Lethal Heating: 01/15/20

15/01/2020

(AU) Fire Inquiry Must Look At Climate Change

AFR - Michael Pelly

It's essential that climate change be part of an inquiry into the bushfires raging across the country, says former Supreme Court judge Bernard Teague.

Black Saturday royal commissioner Bernard Teague says the impact of climate change "needs to be looked at it in greater depth". Eamon Gallagher

The former supreme court judge who ran the Black Saturday royal commission says it is essential that climate change impact be part of an inquiry into the 2019-20 bushfires and has warned against any move to restrict its terms of reference.
Bernard Teague told The Australian Financial Review he also supported an examination of state and federal protocols for disaster relief
Other lawyers said current roadblocks on federal assistance – a likely focus of the royal commission flagged by Prime Minister Scott Morrison at the weekend – could be overcome by relying on the implied nationhood power in the constitution, which gives the Commonwealth broad authority.
Mr Teague was a judge on the Supreme Court of Victoria from 1987 to 2008 before being tapped to run the inquiry into the Black Saturday fires of February 7, 2009, in Victoria that claimed 173 lives.
He said climate change had been "small beer" for his inquiry because of apparent consensus about its continuing impact.
"We had two hours on climate change – this is 10 years ago – because we could get a stack of scientists who would take one side and not one scientist was prepared to come before our commission and be cross-examined about climate change."
He said that in 2010 "everyone was saying there's only the prospect of worse fires in the future because of climate change".
"It needs to be looked at it greater depth in light of the experience of the past 10 years, which has only shown what everyone now accepts – well almost everyone – that it has an enormous impact that we need to better understand.
"It impacts on a lot of things, like controlled burning for example."
He said the inquiry needed to have the widest possible terms of reference and suggested there were a number of recently retired judges who would be candidates.
Mr Teague said it was better to have multiple commissioners, citing his own experience: "There were so many other perspectives they would bring to bear."
He said the Morrison government should brave the potential criticism that might arise with any examination of the roles of state and federal governments.
"If a government says 'these are the problems that are arising in the present situation and these are potential ways of dealing with them', I think the community is going to be so much better off."
One issue for any inquiry will be the activation of defence forces. Mr Morrison said on Sunday that the compulsory calling up of 3000 Army Reservists to help in the fire recovery effort had pushed the Commonwealth to the "very edge" of "extreme constitutional territory".
Mr Morrison said he would take a proposal for a royal commission to cabinet and that it also would include building better resilience and adaption to climate events such as fire, drought, floods and cyclones.

'States need to be consulted'
Fiona McLeod, SC, senior counsel for the Commonwealth at the Black Saturday royal commission, said there was a fundamental problem.
"If you look at the way Commonwealth aid has traditionally been provided, the States have to exhaust their resources – government, commercial and community – before they can ask for help," Ms McLeod said.
Ms McLeod agreed with University of Sydney Professor Anne Twomey that there were doubts about whether such action was supported by the defence power or the external affairs power, which were used to justify using the defence forces in humanitarian and disaster aid overseas.
Both said they felt the implied nationhood power under section 61 of the Constitution would support any deployment for disaster relief, but Professor Twomey added that proper protocols for co-operation with the states were needed.
"The states have the expertise in dealing with bushfires, while the Australian Defence Forces have the expertise in the logistics and management of disaster relief, so it is imperative that systems be developed for them both to work together effectively in a crisis,'' Professor Twomey said.
"It would be counter-productive for the Commonwealth to act unilaterally in calling out the troops, if they were getting in the way of firefighters. States need to be consulted before the troops are called out, so they can fill the greatest needs when they arise."
She added the move to call out the reserves was covered by the provision in section 28 of the Defence Act which covers "civil aid, humanitarian assistance, medical or civil emergency or disaster relief".
Professor Twomey said Section 119, which says the the Commonwealth "shall protect every state against invasion", could also be given a wide application.
Mr Teague said the Black Saturday inquiry had no limitations, in contrast to the Hazelwood Mine Fire Inquiry of 2015-16, over which he also presided.
When the final report offered "matter for further consideration" the state government ordered another inquiry, which led to a recommendations on the long-term rehabilitation of power plants and the impact on human health.
He said if there had been any progress, it would be that there had not been anything like the number of lives lost in recent weeks compered to the devastation of Black Saturday.

