12/11/2019

Regional Mayors Criticise Politicians For Failing To Link Climate Change And Deadly Bushfires

ABC News - Jenya Goloubeva | Nour Haydar


Deputy PM Michael McCormack needs to read the science: Glen Innes Mayor responds to comments on climate change. (ABC News)

Key points
  • Coalition politicians have criticised people for linking deadly bushfires and climate change
  • Mayors from fire-ravaged NSW have hit back at that, saying climate change is contributing to fires
  • Glen Innes mayor Carol Sparks says politicians need to believe the scientific evidence on climate change
Mayors from fire-ravaged areas of New South Wales have said there is no doubt in their minds that the devastating blazes tearing through their communities are a result of climate change.
Their comments are a rebuke to senior leaders within the state and federal governments, including Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Deputy PM Michael McCormack, who have criticised people for linking the current deadly bushfires to climate change.
Three people died in fires across the state at the weekend, with the State Government declaring a state of emergency amid predicted catastrophic conditions and predictions that the coming days will see "the most dangerous bushfire week this nation has ever seen".
"What people need now is a little bit of sympathy and understanding and real assistance, they need help, they need shelter," Mr McCormack said on ABC Radio National this morning.
"They don't need the ravings of some pure enlightened and woke capital city greenies at this time when they are trying to save their homes."


Firefighters drive through the middle of the Hillville bushfire near Taree, on the NSW mid-north coast, on Friday. (ABC News)

 Carol Sparks, the Mayor of Glen Innes, where two people died at the weekend, called on Mr McCormack to refer to scientific evidence before commenting further.
"I think that Michael McCormack needs to read the science, and that is what I am going by, is the science," she said.
"It is not a political thing - it is a scientific fact that we are going through climate change."
Responding directly to the comments made by the Deputy PM this morning, Mid Coast mayor Claire Pontin said she felt "cranky" when she heard Mr McCormack say that "we've had fires in Australia since time began".
"They need to get out and have a real look at what's happening to this country," Ms Pontin said.
"We've not had situations like that. Fifty years ago, this would never happen."
Ms Pontin said the issue went beyond politics and said it was essential to talking about climate change when considering how to respond to the bushfires,
"We don't have capital city greenies around here, we have farmers coming to us and saying, "look what's happened to my farm, I can't afford to feed the cows anymore because I've been buying feed for the last 18 months." she said.
"It's just ridiculous.
"It's not going to go away if we bury our heads in the sand."
The Bureau of Meteorology has said that "climate change is influencing the frequency and severity of dangerous bushfire conditions in Australia."
Federal Greens MP Adam Bandt said the weekend fires demonstrated that "the Government does not have the climate emergency under control".
"Scott Morrison has done everything in his power to increase the risk of catastrophic bushfires and sadly we are now witnessing apocalyptic scenes that none of us — none of us —want to see in Australia,” he said.
But Mr McCormack accused the Greens of exploiting the issue to score a "political point."
"That's what Adam Bandt, and the Greens, and Richard Di Natale, and all those other inner-city raving lunatics — and quite frankly, that's how he was carrying on yesterday — that's what they want, we're not going to go down that path."
Michael McCormack dismissed concerns the bushfires were linked to climate change. (AAP: Lukas Coch)

Mayor says Deputy Prime Minister needs to read the science
Former NSW Fire and Rescue chief Greg Mullins has been trying to set up a meeting with the Prime Minister and his team to address the bushfire emergency.
Mr Mullins and 22 other former emergency chiefs wrote a letter to Mr Morrison earlier this year predicting a bushfire crisis and calling the Prime Minister to the table to come with an action plan. The meeting has not been held.
"The numbers don't lie, and the science is clear," he wrote in an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald.
"Unprecedented dryness; reductions in long-term rainfall; low humidity; high temperatures; wind velocities; fire danger indices; fire spread and ferocity; instances of pyro-convective fires "fire storms - making their own weather); early starts and late finishes to bushfire season." An established long-term trend drive by a warming, drying climate," he wrote.
Mr Mullins cited previous examples when federal politicians shut down the climate change discussion saying it was inappropriate while fires are still burning. "But if not now, then when?" he asked.
NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro is another politician who has said now is not the time, lashing out at people for raising the issue of climate change.
"For any bloody greenie, lefty out there that wants to talk about climate change when communities are at risk — and over the next 48 hours we may lose more lives — and if this is the time that people talk about climate change they are a bloody disgrace," he said.
Fires also burned across Queensland at the weekend, such as this one near Yeppoon. (Facebook: Anthony Carter)
But Ms Pontin dismissed that.
"It's always the time to be talking about it," she said.
"Every level of government needs to recognise that there is a big issue and it's almost too late to act, but we've got to start doing something now."
What remains of a fire that tore through Rainbow Flat. (ABC News: Mridula Amin)

