22/10/2019

The Culprit Behind East Australia's Big Dry

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

When leading climate scientist Matthew England began work at a lab in Hobart in the mid-1980s, visitors were greeted by a huge graphic depicting a tight correlation between El Ninos and Australia's farm yields.
Any government minister would leave understanding that "we’ve got a tremendous amount of economic wealth" dependent on Pacific climate influences, making El Nino research "iconic", England says.
It turns out more attention should have been paid to the Indian Ocean.
Climate scientists and meteorologists increasingly pay attention to what's happening in the Indian Ocean to help predict rainfall in south-eastern Australia. Credit: Andrew Weldon
As we have seen this year, conditions that drive El Ninos - relative sea-surface temperature differences between the western and eastern Pacific - have been neutral. But the counterpart ratio in the Indian Ocean has gone haywire. Known as the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), the gauge last week hit record levels.


In its so-called positive phase, tropical waters off Australia's north-west are relatively cool  - compared with those near Africa - strengthening easterly winds and reducing the potential convection that typically supplies much of south-eastern Australia's critical winter and spring rains. A negative IOD has the opposite effect.
“They used to think the Indian Ocean was a slave to the Pacific," says Cai Wenju, a senior climate researcher at the CSIRO, adding this year's IOD figures are "gigantic".
“The biggest clue" that the Indian Ocean could influence Australia independently came in 2007 and 2008 when the Pacific was in its La Nina phase, which should have raised the odds for good rains, Dr Cai said. Instead, the Millenium Drought was still playing out, and there were positive-phase IODs three years in a row.
"Sometimes, the El-Nino Southern Oscillation has copped a bad rap when it should have been the IOD," Andrew Watkins, head of long-range forecasting at the Bureau of Meteorology, says.
Australian researchers from the 1980s had started examining how relative warm or cool waters off Western Australia could affect rainfall over the continent. However, it took two papers published in Nature in 1999 by Japanese and North American scientists - including Australian Peter Webster - to tease out the potential of an independent IOD.

Average Australian rainfall for the first nine months of the year has been the lowest since 1965, made worse by poor cool-season rains. Credit: Nick Moir
Scientists including England and Cai will gather in China next month to mark that 20th anniversary, with the IOD now a key component of Australia's and global weather and climate predictions.
Scientists caution that reliable observation data only goes back a couple of decades but it is clear this year's positive-IOD is already one of the strongest of record. So-called "reanalysis" using a combination of observations and modelling suggests the event is also notable over the past 150 years.

Nerilie Abram, an associate professor at the Australian National University, published work in 2009 that used coral cores among other data to push IOD estimates back to the mid-1800s. Research awaiting publication will look back 1000 years. While the current event is significant, her study suggests “perhaps the instrumental record doesn’t tell us the full range what’s actually possible in the Indian Ocean”.
The magnitude of an IOD appears to matter more for rainfall over south-eastern Australia than the El Nino-La Nina flux, the Bureau of Meteorology's Watkins said: "The stronger the IOD, the stronger the impacts ... for Australia, and maybe for Africa."
Another difference is that Indian Ocean conditions are more regulated by the seasonal cycle than the Pacific. Positive or negative IODs typically take form by May or June, peak around September and October, and break down in November to December as the monsoon shifts south, disrupting the easterly winds.
Poor winter and spring rains from positive IODs are not just bad for farmers. Those rains also supply much of the run-off that let our rivers run and fill the dams. Heatwaves are more severe and prolonged as soils dry out, removing the cooling function from evaporation, and setting up a busy bushfire season.
Australia's year-to-date daytime temperatures are already running at a record high, the bureau says. "It’s not a great precursor for the summer ahead when we’ve had a strong positive IOD," Abram says. “We’ve tended to have very severe summer bushfires particularly in the Victoria area."
While researchers are yet to settle on how much of a role climate change is already playing in big El Ninos or IODs, "we’re seeing extreme events become more common”, Abram says.
Dr Cai says that while the Indian Ocean is warming - along with others around the world - “the west is warming faster”. Under such conditions, "it’s easier to have an extreme positive IOD event", he said.
Bad bushfire seasons in Victoria and elsewhere in Australia's south-east have often coincided with positive IOD events, such as in 2009. Credit: AAP

Such a future would be bad news for farmers, and raise doubts about the effectiveness of policies proclaimed to be "drought-proofing".“We change the average climate by having these events more frequently or more strongly,"  Abram says. "It has an effect of changing our average rainfall.”
England says that while IODs can act independently of the Pacific, the connections remain important. For instance, the so-called Indonesian Throughflow - where warm water from the Pacific funnels its way to the Indian Ocean - could change.
"The predictions are for that to weaken," he says. "If it does, that would be a double whammy of more El Ninos plus more positive-IODs."
The potentially huge consequences from such complex interactions are a reminder that researchers can't rest.
"We are perturbing the atmosphere in a profound way with greenhouse gases," England says. "How this changes our modes of variability is uncertain.”

