Lethal Heating: 10/27/18

27/10/2018

A Difference Of Degrees: The Looming Climate Catastrophe

Australian Strategic Policy Institute - Robert Glasser*

Image courtesy of DVIDSHUB on Flickr

The release earlier this month of a major UN-sponsored scientific report on the significant impacts expected from 1.5°C of global warming—the aspirational limit countries adopted in the Paris climate agreement—generated widespread media interest. Much of the commentary has rightly focused on the rapidly closing window of opportunity to achieve the aspiration and the huge scale of the societal changes required.
But the recent coverage has largely overlooked an equally important aspect of the study. Based on the most recent scientific evidence, researchers have now determined that extremely harmful climate impacts will strike at much lower temperature thresholds than previously projected.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C, which was produced at the request of countries adopting the Paris agreement, is an authoritative and cautious document. It’s the culmination of the efforts of 133 contributing authors who analysed more than 6,000 scientific studies and incorporated comments from over 40,000 expert and government reviews.
The report highlights the enormous challenge of limiting global warming to 1.5°. Annual emissions of CO₂ will need to be halved by 2030 relative to 2016 levels and renewable energy will need to supply 70–85% of global electricity demand (with coal’s contribution essentially ceasing) by 2050. It notes that systemic changes on this scale would be historically unprecedented and require ‘deep emissions reductions in all sectors, a wide portfolio of mitigation options and a significant upscaling of investments in those options’.
A key objective of the report is to describe how the climate-related risks at 1.5° would differ from those at 2° of warming (the upper limit agreed in Paris). Not surprisingly, the report concludes that the risks for human and natural systems are higher at 2°, but it is the scale of the difference that is most worrying—particularly given that without further ambition to reduce greenhouse gases, we can expect between 3° and 4° of warming.
For example, that 0.5° difference would, according to the report, result in several hundred million additional people falling into poverty; a 50% increase in the proportion of the global population experiencing water stress; 420 million more people frequently exposed to extreme heatwaves; 184 to 270 million more people exposed to an increase in water scarcity; and a 10-fold increase (from 8 million to 81 million) in the number of vulnerable people affected by changes to crop yields (jumping to a 50-fold increase at 3° of warming).
As distressing as these projections may be, they probably underestimate the actual harm because they don’t generally take account of the cascading impacts of disasters, which can often be more severe than the proximate impacts. The report in effect acknowledges this, noting that ‘The literature on compound as well as interacting risk at warming of 1.5°C and 2.0°C is limited.’ It observes that ‘Multi-sector risks are projected to overlap spatially and temporally, creating new (and exacerbating current) hazards, exposures, and vulnerabilities that will affect increasing numbers of people and regions with additional warming.’
Media coverage of one of the report’s most important findings has been relatively low-key. Recent research has now determined that global warming will trigger highly harmful societal impacts at significantly lower temperatures than was previously assumed.
The IPCC’s 2014 Fifth Assessment Report identified five categories of impacts and determined for each the implications at various levels of warming for people, economies and ecosystems. The categories are: unique and threatened systems; extreme weather events; distribution of impacts; global aggregate impacts; and large-scale singular impacts (so-called climate tipping points). The current study, drawing on the most up-to-date scientific evidence, has determined that the 2014 assessment significantly underestimated the risks in four of the five categories.
For example, in the case of ‘unique and threatened systems’, the threshold for the transition from ‘high’ to ‘very high’ risk has been lowered from 2.6° to between 1.5° and 2° of warming. The change reflects recent research that, among other things, has now determined with ‘very high confidence’ that 2° of warming will result in the total loss of coral reefs from the world’s tropical and subtropical regions.
‘Extreme weather’ is the only category of impacts for which the report’s finding is relatively unchanged from 2014. However, that is largely because, as the authors point out, ‘The impact literature contains very limited information about the potential for human society to adapt to extreme weather events and hence it has not been possible to locate the transition from “high” … to “very high” risk within the context of assessing impacts at 1.5°C versus 2°C global warming.’
Given the hugely disproportionate effect climate change will have on less developed countries and the likelihood of cascading impacts, there is good reason to suspect that plugging this research gap will reveal a significantly lower threshold in this major category as well.
As the scientific uncertainty diminishes, it is becoming increasingly clear that we have greatly underestimated the impacts of climate change. The IPCC report’s findings make it urgent for nations, including Australia, to scale up rapidly their national commitments under the Paris agreement.

*Robert Glasser is an ASPI visiting fellow. His past roles include Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction

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Sweden’s Sustainable Cities A Lesson For Australia

Government News - Georgia Clark

Växjö, a city in southern Sweden, achieved a 17% emissions reduction in 2016-17.

