Lethal Heating: April 2019

30/04/2019

We Underestimate Young People Because It's Convenient

Fairfax - Caitlin Fitzsimmons*

When I was nine, the threat of nuclear war loomed large. I understood that Ronald Reagan was the president of the United States and Mikhail Gorbachev the leader of the Soviet Union. I knew about the nuclear arms race, specifically the Star Wars program and MX Missile, and the movement for nuclear disarmament.
I was a tad precocious but no prodigy, and I remember talking about the nuclear threat with other children.

When I was a child, the threat of nuclear war loomed large. Credit: Reuters

So I’m not remotely surprised that nine-year-olds today are writing about climate change and even the Paris agreement in their school work.
Of course, they are - climate change is an existential threat for Generation Z. Did you think they wouldn’t notice?
In a recent incident that made the news, the NSW Department of Education ordered Ramsgate Public School to remove two letters from students published in an online newsletter.
The children had written letters about climate change, notionally to Prime Minister Scott Morrison though the letters weren’t sent, as part of an exercise in persuasive writing.
A department spokesman told The Sun-Herald the letters were written after a geography lesson about the Great Barrier Reef. The spokesman said there was no problem with the lesson or the letters themselves but because they were addressed to the Prime Minister and were critical of government policy, the publication of the letters breached the Controversial Issues in Schools policy.

Young people are concerned about the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, which is threatened by warming water temperatures.

The incident was reported in The Daily Telegraph, which quoted two right-wing think tanks and a conservative academic in a story about how teachers are ostensibly subjecting children to a political agenda in the classroom and “brainwashing young, immature and vulnerable children with their politically correct ideology”.
The same rhetoric was used to belittle the children and teenagers in the school student strike for climate - even the 17-year-olds who were nearly of voting age were dismissed as “pawns”.
Last week, Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg, the girl who started the worldwide school strike movement, addressed the British Parliament.
Predictably, people who don't want to hear her message choose to attack her instead - they mock her appearance and stern manner, her Asperger's, claim she is paid to protest, and dismiss her on the basis that she has only just turned 16.
If you would prefer to listen to an adult who has studied the issue then by all means do so - they will tell you the same as Thunberg. The difference is that Thunberg's youth gives her message about the future a certain moral clout.
Climate change is a tough issue for teachers and not just because they are hamstrung by policy.
A relative who teaches primary school recently confided in me about the emotional cost of teaching Gen Z, when he is increasingly pessimistic about their future given the devastation of our natural world.
Let’s not pretend that children and teenagers can’t understand what’s going on. Young people are young people and they are smarter than we give them credit for.
Don’t take my word for it. Here’s Professor Tonia Gray, a specialist in pedagogy and learning at the University of Western Sydney: “We underestimate the capabilities and the skills of the modern child. Don’t sell them short and don’t dumb it down.”
Associate Professor Penny Van Bergen, an education expert at Macquarie University, says a child aged nine is old enough to learn complex concepts such as climate change and even the principles of the Paris agreement.
UNICEF recently released its 2019 Young Ambassador Report based on consultations with 1517 Australian children and teenagers and an additional survey of 1007 young people aged 14 to 17. The report found young Australians are “extremely worried about what they see as the ongoing failures of governments, businesses and communities to act as effective stewards for a clean and livable environment”.
Students as young as Year 5 start to clearly express these opinions. Even preschoolers brought up the fact that litter could harm wildlife.
Among the surveyed teenagers, the vast majority (86 per cent) view climate change as a threat to their safety, with 73 per cent saying it affects the world “a lot” now and 84 per cent saying it will affect the world “a lot” in the future.
Three out of four want Australia to be taking action on climate change, to lead by example and play our part in stopping its worsening effects.
Only 8 per cent believe we shouldn’t take action because of negative effects on the economy and only 5 per cent that we are too small a nation to make a difference.
Only 4 per cent do not believe climate change is both real and caused by human activity.
Other environmental concerns such as plastic pollution, extinction of animals, deforestation and coral bleaching also rate highly. (If any readers want to argue about climate change, don’t bother - instead please focus your attention on any of the myriad of environmental problems you do acknowledge).
It suits adults to underestimate children because it means we don’t have to take them or their concerns seriously.
It’s a form of ad hominem argument, where you seek to discredit the person rather than engage with their substantive argument.
No one wins hearts and minds by demonising a child, so they’ll portray them as brainwashed innocents instead.
Young people and all future generations are the ones who will inherit a vastly depleted natural world. The only way to counter that moral authority is to call them “pawns” in a debate they couldn’t possibly understand.
Or we could hear the message and act.
As Thunberg says, we need to act like the house is on fire - because it is.
If we do anything less, the young will never forgive us.

*Caitlin Fitzsimmons is the associate editor of The Sun-Herald.

