Lethal Heating: 01/20/20

20/01/2020

(AU) Behind The Smokescreen, The Coalition's Stance On Climate Change Hasn't Changed At All

The Guardian - Greg Jericho

If Scotty from Marketing and his coal-fired peers really believed in the climate crisis, they’d be doing something about it. Behind the smokescreen, the Coalition's stance on climate change hasn't changed at all.

The government’s actions over the past decade mean they have not earned the benefit of doubt, rather they have earned our total scepticism. Photograph: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images

The speed with which the conservative side of politics and the media has gone from assuring us climate change was not a problem, so we don’t need to worry about reducing emissions, to asserting that climate change is a problem, but we still don’t need to worry about reducing emissions, is breathtaking. Literally, given the levels of smoke still around.

You don’t get a cookie for saying you think climate change is real.
I’m sorry, you don’t. All you get is the capacity to say you have reached 1990 levels of comprehension – as that was when the first IPCC report was issued. You don’t get a prize for spending 30 years doing all you can to halt, undermine and dismantle action to reduce emissions, only to now say: “Hey, climate change is real.”
Consider that the Sydney Morning Herald this week ran a front page story headlined “Minister slams climate debate”, with the lead that “Australia’s bushfire crisis has prompted a blunt warning from Science Minister Karen Andrews to those she says are wasting time arguing about whether climate change is real”.
Oh good, that’s all sorted then.

But when you read on, you see nothing in her statement suggest one iota of a shift in the government’s position on emissions. She told the Herald: “My starting position in the discussion tomorrow will be that the climate has changed and it continues to change. We need to focus on the steps to adapt and mitigate the impact of those changes.”
The important point is she desires to mitigate the impact of the change, not to mitigate the actual change.
Right now the government is indulging in the equivalent of responding to polio by promising to invest in more iron lungs. And bizarrely, it is getting credit for it.
Adaptation is not mitigation.

The need for action on climate change is the need to reduce emissions

What is being said now is no different to what was said by Tony Abbott back when he was prime minister. In 2015, Abbott told parliament: “As far as the government is concerned, climate change is real. Mankind makes a contribution, and it is important to have strong and effective action to deal with it.
“We have met and beaten our Kyoto targets ... We are on track to meet and beat our current commitments to reduce emissions by 2020 by 13 per cent on 2005 levels.”
He then concluded: “I’m not going to put someone’s job at risk, a region’s, town’s future at risk, I’m not going to put up electricity prices to do it, I’m not going to put a tax on them to do it. I’m going to achieve it in the way we’ve met our Kyoto 2020 targets, meet and beat, and we’ve done that through better technology, through the policies we’ve put through the emissions reduction fund, and we’re going to continue to do that because it is really important.”
Oh sorry, that wasn’t Abbott, that was Scott Morrison in his interview with David Speers last Sunday.
If you can discern any difference in language between what Morrison is now saying and what Abbott said in 2015, then your level of reading between the lines has become so great you are seeing things that are not there.
Just because we all desire the Coalition to do something on climate change doesn’t actually mean they will.

Climate change protesters take to the streets in Sydney. Photograph: Steven Saphore/AAP

