Lethal Heating: 09/26/19

26/09/2019

Climate Change Could Stretch Our Capabilities, Defence Force Chief Speech Warns

ABC News - Melissa Clarke

The speech, obtained under freedom of information, was prepared for General Angus Campbell. (AAP: Andrew Taylor)

Key points

The Defence Chief's speech warns of the threat climate change poses to Australia's military and deployments
The speech was prepared for General Angus Campbell for an invitation-only event in regional NSW
It stated that climate change disasters have required more Australian personnel than the Afghan war

Increasingly frequent natural disasters caused by climate change could stretch the capability of the Australian Defence Force (ADF), according to a speech prepared for Defence Force Chief Angus Campbell.
It warns of climate change prompting more disaster relief efforts, as well as more peace-keeping missions, given it says climate change has "the potential to exacerbate conflict".
The speech, obtained under freedom of information, was prepared for General Campbell to deliver to an invitation-only retreat in regional New South Wales in June for managers from government departments and agencies.
It's not clear how closely he followed it, with General Campbell characterising his presentation as "extemporaneous" but drawing on "key facts and vignettes" from the written speech.
The speech notes that Australia is in "the most natural disaster-prone region in the world" and that "climate change is predicted to make disasters more extreme and more common".
It sets out the level of commitment required from the ADF to respond to climate change-related events compared to more traditional deployments.
"Australia sent around 1,000 troops to support Operation Fiji Assist [after Cyclone Winston], about 1,600 ADF personnel assisted after Cyclone Debbie hit Queensland and earlier this year, close to 3,000 troops helped North Queensland clean up after the floods," the written speech states.
"At the height of our involvement, we had about 1,500 troops in Afghanistan.
"The number of troops deployed on disaster relief missions can, at times, be a significant commitment for Defence.
"Deploying troops on numerous disaster relief missions, at the same time, may stretch our capability and capacity."

The global effort to combat climate change has been discussed at the United Nations in New York this week. (AP Photo: Evan Vucci)

Warming unprecedented in 2,000 years

Research shows Little Ice Age, Medieval Warm Period weren't globally coherent periods of warming or cold.

As well as missions to assist after natural disasters, climate change could see the ADF drawn into more conflicts around the world, the speech warned.
It considers the Syrian civil war, setting out how climate change-induced drought "added enormous pressure" to existing problems.
"Defence may also be increasingly called upon to support stabilisation, governance or peace-keeping activities."
The written speech also set out how the Federal Government's actions on climate change could affect relationships with Pacific island nations, given they are asking Australia to do more to reduce emissions.
"It could impact our ability to influence their choices for support in the region."

Labor's Pat Conroy said whether or not the speech was delivered remains irrelevant. (ABC News: Matt Roberts)

Labor's spokesman for the Pacific, Pat Conroy, described the speech as the most significant from Defence in a decade, whilst noting General Campbell's insistence he spoke off-the-cuff at the event.
"It doesn't actually matter whether it was given or not," he said.
"This was the final speech, signed off by all of Defence, including the Chief of the Defence Force, as their official views at this forum on climate change as a national security threat."

An island's race against time

The Carteret Islands were the first place in the world to require population relocations due to climate change, with predictions they would be submerged by 2015.

The Department of Defence declined to clarify what General Campbell said, however prior reporting of the presentation included remarks identical to the written speech.
"If this is in a prepared speech for an outside event, you can guarantee Defence is giving this same advice to Government," Mr Conroy said.
"I'm heartened that the ADF is thinking about this seriously, as they should, and projecting into the long term.
"[The] Government is clearly not taking it seriously, otherwise you wouldn't have a very weak 2030 target that they have no hope of achieving."
The Federal Government last year signed the Boe Declaration, a Pacific-wide declaration stating that climate change is the single greatest threat to security in the region.
However, the Coalition was slammed at last month's Pacific Islands Forum leaders meeting in Tuvalu over its refusal to take stronger action to combat climate change.

