Every 12 June a grateful planet pauses to give thanks to those brave souls who bear the burden of knowing what the rest of us can’t stand to think about
14/06/2017
It's Hug A Climate Scientist Day. Just Remember: No Surprise Hugs!
The Guardian - First Dog on the Moon
Every 12 June a grateful planet pauses to give thanks to those brave souls who bear the burden of knowing what the rest of us can’t stand to think about
Every 12 June a grateful planet pauses to give thanks to those brave souls who bear the burden of knowing what the rest of us can’t stand to think about
Food Shortages Due To Climate Change Could Fuel Violence, Unrest - Research
Thomson Reuters Foundation - Lin Taylor
"We've already started to see climate change as an issue that could cause food riots in some parts of the world" - study co-author Bear Braumoeller
Food shortages caused by climate shocks like drought or floods could exacerbate violence and riots in politically unstable countries, researchers say.
Fragile states that are poor and depend heavily on agriculture are most at risk of violent uprisings since they struggle to cope with climate change, according to a study published this week in the Journal of Peace Research.
"We've already started to see climate change as an issue that won't just put the coasts under water, but as something that could cause food riots in some parts of the world," said study co-author Bear Braumoeller from The Ohio State University.
The last time the world saw a severe food crisis was in 2007 and 2008, when extreme weather events hit major grain producing regions the year earlier, causing spikes in the demand and cost of food.
The higher prices led to social and political unrest in Morocco, Bangladesh, Tunisia and Indonesia, according to a 2016 report by Global Footprint Network and United Nations Environment Programme.
Drought is becoming more frequent and severe in places like eastern and southern Africa, and that – combined with the recent El Nino phenomenon – is taking a heavy toll on rural lives and economies.
Last April, a rice farmer in the Philippines was killed during protests demanding government assistance after drought linked by some to El Nino hit hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland.
El Nino, a warming of ocean surface temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific that typically occurs every few years, is linked to crop damage, fires and flash floods.
Moreover, the US-based Center for Climate and Security on Friday said factors like global water shortages, displacement or migration caused by climate change, and rising sea levels also posed serious threats to international security.
Braumoeller said having a stable government was key to placating growing civil unrest and violence in the face of food shortages caused by climate change.
"A capable government is even more important to keeping the peace than good weather," he said in a statement. "Less vulnerable countries can better handle the problems that droughts or food price fluctuations create."
Braumoeller said fragile states needed to address instability and invest in sustainable, "greener" industries to increase their economic growth, in order to cope with food shortages due to climate change.
"Development aid is important now and it is likely to be even more important in the future as we look for ways to increase climate resilience," he said.
Links
"We've already started to see climate change as an issue that could cause food riots in some parts of the world" - study co-author Bear Braumoeller
Food shortages caused by climate shocks like drought or floods could exacerbate violence and riots in politically unstable countries, researchers say.
Fragile states that are poor and depend heavily on agriculture are most at risk of violent uprisings since they struggle to cope with climate change, according to a study published this week in the Journal of Peace Research.
"We've already started to see climate change as an issue that won't just put the coasts under water, but as something that could cause food riots in some parts of the world," said study co-author Bear Braumoeller from The Ohio State University.
The last time the world saw a severe food crisis was in 2007 and 2008, when extreme weather events hit major grain producing regions the year earlier, causing spikes in the demand and cost of food.
The higher prices led to social and political unrest in Morocco, Bangladesh, Tunisia and Indonesia, according to a 2016 report by Global Footprint Network and United Nations Environment Programme.
Drought is becoming more frequent and severe in places like eastern and southern Africa, and that – combined with the recent El Nino phenomenon – is taking a heavy toll on rural lives and economies.
Last April, a rice farmer in the Philippines was killed during protests demanding government assistance after drought linked by some to El Nino hit hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland.
El Nino, a warming of ocean surface temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific that typically occurs every few years, is linked to crop damage, fires and flash floods.
Moreover, the US-based Center for Climate and Security on Friday said factors like global water shortages, displacement or migration caused by climate change, and rising sea levels also posed serious threats to international security.
Braumoeller said having a stable government was key to placating growing civil unrest and violence in the face of food shortages caused by climate change.
"A capable government is even more important to keeping the peace than good weather," he said in a statement. "Less vulnerable countries can better handle the problems that droughts or food price fluctuations create."
Braumoeller said fragile states needed to address instability and invest in sustainable, "greener" industries to increase their economic growth, in order to cope with food shortages due to climate change.
"Development aid is important now and it is likely to be even more important in the future as we look for ways to increase climate resilience," he said.
Links
- Food scarcity and state vulnerability: Unpacking the link between climate variability and violent unrest
- Release: Experts Identify 12 Major Epicenters of Climate Risks to International Security
- The Climate Security 101 Project: An Online Clearinghouse for Climate Security Questions
- Our Take: New Intelligence and Presidential Memos on Climate Change and National Security
- Release: 3 Bipartisan Groups of Military and Security Leaders Urge New Course on Climate
- Surprise as a Catalyst for Including Climatic Change in the Strategic Environment
- Future imaginings and the battle over climate science: an interview with Michael Mann
The Three-Minute Story Of 800,000 Years Of Climate Change With A Sting In The Tail
The Conversation -
There are those who say the climate has always changed, and that
carbon dioxide levels have always fluctuated. That’s true. But it’s also
true that since the industrial revolution, CO₂ levels in the atmosphere
have climbed to levels that are unprecedented over hundreds of
millennia.
So here’s a short video we made, to put recent climate change and carbon dioxide emissions into the context of the past 800,000 years.
The temperature-CO₂ connection
Earth has a natural greenhouse effect, and it is really important. Without it, the average temperature on the surface of the planet would be about -18℃ and human life would not exist. Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is one of the gases in our atmosphere that traps heat and makes the planet habitable.