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Ocean-Dwelling Species Are Disappearing Twice As Quickly As Land Animals

Smithsonian.Com - Meilan Solly

Researchers point toward marine creatures’ inability to adapt to changing water temperatures, lack of adequate shelter

Kevin Lino NOAA/NMFS/PIFSC/ESD Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Marine animals are twice as vulnerable to climate change-driven habitat loss as their land-dwelling counterparts, a new survey published in the journal Nature finds.
As Mark Kaufman reports for Mashable, the analysis—centered on around 400 cold-blooded species, including fish, mollusks, crustaceans and lizards—suggests marine creatures are ill-equipped to adapt to rising temperatures and, unlike land animals that can seek shelter in the shade or a burrow, largely unable to escape the heat.
“You don't have anywhere to go,” Natalya Gallo, a marine ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who was not involved in the study, tells Kaufman. “Maybe you can hide under a kelp leaf, but the entire water around you has warmed.”
Speaking with National Geographic’s Christina Nunez, lead author Malin Pinsky, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, further explains that ocean dwellers “live in an environment that, historically, hasn’t changed temperature all that much.”
Given that cold-blooded creatures rely on their surroundings to regulate body temperature, relatively stable marine ecosystems have actually made their inhabitants more susceptible to significant temperature changes. And while ocean temperatures are still much lower than those on land, as Anthony J. Richardson and David S. Schoeman point out in an accompanying Nature News and Views piece, marine heat waves, increased carbon dioxide pollution and other products of global warming are driving Earth’s oceans to higher temperatures than ever before.
To assess the threat posed by warming waters, Pinsky and her colleagues calculated “thermal safety margins” for 318 terrestrial and 88 marine animals. According to Motherboard’s Becky Ferreira, this measure represents the difference between a species’ upper heat tolerance and its body temperature at both full heat exposure and in “thermal refuge,” or cooled down sanctuaries ranging from shady forests to the depths of the ocean.
The team found that safety margins were slimmest for ocean dwellers living near the equator and land dwellers living near the midlatitudes. Crucially, Nunez writes, the data revealed that more than half of marine species at the higher end of their safety margins had disappeared from their historical habitats—a phenomenon known as local extinction—due to warming. Comparatively, around a quarter of land animals had abandoned their homes in favor of cooler environments.
On average, tropical marine creatures have a safety margin of 10 degrees Celsius. “That sounds like a lot,” Pinsky tells Nunez, “but the key is that populations actually go extinct long before they experience 10 degrees of warming.” In fact, Pinsky notes, just a degree or half-degree shift can dramatically impact such animals’ food-finding skills and reproduction abilities.
While some marine creatures can escape the heat by migrating to colder waters, others have fewer options: As Mashable’s Kaufman observes, surface-dwelling fish can’t simply move to the deep ocean and expect to thrive or even survive. The same is true of marine animals living in the shallow waters off of continental shelves, Bob Berwyn adds for InsideClimate News. And these species, as well as ones forced to flee their long-time habitats, are far from obscure ones likely to have no impact on humans’ livelihood; many, including halibut and winter founder, serve as key food sources for coastal communities.
“This affects our dinner plates in many cases,” Pinsky says to Kaufman.
Berwyn highlights several examples of animals reaching or surpassing their heat threshold. Coral reef-dwelling damselfish and cardinalfish, for example, have started to disappear from some areas, hampering the health of these already threatened ecosystems. Summer flounder, once native to the North Carolina coast, have moved to cooler waters, forcing fishermen to travel some 600 miles further north than before in order to catch them.
Although the new study emphasizes marine dwellers’ plight to an extent little-seen in academia, Alex Gunderson, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at New Orleans’ Tulane University, is quick to point out that terrestrial creatures remain at risk, too: As he tells National Geographic’s Nunez, “Land animals are at lower risk than marine animals only if they can find cool shaded spots to avoid direct sunlight and wait out extreme heat.”
Building on the researchers’ call to lower greenhouse gas emissions, stop overfishing and limit ocean habitat destruction, Gunderson concludes, “The results of this study are a further wake-up call that we need to protect forests and other natural environments because of the temperature buffer that they provide wildlife in a warming world.”

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Get Set For Take-Off In Electric Aircraft, The Next Transport Disruption

The Conversation - Jake Whitehead | Michael Kane

Multiple forms of electric aircraft are being developed rapidly. MagniX, Author provided (No reuse)

Move aside electric cars, another disruption set to occur in the next decade is being ignored in current Australian transport infrastructure debates: electric aviation. Electric aircraft technology is rapidly developing locally and overseas, with the aim of potentially reducing emissions and operating costs by over 75%. Other countries are already planning for 100% electric short-haul plane fleets within a couple of decades.
Australia relies heavily on air transport. The country has the most domestic airline seats per person in the world. We have also witnessed flight passenger numbers double over the past 20 years.
Infrastructure projects are typically planned 20 or more years ahead. This makes it more important than ever that we start to adopt a disruptive lens in planning. It’s time to start accounting for electric aviation if we are to capitalise on its potential economic and environmental benefits.

What can these aircraft do?
There are two main types of electric aircraft: short-haul planes and vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) vehicles, including drones.
The key issue affecting the uptake of electric aircraft is the need to ensure enough battery energy density to support commercial flights. While some major impediments are still to be overcome, we are likely to see short-haul electric flights locally before 2030. Small, two-to-four-seat, electric planes are already flying in Australia today.

An electric plane service has been launched in Perth.

A scan of global electric aircraft development suggests rapid advancements are likely over the coming decade. By 2022, nine-seat planes could be doing short-haul (500-1,000km) flights. Before 2030, small-to-medium 150-seat planes could be flying up to 500 kilometres. Short-range (100-250 km) VTOL aircraft could also become viable in the 2020s.
If these breakthroughs occur, we could see small, commercial, electric aircraft operating on some of Australia’s busiest air routes, including Sydney-Melbourne or Brisbane, as well as opening up new, cost-effective travel routes to and from regional Australia.

