Six Sentences Of Hope: Defining A Unifying Vision In The Face Of The Climate Crisis

The Guardian - Richard Flanagan

A sense of futility haunts us all, so I sought to distill in as few words as possible what could be done by us as a people. Writing them, I felt my despair lift

‘It’s time to take our future back. It’s time to stand and fight.’ An anti-Adani coalmine protest at Airlie Beach, Queensland. Photograph: Darren England/AAP

In 1971, the Liberal Billy McMahon – routinely judged the worst Australian prime minister ever, an achievement not to be underestimated in a nation where the worst routinely rule – created a new portfolio: Environment, Arts and Aboriginal Affairs. Nobody wanted the job: given it, Peter Howson observed that he was responsible for “trees, boongs and poofters.”
What’s changed with our conservative rulers over the last half century? On the evidence of the shame the prime minister, Scott Morrison, visited on all Australians last week at the Pacific Islands Forum, not very much. There he tried to pressure Pacific leaders to remove from the final forum communique and climate change statement all references to coal, to limiting warming to less than 1.5C, and to setting out a plan for net zero emissions by 2050.
Tuvalu’s prime minister, Enele Sopoaga, was too diplomatic when he told Scott Morrison: “You are trying to save your economy, I am trying to save my people.”
Because it isn’t Australia’s economic security that is at stake, but the security of the profits of coalmining corporations and their owners – the likes of Gautam Adani and Gina Rinehart – along with the security of the seats of influential Queensland MPs for whom Clive Palmer’s $60m-plus election campaign was so important.
And for them, and his own electoral security, Scott Morrison was willing to sacrifice any sense of national security.
Not content at a time of growing global tensions to have deeply damaged our standing with our close neighbours, the deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, observed that Pacific islanders would “continue to survive because many of their workers come here and pick our fruit”, thereby managing in a single sentence to dismiss Pacific islanders’ concerns for their future and simultaneously invoke Australia’s horrific blackbirding past that saw 19th century Pacific islanders kidnapped and coerced into semi-slavery working on Australian sugar cane plantations.
And when next it is our homes that vanish in an unprecedented mega-fire, or flood, or cyclone, or under a rising sea, what patronising cant might our Marie Antoinettish leaders offer up for our future? Help in the kitchen of a coal company executive? Work in the garden of a National party grandee?
Like so many Australians, I have felt powerless watching the climate crisis unfold in our country. Last week’s events brought home to me how the most powerful in our country seemed to be those that would ensure the very worst future eventuates in their craven service to the fossil fuel industry and its propagandists, thereby ensuring we exacerbate the climate emergency rather than seek to limit its damage.
The question of the age is how. In the face of a human-induced change that threatens the future of our species how to act? How to live? How to be?
In seeking the answer we find ourselves alone in the universe without illusions. There are no leaders, no parties, no nation, no gods that will save us. We discover at this terrible moment a shocking truth: we only have ourselves. And each of us finds within ourselves only failure, cowardice, timidity, in short, a despair at our general weakness.This sense of futility haunts us all.
And yet within that failure is hope. Having only ourselves we finally discover bedrock: ourselves.
Everywhere – in every party, organisation, workplace, club, gym, street, café and pub – are to be found those who do not agree with where power is taking our country.
And at the moment, we can still keep climate change within the 1.5C change. It is difficult. But it remains possible. And science tells us that at 1.5C we can still exercise control over our future.
But if we choose not to act now within a decade we will be looking at between 2C and 6C of warming by 2100. And at that point science tells us that we can no longer control anything.
It won’t matter whether we fight or not, because the fight will be lost. The changes will not be able to be contained and we will be living on a planet increasingly hostile to human existence.
And so the situation is not yet terminal. It remains in our control if we wish to take control. There is hope if we dare hope. There is a better future if we are willing to express it and demand it.
And it is clear that the concerns that so many of us have dwarf the differences of groups and parties. I thought on the things that we could unite around as Australians, that we could use to go forward, that would make our country, as it has been in the past, a global leader, and a proud country once more.
Words only have the power others grant to them. If we do nothing we are endorsing Michael McCormack’s words and Scott Morrison’s actions in Tuvalu.
Or we can use other words.
And so I sought to distill into as few words as possible what could be done by us as a people. What was feasible, what was achievable. None are new ideas, all are founded in science, and all are being fought for in various ways. But everywhere we see them dismissed and attacked as impossible, ludicrous and unworkable.
Yet when reduced to their essence how reasonable they are. When conceived as a mutual and national endeavour how possible they become. And writing them I felt my despair lift. I realised that there can be a positive vision for our future, a future that brings us together rather than divides us, that makes us a better, stronger country.
And in six sentences I saw hope is possible.