We have known about the greenhouse effect for well over a century. About 150 years ago, a physicist called John Tyndall used laboratory experiments to demonstrate the greenhouse properties of CO₂ gas. Then, in the late 1800s, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius first calculated the greenhouse effect of CO₂ in our atmosphere and linked it to past ice ages on our planet.
Modern scientists and engineers have explored these links in intricate detail in recent decades, by drilling into the ice sheets that cover Antarctica and Greenland. Thousands of years of snow have compressed into thick slabs of ice. The resulting ice cores can be more than 3km long and extend back a staggering 800,000 years.
Scientists use the chemistry of the water molecules in the ice layers to see how the temperature has varied through the millennia. These ice layers also trap tiny bubbles from the ancient atmosphere, allowing us to measure prehistoric CO₂ levels directly.
Temperature and CO₂
The ice cores reveal an incredibly tight connection between temperature and greenhouse gas levels through the ice age cycles, thus proving the concepts put forward by Arrhenius more than a century ago.
In previous warm periods, it was not a CO₂ spike that kickstarted the warming, but small and predictable wobbles in Earth’s rotation and orbit around the Sun. CO₂ played a big role as a natural amplifier of the small climate shifts initiated by these wobbles. As the planet began to cool, more CO₂ dissolved into the oceans, reducing the greenhouse effect and causing more cooling. Similarly, CO₂ was released from the oceans to the atmosphere when the planet warmed, driving further warming.
But things are very different this time around. Humans are responsible for adding huge quantities of extra CO₂ to the atmosphere – and fast.
The speed at which CO₂ is rising has no comparison in the recorded past. The fastest natural shifts out of ice ages saw CO₂ levels increase by around 35 parts per million (ppm) in 1,000 years. It might be hard to believe, but humans have emitted the equivalent amount in just the last 17 years.
Before the industrial revolution, the natural level of atmospheric CO₂ during warm interglacials was around 280 ppm. The frigid ice ages, which caused kilometre-thick ice sheets to build up over much of North America and Eurasia, had CO₂ levels of around 180 ppm.Burning fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas, takes ancient carbon
that was locked within the Earth and puts it into the atmosphere as
CO₂. Since the industrial revolution humans have burned an enormous
amount of fossil fuel, causing atmospheric CO₂ and other greenhouse gases to skyrocket.
In mid-2017, atmospheric CO₂ now stands at 409 ppm. This is completely unprecedented in the past 800,000 years.
The massive blast of CO₂ is causing the climate to warm rapidly. The last IPCC report concluded that by the end of this century we will get to more than 4℃ above pre-industrial levels (1850-99) if we continue on a high-emissions pathway.
If we work towards the goals of the Paris Agreement, by rapidly curbing our CO₂ emissions and developing new technologies to remove excess CO₂ from the atmosphere, then we stand a chance of limiting warming to around 2℃.
The fundamental science is very well understood. The evidence that
climate change is happening is abundant and clear. The difficult part
is: what do we do next? More than ever, we need strong, cooperative and
accountable leadership from politicians of all nations. Only then will
we avoid the worst of climate change and adapt to the impacts we can’t
halt.
Links
 |
Ice cores are a window into the past hundreds of thousands of years.
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Ludovic Brucker
|
So here’s a short video we made, to put recent climate change and carbon dioxide emissions into the context of the past 800,000 years.
The temperature-CO₂ connection
Earth has a natural greenhouse effect, and it is really important. Without it, the average temperature on the surface of the planet would be about -18℃ and human life would not exist. Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is one of the gases in our atmosphere that traps heat and makes the planet habitable.
We have known about the greenhouse effect for well over a century. About 150 years ago, a physicist called John Tyndall used laboratory experiments to demonstrate the greenhouse properties of CO₂ gas. Then, in the late 1800s, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius first calculated the greenhouse effect of CO₂ in our atmosphere and linked it to past ice ages on our planet.
Modern scientists and engineers have explored these links in intricate detail in recent decades, by drilling into the ice sheets that cover Antarctica and Greenland. Thousands of years of snow have compressed into thick slabs of ice. The resulting ice cores can be more than 3km long and extend back a staggering 800,000 years.
Scientists use the chemistry of the water molecules in the ice layers to see how the temperature has varied through the millennia. These ice layers also trap tiny bubbles from the ancient atmosphere, allowing us to measure prehistoric CO₂ levels directly.
 |
| Antarctic temperature changes across the ice ages were very similar to globally-averaged temperatures, except that ice age temperature changes over Antarctica were roughly twice that of the global average. Scientists refer to this as polar amplification (data from Parrenin et al. 2013; Snyder et al. 2016; Bereiter et al. 2015). Ben Henley and Nerilie Abram |
The ice cores reveal an incredibly tight connection between temperature and greenhouse gas levels through the ice age cycles, thus proving the concepts put forward by Arrhenius more than a century ago.
In previous warm periods, it was not a CO₂ spike that kickstarted the warming, but small and predictable wobbles in Earth’s rotation and orbit around the Sun. CO₂ played a big role as a natural amplifier of the small climate shifts initiated by these wobbles. As the planet began to cool, more CO₂ dissolved into the oceans, reducing the greenhouse effect and causing more cooling. Similarly, CO₂ was released from the oceans to the atmosphere when the planet warmed, driving further warming.
But things are very different this time around. Humans are responsible for adding huge quantities of extra CO₂ to the atmosphere – and fast.
