The Saturday Paper - Rick Morton
While Scott Morrison toured Trump’s America, the world’s top climate scientists fought it out over their latest warning of the coming disaster.
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| Prime Minister Scott Morrison and United States President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. |
In
the early hours of Tuesday morning, as Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg
addressed world leaders at a climate summit in New York, and Scott
Morrison toured a McDonald’s drive-through in Chicago, some of the
planet’s top climate scientists were locked in “tense” negotiations in
Monaco.
History tends to happen all at once, although its parts are by no means equal.
At the Grimaldi Forum, which hugs the water
in Monaco’s eastern beach quartier, more than 100 scientists from almost
40 countries met to debate the final wording of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on oceans and ice systems.
It asks a critical question: What happens to the Earth’s oceans,
glaciers, surface ice and permafrost – on which a latticework of
ecosystems depend – if humans fail to halt warming?
The director of the Australian National
University’s Climate Change Institute, Professor Mark Howden, was in the
room, going over the text word by word, line by line, into the early
morning.
“We have got a problem,” he tells
The Saturday Paper from Monaco. “Change is happening, it is happening quickly, and the implications are profound.”
That the report says as much is an
achievement. All governments and scientists involved in the process must
vet and ultimately approve the document before its release.
Diplomatically, Howden notes there were “different views and different
emphases” from various quarters.
“It was particularly true for some countries that have a vested interest in continuing to burn and sell fossil fuels,” he says.
These were the nations squarely in the sights of activist Greta Thunberg in New York.
“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood
with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones,” she told the
United Nations Climate Action Summit. “People are suffering. People are
dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing.
“We are in the beginning of a mass
extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of
eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
Although more strident, none of what she said was at odds with the IPCC’s expert report.
In 1170 pages, the report speaks with an urgency rarely seen in such documents. The word “unprecedented” is used 48 times.
It is “very likely”, for instance, that the
levels of Arctic Sea ice have been falling by almost 13 per cent each
decade, a rate scientists say has not been seen in the past 1000 years.
Meanwhile, between 2006 and 2015, the rate of global mean sea-level rise
hit about 3.6 millimetres each year. This is “unprecedented over the
last century” and more than double the rise seen between 1901 and 1990.
Each scenario covered in the report
represents its own clear and near-present threat. The finely linked
feedback loops across the world operate like a Rube Goldberg machine,
each change poised to nudge several others or trigger a cascading series
of catastrophes, which could fall beyond the scope of human
intervention.
In parts of the system, the report says, the
“acceleration of ice flow and retreat in Antarctica, which has the
potential to lead to sea-level rise of several metres within a few
centuries, is observed”.
“… These changes may be the onset of an irreversible ice sheet instability.”
Crucially, earlier reports did not expect these sea-level rises to happen this century.
In this instance, as with dramatic and
“widespread permafrost thaw”, which the report also predicts, the
complex interactions between this degradation and later collapse are
simply not known.
What scientists do understand, with some
confidence, is that somewhere between 1460 and 1600 gigatons of organic
carbon are stored within Arctic and boreal permafrost. This is almost
twice the amount of all the carbon in the atmosphere, which will be
released if this permafrost melts.
There will be tipping points.
As it stands, the global temperature is one
degree warmer than it was in pre-industrial times. But these averages
can have the unfortunate effect of masking the true scale of the
extremes that are built into the calculation.
“We are seeing really devastating impacts
right now at one degree of warming with regional variations of up to 10
degrees in places like northern Europe, which makes those places
actually uninhabitable for some people.”
“That one-degree average is across the entire
globe,” says Howden. “If you look only at the land area, that has gone
up to 1.5 degrees Celsius. So immediately you can see the usefulness of
relying on a worldwide figure.
“Look at the last ice age on this planet,
that featured average temperatures 5 to 6 degrees colder than they are
now. So now when we consider the scenarios of the future – of 3, 4 and 5
degrees – all of a sudden you are getting a feel for the scale of the
change at an earth systems level.”
Climate change and its language of averages
is a bell curve, which has been shifted along its axis by human
emissions, totally altering the normal distribution. While the middle
may not change appreciably, what was once an extreme becomes more
common. Spikes, previously unseen in the data, start to emerge.
