14/01/2019

An Ocean Of Evidence On Warming Is Our Cue To Take Action - Now

Fairfax - John Church

John Church is a professor at the Climate Change Research Centre, University of NSW, and the first Australian to receive the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge in climate change award, for his work on rising sea levels.
Over 90 per cent of the heat trapped in the climate system by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations from our burning of fossil fuels is stored in the oceans. With much less variability than surface temperatures, ocean warming is one of the most important indicators of the ongoing pace of climate change.
Two new studies published last week confirm the world’s oceans are warming. The first,
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, shows that ocean warming has accelerated since 1870. The second, a perspective published in the prestigious iournal Science, reports studies that indicate the rate of ocean warming over recent decades is 10 per cent or more greater than the studies considered in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment published in 2013, and that the rate has increased since 1991.
Broken sea ice emerges from under the hull of a Finnish icebreaker as it traverses the Arctic's Northwest Passage.
Credit: AP
The updated observations are in agreement with the results of climate model simulations of the impacts of our continuing release of greenhouse gases. These models show the ocean will continue to warm through the 21st century and beyond.
Greenhouse gases have a long life time in the atmosphere. Even if carbon dioxide emissions were to cease completely, atmospheric concentrations would only decrease slowly over thousands of years unless we discover a way to artificially remove them from the atmosphere.As a direct consequence, surface temperatures would remain elevated. As result of the oceans’ ability to store heat, they will continue to warm for centuries.
Decisions we make now about greenhouse gas emissions have long-term consequences for the world and Australia’s climate and sea level, and of course for the natural environment and our modern society.
Continued greenhouse gas emissions at a business-as-usual rate would result in the ocean warming accelerating through the 21st century, and a contribution to sea-level rise of about 30cm from ocean thermal expansion alone by 2100. The warmer ocean would be accompanied by warmer surface temperatures, increased frequency of climate extremes, and increased intensity of extreme rainfall events and hurricanes, with major disruptions to society.
The ice sheets are even more important for long-term sea-level change. Unabated emissions this century would commit the world to metres of sea-level rise over coming centuries. We would likely cross the threshold, well before 2100, leading to an accelerating melting of the Greenland ice sheet and a sea level rise of up to about seven metres. An acceleration of the Greenland contribution to sea level rise has already been observed.
For Antarctica, a warming ocean would lead to the decay of ice shelves and an accelerating flow of ice into the ocean, as revealed by recent observations of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The rate of sea level contribution from Antarctica is more uncertain but could equal or exceed the contribution from thermal expansion by 2100, and could be metres over coming centuries.
Global average temperature is already about 1C above pre-industrial levels and we have already seen an increased frequency of coastal flooding events. Unabated emissions would see permanent inundation and a dramatic increase in the frequency of coastal flooding events, disrupting the lives of tens to hundreds of millions of people.
Urgent, significant and sustained mitigation of our greenhouse gas emissions are required if we are to meet the Paris targets of “limiting global average temperatures to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels”, and thus significantly reduce the impacts of climate change. Current mitigation “promises” are not sufficient to meet these goals, and planned mitigation is even further away. Every day we delay action makes the Paris targets more difficult to achieve.
The long time scales of the ocean means we will have to adapt to climate and sea level change resulting from past emissions. However, further sea level rises and other changes in our climate can be greatly reduced, but not eliminated, by reaching the Paris goals.
We should remember that sea levels were six to nine metres above current levels at a global average temperature about 1C above pre-industrial values.
Current Australian government figures do not indicate Australia is on track to meet our committed greenhouse gas emission mitigation target of 26 to 28 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030 “in a canter”. Meeting this target will require the urgent development of an effective Australian climate policy.
Perhaps more importantly, this target is completely inadequate. To make a proportionate commitment to meeting the Paris targets, Australia needs to ratchet up our targets, as expected by the Paris agreement, and to urgently develop realistic plans to meet these targets.
Actions we take now will affect the lives of our children and grandchildren and that of future generations. We know what is required for significant mitigation and we have the knowledge and technologies to do it. What we require urgently is the will to do it.