The speed at which CO₂ is rising has no comparison in the recorded past. The fastest natural shifts out of ice ages saw CO₂ levels increase by around 35 parts per million (ppm) in 1,000 years. It might be hard to believe, but humans have emitted the equivalent amount in just the last 17 years.
 |
| How fast are CO₂ levels rising? Ben Henley and Nerilie Abram |
In mid-2017, atmospheric CO₂ now stands at 409 ppm. This is completely unprecedented in the past 800,000 years.
 |
| Global Temperature and CO₂ since 1850. Ben Henley and Nerilie Abram |
If we work towards the goals of the Paris Agreement, by rapidly curbing our CO₂ emissions and developing new technologies to remove excess CO₂ from the atmosphere, then we stand a chance of limiting warming to around 2℃.
 |
| Observed and projected global temperature on high (RCP8.5) and low (RCP2.6) CO₂ emission futures. Ben Henley and Nerilie Abram |
Links
13/06/2017
White House Effort To Stop Youth Climate Lawsuit Is 'Drastic And Extraordinary'
 |
| Demonstrators protest President Donald Trump's June 1 decision to exit the Paris Climate Agreement. Image: Scott Olson/Getty Images |
Trump's legal team on Friday took an unusual step that shows just how determined the Justice Department is to keep Juliana v. United States from going to trial.
Lawyers filed a "writ of mandamus" petition with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to review a federal judge's decision from November, which denied the government's motion to dismiss the precedent-setting lawsuit.
A mandamus is considered a "drastic and extraordinary" remedy reserved for "really extraordinary causes," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the Supreme Court's 2004 majority opinion Cheney v. U.S. The administration essentially wants to leapfrog over a lower court in hopes of finding a more favorable ruling in a higher court.
 |
| Steam and exhaust rise from a power station in Germany. Image: Lukas Schulze/Getty Images |
"The U.S. government is running from some of its youngest constituents, and all we're asking for is a plan to preserve our future," Victoria Barrett, an 18-year-old plaintiff from White Plains, New York, said in a statement provided by Our Children's Trust, the organization behind the lawsuit.
To understand why the Trump administration is going to such lengths, let's review some recent history.
In 2015, a group of citizens, now ages 9 to 21, filed a lawsuit accusing the federal government and energy companies of failing to rein in greenhouse gas emissions and curb fossil fuel use, despite mounting evidence on human-caused global warming. Plaintiffs claim that failure violates their "constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property.
While President Trump continues to reject science, these young people are fighting for the future of the planet. — Bernie Sanders
The Obama administration and industry groups filed motions to dismiss the lawsuit, and in April 2016, U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Coffin denied those motions. After reviewing Coffin's decision, U.S. District Court Judge Ann Aiken in Oregon also rejected the motions — setting a landmark precedent for climate issues as legal rights.
"I have no doubt that the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society," Aiken said in her Nov. 10, 2016, opinion.
In February, after Trump was sworn in, the young plaintiffs filed a legal notice saying they were replacing Obama with Trump as the main defendant. Weeks later, the Trump administration and fossil fuel companies filed separate motions to the District Court seeking review of Aiken's decision to the Ninth Circuit.
That was an unexpected step; it's unusual for the government to try to appeal a case to a higher court before a lower court has ruled on the lawsuit. Trump's team also filed a motion to delay trial preparations until after its appeal is considered.
That brings us to the present.
 |
| Demonstrators protest Trump's June 1 decision to exit the Paris Climate Agreement. Image: Scott Olson/Getty Images |
On June 8, a day before the so-called deadline, Aiken denied the Trump administration's request, arguing that involving the higher appeals court at this point in the legal proceedings is "not warranted."
The decision was a big blow to Justice Department efforts to avoid going to trial. In response, the administration filed the rare "writ of mandamus" petition asking the Ninth Circuit to review Aiken's decision.
 |
| Trump at the White House, after announcing his decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement. Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images |
Douglas Kysar, a law professor at Yale Law School who is not involved in the litigation, called the writ "offensive to Judge Aiken, the entire federal judiciary, and, indeed, to the rule of law itself."
"We should all question why the Trump administration's lawyers are willing to try such a trick rather than forthrightly defend the case," he said in a statement provided by Our Children's Trust.
The Ninth Circuit's decision will have important implications for the future of the lawsuit, and whether it goes to trial.
If the latter happens, we can already guess what Trump will tweet in response: "See you in court."
Links
- What if ... governments and companies are challenged in courts over alleged inaction on climate change?
- West Coast Environmental Law
- Climate Vulnerable Forum – Drive for greater climate action
- More People Heading To Court To Spur Action On Climate Change, Study Finds
- Thinking Globally, Acting Transnationally
- Laws To Tackle Climate Change Exceed 1,200 Worldwide: Study
- More Countries Are Backing Their Paris Pledges With National Laws
- Companies Must Take Climate Change Litigation Risk Seriously
- Donald Trump Being Sued By Nine-Year-Old Levi Draheim Over His Climate Policies
- Government Given 21 Days To Explain Climate Change Failures Or Face Legal Action
- Girl, 9, Sues Indian Government Over Inaction On Climate Change
- Adani Mine Railway Loan Would Breach Government's Policy, Says Legal Group
- Courts Now At Front Line In Battles Over Climate Change
- Environmental Groups Sue Trump Administration For Approving Keystone Pipeline
- The Adani Brief: What Governments And Financiers Need To Know About The Adani Group's Record Overseas
- 'Biggest Case On The Planet' Pits Kids Vs. Climate Change
- This Climate Lawsuit Could Change Everything. No Wonder The Trump Administration Doesn't Want It Going To Trial
- Great Barrier Reef Just The Tip Of The Climate Change Iceberg
- How Climate Change Battles Are Increasingly Being Fought, And Won, In Court
- 'Claim The Sky': A New Climate Movement For The Trump Era
- Can A Children's Lawsuit Force Action On Climate Change?
- Meet The 16yo Suing The US Government Over Climate Change
- Government Facing Legal Action Over Failure To Fight Climate Change
- How Climate Change Will Shape Environmental Law
Could Governments And Oil Companies Get Sued For Inaction On Climate Change?
Toronto Star -
Experts predict a coming era of "climate litigation," which is slowly emerging around the world and could soon come to Canada.
OTTAWA—Eight hundred million dollars: that’s the potential price tag
of the rising ocean in Vancouver. The city needs a new storm surge
barrier to stop flooding if, according to municipal planners, sea levels
climb by one metre this century due to climate change.