And their actions over the past decade mean they have not earned the benefit of doubt, rather they have earned our total scepticism.
The same goes for the conservative media. This week the NT News was getting praise for its front page, in which it stated: “What Australian needs now is real, affordable solutions – not armies of keyboard warriors.”
But aside from the pretty random sideswipe at keyboard warriors, the statement is the perfect representation of meaningless dribble designed to sound like a bold stance.
You know what is a real and affordable solution? Putting a price on carbon. And yet in the NT News editorial, the word emissions was not even mentioned, and I am prepared to bet my superannuation fund they would not suggest a price on carbon was an affordable solution.
Similarly the Daily Telegraph’s editorial on Thursday on “Moving climate debate forward” praised the government’s policy and demanded the ALP come clean with how much theirs would cost.
Give me strength.
It seems that moving forward is reenacting the exact same coverage that occurred during the last election.
You can’t say you agree with the science on climate change and then completely disregard the science that calls for the need to reduce emission by 45% from 2010 levels as soon as possible and to get to zero net emissions by at least 2050.
Saying you agree with the science of climate change but that you believe the government’s current plan is adequate is like saying you agree with vaccination, but you chose to only get one of your three kids immunised because, heck, that is more affordable.
The cheapest way to deal with the cost of climate change is to reduce our emissions and prevent, as much as is possible, further increases in global temperatures.
Dealing with climate change will be tough – people will lose jobs, the prices of some things will rise, but the cost of inaction is going to be much greater and more damaging – both to our economy and to our society.
Fortunately, the path to a vibrant emissions-free economy remains, and as Ross Garnaut has pointed out, such a shift will be extremely beneficial for our economy if we act now.
Indeed perhaps the most frustrating thing about the past decade is that not only have we have wasted a chance to reduce emissions, we have forgone the opportunity to set up our economy for the next 100 years.
Do not fall for the government’s spin. The need for action on climate change is the need to reduce emissions and to also take a leading role in that fight on the international stage.Climate Change
So when you hear someone in government say they believe in climate change, ask what they are doing about reducing emissions; everything else is spin.

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Long Shaped By Fire, Australia Enters A Perilous New Era

Yale Environment 360 - Fred Pearce

Australia has always been a dry continent where fire has played an important ecological role. But the latest massive conflagrations there are evidence that a hotter climate has thrust Australia into a new normal where fires will keep burning on an unprecedented scale.

A firefighting crew works to control a blaze in Sydney, Australia in November. Brett Hemmings/Getty Images

Australia is sometimes called “the fire continent” because the ecology of the world’s driest inhabited land has been shaped by repeated burning. But even the fire continent has never seen anything like the recent conflagrations.
Bush fires have been raging in the southeastern states of New South Wales and Victoria for four months now. More than 38,000 square miles, an area the size of South Carolina, have burned. At least 28 people have died and some 2,000 houses in rural towns have been destroyed.
In Mallacoota, a coastal town in Victoria, 1,000 residents and tourists were rescued from the beach by the Australian navy as the flames closed in. Even the vineyards of the Adelaide hills, home of some of the country’s most prized and widely exported chardonnays and sauvignon blancs, have burned. Adding to the mayhem, state authorities in South Australia have been shooting thousands of camels to protect aboriginal communities besieged by herds of the feral animals searching for water.
But seemingly only the country’s climate-denial politicians are surprised. Australia’s meteorologists and fire chiefs had been predicting a record fire season for months. The weather watchers saw early in the year that Australia faced a fire-raising combination of natural rainfall cycles — notably fluctuations in sea temperatures in the Indian Ocean that brought high temperatures and drought to southeast Australia this year — and a very unnatural trend toward a hotter and drier climate. The ensuing blazes have attracted worldwide attention, in large measure because they are part of a pattern of intensifying fires from the Arctic to the Amazon.

Last year, Australia saw the six hottest days it ever recorded, maxing out at 122 degrees Fahrenheit.

Australia is among the countries most exposed to the gathering pace of planet-wide warming. Last year, Australia experienced its highest recorded temperatures, 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the late 20th century average, and 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) above the early 20th century average — twice the global increase. The year also saw the six hottest days ever recorded in Australia, maxing out at 49.9 degrees C, or 122 degrees F.
Higher temperatures are ensuring that vegetation dries out faster and further in droughts, creating extreme fire risk. And the droughts have come. Australia’s average rainfall in 2019, at 10.9 inches, was 40 percent below the late 20th century average and 12 percent below the previous lowest. The resulting fires far exceeded in extent Australia’s most deadly bushfire disaster in February 2009, when 173 people died but only 1,700 square miles burned.
As the country has reacted in horror, meteorologists have said, in effect, “We told you so.” The rising fire risk was predicted by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s senior research scientist Chris Lucas, who warned 13 years ago that in southeast Australia “fire seasons will start earlier and end slightly later, while being generally more intense. This effect… should be apparent by 2020.”And so it has proved.
In a paper published last September with Sarah Harris of the Country Fire Authority in Victoria, Lucas reiterated that “anthropogenic climate change is the primary driver” of increased fire vulnerability. The analysis did not make a good fit with the posturing of the nation’s politicians, who in recent weeks have had to defend their notorious skepticism about climate change, continued support of fossil fuels, and failure to increase funding for fire services. In a radio interview in November, as the fires gathered pace, Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack dismissed any link to climate change as “the ravings of some pure, enlightened, and woke capital-city greenies.”