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How The Fossil Fuel Industry Got The Media To Think Climate Change Was Debatable

Washington Post - Amy Westervelt

A brown-coal-fired power plant in Bergheim, Germany. (Sascha Steinbach/EPA-EFE/REX)
Late last year, the Trump administration released the latest national climate assessment on Black Friday in what many assumed was an attempt to bury the document. If that was the plan, it backfired, and the assessment wound up earning more coverage than it probably would have otherwise. But much of that coverage perpetuated a decades-old practice, one that has been weaponized by the fossil fuel industry: false equivalence.
Although various business interests began pushing back against environmental action in general in the early 1970s as part of the conservative “war of ideas” launched in response to the social movements of the 1960s, when global warming first broke into the public sphere, it was a bipartisan issue and remained so for years. On the campaign trail in 1988, George H.W. Bush identified as an environmentalist and called for action on global warming, framing it as a technological challenge that American innovation could address. But fossil fuel interests were shifting as the industry and its allies began to push back against empirical evidence of climate change, taking many conservatives along with them.
Documents uncovered by journalists and activists over the past decade lay out a clear strategy: First, target media outlets to get them to report more on the “uncertainties” in climate science, and position industry-backed contrarian scientists as expert sources for media. Second, target conservatives with the message that climate change is a liberal hoax, and paint anyone who takes the issue seriously as “out of touch with reality.” In the 1990s, oil companies, fossil fuel industry trade groups and their respective PR firms began positioning contrarian scientists such as Willie Soon, William Happer and David Legates as experts whose opinions on climate change should be considered equal and opposite to that of climate scientists. The Heartland Institute, which hosts an annual International Conference on Climate Change known as the leading climate skeptics conference, for example, routinely calls out media outlets (including The Washington Post) for showing “bias” in covering climate change when they either decline to quote a skeptic or question a skeptic’s credibility.
Data on how effective this strategy has been is hard to come by, but anecdotal evidence of its success abounds. In the early 1990s, polls showed that about 80 percent of Americans were aware of climate change and accepted that something must be done about it, an opinion that crossed party lines. By 2008, Gallup found a marked partisan divide on climate change. By 2010, the American public’s belief in climate change hit an all-time low of 48 percent, despite the fact that those 20 years saw increased research, improved climate models and several climate change predictions coming true.
By demanding “balance,” the industry transformed climate change into a partisan issue. We know that was a deliberate strategy because various internal documents from ExxonMobil, Shell, the American Petroleum Institute and a handful of now-defunct fossil fuel industry groups reveal not only the industry’s strategy to target media with this message and these experts, but also its own preemptive debunking of the very theories it went on to support.
It need not have been such a successful strategy: If news purveyors really wanted to be evenhanded on coverage of climate change, they could certainly weave in the insights of more conservative scientists — those whose predictions err on the sunnier side of apocalypse. Instead, many took the industry’s bait, routinely inserting denialist claims into stories about climate science in the interest of providing balance: In an analysis of 636 articles covering climate change that appeared in “prestige U.S. outlets” from 1988 to 2002, researchers from the University of California at Santa Cruz and American University found that 52.65 percent presented climate science and contrarian theories as equal. The practice continued into the mid-2000s. As recently as 2007, PBS NewsHour invited well-known (and widely debunked) former weatherman Anthony Watts on to counterbalance Richard Muller, a former Koch-funded skeptic who had shifted his view.
By about 2008, most mainstream print outlets had moved past the notion that “balance” means including climate contrarians in coverage of climate science. These outlets do still trip up occasionally, though. In 2017, ProPublica published a remarkably uncritical Q&A with Happer, for example, describing him as “brilliant and controversial,” and characterizing his view that global warming is good for the planet as merely “unusual.” That same year, the New York Times was roundly criticized for hiring climate contrarian Bret Stephens as a regular editorial columnist (and his first column didn’t help).