 
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Meltdown: Chilling Proof Of Global Heating

The Guardian - 

An arresting exhibition from activist charity Project Pressure uses conceptual photography to capture the decline of the ice caps
The Lewis Glacier, Mt Kenya by Simon Norfolk. The line of fire shows where the glacier used to extend to. Photograph: Simon Norfolk/Project Pressure
"What is it about those melting glaciers and desperate polar bears that makes us want to look away?” the activist and author Naomi Klein asked in 2015. In her book This Changes Everything, she laid the blame on powerful global corporations and acquiescent governments, which both simultaneously underplay the scale of the climate emergency and exploit our collective sense of helplessness in the face of it. Since then, a new urgency has driven climate activism, most successfully in the disruptive protests of Extinction Rebellion. Can art, though, have a meaningful role in raising awareness of that urgency?
A forthcoming exhibition, Meltdown: Visualising Climate Change, at the Horniman Museum in London sets out to answer that question in the affirmative. It focuses on the fate of the world’s glaciers through the prism of art, photography and film. “We are using art as a kind of seduction to draw people in, then shock them,” says photographer Simon Norfolk, one of the artists involved.
Why glaciers, though? Norfolk points out that, while severe floods and forest fires are in some ways more dramatically visual, “they can leave you open to the charge of not being scientific”. Glaciers, on the other hand, are one of the key and irrefutable indicators of climate change. “Through photography and film, you can record over time the ways in which they are receding, and by how much,” he says. “Plus, they are just so visual.”
The Lewis Glacier, Mt Kenya, 1963 (A), 2014. The image traces a line where the glacier’s front was in 1963 while showing where it is now. Using scientific maps and GPS, Norfolk marked out the older  line using hidden flashlights. ‘I walked along the line dragging my burning stick, joining up the dots of the flashlights. It took about 20 minutes, which was hard work at altitude. The exposure for the mountain and the stars continues for the rest of the hour. I wanted it to be all in camera because climate change is surrounded by loons who will claim I faked it all.’
By way of illustration, his arresting image The Lewis Glacier, Mt Kenya, 1963 shows a line of fire snaking along the rocky slope of a once completely snow-covered mountain skirting close to some scattered wooden buildings. It is one of a series of photographs he made using long, slow exposures on a mounted camera to track him as he ran along a meandering line on the mountain holding a flaming torch. (You can see him collapse with altitude exhaustion in a short film documenting the making of the work shot by the Observer photographer Antonio Olmos.) “I use old maps to trace the exact line where the front edge of the glacier existed in previous years,” he explains. “My starting point was 1963, the year I was born, and I have made similar images for selected years ever since. It is a way of photographing the absence of something, in this instance a few kilometres of ice that have disappeared in the intervening years.” The series won Norfolk a Sony World Photography award in 2015.
Ice Cave, Vatnajökull, 2014. Richard Mosse used a large-format plate-film camera and infrared film to photograph the ice cave under the Vatnajökull glacier in Iceland. Glacier caves usually form when air enters where water flows underneath the ice, the warm air slowly creates melting and forms a cave from beneath. The dynamic process is becoming more unpredictable as the weather changes and cave access may become impossible in the future.
Meltdown is curated by Project Pressure, an activist charity that, since 2008, has commissioned artists to work with climate scientists on often ambitious projects that highlight the earth’s increasingly unstable environment. Their partners and sponsors include Nasa, WGMS (World Glacier Monitoring Service), Hasselblad and the UN Climate Action Summit. “When we began in 2008, climate change was not high on the activist agenda in the way that it is now, but we understood the urgency,” says the founder of the project, Danish photographer Klaus Thymann. “For centuries, landscape has been one of the classic themes of great art, so it makes sense to use art as another means to make people aware of the climate emergency and hopefully help instigate institutional and behavioural changes.”
From a purely artistic perspective, what is most interesting about the Meltdown exhibition is that, though it includes the work of a few documentary photographers, it is a reflection of the broad range of conceptual strategies being adopted by contemporary activist artists: from Richard Mosse, winner of last year’s prestigious Prix Pictet, to Noémie Goudal, a French artist whose photographic installations, a hybrid of the real and the created, are made in often elemental landscapes.
Glacier 1, 2016, by Noemie Goudal. French conceptual artist Goudal is interested in the meeting of the organic and the manmade. This work was made on the Rhône glacier, where Goudal constructed a large-scale photographic installation printed on biodegradable paper that disintegrates in water. ‘All my work is about the fragility of the landscape,’ she says.