Residents of Mallacoota in Victoria are evacuated by army personnel on January 3. Justin McManus/The Age/Fairfax Media via Getty Images

Now, with Australians demonstrating in the streets against his policies, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been forced to concede the “greenies” were right all along. “We’re living in longer, hotter, drier summers,” he said in a recent TV interview. “This is obviously affected by the broader changes in climate.”
Australia is used to bushfires. Its history is littered with the havoc they can bring: Black Friday in 1939, when 7,700 square miles burned and 71 people died; Black Tuesday in 1967, when 1,020 square miles burned and 62 died; and Black Saturday in 2009. Much of its ecology, including its iconic eucalyptus forests, depends on regular fires,
Australia has more than 800 endemic eucalyptus species, comprising around three-quarters of its forests. Most species thrive in fire-prone areas with nutrient-poor soils. Their foliage is rich in oils that readily burn, releasing their seeds from woody capsules and creating areas of nutrient-rich ash where the seeds will germinate.
But, much as they need fire, too much fire can wipe them out. And this year it has been so hot and dry that the fires have spread into forests with eucalyptus species adapted to wetter conditions, according to David Bowman, a fire ecologist at the University of Tasmania. Whether they can recover will be a critical question for forest ecologists.
Equally uncertain is how wildlife is coping. Chris Dickman of the University of Sydney hazarded a guess — based on his previous assessment of animal densities done for the environmental group WWF Australia — that more than a billion mammals, reptiles, and birds could have perished already, either burned, starved, or eaten by predators such as raptors and feral cats that stalk fire zones.

“The fires… will certainly cause the extinction of some of Australia’s most iconic, fragile and beautiful inhabitants,” says an expert.

But Kate Parr of the University of Liverpool, an expert on assessing the impact of wildfires on wildlife, said the estimate was based on sparse field data. Moreover, it assumes no survivors, which may be unduly pessimistic. “Australia’s animals have a long and impressive history of co-existing with fire,” says Dale Nimmo of Charles Sturt University in New South Wales. Some have well-developed escape routines. Others hunker down in deep burrows and may go into temporary hibernation until the fires are gone and food sources start to return.
Singed koalas have featured strongly in TV reports of the fires. They may be individually vulnerable, but most koalas live outside the fire zones, says Ayesha Tulloch of the University of Sydney.
Nonetheless, the exceptional nature of the fires could overwhelm the best coping strategies. “The full effect of the fires… will certainly cause the extinction of some of Australia’s most iconic, fragile, and beautiful inhabitants,” says Ben Garrod, an evolutionary biologist at the University of East Anglia in the UK. Among those at highest risk are endangered species that live mostly in the fire zones, including the eastern bristlebird; the long-footed potoroo, a rabbit-sized marsupial; and the silver-headed antechinus, a mouse-sized carnivorous marsupial only discovered in 2013.
Some foresters have argued that the ferocity of the recent fires is due, in part, to there being too much wood to burn. Rod Keenan of the University of Melbourne, who gets funding from the forestry industry, blames the megafires on the reluctance of the authorities to carry out preemptive controlled burning of dead wood early in the dry season. Forester Vic Jurskis, in a well-publicized open letter to the prime minister, blamed the reluctance on a “green influence on politics.”