While print outlets aren’t perfect, TV news has lagged further behind on climate, often presenting climate contrarians as an equal and opposite balance to climate scientists. In coverage of the national climate assessment, for example, multiple cable news shows featured both climate scientists and climate deniers, as though the two are simply opposite sides of a debate. “Meet the Press,” “Anderson Cooper 360” and “State of the Union” all brought on climate deniers to provide balance to their shows. Republican politicians made the cable news rounds, too, spouting familiar tall tales about climate change being normal and cyclical or sun spots and volcanoes being the real culprits. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) repeated the “the climate always changes” story on CNN, while Rick Santorum, informal White House adviser Stephen Moore and British politician Nigel Farage pushed the “climate scientists getting rich” narrative.
Though some outlets have moved to extricate deniers from the conversation, too many television news programs continue to bring on “contrarian” experts, giving a platform to tired lies. I say “lies” because fossil fuel industry scientists debunked these theories themselves decades ago, so they are knowingly perpetuating falsehoods. In a “global warming primer” prepared in the 1990s by the Global Climate Coalition, a since-disbanded consortium of fossil fuel producers, utilities, manufacturers, and other U.S. business interests (including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce), a Mobil scientist debunked all of the prevailing contrarian theories of the day on climate change. That part of the primer was left unprinted, of course, and oil companies went on to fund scientists promoting those very theories — the same ones that industry spokesmen and conservative politicians spout today.
In addition to propping up experts and leaning on media to use them as sources, oil companies have spent millions on advertising and advertorials over the years. Which seems innocuous — most companies advertise — but oil companies don’t sell a consumer product so much as a commodity. Most people aren’t loyal to a particular brand of gas; they buy whatever is most convenient or cheapest. So, when oil companies take out ads, it’s with the intention of shifting the opinions of the voting public, policymakers, and the media.
In an exhaustive survey of ExxonMobil’s advertorials from 1977 to 2014, science historian Naomi Oreskes and researcher Geoffrey Supran found that these pieces often took the form of “op-ads” that look and read a lot like op-eds but are paid for by an advertiser. Some simply presented positive stories about the company (heavily focused on their investments in algal biofuels, for example), but others argued for more relaxed policies on offshore drilling or a “common sense” approach to climate change regulation. The researchers found that “83 percent of peer-reviewed papers and 80 percent of internal documents acknowledge that climate change is real and human-caused, yet only 12% of advertorials do so, with 81 percent instead expressing doubt.”
A 1981 internal Mobil memo discovered by the Climate Investigations Center is an evaluation of the first decade of Mobil’s advertorial program, and it makes the company’s goals clear: “Not only is the company presenting its opinion to key opinion leaders, but it has been engaging in continuing debate with the New York Times itself. In fact, the paper has even changed to positions similar to Mobil’s on at least seven key energy issues.”
Granted, Mobil communications staff are giving themselves a lot of credit here, but whether they accomplished their goal is almost beside the point. This document shows the intention of these campaigns, and that’s something that should be taken seriously by any media outlet agreeing to run them, especially because many still do today. Campaigns that bring in big money at a time when the business of news is struggling are surely hard to turn down, but media outlets need to seriously consider the impact these campaigns have on their ability to inform the public, and work to mitigate that impact, above and beyond the usual “church and state” division between advertising and editorial. They could stop running these campaigns alongside climate reporting, do a better job of labeling campaigns, or refuse to run them altogether.
It’s well past time the media stopped allowing itself to be a tool in the fossil fuel industry’s information war. Oreskes likens the push for “balance” on climate change to journalists arguing over the final score of a baseball game. “If the Yankees beat the Red Sox 6-2, journalists would report that. They would not feel compelled to find someone to say actually the Red Sox won, or the score was 6-4,” she says.

