10/10/2018

How To Understand The UN's Dire New Climate Report

The Atlantic - Robinson Meyer

It tries to find hope against a backdrop of failure.
Men perform a ceremony on the drought-stricken bed of Poopo, a lake in Bolivia. David Mercado / Reuters
People must be burnt out on major climate reports, and can you really blame them? Every year, it seems, yet another group of scientists compiles what we know about climate change. And every year, with few exceptions, the broad outlines of that knowledge seem worrying. But nothing ever really changes—and so our ongoing apocalypse becomes not only all the more terrifying, but all the more tedious.
That burnout is understandable, but I urge you to pay attention to—yes—a new report, released this week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN-convened coalition of climate scientists from around the world. Where previous assessments have warned of our hideous overheated future, this one does something different: It tries to sketch a better one.
The report articulates what seems, from the vantage point of 2018, like a best-case scenario for climate change. It describes what the world will look like if it warms by only 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.5 degrees Celsius, by the end of this century. Meeting that target would require humanity to abandon coal and other fossil fuels in the next decade or two: an economic transition so abrupt that, in the IPCC’s words, it “has no documented historic precedents.”
This lukewarm world would still suffer many of the consequences of climate change. There would be more deadly heat waves, more heavy rainstorms, and more intense and frequent droughts. Yet some of the phenomenon’s most catastrophic symptoms—including dozens of feet of sea-level rise and planet-wracking extinctions—might be averted.
The report, in other words, lays out humanity’s last best hope for managing climate change. But it does so against a backdrop of generational failure.
More than a quarter-century ago, the countries of the world hammered out the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. In language signed by President George H. W. Bush and ratified by the Senate, that document—which later gave rise to both the IPCC’s reports and the Paris Agreement—laid out the goal for all of the UN’s future work on climate change. “The ultimate objective,” it said, was to cut greenhouse-gas emissions so as to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”
“Climate scientists have made it abundantly clear, over the past few years, that we’ve already passed that goal. We’ve already dangerously interfered,” says Christopher Field, the director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment who has worked on previous UN reports, but was not involved in this one.
The new report confirms his contention. It finds that the world has already warmed by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1 degree Celsius, since humans began sending industrial pollution into the atmosphere. The costs of this warmth can be seen around the world: This decade alone, sweltering heat waves have killed thousands; engorged floods have ravaged cities from Houston to North Carolina; and half of the coral in the Great Barrier Reef has died.
The question is what happens next. “The international community is struggling with how to address the climate challenge … [while] not being able to meet the ultimate objective,” Field told me. “We’ve already seen dangerous interference—now the question is, how do we deal as effectively as we can with that?”
The new 2.7-degree plan tries to lay out such a strategy. Written by 91 researchers from around the world, it summarizes the findings of more than 6,000 different scientific studies. It argues that humanity must begin rapidly switching away from fossil fuels if it hopes to avoid ecological upheaval. But almost every step of its prescription sits at odds with current policy.
Under its plan, the level of carbon pollution released into the atmosphere every year must begin to fall immediately. (Instead, it hit a record high last year.) By 2030, the world would need to have cut its annual emissions by about half. (Even the Obama administration’s now-cancelled climate policies only cut U.S. emissions by about a quarter by that year.) By 2050, the world must get 80 percent of its electricity from renewable or nuclear power. (Today, only about 20 percent of electricity comes from those sources.)
Additionally, humanity would need to start removing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it emitted by 2050. But even in that world, humanity would probably overshoot the 1.5-degree target for a few decades.
Nowhere are its prescriptions more glaring than around coal. By 2050, it warns that coal must generate no more than 7 percent of global electricity. Today, coal generates about 40 percent of the world’s power.
But more than 1,600 new coal plants are due to come online worldwide in the next few decades, most under contract from Chinese companies. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has tried to create new subsidies for coal companies. It has also moved to weaken or repeal pollution regulations limiting airborne neurotoxins, as well those reducing greenhouse-gas emissions—rules that attracted the ire of coal companies.
“Many will dismiss the [2.7-degree] target as unrealistic, if not laughable,” said Kim Cobb, a professor of climate science at Georgia Tech, in an email. “It is not our job as scientists to give the world a ‘pass’ in the face of damaging delays in tackling climate change.”
She added that its authors “spent months of their lives outlining a path that is entirely justified, from a cost perspective, and urgently needed.”
This report is the first time that the IPCC has examined a 2.7-degree warming “target.” For more than a decade, every nation on the planet has pledged to limit warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius. This goal remains as notional as its newer and more ambitious peer: Even if every country met its obligations as they stand today under the Paris Agreement, the world would emit too much carbon dioxide and shoot past the goal.
But that less ambitious target of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit has started to look more and more dangerous. In particular, increasing Earth’s temperature by that amount seems like it might greatly increase the risk of destabilizing ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland.
“We know there’s a threshold somewhere—probably in the vicinity of [3.6 degrees Fahrenheit]—where we’re very likely committed to more than [30 feet of sea-level rise] over centuries,” Field told me. It may be possible to preserve those large stores of ice at 2.7 degrees, scientists have found.
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech, told me that the report as a whole should be seen as a re-appraisal of where we’re heading as a planet. “It’s like we had a medical issue. The physician had diagnosed it. But now they’re worried it might be worse than we thought,” she said. “So we go back and do a complete work over, every type of test we can imagine.”
The new prognosis is stirring. A world that warms by 3.6 degrees—and not 2.7 degrees—will find that its problems metastasize out of scale with that seemingly small difference. In the hotter world, the number of people affected by water scarcity will double. Twice as many corn crops will perish in the tropics. The size of global fisheries will drop by 50 percent. And 99 percent of the world’s coral reefs will perish.
Plants and animals will also have a much harder time. If the world warms 3.6 degrees, the number of species projected to lose half their habitat will double as compared to the 2.7-degree world. These effects are particularly acute for the Arctic. In the 2.7-degree world, the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean will entirely melt about once a century. In the 3.6-degree world, the Arctic Ocean will go ice-free about once a decade—a potentially cataclysmic moment for polar bears, seals, and other high-latitude mammals.
“A lot of the reason it’s been so challenging to turn the corner on climate change is it will mean that some of the folks who are in positions of power and privilege won’t maintain that privilege,” Field said. “We have a huge number of special interests that benefit from making the transition slower rather than faster.”
Even lacking that clause, the new report might set the stage for the next stage of the climate challenge. As every climate scientist will tell you, the battle to prevent climate change entirely has already been lost. But the battle to blunt its effects—to manage it, as humanity manages the threats of hunger, poverty, war, disease, and other afflictions, and to choose a better, cooler future—has just begun.