A wallaby licks its burnt paws after escaping a bushfire near the township of Nana Glen in New South Wales in November 2019. Wolter Peeters/The Sydney Morning Herald via Getty Images

But that charge is misplaced. Ecologists have long since realized that it can be necessary to set fires to prevent fires. The United States learned the hard way in 1988, when Yellowstone burned, that preventing all fires is a recipe for storing up fuel for future megafires. And Australian environmental campaigners know it, too. In a policy paper drawn up in 2017, long before the present fires, Australia’s Green Party called for a “scientifically based, ecologically appropriate use of fire” as “an effective and sustainable strategy for fuel-reduction management that will protect biodiversity and moderate the effects of wildfire.”
The story of the Australian bushfires has gained international attention in part because it reflects a global pattern. Fires in the Amazon in August gained as many headlines as the Australian blazes. Similarly, extreme fires in the boreal forests of Siberia burned some 16,000 square miles, according to Greenpeace, with matching conflagrations in Alaska and western Canada. In 2018, California was struck by its deadliest and most extensive wildfires, covering 3,000 square miles and causing more than 100 fatalities. And in 2015, 10,000 square miles of Indonesian forests burned.
Researchers have affirmed that climate change is increasing the risks. A review published this week by British and Australian researchers concluded that “human-induced warming has already led to a global increase in the frequency and severity of fire-weather, increasing the risk of wildfire.” A 2015 global study by Bowman and colleagues looked at trends in the length of droughts. They found that the average “fire-weather season length” had increased by an alarming 19 percent between 1979 and 2013.
Yet despite the rising incidence of drought, the actual extent of fires around the world, though still around 1.3 million square miles every year, has been falling. One study found a 24 percent decline in the past two decades. This was in part due to a decline in deforestation in the Amazon after 2004 (a trend now reversed), and in part because many fewer fires are being set by farmers and pastoralists to clear bush in the increasingly densely populated savanna grasslands of Africa. “When land use intensifies on savannas, fire is used less and less,” says Niels Andela of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, who led the research.

One solution is to learn from indigenous methods of using fire to manage the land.

More and more of the forest and bush fires that occur globally are due either to the deliberate clearing of forests for permanent agriculture — as in the Amazon and Indonesia — or because a changing climate is dramatically increasing the risk of wildfires. And there is growing evidence that these climate-induced fires are more intense and less amenable to control.
In short, there are fewer fires, but more wildfires.
So is there a way of mitigating the risks? One approach, say many ecologists, is to accept that all fires are not bad and to learn from indigenous methods of using fire to manage the land. In North America, “native people burned extensively,” says Lee Klinger, formerly at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and now an independent scientist who has studied fire regimes in California.
Before Europeans arrived, traditional burning ensured that there were many more fires in forests on the West Coast than today, he says. “But they burned more frequently, and so less destructively,” said Klinger. “There were ground fires, but not the canopy fires we see today.”
Australian researchers and aboriginal communities say much the same. Traditional aboriginal “fire-stick” farming certainly changed the ecology by setting small fires to clear land for cultivation. But many researchers say the effects could be beneficial. This “cool burning” maintained open grasslands, extended the range of fire-adapted species, and often increased local biodiversity by creating mosaics of different habitats. “Aboriginal burning was critical for the maintenance of habitats for small mammals,” according to Bowman, who has coined the term “pyrodiversity” to describe its biodiversity benefits.

Wildfires in Bairnsdale, Australia on December 30. Glen Morey / AP

The question now is whether even such intelligent means of fire management can hold back the flames. With climate change leaving the bush bone dry, and with temperatures soaring to levels much higher than local ecosystems are adapted to, the old ways may no longer work.
The question is especially pertinent for Australia. Most climate models predict that “Australia will warm faster than the rest of the world,” says Kevin Hennessy, climate researcher at the CSIRO, Australia’s national research agency. Global heating will also likely cause a continued decline in rainfall in southern Australia, resulting in longer droughts and many more days with severe fire danger.
But Australia’s current fires increasingly look like a harbinger of new conflagrations elsewhere. During a period of strong warming in the American West over the past half century, the number of wildfires covering more than 1.5 square miles has increased fivefold — a trend that the researchers link to higher temperatures and longer droughts, and expect to continue.
In Mediterranean Europe, where wildfires are an increasing summer threat from Portugal to Greece, researchers predict a 40 to 100 percent increase, depending largely on temperature increases. Few doubt that fires will also become more frequent in the boreal forests of the far north as the Arctic warms. Most recently, a paper published last week in Science argued that a lethal combination of deforestation and climate change will double the area burned annually by wildfires in the southern Amazon by 2050. Paulo Brando of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts titled his paper: “The Gathering Firestorm.”