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How 300 Years Of Urbanization And Farming Transformed The Planet

CityLab - David Montgomery

Three centuries ago, humans were intensely using just around 5 percent of the Earth’s land. Now, it’s almost half.
Source: ecotope.org (David H. Montgomery / CityLab)
Humans are transforming the Earth through our carbon emissions. Arctic sea ice is shrinking, seas are rising, and the past four years have been the hottest since record-keeping began. But long before the first cars or coal plants, we were reshaping the planet’s ecosystems through humbler but no less dramatic means: pastures and plows.
Environmental scientist Erle Ellis has studied the impact of humanity on the Earth for decades, with a recent focus on categorizing and mapping how humans use the land—not just now, but in the past. And his team’s results show some startling changes. Three centuries ago, humans were intensely using just around 5 percent of the planet, with nearly half the world’s land effectively wild. Today, more than half of Earth’s land is occupied by agriculture or human settlements.
“Climate change is only recently becoming relevant,” said Ellis, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “If it keeps going how it is, it will become the dominant shaper of ecology in the terrestrial realm, but right now the dominant shaper of ecology is land use.”
In contrast to the typical division of the world into ecological “biomes,” Ellis and his team at the Laboratory for Anthropogenic Landscape Ecology map what they call “anthromes,” or “anthropogenic biomes.” These show the intersection of ecology and human land use.
Using a range of sources, Ellis’s team mapped out that land use, dividing the planet into grids and categorizing each cell based on how many people lived there and how they impacted the land. The densest areas were cities and towns, followed by close-packed farming villages. Less populated areas were categorized by their dominant land use—crops, livestock pasture, or inhabited woodlands—while other areas were marked as largely uninhabited. (See image Land use, above.)
Even with only one snapshot per century, the animation makes some of the trends obvious. Large swaths of Russia and the United States become cropland over the 19th century, while livestock occupies increasing amounts of previously semi-wild land in Africa and Asia.
“Asia is pretty much the dominant transformed area, and transformed the earliest,” Ellis said. “Europe is also pretty dense ... The rest of the world has a different trajectory. Much slower, less dense.”
All of this is a mixture of estimates and approximations. One reason Ellis and his team only looked every hundred years and divided the world into cells that stretch for miles was to avoid giving a false impression of precision.
People ask Ellis, “‘What was my backyard like?’” he said. “Well, we don’t have any solid evidence … The further back in time you go, the more you have to consider [this], in a sense, educated guesswork.”
Even more recent data can have issues, based on political decisions that countries make about how to self-classify their land. Saudi Arabia, for example, reports “almost every part of their country as being rangeland” even though much of that arid land is seldom if ever grazed.

Humans shape even “seminatural” biomes
Significant portions of the world, both now and in the past, have been what Ellis’s team terms “seminatural.” These are areas—frequently forests—with low but real human habitation. This could reflect a large cell of the grid that has a farming village or two but mostly natural forests. But frequently, Ellis says, humans have taken a much bigger role in shaping seemingly natural wilderness than people think.
Take the “pristine myth”—the idea that the Americas before European colonization were dominated by pristine wilderness untouched by human hands. In fact, modern researchers believe that indigenous tribes had actively shaped their landscapes through agriculture and regular burning of American forests.
Because of this, the devastating spread of epidemics among indigenous populations after 1492 also had a huge impact on climate—and not just locally. Some scholars believe disease-ravaged peoples significantly cut back on their management of American forests, which meant far less carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere from fires and far more absorbed into newly grown forests. The combination could have played a significant role in the “Little Ice Age” that lowered global temperatures for several centuries between around 1500 and 1850 C.E.
This kind of active land management was done not just by sedentary populations, but by hunter-gatherers, too. This, Ellis says, is a shortcoming in the data.
“There’s no direct mapping of hunter-gatherers’ land use in these datasets. That’s something we’re trying to rectify now,” he said, noting that evidence suggests even non-agricultural people have major effects on the environment.
The data also shows the massive impact made by cities, the most dramatic way humans transform their environment. In 1700, a negligible portion of the Earth’s surface was covered by cities. Over the three centuries that followed, this boomed by around 40 times. Cities are still just half a percent of the planet’s land area, but they have had the most dramatic increase in impact of any of Ellis’s “anthromes.”
Source: ecotope.org (David H. Montgomery / CityLab)
Densely populated farming villages—which often have similar concentrations of people per square mile as American suburbs—are also big, especially in the developing world. (Ellis’s team don’t map any urban areas in the Americas or Australia before 1900, and never apply the “villages” category to those continents, because those areas didn’t have “histories of intensive subsistence agriculture.”)
Huge portions of India and China are occupied by these kind of villages. So, too, were the hinterlands around major European cities before improvements in transportation enabled produce to be brought from farther away. Paris, for example, used to be surrounded by suburban “market gardens” which, historians André Jardin and André-Jean Tudesq note, could produce five or six harvests per year and had a “virtual monopoly of the Parisian market” for food until the second half of the 19th century.