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Why Half A Degree Of Global Warming Is A Big Deal

New York Times - Brad Plumer | Nadja Popovich | Illustrations Iris Gottlieb



The Earth has already warmed 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since the 19th century. Now, a major new United Nations report has looked at the consequences of jumping to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius.
Half a degree may not sound like much. But as the report details, even that much warming could expose tens of millions more people worldwide to life-threatening heat waves, water shortages and coastal flooding. Half a degree may mean the difference between a world with coral reefs and Arctic summer sea ice and a world without them.

Arctic

Status of Arctic summer sea ice:

An additional half-degree of warming could mean greater habitat losses for 
polar bears, whales, seals and sea birds. But warming temperatures could 
benefit Arctic fisheries.

Extreme heat

World population exposed to severe heat waves (like one that blanketed 
southeastern Europe in 2007) at least once every five years:

Extreme heat will be much more common worldwide under 2°C of warming 
 compared to 1.5°C, with the tropics experiencing the biggest increase in the 
number of “highly unusual” hot days.

Water scarcity

Increase in urban population exposed to severe drought:

The Mediterranean region is expected to see “particularly strong 
increases in dryness” in a 2°C world compared to a 1.5°C world.

Plants and animals

Species losing more than half of their range:

Coral reefs

Status of coral reefs worldwide:

Sea level rise

Population exposed to flooding from sea level rise in 2100 (without adaptation):

A half a degree of warming could be significant for small island nations, 
which are particularly vulnerable to sea level rise and 
other climate change impacts. 

Crops

Global crop yields are expected to be lower under 2°C of warming compared to 1.5°C,
especially in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America.

Small changes, big impacts
The report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, compiled by hundreds of scientists from around the world, warns that these dangers are no longer remote or hypothetical.
Nations have delayed curbing their greenhouse gas emissions for so long that warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) is now all but inevitable. At current rates of warming, the world will likely cross the 1.5 degree threshold between 2030 and 2052, well within the lifetime of most adults and children alive today.
And 1.5 degrees is a best-case scenario. Without an extremely rapid, and perhaps unrealistic, global push to zero out fossil fuel emissions and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) or higher this century looks more likely.
Each time the Earth heats up an extra half-degree, the effects aren’t uniform across the planet. Some regions, such as the Arctic, will heat up two to three times faster. The Mediterranean and Middle East regions could see a 9 percent drop in water availability at 1.5 degrees of warming and a 17 percent drop at 2 degrees, according to one major study cited in the report.
“If you’re looking at this one region, which is already water-scarce today and sees a lot of political instability, half a degree makes a really big difference,” said Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, the head of climate science and impacts at Climate Analytics and the lead author of that study. “It’s a good reminder that no one experiences the global average temperature.”
The odds of extreme weather events like severe heat waves or powerful rainstorms also don’t go up uniformly with an extra half-degree. The number of extremely hot days around the world, for example, tends to rise exponentially as the global average temperature increases, the report said.