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Australian Government Seen Globally As Climate 'Denialist', UN Summit Observers Say

The Guardian - Adam Morton

Experts at the meeting say Australia is seen as ‘engaging in greenwashing’ and using accounting tricks to increase emissions

Scott Morrison inspects an interactive menu in Chicago while other leaders attend the climate summit. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

Scott Morrison is increasingly seen as running a “denialist government” that is not serious about finding a global climate solution and uses “greenwash” to meet its emissions commitments, analysts and former diplomats say.
Australian observers in New York said Morrison’s failure to attend a UN climate action summit on Monday despite being in the US, and his apparent rejection of the need for Australia to do more to address its rising greenhouse gas emissions, eroded goodwill for the country on the issue.
While representatives from about 60 nations spoke at the summit, Morrison gave a keynote speech at the Chicago Institute for Global Affairs in which he challenged China to do more heavy lifting on climate change and suggested it should be treated as a “newly developed” economy rather than a developing one.
Bill Hare, the chief executive and senior scientist of Climate Analytics and a longtime adviser to countries at climate talks, said the UN summit had been “very disappointing” as most larger polluters, including Australia, had failed to meet the secretary general Antonio Guterres’ call to increase commitments, leaving ambitious strides to smaller nations.
He said country representatives at the summit were dismissive of Australia’s intentions.
“Diplomatic officials from countries that I speak with see Australia as a denialist government,” he said. “It’s just accepted that’s what it is. It is seen as doing its own promotion of coal and natural gas against the science.”
Hare said Morrison’s suggestion China should be doing more on climate, and be treated similarly to the most developed countries, while Australia’s emissions continued to increase year-on-year was a “ridiculous fake argument”.
He said China, the world’s most populous country and biggest annual polluter, was not doing anywhere near enough to tackle the crisis, but was doing more than Australia on many measures. It had national policies in a number of areas – boosting renewable energy, energy efficiency, electric vehicles and efficiency in industry – where Australia did not.
“Is that having enough of an effect in China? No. But will China peak its emissions by the end of the 2020s? Yes,” Hare said.
“Will Australia? There is no evidence that Australia will peak its emissions as far as I’ve seen in any projections that have been published.”
A report backed by the world’s major climate science bodies released on the eve of the summit found current plans would lead to a rise in average global temperatures of between 2.9C and 3.4C by 2100, a shift likely to bring catastrophic change across the globe.
Richie Merzian, a former climate diplomat who now works at progressive thinktank the Australian Institute, said Australia was seen by other countries as denying the severity of the problem and in engaging in “greenwashing” by using accounting tricks to meet targets while actual emissions increased.
While leaders from other countries did not attend – notably Japan, Brazil and South Africa, while Donald Trump made a surprise passing appearance – Merzian said Morrison’s absence was seen as condescending as he was nearby. “If prime minister Morrison thinks he has skipped this meeting and not damaged his relationship with the Pacific, he’s in denial,” Merzian said.
With Morrison absent, having not being invited to speak, Australia’s delegation was instead led by the foreign affairs minister, Marise Payne, and the Australian ambassador for the environment, Patrick Suckling.

Kevin Rudd: Australia is ‘free-riding’
The former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd told the ABC Morrison’s failure to attend sent a message to corporate Australia it was not serious about climate action. National emissions have increased each year since the carbon pricing scheme was abolished in 2014.“When you have a prime minister of the country not stepping up to the plate, addressing the world’s forum, and indicating what Australia’s future carbon reduction commitments will be, it sends a very clear message to the Australian domestic community and the international community that the Australian government is just not serious,” Rudd said.
“We are free-riding on the rest of the world. I believe it’s unacceptable.”
Asked about criticism thrown at the Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, who gave an impassioned address at the summit, Rudd said she represented “the anger of that generation and does so effectively”.
“It might insult a whole lot of middle-aged white guys, because it is not the way that we would talk, or we think that it is inappropriate for a young girl to speak that way, but when I speak to young people around the world, whether it is in China, here in the United States or back home in Australia, frankly there is a rising rage that our generation has failed to step up to the plate,” he said.