The involvement of local government has been essential to Swedish city’s remarkable carbon emissions reduction success, experts say.
It calls itself “the greenest city in Europe.”
Växjö, a city in southern Sweden’s Kronoberg County, achieved a stunning 17 per cent emissions reduction in just one year, and since implementing a suite of policies in the early 1990s has slashed its carbon emissions by more than half.
A local district heating system that replaces fossil fuels with biomass energy like food waste and waste wood makes up 90 per cent of the city’s energy, while a key scheme taxes emissions and funds carbon-reduction projects.
The promotion of sustainable transport options like cycling has contributed to the city’s carbon reductions, while 25 per cent of the energy for transport and work machinery comes from renewable energy.
The municipality’s energy supply is now 67 per cent renewable, with a goal of going completely fossil-fuel free by 2020.

Lessons for Australian councils

Mikael Granberg

The secret to Vaxjo’s remarkable carbon reductions is the involvement of local government in driving sustainable development, says Professor Mikael Granberg, director of the Centre for Climate & Safety at the Karlstads University in Sweden.
In Sweden, local government has “substantial financial, constitutional, legal, political and professional resources” and an instrumental role in driving sustainability, Professor Granberg tells Government News.
“Looking at eco-governance, local government has quite wide responsibilities, including sewerage, waste-treatment, recycling, green public purchase, green consumption and green accounts. Swedish local government are crucial actors with a potential to contribute and drive sustainable development,” he said.
Since 1948, Swedish local governments have had responsibility for spatial planning within their own territory – a responsibility which Professor Granberg says plays an immense role in the nation’s overall climate targets.
“Spatial planning is expected to deliver both climate change risk reduction and adaptation, and to balance other societal interests and priorities,” he said.

Australian councils need to ‘step up’

Brendan Gleeson

Professor Brendan Gleeson, director of the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, says Australian councils can learn a lot from Swedish local governments’ success in driving down emissions.
It highlights the value of council leadership in driving sustainable power generation and distribution – a leadership that needs to be reasserted by councils in Australia, Professor Gleeson said.
“Växjö shows that local governments need not be constrained by poor national leadership on sustainability issues and can assert themselves to drive impressive sustainability transitions,” he told Government News.
Växjö illustrates the potential for concerted local action to drive per capita emissions down to very low levels, Professor Gleeson says. “Local action is feasible and potentially powerful even in the context of national inertia on sustainability action.”

Re-establish local ownership
Many Australian councils once owned important forms of infrastructure including energy and need to consider re-establishing municipal ownership of key assets, such as power generation and transport, as a means to drive change and enhance local economies, Professor Gleeson argues.
Professor Granberg, who collaborates with Australian researchers in the area, agreed that Australian councils could play a key role in helping drive down the country’s emissions.
“Local government is able to deal directly with households and small businesses in ways not possible for state or federal government. Local government has also proved to be an important source of program innovation,” he says.
However, greater local government involvement in sustainable development and carbon reductions would necessitate more resource-allocation to councils, Professor Granberg said.
He added:

“In Australia, environmental protection is a largely unfunded mandate for local government and, accordingly, financial resources are scarce, which ties to the challenge of employing trained and expert staff. So, there are challenges, but I still cannot see how local government can be avoided if we want to mitigate emissions and adapt to climate impacts.”

Professor Granberg says local government needs to “step up and take on this challenge” and perhaps challenge other levels of government on sustainable development and climate change mitigation.
But while local governments are a “key frontline player” in promoting carbon reductions, Professor Gleeson says that strong federal leadership is still needed.
It’s this national leadership in Sweden that has also contributed to the nation’s carbon reductions, he says.

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Climate Change Is No Joking Matter. Except, This Week, It Was.

New York Times - John Schwartz

Late night is heating up. That is, shows like “Saturday Night Live,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah” have been focusing on global warming in the past week.
Beer jokes. Al Gore with some startlingly profane rappers. And, of course, digs at President Trump.
We don’t usually get a lot of laughs out of climate change, a topic that gets precious little airtime, even on the broadcast news shows. But comedy shows riff off the news, and there has been a lot of climate science in the news recently, especially the grim report from a United Nations science panel predicting enormous weather disasters by 2040, well ahead of previous estimates.
And then there was Mr. Trump, who gave an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday in which he again expressed his doubts about climate change, even suggesting that it may reverse itself. (Not going to happen, Mr. President.)
He came back to the topic on Tuesday in an interview with The Associated Press, explaining that “I have a natural instinct for science, and I will say that you have scientists on both sides of the picture.” (For the record: The percentage of scientists whose work supports the overwhelming evidence for climate change is itself overwhelming.)
Last Saturday’s episode of “SNL” had not one but two segments that dealt with climate change, including that rap number about trees (with a cameo by Mr. Gore).

