Climate Change Is Driving Dangerous And Unpredictable Weather

Fairfax - Professor Mary Heath*

Something strange is going on with the weather. It might be spring, but that hasn't stopped snow falling in the ACT. Or, wet weather forcing the territory's major flower festival to close for the second day running. In Victoria, farms that were dying  of thirst only months earlier have had dams fill too quickly – flooding parts of the state.
In South Australia we're dealing with a storm that has been described as "cyclonic", "super" and a one-in-50-year event.

It might be spring, but that hasn't stopped snow falling in the ACT. Photo: Clare Sibthorpe

I live in a sleepy Adelaide suburb, the sort of place where droughts are front of mind, not flooding rains. My house is near a creek that is dry for most of the year. I have lived beside it for almost 20 years with little concern, but a fortnight ago the State Emergency Service issued what would become the first of many warnings.
I arrived home in time to see the creek burst its banks, sending a torrent of muddy water down our street and another a block away. Neighbours at the top end of the street were flooded almost immediately. I spoke to one woman who looked up from the TV to realise a tide of muddy water was coming in under the door and across her carpet.

A large tree toppled over in the inner southern suburb of Springfield in Adelaide. Photo: Twitter/Lauren Rose

I helped move sandbags and direct traffic out of our street, where a lake was rapidly forming. In the end, I was lucky. Having just experienced that "one-in-50-year" event, colour me surprised to discover another on the way a fortnight later.
The bureau warned this would be worse. Given the previous flood, and warnings of gale-force winds, I decided to take precautions this time: lifting precious items onto higher surfaces, packing away anything that could fly away, requesting sandbags, finding candles and getting out the gumboots.
Then the storm that everyone in Australia has been reading about arrived. The power went off, and the rain came.
As I write, rain is still falling and the winds are strong. The flood risk for the state, including my nook, has not yet peaked. Friends and relatives in the north of the state have fallen silent; they may be without power for days rather than hours. My thoughts are with the people whose homes have been damaged or destroyed, who are cold and without information.
The striking thing about all of this, from where I sit, is the fact that two once-in-50-year events have occurred in a fortnight. Meteorologists with long careers say they have never seen such a ferocious storm in our state.
The weather is rewriting history, because climate change is here on an otherwise quiet suburban street. Climate change is driving ever more dangerous and unpredictable weather that means predictions of what will happen once in  50 years, based on past data, will bear no resemblance to what we must deal with in the future.
It's time for the politicians, who claim to have our best interests at heart, to stop pretending that we can have power security based on fossil fuels without paying for it with a future that we are only glimpsing now, following the first tornadoes I remember hearing of in our state tearing across the land and ripping steel pylons out of the ground like playthings.

*Mary Heath is an Associate Professor at Flinders University, and has lived in Adelaide since 1975

Links

• South Australian storm a preview of climate change: Climate Council
• Climate Forecast: Australia's Weather Will Get Wilder
• A perfect storm hits South Australia (and the climate change debate)
• Was that climate change? Scientists are getting faster at linking extreme weather to warming

Landmark Paris Climate Change Treaty To Come Into Force Amid Alarm Over 'Signals From The Natural World'

The Independent - Ian Johnston

Expert says the 'breakneck speed' at which the Paris deal is being ratified could be because of '16 straight months of record-breaking temperatures'

Demonstrators form a human chain on the Champs de Mars during the Paris climate summit. Getty

The Paris climate change deal – hailed as a landmark step in the fight against global warming – is to be ratified by the European Union in a move that will bring the international treaty into force.
EU ministers approved the ratification at an extraordinary meeting of the Environment Council.
The agreement, already ratified by the US and China, the world's biggest polluters, becomes binding after at least 55 countries who are responsible for 55 per cent of total emissions formally sign up.
Ratification by the EU, which is responsible for 12 per cent of global emissions, would take it over the threshold, allowing the treaty to come into force before the end of this year, some four years earlier than planned.
Concern has been growing over the pace of climate change, with a group of leading climatologists warning this week that the planet could hit 2C of warming – the level at which it is thought the effects will become dangerous – by 2050 or even sooner.
They warned that the measures promised at Paris would not be enough and called for the "doubling or tripling" of efforts.
The EU ministers' decision is expected to be backed by the European Parliament next week, after which the EU will formally submit its ratification to the United Nations – before individual countries such as the UK have done so.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said: "I am happy to see that today the member states decided to make history together and bring closer the entry into force of the first-ever universally binding climate change agreement.
"We must and we can hand over to future generations a world that is more stable, a healthier planet, fairer societies and more prosperous economies.
"This is not a dream. This is a reality and it is within our reach. Today we are closer to it."
Miguel Arias Cañete, EU Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy, admitted that some had doubted the 28-nation bloc would be able to agree to act so quickly.
"Today's decision shows what Europe is all about: unity and solidarity as member states take a European approach, just as we did in Paris," he said.
"We are reaching a critical period for decisive climate action. And when the going gets tough, Europe gets going."


