(AU) Black Summer Bushfires Made Worse By Climate Change, Risk To 'Rapidly Intensify'

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

Last year's Black Summer bushfires were made worse by climate change, and future risks will likely rapidly intensify for south-eastern Australia without significant efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, researchers say.

The review paper, published Thursday in the Communications Earth & Environment journal, found the warming climate contributed to elevating the threat, from drying out fuel loads to worsening bushfire weather.

The risk of bushfires will intensify faster than expected, researchers say. Credit: Nick Moir

"There are multiple ways where the effects of climate change are acting to increase fire risks," said Nerilie Abrams, a climate scientist at Australian National University and lead author of the paper. "What you expect to see is not just a gradual increase...but a very rapid intensification of fire risks."

In particular, the projected continued reduction in winter and spring rainfall was likely to pre-condition south-eastern Australia, particularly in Victoria, to forest fire.

Bushfires

Is there a link between climate change and bushfires?

Increased forest dieback in response to heat stress and the reduction in cool-season rainfall would add to the risks, the paper said.

Fire weather could also worsen, with "some evidence that these extreme front events [that draw heat from inland Australia to the coast] will become more frequent in southern Australia", the report said.

Similarly, the number of days favouring extreme pyrocumulonimbus clouds – fire-induced storm cells –forming over firegrounds are also projected to have "significant increases" under a high greenhouse gas emissions future.

During the satellite era up to 2019, 60 such fire-induced weather events were recorded or suspected in Australia, the researchers found. During the 2019-20 fire season, at least 29 such events occurred including at least 18 in a single week.

While communities can make some changes to adapt to the rising fire risks, they should also address what is driving the increase, specifically the rising greenhouse gas emissions, scientists said. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The week-long flurry had "previously undocumented impacts on winds and chemical composition into the stratosphere, and a planetary-scale radiative forcing effect equivalent to a moderate volcanic eruption", the paper found.

Driving the increased fire risk was how the warming climate was forecast to alter natural climate variability, such as increasing the likelihood of extreme El Nino events and positive phases of the so-called Indian Ocean Dipole that typically reduce rainfall in south-eastern Australia.

"[T]he potential exists for more frequent years with extreme hot and dry conditions in southeast Australia, beyond that expected from mean temperature and rainfall trends alone," the research found. "If this potential is realised, fuels in south-east Australia will be dry from winter to summer more often, and dangerous fire weather during fire seasons will occur more frequently.

Professor Abrams said that, while communities can seek to add adapt to the rising bushfire risks, it was important that governments examined why they were increasing and how they might be limited.

“We don’t expect every summer to be like 2019-2020 – and this La Niña year is a good example of that," she said.

‘‘However, ... if we can bring ourselves onto a low greenhouse gas emission pathway, these projected climate changes won’t be as extreme and will be easier to adapt to than if we were on a high-emissions pathway.’’

Links

• Connections of climate change and variability to large and extreme forest fires in southeast Australia
• Australia’s Angry Summer: This Is What Climate Change Looks Like
• Indian Ocean Dipole linked to global warming in new research by Australian scientists
• Indian Ocean phenomenon spells climate trouble for Australia 
• Australia’s Black Summer a climate wake-up call
• Australian Bushfires: More Frequent, Prolonged, Severe Courtesy Climate Change, Warn Experts
• Wet, wet, wet in La Niña, but 2020 was still Australia’s fourth-hottest year

Kenya Faces $62bn Bill To Mitigate Climate-Linked Hunger, Drought And Conflict

The Guardian - Peter Muiruri

Country accounts for less than 0.1% of global emissions but suffers disproportionately from related disasters, say new report

Power-generating wind turbines in Loiyangalani in northern Kenya. Photograph: Thomas Mukoya/Reuters

Kenya needs $62bn (£46bn) to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis in the next 10 years, according to a government document sent to the UN framework convention on climate change. It equates to almost 67% of Kenya’s GDP.

The report illustrates the scale of the challenge as the country aims to cut greenhouse gases by 32% within the next decade. It will rely on international sources to fund close to 90% of the expenditure. Securing such a colossal amount of often contentious climate financing from rich countries yet to honour their commitments to the $100bn target pledged during the 2015 Paris agreement will be a tall order.

Kenya accounts for less than 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions and has a per capita emission of less than half the global average. But low-emitting countries such as Kenya are suffering the most from the effects of climate change, and are poorly equipped to effectively respond or build resilience to key hazards such as drought and flooding.

For example, a 2011 drought in Kenya caused damage estimated at $11bn, while another in 2014-18 left 3.4 million people in food insecurity and half a million lacking access to water. In 2018, floods displaced 230,000 people in Kenya, including 150,000 children, drowned 20,000 livestock and led to the closure of 700 schools.

Villagers transport supplementary food provided by the UN World Food Programme during the drought in 2011. Photograph: David Bathgate/Corbis/Getty Images

The country also lost 8,500 hectares (21,000 acres) of crops in a country where 84% of the land is “arid and semi-arid, with poor infrastructure and other developmental challenges, leaving less than 16% of the land to support over 80% of the population”.