Possible short-haul electric aircraft ranges of 500km and 1,000km around Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Author provided

Why go electric?
In addition to new export opportunities, as shown by MagniX, electric aviation could greatly reduce the financial and environmental costs of air transport in Australia.
Two major components of current airline costs are fuel (27%) and maintenance (11%). Electric aircraft could deliver significant price reductions through reduced energy and maintenance costs.
Short-haul electric aircraft are particularly compelling given the inherent energy efficiency, simplicity and longevity of the battery-powered motor and drivetrain. No alternative fuel sources can deliver the same level of savings.
With conventional planes, a high-passenger, high-frequency model comes with a limiting environmental cost of burning fuel. Smaller electric aircraft can avoid the fuel costs and emissions resulting from high-frequency service models. This can lead to increased competition between airlines and between airports, further lowering costs.

What are the implications of this disruption?
Air transport is generally organised in combinations of hub-and-spoke or point-to-point models. Smaller, more energy-efficient planes encourage point-to-point flights, which can also be the spokes on long-haul hub models. This means electric aircraft could lead to higher-frequency services, enabling more competitive point-to-point flights, and increase the dispersion of air services to smaller airports.
While benefiting smaller airports, electric aircraft could also improve the efficiency of some larger constrained airports.
For example, Australia’s largest airport, Sydney Airport, is efficient in both operations and costs. However, due to noise and pollution, physical and regulatory constraints – mainly aircraft movement caps and a curfew – can lead to congestion. With a significant number of sub-1,000km flights originating from Sydney, low-noise, zero-emission, electric aircraft could overcome some of these constraints, increasing airport efficiency and lowering costs.
The increased availability of short-haul, affordable air travel could actively compete with other transport services, including high-speed rail (HSR). Alternatively, if the planning of HSR projects takes account of electric aviation, these services could improve connectivity at regional rail hubs. This could strengthen the business cases for HSR projects by reducing the number of stops and travel times, and increasing overall network coverage.

Synchronised air and rail services could improve connections for travellers. Chuyuss/Shutterstock

What about air freight?
Electric aircraft could also help air freight. International air freight volumes have increased by 80% in the last 20 years. Electric aircraft provide an opportunity to efficiently transport high-value products to key regional transport hubs, as well as directly to consumers via VTOL vehicles or drones.
If properly planned, electric aviation could complement existing freight services, including road, sea and air services. This would reduce the overall cost of transporting high-value goods.

Plan now for the coming disruption
Electric aircraft could significantly disrupt short-haul air transport within the next decade. How quickly will this technology affect conventional infrastructure? It is difficult to say given the many unknown factors. The uncertainties include step-change technologies, such as solid-state batteries, that could radically accelerate the uptake and capabilities of electric aircraft.
What we do know today is that Australia is already struggling with disruptive technological changes in energy, telecommunications and even other transport segments. These challenges highlight the need to start taking account of disruptive technology when planning infrastructure. Where we see billions of dollars being invested in technological transformation, we need to assume disruption is coming.
With electric aircraft we have some time to prepare, so let’s not fall behind the eight ball again – as has happened with electric cars – and start to plan ahead.

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29/04/2019

Tim Winton: Our Leaders Are Ignoring Global Warming To The Point Of Criminal Negligence. It's Unforgivable

The Guardian - Tim Winton

Our leaders are ignoring global warming to the point of criminal negligence. It's unforgivable

Two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef was hit by back-to-back mass coral bleaching. Photograph: Kerryn Bell/ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies

I’ve been asking myself a question – and even posing it makes me queasy.
Is it too late – are we beyond saving?
As a culture and a polity, when it comes to climate change, have we arrived at a point where we are now expected – even trained – to abandon hope and submit to the inevitable?
OK, I guess that’s two questions. In good faith I can still say that the answer to the first is no. But I’d be a liar and a fool to give the same response to the second.
No, it isn’t too late. But we’ve squandered decades of opportunities to mitigate and forestall impacts and we’re making a pig’s breakfast of responding to what is now a crisis. Even so, humans are not yet beyond saving themselves from the worst ravages of global warming. There’s fight in us yet, even if it’s a bit shapeless.
The problem – and it’s an existential threat both profound and perverse – is that those who lead us and have power over our shared destiny are ignoring global warming to the point of criminal negligence.
Worse than that, their policies, language, patronal obligations and acts of bad faith are poisoning us, training citizens to accept the prospect of inexorable loss, unstoppable chaos, certain doom. Business as usual is robbing people of hope, white-anting the promise of change. That’s not just delinquent, it’s unforgivable.
Over the last 15 years in Australia our national governments have failed to respond effectively to the challenge of climate change, and for most of that time we actually gave ourselves the luxury of calling it a challenge.
Now it’s more of a crisis. And it’s not as if our leaders are incapable of producing a timely response to a crisis. After all, in 2009 the government took bold steps to avoid an economic depression. And in the matter of refugees arriving by boat, governments still spend billions on emergency-level funding and infrastructure to meet what they view as a crisis of national security.
But in the case of climate change there’s no equivalent sense of immediacy, no sense of priority commensurate with the dangers it poses to our future ability to feed ourselves, defend our largely coastal settlements, insure our homes, maintain national security and keep our children safe from harm.