'Dangerous' climate change could arrive as early as 2050

The UK's climate change and industry minister, Nick Hurd, gave the green light to adopting the Paris agreement at the meeting.
"The Paris climate agreement is an ambitious and landmark deal. I welcome today's agreement, pushing forward EU ratification of the Paris climate change agreement," he said.
"Following the Prime Minister's announcement last week at UN General Assembly, the UK will complete its domestic approval process by the end of the year."

Show all 25 images.

Richard Black, director of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), said the speed at which the deal was being approved was "truly remarkable".
"It's striking not only in the context of global climate talks, which for so many years moved at glacial pace – it's very unusual for Governments to bring any major treaty into force in less than a year," he said.
"It's tempting to say that this breakneck speed is the result of signals from the natural world, such as having 16 straight months of record-breaking temperatures and the final refutation of the 'global warming pause' narrative.
"But another equally important factor is in many nations, led by China, a clean energy revolution is taking off driven by economics as well as climate concerns – which makes cutting emissions much easier."
He agreed the pledges made at Paris were not enough to keep global warming well below 2C – the target agreed at the summit.
"But the Paris deal contains measures to 'ratchet up' national commitments, and its astoundingly quick entry into force raises the prospects of tighter emission cuts down the line that could yet steer the world away from dangerous climate change, as the majority of citizens globally want," Mr Black added.
Molly Scott Cato MEP, the Green Party's spokesperson on EU relations, said the EU had been "crucial for the fight against dangerous climate change", setting targets that "prevented our Government from totally crushing the renewable energy sector".
"But as we prepare to leave the EU it is a worrying fact that many of those who campaigned to leave and are now steering our course and are deeply sceptical about climate change and not remotely interested in pushing for a renewable energy transition," she said.
"So it is critical at this time that climate campaigners, those from the renewable energy sector, progressive politicians; indeed, anyone who cares about a safe and secure future, work together. We need to pile pressure on the government to sign the Paris Agreement without further delay."

Links

• Most people alive today set to witness dangerous global warming in their lifetime, scientists warn
• Insurers call climate change 'the mother of all risks' as Government fails to meet renewable energy targets
• Paris climate change agreement: China and US ratify deal as Barack Obama hails 'moment we decided to save our planet'
• Coffee could be extinct by 2080 due to climate change destroying areas suitable for growing beans
• Britain's leading climate change sceptic says global warming is real

Smart Networks Will End 1950-Style Energy Arguments

New Daily - Rob Burgess

Smart grids, as with the internet, will not fall over if attacked at one point. Photo: Getty

Don’t be fooled by the political posturing over South Australia’s state-wide blackout – the really important question is not whether an “over-reliance on renewable energies” was to blame, as deputy PM Barnaby Joyce asked.
South Australian senator Nick Xenophon tried to get a bit of mileage out the same question, and Prime Minister Turnbull threw a sop to the climate-sceptics in his party-room by calling the event a “wake up call” on renewables.
What none of the leaders have acknowledged, however, is that the 1950s centralised power model that fell over on Wednesday is already doomed – with or without the wind-farms so despised by the likes of Mr Joyce.

We’re all in the dark
The news media, too, has been slow to throw off the idea that large power stations, owned by energy-generation oligopolists, will continue to dominate 21st century power supply.
They won’t, because while politicians bicker and the media weigh one centralised-power argument against another, in the background an unstoppable energy revolution is underway.
The New Daily covered this historic shift a year ago, when it became clear that new technologies were unleashing market forces that will overtake the centralised model.
The key technologies are solar power and a new generation battery storage systems that give households and businesses the ability to sell, as well as buy power.

Tesla Powerwall: one of the devices giving consumers choice about how they buy and sell power.

Lithium-ion batteries such as the Powerwall, now being sold into Australia by electric-car manufacturer Tesla, put power ‘consumers’ in control.