When discussing this scenario last fall, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson said something that made Andrew Gage perk up and listen from his law office in Victoria. “There are direct costs to our taxpayers, but this is not an act of God,” Robertson reportedly said. “This is tied directly to human activity.”
Translation for Gage: Maybe it’s not just Tracy and Tom Taxpayer who should be on the hook for the new storm barrier. Maybe whoever is to blame for the rising ocean should fork over some cash.
That’s the idea, crudely put, behind an emerging front in the battle against climate change. And environmental groups and legal teams around the world are looking to the courtroom as their theatre of war.
The clunky term for it is “climate change litigation.” The legal field is in its infancy, but many feel it will inevitably make an impact, given the estimated costs of new infrastructure and economic disturbances expected from climate change — some of which are astronomical. A 2012 report from the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a group of international researchers, pins the global cost at $1.2 trillion in 2010, a figure they predict will quadruple by 2030.
In March, Policy Horizons Canada, a government department that predicts possible challenges for the public service in the coming 10 to 15 years, published a paper in April that warned of future court challenges over climate change. The paper outlines how large emitters like oil and gas companies, as well as governments, could be taken to court over alleged inaction on climate change.
In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the federal environment ministry said the government wouldn’t speculate on hypothetical legal matters.
However, the statement said that a government roundtable predicted in 2011 that the economic impact of climate change on Canada could reach $5 billion per year by 2020 and between $21 billion and $43 billion per year by 2050.
“Environment and Climate Change Canada is taking serious climate action and developing policies that will benefit current and future generations,” it said.
Climate litigation is already happening in other parts of the world. One of the most frequently cited cases involved an environmental group, Urgenda, which took the Netherlands to court over its allegedly lacklustre emissions reduction targets. In June 2015, a Dutch court ruled in favour of Urgenda and found that the government must do more to curb emissions because of “its duty of care to protect and improve the living environment.”
In Germany, a Peruvian farmer is reportedly appealing a decision to reject his lawsuit against energy company RWE, which he accuses of increasing the threat of flooding from a glacial lake near his home in the Andes.
There is also a case in the Philippines involving Greenpeace, which is arguing that the world’s largest oil companies are violating the human rights of local people because of the rising incidences of extreme weather, such as the 2013 storm that killed thousands and caused billions of dollars in destruction.
In the United States, where a soon-to-be-published study provided to the Star says some 500 climate change litigation cases have been heard and rejected, a group of state attorneys general launched an investigation last year into major oil companies like Shell, Chevron and Exxon Mobil. The Policy Horizons paper calls the move “unprecedented” and describes how the investigation’s aim is to determine whether emitters deliberately ignored, and even tried to create doubt about, the causes and consequences of climate change.
Gage, who is a staff counsel with West Coast Environmental Law, believes it is only a matter of time before such a case lands in Canadian court.
“I have no doubt that this type of litigation is going to happen, because as the climate costs more and more, people are going to be demanding that someone pays for the costs,” Gage said in an interview this week.
Mark Carney, the former Bank of Canada governor who moved to the United Kingdom to take up the central banker job there, made a similar prediction in a 2015 speech to a London business crowd. He warned that “such claims could come decades in the future, but have the potential to hit carbon extractors and emitters — and, if they have liability coverage, their insurers — the hardest.”
Stepan Wood, the York Research Chair in Environmental Law and Justice and director of the Environmental Justice and Sustainability Clinic at Osgoode Hall, said the government would be wise to start thinking about this.
“I don’t think there’s anybody in the legal community who would bet against some kind of litigation being launched in Canada, against either government or emitters, in the near future,” he said.
“There’s a feeling that the ball is starting to roll.”
Wood outlined the various legal avenues for a prospective climate litigation case in this country.
One way is to issue a tort claim for damages against an emitter, such as an oil company. But Wood said the big hurdle in such cases is to prove causation: how can you convince a judge that the consequences of climate change that are costing you can be blamed on this particular emitter?
Wood said other options could include lawsuits under securities law, where company shareholders could sue, or possibly lawsuits for misinformation, similar to when tobacco companies were accused of ignoring evidence that cigarettes cause cancer.
Gage, meanwhile, argues one of the most likely cases to succeed could be if municipalities band together for a class-action lawsuit against large corporate emitters. The cities would argue they’re owed money to help pay for infrastructure, such as the storm barrier in Vancouver, Gage said.
One counterargument could be that everyone shares responsibility for climate change. It takes consumers to burn fossil fuels, and if the government has failed, you might say that the citizens bear responsibility for not forcing it to act.
Gage said that it’s time to have this debate because the era of climate litigation could be around the corner.
“The idea that we’re going to avoid this conversation forever is ludicrous. Of course we’re going to have this conversation, and it’s going to result in litigation,” he said.
Links
Experts predict a coming era of "climate litigation," which is slowly emerging around the world and could soon come to Canada.
 |
| A girl walks along the shore as strong waves from Typhoon Hagupit hit the eastern Philippines in 2014. Climate change is being blamed for more extreme weather conditions. (Aaron Favila / AP FILE PHOTO) |
When discussing this scenario last fall, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson said something that made Andrew Gage perk up and listen from his law office in Victoria. “There are direct costs to our taxpayers, but this is not an act of God,” Robertson reportedly said. “This is tied directly to human activity.”
Translation for Gage: Maybe it’s not just Tracy and Tom Taxpayer who should be on the hook for the new storm barrier. Maybe whoever is to blame for the rising ocean should fork over some cash.
That’s the idea, crudely put, behind an emerging front in the battle against climate change. And environmental groups and legal teams around the world are looking to the courtroom as their theatre of war.
