change posed a threat to the world and the global community needs to act. We have had no statement from Scott Morrison about the IPCC or the 1.5 degree report, which is set to be released next week.
Between now and 2050 we’ll need to transform our carbon-emitting economy into a carbon-absorbing one. That will require enormous investments in innovation across a wide array of technologies and sectors, from clean energy to seaweed aquaculture and carbon fibre production. With Morrison at the helm, we are headed towards a world where food security is diminishing, where drought is the new normal and where our basic requirements of shelter from the elements, water and food security increasingly hang in the balance. Time is now so very short to act that, if the rest of the world was performing as poorly as Australia is in reducing its emissions, all hope would already be lost.

*Tim Flannery is an author, palaeontologist and chief councillor of the Climate Council.


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