28/01/2020

(AU) Australia's Bushfires To Push Global Emissions To New High: Met Office

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

Australia's huge bushfires are forecast to help drive global atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide to one of the fastest annual increases on record.
Average carbon dioxide levels reached about 411.5 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere in 2019, adding to a steady climb propelled by human activities, according to a calculation of figures released by Britain's Met Office.


Smoke from bushfires is spreading high and far east.

 However, the pace could accelerate this year, in part because of the carbon being released by the Australian fires.
"A forecast of the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide shows that 2020 will witness one of the largest annual rises in concentration since measurements began at Mauna Loa, in Hawaii,  in 1958," the Met Office said in a statement.
Australia's bushfires have so far burnt about 12 million hectares, including more than 5.2 million hectares in NSW, 2.5 million in Queensland, 2.2 million in Western Australia, 1. 4 million in Victoria and about half a million in South Australia.
"While human-caused emissions cause the CO₂ rise in concentration, impacts of weather patterns on global ecosystems are predicted to increase the rise by 10 per cent this year," the Met Office statement said.
"Emissions from the recent Australian bushfires contribute up to one-fifth of this increase," it added.
Estimates this year indicated the fires had resulted in at least 350 million tonnes of CO₂ - or about two-thirds of Australia's annual emissions - based on burning of 5 million hectares. Global treaties typically do not count such emissions to a national account since the incinerated vegetation is assumed to grow back eventually.
“Although the series of annual levels of CO₂ have always seen a year-on-year increase since 1958, driven by fossil fuel burning and deforestation, the rate of rise isn’t perfectly even because there are fluctuations in the response of ecosystem carbon sinks, especially tropical forests," Professor Richard Betts, of the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Science and Services and the University of Exeter, said.
Emissions from bushfires in Australia have helped push global levels of carbon dioxide to new highs, the UK Met Office says. Credit: Nick Moir
"Overall these are expected to be weaker than normal for a second year running," he said.
Australia posted its hottest and driest year on record in 2019, factors that contributed to the readiness of forests to burn, climate scientists have said.
This year, atmospheric concentration of CO₂ are expected to peak above 417 parts per million in May, while the average for the year is forecast to be 414.2 ppm, with a range of plus or minus 0.6 ppm, the Met Office said.
This annual average represents an increase of 2.74 ppm, with a range of plus or minus 0.57 ppm rise, on the average for 2019, it said.

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(AU) Australia Will Continue To Burn Unless Indigenous Voices Are Heard

Independent Australia - Paul Dutton

Bushfire management has been practised by Indigenous communities for centuries. (Image by Brett and Sue Coulstock / Flickr)
Paul Dutton
Paul Dutton is a Barkindji man from far-western NSW and part of the Stolen Generation.He works as an Indigenous engagement consultant.
If Aboriginal people continue to be removed from our responsibility, then the nation will continue to burn.
For Aboriginal people – not only for those from Country because we all have a significant dedication to where we live – our Spirit is aching.
The science concerning the growing effects which climate change and increases in temperatures will have on Australia has long been discussed. It was predicted long ago that Australia would first see the consequences of a heating planet.
In September 2019, Australia experienced the start of its worst-ever fire season — still ever-present coming towards the end of January 2020. It has been estimated that 25 million hectares of bushland have been burnt.