How cities drive land-use changes
That kind of intensive agriculture to feed a demanding urban market is part of the huge impact that cities have on the use of land even well outside their boundaries. Those thousands or millions of urban dwellers aren’t producing their own food, and thus need more food produced elsewhere in order to eat.
Ellis describes two different ways that cities impact far-away anthromes through their demands for food—one of them devastating to natural ecosystems, the other surprisingly beneficial.
The first sees new land being put under the plow, as societies try to produce more food for a growing population. This is often low-productivity agriculture, reflecting the marginal quality of the farmland: If it was good for farming, it would have been farmed already. But later, as populations grow, comes an “intensification” process as technology increases the yields on low-productivity farmland.
Agricultural expansion has a massive impact on natural biomes, and has for millennia. But the second process, intensification, has the potential to restore some of the natural biomes that humans previously plowed under.
“Dense cities actually have the potential to help areas recover, because dense populations in cities often are basically pulling people out of the rural areas where they’re farming low-productivity land,” Ellis said. The increased production on good land means the marginal farmland is no longer needed.
Author Charles Mann described this process taking place in New York’s Hudson River Valley in his 2018 book, The Wizard and the Prophet. In the late 19th century, this region was dominated by “hardscrabble farms and pastures ringed by stone walls.” Now many of those “hardscrabble farms” are gone. Six counties in the lower Hudson Valley had around 350,000 people and 573,000 acres of timberland in 1875; today those same counties have more than 1 million people but three times as much forest.
“Many New England states have as many trees as they had in the days of Paul Revere,” Mann writes. “Nor was this growth restricted to North America: Europe’s forest resources increased by about 40 percent from 1970 to 2015, a time in which its population grew from 462 million to 743 million.”
But while this intensification of agriculture is allowing the return of nature in parts of developed countries, the first phase—expansion—is still playing out in the developing world. Erle’s maps show the expansion of crops and livestock into areas like Africa’s Sahel and South America’s Amazon rainforest over the past century.
“Land transformation is the big story of biosphere transformation so far,” Ellis said. “If you’re trying to understand how we produced the ecology we have now, it’s the story of land-use transformation.”
Source: ecotope.org (David H. Montgomery / CityLab)
What’s next for Earth
So what will a future mapmaker show for the world’s land use in 2100? Ellis said he expects urbanization to continue, at least doubling the share of the planet’s land devoted to urban areas over the next century.
Similarly, he expects developed countries to see an intensification of agriculture that enables marginal land to be returned to the wild—a process already under way in newly developed countries like China. Poorer countries, on the other hand, may continue to convert marginal wild land into farmland.
“It’s only poor farmers without much investment that can make that work,” Ellis said. “When you’re investing large amounts of money in farm equipment and fertilizers, you don’t invest that in marginal land.”
Much depends, however, on political, economic, and technological changes that will unfold over the next 80 years. For example, Ellis said, the United States has recently seen “a huge shift from beef to chicken” in consumer demand. “That changes the kind of land that’s in demand, from grassland to production of maize and soy.”
Among the factors that could affect the future of Earth’s land use are political decisions in Brazil, where new President Jair Bolsonaro wants to open up more of the Amazon rainforest to agriculture, and technology, where a potential breakthrough in electrical generation such as fusion power could enable transformative changes such as vertical urban farming. Conservation efforts, or lack thereof, could also impact areas of intensive agriculture in developed countries.
“The future of the biosphere… depends partly on economics, partly on politics, but also partly on vision,” Ellis said. “It depends on what people’s values are.”

