Lethal Heating: 08/07/20

07/08/2020

(AU) Can TV Affect Our Attitudes To Climate Change And Carbon Emissions?

Sydney Morning Herald - Craig Mathieson

Fight for Planet A:

Our Climate Challenge

ABC, Tuesday, 8.30pm

When Craig Reucassel first contemplated making a docuseries for the ABC about the battle to avert climate change’s damage, he knew the path he wanted to avoid.

“I didn’t want to do another show that scared the living hell out of the audience,” says the broadcaster and linchpin member of The Chaser’s satirical squad.

Existential fear would, literally, make people turn off. Instead, Reucassel wanted to make appreciable change feel within reach.

“One of the things we know is that if a task feels too great and overwhelming, then people are more likely to turn away,” Reucassel says. “A section of the community is really anxious about climate change and want to act, another part doesn’t think it’s a problem yet, but will be one day. You have to figure out how to pitch a show broadcast to everyone to people with all these different sensibilities.”

The result is a skilful balancing act. In the first episode alone of Fight for Planet A: Our Climate Challenge, Reucassel provides a visual representation of individual Australia’s carbon footage, tweaks the corporate gas giants underwriting the nation’s emissions, consults experts, and commissions practical experiments with a cross-section of households.

He’s blunt about the looming risk, optimistic when pitching initiatives, and close to tears watching teenagers march at a climate change rally. The 43-year-old is a model of persuasiveness.

In Fight For Planet A ex-Chaser Craig Reucassel looks at Australia's carbon emissions. Credit: AVC

“I’m not expecting it to solve anything, but it can add knowledge to the conversation. Hopefully people can become aware of what they can do and be more engaged,” Reucassel says. “With climate change we have the solutions, we can make a massive difference, and that makes me optimistic, but not doing that for years on end is then frustrating.”

Reucassel has experience with trying to galvanise viewers, having cut through convention with two seasons of War on Waste, the ABC docuseries that dug into Australia’s waste output and how it could be reduced. But he’s clear that he doesn’t view his role as one of advocacy.

“I view it as an exploration that can lead to understanding. As an example, with War on Waste if I was merely an advocate I never would have put GPS [trackers] in plastic bags to see where they ended up,” Reucassel says. “I would have just said, ‘Hey guys, this is what you should do with your plastic bags’.

“With this [series] there’s a food episode and I’m sure some people will get annoyed that I didn’t just say become a vegetarian, but I’m looking for answers for everyone and some people won’t do that,” he says. “Instead we looked at the carbon footprints for different types of meats, and their alternatives.”

"For some people the idea that a show comes from a political position is a turn-off, but it’s also attractive to others,” says Melbourne University lecturer Dr Lauren Rosewarne. Credit: ABC

Television, more than ever, looms large in our lives. But its ability to motivate change can vary, even as it allows for a plethora of approaches. Audiences might be alarmed, or even disgusted, by what they’re shown, but that doesn't necessarily guarantee they’ll make concrete changes to their own beliefs or behaviour. And there’s never a unified response.

“For some people the idea that a show comes from a political position is a turn-off, but it’s also attractive to others,” says Dr Lauren Rosewarne, a lecturer in politics and art at the University of Melbourne. “What comes up in research around TV as an educative medium is the question of whether you’re watching something you’d watch anyway and would enjoy – and getting a little education on the side – or is this school gussied up as entertainment?”

Rosewarne points to HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver as the best take on the “spoon full of sugar” approach: a finely honed half hour of satirical commentary that is delightfully witty and accessible even as it provides a deep dive into issues normally examined at such depth in policy papers or scholarly articles.

“That’s a very good example of how you can strike a problem between education and entertainment,” Rosewarne says. “Lots of shows fail dismally, but it can be done.”

For Craig Reucassel, the current incentive to try and galvanise viewers is that he feels War on Waste had a successful impact. At first the tangible effects were at an individual level, such as an embrace of reusable coffee cups. But then Reucassel heard from councils that people were contacting them about recycling, so they started making changes. The momentum filtered upwards, eventually reaching the federal government, which “brought in some really positive policies on the plastic front”.

He’s hoping that Fight for Planet A, with its Chaser-ready stunts and cheerfully impertinent practical exercises, can reach the same unexpected audience as War on Waste: Australia’s adolescents. After it debuted, Reucassel found himself getting bailed up on the street by school students keen to pass on feedback about their own recycling actions.

After the broadcast of War on Waste, Craig Reucassel was approached by school children keen to pass on feedback. Credit: ABC

“War on Waste became a kind of family show, and that is quite powerful when parents and kids can watch something together and then talk about the issues,” Reucassel says. “That rarely happens with TV – my kids normally go off and watch YouTube in their rooms.

