(AU) Climate Change Talk Has Been Around For 30 Years. Where's The Action?

ABC Radio National | Richard Aedy

My moment of realisation about the seriousness of climate change came 25 years ago. I expected governments to act. (Getty Images: Neil Overy/Gallo Images)

Richard Aedy has been a journalist for more than 30 years. He's been concerned about climate change for most of that time. Richard has been at Radio National since 1998.

I can't tell you what I was doing on June 23, 1988, though I can take a guess.

I was a week or so from finishing my journalism course and — how times have changed — I'd already been offered a job.

That's what would have been occupying my time — along with my girlfriend and my friends and going out. I definitely wouldn't have been thinking about climate change.

But some people were. Because on June 23, 1988, James Hansen, a climate scientist at NASA, appeared before a US Senate hearing with a warning for the world.

Essentially, he said three things: that Earth was the warmest it had been since records began; that the increase in temperature was due to the greenhouse effect; and that the effect of this global warming was that extreme weather events were more likely.

If you'd been paying attention through the 1980s, this wasn't a gigantic surprise.

Hansen and others had been publishing research in the scientific journals through the decade, and the news media often picked up on it.

In the background, the beginnings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had started to come together in 1985 and it was formally launched in 1988.

But with Hansen's testimony, climate change and global warming became a thing.

'The balance of evidence'

The IPCC's first assessment report came out in 1990.

I was a reporter for Radio New Zealand by then and sort of aware of it — but I was also in my mid-20s, and very self-involved.

I spent most of my 20s working in Auckland, and climate change wasn't front of mind. (Supplied)

If you go back to that first report, it's not exactly 'the sky is falling' territory — it's cautious. The story was about what might happen in the future, in the next century.

To a young man, even one with a science degree, it seemed interesting rather than compelling — after all, the next century was a long way off.

Listen to the RN Hot Mess podcast We've known about climate change for decades, but we've done relatively little in response. In this special four-part series, Richard Aedy finds out why.

But by 1995 it wasn't. That's when the IPCC's second assessment report came out, right at the end of the year.

The language was more certain. The report used a key phrase: "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate."

It doesn't sound like much, does it? But it was enough for me.

By then I was in London, at BBC Radio's Science Unit, and I understood how careful scientists tend to be.

Their method, of only accepting that something is true when you cannot prove that it's not, means their work proceeds in increments and may well be contested.

They're not ones for shouty certainty. So that line, "the balance of evidence", was the equivalent of ringing a bell.

That's when I had my moment of realisation — that climate change was happening and that we needed to do something about it.

With that realisation came another: governments are full of smart people.

I was confident that governments would begin to get serious about it, that they would find ways of reducing the emission of greenhouse gases and prevent a serious rise in temperatures. That's how smart I was.

Over the next few years I had a lot on. I got married, came home, started a new life in Sydney and became a father.

I also grew increasingly bewildered as governments, especially our government, did little or nothing to reduce emissions.

In 2001, the IPCC released its third assessment report. This one was more certain and spelt out the consequences of climate change this century.

Unfortunately it came out nine days after September 11 and disappeared completely.

 and media 'balance'

Over the next few years, something else became apparent.

It wasn't just that the government wasn't acting on climate change — increasingly, there was pushback against the science.

Despite a consensus in the scientific literature, it was challenged in the public space and mainstream media.

An increasing number of articles were written to the same formulas: reputable climate scientist says things are getting worse, but this other scientist says they're not.

Or, new research from this person says global warming is greatly exaggerated, or perhaps not even a thing.

To my dismay, the broadcast media, including the ABC, began to do the same by 'balancing' their stories and interviews, giving the same airtime to a climate change denier, as it did to a climate scientist.

I got why this was happening. For the news media, a story is always better if there's a fight in it, two sides with different points of view.

For broadcasters in particular, 'balance' has been integral to how it's done.

But with the denier often going unchallenged, 'balance' was often hiding journalists' lack of scientific literacy, and sometimes basic numeracy.

If journalism's job is to inform the public, and it is, this was a fail.

Hopes dashed

I'm trying to find out why there has been so little done to stop climate change. (Supplied)

In the middle of all this, the Millennium Drought, the Stern Review and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth meant the planets aligned to make climate change something people cared about.