For Meltdown, Mosse used a large-format plate camera to photograph an eerily beautiful ice cave underneath the Vatnajökull glacier in Iceland. It was formed by air entering beneath the ice cap, and, in Mosse’s blue-tinged prints, resembles a sci-fi landscape, all smooth curves and jagged icicles, made all the more unreal by his use of infrared film.
Goudal specalises in elaborate interventions with the landscape. For this commission, she photographed the Rhône glacier in the Swiss Alps, before printing the results on large sheets of biodegradable paper. She then mounted the prints, which are 3.5 metres tall, on to plastic canvas using “a children’s glue that disintegrates on contact with water”. The prints were then suspended in front of the landscape she had photographed and, throughout a single day, she shot around a hundred frames of the disintegrating image.
“I am primarily interested in the choreography of the landscape and how it moves and changes continually,” she says. “I want to alter our perception of it through images that show the organic and the artificial blending and clashing. In this instance, I kept on shooting until the scene reverted to the original landscape.”
Mt Baker, 2014, by Peter Funch. Danish artist Funch uses old tourist postcards and historic photos as source material for his series Imperfect Atlas. In this case the images are re-creations of vintage postcards of Mount Baker [in Washington state, US] found on eBay ‘I located the positions from which the original postcard images had been made,’ he says, ‘and re-shot the glaciers from those positions to create comparative juxtapositions of then and now.’
I had assumed that Goudal’s disintegrating prints were a visual metaphor for the effects of global warming on the glacier, but she insists that her art “does not really fit into a discourse about environmental issues” and is more about the ways in which artists and scientists “observe and interpret” the environment. “Geology and astronomy are important elements in my work,” she says, “but, apart from this commission, there is really no big eco-subtext in the rest of my work.”
Other artists have turned to the past to make sense of our present ecological dilemmas. Peter Funch uses vintage tourist postcards and historic images of Mount Rainier and Mount Baker in the North Cascades in Washington as raw material for his series Imperfect Atlas. Using maps and satellite images, he pinpointed the exact spot from which the original pictures were taken so that he could photograph today’s mountain glaciers from the same position. Funch also employed an old-fashioned technical process called RGB tricolour separation, in which red, green, and blue filters are used to create three separate monochrome images, which are then combined to make a single full-colour image. The process was invented in 1850, a decade after the first recorded evidence that the mountain glaciers were receding. As his work makes clear, even the earliest 19th-century photographs of glaciers were visual documents of their slow decline.
Bone from 4000 BC, Switzerland, 2017: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin make photographic still lifes of the often perfectly preserved objects revealed by shrinking glaciers, such as this human bone which remained intact in the ice for thousands of years.
“In the exhibition, we use glaciers as a symbol,” says Thymann. “But some of the work is about what makes a surprising story. The artists Broomberg and Chanarin photographed objects that were found inside the ice of melting glaciers. Simon and myself collaborated on Shroud, which uses photographs and film to portray the attempt to slow down the melting of the Rhône glacier by wrapping a vast section of it in a thermal blanket.”
These images are desperate and deathly, like a Christo installation gone wrong. It turns out that the owners of a popular tourist attraction, an ice grotto, have spent 70,000 euros to try and preserve their site. These kinds of measures are symptomatic of what Thymann calls a kind of belated “adaptation anxiety” – “What are we going to do? How can we adapt to this?”
Shroud, 2018, by Simon Norfolk and Klaus Thyman: in an attempt to arrest the melting of the ice at an ice-grotto tourist attraction at the Rhône Glacier, local Swiss entrepreneurs paid for it to be covered up with a thermal blanket. ‘We chose the title,’ says Norfolk, ‘because it looks like they have created a shroud for the glacier’s death.’
That, of course, is a crucial question at the heart of the exhibition – and our global climate emergency. As Norfolk points out: “It is the poorest, who caused the least amount of damage to the environment, that will suffer the most. The rich will build higher flood walls around the financial district in Manhattan, but what will happen to people in Bangladesh?”
The point of Project Pressure is to create change though art. “This is not a time for helplessness or looking away,” says Thymann. “The mission is to use art to help accelerate change.” Norfolk nods his head in agreement. “It’s not about making another fancy photobook or beautiful exhibition, it’s about making trouble, starting arguments.”

• Meltdown: Visualizing Climate Change is at the Horniman Museum, London, from 23 November to 12 January 2020

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(UK) Climategate 10 Years On: What Lessons Have We Learned?