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Treaty On HFCs Aims To Curb Global Warming From Greenhouse Gases In Air Conditioning, Refrigeration

ABC - Ben Deacon

In many parts of Australia, air conditioners have gone from being a luxury to what many consider a necessity.
It's a trend that's being echoed around the world as billions of people in hot counties lift themselves out of poverty.
But the explosion in demand for the energy-intensive appliance is alarming climate change experts, who say we're heating the world up by cooling it down.
Alice Springs recently recorded more days over 45C in a single week than in the past 76 years.
Victoria MacLean, who runs the Bureau of Meteorology's weather station in Alice Springs, said the start of 2019 was unbearable, even by local standards.
"We had 11 days in a row recently of 40-degree-plus days. We had a 45.6 day. In fact we had another one like this as well and that did break the record for the Alice Springs airport," said the meteorologist.
During the heatwave, Alice Springs had more days over 45 degrees Celsius in a single week than the town has recorded in the past 76 years.
Like most people in the desert community, Ms MacLean coped by running her air conditioner flat out.
"We closed off the downstairs side of the house and we actually stayed down there, we slept down there a few times, just to stay cool.
"We've got two dogs; we had to keep them inside because they just couldn't handle it."
But she does worry about the environmental impact of air conditioning.
"It's kind of ironic that you'd been using the air conditioning, and we've got climate change going on, so we're trying to conserve energy, but then you have to use more of it."

Air conditioners' environmental impact
Air conditioners are a double whammy in terms of climate change.
They're the most energy-hungry appliance in the average home, which in Australia is mostly powered by fossil fuels, and the refrigerants inside air conditioners are potent greenhouse gases.
IEA chief economist Laszlo Varro speaking at the GHGT-14 conference in Melbourne.
Experts say demand for air conditioning is increasing so fast internationally that it will have a real impact on the earth's climate.
Laszlo Varro, chief economist for the International Energy Agency (IEA), told a recent conference of greenhouse gas scientists in Melbourne that Asia was experiencing an energy transformation unlike anything in history.
"The overwhelming majority of electricity-demand growth comes 10 years after you provide electricity to the village," Mr Varro said.
"You provide electricity to the village and then the kids go to school. Then they work in a factory and they buy a refrigerator and a television.
"This is when electricity demand explodes and the most important household appliance in this respect is air conditioning."
There are 3 billion people living in regions of the world where air conditioning is needed more than 300 days a year, and as the world's climate warms, that number is getting bigger and bigger.
The IEA estimates there could be an extra 4 billion air conditioners around the world by mid-century, which alone could push up the world's temperature by more than half a degree.
"We expect up to 4,000 terawatt hours, which is 10 times the Australian electricity system, [in] additional electricity demand, [which] can potentially emerge only from air conditioning," Mr Varro said.
"And this is coming in parts of the world where today coal is the dominant source of power generation."
Mr Varro said the investment wave into new coal capacity in Asia was so robust that about one-third of coal-fired power stations around the world were less than 10 years old.
"That's not so bad for an industry that's supposed to be dying."
Global cooperation on air conditioners and climate change
On January 1, while Alice Springs endured its heat wave, an international treaty quietly came into effect to limit the impact of refrigeration and air conditioning on the world's climate.
The Kigali Amendment follows the extraordinary success of the Montreal Protocol in banning ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs.
The new treaty commits signatories to phase down hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, the greenhouse gases found in almost all modern air conditioners.
In 2016, the former US Secretary of State John Kerry said Kigali was "likely the single most important step that we could take at this moment to limit the warming of our planet".
Patrick McInerney from the Environment Department (centre) co-chaired the negotiations for the Kigali Amendment.
Peter Brodribb, an internationally recognised expert in the environmental impacts of HFCs, said Australia played a key role in the negotiations.
"In fact the co-chair of the executive committee was an Australian, Patrick McInerney from the Department of the Environment. He was one of the main people that negotiated the agreement," he said.
The Kigali Amendment commits developed countries to reduce production and importation of HFCs by 85 per cent by 2036 and 80 to 85 per cent in developing countries by 2047.
In October 2017, Australia became the 10th of 66 countries to ratify the Kigali Amendment, and began its HFC phase-down on January 1, 2018.
The United States is still to ratify the amendment.
Kigali aims to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 72 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide between 2019 and 2050: the equivalent of well over one year's total global greenhouse gas emissions.
Mr Brodribb said Kigali meant more than just the banning of a group of potent greenhouse gases.
"By transitioning to new refrigerants, what this means is that companies have to do new designs, and with new designs they create products that are much more efficient," he said.
"They consume less electricity and once again, that will contribute less to global warming."

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