Lethal Heating: 02/24/19

24/02/2019

Climate Change-Related Litigation Was Once Seen As A Joke, But It Could Soon Become Business Reality

ABC - Nassim Khadem

Climate change is a financial risk companies are starting to prepare for. (Australian Antarctic Division)

Australian company directors have
started caring about climate change

Australian company directors nominate climate change as the number one issue they want the government to address in the long-term, in a survey of more than 1,200 business leaders.

CEOs of Australia's largest companies are hearing the message and realising that on issues from climate change to gender diversity the need to act is not just a moral one.
On Wednesday, Australia's largest coal miner, Glencore, joined a growing list of global companies that have succumbed to shareholder pressure to act on climate change.
The Swiss-based resources giant, headed by billionaire Ivan Glasenberg, recognised there is a business case for freezing its global coal production at current levels.
It said it would instead shift focus to producing commodities including copper, cobalt, nickel, vanadium and zinc.
The announcement was made after the company held talks with the Climate Action 100+ initiative, whose global members collectively manage more than $US32 trillion in assets.The group includes a number of major Australian superannuation funds such as AMP Capital, AustralianSuper, Cbus, IFM Investors, QSuper and BT Financial Group.
It's shown it has sway when it comes to pressuring companies to implement changes aimed at achieving the goals of the Paris climate agreement.
In recent months the group has worked with other companies, including Shell, BP and Maersk, and convinced them to take steps that show they are serious about meeting the Paris climate agreement goals.
Emma Herd, chief executive of the Investor Group on Climate Change and member of the global Steering Committee for the Climate Action 100+, said the change in sentiment was because of greater recognition by CEOs that climate change is not just an ethical issue.
"This is about financial risk, as well a company's social licence to operate," she said.
"Super funds were first onto the issue because they take a 30-year investment horizon. These are very big mainstream funds asking very big mainstream companies to have a business plan on climate change."

Banks increase exposure to fossil fuels

Australia's major banks have been getting back into fossil fuels over the past year, casting doubt on their seriousness in tackling climate change through their investments.

Climate change-related litigation on the rise
Climate change-related litigation is no longer a joke.
Regulators are weighing in as the prospect of lawsuits becomes more realistic.In a speech in June, ASIC Commissioner John Price said directors "would do well" to carefully consider a 2016 legal opinion by Noel Hutley SC and Sebastien Hartford-Davis that they could face lawsuits for failing to consider risks related to climate change.
Meanwhile, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) has been pushing ASX200 companies to run "stress tests" on potential climate risk scenarios.
In November, 2017 APRA executive Geoff Summerhayes warned that "should extreme weather events become more frequent and intense as scientists predict", there could be "adverse economic impacts" that threaten financial system stability.
That same year, Melbourne law practice Environmental Justice Australia had launched a case arguing the Commonwealth Bank had breached corporate law by not disclosing climate change as a major or material risk in its annual report.
The case was dropped when the bank subsequently disclosed climate risk in its annual report.
In July last year Industry super fund REST — the default industry super fund for many retail workers — faced a federal court legal battle over claims it breached its trustee duties by failing to properly factor climate change-related risks into its investment decisions.
Mark McVeigh, a 23-year-old ecology graduate, took on the legal case against the super fund, accusing it of breaching superannuation law by failing to act in his best interests.
Then in October, the New York Attorney-General's office sued ExxonMobil, accusing the fossil fuel giant of defrauding investors by misleading them about the financial risks the company faced from climate change regulations.
Oil giant Shell was first threatened with a lawsuit last year by the Dutch branch of Friends of the Earth. Greenpeace, ActionAid and other groups have now joined in, accusing Shell of "deliberately obstructing" efforts to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius.
They have threatened they will move to a court summons on April 5 if Shell does not change its business model to comply with the Paris climate accord.
A study released on Monday by environmental campaign group Market Forces found just 14 per cent of Australia's top 100 companies have disclosed detailed scenario analysis demonstrating their viability in a 2-degree policy pathway.
As investors, regulators and litigators continue to exert pressure, it's only a matter of time before companies act.

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A Terrifying Look At The Consequences Of Climate Change

The Economist

But David Wallace-Wells is optimistic about humans’ ability to reverse some of the damage