Kevin Rudd defeated a tired Howard government, and gave me hope.

For more than two years I thought he and then-environment minister Penny Wong were going to get emissions trading to happen. When he abandoned it, I wrote a furious letter to my then-MP, Maxine McKew. I never heard back.

The carbon tax that came out of the deal between Julia Gillard and Bob Brown always felt second best to an ETS and much easier to reverse. So it proved.

Tony Abbott made 'axe the tax' one of his effective three-word slogans and was true to his word in 2014. I despaired.

And then things got worse.

Since 2015, the world has seen its five hottest years on record. Much of the eastern part of the country has been gripped by drought.

A few summers ago, fires burnt parts of alpine Tasmania that hadn't burnt in a thousand years. Last year was the hottest year in Australia since records began — and we had the biggest bushfires in history.

Scientists have repeatedly warned that the effects of climate change would include more extreme weather. (Supplied: Gena Dray)

All this has taken is around 1 degree of global warming, nearly all of it since the 1950s. In Australia, it's a bit more than 1 degree.

Scientists have warned us repeatedly about the dangers of 2 degrees of warming — but at the moment, we're heading for more than that.

Reading that phrase underlines the problem.

Two degrees doesn't seem alarming, it sounds like very little. But it's a lot.

Put it this way: between around 100,000 years ago and 12,000 years ago, we had the last Ice Age.

Much of the northern hemisphere was covered by ice and our oceans were around 100 metres lower than they are now.

On average, the temperature was around 4 degrees cooler than it was 100 years ago. Four degrees, that's all it took.

If we have another 3 degrees of warming, much of the planet would become uninhabitable.

And if we don't change, that's where we're going.

Scientists have warned us about the dangers of 2 degrees of warming — at the moment, we're heading for more than that. (ABC News: Jordan Hayne)

Climate change is much bigger, much more of a threat and much harder to deal with than coronavirus.

Scientists have spelt out this out repeatedly for 30 years, and environmental groups have championed the cause. But both made mistakes.

For too long, scientists believed that the facts spoke for themselves, that all they had to do was get them out there. And the NGOs had a tendency come across as self-righteous, or guilt-trippy.

I was already on board — with me they were preaching to the choir — but I don't think they pulled in enough other people.

But here we are. After years of drought at home, and increasingly extreme weather all over the world, polling shows that most of us get it enough to think climate change is a problem and that we should do something about it.

School students around the world have added their voices to the call for action. (Getty: Mark Evans)

And yet we've done very little. I want to know why. That's why I've made this series.

And yes, part of it turns out to be the fossil fuel industry. Part of it turns out to be that change is hard, and that it's been easier for politicians to do little, especially when they are themselves divided.

But part of it turns out to be you and me — our own psychology, the stuff that makes us human, means acting on climate change is hard to do.

Not that it can't be done — and there is hope. We'll get to that too. I hope you'll join me for Hot Mess.

In 1988, Canada hosted a conference that put climate change on the global agenda.

Links

• A pocket guide to climate change
• How climate change has impacted the world since your childhood
• How one in 10 homes could fall into uninsurable 'red zones of risk'
• How to see through the climate change rhetoric: a pocket guide to the basics
• Why this mum chooses her words carefully when talking about climate change
• Climate change means the childhood you remember no longer exists

Damage From Climate Change Will Be Widespread And Sometimes Surprising

The Economist

It will go far beyond drought, melting ice sheets and crop failures

Editor’s Note This is the fourth in a series of climate briefs. To read the others  visit The Economist's Climate Change Hub.

ON NOVEMBER 21ST 2016, a line of thunderstorms passed through the Australian state of Victoria. By the end of the following day, it had sent 3,000 people to hospital. Storms typically hurt people by blowing down buildings, flooding streets or setting fires.

In this case, though, the casualties were caused by asthma. Late that afternoon a peculiarly powerful downdraft generated by the storm front pushed a layer of cold air thick with pollen, dust and other particles through Melbourne. The city’s ambulance service was swamped within hours. At least ten people died.