“There aren’t many shows that promote discussion, and it’s interesting that I sat down with my three teenage boys and we all watched Shaun Micallef’s on the Sauce together,” he adds. “That’s where TV can be strong. It still has that place in the lounge-room that can be really powerful.”

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(NZ) How Climate Change Made The Melting Of New Zealand’s Glaciers 10 Times More Likely

The Conversation - Lauren Vargo

Dave Allen, Author provided

Glaciers around the world are melting — and for the first time, we can now directly attribute annual ice loss to climate change.

We analysed two years in which glaciers in New Zealand melted the most in at least four decades: 2011 and 2018. Both years were characterised by warmer than average temperatures of the air and the surface of the ocean, especially during summer.

Our research, published today, shows climate change made the glacial melt that happened during the summer of 2018 at least ten times more likely.

Scientists have been monitoring glaciers in New Zealand for more than 40 years. Dave Allen, Author provided

As the Earth continues to warm, we expect an even stronger human fingerprint on extreme glacier mass loss in the coming decades.

Extreme glacier melt

During the 2018 summer, the Tasman Sea marine heatwave resulted in the warmest sea surface temperatures around New Zealand on record — up to 2℃ above average.

Research shows these record sea surface temperatures were almost certainly due to the influence of climate change.

Summer sea surface temperature anomalies (in °C, relative to mean temperatures between 1979 and 2009) for December 2010 to February 2011 (left) and December 2017 to February 2018 (right). Author provided

The results of our work show climate change made the high melt in 2011 at least six times more likely, and in 2018, it was at least ten times more likely.

These likelihoods are changing because global average temperatures, including in New Zealand, are now about 1°C above pre-industrial levels, confirming a connection between greenhouse gas emissions and high annual ice loss.

Changing New Zealand glaciers

New Zealand’s glaciers lost more ice in 2011 and 2018 than in any other year in the last four decades. Dave Allen, Author provided

We use several methods to track changes in New Zealand glaciers.

First, the end-of-summer snowline survey began in 1977. It involves taking photographs of over 50 glaciers in the Southern Alps every March.

From these images, we calculate the snowline elevation (the lowest elevation of snow on the glacier) to determine the glacier’s health. The less snow there is left on a glacier at the end of summer, the more ice the glacier has lost.

The second method is our annual measurement of a glacier’s mass balance — the total gain or loss of ice from a glacier over a year.

These measurements require trips to the glacier each year to measure snow accumulation, and snow and ice melt.

Mass balance is measured for only two glaciers in the Southern Alps, Brewster Glacier (since 2005) and Rolleston Glacier (since 2010).

Both methods show New Zealand glaciers lost more ice in 2011 and 2018 than during earlier years since the start of the snowline surveys in 1977.

Images taken during the end-of-summer snowline survey show how the amount of white snow at high elevations on Brewster Glacier decreases over time, compared to darker, bluer ice at lower elevations.

Attributing extreme melt

Earlier research has quantified the human influence on extreme climate events such as heatwaves, extreme rainfall and droughts. We combined the established method of calculating the impact of climate change on extreme events with models of glacier mass balance. In this way, we could determine whether or not climate change has influenced extreme glacier melt.

This is the first study to attribute annual glacier melt to climate change, and only the second to directly link glacier melt to climate change. With multiple studies in agreement, we can be more confident there is a link between human activity and glacier melt.

Franz Josef is another iconic New Zealand glacier. This timelapse video shows it has retreated by 900 metres since 2012. Credit: Brian Anderson

This confidence is especially important for Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, which use findings like ours to inform policymakers.

Recent research shows New Zealand glaciers will lose about 80% of area and volume between 2015 and the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at current rates. Glaciers in New Zealand are important for tourism, alpine sports and as a water resource.

Glacial retreat is accelerating globally, especially in the past decade. Research shows by 2090, the water runoff from glaciers will decrease by up to 10% in regions including central Asia and the Andes, raising major concerns over the sustainability of water resources where they are already limited.

The next step in our work is to calculate the influence of climate change on extreme melt for glaciers around the world. Ultimately, we hope this will contribute to evidence-based decisions on climate policy and convince people to take stronger action to curb climate change.

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John Tyndall: The Forgotten Co-Founder Of Climate Science

The Conversation - Roland Jackson

John Tyndall. wellcome/wikipedia, CC BY-SA

Roland Jackson is Research Associate in the History of Science and Visiting Fellow at the Royal Institution, University College London

It is surprising that the Irish scientist John Tyndall, born 200 years ago on August 2 1820, is not better known.

