21/08/2019

Queensland Police To Get New Powers To Search Climate Change Protesters

The Guardian - 

Crackdown includes new laws that make it illegal to possess a device used for locking on, and comes as Extinction Rebellion ramps up activities
Police are seen trying to stop Extinction Rebellion protesters from marching in Brisbane’s CBD on 6 August. Queensland police will have new powers to search suspected climate change protesters. Photograph: Darren England/AAP
Queensland police will be given new powers to search suspected climate change protesters, as the state government attempts to crack down on an escalating campaign of civil disobedience.
Extinction Rebellion protesters have regularly disrupted traffic in the Brisbane CBD. They have indicated those stoppages would escalate in the coming months. Other groups have attempted to stop the operations of mining companies, contractors and coal freight networks across the state.
In state parliament on Tuesday the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, announced stronger penalties and expanded police powers that would apply to climate demonstrations and vegan protests at agricultural properties.
In outlining the new laws, which were agreed to by the state cabinet on Monday, Palaszczuk said she had been persuaded by the state’s police commissioner, Katarina Carroll, who had shown her “evidence of locking devices laced with traps that are dangerous”.
Protesters regularly use devices or other means to “lock on”, effectively making it difficult or unsafe for them to be removed from a location.
Palaszczuk claimed in parliament that protesters had used “sinister tactics” – cylinders containing glass fragments and gas containers “so that anyone trying to cut a protester free will be injured or worse.
“Police will have the power to search those they reasonably suspect ... of having those devices. They will be illegal.
“Every single minute our [emergency services] spend dealing with these types of protesters, is a minute they are spending not helping others. It will not be allowed to continue.”
The most recent stoppage on Monday caused the closure of the William Jolly Bridge across the Brisbane River and associated traffic delays along the Riverside Expressway, a crowded commuter route.
An Extinction Rebellion protestor is removed by police after abseiling off William Jolly Bridge in Brisbane on Monday. Photograph: Darren England/EPA
Brisbane has been particularly susceptible to Extinction Rebellion protests because of the way traffic chokes at the city’s river crossings. Protesters appear to be hitting a nerve in Queensland, where coal provides significant royalties income for the state, and where the Adani Carmichael mine, the world’s most controversial coal project, is under construction.
Before the new laws were announced, police actions appeared to become more heavy-handed. Officers were accused of acting to shield corporate interests.
Protesters have complained that they already face court-imposed fines up to $61,000, while the state punishes “major” breaches of environmental law by mining companies with minor penalties.
The Queensland police minister, Mark Ryan, described climate protesters as “extremists”. He said the laws would introduce a new offence, making it illegal to possess a device used for locking on at a protest.
“This government will bring in measures who believe their rights can ride roughshod over the rights of others,” Ryan said.
“This new offence will make it illegal to possess these devices. Police will have the power to search a person or vehicle suspected of possessing these devices.
“Anyone who uses one of these devices during a protest will be subject to a new category of offence, with penalties.
“If anyone believes passionately in something, they should argue their case on the merits.”
The government also announced that protesters who trespass on farmland and cause a “biosecurity risk” can be punished with up to a year in prison.

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Warming Climate To Stir Up More Damaging Waves As 'Rare Event' Nears: Research

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

Waves are forecast to become larger and more powerful and to shift direction if the climate continues to warm at its current rate, with southern Australia among the regions to be hardest hit globally, new research says.
The study, led by scientists from Griffith University and published in Nature Climate Change on Tuesday, comes as meteorologists forecast a "quite rare event" later this week as a potentially damaging swell hits eastern Australia.
A monster wave in January 2015 that washed a woman off Nobbys breakwall in Newcastle. Credit: Cordelia Troy
Using about 150 model simulations, the researchers found about half the world's coastline was "at risk from wave climate change" by the final two decades of this century if greenhouse gas emissions remained at their current "business-as-usual trajectory".
The wave changes, driven primarily by strengthening winds "might potentially exacerbate or even exceed in some coastal regions, impacts of future sea-level rise", the paper said.
Widespread ocean regions can expect annual mean significant wave height -  the average difference between trough to crest of the highest third of waves - to increase between 5 and 15 per cent compared with a 1979-2004 baseline.
The mean period between waves was projected to increase by a similar range of 5 to 15 per cent, implying increased forces to pound beaches and infrastructure when the waves reach the coast.
Wave direction would also shift between 5 and 15 degrees, potentially shifting sand and hammering some areas now typically sheltered by headlands and other coastal formations.
"For Australia, the south coast and Victoria especially are really going to be impacted by the Southern Ocean changes," Joao Morim, a PhD candidate at Griffith University and lead author of the paper, said.
The expected impact from swells for Australia's coastline would be driven by an intensification and poleward shift of storm activity.
The west coast of South America was another region facing more damaging waves while the North Atlantic would most likely see a reduction because of a decrease mid-latitude storm activity in that basin, Mr Morim said.
Surfers ride big waves along the Sydney coastline in November 2015. Credit: Nick Moir
However, should emissions be limited sufficiently to contain global warming to within the Paris climate target of 2 degrees compared with pre-industrial levels, the projected wave changes "are not standing out from the natural variability", Mr Morim said. His work was part of a six-year project also involving the CSIRO.
Mitchell Harley, a lecturer at the University of NSW's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering who was not among the paper's authors, said the work was a "nice step forward and presents a nice summary of what we do know and importantly what we don't know".
Dr Harley said his interest was that waves would change over the next decade or so at a more local level.
"What this paper shows is there is still a lot of uncertainty in these projections," he said.
"Storms are changing, the wind fields are changing around the world, and that's going to have inevitable consequences on how our waves are striking the coast and consequently how our coastline is going to respond," he said, adding that satellites had identified an increase of about 3 per cent in wave energy over the past half century.
Even small changes in the direction of waves "can cause large-scale reorientations" of the coastline, as sand gets scoured from some beaches and dumped on others, Dr Harley said. Clarkes Beach near Byron Bay was one recent example where dunes had been eroded by shifting conditions.
Beach erosion has lately been a pressing issue for parts of Perth. Credit: WA Today
Beaches in Australia south of about the Sunshine Coast tended to be shaped primarily by waves while those further north are dominated by tropical cyclones and tidal changes, he said.
Coastal residents might get to experience some relatively severe wave activity this week, with significant wave heights expected to reach about six metres along parts of the NSW coast on Thursday.
Jordan Notara, a forecaster at the Bureau of Meteorology, described the predicted swell as "quite a rare event" for August, and said waves could be damaging. The bureau has also issued a warning about the surf conditions.
Dr Harley said this week's swell would be coming from "the dead south", a typical direction for such big waves.
In the future, though, direction changes of the waves in extreme events - as predicted by the research paper - "really causes huge effects on the wave-exposure of the coastline", he said.