The program also devoted a “Weekend Update” report to the United Nations climate findings.
Michael Che described the problem of climate change communication this way: If people see it as being about losing everything, “Nobody cares about everything,” he said. “People only care about something.” His example: If Fox News said that climate change would take away “all the flags and Confederate statues, there’d be recycling bins outside of every Cracker Barrel and Dick’s Sporting Goods.”
Mr. Che had similarly pointed suggestions about building interest in climate change among black people and women. For those, you’ll have to watch the video.

Stephen Colbert jumped on Mr. Trump’s statements about climate change, saying: “After a year of massive storms causing untold damage, and our glaciers just shrinking in every direction, Trump was still ambivalent on the concept of climate change. He told the reporter, ‘You have scientists on both sides of the issue.’ That is true, there are scientists on both sides. On one side, all the scientists. On the other, one guy who runs a blog called RealTrueAmericanScienceEagle.jesus.”
He also cited a study that we wrote about in The New York Times that suggests climate change could raise the cost of beer as it shrinks barley harvests. “Or as the brothers at Sigma Phi Epsilon put it, ‘Climate change just got real.’”

Trevor Noah jumped on the beer news, too. “Climate change: Sometimes it feels so hopeless, all you want to do is get drunk and forget about it,” he said. “Well, sadly, that won’t be an option, because of climate change.”
To his credit, Mr. Noah talks about climate change fairly often.
Does joking about climate change blunt the message that it is a threat, even a crisis?
Hardly, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. He noted that broadcast media rarely talks about the topic, and it barely came up during the 2016 presidential debates. So for many television viewers, he said, seeing a segment on “Weekend Update” or “The Late Show” means “millions of people just had a conversation or watched on television discussions about climate change that they otherwise never get exposed to.”
What’s more, his center’s own research, he said, shows that “comedy is a really effective means to engage people,” and especially young people, in what he called “a sideways way.” He said that “through humor, people can deal with very difficult and scary topics that people will tend to ignore or avoid.”
The challenge, he suggested, is making any of this funny. “God knows, it’s pretty hard to laugh about most of the things that are going on today.”
Late-night television has long been topical, said Bill Carter, who used to cover the industry and has written two books about the struggle for dominance. But the rapidly spinning news cycle of the Trump administration has focused the comics’ attention on news out of Washington more than ever before, he said. And that fills a need.
“The audience is in a state of anxiety. The country is in a state of anxiety,” he said. “They’re watching the shows to get some relief.”
It helps, he added, that “this administration produces more risible material than any one in history.”

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How To Ignore Climate Change

Psychology Today - Grant Hilary Brenner*

Disturbing research on how climate change is hurting our emotional well-being.

DurkTalsma via Getty Images

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty. — John Muir

Climate change is a major stressor in contemporary life. There is not a single day that we don’t read about the hazards of climate change, learn about a horrible disaster plausible connected with climate change. For those of us who accept the science, we often feel outrage at people — especially those in power — who not only refute climate change, but roll-back efforts intended to address the hazards facing our planet and species. In addition to outrage, shame, sorrow, helplessness, fear, disgust, resilience eroding cynicism, and the like... nothing good for emotional wellness.
What kind of animal are we to continue down this path, faced with what we now know? We know that the bystander effect is powerful. Crowds of people will walk by someone dying on the sidewalk, and do nothing. We tell ourselves that someone else will do something, absolving ourselves from having to act, a deadly human characteristic called "diffusion of responsibility" which comes out in groups. The more the merrier, one might darkly quip.
We also fail to act because we go along with the herd. If no one else is addressing the issue, perhaps most importantly our leaders, why should I risk separating myself from the group? Being exiled is, evolutionarily speaking, tantamount to a death sentence more often than not. That's part of why rejection feels so bad, why social exclusion lights up pain centers in the brain. Social conformity is a powerful and lethal force, as much as it shapes society in positive ways as well.

How do weather factors affect our health?
Numerous studies have provided evidence that climate change is associated with poor mental and emotional well-being. Many of these studies have been smaller scale or focused on specific populations. That is, until now.
Researchers from MIT, Harvard, UCSD, the Laureate Institute for Brain Research, and the Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Hospital (2018) published the results of a large-scale study providing empirical evidence of the mental health risks threatened by climate change. Working from a broad framework for mental health, they recognize that “[s]ocial, economic and physical systems are critical determinants of psychological well-being.” They note that mental health disorders exact a high price, with close to 50 percent of Americans experiencing some mental health issue in their lifetime, affecting productivity, general health and quality of life. The WHO has identified mental health issues such as depressive and anxiety disorders as tantamount to an epidemic, a public and global health crisis which will take a massive toll on all of human society if left unchecked.
The authors note that while many studies have shown the negative impact of specific events, including increased depression and posttraumatic stress disorder after hurricanes and floods, increased suicide rates during heat waves and drought, and increased psychiatric hospitalization when the temperature rises, well-designed studies of the large-scale effects of climate change on population mental health have been harder to conduct.