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You Can't Save The Climate By Going Vegan. Corporate Polluters Must Be Held Accountable.

USA Today - Michael E. Mann | Jonathan Brockopp

Many individual actions to slow climate change are worth taking. But they distract from the systemic changes that are needed to avert this crisis.

Climate protest in Bangkok on May 24, 2019. (Photo: Lauren DeCicca/Getty Images)
Authors
“People start pollution. People can stop it.” That was the tag line of the famous “Crying Indian” ad campaign that first aired on Earth Day in 1971. It was, as it turns out, a charade. Not only was “Iron Eyes Cody” actually an Italian-American actor, the campaign itself successfully shifted the burden of litter from corporations that produced packaging to consumers.
The problem, we were told, wasn’t pollution-generating corporate practices. It was you and me. And efforts to pass bottle bills, which would have shifted responsibility to producers for packaging waste, failed. Today, decades later, plastic pollution has so permeated our planet that it can now be found in the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench 36,000 feet below.
Here is another Crying Indian campaign going on today — with climate change. Personal actions, from going vegan to avoiding flying, are being touted as the primary solution to the crisis. Perhaps this is an act of desperation in an era of political division, but it could prove suicidal.
Though many of these actions are worth taking, and colleagues and friends of ours are focused on them in good faith, a fixation on voluntary action alone takes the pressure off of the push for governmental policies to hold corporate polluters accountable. In fact, one recent study suggests that the emphasis on smaller personal actions can actually undermine support for the substantive climate policies needed.
This new obsession with personal action, though promoted by many with the best of intentions, plays into the hands of polluting interests by distracting us from the systemic changes that are needed.
There is no way to avert the climate crisis without keeping most of our coal, oil and gas in the ground, plain and simple. Because much of the carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries, our choices in the next few years are crucial, and they will determine the lives our grandchildren and their grandchildren. We need corporate action, not virtue signaling.
Massive changes to our national energy grid, a moratorium on new fossil fuel infrastructure and a carbon fee and dividend (that steeply ramps up) are just some examples of visionary policies that could make a difference. And right now, the "Green New Deal," support it or not, has encouraged a much needed, long overdue societal conversation about these and other options for averting climate catastrophe.
But we need more than the left wing of the Democratic Party on board. We need a national plan of action that will include everyone.
Consider the benefits. With five years of concentrated effort, we could have a supply of clean, renewable energy that is virtually inexhaustible. We could have many fewer deaths from mercury, particulates and ozone produced by burning dirty fossil fuels. And, we could set a shining example for the rest of the world of how the climate crisis can be solved both equitably and productively.

Don't change light bulbs, change energy system
Focusing on policies that incentivize corporate environmental stewardship will force us to work together and cross political, racial and religious lines. It will connect us to the rest of the world as we aim to solve a truly global problem. In contrast, a focus on personal action can divide us, with those living virtuously distancing themselves from those living “in sin.”
A national plan of action, in fact, is not a new idea. It was proposed by Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1992 when he promised “an action plan on climate change.” If we had taken up his challenge over a quarter century ago, when carbon dioxide levels were about 350 parts per million, this would all be much easier. Now they are surpassing 415 ppm and rising quickly, and we are locking in ever more dangerous climate change impacts.
What decades of industry obstinance bought us is a trip down a much steeper carbon emissions ramp, so now we must turn from changing light bulbs to changing our entire energy system. There is still time to avert the worst impacts of climate change, but not without immediate, collective action.

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Why We're Rethinking The Images We Use For Our Climate Journalism