1. We believe Australia can be an affirming light in a time of despair, a global leader in transitioning to a carbon-free and socially just society, and that is why we wish our government to –
2. Work with Australian land managers to stop land clearing, protect existing forests and grow new forests to absorb existing carbon pollution.
3. Work with Australian farmers and graziers to make farming carbon neutral.
4. Work with Australian miners to ensure a transition into 21st century minerals (nickel, rare earth) and end thermal coalmining and gas fracking in Australia.
5. Work with Australian regulators to make all Australian ground transport powered by renewable energy by 2030.
6. Work with Australian industry to make Australia a renewable energy giant and carbon-neutral economy by 2050, funded by progressive pollution tariffs on global heaters.
7. That neither the government nor Labor party would at present even contemplate such things is beside the point. That we must compel them is.

At the end of the Pacific Islands Forum, Enele Sopoaga asked the world to not forget his people: “We ask, please, understand this: our people are dying.”
I don’t doubt that there are far better words than my six sentences to be had and which will and should appear.
But we need to act now for if we don’t the fate of the Tuvalese may soon be ours also.
It’s time to take our future back. It’s time to stand and fight.
And though these final words seem strange as I write them, I feel them to be true: we will discover the language of hope in the quality of our courage.

Links

• An Urgent Call To Protect The World's "Third Pole"
• The Next Step In Fighting Climate Change
• Why Science Needs The Humanities To Solve Climate Change
• Want To Do Something About Global Warming? Talk About It With Your Family And Friends
• We Went To The Moon. Why Can’t We Solve Climate Change?
• The Counter-Intuitive Solution To Getting People To Care About Climate Change
• The One Viable Solution To Climate Change
• When it comes to coal, Australia has transitioned away from economics and common sense
• Picking fruit is work, not benevolence, and doesn't absolve Australia of climate responsibility

West Antarctica Is Melting—And It’s Our Fault

National Geographic - Alejandra Borunda

The fingerprints of human-caused climate change have made it to Antarctica, a new study shows

Pine Island Glacier, in West Antarctica, is retreating quickly. In 2014, this iceberg, 20 miles wide, broke off the tongue of the glacier and floated away. Other chunks of ice continue to shear off the glacier. Photograph by Jeff Schmaltz, NASA/GSFC/MODIS Land Rapid Response Team

The towering glaciers of West Antarctica hold the fate of the world’s coasts in their flanks. Their collapse could send sea levels up by at least a foot by 2100—and potentially much more.
For years, scientists have watched and learned that those glaciers are crumbling and melting, the rate speeding up over the decades and imperiling the stability of the entire ice sheet. But while the science was clear that human influences on climate would affect the ice down the line, it has been hard to tell whether human-driven global warming has affected the melting already underway.
Now, a team has unraveled evidence of that human influence. In a study published Monday in Nature Geoscience, a team of scientists showed that over the past century, human-driven global warming has changed the character of the winds that blow over the ocean near some of the most fragile glaciers in West Antarctica. Sometimes, those winds have weakened or reversed, which in turn causes changes in the ocean water that laps up against the ice in a way that caused the glaciers to melt.
“We now have evidence to support that human activities have influenced the sea level rise we’ve seen from West Antarctica,” says lead author Paul Holland, a polar scientist at the British Antarctic Survey.

The ocean eats the ice
The massive West Antarctic ice sheet holds something like 6 percent of the world’s fresh water frozen in its guts. If it all melted away, global sea levels would rise by about 10 feet or more. That’s not likely to happen anytime particularly soon, scientists think, but some parts of the ice sheet are particularly vulnerable, in danger of crossing a crucial “tipping point” if they retreat too far. (Read about the "tipping point" here).
In the past decades, some glaciers in the region have been retreating shockingly quickly. Pine Island Glacier and Thwaites Glaciers, for example, are losing about 100 billion tons of ice each year, and more in bad years. (See what a 10 billion ton chunk of ice looks like in this video).
The glaciers have been receding because their snouts spill over the edge of the continent into the surrounding ocean, which is warmer than the ice. The warm water melts away the ice.
Just how warm the ocean is, though, matters a lot. Over decades, the temperature of the water has waxed and waned, driven in part by natural climate cycles that send different water masses close to the edge of the ice sheet at different times, cycling through from cold to a little less cold every five years or so.