I worry that this widely-shared grief and unfocussed rage may become the signal human disposition of our time

The message implicit in our governments’ refusal to act is that we should all just suck it up – as in “climate change is bullshit, and even if it’s not there’s nothing you can do about it”.
Once internalised, this narrative is profoundly dangerous, not only for individuals, but for the entire community. It’s a licence for nihilism, a ticket to hell in a handbasket. And the cohort responsible for this mixture of denial and fatalism is far removed from the daily experience of the ordinary citizen, especially the youngest and poorest of us. They have become a threat to our shared future and we must hold them to account, immediately and without reservation.
In the last 25 years I’ve observed a peculiar social phenomenon in individuals and communities that I mistakenly thought I understood because I was a child of the cold war.

Dead fish in the Darling River at Menindee, New South Wales, Australia. Officials on 28 January 2019, found hundreds of thousands of dead fish in the Menindee weir pool and neighbouring waterways. Photograph: Graeme Mccrabb Handout/EPA

While working to help save ecosystems across Australia I’ve noticed a bruised attitude of beleaguerment in individuals and within groups that’s increasingly hard to ignore, a mounting grimness in the faces and language of people barely holding on in the face of steady, cumulative and unrelenting losses.
They’re losing places, ecosystems, potential. It’s not restricted to activists; I see it in neighbourhoods and towns, I read it online, I get it in the mail. Ordinary folks – young and old – watching their waterways curdle, their soils blow away, their green spaces bulldozed, their fish gasping for air. Feeling wounded and betrayed, some are clinging to the last tendrils of hope, others are falling into despair. And that worries me.
Ecological depletion is being experienced communally as a mounting loss of access and an erosion of possibility. In essence, a pruning back of future prospects. It’s expressed as grief, and the most palpable, widespread and immediate expression of it is now brewing over climate change.
Beneath that grief there’s rage.
I worry that this widely-shared grief and unfocussed rage may become the signal human disposition of our time, that the Anthropocene will be marked by fury and hopelessness. This frightens me just as much as the prospect of beachside properties falling into the sea, or even the death of our coral reefs. Acidifying cultures are as chaotic and dangerous as acidifying oceans.
Younger people in particular have begun to feel abandoned by their leaders and elders. They suspect they’ll be left without food or ammunition to stage a fighting retreat in which every battle is a defeat foreseen and every bit of territory was surrendered in advance by politicians and CEOs who deserted them long ago to hide in their privileged bunkers and silos.
So what hope for our kids? Why should we be surprised they’d walk out of school and march? Their futures are being traded away before their eyes. They see what many of their elders and betters refuse to acknowledge. That they’re being robbed.
During the cold war many of us were gripped by dread – it was personal and communal – and in the books and films of the era our anxiety was palpable. We lived every day with the prospect of nuclear annihilation, and sometimes that possibility was clear, present and extremely proximate, a matter of hours and minutes when a possibility became an actual probability.
And for some time now I’ve been trying to see our current crisis through that lived experience. Because we survived, didn’t we? The worst never happened. No one pressed the button. So, chances are, all will be well this time, too – right?

The Great Barrier Reef experienced bleaching events so catastrophic they caused our most senior coral scientists to weep

But the reason humanity survived the cold war is because world leaders paid attention. They took emergent crises seriously. And in each instance of utmost danger, arguments of ideology and nationalism eventually fell away before the sacred importance of life itself. Beneath all the posturing there was, finally, a bedrock of humanity informing the technocrats and generals. Stepping back from the brink was expensive. Think what it cost in terms of pride, political prestige, assets, even territory. Consider the expenditure of ingenuity and infrastructure.
And there’s our problem. Because in this country, when it comes to climate change, there’s no equivalent attention to the crisis. For some there’s no crisis at all.
Our governments and corporations are ensnared in a feedback loop of “common sense” and mutual self-preservation that’s little more than a bespoke form of nihilism. Ideology, prestige, assets and territory are now tacitly understood to be worth more than all life, human or otherwise.
And the four great capacities of humanity to solve a crisis – ingenuity, discipline, courage and sacrifice – these seem to be reserved for more important enterprises. The future, by all accounts, can wait.
But the future is already with us. The button has been pushed – again and again.
In 2011, along hundreds of kilometres of the West Australian coast, abalone crawled off the reefs to die in their untold thousands on the baking white beaches because of a 2-degree spike in sea temperature. A little further north at Shark Bay, the world’s largest seagrass meadows suffered a sudden mortality of 20%. In the Northern Territory two years later, mangrove forests died along a 1,000km stretch of coast. And the Great Barrier Reef experienced successive bleaching events so catastrophic they caused the nation’s most senior coral scientists to weep.
Here’s the thing. To our current national government climate change is but a dry-lightning storm in a district unknown. For the denialists who control policy, the storm itself is an endlessly debatable phenomenon. And if the parish it’s lighting up really does exist, then it can safely be dismissed as remote and insignificant.
But that district is real. Most of us know it as the immediate future. Some know it as the present. And it’s already burning. It’s peopled with folks who weep and seethe and dread what else may lie ahead.
We can no longer wait patiently for our leaders to catch up. We cannot allow ourselves to be trained to accept hopelessness. Not by business, nor by governments. Both have subjected us to a steady diet of loss and depletion. It’s sapped us and left us mourning a future we can see fading before it even arrives.
There’s no good reason to submit to this. No sane purpose in putting up with it. Because grief will paralyse us, and despair renders doom inevitable. We can afford neither.
Australians can make a bad outcome inexorable by submitting to it meekly. Or we can fight for a viable future and meet this crisis shoulder to shoulder. I am of the passionate belief that we can and will. But to do this we’ll need to get our house in order – and fast. That means calling bullshit on what’s been happening in our name for the past 15 years.
It’s time to make sharp demands of our representatives, time to remove those who refuse to act in our common interest, time to elect people with courage, ingenuity and discipline, people who’ll sacrifice pride, privilege and even perks for the sake of something sacred.
Because there’s something bigger at stake here than culture wars and the mediocrity of so-called common-sense. It’s the soil under our feet, the water we drink, the air we breathe.
Life. It’s worth the fight. But, by God, after decades of appeasement, defeatism and denialism, it’s going to take a fight. Time’s short. So, let’s give our grief and fury some shape and purpose and reclaim our future together.
Enough cowardice.
Enough bullshit.
Time for action.

