Lethal Heating: 07/12/19

12/07/2019

The Torres Strait Islanders Taking 'World-First Climate Change Case' to UN

SBS - Shahni Wellington, NITV News

The case frames climate change as “a human rights issue”, with First Nations people among the most vulnerable to a changing climate.

A delegate walks beneath the ceiling painted by Spainish artist Miquel Barcelo before a UN Human Rights Council session at UN offices in Geneva. (AFP)

If all goes to plan for a group of Torres Strait Islanders, the UN Human Rights Committee will pressure the Australian government to reduce the country's climate change emissions.
In a complaint lodged in May with the committee, seven Traditional Owners say climate change is already threatening their homes, traditions and sacred sites.
They have lodged what they describe as a "world first legal complaint against the Australian government" which alleges the country is violating their human rights by failing to address the issue.
The group also claim it is the first legal action in the world brought by inhabitants of low-lying islands against a nation-state.

MP Cynthia Lui, Cr Clara Tamu and Kabah Tamu inspect Warraber's old seawall.

Locals on the Torres Strait Islands say rising tides are washing away graves and sacred sites.
Community leaders also fear they will be forced to find a new home, if climate change continues to impact the islands.
One of the complainants, Kabay Tamu, says the UN is expected to demand a response from the Australian government later this year.
“It’s their duty of care to protect us Torres Strait Islanders up there and we feel that we haven’t been protected,” the sixth-generation Warraber man said.
“The process may take two to three years… but we are happy to wait because we’ve already been fighting. Our leaders have been fighting for a long time.”

'We lose metres of land all the time'
The islanders making the complaint have requested that Australia brings emissions at least 65% below 2005 levels by 2030, phases out thermal coal power stations and commits at least $20 million for seawalls on the Torres Strait Islands.
“If we have to move away, that’s colonisation all over again,” Mr Tamu said.
“The connection we have to the land and the sea ... you can’t put a price on that.”

High tides breach an older seawall at Saibai.

“Every high tide, every monsoon season we get coastal erosion happening,” Mr Tamu said.
“We lose metres of land all the time, especially with high tides and severe weather, rough winds coming through. It’s been happening more often now.”
The UN will now assess if Australia's climate emission policies are adequate, and if the government is effectively stripping people of their basic human rights.
The Australian government has received the complaint and the UN committee is likely to request a response later this year.

Links

Glacial Melting In Antarctica May Become Irreversible

The Guardian - Adam Morton

Thwaites glacier is likely to thaw and trigger 50cm sea level rise, US study suggests

An aerial view of Thwaites glacier, which shows growth of gaps between the ice and bedrock. Photograph: Nasa/OIB/Jeremy Harbeck/Handout/EPA

Antarctica faces a tipping point where glacial melting will accelerate and become irreversible even if global heating eases, research suggests.
A Nasa-funded study found instability in the Thwaites glacier meant there would probably come a point when it was impossible to stop it flowing into the sea and triggering a 50cm sea level rise. Other Antarctic glaciers were likely to be similarly unstable.
Recent research found the rate of ice loss from five Antarctic glaciers had doubled in six years and was five times faster than in the 1990s. Ice loss is spreading from the coast into the continent’s interior, with a reduction of more than 100 metres in thickness at some sites.
The Thwaites glacier, part of the West Antarctic ice sheet, is believed to pose the greatest risk for rapid future sea level rise. Research recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal found it was likely to succumb to instability linked to the retreat of its grounding line on the seabed that would lead to it shedding ice faster than previously expected.
Alex Robel, an assistant professor at the US Georgia Institute of Technology and the study’s leader, said if instability was triggered, the ice sheet could be lost in the space of 150 years, even if temperatures stopped rising. “It will keep going by itself and that’s the worry,” he said.
Modelling simulations suggested extensive ice loss would start in 600 years but the researchers said it could occur sooner depending on the pace of global heating and nature of the instability.
Hélène Seroussi, a jet propulsion laboratory scientist at Nasa, said: “It could happen in the next 200 to 600 years. It depends on the bedrock topography under the ice, and we don’t know it in great detail yet.”
Antarctica has nearly eight times more land-based ice than Greenland and 50 times more than all mountain glaciers combined. The Thwaites glacier alone contains enough ice to increase global sea levels by about 50cm. Sea level rise linked to warming has already been linked with increased coastal flooding and storm surges.
The researchers found a precise estimate of how much ice the glacier would shed in the next 50 to 800 years was not possible due to unpredictable climate fluctuations and data limitations. However, 500 simulations of different scenarios pointed to it losing stability. This increased uncertainty about future sea level rise but made the worst-case scenarios more likely.
A complete loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet would be expected to increase global sea levels by about five metres (16ft), causing coastal cities around the world to become submerged.
A separate study last week in the same journal found the expanse of sea ice around Antarctica had suffered a “precipitous” fall since 2014. Satellite data showed Antarctica lost as much sea ice in four years as the Arctic lost in 34 years.
Unlike the melting of ice sheets on land, sea ice melting does not raise sea levels but the loss of the reflective white ice leads to more of the sun’s heat being absorbed in the ocean, increasing the pace of heating.
Antarctic sea ice had been gradually increasing during 40 years of measurement and reached a record maximum in 2014, before falling markedly. The cause of the abrupt turnaround has not been established.