See the crack splitting an Antarctic ice shelf in two

Stunning drone footage shows how an iceberg the size of Houston, Texas is holding on by a thread.

Jaskiran Nagi

The main thing that controls whether warm water makes it to the edge of the ice sheet, it turns out, is the strength of the winds a little bit farther offshore, in the heart of the icy, bitter Amundsen Sea. Sometimes, those winds—cousins of the famous raging band of Southern Ocean winds known as the Roaring 40s—slacken or even reverse. When they do, more warm water ends up near the edge of the ice sheet, which means more ice melts away. (See what the world would look like if all the ice melted away).
“In the 1920s, the winds were pretty much consistently blowing toward the west,” says Holland. “So in the old days, it was cold all the time—it flopped between cold and very cold.”
But now, because of the slow warming of the planet, the whole baseline has moved up. Instead of the cycle flipping between cold and very cold, the flip is between warm and cold.
Scientists knew that the strength of the winds in this region of the Amundsen Sea affected the water temperature. Records of wind strength and direction only went back until 1979. But the patterns in this region match up nearly perfectly with conditions far away, in the tropical Pacific Ocean, where much better, longer-term records exist—so the team could extrapolate how the polar-region winds have changed over the last century.
They used a suite of climate models to look at how the wind patterns would have evolved over the last 100 years if human-caused global warming weren’t in play, and compared that with what the winds actually did. Today’s pattern—with about equal west-flowing and east-flowing winds—means the whole region ends up quite a bit warmer than it was 100 years ago, when the wind flowed toward the west most of the time.

Ice out of Balance
In the past, and even up to the early part of the record the scientists looked at in the 1920s, ice melted during warm phases and grew back during cold phases. But over the last century, that balance has come undone. The shifting winds and warm ocean phases have eaten away at the ice more quickly than it’s being replaced.
Several particularly notable moments of wind-flipping, like in the 1970s, matched up closely with major retreats of the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers.
Those glaciers are particularly sensitive to melting at their snouts. The ground underneath them, it turns out, is concave, like a bowl. The glacier ice is attached the “rim” of the bowl, but if it melts back past that edge, warm ocean water can spill underneath it and melt it even more quickly from the bottom.
In 1974, one of these strong moments of melting pushed the glaciers past one of these “rims,” and since then the glacier has melted much more quickly than it did before—at least 50 percent more melt after that un-groundig than before, said Eric Steig, an atmospheic and ice core scientist at the University of Washington and an author of the paper.

The suspect has been identified—and it’s us
The ultimate cause of the wind patterns, they found, is human-caused climate change. The extra greenhouse gases humans have pumped into the atmosphere over the past few hundred years have changed the way heat moves around the planet so thoroughly that they’ve changed the shape of the basic wind patterns at the poles.
The Antarctic ice sheet sat more or less stable in shape and size for many thousands of years. But about a century ago, pieces of it started to retreat in measurable ways. That’s well within the time frame when carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases had started to accumulate thickly in the atmosphere, so it seemed logical to think that human influence was affecting the ice. But Antarctica is a complicated place that changes a lot because of natural variability, so it has been challenging to pinpoint the extent of human influence on the changes.
“It was very hard to imagine that the ice sat around happily for millennia and then decided to retreat naturally just as humans started perturbing the system, but the evidence for forcing by natural variability was strong,” writes Richard Alley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, in an email.
But a warming planet has very clearly changed the way winds move around Antarctica—and that change is likely to continue, unless something drastic happens to slow or reverse the warming process.
“If we carry this pattern forward, we may move to a situation where we’re flipping between warm and very warm,” says Holland. And that could be devastating for the ice.
But the future isn’t yet written, Steig stressed. Keeping future greenhouse gas emissions in check would go a long way toward keeping those crucial winds from weakening further, the water under the edge of the ice chilly, and the ice frozen.
“[West Antarctic Ice Sheet] melting will affect everyone,” says Steig. “The effects will be global, because sea level will rise globally.”

