Lethal Heating: 06/28/21

28/06/2021

(AU The Guardian) From Barnaby Joyce To The Great Barrier Reef, Coalition Climate Inadequacy Is On Parade

The Guardian - Greg Jericho

Australia’s government is still in denial, caught unawares by the tide of global opinion moving against it

‘The National party has just re-elected as its leader Barnaby Joyce, whose main policy position appears to be to ensure such a target is never set.’ Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

How the heck can this still be happening?

It’s 2021 and we have a government within sight of an election with no policy on climate change that endeavours to reach net zero emissions, and the National party has just re-elected as its leader Barnaby Joyce, whose main policy position appears to be to ensure such a target is never set.

Climate change denial continues to be the strongest force in Australian politics.

Instead of a target we have, as foreign affairs minister Marise Payne articulated so circuitously last week on Insiders, a “broad position of the Australian government that we want to achieve net zero emissions as soon as possible and preferably by 2050”.

That is a shift from their once saying they wanted to achieve it in the second half of this century – that’s what counts as progress in this country.

The whispers continue that the government is trying to come up with an actual target, but I am not Charlie Brown, so I’ll let others try to kick Lucy’s football.

At no point has this government done anything to make net-zero emissions achievable, let alone acknowledge that 2050 will be too late to limit temperatures to rising 2C above pre-industrial levels.

To be fair, there is no pressure on them to acknowledge this, given the Labor party is stuck on 2050, and most of the media also think it is some magical timeframe that will solve all climate change ills.

It’s rather apt, given the past 30 years, that governments around the world have finally settled on an emissions target that is sold as being wonderful and yet is manifestly inadequate.

I guess this is “the good” that should not be the enemy of the perfect.

Even more apt is that this inadequate target remains well beyond the scope of the Morrison government, especially now Joyce is back.

Inadequate is not enough.

It might be easy to forget, during a cold winter, or even as we exit a La Niña period, that the world continues to warm.

Over the past 50 years temperatures have risen within an ever-rising 0.3C range.

The problem is that while we are currently experiencing lower temperatures, they are lower only relative to the most recent El Niño period.

Over the past year global surface temperatures have been 1.1C above the average of the last part of the 1800s. That is below the record of 1.3C set in 2016, but is still warmer than any time before December 2015.

It’s not just that the hot years are getting hotter; the “cold” years are less cold.

It’s not just that the policy is inadequate, it is that the Morrison government continues to hope it will skate by on such a policy with no consequences.

Clearly it has been caught unawares by the tide of global opinion moving against our inadequacies.

We already have the EU and the G7 musing about carbon tariffs that almost seem designed with Australia in mind, and then this week came the news that Unesco has recommended the Great Barrier Reef world heritage site be listed as “in danger”.

Both these aspects highlight that climate change policy is actually economic policy. And you need to act right now – not in or “preferably by” 2050.

Environment minister Sussan Ley – the same person who in 2019 went for a snorkel on the reef and declared it “vibrant” – instead blamed Unesco’s processes and argued that it blindsided the Australian government – a charge Unesco strenuously disagrees with.

It is odd, however, that this could be a shock to anyone, given Graham Readfearn reported earlier this month that such a listing was very much on the cards, and the government’s own Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority had listed the reef as “very poor” back in 2019.

This decision not only points to our lack of action on climate change but also the Morrison government’s complete diplomatic failure.

Failure and inadequacy – the hallmarks of this government’s climate change policy since 2013.

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The Coalition doesn’t want to focus on climate change – but Australia will be forced to

(NZ Herald) Green Hydrogen: New Zealand Scientists Edge Closer To Climate-Friendly Fuel Future

NZ Herald - Jamie Morton

Green hydrogen is being used to fuel New Zealand's first hydrogen fuel cell bus, unveiled by Auckland Transport in March. Image / Auckland Transport

Scientists are edging closer to making green hydrogen a star of New Zealand's clean energy future, as the Government injects millions more dollars into a major research effort.

Green hydrogen has become a growing focus of New Zealand's "just transition" away from oil and gas because it can be created sustainably, using renewable energy or biomass.

It's being eyed as a climate-friendly way to generate electricity, power engines and heat homes and make fertilisers.

While hydrogen is produced around the world, nearly all of it is "brown" hydrogen - or that made from coal and natural gas, and the source of hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO2 emissions each year.

But green hydrogen can be made by using electrolysis from renewable energy sources, leaving little carbon footprint.

The biggest drawback?

It remains expensive to produce.

That's a barrier a GNS Science-led research programme is aiming to overcome, through pioneering new approaches to make the energy source affordable, efficient and plentiful.

With a $9 million boost through the Government's Advanced Energy Technology Platform (AETP), scientists will push ahead in developing three ways to make green hydrogen.

That includes creating it from water using an electrolyser - currently the most common approach - but also using energy directly from sunlight to split the water, as well as high-energy plasma.

Already, GNS scientists have been working to improve a system of water electrolysis called polymer exchange membrane, or PEM.

In contrast to the more commonly used "alkaline" electrolyser, PEM is better suited to working with the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources like wind and solar that could provide electricity for hydrogen production.