The clunky term for it is “climate change litigation.” The legal field is in its infancy, but many feel it will inevitably make an impact, given the estimated costs of new infrastructure and economic disturbances expected from climate change — some of which are astronomical. A 2012 report from the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a group of international researchers, pins the global cost at $1.2 trillion in 2010, a figure they predict will quadruple by 2030.
In March, Policy Horizons Canada, a government department that predicts possible challenges for the public service in the coming 10 to 15 years, published a paper in April that warned of future court challenges over climate change. The paper outlines how large emitters like oil and gas companies, as well as governments, could be taken to court over alleged inaction on climate change.
In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the federal environment ministry said the government wouldn’t speculate on hypothetical legal matters.
However, the statement said that a government roundtable predicted in 2011 that the economic impact of climate change on Canada could reach $5 billion per year by 2020 and between $21 billion and $43 billion per year by 2050.
“Environment and Climate Change Canada is taking serious climate action and developing policies that will benefit current and future generations,” it said.
Climate litigation is already happening in other parts of the world. One of the most frequently cited cases involved an environmental group, Urgenda, which took the Netherlands to court over its allegedly lacklustre emissions reduction targets. In June 2015, a Dutch court ruled in favour of Urgenda and found that the government must do more to curb emissions because of “its duty of care to protect and improve the living environment.”
In Germany, a Peruvian farmer is reportedly appealing a decision to reject his lawsuit against energy company RWE, which he accuses of increasing the threat of flooding from a glacial lake near his home in the Andes.
There is also a case in the Philippines involving Greenpeace, which is arguing that the world’s largest oil companies are violating the human rights of local people because of the rising incidences of extreme weather, such as the 2013 storm that killed thousands and caused billions of dollars in destruction.
In the United States, where a soon-to-be-published study provided to the Star says some 500 climate change litigation cases have been heard and rejected, a group of state attorneys general launched an investigation last year into major oil companies like Shell, Chevron and Exxon Mobil. The Policy Horizons paper calls the move “unprecedented” and describes how the investigation’s aim is to determine whether emitters deliberately ignored, and even tried to create doubt about, the causes and consequences of climate change.
Gage, who is a staff counsel with West Coast Environmental Law, believes it is only a matter of time before such a case lands in Canadian court.
“I have no doubt that this type of litigation is going to happen, because as the climate costs more and more, people are going to be demanding that someone pays for the costs,” Gage said in an interview this week.
Mark Carney, the former Bank of Canada governor who moved to the United Kingdom to take up the central banker job there, made a similar prediction in a 2015 speech to a London business crowd. He warned that “such claims could come decades in the future, but have the potential to hit carbon extractors and emitters — and, if they have liability coverage, their insurers — the hardest.”
Stepan Wood, the York Research Chair in Environmental Law and Justice and director of the Environmental Justice and Sustainability Clinic at Osgoode Hall, said the government would be wise to start thinking about this.
“I don’t think there’s anybody in the legal community who would bet against some kind of litigation being launched in Canada, against either government or emitters, in the near future,” he said.
“There’s a feeling that the ball is starting to roll.”
Wood outlined the various legal avenues for a prospective climate litigation case in this country.
One way is to issue a tort claim for damages against an emitter, such as an oil company. But Wood said the big hurdle in such cases is to prove causation: how can you convince a judge that the consequences of climate change that are costing you can be blamed on this particular emitter?
Wood said other options could include lawsuits under securities law, where company shareholders could sue, or possibly lawsuits for misinformation, similar to when tobacco companies were accused of ignoring evidence that cigarettes cause cancer.
Gage, meanwhile, argues one of the most likely cases to succeed could be if municipalities band together for a class-action lawsuit against large corporate emitters. The cities would argue they’re owed money to help pay for infrastructure, such as the storm barrier in Vancouver, Gage said.
One counterargument could be that everyone shares responsibility for climate change. It takes consumers to burn fossil fuels, and if the government has failed, you might say that the citizens bear responsibility for not forcing it to act.
Gage said that it’s time to have this debate because the era of climate litigation could be around the corner.
“The idea that we’re going to avoid this conversation forever is ludicrous. Of course we’re going to have this conversation, and it’s going to result in litigation,” he said.
Links
- What if ... governments and companies are challenged in courts over alleged inaction on climate change?
- West Coast Environmental Law
- Climate Vulnerable Forum – Drive for greater climate action
- More People Heading To Court To Spur Action On Climate Change, Study Finds
- Thinking Globally, Acting Transnationally
- Laws To Tackle Climate Change Exceed 1,200 Worldwide: Study
- More Countries Are Backing Their Paris Pledges With National Laws
- Companies Must Take Climate Change Litigation Risk Seriously
- Donald Trump Being Sued By Nine-Year-Old Levi Draheim Over His Climate Policies
- Government Given 21 Days To Explain Climate Change Failures Or Face Legal Action
- Girl, 9, Sues Indian Government Over Inaction On Climate Change
- Adani Mine Railway Loan Would Breach Government's Policy, Says Legal Group
- Courts Now At Front Line In Battles Over Climate Change
- Environmental Groups Sue Trump Administration For Approving Keystone Pipeline
- The Adani Brief: What Governments And Financiers Need To Know About The Adani Group's Record Overseas
- 'Biggest Case On The Planet' Pits Kids Vs. Climate Change
- This Climate Lawsuit Could Change Everything. No Wonder The Trump Administration Doesn't Want It Going To Trial
- Great Barrier Reef Just The Tip Of The Climate Change Iceberg
- How Climate Change Battles Are Increasingly Being Fought, And Won, In Court
- 'Claim The Sky': A New Climate Movement For The Trump Era
- Can A Children's Lawsuit Force Action On Climate Change?
- Meet The 16yo Suing The US Government Over Climate Change
- Government Facing Legal Action Over Failure To Fight Climate Change
- How Climate Change Will Shape Environmental Law
Thus Spake Mungo: Finkel Panders To ‘Technology Agnostic’ Turnbull
Echonetdaily - Mungo MacCallum
Malcolm Turnbull likes to describe himself as a technology agnostic.
