Lethal Heating: 03/14/20

14/03/2020

(AU) Summer Of Crisis

Australia’s Black Summer of 2019-2020 was characterised by catastrophic bushfires. The bushfire season started in winter and was the worst on record for New South Wales in terms of its intensity, the area burned, and the number of properties lost. It was also the worst season on record for properties lost in Queensland.
The Summer of Crisis report is the first comprehensive overview of the devastating climate impacts Australians experienced this summer. It focuses on New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, because the effects of the bushfires were most severe in these areas, but we acknowledge that the bushfires affected Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania.

DOWNLOAD THE REPORT
LARGE IMAGE

DOWNLOAD REPORT

KEY FINDINGS

Climate change fuelled Australia’s devastating Black Summer

Extremely hot, dry conditions, underpinned by years of reduced rainfall and a severe drought, set the scene for this summer’s unprecedented fires.
Cool season rainfall has declined in southeast Australia over the last two to three decades, while temperature records have been broken over and over. 2019 was Australia’s hottest, driest year on record. 2018-2019 was southeast Australia’s driest two-year period on record.
The Australian fire season has lengthened in NSW, decreasing the ability of land managers to conduct hazard reduction burns and increasing the number of fire danger days.

Australia’s Black Summer was unprecedented in scale and harm. The bushfire season was the worst on record for New South Wales in terms of the scale of the bushfires, the number of properties lost and the amount of area burned.

People and animals affected:

Nearly 80 percent of Australians were affected either directly or indirectly by the bushfires. – One billion animals were killed by the bushfires, 800 million in NSW.

Area burnt:

The Gospers Mountain fire was the largest forest fire ever recorded in Australia, burning more than 500,000 hectares.
This season’s fires were incredibly large in area, even compared to forests all around the world. Around 21 percent of Australian temperate broadleaf and mixed forests was burnt. The average annual area burnt for most continents, including Australia, is well below 5%, except for Africa and Asia, which have average annual areas burnt of 8-9%.

Record breaking weather:

Catastrophic fire danger ratings were experienced at locations and times of the year never before recorded.
For the first time ever catastrophic fire conditions were forecast for Greater Sydney.

The bushfires are estimated to have spewed between 650 million and 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That is equivalent to the annual emissions from commercial aircraft worldwide and is far higher than Australia’s annual emissions of around 531 million tonnes.

The amount of carbon dioxide released by the bushfires is also more than the annual emissions of Germany.

Climate change events are becoming increasingly economically devastating.

The tourism sector alone is set to lose at least $4.5 billion because of the bushfires. It is estimated that there was a 10-20 percent drop in international visitors booking holidays to Australia.
The bushfire smoke that blanketed Sydney is estimated to have cost the city $12-50 million per day.
More than 23,000 bushfire related insurance claims were lodged across New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Victoria between November and February, totalling an estimated value of $1.9 billion.

The summer of 2019-20 saw unprecedented climate impacts fuelled by the burning of coal, oil and gas.

The hot, dry conditions that fuelled these fires will continue to worsen without substantial, concerted action to rapidly phase out coal, oil and gas.
Australia urgently needs a plan to cut our domestic greenhouse gas emissions to net zero and to phase out fossil fuel exports because we are one of the world’s largest polluters.
Taking action now will provide a chance to stabilise, then eventually reduce disaster risks for future generations.
Clearly, what Australia does matters and the longer we delay, the harder the problem will be to solve. We simply cannot leave this mess for our children to try to fix.

Links

Coronavirus Should Give Us Hope That We Are Able To Tackle The Climate Crisis

The Conversation - David Comerford

EPA-EFE/Ritchie B Tongo

David Comerford

David Comerford is Program Director, MSc Behavioural Science, University of Stirling

Coronavirus has disrupted everyday life throughout the world through travel bans, flight restrictions and the cancellation of sporting and cultural events.