The risks that weather and climate pose to human life are not always as specific to the peculiar circumstances of time and place as that sudden-onset asthma epidemic. But they are complex functions of what, where and who, and their mechanisms are not always easily discerned. What is more, they can interact with each other.

For example, if the southern spring of 2016 had not brought weather particularly well suited to the growth of allergenic grasses, would that stormy afternoon have been so catastrophic? Such complexities mean that a gradual change to the climate can lead to sudden changes in the impacts on human beings when things pass a certain threshold. And that threshold will not necessarily be discernible in advance.

Not all the ways in which today’s weather harms people will be exacerbated by climate change. But research suggests that many of them will. Most of the problems people have with weather and climate come from extremes. When means shift a little, extremes can shift a lot (see chart). Today’s rare extremes become tomorrow’s regular disturbances; tomorrow’s extremes are completely new.

LARGE IMAGE

How damaging these impacts will be to the economic and physical welfare of humankind depends on how much warming takes place and how well people adapt—both of which are currently unknowable. But it is possible to get a qualitative sense of what they could mean by looking at the range of timescales over which they operate. At one end, a thunderstorm’s pollen surge, sweeping by in minutes; at the other, sea-level rise which could last longer than any civilisation in human history.

In terms of short-lived events, the worst sort of bad day that the world’s weather can offer is generally taken to be the one on which you get hit by a tropical cyclone, which is why hurricanes (as they are known in the Atlantic) and typhoons (as they are known in some other places) have become so heated a part of the arguments about climate change. A single hurricane can do more than $100bn in damage, as Harvey did when it hit Houston in August 2017, or kill thousands, as Maria did the following month in Puerto Rico.

Tropical cyclones can only form over a sea or ocean with a surface temperature of 27°C or more. The area where such temperatures are possible will definitely increase with warming. But that does not mean hurricanes will become more common. Their formation also requires that the wind be blowing at a similar speed close to the surface and at greater altitudes—and this condition, models say, will become less common in future over many of the places where hurricanes spawn. Thus models do not predict a great increase in the number of tropical cyclones; Atlantic hurricanes may well become more rare.

But more heat in the oceans means that those tropical cyclones which do get going are more likely to become intense. There is thus broad agreement among experts that the proportion of hurricanes which reach category four or five looks set to increase. So, too, does the rainfall associated with them, because warmer air holds more moisture. Studies of the flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey suggest that warming due to climate change increased its rainfall by about 15%. Extreme rainfall events of many sorts increase in warmer worlds.

The heat which powers hurricanes at sea can, on land, kill directly. Humans cool themselves by sweating, a process that becomes less effective the more humid the atmosphere. Combining the heat and the humidity into something called the wet-bulb temperature (WBT) allows scientists to measure temperatures in a way that reflects that difficulty (similar measures in America are called the heat index). WBTs of 35°C and above are lethal.

Until recently it was thought that WBTs that high would not be seen until warming had continued for decades. A review of weather-station data from 1979 on, however, shows that for very brief periods local WBTs almost that high are already being experienced occasionally in South-East Asia, the Persian Gulf and the coastal south-west of America, and that their frequency had doubled since 1979.

With 2.5°C (4.5°F) of global warming above pre-industrial levels, which is quite possible in the second half of this century if action on emissions is not significantly increased, these unliveable conditions will become a regular occurence in parts of the humid subtropics.

Another recent study defines climates which people find liveable according to where, historically, they have lived, and then sees which such areas move beyond those climatic bounds as the world warms. Temperature rises quite plausible by 2070 would see many areas where people live today develop climates unlike any that people have lived in before (see map). Some econometric analyses based on interannual differences suggests that, in general, higher temperatures lead to lower labour productivity and more violence.

In the nearer term, there is an increased likelihood of heatwaves. Between August 3rd and 16th 2003, Europe saw 39,000 more deaths than would have been expected on the basis of previous years. The excess mortality was due to a summer that was hotter, by some estimates, than any for the previous 500 years. Modelling suggests that, even in 2003, climate change had made such a heatwave at least twice as likely.