Links

• What Climate Tipping Points Should We Be Looking Out For?
• Glacial Melting In Antarctica May Become Irreversible
• Journey To Antarctica: What Scientists Think Of Trump’s Latest Climate Tweet
• Antarctic Sea Ice Declining ‘Precipitously’ Since 2014, Study Finds
• NASA: Antarctica's Effect On Sea Level Rise In Coming Centuries
• Antarctica Is Losing Ice At An Accelerating Rate. How Much Will Sea Levels Rise?
• Polar Warning: Even Antarctica’s Coldest Region Is Starting To Melt
• Journey to Antarctica: Is This What a Climate Catastrophe Looks Like in Real Time?
• Alaskan glaciers melting 100 times faster than previously thought
• Himalayan glaciers melting at alarming rate, spy satellites show

Global Ocean Circulation Appears To Be Collapsing Due To A Warming Planet

Forbes - Trevor Nace

Global ocean circulation appears to be slowing

NASA

 Scientists have long known about the anomalous "warming hole" in the North Atlantic Ocean, an area immune to warming of Earth's oceans. This cool zone in the North Atlantic Ocean appears to be associated with a slowdown in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), one of the key drivers in global ocean circulation.
A recent study published in Nature outlines research by a team of Yale University and University of Southhampton scientists. The team found evidence that Arctic ice loss is potentially negatively impacting the planet's largest ocean circulation system. While scientists do have some analogs as to how this may impact the world, we will be largely in uncharted territory.
AMOC is one of the largest current systems in the Atlantic Ocean and the world. Generally speaking, it transports warm and salty water northward from the tropics to South and East of Greenland. This warm water cools to ambient water temperature then sinks as it is saltier and thus denser than the relatively more fresh surrounding water. The dense mass of water sinks to the base of the North Atlantic Ocean and is pushed south along the abyss of the Atlantic Ocean.

Schematic of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation

Wikipedia

This process whereby water is transported into the Northern Atlantic Ocean acts to distribute ocean water globally. What's more important, and the basis for concern of many scientists is this mechanism is one of the most efficient ways Earth transports heat from the tropics to the northern latitudes. The warm water transported from the tropics to the North Atlantic releases heat to the atmosphere, playing a key role in warming of western Europe. You likely have heard of one of the more popular components of the AMOC, the Gulf Stream which brings warm tropical water to the western coasts of Europe.
Evidence is growing that the comparatively cold zone within the Northern Atlantic could be due to a slowdown of this global ocean water circulation. Hence, a slowdown in the planet's ability to transfer heat from the tropics to the northern latitudes. The cold zone could be due to melting of ice in the Arctic and Greenland. This would cause a cold fresh water cap over the North Atlantic, inhibiting sinking of salty tropical waters. This would in effect slow down the global circulation and hinder the transport of warm tropical waters north.

Measured trend in temperature variations from 1900 to 2012.
NOAA

Melting of the Arctic sea ice has rapidly increased in the recent decades. Satellite image records indicate that September Arctic sea ice is 30% less today than it was in 1979. This trend of increased sea ice melting during summer months does not appear to be slowing. Hence, indications are that we will see a continued weakening of the global ocean circulation system.
This scenario of a collapse in AMOC and global ocean circulation is the premise for the movie "The Day After Tomorrow." As a disclaimer, the plot line in which much of New England and Western Europe gets plunged into an ice age is significantly over exaggerated and unrealistic on human time scales.
While geologists have studied events in the past similar to what appears to be happening today, scientists are largely unsure of what lies ahead.

Links

• The Real Reason They Behave Hypocritically On Climate Change Is Because They Want To
• Is Carbon Sequestration An Effective Way To Combat Climate Change?
• How Can We Address Climate Change Through Agriculture?
• Can't Take The Heat? Get Out And Teach Kids About Climate Change
• Smarter Land Use Could Combat Climate Change
• Making One Billion People Resilient To Climate Change By 2030
• Dead Microbes Lock Away Carbon—What This Means For Climate Change
• Climate Change: 18 Months To Save The World
• 6 Hidden Costs Of Government Inaction On Climate Change
• The Vital Next Step In Fighting Climate Change
• What Role Should Carbon Pricing Play In Addressing Climate Change?
• Implementing The One Viable Solution To Climate Change