06/08/2021

(AU SMH) Remote Cape Howe On The Ocean Front Line For Climate Change

Sydney Morning Herald - Miki Perkins

 At the windswept eastern tip of Victoria lies a remote marine wilderness on the front line of climate change and the warming of the Australia’s oceans.

About 20 kilometres from Mallacoota, Cape Howe Marine National Park interests scientists because of its proximity to the powerful East Australian Current, which travels down the eastern coast of Australia.

Cape Howe is experiencing the effects of climate change at an accelerated rate and scientists are taking notice.

Climate change is strengthening this current and providing a dispersal method for tropical species to move into southern waters, including marine pests such as urchins.

Rangers doing underwater surveying work to measure the impact of climate change at Cape Howe.
Keen to track these changes, scientists from Parks Victoria and Deakin University have been surveying reef life using remote underwater video cameras. Dive teams have also surveyed marine life to discover how this rich, underwater ecosystem is changing during climate change, and what this means for the rest of Victoria.

“With this area being at the forefront for climate change, what we see helps us forecast what might happen further along the coast, and help us make better decisions about how to manage the biodiversity and ecological values,” says Tess Hoinville, a marine diving and monitoring officer at Parks Victoria.

Cape Howe Marine National Park

Simply reaching Cape Howe can be challenging: the dive survey sites sit at the edge of a vast continental shelf, buffeted by strong currents and waves.

But once divers sink below the surface, they float above rocky reef, seagrass, sponge beds and crayweed and common kelp forests. The area boasts an abundance of fish like wrasse and banded morwong, as well as octopus and Australian fur seals.

A rare grey nurse shark at Cape Howe.
On the most recent survey, in April, divers were thrilled to see a very rare grey nurse shark. There are only two records of grey nurse shark sightings in Victoria, including one from Mallacoota Inlet in the early 1970s.

But they also saw species that likely travelled from further north on the warming current, like black sea urchins, a marine pest. This urchin has extended its historical range from NSW into eastern Victoria and Tasmania due to warming waters, with its larvae unable to survive in colder temperatures.

There has been an increase in the number of black sea urchins at Cape Howe.
By overgrazing the seaweed on a reef, these urchins create extensive “barrens”, leaving nothing but bare rock, which are unable to support marine life.

Despite the increased presence of urchins, Cape Howe is still incredibly diverse and rich in its fish species, says Daniel Ierodiaconou, an associate professor of marine science at Deakin University.

Cape Howe has some of the highest fish diversity of any part of Victorian waters.
“It’s still incredibly diverse in terms of the fish that we’re seeing – it’s a mixing bowl,” says Associate Professor Ierodiaconou.
Biodiversity
Inside the battle to save Tasmania’s giant kelp forests

There are some strategies that work to remove urchins. About 100 kilometres further east of Cape Howe, at Beware Reef, off the coast of Cape Conran, a successful program over two years has culled 25,000 black sea urchins. The kelp forests have regrown.

Speaking by phone on a ship returning from a Norfolk Island fish survey trip, Associate Professor Ierodiaconou said the fish diversity surveys were part of a national and global effort to use video technology under water to document diversity. “Often, it’s baseline information that we’re capturing for the very first time.”

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(The Guardian) Our Leaders Look Climate Change In The Eyes, And Shrug

The Guardian - 
It is not good to be too pessimistic on the climate crisis. That said, it sure does seem like we’re screwed

‘Capitalism is a machine made to squeeze every last cent out of this planet until there is nothing left.’ Photograph: Xinhua/Rex/Shutterstock
Author
Hamilton Nolan is a freelance writer and columnist based in New York. He is the Washington Post public editor for the Columbia Journalism Review and Labor reporter for In These Times.
He is a contributor to The Guardian, MSN, The New York Times, Gizmodo, New York Daily News, News.com.au, Salon, and Stuff.co.nz.
If you have cultivated an Edgar Allen Poe-like appreciation for the macabre, there is a certain sort of amusement to be had in watching the developed world deal with the insistent onslaught of climate change.

Like many horror stories, this one features a main character full of futile determination to maintain a sense of normalcy even as the ominous signs of doom become ever more impossible to ignore.

We can chuckle knowing that the monster is going to come for our designated protectors. We stop chuckling knowing that it’s coming for all of us next.

It is easy to imagine that a real live existential threat to our way of life would prompt any society to assume war footing and marshal everything it has to fight for survival. Unfortunately, this response only takes hold in actual war situations, where the threat is “other people that we can shoot and kill in glorious fashion”.

When the threat comes not from enemy people, but from our own nature, we find it much harder to rise to the occasion. Where is the glory in recognizing the folly of our own greed and profligacy? Leaders are not elected on such things. We want leaders who will give us more, leading us ever onwards, upwards and into the grave.

The latest demonstration of this comes from the G20, that coalition that is as good a proxy as any for the combined will of the world’s richest countries. The latest G20 meeting wrapped up last week without firm commitments on phasing out coal power, or on what steps nations will promise to take to try to hold global warming to 1.5C. This goal is both necessary and, perhaps, unlikely – a report by scientists found that China, Russia, Brazil and Australia are all pursuing policies that could lead to a cataclysmic five degrees of warming.