Such losses, the document says, continue to knock about 3-5% off the country’s GDP. Food security, warns the report, will worsen because Kenyan farmers are almost entirely weather-dependent. In addition, major rivers are seeing reduced flow as glaciers on the country’s biggest water tower, Mount Kenya, shrink. They are already down to 17% of their original size and will disappear in 30 years, the report says.

Erratic rainfall has hampered hydroelectric generation and forced Kenya to look at exploiting 400m tonnes of coal reserves with proposals to build two power plants: one using local coal and the other imported coal. Providing cheap fuel will come with negative environmental and social impacts.

The report says: “The use of coal is accompanied by strong environmental impacts, such as high emissions of sulphur dioxide, heavy metals and harmful greenhouse gases. The country is therefore faced with choosing between the exploitation of her fossil fuel resources to realise her development objectives and forgoing their exploitation for environmental reasons. To forgo all the benefits of exploiting the fossil fuel resources, Kenya will need significant international support.”

Greenpeace and environmental activists demonstrate in Nairobi against the construction of a coal power plant in Lamu on Kenya’s coast in 2019. Photograph: Simon Maina/AFP/Getty Images

The climate crisis is also having an impact on national security with the scramble for meagre natural resources leading to violent conflicts. The report says: “Increased intensities and magnitudes of climate-related risks in Kenya aggravate conflicts, mostly over natural resources. This has frequently forced the country to reallocate development resources to address climate-related emergencies.”

Research by Imperial College Business School and Soas University of London for the UN in 2018 showed how developing countries lack the resources required to stem the tide of climate crisis, with the lack of resilience and mitigation measures driving them into unsustainable debt.

“For every 10 dollars paid in interest by developing countries, an additional dollar will be spent due to climate vulnerability. This financial burden exacerbates the present-day economic challenges of poorer countries. The magnitude of this burden will at least double over the next decade,” the research findings state.

Kenya, a member of the Climate Vulnerable Forum, has in recent years seen debt at critical levels with a November economic update from the World Bank showing debt to GDP rising from 62.4% of GDP in June 2019 to 65.6% in June 2020.

Without affordable climate financing, the convention on climate change says any investments in these counties will have to factor risks from climate vulnerability with corresponding increased debt repayments.

Links

• 'A critical situation': Bangladesh in crisis as monsoon floods follow super-cyclone
• 'The water will come back': why Kenya's struggle against flooding is far from over
• Kenya's pastoralists face hunger and conflict as locust plague continues
• Fish ponds and water harvesting: climate-smart farming comes to Kenya
• Scientists turn to tech to prevent second wave of locusts in east Africa
• A humanitarian crisis looms in Africa unless we act fast to stop the desert locust
• Cuts to UK aid: package to drought-hit Kenya to end in 2024
• COP22 host Morocco launches action plan to fight devastating climate change

(AU) Zero Attribution: Australia’s Bureau Of Meteorology Keeps Silent On Climate Science

Michael West Media - Sandi Keane | Tasha May

Meteorological services around the world have embraced climate attribution science, which ascertains the effect of climate change on extreme weather events. Not so Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, which is remarkably coy about its work in this field.

Illustration by Alex Anstey

One of the top 10 breakthrough technologies of 2020, according to the prestigious Massachusetts’s Institute of Technology Tech Review, was climate change attribution science.

Meteorological bureaus around the world have embraced the advancements in meteorological science. New Zealand’s MetService is developing a machine that will be able to determine, within a day or two of an extreme weather event having occurred, the role of climate change in the severity and frequency of the event. The UK’s Met Office has developed a state-of-the-art modelling system for event attribution.

Climate attribution involves understanding and quantifying “how much of the credit or risk for an event (or type of events) should go to global warming and how much should go to natural weather patterns or random climate variability”.

Burying the lead

In contrast to the trend globally towards climate attribution,  Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology seems to have gone to ground at any mention of climate change in connection with the words “unprecedented bushfires”.

The bureau declined, twice, to be interviewed about its research on an Attribution Method for Extreme Events when asked by The Guardian.

And while BoM’s State of the Climate 2020 report notes the fact that “reducing emissions will lead to less warming and fewer impacts”, this only appears of the report’s final page. This fact is also not mentioned in the Key Points at the start of the report.

And, as Michael West Media has reported previously, the BoM’s explainer video “Bushfires and Exceptional heat: what’s driving our weather right now?” fails to mention climate change as a cause of the Black Summer bushfires. Our investigation revealed that this omission is in line with “CEO’s [Andrew Johnson] view the Bureau should not be proactively discussing climate context”.

Modelling greenhouse gas effects

As noted by the Massachusetts’s Institute of Technology’s Technology Review (March/April 2020 edition):

“Thanks to improved climate simulations, accumulating weather data, and more powerful computers, it’s now possible to model worlds with and without the greenhouse gases we’ve added to the atmosphere over the past 150 years.
And that lets researchers conclude that specific weather events, such as the devastating bushfires in Australia, were — within certain upper and lower bounds — more likely and more damaging thanks to global temperature increases.”

The Review’s senior energy editor James Temple acknowledged that previously, “the party line among meteorologists and climate scientists” was that “you can’t attribute any specific weather event to climate change”.