More than 10 million Italians have been banned from travelling, and all public events cancelled. In China, 30 million people are still under lockdown, allowed to leave their homes only every two days. The Japanese prime minister has requested that all schools close for the entire month of March, while the Italian and Iranian authorities have closed all schools and universities. Despite the costs and inconveniences these actions impose, the general public is generally quiescent, even approving.
But coronavirus is not the only global crisis we face: the climate crisis, as others have noted, is expected to be more devastating. Some have observed that the response to the two crises is starkly different. As an expert in behavioural sciences, I have been giving some thought to what explains this difference.

The entrance of a former military hospital in Milan, Italy, 6 March 2020, to which COVID-19 patients are being transferred. Andrea Fasani/EPA-EFE

At first glance the difference is surprising, because the climate crisis is structurally very similar to the coronavirus crisis for a number of reasons:

Both are characterised by an escalating probability of disaster. In the case of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, this is due to the nature of contagion: each patient can pass the disease on to more than one person and so rates of infection tend to accelerate. In the case of climate change, the increased risk of initiating feedback loops (processes which amplify the warming trend) and crossing tipping points as global temperatures rise have the same effect.
Tackling either problem will dusrupt our lifestyles in a number of ways, some of which are quite similar – consider the drastic rise in staycations elicited by the coronavirus crisis.
In both cases there is a coordination problem: the efforts of any one individual will achieve nothing to mitigate the risk unless accompanied by efforts from many others.
And in both cases, authorities acknowledge the urgency of acting. Governing administrations in 28 countries have declared a climate emergency.

Close to home
Given these similarities, one might think that both would evoke similar responses. But the response to the coronavirus crisis has arguably been far greater than the response to the climate crisis. Why?
Coronavirus is a recent, self-evident and rapidly escalating threat. It feels like a shock to the status quo, and the unease that shock engenders motivates action. Each day brings new evidence of the direct consequences of the outbreak, and these consequences are rapidly moving closer to home. It impresses as a clear and present danger that requires action now.
The threat of climate change, on the other hand, has been suggested for decades, and hard evidence has accumulated only gradually. Consequently, it does not evoke the same kind of unease. While there is no doubt that present and past activities by humans have generated emissions that will have consequences for the climate, it is not wholly possible to ascribe any specific event to climate change. The impression it makes is of a vague problem that will be encountered in the future, not something immediate.

Antarctica is becoming a popular tourist destination – but the continent’s delicate ecosystems are already suffering due to global warming. Federico Anfitti/EPA-EFE

There is also a sense in which the future is going to be bad regardless what steps we take now to address climate change. This can beget feelings of helplessness. With coronavirus, it feels as though today’s actions will have real and demonstrable consequences.
People are more supportive of policies if they can explain the mechanism through which the policy operates. There is a simple and intuitive mental model of how COVID-19 spreads (through people) and how we can stop its spread (keep infected people isolated).
Though we have been taught that heating our homes, driving our cars and so on contributes towards climate change, the causal chain through which this actually occurs is not intuitive. It feels as though we are dealing with coronavirus effectively when we quarantine infected people, but it does not feel as though we are taking a concrete step towards dealing with climate change by, for instance, banning the burning of unseasoned wood.

Some hope
So, what lessons can we learn from this?
Communication appears to be key. Creating intuitive mental models and apt metaphors to explain the link between our consumer behaviour, carbon emissions and a changing climate is a tall order. But if advocacy and lobby groups can do so, it might facilitate a sense of responsibility and agency. Also, it seems that the current communication around the risks and negative outcomes of climate change may be too diffuse and varied to be easily assimilated by the general public. If media outlets and governments could coordinate to clarify the nature of climate risk, coronavirus shows us that the public are more than capable of responding appropriately.