Links

Device Could Bring Both Solar Power And Clean Water To Millions

The Guardian - Nicola Davis

Researchers say one invention could solve two problems for people lacking basic resources

More than 780 million people worldwide lack basic access to safe drinking water. Photograph: Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters

A device that can produce electricity from sunlight while simultaneously purifying water has been produced by researchers, an invention they say could solve two problems in one stroke.
The researchers say the device is not only a source of green energy but also offers an alternative to current technologies for purifying water. These, they add, often consume large amounts of electricity and require infrastructure beyond the reach of many communities that lack basic access to safe drinking water – a situation thought to affect more than 780 million people worldwide.
“These people spend a collective 200m hours a day fetching water from distant sources,” said Prof Peng Wang, a co-author of the research from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.
With solar farms often located in arid regions, the device could provide clean water where it is needed most. What is more, the team say it could be used in a backyard or on an industrial scale.
“Having a significant amount of freshwater produced continuously on a daily basis [means] many challenging tasks can then be easily achievable,” said Wang. “The generated clean water can be used [for] cleaning solar panels to remove dust particles; it can be use to irrigate plants and crops, making desert agriculture possible.”
Writing in the journal Nature Communications, Wang and colleagues reveal how they constructed the device.
On the top is a horizontal commercial silicon solar cell and beneath this are several tiers through which saline, brackish or contaminated surface water is run. Waste heat from the solar cell warms the saline water passing immediately beneath it – the water evaporates, passes through a membrane and condenses to yield clean water, releasing heat in the process that warms the saline water in the tier below that – the process is then repeated for the next tier. The purified water flows out of the device and is collected.
The team found the device can be used to purify saltwater as well as seawater contaminated with heavy metals, with the water collected containing levels of lead, copper, sodium, calcium and magnesium all below the levels deemed safe for drinking water by the World Health Organization.
While the team outline various versions of the device, they reveal that under conditions on a par with a bright, cloudless day the energy efficiency of the solar cell was about 11% – a figure they say is on a par with what would be expected without the distillation section attached, and higher than previously reported by others working on such devices.
The device was also able to produce clean water from seawater at a rate they say is higher than conventional solar stills.
The device, while not the first to make use of solar distillation, has a particular advantage: by combining two types of device that typically each require a large land area, and mounting systems, the approach is relatively compact.
Wang said the device turned the traditional link between water and electricity on its head: conventionally, electricity is produced by heating water to produce steam that is then used to turn turbines. While he said the team was still working on scaling up the device and reducing costs, they are optimistic.
“It is our hope that we move quickly to push this technology towards its large-scale adoption,” he said.