According to the IPCC, once-in-a-century
events are projected to occur at least once a year by 2050, regardless
of any further progress the world makes in controlling carbon output.
It is already too late, even if humans manage
to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, to stop warm-water corals – such as
those that form the Great Barrier Reef – from moving into the “very high
risk” category with significant losses and local extinctions.
The report cites Tasmania as a case study,
noting a marine heatwave that stretched for 256 days from 2015 and into
2016. This coincided with drought, fires and floods in Tasmania. The
total damage bill was $US300 million.
Man-made climate change meant the duration of
that heatwave was 330 times more likely and its intensity almost seven
times more likely than it otherwise would have been.
This was the week into which Prime Minister
Scott Morrison flew on the Australian government’s new VIP jet, an
Airbus A330 his office has taken to calling “Shark One”, for a series of
events with United States President Donald Trump.
Australia was not invited to speak at the
climate summit in New York – along with Japan, Saudi Arabia and the US –
because only those nations with ambitious emissions reduction plans
were given the floor.
Morrison addressed the UN General Assembly on Thursday, after the climate summit, and said Australia is “doing our bit”.
“We are committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030,” he said.
“This is a credible, fair, responsible and achievable contribution to global climate change action.”
Morrison pointed out that Australia is
responsible for just 1.3 per cent of global emissions and the nation’s
coal exports make up 5.5 per cent of worldwide output. Of course, the
Morrison government wishes that figure were higher.
As the prime minister’s trip to the US
entered full swing, freedom of information documents released to the
Australian Conservation Foundation revealed the extent to which the
Australian government is pushing coal exports overseas.
The background briefs for Resources Minister
Matt Canavan’s August visit to Bangladesh, India and Singapore
highlighted the potential of coal exports to India growing even further
on the back of the nation’s investment in the Adani project in the
Galilee Basin. This, despite “sensitivities” concerning environmental
groups.
Ahead of Morrison’s trip to Vietnam, also in
August, a briefing notes: “We strongly recommend a focus on coal exports
to Vietnam as part of the Prime Minister’s planned visit.”
Speaking at the UN this week, Morrison
appeared to direct a specific comment at Thunberg, and her fellow young
climate activists.
“We should let our kids be kids, teenagers be teenagers,” he said.
Earlier, he cautioned against “needless anxiety”.
According to the world’s leading climate scientists, though, there is urgent need for alarm.
Professor Howden says the world is now “way outside the historical envelope” for intense variation in climate patterns.
The reality of climate change evolves in ways
that may not be immediately obvious. New systems are challenged by the
very issues they are meant to address.
Take the largest supercomputer in the
southern hemisphere, for instance. Data that underpins global climate
analysis for the IPCC – too big for any one nation to handle – is stored
on a network around the world. The Australasian contingent is held by
the Raijin installation at the National Computational Infrastructure
(NCI) facility located on the Australian National University campus in
Canberra.
Changes to the atmosphere will mean the
state-of-the-art evaporative cooling system – installed to keep this
data from melting down – “will become problematic sooner” on back-up
tape drives. Essentially, atmospheric changes mean the system could
fail.
Researchers have raised the alarm with
The Saturday Paper
that there is no true offsite back-up of this data, nor any of the
Bureau of Meteorology archives, Landsat images and other globally and
nationally significant collections.
Despite considerable federal government funding, none of this has been designated critical infrastructure.
Located just a kilometre to the east of Black
Mountain’s lowest reaches, the centre is on the edge of a
bushfire-prone zone, which stops just before the ANU campus. The ACT
government says these are reviewed frequently. Put bluntly though, the
data that records climate change could be destroyed by climate change.
In 2003, a deadly firestorm ripped through
the ACT, the worst in the territory’s history, killing four and razing
almost 500 houses along Canberra’s fringe.
In the aftermath, an inquiry was asked to
account for what was and what might have been. Its report noted perhaps
the only thing that stopped the fires ripping across Black Mountain and
into central Canberra was a blaze that had gutted large swaths of
Stromlo Forest Park on Christmas Day two years earlier, burning right up
to the lawns of the Australian Mint.