As with many of his other utterances, this is not to be taken literally; our prime minister is not wrestling with the problem of whether technology actually exists or not. After all, Turnbull is the master of innovation; Tony Abbott once said that he practically invented the NBN, although perhaps we had better not go into that right now.
What Turnbull is presumably saying that he is unconcerned about what kind of technology he employs, particularly when it comes to energy generation. Coal, gas, oil, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro – even parliamentary bluster if nothing else suffices.
It is all the same to him as long as it works, by which he means as long as it is acceptable to the party room. It has little if anything to do with the real issues around climate change: it is all about satisfying Tony Abbott, Barnaby Joyce, George Christensen and Eric Abetz.
For this reason Turnbull also refers to his insistence that the debate must be technologically neutral, which is seriously misleading. Energy generation is not about taking the engine out of gear and letting it coast along as far as it will go; it is about choice, about looking for the most efficient solution.
But of course this involves making very sure that the question can be defined in a way that entails its own answer, which is what Turnbull did. He asked the chief scientist, Alan Finkel, to look for ways to make energy cheap and reliable – and, as almost an afterthought, to control emissions within clear limitations.
Finkel, acutely aware of the politics of his brief, could not even
consider what his fellow scientists and economists all but unanimously
agree would be the best result: a price on carbon, preferably morphing
into an emission trading scheme, giving security to investors and
mandating a swift and orderly transition towards away from fossils to
renewables.
He was forced to opt for second, or even third, best: a so-called Clean Energy Target that continues to offer carrots rather than sticks to polluters, a pious hope that electricity prices can be reduced and a hospital pass to Turnbull and his colleagues, leaving it to them to decide just what the target should be and how – or perhaps if – it can be realised.
Finkel, like Turnbull says he wants to get rid of the ideology around the decade long quarrel; perhaps he is being ironic. Climate change is about science, not ideology; the best minds on the subject agree that man-made emissions, especially of carbon dioxide, are having a measurable effect, overall global warming is increasing and as a result extreme weather events will become increasingly more common and more severe. The ideologues are those who either choose to deny the science, or, even less forgivably, regard their own self-interest as more important than that of the planet.
Step forward Tony Abbott, who sometimes regards the science as crap and at other times not, but in any case sees it as irrelevant. To settle the issue would prevent him from getting into another good stoush, the fading memory of his triumphant mud wrestle against Labor's carbon tax. Thus any olive branch from Bill Shorten must be rejected, and if that involves tossing Finkel under a bus in the process, well, tough.
And so he has hoisted his battle flag, with its heraldic arms emblazoned by a shining lump of coal. In spite of Scott Morrison's bizarre appearance in parliament a couple of months ago, not all Liberals are active coal fetishists. Most, indeed, can probably take it or leave it and the heavy users can, presumably, be weaned away from it – perhaps they can be persuaded to embrace other forms of carbon, like graphite, or better still diamonds.
But coal has become a symbol – an ideology, if you like. It can be
used as a casus belli against Labor and that is all that really matters.
Finkel, understanding their obsession, has offered them an out – longer
life for coal fired power stations and even the prospect of building
new or refurbished ones, if anyone silly enough to invest in such
anachronisms can be found.
To Labor, the Greens, and probably the majority of the electorate, this is not acceptable; it is fair enough to allow a reasonable time for coal to be phased out, but the idea of encouraging, even subsidising, new coal as part of the energy mix of the future is perverse. Which leads us, inevitably, to Adani.
Adani is not yet a coal mine; indeed many good judges believe it will never be a coal mine, despite all the ballyhoo about its founding chairman Gautam Adani signing off on the project. It has been clear for some time that the economics of Adani are, at best, rubbery, that the claims of jobs are absurdly exaggerated and the actual returns – financial, environmental and social – for Australia are more likely to be a net negative than the bonanza being trumpeted.
Only the gullible and desperate have fallen for the hype: Queensland's Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk clearly believes that there will be, sometime, somewhere, a pot of coal at the end of the Adani rainbow. But even she admits that it will not happen soon; in the meantime she is handing out the prospect of a royalty holiday for Adani (the proceeds of which will presumably end up in the family vaults in the Cayman Islands) and ramping up the pressure for Turnbull to give a billion dollar loan to the company to build a railway to transport its products to the Great Barrier Reef.
It is not certain that this cosy little arrangement is part of the deal Adani signed last week, but what the hell – federal Labor is largely against it, so it makes a great wedge issue, a definite strike in the ideological war Abbott and his colleagues are determined to pursue.
And they will take any allies they can get: Clive James is an accomplished poet and a brilliantly successful entertainer, but as he boasts, he knows bugger all about science, let alone the complexities of climate change. Nonetheless, last week he let fly in The Australian with a barely coherent diatribe like a more literate version of the deranged One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts – and the right wing ideologues lapped it up.
James's last major work was a translation of Dante's Divine Comedy – a medieval fantasy about good and evil, entirely appropriate as a manifesto for the Mad Monk Tony Abbott and his band of crusaders.
Links
As with many of his other utterances, this is not to be taken literally; our prime minister is not wrestling with the problem of whether technology actually exists or not. After all, Turnbull is the master of innovation; Tony Abbott once said that he practically invented the NBN, although perhaps we had better not go into that right now.
What Turnbull is presumably saying that he is unconcerned about what kind of technology he employs, particularly when it comes to energy generation. Coal, gas, oil, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro – even parliamentary bluster if nothing else suffices.
It is all the same to him as long as it works, by which he means as long as it is acceptable to the party room. It has little if anything to do with the real issues around climate change: it is all about satisfying Tony Abbott, Barnaby Joyce, George Christensen and Eric Abetz.
For this reason Turnbull also refers to his insistence that the debate must be technologically neutral, which is seriously misleading. Energy generation is not about taking the engine out of gear and letting it coast along as far as it will go; it is about choice, about looking for the most efficient solution.