New research on mental health and climate change.

To look at the question of the effects of climate change on population mental health, researchers tapped a database of 2 million US residents between the years of 2002 and 2012, using data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System. People answered the question, “Now thinking about your mental health, which includes stress, depression, and problems with emotions, for how many days during the past 30 days was your mental health not good?” This one question was chosen by the CDC because it has been shown to be a simple, reliable indicator of mental health with statistical validity comparable to other accepted measures.

They took this data and related it to meteorological information using research methodologies from “climate econometrics” to look at relationships between facets of climate change and mental health, over time. The focused in on three high-impact types of stressor: short-run weather exposure, warming over a span of years, and the near-term effects of natural disaster.
They posed several questions:

Do recent meteorological stressors affect mental health?
Are more vulnerable groups affected more severely by meteorological stressors?
Does longer-term warming adversely affect mental health over a span of years?
Does direct impact from tropical storms worsen mental health?

How climate change affects mental illness rates for 2 million people.
They found that all three climate change experiences — the immediate effects of weather, warming over several years, and tropical storm exposure — significantly worsened mental health. They found that shifts in average monthly temperatures from 25 to 30 degrees centigrade to over 30 degrees worsened mental health in a dose-dependent manner. For each degree of average temperature increase, mental health worsened by a 2 percent increase in the rate of reported mental health issues. They found that in acute cyclone disaster zones, using Hurricane Katrina data, rates of mental health difficulties were 4 percent higher than in unaffected areas. For short-term weather changes, both increased heat and increased rain worsened mental health in a dose-dependent relationship.
Based on the short-term effects of warmer and more rainy months alone, extending their findings to the whole US population translates into nearly 2 million extra people with mental health difficulties in any given month when the weather is worse. We all know how tough it can be to struggle through a heat-wave, or a period of prolonged bad weather — these numbers tell the story of our personal experiences writ large.

The chilling implications for spiraling mental illness with unchecked climate change.
These are disturbing findings, and would, for any rational creatures, be a wake-up call. The number of people expected to have significantly worsening mental health, when extended to the population of the US, let alone the world, means millions and millions more people with increase suffering, physical health problems, and impairment in function. Our current mental health systems are already grossly inadequate to meet the current demand for care, as rates of depression, anxiety disorders, and other illnesses continue to rise, and healthcare costs along with them. And these numbers are for a relatively well-resourced, first-world country. Climate change may have more profound effects in regions already under great strain, close to the tipping point.
The broad-brush strokes of this study show that on the population level, climate change has a major negative impact on our well-being, and future work will be more granular, looking at specific mental health and related issues. Areas of interest include the effects on mental health from different meteorological stressors for different groups, including psychiatric illness, behavioral changes, and impact on substance use. In addition to clinical outcomes, distress which does not reach diagnostic significance nevertheless can have major negative effects on individual well-being, family, and culture which we have yet to envision.

The future is uncertain.
Moreover, if we don’t get ahead of the mental health impact of climate change and do something about it, we are likely to get caught off guard and have difficulty responding effectively, compounding the problem further. As with many other anxiety-provoking issues for which there is no clear, good solution, we tend to use denial and avoidance to manage our emotional states, at our own peril.
This research, in some ways, represents a turning-point in understanding the effects of climate change on mental health. We need to better understand the causal relationships among weather-related factors and mental health outcomes. Underlying factors could include, authors note, changes in inflammation as a direct effect of climate, or could be due to factors such changes in level of exercise or eating habits.
Other factors not included in this study, harder to measure at this time, may also be important — such as a rise in sea-level. The study authors note that worry about climate change may itself be a primary factor. There's no question, that at least subjectively the day-in-day-out barrage of terrifying news causes massive amounts of anxiety, whether you are someone who numbs out, worries actively, and/or is trying to do something about climate change. This is truly the stuff of nightmares, as anyone afflicted with apocalyptic nightmares can tell you.
Ongoing research can start to look at these factors so we can understand what is happening when climate change impairs emotional well-being and identify areas of intervention to make us more resilient. If climate change continues to escalate as scientists predict, and the United Nations stridently warns, and we fail to heed these warnings, we open ourselves up to unfathomable, preventable horrors which will affect everyone. Understanding why people refute climate change will help to develop ways to educate, and persuade.

*Grant Hilary Brenner, M.D. is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who helps adults with mood and anxiety conditions.

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