Energy-source agnostic
Whether the storage systems are charged by roof-top solar, by some distant wind, gas or coal-fired station, or whether they are kept topped-up by excess energy from a local-council owned storage facility, these systems will allow users to buy and sell energy with any source they choose.
In power markets, peer-to-peer trading through existing grids will ensure that if an interstate interconnector blows up, smaller regional and local grids won’t fall over.
And energy trading won’t just be between giant energy firms and consumers.
Already, if a large shopping centre with a solar array on its roof is generating too much power on a sunny day, it can use a ‘wheeling access arrangement’ to ‘wheel’ that energy to another buyer looking for cheaper power – a large factory, for instance.

Jemma Green of Perth-based firm Power Ledger – raising capital for energy trading.

Jemma Green, co-founder of the Perth-based energy start-up Power Ledger says that soon this kind of arrangement will become available to anyone who needs to buy and sell power “peer to peer” – including households.
Her firm has developed a sophisticated “energy trading platform, allowing people to buy and sell power without using an electricity retailer”.
It’s important to note that the energy grid infrastructure in South Australia, or anywhere else, will be the means through which peer-to-peer selling will take place – and to that extent will still be a monopoly.
And base-load power from centralised power stations will still move across those grids – though as a smaller percentage of the energy used.
Importantly, given the South Australian power failure, supply cannot be destroyed by freak weather events, or, as seen twice in the Crimean Peninsula in the past year, by terrorist attacks.
Large commercial peer-to-peer trading is already taking place and small scale trading is on its way – New Zealand energy firm Vector is pressing ahead with a trial of the Power Ledger trading platform, and Ms Green tells me her firm has begun a capital-raising scheme which is attracting international investors.
Which firms ultimately prosper in the smart-grid future is yet to be seen.
But one thing is certain – politicians trying to impose their preferred energy mix on Australia consumers will find they are only tilting at windmills, so to speak.

Links

• 75,000 SA homes still in the dark, and it’s not over yet
• Canberra is missing the point on renewables
• Ukrainian Police Blame Second Crimean Power Outage On Sabotage
• Peer to peer energy trading to be trialled in NZ

Climate Change Stealing Rain From Australia By Shifting Winds Towards Antarctica

Fairfax - Clare Sibthorpe

When much of southeast Australia faced abnormally hot and dry weather last summer, forecasters put it down to a high-pressure system blocking clouds from forming. But rising greenhouse gases were also to blame, researchers have found.

Human-caused climate change is robbing crucial rain from southern parts of Australia by shifting Southern Ocean westerly winds towards Antarctica, according to a new study. Photo: supplied

An ice core in a drill that researchers used to study the climate of Antarctica. Photo: supplied

A new study by the ANU and 16 other institutions revealed human-caused climate change is already harming parts of Australia by robbing vital rain and pushing south westerly winds towards Antarctica.
The ANU's lead researcher associate professor Nerilie Abram said the hijacking of rain combined with 2015 being Australia's fifth-warmest year on record and 2016 on track to be the hottest was an ominous mix.
"The findings confirm that climate change is already having an impact on parts of Australia."
When looking at rainfall in southeast Australia, particularly the ACT and NSW, Professor Abram said it was important to consider other weather events such as El Nino phenomenons, which cause hot and dry conditions.
"But certainly in terms of the very long heat wave we saw in February and March, that was associated with the very strong winds heading south towards Antarctica," she said.
Professor Abram said the study, published in Nature Climate Change, showed southwest Australia was hurting the most from the change, where it had lost one fifth of its rainfall since the 1970s.

Humans have caused climate change for 180 years.

But she said more research was needed to understand the long term impacts on that region and the rest of Australia.
"Antarctica and the Southern Ocean experience extreme fluctuations in climate year to year," she said.
"What this research shows shows us is that we need to keep putting money into research to find out how Antarctica's climate is being affected because it directly affects our lives in Australia."
A 2015 study between CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology found climate change would hit Australia harder than other countries, predicting a rise in temperature of more than five degrees within 80 years.
They forecast reduced rain in southern Australia over the next few decades as well as harsher fire seasons for southern and eastern parts of the country.
This August, Germany-based researchers Climate Analytics found the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees of warming – the two goals included in the Paris climate deal – would be much greater in terms of extreme events and disasters than previously believed.
It found that within just 10 - 20 years, southern Australia would face heatwaves on average 13 days longer at 1.5 degrees and 20 days longer at 2 degrees, while dry spells would be 3.5 days longer at 1.5 degrees and six days at 2 degrees.