Extreme heatwaves are becoming more frequent not only because temperatures are climbing. Warming-induced changes in the climate system can weaken the processes that normally move weather around the world, allowing conditions to get stuck. Such stalling can be the difference between a hot week and a lethal month, or in winter a cold snap and a deep freeze.

Springtime and harvest

Hot summers can also harm crops, both directly—many important crops are very sensitive to temperatures above a certain threshold—and through water stress. Milder winters can also do harm by allowing pests to survive, hurting yields.

When unusually hot and dry conditions suck the moisture off the land, the subsequent droughts do not just exacerbate the problems for farmers. They also increase the risk and severity of fires—which an increase in the amount of lightning will, in some regions, spark off more frequently. This is an issue not just in warm, fire-prone places such as Australia. For several months in the summer of 2019, large swathes of northern Russian and Canadian forest—and even some of Greenland’s few woodlands—went up in flames.

Unusual infernos have plagued California for many years now, again as a result of parched conditions, which are drying out rivers, lakes and underground aquifers across the entire south-west of the state. This is no regular drought. It is 19 years in the making, enough for it to be classed as a “megadrought”.

Tree-ring records show only four such in the region over the past 1,200 years, and suggest that this could be as bad as the worst of them, which took place in the 17th century. Such droughts are linked to changing patterns of circulation in the ocean. Models suggest that such patterns are themselves altered by warming, which can thus change the frequency of other large-scale regional shifts in the climate.

And then there is the longest term change: sea level. The sea’s rise comes from three different mechanisms—the expansion of the oceans as they absorb more heat, the addition of meltwater from shrinking glaciers on land, and the physical break down of ice sheets such as those on Antarctica and Greenland.

The first two factors are currently driving an increase of about 1cm every three years, and are set to do so at a similar rate well into the 21st century even if global warming is held well below 2°C; the time it takes seawater to warm up gives the process a significant inertia. Such rises will erode coasts and increase flooding—especially when pushed inland by the surges intense storms produce.

The big unknown, though, once you get to the century time scale, is the stability of the great ice sheets. It is widely believed that there are points of no return after which such sheets are doomed slowly to collapse, thus increasing sea levels by many metres. Where these points of no return are is not clear. It is possible that they might be passed even if warming is kept to 1.5°C above the pre-industrial.

A high likelihood of drought and crop failures; changes to regional climate that upset whole economies; storms more destructive in both their winds and their rains; seawater submerging beaches and infiltrating aquifers: what is known about the impacts of climate change is already worrying enough.

The known unknowns add to the anxiety. It is not just the question of the ice sheets, an uncertainty massive enough to weigh down a continent. There are other tipping points, too, which could see ocean currents shift, or deserts spread. And in the spaces between all these troubles are the unknown unknowns, as surprising, and deadly, as a thunderstorm that kills through pollen.■

Links

• Climate Brief 1: Why tackling global warming is a challenge without precedent
• Climate Brief 2: How modelling articulates the science of climate change
• Climate Brief 3: Humanity’s immense impact on Earth’s climate and carbon cycle
• 1988 World Conference on The Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security
• Conference Statement - The Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security (pdf)
• IMF Leader Says Pandemic Stimulus Must Focus On Battling Climate Crisis
• (US) Think This Pandemic Is Bad? We Have Another Crisis Coming
• While We Fixate On Coronavirus, Earth Is Hurtling Towards A Catastrophe Worse Than The Dinosaur Extinction
• The Coronavirus Outbreak Is Part Of The Climate Change Crisis
• Children Of The Crisis
• While We Self-Isolate, It’s A Good Time To Reflect On The Urgency Of The Climate Crisis
• (AU) Summer Of Crisis

(AU) While The World Looked The Other Way, Corporate Giants Abandoned Coal

Sydney Morning Herald - Bob Carr

Bob Carr, a former NSW Labor Premier and Australian Foreign Affairs Minister, is Professor of Climate and Business at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Can we deal with a pandemic and global warming at once – both urgent, one an immediate hit, the other a decade-long burn?

Well, yes, because – even with front pages dominated by COVID-19 – last month saw an astonishing concentration of decisions by international corporates to ditch carbon. And they slipped by, with the world looking the other way.