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Support For Action Surges, As Majority Say We Face Climate Emergency

Renew Economy - David Spratt*

Climate Emergency

Key Findings:

60% of Victorians and 57% of Queenslanders agreed that Australia is facing a climate change emergency and should take emergency action (58% nationwide).
More respondents in Queensland (56%) than Victoria (51%) support the Government mobilising climate efforts like they mobilised everyone during the world wars.
Less than a third of voters (28%) agreed that what Australia does on climate change will make no difference.

In the first-ever poll of its kind, new research from The Australia Institute (TAI) has found that a clear majority of Australians agree the nation ‘is facing a climate emergency’ requiring emergency action.
In response, governments should “mobilise all of society” like they did during the world wars.
It is an extraordinary finding that shows public sentiment is well ahead of the major political parties, and ahead of the large climate advocacy organisations.
The findings are part of a larger survey which found majority support, and across the political parties, for:

A rapid transition to 100% renewable energy;
A national program to switch to an electrically charged transport system;
Stopping any more native forest logging, and
A large publicly-funded research program into zero-carbon industry and agriculture (See Table 1).

There was also more support than opposition for no new coal mines and no new exploration for new deposits of coal, oil or gas, but a clearer divide between the two political sides on these two issues.

The research sample was 1536 people across four states: Queensland, NSW, Victoria and WA.
The results were released as the ABC’s Vote Compass found that the environment (including climate change) is rated as the number one issue by 29 per cent of respondents in this federal election, a “massive shift” from just 9 per cent in 2016. The environment was nominated as the top concern among undecided voters.
Growing public concern about climate issues was also picked up in the annual Lowy Institute Poll on Australian attitudes released in June 2018, and in the TAI 2018 Climate of the Nation report.
The new TAI poll found that all statements in support of taking ambitious action on climate change received majority agreement, and all statements opposing ambition on climate change received majority disagreement. TAI says:

“Results show support for a wide range of ambitious climate policies and broad agreement that climate change is serious and can and should be addressed. What’s more, the support is present across Australia, rather than being focused in particular states.”

Amongst the results:

Support was greatest for stopping any more native forest logging and reforesting other areas;
Two in three supported a rapid transition to 100% renewable energy, including a majority of each party’s voters;
Three in five supported a large publicly funded research program into zero-carbon industry and agriculture;
Three in five supported a national program to switch to an electrically charged transport system;
Half of Australians supported no new coal mines constructed and no new exploration for new deposits of coal, oil or gas.

But the biggest news is that almost six in 10 respondents agreed that “Australia is facing a climate change emergency and should take emergency action”, and over half agreed that governments should “mobilise all of society to tackle climate change, like they mobilised everyone during the world wars”.
On these two questions, every political party had more support than opposition (see Table 2). TAI notes that “It is especially significant that many respondents disagreed only modest changes are needed, but still supported these required changes.

This shows a good understanding that the fast transition now required will be disruptive and cause some pain, but people accept that is reasonable because a climate emergency level of economic mobilisation is now necessary.
A number of factors have probably contributed to these findings of high levels of understanding of the growing climate emergency, including:

The sustained drought and year of extraordinary climate extremes in Australia; the slow death of the Great Barrier Reef;
The more direct language employed by the likes of Greta Thunberg, the school students strikers, Extinction Rebellion in the UK, and authors such as David Wallace-Wells over the last year;
The growing climate emergency declarations by local governments in Australia and elsewhere; and the campaign to make this the “climate election”.

*David Spratt is Research Director for Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration

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Why The Climate Protests That Disrupted London Were Different

Vox - Eliza Barclay | Umair Irfan

Extinction Rebellion skillfully used civil disobedience to sound the alarm on the climate emergency.

Climate activists blocked Waterloo Bridge on April 16 as part of the Extinction Rebellion movement in London.
Amer Ghazzal / Barcroft Media via Getty Images