Is Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology leadership team still wedded to the old party line?

BoM is a publicly funded organisation, receiving $263.3 million in 2019-20 from taxpayers. It operates under the Meteorological Act 1955, which states that one of BoM’s key functions is:

• (g)  the promotion of the advancement of meteorological science, by means of meteorological research and investigation or otherwise.

Given the increasing importance of Climate Attribution in meteorological science, it would appear the Bureau is legally bound to promote this science.

Yet CEO Andrew Johnson has stated that “the Bureau should not be proactively discussing climate context [of the Black Summer fires]”.

Health and safety issue BoM’s Customer Service Charter states that it is “committed to the health and safety of our customers and our people, with a focus on contributing to zero lives lost from natural hazards”.

The 2019-2020 bushfires were directly responsible for the deaths of 33 individuals, according to the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements. Its Report also found that “extensive smoke coverage across much of eastern Australia may have caused many more deaths”.

A report from the World Weather Attribution into ‘Attribution of the Australian bushfire risk to anthropogenic climate change’ found that human-induced climate change altered the likelihood and intensity of fire weather risk in the 2019/2020 bushfires.

The World Health Organisation also states that climate change “is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year, from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress”.

Again, it appears the BoM’s inability to publicly acknowledge climate change and the scientific advances in climate attribution undermines this stated goal.

Global comparison

As noted earlier, meteorological services in other countries have recognised the importance of Climate Attribution.

New Zealand’s MetService (The Meteorological Service of New Zealand Limited) supports the consensus view of the World Meteorological Organisation that “long-term climate change is increasing the intensity and frequency of extreme weather and climate events and causing sea level rise and ocean acidification”.

MetService is partnering with Bodeker Scientific to develop an Extreme Weather Event Real-time Attribution Machine (EWERAM) whereby “scientifically defensible data will be available to inform quantitative statements about the role of climate change in both the severity and frequency of the event”.

Similarly, the UK Met Office’s EUCLEIA project  aims to provide “critical information to policymakers, public authorities and citizens to guide climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies and to prepare for extreme weather”.

Canada’s Department of Natural Resources, in its 2019 Canada’s Changing Climate Report, acknowledges “attribution studies” as providing “quantitative assessments of the contribution of various climate drivers to observed warming over specified time periods.

“On the basis of such studies, it is extremely likely that human influences, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, have been the dominant cause of the observed global warming since the mid-20th century,” notes the report.

That which shall not be named In response to a Freedom of Information request lodged by Michael West Media, the Bureau of Meteorology said it made its explainer video because:

“We’ve had some strong interest from the community on social media and media groups about what is currently influencing weather across the country.”

This video – “Bushfires and Exceptional heat: what’s driving our weather right now?”  – does not mention climate change. And at the Senate Estimates hearing on March 2 last year, Dr Andrew Johnson, the BoM’s chief executive, seriously downplayed the impact of climate change on the summer’s bushfires when questioned.

In line with its own Charter, which mandates the promotion of the most advanced meteorological science, one would expect the Bureau of Meteorology to be including whatever climate attribution data is available in its answer to this query from the Australian community.

Questions asked of BoM Michael West Media asked the Bureau of Meteorology the following questions:

• Would the BoM like to comment on whether there was any link between climate change and the Black Summer fires?
• Does the BoM consider climate change a political issue and is therefore unable to comment?
• Why did the BoM decline, twice. to be interviewed about its research on an Attribution Method for Extreme Events when asked about it by The Guardian?
• Could the BoM elaborate on what specific climate attribution research is being done and when it will be released to the Australian public?

The Bureau of Meteorology replied with the following statement:

The Bureau operates under the terms of the Meteorological Act 1955, which requires it to conduct research and provide advice on meteorological matters and serve the public interest by working with all sectors of the Australian community and economy. 

Under the Act, the Bureau must also pay particular attention to the needs of the Defence Force, navigation, shipping and civil aviation sectors, as well as primary production, industry, trade and commerce.

The Australian Government Charging Framework requires the Bureau to receive fees for many of its services – these are received from participants across the Australian economy.

The Bureau publishes material that describes a wide range of meteorological phenomena. The Bureau’s latest climate science (including climate attribution work) has been published in State of the Climate 2020.

Special service fee? In response to our investigation last month, some readers suggested that the millions of dollars BoM receives from oil and gas companies was a service fee for special weather monitoring services particular to their business needs.

Michael West Media again contacted BoM to ask how much of the money received from the oil and gas players was spent providing these meteorological services. It responded:

“The Bureau of Meteorology has previously sent you a media statement in answer to your questions. Please refer to that statement.”

Links

• Undue Influence: oil and gas giants infiltrate Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology 
• Climate change attribution
• Extreme event attribution: the climate versus weather blame game
• An Initialized Attribution Method for Extreme Events on Subseasonal to Seasonal Time-Scales
• A change in the weather: new demand for TV presenters to include climate in forecasts
• Bureau of Meteorology: State of the Climate 2020
• Yes, you can blame climate change for extreme weather
• Attribution of the Australian bushfire risk to anthropogenic climate change