Links

• Assessing recent trends in high-latitude Southern Hemisphere surface climate
• Science says climate change is sucking crucial rain from southern parts of Australia
• Climate change jigsaw puzzle: Antarctic pieces missing
• Climate change is drying out parts of southern Australia, study warns

Can You Spot The Reason South Australia Doesn’t Have Power?

BuzzFeed - Brad Esposito | Mark Di Stefano

Around 75,000 homes in South Australia were left without power overnight, after huge storms smashed through the state. Photos emerged of the transmission towers bent and twisted by the weather.

Facebook: aaron.lee.baxter

Despite the images of towers turned into licorice, people quickly blamed the fact that South Australia gets 40% of its energy from renewables. Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said SA's blackout was a "real wake-up call" about renewable energy, One Nation was blaming Labor and the Greens for the blackout and senator Nick Xenophon called the situation a "disgrace" and said he wants an independent inquiry into renewable energy. The storm was the worst South Australia has experienced in more than 50 years and while renewable energy became the cool thing to blame, here's another photo of a transmission tower looking like a cow eating in a paddock.

facebook.com

Many critics of South Australia's energy market seized on a Grattan Institute report published earlier this week that suggested the state's speed in shifting to renewables could "threaten" the power supply.
BuzzFeed News spoke to the author of the report, Tony Wood, on Thursday. He laughed when asked whether South Australia's renewable energy was to blame for the statewide blackout.
"Unless there's something I've missed, [yesterday has] got nothing to do with renewable energy, it's got everything to do with wild weather," said Wood.
Wood pointed to the fact 22 transmission towers were felled during the storm, littering South Australia's usually picturesque countryside with dozens of metal carcasses.
"You can have a coal powered power station in Port Augusta producing power, but it wouldn't have mattered if the power lines go down," he said.
"If that happens you can't get the power to the people."
The Climate Council's John Connor has also been aggressive in pushing back on people blaming renewable energy, calling it "irresponsible and misleading".
"Blaming this extraordinary outage on the state's renewable energy generators, as some people jumped to do well before any facts were known, is both irresponsible and misleading," said Connor.

Links

• blackout 'nothing to do with renewable energy'
• No, Renewable Energy Didn't Cause South Australia's Blackout
• Malcolm Turnbull wants new national renewable energy target
• SA storms: Rushing to renewable energy targets puts sector's reputation at risk

Officials Admit No Modelling Shows How Australia Will Meet Paris Climate Pledge

The Guardian - Michael Slezak

Environment officials tell parliamentary inquiry there is no modelling on how current policies will affect emissions beyond 2020, or when emissions will peak

Australia has no climate modelling showing when its greenhouse gas emissions will peak, government officials have said. Photograph: Stefan Postles/EPA

Government officials have acknowledged that Australia's 2030 greenhouse gas emissions reductions pledged at Paris in 2015 were made without any modelling to show whether existing policies could achieve those targets.
They also admitted the government did not have any modelling revealing when Australia's emissions would peak.
The admissions, made in a parliamentary committee under questioning from Labor Senator for New South Wales Jenny McAllister, fly in the face of advice from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, telling the government it had "existing legislation, policies and measures to enable it to achieve" the the reductions.
They also follow a string of independent modelling exercises showing current policies will not achieve the emissions reductions committed to in Paris. Last week energy advisory firm RepuTex released modelling showing Australia's emissions wouldn't fall much at all between now and 2030, under current policies.
When asked about whether Australia would meet targets laid out in the Paris agreement, Patrick Suckling, the Australian ambassador for the environment, responded that the government had said it would meet those targets and its track record showed it met internationally agreed targets.
"On the basis of past performance, where we've met and exceeded Kyoto 1 and Kyoto 2, that's the track record," Suckling said.
When pushed on the issue by the committee, Suckling referred further questions to Brad Archer from the international climate change and energy innovation division in the Department of Environment and Energy.
Under extended questioning, Archer pointed to various analyses of individual policies but wasn't able cite any modelling that would have informed government if the current set of policies would achieve the 2030 targets.
He said the government was paying polluters to pollute less under the Emissions Reduction Fund. "So we can take into account what is being achieved under the Emissions Reduction Fund." But he couldn't identify any analysis that looked at the overall impact of current policies.
Archer said: "It's not the case that we have modelling capacity available on-tap to continually undertake analyses." At another point he added: "There are inherent challenges in making projections over long periods of time."
Kushla Munro from the international branch of the Department of Environment and Energy later told the committee that the government's "latest emissions projections go to 2020" and that 2030 projections were being prepared.
When asked by McAllister when Australia's emissions would peak, Archer said "that's a very interesting question," and that modelling done so far didn't include analysis of current policies.
McAllister told Guardian Australia the Turnbull government needed to "own up and admit that their climate policies just aren't credible".
"These officials have confirmed Australia's worst kept secret – that the Turnbull government has no idea how it will meet our 2030 emission reduction targets," she said.
"They can't say when Australia's emissions will peak and begin to decline, and they wouldn't confirm that the government's current policy settings will see us meet the target without adjustment."