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Climate Change Could Cost The U.S. Up To 10.5 Percent Of Its GDP By 2100, Study Finds

Washington Post - Andrew Freedman

Extreme weather events will be a major source of future losses.
Construction worker Dineose Vargas wipes his face at a construction site on the Duncan Canal in Kenner, La., on Aug. 13. (Gerald Herbert/AP)
Extreme weather events, cuts to worker productivity and other effects of climate change could cause major global economic losses unless greenhouse gas emissions are significantly curtailed in the next few decades, according to a new working paper published Monday. The paper is the latest in a string of reports from the United Nations and global financial institutions and others showing that climate change constitutes a looming financial risk.
At a time when there’s concern about a global economic downturn, the new study, published as a working paper in the National Bureau of Economic Research, warns of a far bigger cut to economic growth if global warming goes unchecked.
The study is unique in that it finds higher potential costs from climate change, particularly in the industrial world, compared with past research. For example, the study found that continued temperature increases of about 0.072 degrees per year (0.04 Celsius) under a roughly “business as usual," or high-emissions, scenario would yield a 7.2 percent cut to GDP per capita worldwide by 2100. (This is relative to a world in which countries see temperature increases equal to their 1960 to 2014 rate of change.)
In contrast, if countries were to cut greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris climate agreement, then such effects could be limited to closer to a 1.1 percent loss in GDP per capita.
“What our study suggests is that climate change is costly for all countries under the business as usual scenario (no matter whether they are hot or cold, rich or poor), and the United States will be one of the countries that will suffer the most (reflecting sharp increases in U.S. average temperatures by 2100),” study co-author Kamiar Mohaddes, an economist at the University of Cambridge, said via email.
For the United States, the study finds that if emissions of greenhouse gases are not significantly cut in keeping with the goals of the Paris accord, the country could see a 10.5 percent cut in real income by 2100. The hardest hit countries will be poorer, tropical nations, but in contrast to previous studies, the new paper finds that no country will be spared and none will see a net benefit economically from global warming.
The team of researchers from the University of Cambridge, the International Monetary Fund, the University of Southern California and the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan examined economic data from 174 countries during the period from 1964 to 2014, and concluded that per capita economic output growth is adversely affected by prolonged changes in temperature, both above or below its historical norms. Extreme temperature and precipitation events can reverberate throughout state, national and international economies, the study found.
“It is not only the level of temperature that affects economic activity, but also its persistent above-norm changes. For example, while the level of temperature in Canada is low, the country is warming up twice as fast as rest of the world and therefore is affected by climate change (including from damage to its physical infrastructure, coastal and northern communities, human health and wellness, ecosystems and fisheries),” Mohaddes said.
Other countries will experience major losses, too, if emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases are not reduced soon. Canada, for example, could lose more than 13 percent of its GDP by 2100, while Japan, India and New Zealand could be subjected to a 10 percent hit as well.
Mohaddes said the study takes into account the changes in average temperatures and precipitation, and in the variability of weather patterns as the climate warms.
For the United States, the new study comes up with a similar damage figure as a paper cited in the National Climate Assessment, which the Trump administration released late last year. That report contained a statistic that received widespread media attention, finding that climate change could cost the country 10 percent of its GDP.
However, the previous figure was based on a 2017 paper in the journal Science, and used an extreme, although possible, climate change scenario, with about 14.4 degrees (8 Celsius) of warming by 2100 compared to preindustrial levels, which is not considered the most likely outcome.
The study released Monday comes to nearly the same figure using a more realistic global warming scenario, one that’s closer to 7.2 degrees (4 Celsius) of warming by 2100 compared to preindustrial levels.
Mohaddes says that economic losses from climate change depend in part on extreme events, which can cause temperatures to temporarily greatly exceed or fall below their historical baseline.
“The UK recently had its hottest day on record. Train tracks buckled, roads melted, and thousands were stranded because it was out of the norm. Such events take an economic toll, and will only become more frequent and severe without policies to address the threats of climate change,” Mohaddes said in a statement.
The study, like other projections on how climate change may influence economic growth, makes assumptions about emissions trends, how society may try to adapt to the effects of global warming and other factors. However, although the specific figures may contain uncertainties, the overarching finding that all countries will experience economic damage from climate change, rather than just poor, tropical nations, is more robust.

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