While it has the advantage of being readily adaptable to large-scale hydrogen production, PEM systems still rely on catalysts based on metals that are rare, expensive or inefficient – and which ultimately make green hydrogen more expensive than fossil fuels.

GNS Science scientists (from left) Dr John Kennedy, Dr Michelle Cook and Dr Jerome Leveneur are working to make green hydrogen a viable future energy source for New Zealand. Image / GNS Science

The project's leader, Dr John Kennedy, said New Zealand had a chance to be a "world leader" in the production and export of green hydrogen – shifting us from an importer to an exporter of energy.

Currently, New Zealand brought in about 60 per cent of its energy in the form of oil and coal - and green hydrogen offered a chance to make the country more self-sufficient. Specifically, hydrogen could replace fossil fuels for stationary power and transport industries that contributed 40 per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions.

"We'll be working with partners from across New Zealand and around the world, developing our industry capability and creating innovative solutions which will lead to a globally-connected green hydrogen economy," Kennedy said.

The project also aims to scale up the hydrogen industry by training engineers, scientists and technicians.

"The AETP funding will include grants, scholarships and placements to develop skills in the green hydrogen industry – to ensure that qualified people are available to fill the jobs that will be created as the industry grows," GNS Science energy materials scientist Dr Michelle Cook said.

"We're particularly focused on partnerships with iwi and wananga, to support the learning and development of rangatahi Māori in the energy sector."

The horizon-scanning H2 Taranaki Roadmap, produced by local agencies, has already forecast that hydrogen will be increasingly produced using electricity to split water, with the only emission being oxygen.

The report found hydrogen could be utilised as a fuel, particularly for heavy vehicles, as a feedstock for products such as urea or methanol, or to store electrical energy for long periods of time from weeks to years.

A new network could include storage of hydrogen or synthetic natural gas in depleted gas fields, it said, and electricity generation using green hydrogen in Taranaki's gas-fired peaker plants.

Earlier this year, New Zealand and German scientists joined forces in a new research alliance focused on advancing green hydrogen technology.

And last month, Christchurch-headquartered cryocooler developer AFCryo unveiled a new production system to provide a cheaper and more reliable way of generating green hydrogen.

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( Axios ) Global Warming Makes Extreme Weather A Regular Event

Axios - Andrew Freedman

Earth's climate has drastically
shifted in three decades

Global average temperature anomalies during 1981-1990 and 2011-2020, compared to 1981-2010 average.

Data: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies; Graphic: Axios Visuals

The climate change the planet has seen so far, now that the world has warmed by about 1.2°C (2.16°F) since the preindustrial era, is already resulting in unprecedented and destructive events worldwide.

Why it matters: In the past few decades alone, climate change has shifted from a far-off problem disconnected from our day-to-day lives to a crisis to be grappled with here and now.

From the dried-out landscape of the Southwest to the rapidly warming Arctic, the shifts we've already seen have resulted in what some researchers call "weather weirding," as deadly and damaging weather events supercharged by global warming strike with increasing regularity.

The details: A look at just the past few years shows a climate that's already separated from the conditions that existed when millennials were born starting in the 1980s.

The last colder-than-average month globally, compared to the 20th century average, was February 1985. Each of the past three decades has been hotter than the one before it.
All the 10 warmest years have occurred since 2005.
The oceans, which absorb most of the extra heat trapped by greenhouse gases, are warming so rapidly that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's chart of ocean heat content has had to be continually adjusted upwards to accommodate the new readings.

Extreme events: Climate change has manifested itself in the form of extreme weather and climate events that have cost lives and property.

During 2020, California saw its worst wildfire season on record, with massive fires also occurring in other Western states as well as Siberia and Australia, among other areas.
Due to human-caused global warming, heat waves are becoming more severe and longer-lasting across large portions of the globe, from the American Southwest to the Middle East.
A burgeoning scientific field known as extreme event attribution focuses on the links between climate change and extreme weather events, with some of these studies showing that individual events could not have occurred without human-caused global warming.
Sea level rise is leading to a dramatic increase in so-called "sunny day flooding" — floods caused by high tides combined with higher sea levels rather than weather — in major cities along the East Coast of the U.S., a trend that is forecast to continue.

What's next: The summer of 2021 is a prime example of the costly extreme weather that's becoming the norm, with a severe drought in the West combining with record heat waves to create ideal conditions for wildfires in much of the region.

Yes, but: Studies show that the more we cut emissions of greenhouse gases — especially if we do it quickly — the better our chances are of averting truly catastrophic consequences of climate change, such as the collapse of the Greenland or West Antarctic Ice Sheets.

Upcoming climate negotiations in November are aimed at securing enough emissions reduction commitments to avert such disastrous outcomes.
However, even if all emissions were to stop today, the long atmospheric lifetime of carbon dioxide — on the order of 1,000 years per each molecule — means that we will have to cope with climate change's effects for the rest of our lives.
Because of this, adaptation efforts are underway to make society more resilient to climate shocks.
Also, the relentless and steep upward march of emissions has plateaued to some degree, though the necessary cuts have not yet begun.

The bottom line: How severe the effects will be is largely up to us. Innovation in the energy sector to create the clean technologies of the future, as well as the resources we already have available, such as wind, solar and battery technology, mean we can cut emissions by large amounts starting now, depending on the political will.

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