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(AU) Can Scott Morrison Seize This Watershed Moment For Climate Policy?

Sydney Morning Herald - Rob Harris

Andrew Hirst, the no-nonsense Liberal Party federal director, had a blunt warning for cabinet ministers who were still swept up in shock of Morrison's May Miracle.
In the weeks following the Coalition's election victory, Hirst was invited to present his findings about why and how the government had won re-election, face-to-face with 23 men and women in the cabinet room.

Images of thick smoke blanketing Parliament House have put Australia at the centre of a new global debate on climate change. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The result was largely driven by economic reasons, those seated around the table recall him saying, and the victory should not be misrepresented by any other issue. It had not been a referendum on climate change, as some had billed it.
Hirst - who had a front-row seat during the past decade of the Coalition climate wars as a senior aide to both Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull - told the room global warming remained a significant issue to many voters, especially in inner-city electorates, and the party remained vulnerable on the topic.
A discussion followed that if the government was not going to dramatically change its policies, it needed to better communicate what it was doing to lower emissions and that it was taking the issue seriously.
Almost eight months on from Hirst's warning to ministers, the government is again confronting its climate divisions following devastating bushfires across Victoria and NSW.

Andrew Hirst, who served as deputy chief of staff to then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott, warned the election win was based on economics and wasn't a referendum on climate change. Credit: Andrew Meares

Images of the nation's capital, its Parliament obscured by smoke, has put Australia at the centre of a new global debate on the issue.
Pictures of Scott Morrison, then treasurer, holding a lump of coal in February 2017 have often accompanied footage of razed towns and charred rain forests.
And like leaders before him, Morrison is attempting to deal with the fallout, while trying to balance the party's "broad church" of moderates and conservatives, believers and deniers, and the voters from inner-city Higgins to regional Herbert.
But Liberal MPs in the cities and the bush are now reporting their offices have been bombarded with correspondence with complaints of government inaction during the past month. Many believe the expectation of climate action is now a concern of Morrison's own "quiet Australians".

Then-treasurer Scott Morrison with a lump of coal in Parliament in February 2017. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

"These are not the usual mass produced template emails from activists," one MP remarked.
"These are from mainstream mums who are anxious about the smoke and fearful about their kids' futures."
So like commentators and lobby groups, MPs are watching their Prime Minister's reaction as he deals with the biggest crisis since coming to power.
They, like the commentariat, are second-guessing every public comment and attempting to read between the lines. Will this be a watershed moment for climate policy? Or just a PR exercise?
In a series of interviews since the devastation, Morrison has stressed there is "no dispute" climate change was causing "longer, hotter, drier, summer seasons".
And at every opportunity he has been at pains to stress the government would "meet and beat" its Paris target of reducing emissions by 26-28 per cent compared with 2005 levels by 2030.
"We want to reduce emissions and do the best job we possibly can and get better and better and better at it. I want to do that with a balanced policy which recognises Australia's broader national economic interests and social interest," he told the ABC's David Speers on Sunday.
"In the years ahead we are going to continue to evolve our policy in this area to reduce emissions even further and we're going to do it without a carbon tax, without putting up electricity prices, and without shutting down traditional industries upon which regional Australians depend for their very livelihood."

Scott Morrison sat down with David Speers for an interview on his response to the Australian bushfire crisis.