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(AU) Opinion: In Australia’s Raging Bushfires, A Climate-Change Warning To Its Leaders — And Ours

Los Angeles Times - Evan Karlik

Residents watch flames in Lake Tabourie, Australia. Brett Hemmings / Getty Images

Evan Karlik

Evan Karlik is a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy and an affiliate at Georgetown University’s Center for Australian, New Zealand and Pacific Studies. In 2018 he served as a defense fellow in the House of Representatives.

With more than 14 million acres in Australia blackened by bushfires, climate change is a glaring threat to Australians — and to the standing of their prime minister, Scott Morrison.
Distressed residents in fire-ravaged towns have rebuffed his handshakes and heckled his entourage. The nation’s capital, Canberra, rang in 2020 with the world’s worst air quality, causing airline cancellations and government office closures. Beach evacuations of stranded residents cornered between flames and sea now rank as Australia’s largest-ever peacetime maritime rescue operation.
U.S. firefighters feel kinship with their Australian brothers and sisters, and more than 100 have been dispatched to battle the blazes Down Under. While Americans are no strangers to wildfires, Washington would do well to note how Australia’s climate policies are entwined with this current crisis.
In 2000, an Australian parliamentary committee report acknowledged the country’s per capita carbon emissions were the highest in the world and highlighted the country’s acute climatic vulnerability. A 2013 report by the Climate Council, an independent Australian nonprofit, pointed to the increasing likelihood of high fire danger weather due to spiking temperatures, drought conditions and longer and more frequent heatwaves.
And in a November poll, 60% of Australians said they believed the country should be doing more to combat climate change.
But Australia’s reigning politicians have been deaf to these signals.
Greg Mullins, a former fire commissioner in the Australian state of New South Wales, recently told National Public Radio that the national government has been “missing in action in terms of leadership” and that Morrison “does not have his finger on the pulse of the nation.”
Morrison gleefully wielded a fist-sized chunk of coal on the floor of Parliament in 2017. A year and a half later, his right-wing party — incensed over proposed legislation that would have instituted energy sector emissions targets — ousted his predecessor and made fossil-fuel-friendly Morrison head of state.
Australian journalist Hugh Riminton has lamented the coal lobby’s grip on Canberra, calling his country “a burning nation led by cowards.” Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan compared the rabid bushfires to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster — another environmental catastrophe that foretold the demise of the existing, untenable political order — and likened Morrison and his “criminal course of inaction” to the decadent and disconnected Roman emperor Nero, who is famously said to have played a fiddle while flames leveled most of ancient Rome.
These domestic denunciations square with the persistent criticism of Australia from its regional neighbors. Pacific island countries are markedly vulnerable to climate change on account of sea level rise, ecosystem collapse due to ocean acidification and coral bleaching, and saltwater contamination of freshwater wells.
Enele Sopoaga, former prime minister of Tuvalu in Polynesia, scoffed at Canberra’s highly publicized Pacific Step-Up diplomatic initiative, which offers generous infrastructure financing, a work-visa program and new undersea communications cables “while you keep pouring your coal emissions into the atmosphere … and drowning my people into the water.” An official in Palau, 600 miles east of the Philippines, called Australia an “abusive spouse” that provides aid for climate mitigation projects while refusing to adopt meaningful emissions reductions.
Prior to the annual conclave of leaders at last year’s Pacific Islands Forum in Tuvalu, Rev. James Bhagwan pointedly reminded Australia’s prime minister that “he is setting foot in a country that could soon be under water.” The headline on his Sydney Morning Herald commentary said it all: “A climate plea to Scott Morrison from a churchman of the Pacific’s sinking nations.”
“No leader who claims Christian morality can allow this conduct on their watch,” Bhagwan wrote.
Present U.S. policy could benefit from such soul-searching. The White House’s abandonment of emissions targets — and combative legal action against states such as California that pursue their own fuel efficiency requirements or carbon cap-and-trade programs — demonstrate either complete obliviousness or categorical insensitivity to those affected by climate change.
For Morrison, the wrath of a traumatized Australian electorate may become evident at the ballot box. In the United States, legislators who acquiesce to how the Trump administration is undermining the 2015 Paris climate agreement and discouraging state-level climate initiatives could find themselves indicted during campaign season and punished at the polls for their dereliction and inaction.
Climate policy negligence will also undermine U.S. relations with Pacific island states.
Morrison’s “utterly tone deaf” defense of robust coal exports during the most recent Pacific Islands Forum meant Australia “upset its friends, opened the door further to China, and trashed its global reputation,” former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd wrote last fall.
American climate policy requires a course correction, or it’s only a matter of time until the U.S. is pilloried in the strategically essential Pacific, leaving an influence vacuum for opportunistic Beijing. China is all too happy to tout itself as one of the first countries to sign the Paris agreement and to reiterate its pledge of stabilizing its carbon emissions over the next decade.
A heart-wrenching image of a charred juvenile kangaroo trapped against barbed wire captured the devastation of Australia’s bushfires and the bitterness of climate inaction. Distraught onlookers around the world took note. We can only hope that U.S. leaders did too.

