Lethal Heating: 04/18/20

18/04/2020

(AU) Scientists Trial Cloud Brightening Equipment To Shade And Cool Great Barrier Reef

The Guardian - Graham Readfearn

Exclusive: experiment uses a modified turbine to spray trillions of nano-sized salt crystals into the air from a barge

Can cloud-brightening help save the Great Barrier Reef? Trials have begun.

Scientists have carried out a trial of prototype cloud brightening equipment on the Great Barrier Reef they hope could be scaled up to shade and cool corals and protect them from bleaching caused by rising global temperatures.

The experiment used a modified turbine with 100 high-pressure nozzles to spray trillions of nano-sized ocean salt crystals into the air from the back of a barge.

In theory, the tiny salt crystals are able to mix with low-altitude clouds, making them brighter and reflecting more sunlight away from the ocean surface.

The trial was not designed to test the effectiveness of cloud-brightening itself, but Daniel Harrison of Southern Cross University, who led the project, told Guardian Australia it had successfully demonstrated that the delivery system worked.

Between 25 and 28 March, Harrison and a small team of researchers from the university and the Sydney Institute of Marine Science carried out the experiment beside Broadhurst reef off Townsville, in Queensland.

Researchers from the University of Sydney and Queensland University of Technology were also on hand to test the prototype, developed in partnership with EmiControls of Italy. Several other researchers, including an EmiControls representative, were unable to join the crew as planned because of Covid-19 travel restrictions.

A seperate vessel 5km away carrying atmospheric modelling equipment was able to detect the mist created by the prototype. Future experiments will measure if the salt particles do brighten clouds.

The cloud-brightening approach is just one of 43 concepts being funded under a $150m government-backed research and development program announced on Thursday.

Scientists are racing to find measures that could be used to reduce the impact of rising ocean temperatures on corals caused by global heating.

In 2020, the Great Barrier Reef experienced its third outbreak of mass coral bleaching in five years. Tropical coral reefs are especially sensitive to global heating. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says 70-90% of coral reefs will die as global heating gets to 1.5C.

Harrison said the technology, deployed in March under a permit from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, had promise because it was relatively cheap, could be deployed at scale and kick-started a process that occurs naturally.

“Nature does most of the work for you,” he said. “This makes a nano-sized salt crystal at hundreds of trillions per second. They get into a cloud and grow a cloud droplet that reflects a lot more sunlight.”

Harrison said the technique was effectively boosting a natural process, because clouds mostly form over the ocean when moisture gathers around salt crystals stirred up by winds from the ocean surface.

He said while a cloud of mist was visible off the back of the boat, about 99% of the particles created by the nozzles were too small to see. However, they could be detected by atmospheric measuring equipment on the accompanying vessel.

A trial on the Great Barrier Reef of cloud brightening equipment. Photograph: Brendan Kelaher/Southern Cross University

“We thought we might only be able to detect it a couple of kilometres downwind, but we detected it 5km downwind,” Harrison said.Scientists on the barge said they could see corals “bleaching around us” as they carried out the experiment.

Harrison and the core team drove 3,600km north to Townsville from Coffs Harbour, and back, camping and preparing their own food along the way to remain isolated from others not involved in the project as Covid-19 travel restrictions began to be rolled out.

Future research will also examine any downstream risks from the technique, and any local impacts on rainfall.

Manduburra traditional owner Usop Drahm, who joined the expedition, said: “We welcome scientific research where Indigenous people and the rest of Australia work together to maintain the reef ecosystem for future generations.

“This technology might help prevent bleaching and we like that it uses no chemicals and relies on natural processes.”

Harrison said while the trial was not set up to detect if clouds had been brightened, “the theory says [the particles] would have mixed up to the heights of low-level clouds about 800 metres up”.

The salt crystals would have remained in the air for only one or two days in the initial experiment, he said. The approach does not make clouds, but brightens those already in the atmosphere.

There are plans to scale up the experiment using more and larger turbines so that their output is about 10 times larger.

This, Harrison said, could cover an area of hundreds of square kilometres – a scale large enough to slightly cool ocean temperatures.

Within four years, Harrison said, it was hoped the project would show a brightening response in the clouds.

But he said the success of such projects would depend on action to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

He said as temperatures went up, the cloud brightening technique became less and less effective at protecting corals from mass bleaching.

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Big Parts Of The Great Barrier Reef Are Dying

The Economist

The bleaching adds to Australia’s summer of unnatural calamities

OVER THE southern hemisphere’s summer, mercifully now at an end, Australia burned under a pitiless sun. Bush fires down the continent’s eastern flank consumed 46m acres of countryside, destroying homes, taking lives and driving rare animals towards extinction. To many Australians, the satellite pictures showing huge plumes of smoke drifting off to the east over the Great Barrier Reef seemed a portent of life in an age of man-made warming.

It turns out that high temperatures were wreaking havoc under the water as well. This month comes news that exceptionally warm seas have led the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s biggest coral system, to suffer its third mass bleaching in five years. The bush and the reef, both ravaged on a gargantuan scale: Australians almost define themselves by these two ecosystems, which once seemed boundless.

Coral bleaching takes place when sea temperatures spike, causing the coral polyps that make up reefs to eject the algae that generate their food via photosynthesis. Without the pigmented algae, coral soon dies, leaving the intricate colonies a ghostly white. Reefs can recover from occasional bleachings: the fastest-growing corals regenerate in a decade or so. But mass bleachings on the Great Barrier Reef are becoming ever more frequent. The first occurred only in 1998. There have since been four more: in 2002, 2016, 2017 and now this year. They have become so common that the Bureau of Meteorology issues forecasts for them.