Links

UN Official: US Can't Ignore That Climate Change Will Force 120 Million People Into Poverty

The Hill - Philip Alston*

Climate change is making headlines this summer with record temperatures, devastating floods and climate-related migration. But in the U.S., mainstream discussions about climate change are remarkably out of touch with the scale of the crisis and the economic and social upheaval it will bring. Political leaders have failed to put forward a vision for avoiding catastrophic consequences or protecting those most affected.
As UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, I recently released a report finding that climate change threatens the future of human rights and will impoverish hundreds of millions, including middle class people in wealthy countries. It will push 120 million people into poverty by 2030 alone, and could lead to a “climate apartheid” scenario where the wealthy pay to escape overheating, hunger and conflict while the rest of the world is left to suffer.
Yet, far from taking appropriate action, we are accelerating in the wrong direction. In the U.S., arguably the country with the greatest responsibility for climate change, President Trump has placed former lobbyists in oversight roles, adopted industry talking points, presided over an aggressive rollback of environmental regulations, and is actively silencing and obfuscating climate science. US fossil fuel companies have long embarked on campaigns to prevent meaningful change and thwart any talk of binding emissions commitments, working to create doubt over climate science and doing serious damage to climate action.
This is not a crisis that can be met with incremental change that avoids rocking the boat. It requires fundamental transformation of energy, agriculture and industry on an unprecedented scale. Unfortunately, the conversation in the U.S. has not caught up to the scale of the impending challenge. By withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, the most promising (if inadequate) step in addressing climate change, the U.S. has ceded a leadership role on this issue and remained mired in denialism that every other country has put to rest.
The many policymakers who rightly accept the scientific consensus are still not setting out a coherent path for rapidly reducing carbon emissions, either at home or globally. The Democratic presidential primary is illustrative of this failure, where the discussion of climate change at recent debates was superficial and unfocused, and the Democratic National Committee has resisted widespread calls for a climate change debate. The Chamber of Commerce line that it will be up to the private sector to solve climate change is a dangerous delusion.
The Green New Deal introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) is representative of what is needed, and would achieve net-zero emissions while investing in green jobs, social support and infrastructure. This is not a progressive wish list, but the bare minimum that is necessary. Climate change cannot be tackled in isolation — it will result in massive upheaval even under the best-case scenarios and requires a robust social safety net to protect people from the fallout.
Some have lamented the costs of climate action while ignoring both the costs of inaction and the economic opportunities of a green transition. Maintaining our current course will not result in continued growth, but rather is a recipe for long-term economic catastrophe — just 2 degrees Celsius of warming will see socioeconomic losses amounting to 13 percent of global GDP and $69 trillion of damage. Meanwhile, we continue to subsidize the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $5.2 trillion per year, or 6.3 percent of global GDP.
Already in the U.S., wealthy people are relying on white-glove firefighters and private-sector flood protection, while low-income communities affected by climate change have been stranded and underserved. A well-managed transition can support the most vulnerable, protect workers, and create good jobs while reducing poverty and addressing discrimination and inequality. But ignoring the scale of this crisis will lead to disaster and take the harshest toll on those least able to bear it.

*Philip Alston is the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.

Links

Climate Activists Turn To Lawsuits To Force Action On Global Warming

Nature - Nisha Gaind

Citizens and organizations have filed more than 1,300 cases worldwide since 1990.

Fossil fuels in Pakistan: in 2015, a farmer sued the government for failing to implement its climate policy. Credit: Muhammed Muheisen/AP/Shutterstock

Citizens and organizations have filed more than 1,300 lawsuits related to climate change in at least 28 countries around the world, an analysis has found.
Of the 1,328 suits filed from 1990 to May 2019, more than three-quarters were in the United States (see ‘Climate in court’). But the report’s authors note that the share of lawsuits filed in low- and middle-income countries such as Pakistan and Uganda is on the rise. The vast majority of suits have been filed since 2006.

Source: J. Setzer and R. Byrnes. Global Trends in Climate Change Litigation: 2019 Snapshot (LSE, 2019)

The count includes cases against governments and businesses. It also includes suits registered with international courts and bodies such as the Court of Justice of the European Union and the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
Most of the legal battles are against governments, in attempts to bolster action against global warming. Many cases seek to strengthen climate policies — for instance, in a landmark 2015 case in the Netherlands, a court ruled in favour of citizens who said their government should accelerate emissions reductions.
Others seek to ensure that existing climate policies are properly enforced. In another 2015 case, a farmer in Pakistan sued the national government for failing to implement its 2012 climate policy. A court ruled in the farmer’s favour and directed government ministries to strengthen their endeavours to combat climate change.
A minority of lawsuits seek to undermine efforts against climate-change, the report found.
The analysis, conducted by policy researchers at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, notes that cases are increasingly drawing on ‘attribution science’, which aims to establish causal links between human-induced climate change and certain extreme weather events.

Links