Thousands of activists unleashed strategic disorder in London for 10 days to draw attention to the accelerating climate crisis. In costume and in tents, they barricaded roads and bridges at major city landmarks, with more than 1,000 peacefully submitting to arrest.
The coordinated direct actions across the city were organized by Extinction Rebellion, a movement founded last year to demand a more aggressive climate target from the British government: net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2025.
With a core message that climate change is an “emergency” that threatens the survival of the human species, Extinction Rebellion sounded a shriller alarm than past climate protests. Members also deployed ostentatious, nonviolent tactics — such as gluing themselves to the Waterloo Bridge — at a scale that “has never been done before,” according to Alanna Byrne, a press coordinator with Extinction Rebellion.
“We know we have disrupted your lives,” the group said Wednesday in a statement. “We do not do this lightly. We only do this because this is an emergency.”
Extinction Rebellion’s urgency and energy on climate change is aligned with a wave of youth climate activism bubbling up in Europe, the United States, and beyond — including a series of student strikes, led by the riveting Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old from Sweden.
Thunberg arrived in London on Sunday to join the Extinction Rebellion protests and deliver a fiery speech to British members of Parliament, whom she says have failed to take climate change seriously: “You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before,” she chided.
If a protest is measured by how much attention and irritation it stirs up, then Extinction Rebellion has been wildly successful. London Mayor Sadiq Khan, Conservative member of Parliament Boris Johnson, and media celebrities have all called the protesters a nuisance and asked them to stop. A couple of lawmakers and the actress Emma Thompson have rallied behind them.
“I think Extinction Rebellion is extremely important,” Edward Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, told Vox. “They’re showing how much they care and that they’re willing to pay the price — be arrested — because government inaction on climate change is unacceptable. I hope it catches on.”
Yet as the protesters transition this week from disrupting transit to pleading with policymakers, new questions have emerged: How quickly can the UK get to net-zero emissions? And will Extinction Rebellion make a difference in setting that target?

Environmental activists from Extinction Rebellion march to Parliament Square on the ninth day of protest action, aiming to invite MPs to take part in people’s assembly on climate and ecological crisis as they return to the Commons after Easter break, on 23 April, 2019 in London, England.
Wiktor Szymanowicz/Barcroft Media/Getty Images

A brief history of Extinction Rebellion
Extinction Rebellion began in the minds of 15 organizers in April 2018 who were part of the UK activist group RisingUp!. The premise was that a more rebellious resistance was needed against “business as usual” and that governments needed to be pressured more to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero.
Extinction Rebellion, also known as XR, officially launched in October, a few weeks after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a massive report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Its key message, which reverberated around the world, was that humanity still has a shot at limiting warming to 1.5°C, and thereby avoiding further catastrophe in the form of disease, famine, water scarcity, and sea-level rise. But time is running out — we may have as little as 11 years left to hit that target, and we are way off track.
The movement also burst onto the scene with the explicit support of the leftist Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who wrote on October 18 that “a people’s rebellion is the only way to fight climate breakdown.”
The movement introduced its “Declaration of Rebellion” at London’s Parliament Square October 31, with the goal of “peaceful civil disobedience, traffic disruption, and symbolic criminal actions” highlighting the British government’s inaction on the climate emergency.

A man holds a placard with a dinosaur drawn on it during a protest about climate change in the middle of Oxford Circus on April 15, 2019, in London, United Kingdom. Extinction Rebellion has blocked five central London landmarks in protest against government inaction on climate change.
Jonathan Perugia/In Pictures/Getty Images

In November, XR shut down several streets in London and targeted government buildings with acts of mass civil disobedience. These, according to XR, would be “minor inconveniences when compared to the potential extinction we are facing.”
XR does not feature any individual leaders on its website. Rather, it describes itself as “a movement that is participatory, decentralized, and inclusive.” Its mission is to get 3.5 percent of the population involved in changing the system — using ideas such as “momentum-driven organizing.” Spinoff groups have now formed in dozens of countries, including the US.
On April 15, XR began a fresh round of actions to shut down London, some of which extended for 10 days. They took a large pink boat emblazoned with the words “Tell The Truth” to Oxford Circus, staged a “die-in” at the Natural History Museum to bring attention to the mass die-off of species, barricaded roads, locked and glued themselves to the Waterloo Bridge, climbed on top of trains, and sat in trees in Parliament Square. Actress Emma Thompson appeared at the Oxford Circus event on Friday.
As of Friday, more than 1,000 people had been arrested in the protests, most of them for violating orders about where protests are permitted.
While they did not completely shut down the city of 8.1 million, they did cause considerable disruption, prompting the irritated mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, to tweet on Sunday that the protests had become “counter-productive” and that the protestors should “let London return to business as usual.”

Climate experts took this as an opportunity to point out that “business as usual” in the context of climate change means utterly catastrophic global warming.

Former London Mayor Boris Johnson, who’s now a member of Parliament, also scolded the protesters and encouraged them to instead blame China for its greenhouse gas emissions. “Surely this is the time for the protesters to take their pink boat to Tiananmen Square, and lecture them in the way they have been lecturing us,” he wrote in the Telegraph. (China does contribute a large and growing share of global emissions — which must be slowed down and reversed — but most of the warming we’re experiencing now is due to the past emissions of wealthier countries like the UK and US.)
Yet not all Londoners were unhappy with the disruption, and many tweeted about how much they enjoyed the opportunity to participate.

Extinction Rebellion protesters in London have three key demands
The protestors want three things from the UK government:

For climate change to be treated as an emergency
A commitment to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2025
The creation of a citizen assembly for climate action

“We don’t want to be doom and gloom, but we also think it’s really, really important to use emergency messaging,” said XR’s Byrne. “One of the major problems that we have is that so many people are not aware of the crisis we’re in and we want the government to be talking about it.”
While the UK government is already mired in Brexit negotiations that have continued to drag on, protestors argue that climate change poses an even bigger threat to the long-term health and security of the country and deserves the same, if not more, political attention.