Source: Insider
People in many affected areas have said they’ve never experienced a bushfire of the ferocity of these, which have led to such nationwide devastation. We’ve lost people, houses, businesses, infrastructure and more than an estimated billion living creatures from Aboriginal lands, from our ecosystems, from our communities and from our livelihoods.
The trauma for everyone who has experienced these bushfires or who has glimpsed them from their television screens has been heartfelt and deeply emotional. Those from communities that have lost near everything, I cannot begin to imagine.
Driving across lands that have experienced such devastation as I have this weekend, the journey was traumatic and painful, thinking about the losses of the living in the country I drove past.
The complete blackness of the bush is like nothing I ever remember experiencing in previous bushfires. I have travelled through Adelaide Hills in 1983 and remember what that looked like. One service station standing and another opposite the highway burnt to the ground, but I’ve never seen the blackness of the grounds and the complete lack of vegetation or living creatures.
I’ve lived in a bushfire season in the Blue Mountains where ash and dead leaves fell into the yard and the sky roiled with smoke and haze but it was nothing like this drive. Observing Pacific Highway civil construction crews working away diligently like it was just another day, while the mountains, only 15 kilometres from them, seemed to be holding back the raging inferno that has changed the landscape and the history of this nation.
Pacific Highway, near Iluka. (Image: Supplied)
Summerland Way, Grafton to Casino (Image supplied)
I travelled a 650-kilometre round trip and observed less than a handful of living ground animals. There was hardly any roadkill. All of which is massively unusual, traumatic and painful. As a nation, how do we change to protect our future? Or is it, what should our government be actively seeking to do? Surely science should be the sole driver of #ClimateActionNow.
Politicians have proven and continue to prove that they will fail to take the necessary actions to commit to the future actions, policies and infrastructure that the nation needs, to provide some direction for caring for Country.
If Aboriginal people continue to be removed from our responsibility, then the nation will continue to burn. A growing voice to cultural burns is being asked for but there is a myriad of infrastructure changes that can and must occur, which present themselves as a positive opportunity. These changes are needed for the nation to recover, rebuild, refocus towards what is the present, not the future and what the science says. Accountability dictates that facts must be acted upon, not political positioning for the sake of a small minority of corporate businesses which do not have Australia’s best interests at heart.
Land
Infrastructure change must surely start with the strong utilisation of a nation full of native plants available for marketing and growing in climates they are used to, without pesticides and without additional water usage. Aboriginal communities know these plants; we are the perfect agricultural experts to develop their uses. This is the opportunity a nation has of empowering Aboriginal communities in what we’ve always used for ourselves.
Australia’s European occupation instantly ignored what was already in abundance in all the vastness of the lands they plundered, setting up European food stocks that have always been labour-intensive and carbon-heavy. We continue to ignore a vast agricultural opportunity with foods that we drive past every day, whether in the city or in remote parts of the country.
Innovating our agricultural future will aid in the holistic needs the nation requires to recommence its commitment to lowering our carbon output.
 
Air
Another opportunity is an immediate change in the building standards that Australia currently ignores. All structures should have a minimum carbon output standard, the nation should lead the world in a national code for environmental building development, including how we control temperatures within structures. The technology exists, time to set a higher standard of green building development.
Water
The nation heard many reports from communities extremely worried about available water, not only for firefighting but simply for basic human rights needs of existence.
There’s no response from governments instigating reforms to what water rights and cultural water rights looks like. Why? Again corporate control of our human rights should not be tolerated.
The wastage of water through stormwater systems is baffling. Why are we not storing vast underground city tanks of stormwater runoff instead of sending it to the oceans and I don’t mean once it already has reached the river systems, but that which accumulates in our drainage systems across all communities in Australia? This should be flowing to local storage tanks. Japan has such facilities — infrastructure built to capture stormwater and filtrate it should be an arid lands priority.
These examples are a small sample of infrastructural changes and environmental changes that Australia's government could implement as a result of the horrific bushfire season that we have experienced. Will the Federal Government make such changes to assist with the community rebuilds that are now being asked for a productive long term planning future? Such steps will help make the drastic changes local economies need, not only now but into the future, to be able to continue functioning. This is especially needed through long periods of drought, rather than spending to sustain farming methods not suited to this continent from a century now long since gone.
Water, lands and air all require a different approach. It's time to accept facts, science and truth over the loudest voices which regularly prove to be false, ignorant and advocating for an economic opportunity that is now passing by each year.


