(AU) West Australian Dry Spell Worsens With Record Water Deficiency Declaration In Cascade

ABC Esperance - Emma Field | Isabel Moussalli

A water deficiency declaration will ensure adequate water supplies for livestock. (ABC Esperance: Emma Field) 

Key Points Cascade near Esperance has been declared water deficient for the first time Water will be carted to the townsite for animal welfare reasons It marks an unprecedented 12 water deficiency declarations across WA in a year

The West Australian Government will begin carting emergency water supplies to another dry agriculture region in the state's south-east today after it made its 12th water deficiency declaration in a year.

The small town of Cascade, about 100 kilometres north-east of Esperance, was yesterday declared water deficient for the first time in its history.

It means the State Government will cart about 640 kilolitres of water a week to temporary tanks at the Cascade townsite.

This water must only be used for animal welfare and emergency firefighting.

For Cascade farmer, Scott Pickering, it has been the driest period his family has seen for five decades and last year he only recorded 169 millimetres of rain, well under half his average annual rainfall.

He said the declaration decision was "fantastic" for farmers who had been struggling with dry conditions for the past few years.

"We've only got about 25 dams; there's only three that have water in it at the moment," Mr Pickering said.

"So we've been carting water internally for probably 18 months and we've been carting water from the town dam since December."

Scott Pickering is one of the farmers affected by water shortages in Cascade. (ABC Esperance: Emma Field)

'The outlook is very grim'

At Kanga Downs, Cascade farmers Ray and Bonnie Arnold recorded two consecutive years of well-below average rainfall and said recent rain did not produce enough runoff into dams.

"It seems to be if we don't get the summer rain … the outlook is very grim," Mr Arnold said.

"We've got an average of 420 [millimetres], but we haven't had that for three years, and it's really showing in the [crop] yields; we are suffering."

The emergency water is not allowed to be accessed by farmers who need water for crop spraying, something that makes Cascade farmers worried.

The Cascade declaration comes after Salmon Gums received the same declaration in March, and Grass Patch was declared in December, both of which are also in the Shire of Esperance.

Ray Arnold carting water from the Cascade standpipe, before the declaration this week. (ABC Esperance: Emma Field)

WA Agriculture Minister Alannah MacTiernan said the unprecedented dry conditions due to climate change had affected water supplies in the area.

"This 12th water deficiency declaration highlights the climatic challenges facing our farmers, who are doing their best to employ sustainable land use strategies to remain viable," she said.

Last week, Gairdner in the Shire of Jerramungup received water deficiency declarations, adding to other declarations in the shires of Ravensthorpe, Lake Grace, Kent, and Dumbleyung.

The WA Government spent more than $2.8 million in the 12 months to June carting water to areas which are classified water deficient.

Links

• 'Enough to dampen the dust — if that': WA farmers face driest conditions in 40 years
• Water deficiency declared on WA's south coast amid animal welfare concerns
• Drought a bigger impact on Australian agriculture than coronavirus, new figures show
• Indigenous groups earn millions in carbon credits to burn country to cut emissions — but only in northern Australia 
• Savanna burns reduce emissions by half a million tonnes
• 'A tinder box': why do we burn the Top End black every year?

(AU) Two Dry Wet Seasons Spark Early Start To NT's Grass Fires, Leaving Experts Worried

ABC News - Laetitia Lemke

Bushfires NT lighting a series of fires for a mitigation burn at Acacia Hills. (ABC News: Laetitia Lemke)

Key Points Bushfires NT says there have been more fires than usual this year It is worried about a bad fire season because of fuel loads in the bush One of the tools for managing fires in northern Australia is under funding threat

In Australia's tropical savannas, property owners are accustomed to the risk of wildfires in the long months of the dry, but one specialist team is warning of an early start to this year's fire season.

Bushfires NT works with firefighters and landowners to help manage the environment to protect lives and property from fire.

One of the greatest challenges is gamba grass, a quick-burning savannah grass introduced in the NT in the 1930s and originally from Africa.