Celebrating Holi festival in medical face masks in Dhaka, Bangladesh, 9 March 2020. Monirul Alam/EPA-EFE

In the meantime, it might be heartening to consider some features of the coronavirus outbreak that would have been expected to inhibit action, but haven’t. The fact that most healthy adults recover from COVID-19 would be expected to induce complacency. And we know that people are generally prone to an optimism bias: the fact that I can engage in behaviours that protect against COVID-19 makes me over-optimistic regarding my personal risk. By contrast, climate change is universal; the healthy and wealthy do not inhabit a separate climate to the rest of us. If we get the messaging right, this universality should motivate even greater coordination than we have seen in response to coronavirus.
Also, taking steps to reduce the risk of coronavirus is always costly (such as cancelling events). By contrast, climate change mitigation still offers opportunities to both reduce greenhouse gas emissions and simultaneously gain via lower energy bills, better air quality and so on.
In my research, I have focused on finding these win-wins, for instance in commuting behaviour and residential energy use. But the commitment I have observed over the past weeks in tackling the coronavirus outbreak makes me ambitious. Instead of applying behavioural science to change individual behaviour, let’s apply it to change hearts, minds and government policies.
One final lesson that the response to coronavirus teaches is that people can still work together to do the right thing. We need hope, and trust in each other, to tackle the climate crisis. Perhaps, counter-intuitively, coronavirus will help us with this.

Links

Coronavirus And Climate Change

New York Times - Brad Plumer

Credit...Spencer Platt/Getty Images

On Monday, oil prices saw their biggest one-day drop since 1991, driven down by coronavirus fears and a price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia. If we’re entering an era of really cheap oil, it’s worth asking what that could mean for climate change.

The traditional view is that a plunge in oil prices hurts efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, as people use more oil and disregard alternatives like electric cars. Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, has warned that cheap oil may slow the transition to cleaner energy worldwide.

But there are also reasons to think the old rules may not apply this time, and that the climate impact of cheap oil doesn’t have to be so stark.

Cheap oil, for instance, has often depressed sales of electric cars. But nowadays, a large share of electric vehicle sales is being driven by regulations in places like China, Europe and California. Those aren’t going away. What’s more, battery prices have been quickly falling over time, which means that electric cars are steadily becoming more competitive with conventional cars, even if you ignore fuel costs.

“For most consumers, high upfront prices are the biggest thing holding electric vehicles back,” Colin McKerracher, head of advanced transport at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said in an email. “Battery prices matter more than oil prices. If those keep falling, electric vehicle adoption will keep going up.”

He added: “Automakers are unlikely to change their long-term plans as a result of fluctuations in the oil market. Electrification is here to stay.”

Generally, a drop in oil prices also leads to an increase in travel, as people take advantage of low prices at the pump or cheaper airfares. But that’s less likely to happen this time, since worries about the coronavirus outbreak are keeping many people at home.

One big question, said Amy Myers Jaffe, an oil expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, is whether the coronavirus outbreak could permanently alter people’s work and transportation habits as companies get more comfortable with remote work and videoconferencing, reducing oil demand over time. “It will be interesting to see if we see big structural changes once this crisis subsides,” she said.

Another dynamic to watch: The oil crash, which is putting a financial strain on drilling companies, could cause some companies to reconsider their plans to invest in low-carbon technology. Alternatively, some companies may decide that renewable sources like wind and solar are actually a safer investment in a world of unstable oil prices.

But the biggest wild card is how policymakers react to the economic slowdown that’s being driven by coronavirus fears. If countries like China try to revitalize their economy by subsidizing polluting industries like steel and cement, emissions could soar in the coming months. During a period of economic crisis, climate concerns often fade, many analysts have noted.

But there’s another scenario: Governments could seize this moment to enact new climate policies. Low oil prices are often a good opportunity to remove subsidies for fossil fuels, which have been increasing in recent years, or raise taxes on carbon dioxide emissions, since consumers are less likely to feel the impact.

“Policymakers may try to bail out the conventional energy system and continue on as usual,” said Michael Webber, chief science and technology officer at Engie, a French energy company. “Or they could try to scale back subsidies for fossil fuels, help retrain workers into cleaner sectors, and take the moment to try to address the climate problem.”

In other words, it’s really up to us.

Links