Links

• Two-thirds of Australia's emissions fund spent for just 7% of 2030 target
• Business and academic leaders urge new conversation about coal-free future
• Australia needs two emissions trading schemes, Climate Change Authority says
• Investors controlling $13tn call on G20 leaders to ratify Paris climate agreement
• Paris agreement is a strong signal that 'we will solve climate crisis', Al Gore says
• Carbon price needed to avoid economic disruption from Paris climate goals – analysis
• CSIRO climate cuts will breach Paris agreement and cost economy – report
• Paris climate talks: Bishop hails 'historic' day as nearly 200 countries sign deal
• Paris climate deal might just be enough to start turning the tide on global warming

South Australian Storm A Preview Of Climate Change: Climate Council

Fairfax - AAP

The lights were hardly out in South Australia before politicians and lobby groups were staking out their ground in the argument over climate change and renewable energy.
Within hours of a massive storm that triggered a statewide power blackout, the Climate Council was blaming global warming for the wild weather.

A satellite image shows the storm over South Australia on Wednesday. Photo: Supplied

It was a "disturbing preview of what's likely to come if Australia fails to act on climate change", council member Will Steffen claimed.
Renewable energy sceptics inside the federal government didn't quite say "We told you so," but the message was none too subtle.
South Australia's aggressive pursuit of renewable energy that supplies about 40 per cent of the state's power had put at risk the stability not only of its own energy network but that of the rest of Australia as it pursues a low carbon emissions future.
"There are serious questions for the future of the energy system about how do we combine energy policy and climate policy," Josh Frydenberg, the federal minister responsible for energy and the environment, said.
"How do we keep the lights on?"
Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce queried whether there was an over-reliance on renewable energy in South Australia.

Professor Will Steffen from the Climate Council. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

How it and other states and territories manage an increasing reliance on renewable energy will be the focus of a special COAG meeting Mr Frydenberg intends holding within weeks.
"There are real questions for the future of the national electricity network as to how we make this transition effectively," he said.
"You can't have a situation like last night."
South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill insists the lengthy outage was caused by bad weather and renewable energy was not to blame.

This is unprecedented: Weatherill. The blame game has begun after South Australia's state wide blackout with the Premier attributing it to storms, others an over reliance on renewable energy. Courtesy ABC News 24.

Independent senator Nick Xenophon is not convinced, calling for an inquiry into his state's power supply.
He wants the Australian Energy Market Commission to carry out a robust independent analysis to learn lessons from the incident and ascertain whether South Australia's energy mix made it more vulnerable to an outage.
Energy expert Andrew Stock, a member of the Climate Council, dismissed attempts to blame renewables for the blackout as opportunistic and irresponsible.
"Storms can knock out electricity networks no matter where the power supply is coming from," he said.
At the time of the blackout, 1000MW of wind power was being fed into the South Australian system.
The council warns the South Australia storm event is a sign of weather to come.
"The atmosphere is packing much more energy than 70 years ago, which contributes to the increasing intensity of such storms, " Professor Steffen said.
Intense rainfall was projected to increase in Australia and had already increased at a global level.
"This is a prelude to a disturbing future, and it's only going to get worse if we don't address climate change."

Sydney wakes up to grey rainy weather.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce said the power outage was a wake-up call for policymakers.
"We will need to ask serious questions about how an entire state lost access to power, which is unacceptable for business and the rest of the community," chief executive James Pearson said.

Links

• No, Renewable Energy Didn't Cause South Australia's Blackout
• Climate change is driving storms like South Australia's
• South Australia blackout: storms set to move to NSW
• The 'perfect storm' on the renewables debate