"Over 50 per cent of the fires that I've been to this year would have been impacted by Gamba," Bushfire NT's Fire Management Officer Nathaniel Staniford said.

"It means a faster-moving fire that's more intense [and] a greater spotting potential, which is where embers will fly ahead of the fire front," he said.

"So we are constantly having to be vigilant and look beyond the control lines."

Bushfires NT run mitigation burns in Australia's Top End. (ABC News: Laetitia Lemke)

And it's not just gamba grass changing the risks.

After two record-breaking dry wet seasons in the NT, Mr Staniford said the landscape had received just enough rain to deliver grass and shrub growth, but that flora was now drying much earlier in the season.

"The fuel is curing at a rapid rate, we are already at 90 per cent cured across most of the Top End, so we are very close to reaching a level where we will start seeing fire ban days declared," he said.

Mr Staniford, who is part of the team that helped fight the recent bushfires in the Shoalhaven Region in New South Wales, is now back in the Territory, moving the Bushfires NT into its new purpose-built facility in Rural Darwin's Acacia Hills area.

The team is working to achieve total compliance on firebreaks and encouraging mitigation burns.

"It's really important to have these mitigation burns in place," he said.

The North Australia Fire Information website can show up a fire within an hour of it starting across parts of Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and the NT. (ABC News: Laetitia Lemke)

"The firebreaks that people put in might be the 4-metre depth but with a mitigation burn on top of that, it increases the strength of that containment line and gives us more options when we are out fighting a wildfire."

Bushfires NT Chief Fire Control Officer Andrew Turner said the strong message was that the window of opportunity to do that work safely was closing quickly.

"We've had 16 wildfires to date just in the last two weeks predominantly and a number of those have caused some significant damage to properties," Mr Turner said.

"Our fires are every bit as dangerous as those down south.

"Every year, there are many cases of people losing property, losing their livelihood and potentially putting themselves in a great deal of danger."

But as preparations ramp up, one of the key resources used to manage blazes in northern Australia is under threat because of a lack of certainty over funding.

Bushfires NT staff create a fire plan. (ABC News: Hamish Harty)

The North Australia Fire Information (NAFI) website can detect a fire within an hour of it starting.

It covers 5 million square kilometres of land stretching across parts of Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and all of the NT.

Dr Andrew Edwards is a research fellow at the Darwin Centre for Bushfire Research that runs the NAFI website at Charles Darwin University.

Dr Edwards said NAFI could show where fires had burned and when, which he said was vital information for large property owners and Indigenous rangers.

"We've gone from huge figures of fire frequency down to 20 or 25 per cent of what was going on before," Dr Edwards said.

"We're talking about hundreds of millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions abatement in Northern Australia over the last seven or eight years."

A back-burn underway in the NT. (ABC News: Laetitia Lemke)

"It's world's best practice, there is not another website like it in the world."

"In fact, we are about to export it to Africa and to South America, where they are hoping to implement similar programs in their savannas," Dr Edwards said.

"We are not for profit, we are not out to make squillions of money, we're just out to help a lot of people do really good fire management."

The University said as of this week it may have secured another 12 months of funding from the Federal Government for the NAFI site.

But with a growing focus on fires across Australia and around the world, the University said it hoped more permanent funding could be secured.

Links

• Indigenous groups earn millions in carbon credits to burn country to cut emissions — but only in northern Australia 
• Savanna burns reduce emissions by half a million tonnes
• 'A tinder box': why do we burn the Top End black every year?
• 'Enough to dampen the dust — if that': WA farmers face driest conditions in 40 years
• Water deficiency declared on WA's south coast amid animal welfare concerns
• Drought a bigger impact on Australian agriculture than coronavirus, new figures show

Climate Worst-Case Scenarios May Not Go Far Enough, Cloud Data Shows

The Guardian - Jonathan Watts

Modelling suggests climate is considerably more sensitive to carbon emissions than thought

Experts say the projections have the potential to be ‘incredibly alarming’. Photograph: Alamy

Worst-case global heating scenarios may need to be revised upwards in light of a better understanding of the role of clouds, scientists have said.