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(AU) Australia's Wildfires Provide A Scorching Warning On Climate Change To The Rest Of Earth

USA TODAY - Editorial

Kangaroo, koala, livestock carcasses strewn along highways like it really is the end of the world. Yet Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is heading the wrong way: Our view

A mural depicting Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison in Melbourne on Jan. 7, 2020. James Ross/epa-EFE

Among global-warming skeptics, it used to be popular to mock environmentalists and climate scientists as Chicken Littles, forever frantic that the sky was falling.
That kind of lampooning has worn thin, given the relentless rise in global temperatures coupled, most recently, with hellish images of a fire-ravaged Australian continent: Skies cast in orange. The spectral image of the famed Sydney Opera House, lost behind smoke so thick that breathing is like inhaling a pack of cigarettes a day. A scorched region across Australia nearly the size of South Carolina.
Mountainous clouds of smoke extending 10 miles high that generate their own weather, triggering lightning without rain and on a course to circle the earth. Nearly 30 people dead since fires started in September; 2,000 homes destroyed.

Up to a billion animals dying
And the animals. A staggering estimate of up to a billion lost. Kangaroos, koalas, livestock. Carcasses strewn along highways like it really is the end of the world. The most searing and heart-wrenching disaster photograph shows the blackened, upright remains of a juvenile kangaroo, a joey, halted in flight by a fence, its arms still wrapped around the wire.
There's a warning in all of this about the direction of the planet.
No, climate change doesn't start wildfires. But its twin symptoms of persistent drought and hot weather create tinder-like conditions — particularly in southeast Australia with a climate not unlike that of California — and allow wildfires to rage out of control. Australia is in the third year of a punishing drought, and high temperature records were recently shattered with triple-digit heat.
Despite international commitments under the 2015 Paris climate agreement to curb the emission of heat-trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, created in large part by the burning of fossil fuels, CO2 levels in earth's atmosphere are greater than at any time in human history and are continuing to rise.
The results have been made plain not just with more destructive wildfires but also stronger hurricanes, record floods and rising seas from melting ice caps. Last year was the world's second hottest on record.

Australia and USA ranked last
Greenhouse gas emission must be curbed in the next decade if there is any chance of preventing average global temperatures from rising above 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) beyond preindustrial levels, the Paris accord goal.
The independent Climate Change Performance Index ranks Australia and the United States dead last among nations on climate policy. The parallels are beyond troubling. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has scoffed at climate concerns by brandishing a lump of coal before Parliament and exhorting, "Don't be scared. Won't hurt you."
Australia is one of the world's leading exporters of coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels contributing to greenhouse gases, and Morrison seeks to increase exports. While he hasn't gone so far as characterizing climate change as a hoax, as President Donald Trump has done, both administrations were blamed for stalling international negotiations last month in Madrid aimed at advancing worldwide emission-reduction goals.
Morrison's approval ratings are tanking as Australia burns. He was ridiculed for flashing a thumbs up from a beach in Hawaii as the fires grew in December. Demonstrations in Australia for climate justice are on the rise.
Earth is growing warmer, and there's no stopping that reality. But Americans, like their counterparts Down Under, can demand that their leaders heed the lessons of a burning continent and take the hard steps necessary to prevent even worse from happening.

The Australian Embassy in Washington declined to provide an opposing view to this editorial.

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