CLIMATE CHANGE is a devilish problem for humanity: at once urgent and slow-moving, immediate and distant, real and abstract. It is a conundrum for writers, too.
Relegating it to a human-interest story—a Bangladeshi displaced by rising sea levels, say—downplays its civilisation-wide significance; sticking to scary forecasts—200m climate refugees by 2050, the UN warns—diminishes its visceral relevance.
That may be why, for all its existential gravity, the subject has yet to produce a great work of literature. It lends itself instead to dystopian science-fiction, or to compendiums of scary science facts, sometimes derided as “climate porn”.
The latest in that genre, “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells, is unabashedly pornographic. It is also riveting.
Mr Wallace-Wells, an editor at New York magazine, freely admits that he is not an environmentalist. He has never willingly gone camping, and rarely recycles. Nor is he an environmental reporter. He is a voyeur, seduced at first by stories that appeared allegorical—Arctic scientists trapped by melting ice on an island inhabited by polar bears, or a Russian boy killed by anthrax from a reindeer carcass uncovered by thawing permafrost.
Yet, as the author makes starkly clear, global warming is no parable. Far from being a problem only for future generations, it is wreaking havoc now. Five of the 20 worst fires in California’s history blazed in 2017; the deadliest incinerated the town of Paradise last year. Floods are becoming wetter, droughts drier and hurricanes fiercer.
Such calamities, Mr Wallace-Wells notes, are not the “new normal”; they mark “the end of normal”, as climate change tips Earth beyond the conditions that allowed humans to evolve in the first place. And that is with barely 1°C of man-made warming since the industrial revolution.
Things will get much worse. The world is on course to become at least 3°C hotter than in pre-industrial times. Within a few decades, this could mean that temperatures in Mecca render the haj physically impossible for many of the 2m Muslims who make the pilgrimage each year.
With a rise of 7°C— plausible if humanity remains wedded to fossil fuels—swathes of Earth’s equatorial band would become uninhabitable. Even if warming did not exceed 2°C, as stipulated in the Paris climate agreement of 2015, rising seas may engulf $1trn-worth of American property.
“Numbers can numb,” Mr Wallace-Wells writes. Yet like fellow climate-porn addicts, he cannot resist piling statistic on dismal statistic. In the hands of a lesser writer, this litany of woe might have degenerated into one of the dry treatises on which he draws.
But whereas his chapters—on the impacts of extreme weather, sea levels, human health, economic consequences and so on—echo reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, his elegant, accessible prose does not.
He has a point when he says that exercising caution over warning signs is tantamount to complacency. Occasionally, however, he could exercise a bit more of it himself. For example, he acknowledges that humans are an adaptive species, then cites projections of lives lost to heatwaves, air pollution and the like, which typically do not factor in adaptation measures.
He nevertheless gets the big things right. His insistence that electing leaders with climate-friendly policies matters immeasurably more than forgoing a plastic straw in your cocktail is surely correct.
Yet he is perversely optimistic: because humans are responsible for the problem, they must be capable of undoing at least some of it, he thinks.
If Americans’ carbon footprints matched those of average Europeans, the United States would emit less than half as much carbon as it does.
The book does not dwell on the policies that might achieve such outcomes; it is more expository than prescriptive.
Some readers will find Mr Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.

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‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ Puts Words To A Future You Don’t Want To Live In

Grist - Kate Yoder

Grist / Amelia Bates

Prepare yourself for grisly descriptions of how the body breaks down in overwhelming heat, predictions of prehistoric plagues springing back to life beneath melting permafrost, and the possibility of an economic collapse several times worse than the Great Depression.
David Wallace-Wells’ dystopian vision of where we’re headed is guaranteed to scare the bejesus out of readers of his new book, The Uninhabitable Earth. Some will surely have to look away. Wallace-Wells, perhaps surprisingly, seems OK with that. More than a hundred pages in, he writes, “If you have made it this far, you are a brave reader.”

Penguin Random House

Based on the viral New York Magazine article that portrayed out a hellish future for humanity, the 230-page book is an immersion in seemingly all of the worst-case climate scenarios. It’s terrifying. The point is to get readers to confront “the scarier implications of the science,” Wallace-Wells told me an in email. More terrifying still: There are scarier scenarios that he didn’t touch.
When his original magazine article came out in 2017, science communicators and climatologists like Michael Mann criticized it for being “overly bleak.” Wallace-Wells argues that our dire situation merits an array of storytelling approaches, including ones that embrace the worst possibilities.
“[T]here is no single way to best tell the story of climate change, no single rhetorical approach likely to work on a given audience, and none too dangerous to try,” he writes in the new book. “Any story that sticks is a good one.”
Probably to distance myself from the book’s intentionally upsetting depictions of our predicament, I started writing down all the new words and phrases I encountered while reading it. (Yes, Grist writers have coping mechanisms, too.) Almost every page unveiled a term that would be new to the general public, like “forest dieback,” for when a bunch of trees suddenly die, or “hothouse,” which is actually a nicer way of saying hell on Earth.
The book unfolded much like Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, a childhood favorite of mine: You knew from the start that the outcome would be unpleasant, but you were guaranteed to learn a few vocabulary words along the way.
So for those too afraid to read it, I picked out a few of the terms likely to stick around. To find out the meaning of “airpocalypse,” “designer climates,” and more, read on: You might just learn some of the most fascinating concepts from the book.
Wallace-Wells coined a few of the words but most aren’t brand new. They’re borrowed from scientists and journalists. “To get a whole new language of climate change doesn’t require a Shakespeare,” he wrote in his email, “just someone who’s very thoroughly cutting and pasting the news” from Twitter.