But of course this involves making very sure that the question can be defined in a way that entails its own answer, which is what Turnbull did. He asked the chief scientist, Alan Finkel, to look for ways to make energy cheap and reliable – and, as almost an afterthought, to control emissions within clear limitations.
| Finkel, like Turnbull says he wants to get rid of the ideology around the decade long quarrel; perhaps he is being ironic. Climate change is about science, not ideology. |
He was forced to opt for second, or even third, best: a so-called Clean Energy Target that continues to offer carrots rather than sticks to polluters, a pious hope that electricity prices can be reduced and a hospital pass to Turnbull and his colleagues, leaving it to them to decide just what the target should be and how – or perhaps if – it can be realised.
Finkel, like Turnbull says he wants to get rid of the ideology around the decade long quarrel; perhaps he is being ironic. Climate change is about science, not ideology; the best minds on the subject agree that man-made emissions, especially of carbon dioxide, are having a measurable effect, overall global warming is increasing and as a result extreme weather events will become increasingly more common and more severe. The ideologues are those who either choose to deny the science, or, even less forgivably, regard their own self-interest as more important than that of the planet.
Step forward Tony Abbott, who sometimes regards the science as crap and at other times not, but in any case sees it as irrelevant. To settle the issue would prevent him from getting into another good stoush, the fading memory of his triumphant mud wrestle against Labor's carbon tax. Thus any olive branch from Bill Shorten must be rejected, and if that involves tossing Finkel under a bus in the process, well, tough.
And so he has hoisted his battle flag, with its heraldic arms emblazoned by a shining lump of coal. In spite of Scott Morrison's bizarre appearance in parliament a couple of months ago, not all Liberals are active coal fetishists. Most, indeed, can probably take it or leave it and the heavy users can, presumably, be weaned away from it – perhaps they can be persuaded to embrace other forms of carbon, like graphite, or better still diamonds.
| Only the gullible and desperate have fallen for the hype: Queensland's Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk clearly believes that there will be, sometime, somewhere, a pot of coal at the end of the Adani rainbow. |
To Labor, the Greens, and probably the majority of the electorate, this is not acceptable; it is fair enough to allow a reasonable time for coal to be phased out, but the idea of encouraging, even subsidising, new coal as part of the energy mix of the future is perverse. Which leads us, inevitably, to Adani.
Adani is not yet a coal mine; indeed many good judges believe it will never be a coal mine, despite all the ballyhoo about its founding chairman Gautam Adani signing off on the project. It has been clear for some time that the economics of Adani are, at best, rubbery, that the claims of jobs are absurdly exaggerated and the actual returns – financial, environmental and social – for Australia are more likely to be a net negative than the bonanza being trumpeted.
Only the gullible and desperate have fallen for the hype: Queensland's Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk clearly believes that there will be, sometime, somewhere, a pot of coal at the end of the Adani rainbow. But even she admits that it will not happen soon; in the meantime she is handing out the prospect of a royalty holiday for Adani (the proceeds of which will presumably end up in the family vaults in the Cayman Islands) and ramping up the pressure for Turnbull to give a billion dollar loan to the company to build a railway to transport its products to the Great Barrier Reef.
It is not certain that this cosy little arrangement is part of the deal Adani signed last week, but what the hell – federal Labor is largely against it, so it makes a great wedge issue, a definite strike in the ideological war Abbott and his colleagues are determined to pursue.
And they will take any allies they can get: Clive James is an accomplished poet and a brilliantly successful entertainer, but as he boasts, he knows bugger all about science, let alone the complexities of climate change. Nonetheless, last week he let fly in The Australian with a barely coherent diatribe like a more literate version of the deranged One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts – and the right wing ideologues lapped it up.
James's last major work was a translation of Dante's Divine Comedy – a medieval fantasy about good and evil, entirely appropriate as a manifesto for the Mad Monk Tony Abbott and his band of crusaders.
Links
- Alan Finkel Auditions For The Role Of Australia's Chief Political Scientist
- Defence of Adani coal useless: world’s energy agency
- The man who could bring peace to Australia's climate wars
- The Finkel review explained: what's in it, and why you should care
- Finkel climate review outlines Clean Energy Target
- 'Pinch year': Power price surge set to knock out smaller energy retailers
- Bill Shorten offers 'olive branch' to Malcolm Turnbull on climate
12/06/2017
Warmer Climate Raises Extinction Risk
Climate News Network - Tim Radford*
Climate change is multiplying existing threats to much of the natural world, and more species face an unparalleled extinction risk.
Biologists have once again confirmed that
the wild things face a growing extinction risk, and that the biggest
losers could be humankind itself.
They point out that at a conservative estimate the economic benefits of biodiversity – the collective word for all the richness of the planet's species – are at least 10 times the cost of conservation of that biodiversity.
And yet, they report, human actions already threaten a quarter of all mammal species and 13% of all birds. An estimated 21,000 plants and other kinds of animal are known to be at risk.
In one of the world's richest habitats of all – the terrain where south-east Asia, India and China meet – people in the last 50 years have put at risk two thirds of all mammals that weigh more than 10kg.
This summary of waste and despoliation is in a series of papers in the journal Nature, one of which looks again at the threats to biodiversity, while another concentrates on the ways people influence and depend on the fruits of three billion years of natural evolution.
Human pressure
It is a given that human economies depend entirely on what grows on the planet, and what can be excavated from its soils. The clearing of the forests and the settlement of the grasslands, pollution from the cities, overhunting and overgrazing, all driven by the swelling of human numbers, have now taken rates of species extinction to alarming levels.
Climate change, too, has now become a factor: it has been linked to the potential extinction of species, and to the obliteration of species in particular regions.
It has also been identified as a danger to the diversity of plant life as temperatures rise and rainfall patterns change with rising ratios of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas emitted from internal combustion engines and coal-fired power stations.