Climate change activists in red costume protest during the ongoing Extinction Rebellion climate change demonstration, near the Houses of Parliament in central London on April 23, 2019.
Isabel Infantes/AFP/Getty Images

As for the citizen assembly, campaigners say that this is a way to address the inherent inequities of climate change — that the people who contributed the least stand to suffer the most — and to bring more solutions to bear.
It’s also a way to make sure everyone is included in a decision-making process that could ripple throughout all of society. “We don’t think the government is capable of sorting this out themselves,” Byrne said. “We need expert knowledge on this, we need everybody to have a say in how we move forward.”

Is net-zero emissions by 2025 a reasonable goal?
XR’s demand for the UK to commit to net-zero emissions by 2025 comes at an interesting moment. The UK is already committed to 80 percent reductions by 2050, and as Vox’s David Roberts has reported, that’s been going pretty well so far, as coal has declined dramatically.
But the hardest work lies ahead: the country now must tackle “emissions from aviation, agriculture, biomass, and above all transportation, which in the UK (as in the US) is now the largest source of emissions.” Oh, and gas boilers; the UK has a lot of those.
As the Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg noted in her Monday speech, another obstacle to net-zero emissions by 2025 is that the UK is still developing new fossil fuels.
“The UK’s active current support of new exploitation of fossil fuels — for example, the UK shale gas fracking industry, the expansion of its North Sea oil and gas fields, the expansion of airports as well as the planning permission for a brand new coal mine — is beyond absurd,” she said.
On May 2, the Committee on Climate Change, an independent body tasked with advising the UK government on emissions targets, will deliver a long-awaited report on how and when the country can reach net-zero emissions. (The CCC declined to comment for this story.) The CCC is expected to propose 2050 as the net-zero target. “2050 is do-able and desirable and would have an insignificant overall cost to the economy,” Lord Turner, chair of the Energy Transitions Commission, told the Observer.
But UK politics seems to be shifting in favor of tougher climate targets. Leaders from the Labour party came out in support of XR on Tuesday, and organizers are hoping for meetings with environment secretary Michael Gove and energy minister Claire Perry next week.
As Dawn Foster writes in Jacobin, “Whereas [former Prime Minister Tony] Blair’s government would have clamped down hard on the protestors and [former Labour Party leader] Ed Miliband’s Labour would have condemned, or at least refused to support, the protestors, Labour now see the protests as an opportunity to nail the Conservatives for ignoring climate change and the environment.”
But some in the UK government have already dismissed the XR demand, claiming that net zero by 2025 is politically impossible. “Yes, you could decarbonize Britain by 2025 but the cost of implementing such vast changes at that speed would be massive and hugely unpopular,” Turner told the Observer.
Nonetheless, in this moment of crisis, young leaders will keep reminding us of how resourceful humans can be in the face of a challenge. “Sometimes we just simply have to find a way. The moment we decide to fulfill something, we can do anything,” Thunberg said. “And I’m sure that the moment we start behaving as if we were in an emergency, we can avoid climate and ecological catastrophe. Humans are very adaptable: We can still fix this.”
Can the UK fix it to the tune of net-zero emissions by 2025? Why not try?

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28/04/2019

Ocean Waves And Winds Are Getting Higher And Stronger

University of Melbourne - Professor Ian Young | Dr Agustinus Ribal

Using billions of satellite measurements, new research shows ocean waves and the winds that generate them have been increasing for the last 30 years

Getty Images

During extreme storms, ocean waves can be more than 20 metres high, or as tall as a five-storey building.
More than being just a product of our weather systems, waves are critical for ocean shipping, the stability of beaches, coastal inundation or flooding and determining the design of coastal and offshore structures.

Extreme wave conditions are increasing around the world. Picture: Getty Images

But our new research, published in Science, shows that these waves, and the winds that generate them, are increasing in magnitude and have been doing so for the last 30 years.
These new measurements show that global average wave conditions are increasing but, more importantly, extreme wave conditions are increasing even more rapidly with the largest increases occurring in the Southern Ocean.
We found that extreme winds in the Southern Ocean have increased by approximately 1.5 metres per second or 8 per cent over the last 30 years. Similarly, extreme waves in this same region have increased by 30 centimetres or 5 per cent. Generally, winds are increasing at a faster rate than the waves.
In addition to the increases in the Southern Ocean, extreme winds have also increased in the equatorial Pacific and Atlantic, and the North Atlantic by approximately 0.6 metres per second over the 30 year period.
These changes in ocean wind and wave climates were determined by creating and analysing a database of satellite measurements of wind speed and wave height.
We used data from a total of 31 satellites that were in orbit between 1985 and 2018. For more than thirty years, these satellites made approximately 4 billion measurements of wind speed and wave height.

Global trends in extreme (90th percentile) wind speed (top) and wave height (bottom) over the period 1985-2018. Areas which a red indicate increasing values, whereas blue indicates decreases. Picture: Supplied

Although the data set is huge, to be useful all the satellites needed to be very precisely calibrated. This was done by comparing the satellite measurements with more than 80 ocean buoys deployed around the world. This is the largest and most detailed database of its type ever compiled.
Importantly, within the combined database, there are three different forms of satellites – altimeters, radiometers and scatterometers. They used different methods to measure ocean waves, so combining them provides an even more robust data set.
The increases in extreme wave height are less uniform than the winds. In addition to increases in the Southern Ocean, the heights of extreme waves are also increasing in the North Atlantic. The rate of increase in wind speed and wave height is shown in the graphs above.
Although increases of 5 per cent for waves and 8 per cent for winds may not seem like much, if sustained into the future such changes to our climate will have major ramifications. The potential impacts of climate induced sea level rises are well known. What most people don’t understand is that the actual flooding events are caused by storm surges and breaking waves associated with storms.
The increased sea level just makes these wind and wave events more serious and more frequent. Increases in wave height and other properties such as wave direction will further increase the probability of coastal flooding. Changes like these will also cause enhanced coastal erosion, putting at risk coastal settlements and infrastructure.