But while Morrison talks up his intention to act on climate change and support new renewable technologies, colleagues wonder whether his rhetoric is being seen as empty while a handful of backbenchers continue to mouth their objections or publicly question the science of climate change.
The conundrum facing Morrison and his cabinet was on show through the pages of the national papers this week.
On Wednesday, Science Minister Karen Andrews - amid weeks of freelancing from Coalition climate contrarians - felt the need to declare the science on climate change was settled.
"Let's not keep having debates about climate change," the former engineer said.
"Let's accept that the climate has changed, the climate is changing and we need to look at what we're going to do about that."
The comment was aimed, in part, at NSW Liberal MP Craig Kelly, who in the days following the New Year's bushfire devastation thought it was be a good idea to appear on a high-rating British television show arguing climate change wasn't real.
In a show of support for Andrews, the following day six Liberals - Trent Zimmerman, Tim Wilson, Dave Sharma, Hollie Hughes, Andrew Bragg and Fiona Martin backed her up in the pages of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
Bragg, who at 35 represents the Gen Y voter group, took to his Instagram with a simple message:
"Climate change is not a belief. It is based on a science. We have no time for conspiracy theories when there is so much to be done."
Hughes backed her colleague having lived much of her life near Moree, a drought-ridden town in western NSW.
"Karen is correct when she says every second spent discussing whether the climate is changing is wasted time – it's time that would be much better spent on mitigation and adaption strategy development," she said.
But on the same day an unnamed cabinet minister fired a warning shot on the front page of The Australian urging Morrison to maintain Coalition unity on climate and emissions targets.
"If we go back to talking about climate or targets or anything, the only climate that will change will be the climate in the party room. It'll blow the place up," the senior MP said.
The comments were backed up by Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce, who had already nailed his colours to the mast on Christmas Eve when he said Australians would be "fools" who'd "get nailed" unless they acknowledge there's a "higher authority" that needs to be respected.
"Single crusades in Australia will have absolutely zero effect on the climate or future bushfires. It'll only have an effect on the economy of Australia," Joyce said in the same front-page article.
This is the political reality Morrison, like Malcolm Turnbull before him, faces. One unnamed quote or rogue interview from a backbencher is enough to distract, discredit and derail any climate policy advancement.As one cabinet minister told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald: "What can he possibly do? Increase the emissions targets? The Right won't let him do that and neither will the Nats. No way. And despite the election win, I don't think he has the authority to do that."
Last month the Australian Election Study, produced by the Australian National University, found the proportion of voters nominating global warming and the environment as their top issue was at an all-time high.
While 93 per cent of Labor voters thought the issue to be important, two-thirds of Coalition voters considered the issue to be either quite important or very important.
Inner-city MPs in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane have been awake to this for some time. They observed the swings against them in May and worry what another year of bushfires will do to their election hopes.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg makes it known he drives an electric car in his seat of Kooyong, in Melbourne's eastern suburbs, for a reason.
South Australian senator Simon Birmingham was also keen to point out it was in important issue to him in his Alfred Deakin Institute Oration last September.
"It would be a mistake for anyone to try to claim an ideological mandate from this year's federal election beyond the majority-building commitments our parties made in areas of economic and national security," he said.
"In areas like protection from religious discrimination or much-needed commitments to emissions reduction, we must govern from the sensible centre, taking actions that are responsible and meaningful but in ways that are respectful to the diverse constituencies we represent."
It is why in the past two weeks Morrison and his cabinet ministers have rushed to spruik investment in renewables, emerging technologies such as hydrogen, carbon capture use and storage, biofuels, lithium production and waste-to-energy.
Some have taken heart from Morrison's indication the government could stop claiming Kyoto carry-over credits to meet its 26-28 per cent emissions reduction target by 2030, "if we are in a position where we don't need them".
But others believe the time for talk is now over.
"We say emissions are going down and they are going up. We say investment in renewables is higher than ever but it's falling because of the policy mess we have created," one Liberal MP said.
"At the moment they are running around like headless chooks, throwing money here, there and everywhere without any thought.
"It is little wonder we have no credibility on this issue."

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