The Guardian -

A series of leaked emails was leapt on by climate-change deniers to discredit the data, but their efforts may have only slowed the search for solutions
Since the first images were taken in 1979, Arctic sea ice coverage has dropped by an average of about 34,000 square miles each year. Photograph: David Goldman/AP
The email that appeared on Phil Jones’s computer screen in November 2009 was succinct. “Just a quick note to encourage you to shoot yourself in the head,” it said. “Don’t waste any more time. Do it today. It is truly the greatest contribution to mankind that you will ever make.”
Nor was it very different from the other emails that were arriving in Jones’s inbox. Others described the climate scientist as the scum of the earth. Some authors promised to kill him themselves. Most of the messages were riddled with obscenities. All made troubling reading.
Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia. Photograph: Chris Bourchier / Rex Features 
As to the cause of this outpouring of hatred, that was straightforward. Jones headed the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, from which a tranche of emails had just been hacked and made public. These, it was claimed, showed that he and fellow researchers were faking the evidence that suggested our planet was heating up dangerously.
The affair was dubbed Climategate by those who deny the existence of global warming and it remains one of modern society’s most troubling affairs. Many observers believe it helped delay measures that might have slowed climate change and given humanity more time to cut atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, its key cause.
Climategate marks its 10th anniversary this month – an opportune moment to reflect on just how serious was its impact on society, and to look at the effect it had on those who were trying to stop Earth from being ravaged by rising seas, spreading deserts, disappearing coral reefs and suffocating heat.
At the time, climate-change deniers were desperate to find ways to undermine the idea that global warming was real, and as Jones’s unit had provided key data that supported this notion – by showing how land temperatures on Earth had been rising sharply in recent decades – his work was considered fair game. So they responded gleefully by ransacking his hacked emails for signs he may have been fiddling results and asserted, in blogs, they had found telltale signs.
These claims were then picked up by media outlets hostile to global warming. “Scientist in climate cover-up told to quit” ran one headline. “Scientists broke law by hiding climate data”, claimed another.
Jones was vilified. “Within a day or two reporters were outside my house, knocking on my neighbours’ doors, digging for dirt,” he recalls. “I got hundreds of abusive and threatening emails. I knew the accusations were nonsense. But as someone used to being in control I buckled at the loss of it. My health deteriorated. I found it difficult to sleep and eat. I was under intense, spiralling pressure and felt I was falling to pieces. Looking back I suppose I was having some kind of a nervous breakdown.”
So what had Jones said in his emails to trigger these attacks? In one message Jones says he would be emailing a journal “to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor”. This was interpreted as being a bid to suppress academic criticism. “We’re choosing the periods to show warming,” he says in another email that seems to suggest he was fiddling his data.
A dried pond in drought-stricken Fuyang, Anhui province, eastern China in October 2019. Photograph: VCG/via Getty Images

