21/03/2019

Labor To Tell Business It Won't Let Energy Policy Be Held 'Hostage'

The Guardian - 

Bill Shorten unveiled a 10-year plan to boost the share of renewable energy in the grid and retire coal generation.
Photograph: David Crosling/AAP 
Labor will use an energy summit convened by small business to declare it will not “be hostage to repeal politics” if it wins the coming federal election, warning it will press ahead with emissions reduction in the electricity sector even if the Liberal party won’t reconcile itself to the national energy guarantee.
Pat Conroy, the shadow assistant minister for climate and energy, will tell Wednesday’s summit Labor wants bipartisan agreement post-election, and will pursue the national energy guarantee developed by Malcolm Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg – a policy that remains popular with a number of stakeholders, including business groups, despite being dumped by Scott Morrison.
But Conroy will also use Wednesday’s outing to put business on notice, telling them an incoming Labor government will not delay policy action endlessly in a fruitless quest for bipartisanship.
“We will not allow the energy sector to be hostage to the repeal politics we saw at the turn of the decade,” Conroy will tell the summit. “Instead we will progress a 10-year energy investment plan that will deliver certainty to the energy sector through long-term contracts – contracts that will enable massive investment in new generation at the cheapest possible cost.”
Bill Shorten last November outlined Labor’s plan B in the event Labor wins the May election and the Coalition can’t be persuaded, post-election, to back its own policy with a higher emissions reduction target of 45%.
Pat Conroy will warn that Labor will press ahead with emissions reduction in the electricity sector even if the Liberal party won’t reconcile itself to the national energy guarantee. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian
Shorten committed to topping up the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to the tune of $10bn and unveiled a new $5bn fund to modernise ageing transmission infrastructure – the ramparts of a 10-year plan to boost the share of renewable energy in the grid and retire coal generation.
The Labor leader said he would use the Australian Energy Market Operator’s integrated system plan as the basis for transforming the energy system, with a Shorten government playing a hands-on role creating renewable energy zones, investing in new generation and transmission infrastructure and also in firming technologies, like batteries and gas peaking plants.
Moving away from the national energy guarantee, even though Labor has clearly telegraphed that possibility, will likely generate pushback in the business community which rallied in support of the policy which became a casualty of the conservative-led push against Turnbull’s leadership of the Liberal party.
While the Morrison government has been attempting to increase political pressure over Labor’s higher emissions reduction target, warning of the costs associated with a more rapid transition to low emissions technologies, Conroy will insist on Wednesday that Labor’s policies will deliver lower energy prices.
He says there has been an increase in wholesale electricity costs principally because of “the failure of the current government to establish and implement a stable and coherent climate and energy policy”.
“We have had nearly 5,200 megawatts of capacity retire in the last seven years, in fact nearly 4,000 megawatts of capacity has retired since August 2014,” Conroy will say.
“This has led to a tightening of the wholesale energy market as insufficient supply has been added, and this has led to black coal and gas generators increasing their share of time as the marginal generator, thereby setting the price.
“Beyond being more expensive forms of generation, the cost of black coal and gas has risen at the same time leading to higher wholesale prices.”
Conroy says Labor’s commitment to achieving 50% renewable energy and the associated investment in transmission infrastructure to make the renewable energy reliable, “will actually deliver lower power prices than what would otherwise be”.

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Indian Summer Monsoon Amplified Global Warming 130,000 Years Ago, Helping End Ice Age