A spokesman for the NCI told
The Saturday Paper
that tape back-ups are held on two sites on the same campus with a
third, much smaller site in a secret location, also in Canberra.
“For data on disk we have no other copy,”
they said, adding that the NCI attempts to make the system as robust as
possible. “But ultimately it is a single copy of data.”
Compare this with the data centres for the
online retailer Amazon, which in Australia are located on three
different flood plains with three different power supplies, among other
fail-safes.
“Unfortunately, Australian research is not funded at the same levels as Amazon data centres,” the NCI spokesman said.
“A ‘simple’ replication of the system to
another location would entail not only just the $70 million [currently
being spent on the NCI’s upgrade] but also the associated data and cloud
infrastructures, and would run to at least $100 million.”
The researchers note a “significant portion”
of Australian research into earth systems and environmental issues
simply could not be done without the NCI.
The implications of this research are broad.
Fiona Armstrong, executive director of the
Climate and Health Alliance, says climate change is already affecting
the health of hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
Take the Townsville floods earlier this year.
Melioidosis, a deadly disease borne from bacteria that gets stirred up
in floodwater, killed one person and left about eight in intensive care.
Severe ramping at Townsville Hospital left many others in need of care
that just wasn’t available in the weeks after the heatwave last summer.
This led to a war of words between Queensland politicians, with the
opposition claiming the state had not invested in hospital services. The
Palaszczuk government rebuked this, saying it was an unprecedented
event.
“That’s how climate change works. Everything about it is unpredictable and unprecedented,” Armstrong says.
“We are seeing really devastating impacts
right now at one degree of warming with regional variations of up to 10
degrees in places like northern Europe, which makes those places
actually uninhabitable for some people.
“There appears to be a long tail for heatwave
impacts, particularly for people with chronic conditions who can suffer
adverse health effects for some weeks after the main event.”
Meanwhile, faced with rising risk of climate
disaster, insurance companies have become increasingly averse to
covering homes in potentially hazardous regions of Australia.
Following the 2011 floods in Roma and
Emerald, Suncorp stopped writing new policies for any property in those
areas until a new flood levee was built.
Submissions released this week from the
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s inquiry into insurance
in northern Australia reveal how serious insurance affordability has
become, owing almost entirely to a changing climate.
“Suncorp understands in north Queensland
alone there could be approximately 100,000 homes that may not meet
current wind-load codes for roofs and other building features,” the
insurance firm says in its submission to the inquiry.
“These homes remain vulnerable to suffering major damage in the next cyclone and as an insurer we must price for this risk.”
According to Suncorp, and almost all of the
other insurers, it is simply not enough to provide government-backed
subsidies to homeowners, as these would need to remain in place forever.
In its submission, Suncorp noted one home in
the US state of Texas, which has been flooded and rebuilt 40 times using
more than $US1 million in government aid. The house itself is worth
only $72,400.
“There is a very real risk that, without
appropriate planning and infrastructure, regions which are vulnerable to
severe weather events, may become ‘uninsurable’,” the Insurance
Australia Group says in its submission.
“Our changing climate is likely to increase
hazard exposure, which will necessarily drive an increase in insurance
premiums,” the Insurance Council of Australia says.
In its report on the costs of inaction
earlier this year, the Climate Council found that one in 19 property
owners will not be able to afford insurance by the end of the next
decade.
As it stands, many homes are insured for
so-called one-in-100-year events, but that will need to change to cover
disasters that were previously unthinkable. Insurers must now look to
one-in-500-year events and even one-in-a-thousand year disasters.
The insurance industry is built on anxiety. In this scenario, it is entirely necessary.
On their own, these are crises. The future will require all nations to deal with them at the same time, and a litany of others.
Faced with the monumental, Australia is
committed to the incremental: creating a “circular plastics economy” and
tackling overfishing, as Morrison spruiked at the UN, while ignoring
the threat of rising emissions.
If the world follows our lead, the planet will experience 3 to 4 degrees of warming – a catastrophe in every sense of the word.
Professor Howden says there is hope, however, and that another kind of tipping point has been reached.
“The combination of climate extreme after
climate extreme right across the globe…” he says. “With the climate
strikes, kids, Greta and industry getting behind this, as well as the
nation’s regulators, change is coming.”
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