And then there was his remark that he was going to employ “Mike’s trick” to use data that would “hide the decline”. In other words, he was going to cover up data that showed the world was really cooling and was not warming, it was claimed.
The Mike in question was Michael Mann, professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, who had worked with Jones for years. His “trick” was no more than a simple technique to combine the records of temperatures measured directly by thermometer with estimates made from tree rings (which roughly reflect temperature variations).
“In fact, the email was an entirely innocent and appropriate conversation between scientists,” Mann states in this week’s BBC Four documentary, Climategate: Science of a Scandal. He and Jones were merely trying to find appropriate ways of illustrating a graph of global temperature changes.
This view was not shared by Sarah Palin: the former US vice-presidential candidate wrote a Washington Post op-ed article that claimed the emails “reveal that leading climate ‘experts’ … manipulated data to hide the decline in global temperatures”.
British climate science was subjected to huge scrutiny by the world’s best journalists and it stood up to the test
Fiona Fox, Science Media Centre
Subsequent investigations by journalists showed these claims were unsupportable, however. Guardian writer Fred Pearce studied the leaked emails and produced a book, The Climate Files, from his research. “Have the Climategate revelations undermined the case that we are experiencing made-made climate change? Absolutely not,” says Pearce. “Nothing uncovered in the emails destroys the argument that humans are warming the planet.”
Pearce was writing for the eco-friendly Guardian, but his views were supported by many others, such as Mike Hanlon, former science editor of the Daily Mail. “Scratch and sniff as we did, there was no smoking gun, no line that would show that there had been a conspiracy to fabricate a great untruth,” he said later. Thus, from the Guardian to the Daily Mail, the notion that Climategate represented “the worst scientific scandal of a generation” – as one UK newspaper had claimed – was found in the end to be unsupportable.
This point is emphasised by Fiona Fox, head of the UK’s Science Media Centre. “British climate science was subjected to huge scrutiny by the world’s best journalists and it stood up to the test. If you look at where we are now in terms of public trust in climate science, it’s hard to sustain the argument that Climategate was fatally damaging to the field.
“Climategate also tells us that front page rows about science are an opportunity as well as a threat and the scientists who stood up in that febrile environment and soundly defended science also did a great job. We need to remember that.”
New Yorkers brave the severe thunderstorms that hit the city among tornado warnings in May 2018. Photograph: Peter Foley/EPA
Several official UK reports on the affair also supported Jones. One inquiry – by Sir Muir Russell, a senior civil servant – specifically praised the “rigour and honesty” of Jones and his colleagues while another, chaired by Lord Oxburgh, found “no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice”. The only real criticism was the suggestion that the researchers had not always shown a “proper sense of openness” in dealing with data inquires.
Jones and colleagues were also backed by the US Environmental Protection Agency which heavily criticised American politicians and energy groups who had tried to use the leaked emails to dismiss the risks facing our overheating world. These individuals had “routinely misunderstood or mis-characterised the scientific issues, drawn faulty conclusions, resorted to hyperbole, impugned the ethics of climate scientists in general and characterised actions as ‘falsifications’ and ‘manipulation’ with no basis or support,” said the agency.
Other powerful support was provided by physicists at University of California, Berkeley, who decided to test if deniers had been right to question Jones’s temperature charts. Led by Professor Richard Muller and backed by funds that included a $150,000 grant from noted climate-crisis denial supporters, the Charles Koch Foundation – the team re-analysed more than 1.6bn land temperature measurements dating back to the 1800s – and came to exactly the same conclusions as Jones: the fairly level temperatures that had continued through the past few centuries began to spike sharply a few decades ago as atmosphere carbon levels rose.
“Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with warming values published previously,” said Muller. “This confirms these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate-change sceptics did not seriously affect their conclusions.”
Such powerful endorsements might have been expected to end deniers’ claims about Climategate. However, they have continued since 2009 to accuse Jones and others of collusion and fraud.
Former Times columnist and climate contrarian Matt Ridley is typical. The “scandal” showed scientists were “conspiring to ostracise sceptics, delete emails, game peer review and manipulate the presentation of data”, he wrote in 2017, ignoring the many reports and studies that in the interim have shown this was not the case.
Note also that since Climategate we have had eight of the warmest years on record; carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise inexorably; and Arctic sea ice levels in summer have reached record lows over the past decade. Occurrences of heavy rainfall and heatwaves have also increased dramatically. The world has continued to heat up dangerously. Yet humanity has done very little to tackle the crisis.
And that raises a critical question: did Climategate play a role in this failure to act? Some observers believe it did and, as an illustration, point to the fate of the Copenhagen climate summit – organised under the UN framework convention on climate change – which took place only a few weeks after the leaking of the CRU’s emails.
A sheep farm in New South Wales. The drought across the Murray Darling Basin is now officially Australia’s worst on record. Photograph: David Gray/Getty Images
The Copenhagen summit is widely regarded as a failure. Instead of agreeing on a legally binding treaty to limit carbon emissions as hoped, delegates chose merely to “take note of” an accord drawn up by a core group of heads of state.
So did the leaking of the Climategate emails have a pernicious influence there? Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, doubts it. “Essentially the conference was badly managed. Climategate had very little impact.”
On the other hand, says Ward, climategate did damage public policy-making in the UK and in other western countries. “Rightwing politicians, allied with fossil fuel companies, used their influence to spread false claims about the emails and to argue against policies to cut fossil fuel use. That propaganda campaign still continues today.” The use of illegally hacked emails in Climategate also shows deniers will resort to all sorts of underhand methods to confuse the public, Ward added. “I am sure they would do the same again today – so scientists are going to have to remain vigilant and be ready to fight back at any time.”
This point is backed by Mann, who has fought vociferously to defend climate science in the US. Although the past few years have seen a significant growth in the public’s belief that the world is heating dangerously, climate-change denial has not gone away.
“Hard denial has evolved into something more pernicious,” he says. “Attention has been deflected from imposing policy solutions towards stressing that changes should be made in individual behaviour – people’s diet, methods of travel and other lifestyle choices. It is a classic industry manoeuvre: put the onus on individuals to change things and ignore the need to impose systemic solutions and make policy reforms.
“Of course, individual action needs to be part of the battle, but not as a substitute for policy reform. It should be as an additional component. We must also be aware how the forces of denial are exploiting the lifestyle change movement to get supporters of action against climate change to argue with each other and engage in behavioural shaming. So yes, we will be vigilant in future.”

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