The Conversation -  | 

Monsoon clouds approach in India.
Manoj Felix/Shutterstock
PhD Researcher in Climatology
The Open University
Lecturer in Ocean Biogeochemistry
The Open University
The past may be a surprisingly useful guide for predicting responses to future climate change. This is especially important for places where extreme weather has been the norm for a long time, such as the Indian subcontinent. Being able to reliably predict summer monsoon rainfall is critical to plan for the devastating impact it can have on the 1.7 billion people who live in the region.
The onset of India’s summer monsoon is linked to heat differences between the warmer land and cooler ocean, which causes a shift in prevailing wind direction. Winds blow over the Indian Ocean, picking up moisture, which falls as rain over the subcontinent from June to September.
The monsoon season can bring drought and food shortages or severe flooding, depending on how much rain falls and in what duration. Understanding how the monsoon responded to an abrupt climate transition in the past can therefore help scientists better understand its behaviour in the future.
Maharashtra, India on May 28 2010, during the dry season.
Arne Hückelheim/Wikipedia, CC BY
When we researched this weather system’s ancient past, we found it was highly sensitive to climate warming 130,000 years ago. Our new study published in Nature Geoscience showed that the Indian summer monsoon pulled heat and moisture into the northern hemisphere when Earth was entering a warmer climate around 130,000 years ago. This caused tropical wetlands to expand northwards – habitats that act as sources of methane, a greenhouse gas. This amplified global warming further and helped end the ice age.The rate at which today’s climate is changing is unprecedented in the geological record, but our study shows how sensitive the Indian summer monsoon was during a global transition into warming in the past and may still be.
The same view in Maharashtra, India on August 28 2010, during the monsoon season.
Arne Hückelheim/Wikipedia, CC BY
The monsoon rains of yesteryear
Over the last one million years, the climate fluctuated between a cold glacial – known as an ice age – and a warm interglacial as the Earth’s position relative to the sun wobbled in its orbit. The last transition from an ice age into the warm climate of the present interglacial – known as the Holocene – occurred around 18,000 years ago. This period of Earth’s history is relatively well understood, but how Earth system processes responded to these climate changes deeper in time is still something of a mystery.
A recent expedition to drill deep into the ocean floor of the Bay of Bengal gave an opportunity to reconstruct past Indian monsoon behaviour over hundreds of years before the last ice age.
Globigerinoides ruber – a species of 
microscopic foraminifera from the Indian Ocean.
Pallavi Anand, Author provided (No reuse)
Our study used these deep sea sediments from the northern Bay of Bengal to capture a direct signal of the Indian summer monsoon from 140,000 to 128,000 years ago, hidden in the fossilised shells of tiny microscopic creatures called foraminifera. These plankton species once lived in the upper ocean water column and captured the environmental conditions of the surrounding seawater in the chemical make up of their shells.
We detected the ocean surface water freshening from river discharge induced by the rains of the Indian summer monsoon from 140,000 to 128,000 years ago – a sign of the strengthening monsoon system. This occurred when the Earth was coming out of a glacial state and into the interglacial which occurred before the one we live in, separated by a single ice age. During this period – which we’ll refer to as the penultimate deglaciation – sea levels rose from six to nine metres worldwide.
Ice-core records show that Antarctica began to warm first during the penultimate deglaciation. Southern Hemisphere warming provided a source of heat and moisture which fuelled the strengthening of the Indian summer monsoon, as seen in our records of surface freshening and river runoff from the northern Bay of Bengal.
Wetland in Leh Ladakh, India.
The expansion of tropical wetlands further north released more methane to the atmosphere,
accelerating global warming.
WATHIT H/Shutterstock
During this warming period around 130,000 years ago, the Indian summer monsoon responded to southern hemisphere warming while the northern hemisphere and other monsoon systems, such as the East Asian summer monsoon – which affects modern day China, Japan and the Far East – remained in a glacial state.
The Indian summer monsoon pulled heat and moisture northwards, driving glacial melting in the northern hemisphere and helping tropical wetlands expand their range. These expanding tropical wetlands resulted in more methane release into the atmosphere which caused even more warming, setting changes in motion which ended the global ice age.
The Indian summer monsoon is an incredibly dynamic system. Though confined to the tropics, the system is sensitive to climatic conditions in both hemispheres. Due to its role in contributing to methane emissions, the Indian summer monsoon also has an outsize impact on the global climate. Monsoons should not be viewed in isolation, just as the polar ice sheets shouldn’t. Earth’s internal climate system is intrinsically linked and abrupt changes at one place can have significant consequences over time elsewhere.

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Climate Change To Blame For Mass Jindabyne Fish Death: Water Ecologist

Fairfax - Finbar O'Mallon

A trout hatchery in the Snowy Mountains has lost 30,000 fish due to high river temperatures and low rainfall, which a water ecologist has blamed on the effects of climate change.
The NSW Department of Primary Industries, which oversees the Gaden Trout Hatchery outside of Jindabyne, confirmed the loss occurred when the Thredbo River hit temperatures of 28.5 degrees around January 26.
A Brown Trout in Lake Eildon. Credit: Justin McManus
Trout are a northern hemisphere fish and begin to stress and die at 24 to 26 degrees, a department spokeswoman said.
"Fish deaths on this scale at Gaden have not been experienced in the last 20 years," she said.
The department also blamed a lack of rainfall on the loss of the 30,000 fingerlings - baby fish - and 1000 broodstock fish, which are used for breeding.
University of Canberra Associate Professor Ben Kefford said it could be good news for native fish in the rivers who get eaten by the non-native trout.
"It will mean they have far less predation from the trout and competition for that matter," Dr Kefford said.
Dr Kefford said he had also witnessed dead trout in the Wellington River in the Victorian alps in January.
"It certainly doesn't surprise me," he said.
"It will be a consequence of a hot summer which is due to climate change and we've currently got very low flows in most of our rivers."
The low river flows were themselves attributable to a lack of rainfall.
He explained that less water meant it was easier for the heat in the air to warm that body of water up.
"If temperatures get hotter and we have increased periods of dry spells this is probably what's going to happen," he said.
Dr Kefford said trout were more susceptible to heat stress hence why they were placed out in mountain alpine streams.
While native fish had higher heat tolerances Dr Kefford said it wasn't well known what their limit was.
The department said the fingerlings lost in January represented three per cent of the entire department's annual stocking production.
"The fingerlings currently at the Gaden Hatchery are in good health and [the department's] fish stockings have continued across impoundments and streams across the state," the spokeswoman said.
"Gaden Hatchery staff did a fantastic job saving the remaining fingerlings by getting them into cooler water as soon as possible."
This summer was Australia's hottest on record with January beating previous heat records as Australians sweated through multiple heatwaves.

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