Changes in the Southern Ocean can have impacts that are felt around the world. Picture: Getty Images

We still don’t know if the historical increases will be sustained into the future. One of the important uses of the extensive satellite database will be to calibrate and validate the next generation of global climate models which are now including ocean wave predictions. Early results from such models yield similar results to the historical record and particularly point to changes in the Southern Ocean.
Changes in the Southern Ocean are important, as this is the origin for swell that dominates the wave climate of the South Pacific, South Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and determines the stability of beaches for much of the Southern Hemisphere.
Changes in the Southern Ocean can have impacts that are felt around the world, with storm waves increasing coastal erosion, and putting costal settlements and infrastructure at risk.
International research teams including the University of Melbourne, are now working to develop the next generation of global climate models to project changes in winds and waves over the next 100 years.
We need a better understanding of how much of this change is due to long-term climate change, and how much is due to multi-decadal fluctuations, or cycles.

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Australia’s Election Is A Chance To Regain Our Leadership On Climate Change

Washington Post - Richard Glover

Students protested in March against a coal mine near the Great Barrier Reef and the inadequate progress to address climate change in Sydney. (Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty Images)

Back in February 2017, Scott Morrison, now the prime minister of Australia, brought a lump of coal to Parliament. He waved it around.
“This is coal,” Morrison told his fellow legislators. “Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared.”
Morrison went on to mock the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, over his party’s enthusiasm for renewable energy. “If Bill Shorten becomes the prime minister,” Morrison said, “all the lights will go off around the country.”
Such sentiments may have won votes two years ago, but they seem less sure-fire today. Morrison’s government is facing an election on May 18 and climate change is a key issue among voters.
In a recent survey, 23 percent of respondents cited the environment as one of their key concerns, sharply up from the 14 percent recorded in 2016, at the time of the last election. The latest polls predict the coalition government’s defeat, with the Labor Party heading for a clear victory.
Young voters, who have registered in record numbers, are particularly passionate about the issue, with 39 percent of respondents under that age of 35 now rating the environment as their No. 1 concern.
Why the shift? Australia is the middle of a particularly savage drought. This past January was the nation’s hottest on record, and large swaths of the country received a fifth of their normal rainfall. There were wildfires in Tasmania and floods in Queensland. Temperatures in March also broke records.
Along parts of the iconic Darling River, the stagnant water turned toxic over summer. Several million fish died and in December and January, their bloated bodies floating to the surface. In one video, two distressed locals each cradled a huge, dead Murray Cod, one declaring some of the dead fish to be 100 years old. An expert panel from the Australian Academy of Science disagreed with that age assessment, yet still assessed the fish as being up to 25 years old — meaning they had endured, and survived, many previous dry spells.
This drought, in other words, was different.
Adding to the change in mood is a growing cynicism about government fear-mongering over renewables. For some years, Morrison’s side has sounded shrill when discussing the cost of a low-carbon economy.
Barnaby Joyce, a significant figure in the governing coalition, at one point predicted a tax on carbon would make a single cow or sheep cost as much as a house. In 2011, Tony Abbott, who later became prime minister, declared the science around climate change was “absolute crap” and said a carbon price would wipe large industrial towns such as Whyalla “off the map.”
Such predictions have moderated over time, yet the government’s wariness about carbon-reduction has continued.
Just this month, a massive new coal mine has been approved for Queensland, despite its potential impact on Australia’s most significant natural wonder: the already damaged Great Barrier Reef.
More bizarrely, in terms of a pro-business government, there were suggestions that a coal-fired power plant be forcibly acquired from its private owners — just to keep it open. The private company, AGL, resisted, citing business reasons for its desire to shift to renewables.
The Labor Party also faces criticism. It has failed in the past to follow through on its climate change commitments. This time around, some point to Labor’s unwillingness to predict the cost of its carbon-abatement plans.
The government, meanwhile, claims to be on track to meet the country’s carbon-reduction targets. Its leadership — whatever the arguments over policy — now accepts the science of anthropogenic climate change.
And yet some still argue that Australia, because of its small population, has a negligible impact on global warning. To me, this is the worst argument for doing nothing.
It’s true that Australia was responsible for just 1.1 percent of global emissions in 2016, ranking Australia No. 16 among the most polluting countries in the world. And yet, per capita, we’re among the worst.
More to the point, as I’ve argued before, it’s pathetic and absurd to say small countries have no role in solving big problems.
Australia could have adopted the same “little us” argument during World War II. Who needs the Australians when such valiant work was being done by others — the Brits, the Russians, the Americans, the Canadians? It’s true, I suppose, that the Allies would have won without the Australians — the nearly 1 million of our people who served; the 27,073 who were killed in action.
But how is that an argument for not doing your bit?
The unstated thought: Important battles should be left to others. Smaller nations can stand on the sidelines and freeload.
Australia is more at risk from climate change than almost any other country in the developed world. It’s taken us a while, but — with this election — many Australians are signaling a desire to put their shoulder to the wheel.

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