This is despite the existence of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, the Tyndall National Institute and the Pic Tyndall summit on the Matterhorn in the Alps. There are even several Mount Tyndalls, Tyndall glaciers and Tyndall craters on the Moon and Mars.

From that, you could surmise that he was both a significant scientist and a notable mountaineer. Yet, due to unfortunate circumstances, he is no household name.

In 1859, Tyndall showed that gases including carbon dioxide and water vapour can absorb heat. His heat source was not the Sun, but radiation from a copper cube containing boiling water. In modern terms, this was infrared radiation – just like that emanating from the Earth’s surface.

Previous work had shown that the Earth’s temperature was higher than expected, which was put down to the atmosphere acting as an insulator. But no-one knew the explanation for what we now call the greenhouse effect – gases in the atmosphere trapping heat.

What Tyndall did was to discover and explain this mechanism. He wrote: “Thus the atmosphere admits of the entrance of the solar heat; but checks its exit, and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet.”

He realised that any change in the amount of water vapour or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could change the climate. His work therefore set a foundation for our understanding of climate change and meteorology.

Tyndall was not, however, the first to make the climate link. That prize goes to the American Eunice Foote, who showed in 1856 using sunlight that carbon dioxide could absorb heat. She suggested that an increase in carbon dioxide would result in a warmer planet.

Research suggests Tyndall was unaware of her work. He would no doubt have been surprised to find that an amateur woman had beaten him to a general demonstration of the absorption of heat by carbon dioxide. To his discredit, he did not believe that women possessed the same creative abilities in science as men.

The greenhouse effect. US EPA

Tyndall made many other discoveries in disparate fields of physics and biology. He made his initial reputation in the obscure topic of diamagnetism, the weak repulsion of substances by a magnet. That brought him to the notice of influential people such as physicist Michael Faraday. Within a few years he was a fellow the Royal Society, Britain’s most prestigious scientific body, and professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution, where he remained for the rest of his scientific career.

Soon he was at work on understanding glacier structure and motion. After that came the work on the absorption of heat by gases, and then the action of light in causing chemical changes. In the process Tyndall explained why the sky is blue – blue light is scattered more by gases in the sky than other colours because of its short wavelength.

He also discovered “Tyndallisation” – a bacteriological technique of sterilisation – when undertaking experiments alongside French biologist Louis Pasteur to support the theory that germs can cause disease. That line of research led to the invention of a respirator for firefighters, though Tyndall never took out a patent. He committed himself to fundamental research, confident that others would generate useful applications.

Science versus religion

As a public intellectual, Tyndall’s was one of the loudest voices advocating a scientific explanation for the natural world and for life itself, a scientific naturalism. In this, religion and theology had no place. He gave the starkest statement of this position in his famous, indeed notorious, Belfast Address, in 1874.

In the Ulster Hall, he thundered:

We claim, and we shall wrest from theology, the entire domain of cosmological theory. All schemes and systems which thus infringe upon the domain of science must, insofar as they do this, submit to its control, and relinquish all thought of controlling it.

But he was never one to belittle the role of religion. Science, for him, provided reliable knowledge of the world. Religion met people’s emotional needs, a role he thought might eventually to be replaced by poetry.

Representing the past

Tyndall didn’t marry until he was in his 50s, but his beloved Louisa killed him by accident in 1893 – giving him an overdose of the wrong medicine in the dark. She then gathered huge amounts of material to write his biography, but died 47 years later with it uncompleted.

Her drafts, as well as Tydnall’s diaries, laboratory notebooks and thousands of letters, are held at the Royal Institution in London. All his correspondence is currently being published by the Tyndall Correspondence Project. I was able to use the material when writing my biography The Ascent of John Tyndall, just released in paperback for his birthday.

The Royal Institution of Great Britain from about 1838.

Louisa’s failure to write a biography is part of the reason he is not better known, but he also had the misfortune to die on the cusp of revolutionary discoveries in physics such as quantum theory and relativity. In a sense, he represented the past.

But today, climate research is more important and pressing than ever – and scientists are making huge strides. I am sure Tyndall would be gratified to find that his foundational work had proved so important.

In his time, however, few people made the connection between the burning of fossil fuels and possible global warming. Tyndall was more worried that Britain would run out of coal and be unable to compete economically with America, given its vaster supplies. One imagines though that, as a scientist, he would be convinced by the current evidence.

Climate science is now the future rather than the past, and it is therefore time to recognise and reinstate Tyndall as a major Irish scientist, mountaineer and public intellectual.

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