The G20 is a perfect model of our collective failure to build institutions capable of coping with deep, long-term, existential problems that cannot be solved by building more weapons. On the one hand, the head of the United Nations says that there is no way for the world to meet its 1.5C warming goal without the leadership of the G20; on the other hand, a recent analysis found that G20 members have, in the past five years, paid $3.3tn in subsidies for fossil fuel production and consumption.

Wildfire fighters advance against biggest US blaze amid dire warnings. Read more
The same group that claims to be bailing out humanity’s sinking ship with one hand is busily setting it aflame with the other hand. It is not good to be too pessimistic on climate change, because we must maintain the belief that we can win this battle if we are to have any hope at all. That said, it sure does seem like we’re screwed.

As overwhelming and omnipresent as the climate crisis is, it is not the core issue. The core issue is capitalism. Capitalism’s unfettered pursuit of economic growth is what caused climate change, and capitalism’s inability to reckon with externalities – the economic term for a cost that falls onto third parties – is what is preventing us from solving climate change. Indeed, climate change itself is the ultimate negative externality: fossil-fuel companies and assorted polluting corporations and their investors get all the benefits, and the rest of the world pays the price.

Now the entire globe finds itself trapped in the gruesome logic of capitalism, where it is perfectly rational for the rich to continue doing something that is destroying the earth, as long as the profits they reap will allow them to insulate themselves from the consequences.
Capitalism is a machine made to squeeze every last cent out of this planet until there is nothing left
Congratulations, free market evangelists: this is the system you have built. It doesn’t work. I don’t want to lean too heavily on the touchy-feely, Gaia-esque interpretation of global warming as the inevitable wounds of an omniscient Mother Earth, but you must admit that viewing humanity and its pollution as a malicious virus set to be eradicated by nature is now a fairly compelling metaphor.

Homo sapiens rose above the lesser animals thanks to our ability to wield logic and reason, yet we have somehow gotten ourselves to a place where the knowledge of what is driving all these wildfires and floods is not enough to enable us to do anything meaningful to stop it. The keystone experience of global capitalism is to gape at a drought-fueled fire as it consumes your home, and then go buy a bigger SUV to console yourself.

This year, the G20 is patting itself on the back for “[recognizing] carbon pricing as a potential tool to address climate change for the first time in an official communique”. This would have been encouraging 30 years ago, when we should have established a carbon tax after it became clear that carbon emissions cause tangible damage to the environment. In 2021, this sort of diplomatic marginalia is the equivalent of a child on the Titanic proudly showing his parents his completed homework, just as the ship slips beneath the waves.

Of course we need a price on carbon. Of course we need extremely strict emissions regulations, massive green energy investments, and a maniacal focus on sustainability fierce enough to radically change a society that is built to promote unlimited consumption. But, to be honest, there is little indication that we will get those things any time soon. The path we are on, still, is not one that leads to a happy ending. Rather, it is one that leads to the last billionaire standing on dry land blasting off in his private rocket as the rest of us drown in rising seas.

Capitalism is a machine made to squeeze every last cent out of this planet until there is nothing left. We can either fool ourselves about that until it kills us, or we can change it.

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(Anthropocene) A New Study Provides A Nuanced—And Ultimately Hopeful—View Of The Climate Generation Gap

Anthropocene - Sarah DeWeerdt

Older cohorts started out less concerned (circa 2009), but worry has increased across all age groups at a similar rate over the last decade

Image: 123RF

Climate concern is increasing among all age groups, raising hopes that different generations can work together to solve the climate crisis, the authors of a new study say.

There’s lots of evidence that climate change awareness and concern have increased over the past decade or so. But some people have posited the existence of a climate generation gap, with younger people more concerned about climate change than older people.

The idea of the generation gap is logical – after all, younger people will be around longer to experience more of the effects of climate change, and the people in charge of governments and corporations who have the most to lose from overhauling the current economic system tend to be older. But actual evidence for such a generation gap is mixed.

In the new study, researchers analyzed 10 years’ worth of data from an ongoing study of social and political attitudes in New Zealand. As part of the survey, respondents were asked to rate their agreement or disagreement on a 7-point scale with the statements “climate change is real” and “climate change is caused by humans.”

The researchers sorted 56,513 study participants born between 1936 and 1995 into a dozen 5-year birth cohorts. Then they constructed three models of the evolution of climate belief and tested which one best fit the data: Do climate change beliefs decline as people age, do patterns of change in climate belief differ across different cohorts, or do birth cohorts vary in their starting point of climate change beliefs but not in their rate of change over time?

The data are consistent with the third possibility, the researchers report in Nature Communications. They found that both acceptance of climate change and agreement that it is human caused increased at similar rates among all age groups from 2009-2018.

However, younger cohorts started out at a higher level of climate belief at the beginning of that period.

“A climate change generation gap is present in baseline levels of climate change beliefs, but the rate of increase in levels of climate beliefs does not differ across age cohorts,” the researchers write. “Both younger and older people are accelerating in their belief at a comparable rate.”

There was no difference in climate beliefs by gender, in contrast to some studies that have found higher climate and environmental concern among women.

“Our findings provide a more nuanced and necessary qualification of the so-called climate change generation gap,” the researchers write.

The findings are good news because they suggest that climate beliefs aren’t set in stone, and that media coverage of and advocacy around climate change over the past several years are having an effect across all age groups, they say.

In addition, climate action will require efforts by all generations working together – and the new results suggest that’s possible.

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