AGL's coal-fired Loy Yang power plant in the Latrobe Valley. Credit: Justin McManus

Apart from anything else, April's tilt against thermal coal puts paid to dreams in Canberra of a new coal-fired plant. After last month’s shift, nobody will invest in it, nobody will insure it. "COVID is a severe sudden shock," one investment banker told me last week. "It will be over some time, but decarbonisation is happening. Institutional investors are leading and the coronavirus has not slowed it."

He might have been thinking of Japan, once reputed a hold-out on climate action. Not now. April brought announcements from Japan’s three largest institutional banks to exclude any financing of new coal-fired power. One, Mizuho, had been the world’s largest private financier of coal.

For this reason Scandinavian investors had targeted it – just as this week the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, the Norwegian Government Pension Fund, dumped its stake in AGL and placed BHP "under observation" as part of its policy excluding companies dependant on thermal coal.

Exit announcements have followed from four Japanese trading houses. Two of them having sold off stakes in Australian coal mines, New Hope and Moolarben.

A bigger hit to climate recalcitrants emerged from the oil and gas sector. Shell had every pretext to delay unveiling its new policy on decarbonisation – the virus and turmoil in oil markets. Still, its investors demanded it and on April 16 Shell said it would be carbon-neutral by 2050. It would even accept responsibility for the emissions of its customers. This new corporate personality mandates a multi-decade switch to wind, solar, biofuels, battery and offsets such as avoided deforestation.

It follows similar announcements by BP in February and Total in April – the big three Europeans aligning themselves with Paris climate targets. The added sting: all three will pull out of industry lobbies that oppose climate action.

The gods of April did not relent, with two of Germany’s biggest asset managers, Deka and Union Investment, endorsing coal exclusion. The zeitgeist struck even in Trump’s America. On April 24, global bank Citi said it would stop providing any financial services to new thermal coal mines or expansion of existing ones; the same with coal-fired power.

Annoyed that Citi and Morgan Stanley had both ruled out Arctic drilling, Trump said they were just afraid of the "radical left"; financial commentators said fossil fuels were a losing game.

The decisions to exit coal by big financial institutions is carefully tracked by Australian energy finance analyst Tim Buckley, who says 133 globally significant financial institutions have announced their exit from coal, 10 in the past two weeks. That, he says, is "triple the run-rate of last year".

On April 17 Austria eliminated coal from its grid when it closed its last coal-fired plant. "Coal power in Austria is history," said the utility chief. "The future belongs to renewable energy."

In the same week Sweden closed its last coal-fired plant two years earlier than planned. The two countries join Belgium celebrating coal-free status.

On April 25 the Appeal Court in Holland delivered the biggest ever courtroom win for climate. It wrapped up seven years of litigation. To comply the government will have to reduce by 75 per cent the output of three coal-fired power stations, even closing one or two. The government will also tackle household heating, a stubbornly difficult sector, by putting €400 million ($A670 million) into double-glazing.

"April is the cruellest month," wrote T S Eliot, and he might have been prophesying 2020 and the pain suffered by advocates of old energy.

On the last day of the month Allianz, one of the world’s biggest insurers with an astronomical investment book, said it would not invest in coal or insure it.

Coal-fired power would be verboten. It will exclude dealings with any corporate that derives more than 30 per cent of its revenue from coal (in two years to be 25 per cent). Farewell also to any partner owning infrastructure that services coal, such as ports or rail, which it now views as long-term toxic and stranded assets.

Once a huge financier of coal, Allianz confirms a massive pivot to renewables.

April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land ...

Links

• A Silver Lining In The Global Pandemic: The Beginning Of The End For Oil?
• Even If Climate Change Wasn't Happening, Phasing Out Coal Is A 'No-Regret' Solution
• Sweden Closes Last Coal Plant Two Years Ahead Of Schedule
• (AU) Proposed Queensland Coal-Fired Power Plant Under Cloud Over Emissions And Financing
• (AU) Anthony Albanese Says Coal Mining Could Continue In Australia In A Net Zero Emissions World
• (AU) New CSIRO, AEMO Study Confirms Wind, Solar And Storage Beat Coal, Gas And Nuclear
• (AU) Australia Says Climate Change Targets Can’t Risk Economy, Jobs