No one yet claims that climate change itself is the principal hazard, but it exacerbates the impact of all the other pressures on wildlife.
Tropical targets
So a team led by David Tilman of the University of Minnesota has delivered a paper looking at the next 50 years, as human impact on habitat poses, they say "unprecedented levels of extinction risk on many more species worldwide" – especially the large mammals of tropical Africa, Asia and South America.
The world had lost half of its terrestrial mammalian megafauna – mammals heavier than 44kg – by 1,000 BC, and 15% of all bird species. In the last 3,000 years human numbers have multiplied 25-fold and another 4bn of us will join the human race by the century's end. So, the scientists argue, unless steps are taken, extinction rates will accelerate.
But, they point out, some steps are being taken: 31 bird species have been saved by conservation programmes from total extinction, and the same efforts have halted the decline of one threatened vertebrate in five. Captive breeding programmes have reintroduced species that were once all but lost.
But there is much more to be done: lion numbers in Africa, for instance, have fallen to one-tenth of their potential.
And in a second paper, a team led by Forest Isbell of the University of Minnesota and backed by co-authors from eight nations on four continents, instances the benefits of conservation.
At a practical finance level, the calculated value of biodiversity to commercial forest productivity is set at between $166bn a year and $490bn.
Right now, the world spends about $25bn a year on conservation. It would cost $76bn annually to meet all the world's conservation targets. And, the authors point out, a cash value simply cannot be set on many of biodiversity's blessings. Some things are priceless.
"Human activities are driving the sixth mass extinction in the history of life on Earth, despite the fact that diversity of life enhances many benefits people reap from nature, such as wood from forests, livestock forage from grasslands, and fish from oceans and streams," said Dr Isbell. "It would be wise to invest much more in conserving biodiversity."
*Tim Radford, a founding editor of Climate News Network, worked for The Guardian for 32 years, for most of that time as science editor. He has been covering climate change since 1988.
Links
Climate change is multiplying existing threats to much of the natural world, and more species face an unparalleled extinction risk.
 |
| Africa's lions number only 10% of those the continent could sustain. Image: Luca Galuzzi via Wikimedia Commons |
They point out that at a conservative estimate the economic benefits of biodiversity – the collective word for all the richness of the planet's species – are at least 10 times the cost of conservation of that biodiversity.
And yet, they report, human actions already threaten a quarter of all mammal species and 13% of all birds. An estimated 21,000 plants and other kinds of animal are known to be at risk.
In one of the world's richest habitats of all – the terrain where south-east Asia, India and China meet – people in the last 50 years have put at risk two thirds of all mammals that weigh more than 10kg.
This summary of waste and despoliation is in a series of papers in the journal Nature, one of which looks again at the threats to biodiversity, while another concentrates on the ways people influence and depend on the fruits of three billion years of natural evolution.
Human pressure
It is a given that human economies depend entirely on what grows on the planet, and what can be excavated from its soils. The clearing of the forests and the settlement of the grasslands, pollution from the cities, overhunting and overgrazing, all driven by the swelling of human numbers, have now taken rates of species extinction to alarming levels.
Climate change, too, has now become a factor: it has been linked to the potential extinction of species, and to the obliteration of species in particular regions.
It has also been identified as a danger to the diversity of plant life as temperatures rise and rainfall patterns change with rising ratios of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas emitted from internal combustion engines and coal-fired power stations.
No one yet claims that climate change itself is the principal hazard, but it exacerbates the impact of all the other pressures on wildlife.
Tropical targets
So a team led by David Tilman of the University of Minnesota has delivered a paper looking at the next 50 years, as human impact on habitat poses, they say "unprecedented levels of extinction risk on many more species worldwide" – especially the large mammals of tropical Africa, Asia and South America.
The world had lost half of its terrestrial mammalian megafauna – mammals heavier than 44kg – by 1,000 BC, and 15% of all bird species. In the last 3,000 years human numbers have multiplied 25-fold and another 4bn of us will join the human race by the century's end. So, the scientists argue, unless steps are taken, extinction rates will accelerate.
But, they point out, some steps are being taken: 31 bird species have been saved by conservation programmes from total extinction, and the same efforts have halted the decline of one threatened vertebrate in five. Captive breeding programmes have reintroduced species that were once all but lost.
But there is much more to be done: lion numbers in Africa, for instance, have fallen to one-tenth of their potential.
And in a second paper, a team led by Forest Isbell of the University of Minnesota and backed by co-authors from eight nations on four continents, instances the benefits of conservation.
"Human activities are driving the sixth mass extinction in the history of life on Earth, despite the fact that diversity of life enhances many benefits people reap from nature"Biodiversity in the form of trees and scrubland saves humans up to US$3 trillion just as carbon storage: that is, it keeps dangerous levels of carbon out of the atmosphere.
At a practical finance level, the calculated value of biodiversity to commercial forest productivity is set at between $166bn a year and $490bn.
Right now, the world spends about $25bn a year on conservation. It would cost $76bn annually to meet all the world's conservation targets. And, the authors point out, a cash value simply cannot be set on many of biodiversity's blessings. Some things are priceless.
"Human activities are driving the sixth mass extinction in the history of life on Earth, despite the fact that diversity of life enhances many benefits people reap from nature, such as wood from forests, livestock forage from grasslands, and fish from oceans and streams," said Dr Isbell. "It would be wise to invest much more in conserving biodiversity."
*Tim Radford, a founding editor of Climate News Network, worked for The Guardian for 32 years, for most of that time as science editor. He has been covering climate change since 1988.
Links
- Climate's muted wildlife extinction threat
- Future threats to biodiversity and pathways to their prevention
- Global warming already causing local extinctions
- Plant biodiversity at risk as climate changes
- Man-made climate change increases extinction dangers
- We're on the brink of mass extinction -- but there's still time to pull back
- Linking the influence and dependence of people on biodiversity across scales
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