Greta Thunberg at the climate summit. Kevin Rudd says she represents ‘the anger of that generation and does so effectively’. Photograph: Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images

Dean Bialek, a former Australian diplomat to the UN, now working with the Mission 2020 campaign led by ex-UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, said Australia was increasingly perceived as a “self-interested laggard”, pointing to the Morrison government’s support for new coalmines as the mainstream science community and the UN secretary general called for thermal coal to be rapidly phased out.
He said Australia was also seen as engaging in double-speak as it claimed to be meeting its international commitments while planning to use “carryover credits” from the Kyoto protocol that did not represent new emission cuts and were not referred to in the Paris agreement.
Australia was also ignoring a key part of the Paris deal: that the targets volunteered in France, in Australia’s case a 26-28% cut below 2005 levels by 2030, were not enough and would be reviewed and ramped up.
“Not only has Australia started with a very weak target but it is now saying it is not planning to increase that very weak target next year,” Bialek said. “There seems to be complete amnesia about this big commitment made in Paris.”
Under questioning in the US, Morrison ducked questions about when Australia would develop an emissions reduction strategy for 2050, despite signing on at the Pacific Islands Forum to a communique pledging to develop one next year.
He said his government would meet the 2030 commitments made at the election. Asked what the plan beyond that was, Morrison said: “We are making our commitments to 2030, that’s what we are doing. We keep setting the targets and we keep meeting them.”

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2019 Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Tied For Second Lowest On Record

NASA - Maria-José Viñas

Arctic sea ice likely reached its 2019 minimum extent on Sept. 18. At 1.60 million square miles (4.15 million square kilometers), this year's summertime extent is effectively tied for the second in the satellite record, according to NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Credit: NASA/Trent Schindler
LARGE IMAGE

The extent of Arctic sea ice at the end of this summer was effectively tied with 2007 and 2016 for second lowest since modern record keeping began in the late 1970s. An analysis of satellite data by NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado Boulder shows that the 2019 minimum extent, which was likely reached on Sept. 18, measured 1.60 million square miles (4.15 million square kilometers).

Arctic sea ice likely reached its 2019 minimum extent on Sept. 18. At 1.60 million square miles (4.15 million square kilometers), this year's summertime extent is effectively tied for the second in the satellite record, according to NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Credit: NASA/ Katie Jepson.
This video can be downloaded at NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio.

The Arctic sea ice cap is an expanse of frozen seawater floating on top of the Arctic Ocean and neighboring seas. Every year, it expands and thickens during the fall and winter and grows smaller and thinner during the spring and summer. But in the past decades, increasing temperatures have caused marked decreases in the Arctic sea ice extents in all seasons, with particularly rapid reductions in the minimum end-of-summer ice extent.
Changes in Arctic sea ice cover have wide-ranging impacts. The sea ice affects local ecosystems, regional and global weather patterns, and the circulation of the oceans.
“This year’s minimum sea ice extent shows that there is no sign that the sea ice cover is rebounding,” said Claire Parkinson, a climate change senior scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The long-term trend for Arctic sea ice extent has been definitively downward. But in recent years, the extent is low enough that weather conditions can either make that particular year’s extent into a new record low or keep it within the group of the lowest.”

An opening in the sea ice cover north of Greenland is partially filled in by much smaller sea ice rubble and floes, as seen during an Operation IceBridge flight on Sept. 9, 2019. Credit: NASA/Linette Boisvert

The melt season started with a very low sea ice extent, followed by a very rapid ice loss in July that slowed down considerably after mid-August. Microwave instruments onboard United States Department of Defense’s meteorological satellites monitored the changes from space.
“This was an interesting melt season,” said Walt Meier, a sea ice researcher at NSIDC. “At the beginning of August we were at record low ice levels for that time of the year, so a new minimum record low could have been in the offering.
”But unlike 2012, the year with the lowest ice extent on record, which experienced a powerful August cyclone that smashed the ice cover and accelerated its decline, the 2019 melt season didn’t see any extreme weather events. Although it was a warm summer in the Arctic, with average temperatures 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit (4 to 5 degrees Celsius) above what is normal for the central Arctic, events such as this year’s severe Arctic wildfire season or European heat wave ended up not having much impact on the sea ice melt.
“By the time the Siberian fires kicked into high gear in late July, the Sun was already getting low in the Arctic, so the effect of the soot from the fires darkening the sea ice surface wasn’t that large,” Meier said. “As for the European heat wave, it definitely affected land ice loss in Greenland and also caused a spike in melt along Greenland’s east coast, but that’s an area where sea ice is being transported down the coast and melting fairly quickly anyway.”

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