The Guardian - 

Guardian picture editor Fiona Shields explains why we are going to be using fewer polar bears and more people to illustrate our coverage of the climate emergency
A villager shouts for help as a wildfire approaches a house at Casas da Ribeira village in Macao, central Portugal on July 2019. Photograph: Patrícia de Melo Moreira/AFP/Getty Images
At the Guardian we want to ensure that the images we publish accurately and appropriately convey the climate crisis that we face. Following discussions among editors about how we could change the language we use in our coverage of environmental issues, our attention then turned to images. We have been working across the organisation to better understand how we aim to visually communicate the impact the climate emergency is having across the world.
Our goal is to provide guidelines for anyone working with images at the Guardian. We are also asking the agencies and photographers we work with to provide images that are appropriate to the changing narrative.
The concern over how best to depict the climate emergency led us to seek advice from the research organisation Climate Visuals, who have found that “images that define climate change shape the way it is understood and acted upon”.
A man and his child wear masks to protect them from heavy smog as they visit Waitan in December 2013 in Shanghai, China. Photograph: VCG/VCG via Getty Images
The industrial landscape across the Dee estuary at sunrise as steam rises from Deeside power station, Shotton Steelworks and other heavy industrial plants in April 2016 in Flintshire, Wales. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
It was important to address our own use of images and understand the processes that lead to image selection for our environmental and weather stories. When given a story, a picture editor or subeditor may have a short time to choose an image from our database, which is why the availability and prominence of climate crisis photography is a key element in the process. It can also be difficult for photographers to capture images that reflect global heating, weather patterns and wildlife extinction, especially when trying to depict what cannot always be seen.
We know, from years of experience, that people love polar bears and pandas, so it is easy to see how these appealing creatures have become the emblems for the topics of endangered species and what we previously termed as global warming. Often, when signalling environmental stories to our readers, selecting an image of a polar bear on melting ice has been the obvious – though not necessarily appropriate – choice. These images tell a certain story about the climate crisis but can seem remote and abstract – a problem that is not a human one, nor one that is particularly urgent.
So it made sense when we heard that research conducted by the team at Climate Visuals has shown that people respond to human pictures and stories. Images that show emotion and pictures of real situations make the story relevant to the individual. Rather than choosing, say, an image of a smoke stack pumping out pollution or a forest on fire, such as this:
A wildfire burns uphill in the Appalachian mountains. Photograph: aheflin/Getty Images/iStockphoto

… we should consider showing the direct impact of environmental issues on people’s daily lives as well as trying to indicate the scale of the impact, such as these:
A woman and child wear masks on a polluted day in Beijing in October 2014. Photograph: Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images
World Environment Day, Dimapur, India, June 2019. Photograph: Caisii Mao/REX/Shutterstock

Gordon Easter and Gail Hale embrace as they return to what remains of their home on Hopper Lane in Coffey Park, in October 2017 in Santa Rosa, Northern California, after a wildfire. Photograph: Kent Porter/AP
More than 6m metric tonnes of lead slag form Black Mountain, a 30-meter pile of toxic lead waste that still contains a sizable quantity of lead, copper, manganese and zinc, in Kabwe, Zambia. Photograph: Larry C. Price
In the UK, the weather is a national preoccupation and as such a subject of tradition for British newspapers. People enjoying a sunny holiday weekend, or a fresh fall of snow at home or abroad can deliver some delightful and beautiful images:
Kids make the most of the drifting snow on the Cotswold hills, Worcestershire, December 2017. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA
People enjoy the sunshine on Bournemouth beach during the late August bank holiday 2019. Photograph: Andrew Matthews/PA
 A woman plays with her dog in a park in Moscow, Russia, February 2019. Photograph: Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA 
But as we have reported, the science tells us a much more sinister story of regular heatwaves and unseasonal weather being a defining indicator of the climate crisis. So, although scenes of children playing in fountains and everyone racing to the beach can be uplifting and irresistible, we have to be mindful of the tone of our journalism. This summer, the British media published dramatic headlines issuing climate warnings and covered in detail the negative impact of the crisis, but the images were typically of people taking pleasure in the environment. The contradiction in messaging, between the headlines and imagery, can undermine the effect of the reporting and how we perceive the risks.
In June this year we published a picture gallery on the heatwave across Europe. In its original form, this was of a lighter tone, but we felt on reflection this was wrong and disregarded the current context, so we amended the publication to include images that covered a range of human experience of the extraordinary temperatures.
The photographer Brook Mitchell made an impactful series about the drought in Australia affecting families in New South Wales, which we published as a photo essay in July. The environmental scenes of the scorched landscape were striking, as were the suffering animals, but the portraits and stories of the people battling the catastrophe really anchored the piece and drove the level of engagement.
It is an example of how, as picture editors and photographers, we are having to think again about finding the right focus. Many of the impacts to communities, biodiversity, agriculture, water and food supply represent the escalating crisis our planet faces, yet visually they can be far more challenging to depict. We need new imagery for new narratives. This can be challenging in a fast-paced newsroom but it is important to be nuanced and creative with search terms to unearth photography beyond the usual keywords of climate change, heatwave and floods.
As our stories make a journey from their initial point of publication through the various networks of social media we also have to be mindful of how the image is connected to the headline. We have to consider that the two must work together to allow the reader to make a broad sense of the article often simply at a glance. Relatable images that are not overly abstract have become a good choice.
However, in its simplest form, getting the emotional tone of imagery in line with the issue is critical, rather than the visual overload of society universally having fun in the sun. We hope that if we keep having these conversations, we will be able to have even more of an impact with our climate coverage, and others will follow suit.
If you are a journalist, a photographer or work with other news organisations depicting the climate crisis, please contact membershipeditorial@guardian.co.uk to join our conversation.

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