Airpocalypse. Dense, dangerous smog.
A catchy word that captures your attention can spread a message farther than, say, “air quality index.” Such is the case for “airpocalypse,” a word that’s been used to describe bouts of noxious air choking cities in China and India. Wallace-Wells described it to me as “a kind of pop-journalism phrase in the spirit of ‘Snowzilla.’” Or the “slushpocalypse” in Seattle.
Air pollution was responsible for 9 million deaths worldwide in 2015, according to a recent report from The Lancet. And it’s likely messing with everyone’s brains, too. Oxygen rates tend to decline as more carbon enters the atmosphere. If atmospheric carbon levels doubled to 930 parts per million, the reduced oxygen in the air could shrink general cognitive ability by 21 percent.

Yogendra Kumar / Hindustan Times / Getty Images

Climate apathy. Indifference toward climate change.
“The world of two degrees seems nightmarish — and the world of three degrees, and four, and five yet more grotesque,” Wallace-Wells writes. But rather than descend into despair, it’s probable that people will “normalize climate suffering at the same pace we accelerate it” and find ways to “engineer new indifference.” (Feeling apathetic? We’ve got just the cure for you: a 21-day apathy detox.)

Climate caste system. A new term for “environmental justice.”
It’s well-established that climate change tends to hit the poor and communities of color the hardest. “This is what is often called the problem of environmental justice; a sharper, less gauzy phrase would be ‘climate caste system,’” Wallace-Wells writes.

Coral dying. What happens when killer-hot water meets coral reefs.
As ocean waters warm up, stressed-out corals expel algae from their tissues, shedding their color and their main source of food. It’s called “coral bleaching.” Wallace-Wells recast the term as “coral dying.” According to the World Resources Institute, the double whammy of warming and ocean acidification will endanger 90 percent of the planet’s reefs by 2030.
“[Y]ou can read right past phrases like ‘environmental justice’ and ‘coral bleaching’ without really feeling the impact of what they imply — both of them quite horrifying,” Wallace-Wells said in the email. “Phrases like ‘climate caste system’ and ‘coral dying’ are a little harder to look away from, I think.”

Designer climates. Human-engineered climates modified to suit local needs.
Someday soon, geoengineers may not be satisfied with reflecting the sun’s rays to stabilize the planet’s temperature. Maybe they’ll remake local climates to help a certain reef system survive global warming, for instance. These interventions, which are decades away, could reach a micro scale, “down to particular farms or soccer stadiums or beach resorts,” he writes. If it sounds like the premise of a cli-fi novel, that’s no coincidence. “I wanted to be sure to highlight the drama of what is contained in the science, whenever I can,” he said.

Hidden hunger. Micronutrient deficiencies.
One of the many weird side effects of having more CO2 in the atmosphere is that it makes our crops less nutritious and more like junk food. Higher CO2 levels mean bigger, more sugary plants, and less protein, calcium, iron, and vitamin C in every bite we take of them. There are more than a billion people who experience “hidden hunger” — not starvation, but a lack of nutrients — and climate change could make that much worse. The health of 600 million people could be at risk from the nutrient collapse of rice. And that’s just one crop.

Narayan Maharjan / NurPhoto / Getty Images

Sunny-day flooding. When high tide creeps into town without the help of a rainstorm.
Seas are rising much faster along the East Coast than the global average, and floods are inundating low-lying cities like Miami on clear-weather days. “Sunny-day flooding,” a phrase coined by scientists, wasn’t supposed to happen until decades from now under most sea-level rise projections, Yale Environment 360 reported.

Long thaw. Sea-level rise over the long haul.
If all the glaciers on Earth melted, we could ultimately see 260 feet of sea-level rise, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It would take centuries or millennia to get there — again, we’re talking about the “long thaw” — but that water would totally reshape the world’s coasts. For perspective, Wallace-Wells noted, some 600 million people live within 30 feet of the sea level.

Wet-bulb temperature. A method to measure heat and humidity together.
To determine wet-bulb temperature, you put a thermometer in a damp sock and swing it through the air. Why on earth would you do this? Well, many temperature projections leave out humidity, which can magnify the dangers of heat. And dangerous it is. With 5 degrees C of warming (9 degrees F), whole swaths of the globe would be “literally unsurvivable for humans.”
Sure, the science is complicated, and that’s part of the reason why the text is peppered with unfamiliar words. There’s another reason, though: Wallace-Wells wanted to create “a whole new way of thinking about climate,” and language is part of that. We’re headed to a world full of new, terrifying questions that our existing lexicon just doesn’t cover.

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