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(AU) Climate Change Is A Serious Threat To National Security

Canberra Times - Robert Niven

Ah, the Australian summer! Christmas holidays, some jobs around the house, and shaving every day.
Because as you know, dear reader, to wear a half-face respirator you must be clean-shaven.
This fire season has seen the deployment of soldiers and reservists to aid in the firefighting efforts.
This fire season has seen the deployment of soldiers and reservists to aid in the firefighting efforts. Picture: Department of Defence
Robert Niven
Associate Professor Robert Niven is an academic at UNSW Canberra, with expertise in environmental contaminants and risk assessment.
This summer has certainly tested our boundaries far beyond normality, even for those of us who saw this coming.
We have now seen our dystopian future, along with its military language: we have "ember attacks", "firefronts", "firegrounds", and towns and people "lost".
Witness the daily briefings by heads of firefighting agencies, like WWII generals preparing for battle. Witness the ACT Emergency Services Agency's cross-border raids into NSW, taking the fight to the enemy, like the Israelis, or Kissinger's bombing of Cambodia.
To me this recalls Henry Lawson:
And many a rickety son of a gun, on the tides of the future tossed
Will tell how battles were really won that History says were lost ...
How 'this was our centre, and this a redoubt, and that was a scrub in the rear
And this was the point where the guards held out, and the enemy's lines were here'.
But just like the Israelis, or Kissinger, we can't fight this war forever - not this way.
Another great shock was our incredible shrinking Prime Minister, unresponsive, unaware even that a response was needed. Morrison the Unready.
Here is the paradox of modern Australia: a highly capable, practical, versatile, adventurous people, forged from many nations, who can bridge effortlessly between Europe, Asia and the Americas; a nation of highly trained specialists. Yet we allow ourselves to be mismanaged by a clueless blokey managerial class, across government, business and all of our institutions.
If our responses are presided over by Australia's utterly incapable political class, we may not even survive as a people or nation-state.
We have just witnessed thousands of people rendered homeless, many for years; the entrapment and forced evacuations of tens of thousands of people under dire circumstances; 10 million hectares burnt and more than 1 billion native animals killed; widespread damage to livestock, agricultural systems and the economy; lethal air pollution in several major cities; long-lasting impacts on our drinking water supplies; and exposure of major gaps in our communications, electricity and transport networks, fuel supplies, air pollutant monitoring systems and fire reporting. A national tragedy which no terrorist or adversary could have dreamt possible!
Yet no representative of Australia's security state, its media champions, or the well-funded security industry, has sought to make any comment or undertaken any act of leadership.
This is the problem of poor risk assessment: the risks catch up with you in the end. Deny the existence of some severe risks, or exaggerate some risks at the expense of others, and your entire risk assessment - hence your response - will be skewed.
Perhaps this explains our Prime Minister's caught-in-the-headlights response in December. Did he seriously believe his election rhetoric?
This is the most shocking dimension of the problem: a security Prime Minister had not imagined that climate-change risks are a matter of national security.
I don't claim to speak on their behalf, but I certainly think Australia owes our protesting schoolchildren an apology.
Can the Australian people see through the mirrors? Despite the vast sums spent on Australia's security over the past two decades, especially on terrorism and asylum seekers, Australia's security and defence apparatus seems antiquated and unfit for purpose. Is it just an edifice, an ornament used to win elections?
Could the $10 billion spent on onshore and offshore detention since 2006 have been better spent on climate action and preparedness?
Risk management is always a zero-sum game. A dollar spent on a lower risk here could have been spent on a higher risk elsewhere. Distort the risks, and you will pay the price. There are no right-wing or left-wing risks: they are all risks. They must all be assessed on the same scale.
What is the future? We can be sure that Australia's adversaries will have noted our newly exposed vulnerabilities - and exploit them. If this summer wasn't apocalyptic enough, imagine a new hybrid warfare with AI weapons, cyber disruption, influence campaigns and climate change? Sci-fi, cyber-fi, info-fi, cli-fi.
If our responses are presided over by Australia's utterly incapable political class, we may not even survive as a people or nation-state. We don't have time for another ten years of denialism, or failure to act on climate change. This is war.
As the first step, we must face up to Australia's incapable managers and talking heads across our society: the directionless political class, the press and talkback toadies, the rent-seeking business leaders, the public servant sycophants in suits. They must all be removed as a matter of national security.
We cannot continue our current stupidity as if nothing has changed.
It is time, and beyond time, to allow Australia's underlying capability, technical expertise and resolve - visible now in our emergency agencies, charities, brave reporters and local mayors - to shine through to our national leadership.

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