Recent modelling data suggests the climate is considerably more sensitive to carbon emissions than previously believed, and experts said the projections had the potential to be “incredibly alarming”, though they stressed further research would be needed to validate the new numbers.

Modelling results from more than 20 institutions are being compiled for the sixth assessment by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is due to be released next year.

Compared with the last assessment in 2014, 25% of them show a sharp upward shift from 3C to 5C in climate sensitivity – the amount of warming projected from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide from the preindustrial level of 280 parts per million. This has shocked many veteran observers, because assumptions about climate sensitivity have been relatively unchanged since the 1980s.

“That is a very deep concern,” Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said. “Climate sensitivity is the holy grail of climate science. It is the prime indicator of climate risk. For 40 years, it has been around 3C. Now, we are suddenly starting to see big climate models on the best supercomputers showing things could be worse than we thought.”

He said climate sensitivity above 5C would reduce the scope for human action to reduce the worst impacts of global heating. “We would have no more space for a soft landing of 1.5C [above preindustrial levels]. The best we could aim for is 2C,” he said.

Worst-case projections in excess of 5C have been generated by several of the world’s leading climate research bodies, including the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre and the EU’s Community Earth System Model.

Timothy Palmer, a professor in climate physics at Oxford University and a member of the Met Office’s advisory board, said the high figure initially made scientists nervous. “It was way outside previous estimates. People asked whether there was a bug in the code,” he said. “But it boiled down to relatively small changes in the way clouds are represented in the models.”

The role of clouds is one of the most uncertain areas in climate science because they are hard to measure and, depending on altitude, droplet temperature and other factors, can play either a warming or a cooling role. For decades, this has been the focus of fierce academic disputes.

Previous IPCC reports tended to assume that clouds would have a neutral impact because the warming and cooling feedbacks would cancel each other out. But in the past year and a half, a body of evidence has been growing showing that the net effect will be warming. This is based on finer resolution computer models and advanced cloud microphysics.

“Clouds will determine humanity’s fate – whether climate is an existential threat or an inconvenience that we will learn to live with,” said Palmer. “Most recent models suggest clouds will make matters worse.”

In a recent paper in the journal Nature, Palmer explains how the new Hadley Centre model that produced the 5+C figure on climate sensitivity was tested by assessing its accuracy in forecasting short-term weather. This testing technique had exposed flaws in previous models, but in the latest case, the results reinforced the estimates. “The results are not reassuring – they support the estimates,” he wrote. He is calling for other models to be tested in a similar way.

“It’s really important. The message to the government and public is, you have to take this high climate sensitivity seriously. [We] must get emissions down as quickly as we can,” he said.

The IPCC is expected to include the 5+C climate sensitivity figure in its next report on the range of possible outcomes. Scientists caution that this is a work in progress and that doubts remain because such a high figure does not fit with historical records.

Catherine Senior, head of understanding climate change at the Met Office Hadley Centre, said more studies and more data were needed to fully understand the role of clouds and aerosols.

“This figure has the potential to be incredibly alarming if it is right,” she said. “But as a scientist, my first response is: why has the model done that? We are still in the stage of evaluating the processes driving the different response.”

While acknowledging the continued uncertainty, Rockström said climate models might still be underestimating the problem because they did not fully take into account tipping points in the biosphere.

“The more we learn, the more fragile the Earth system seems to be and the faster we need to move,” he said. “It gives even stronger argument to step out of this Covid-19 crisis and move full speed towards decarbonising the economy.”

Links

• Football pitch-sized area of tropical rainforest lost every six seconds
• UK considers ending financial support for fossil fuels overseas
• Russian mining firm accused of using global heating to avoid blame for oil spill
• Atmospheric CO2 levels rise sharply despite Covid-19 lockdowns
• Count international flights from UK in emissions targets, urges thinktank
• Markets not paying attention to climate crisis, IMF says
• 'The human fingerprint is everywhere': Met Office's alarming warning on climate
• Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow likely to be delayed by a year
• Climate change is turning parts of Antarctica green, say scientists