The latest bleaching is not as severe as the worst one, in 2016, when about half of the northern part of the 2,300km-long reef died. But the run of recent bleachings had already killed off relatively heat-intolerant coral species. What is striking this year, says Terry Hughes of James Cook University in Queensland, who led a recent aerial survey of the reef, is that for the first time the bleaching extended to the southern part of the reef. There, closer to the pole, waters should be cooler. Not this year. February saw the highest sea-surface temperatures across the reef since monitoring began 120 years ago.

The biblical rains that recently extinguished the bush fires have also helped to lower water temperatures over the reef. The rains are proof to climate-change deniers—who are given a platform by Rupert Murdoch’s press and who are represented on the ruling coalition’s backbenches—that recent fires, droughts and floods are simply part of the natural cycle. They point with glee to the bush springing back to life. Yet while important habitats, such as those dominated by eucalypts, depend upon fire to regenerate, this summer’s fires, exceptionally, destroyed temperate rainforests too. They also incinerated perhaps a third of koalas in New South Wales—hardly a run-of-the-mill dip in the population.

Regarding the reef, the deniers play down the damage and insist on the ability of “nature to fix nature”. That is despite the cumulative effect of successive bleachings from which reefs struggle to recover. Mr Hughes says the Great Barrier Reef can no longer return to its state of even five years ago; in the coming decades, healthy coral is likely to be confined to ever smaller patches.

The bush fires threw the prime minister, Scott Morrison, off balance. Holidaying in Hawaii made him look out of touch, while his Liberal Party’s cosy links to oil, gas, coal and iron-ore interests came under closer scrutiny. Among big economies Australia ranks behind only Saudi Arabia in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions per head—and that does not count the emissions when its exports of coal and gas are consumed elsewhere.

Perhaps in this respect, the new coronavirus is a tonic for Mr Morrison. His polls, hurt by the fires, have risen as Australia has escaped an epidemic on a par with Europe or America. Meanwhile, the government intones it is on course to “meet and beat” national commitments under the Paris agreement on climate to cut emissions—although that is thanks in part to an accounting gimmick.

As for the latest bleaching, the government has largely ignored the news.

Mr Morrison’s official “envoy” to the Great Barrier Reef, Warren Entsch, a Queensland politician, points out that “bleached corals are not dead corals” and predicts that many will recover. Although he admits climate change is a concern, he once complained that “indoctrinating” youngsters to be worried about it is a form of “child abuse”. Most Australians care both about climate change and about the Great Barrier Reef—but not enough, alas, to call their government out over such ambivalence.

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The Guardian View On The Climate And Coronavirus: Global Warnings

The Guardian - Editorial

Steep falls in emissions have been the pandemic’s immediate effect. But what’s needed is a green recovery

A wind farm in Norfolk. ‘Every possible effort must now be made to ensure that any and every stimulus package is directed towards renewable energy and zero- or low-carbon infrastructure and transport.’ Photograph: Richard Osbourne/Blue Pearl Photographic/Alamy

So far, discussions of a coronavirus exit strategy have mainly focused on the steps that could bring an end to the lockdown. In the short term, both in the UK and elsewhere, there is nothing more desirable than letting people resume their lives, once it is safe to do so.

But the speed of the “return to normal” is not the only thing that matters. The manner in which the world’s leaders manage the colossal economic and political shocks caused by the virus is also of the utmost importance. And at the top of their list of priorities, alongside human welfare, must be the biosphere and its future.

It’s too soon to say with any confidence what impact coronavirus will have on the climate emergency. The brakes placed on economic activities of many kinds, worldwide, have led to carbon emission cuts that would previously have been unthinkable: 18% in China between February and March; between 40% and 60% over recent weeks in Europe. Habits and behaviours once regarded as sacrosanct have been turned on their heads: road traffic in the UK has fallen by 70%. Global air traffic has halved.

Meanwhile, a much-needed spotlight has been thrown on humans’ troubling relationship to wildlife, with some experts arguing that the degradation of the natural world and exploitation of other species is among the pandemic’s causes. In human terms, the economic contraction precipitated by the virus – and predicted by the World Bank to lead to a severe depression – is sure to be brutal. No one, and least of all an elected government, would have chosen to limit emissions in this way.

But if further savage waves of destruction to people’s livelihoods are to be avoided, rather than simply stored up or ignored until they become unignorable, just as coronavirus was, every possible effort must now be made to ensure that the recovery, when it comes, is as green as possible; that any and every stimulus package is directed towards renewable energy and zero- or low-carbon infrastructure and transport.

The urgency and desperation surrounding all such efforts are likely to militate against progressive measures. Already, governments are coming under huge pressure to bail out oil and gas companies (in the US and Canada this has already begun). But while in the short term the low oil price, which is also the result of a price war being waged by Saudi Arabia and Russia, could have the damaging effect of making oil more competitive against renewables, plunging demand and turmoil in the industry provide an opportunity that must be seized by all who oppose the continued dominance of fossil fuels.

There are other questions besides the future of oil that the crisis has opened up in unexpected ways. Huge political shifts are under way, with fiscally conservative governments such as Boris Johnson’s intervening in economies to an unprecedented extent. What was once impossible (socialist, reckless) now turns out not to be, at all. Could the renewed shock of human vulnerability in the face of Covid-19 make way for an increased willingness to face other perils, climate chaos among them?

Impossible to say at this stage, perhaps. Certainly not without a fight against all those who will promote a return to business (and emissions) as usual. But with the postponement of crucial UN biodiversity and climate conferences, it has never been more important to keep up the pressure. There is no exit strategy from our planet.

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