The risk of tipping points
The report also highlights the possibility that even modest amounts of warming may push both human societies and natural ecosystems past certain thresholds where sudden and calamitous changes can occur.
Take coral reefs, which provide food and coastal protection for half a billion people worldwide. Before the 1970s, it was virtually unheard-of for ocean temperatures to get so warm that swaths of corals would bleach and die off. But as global average temperatures have risen half a degree in that span, these bleaching events have become a regular phenomenon.
With an additional half-degree of warming above today’s levels, the report said, tropical coral reefs will face “very frequent mass mortalities,” though some corals may adapt if given enough time. But at 2 degrees of total warming, coral reefs are in danger of vanishing entirely.
It is less certain when other long-feared tipping points will occur, such as the irreversible disintegration of the vast ice sheets on top of Greenland or West Antarctica. But the report warns that these ice sheets could potentially start to destabilize with 1.5 to 2 degrees of warming, committing the world to many more feet of sea level rise for centuries to come.
The report also warns that vulnerable areas, like many African countries and small island nations, may struggle to cope with multiple impacts. Crop failures, heat waves and the expansion of malaria-carrying mosquitoes compound when they occur together.
“You’re not just adapting to one thing at a time, you’re adapting to everything shifting at once,” said Kristie L. Ebi, a professor of public health at the University of Washington and one of the lead authors of the report’s chapter on climate impacts.

Beyond 1.5 degrees
At the United Nations climate negotiations in Paris in 2015, countries promised to hold total global warming to well below 2 degrees and agreed to “pursue efforts” to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. Leaders of small island nations, like the Marshall Islands and Maldives, had deemed that lower goal essential to their survival.
At this point, however, both goals are starting to look wildly out of reach. If you add up all the national pledges made in Paris to curb emissions, they would put the world on track to warm around 3 degrees Celsius or more.
Holding warming to 1.5 degrees, the report said, would entail a staggering transformation of the global energy system beyond what world leaders are contemplating today. Global greenhouse emissions would need to fall in half in just 12 years and zero out by 2050. To stay below 2 degrees, emissions have to decline to zero by around 2075. Virtually all of the coal plants and gasoline-burning vehicles on the planet would need to be quickly replaced with zero-carbon alternatives.
In addition, the report said, the world would have to swiftly develop and deploy technology to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year — using technology that is still untested at large scales.
“My view is that 2 degrees is aspirational and 1.5 degrees is ridiculously aspirational” said Gary Yohe, an environmental economist at Wesleyan University. “They are good targets to aim for, but we need to face the fact that we might not hit them and start thinking more seriously about what a 2.5 degree or 3 degree world might look like.”

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To Tackle Climate Change, A New U.N. Climate Report Says Put A High Price On Carbon

New York Times - Brad Plumer

The Tesoro Los Angeles oil refinery in California. Economists have long been enthusiastic about carbon pricing because of the idea’s simplicity. Credit Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
WASHINGTON — In its landmark report on the fast-approaching dangers of climate change, a United Nations scientific panel said on Sunday that putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions would be central for getting global warming under control.
More than 40 governments around the world, including the European Union and California, have now put a price on carbon, either through direct taxes on fossil fuels or through cap-and-trade programs. But many of them have found it politically difficult to set a price high enough to spur truly deep reductions in carbon emissions.
The concept of carbon pricing received another implicit endorsement on Monday from the Nobel Prize committee, which awarded Yale’s William D. Nordhaus a share of the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science for, among other things, making a case that “the most efficient remedy for the problems caused by greenhouse gas emissions would be a global scheme of carbon taxes that are uniformly imposed on all countries.”
Scientists who worked on the United Nations report hailed Professor Nordhaus’s work as influential for thinking about how to tackle climate change.
“It’s great to see the importance of Bill’s work being recognized,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University and an author of the report. “Though many think a price on carbon is too expensive, it’s really a way of getting the true impacts of emissions into the economy so we can make better decisions.”
In the 1970s, Professor Nordhaus conducted the first detailed look at the economic damages that global warming could inflict on human society, right as climate scientists were starting to sound the alarm about rising greenhouse gas emissions. He argued that companies that burn fossil fuels should be taxed at a rate that reflected the harms they were imposing on the rest of the world.
William Nordhaus shared the Nobel prize in economics in part for showing that carbon taxes are an efficient way to reduce global carbon emissions. Credit Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times
Economists have long been enthusiastic about carbon pricing because of the policy’s efficiency. Give companies a financial incentive to reduce their fossil-fuel use, and they will find creative and cost-effective ways to do so without the need for heavy-handed government regulations.
To date, however, policymakers have often had more success in reducing emissions by relying on those heavy-handed government regulations. Examples include France’s state-led push to build nuclear power in the 1970s and 1980s and the United States’ strict fuel-economy standards for cars and light trucks, which have reduced domestic oil consumption by billions of barrels.
“It is safe to say that policies other than carbon pricing have driven the majority of emissions reductions to date,” said Jesse Jenkins, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
One possible reason for that: While government regulations can often be more expensive in reducing emissions on a per-ton basis, they also tend to hide their costs from voters, and therefore can be a safer political bet. A policy that requires utilities to build more renewable energy has visible benefits — more wind and solar — and murky costs. But a carbon tax that directly increases the price of gasoline at the pump or electricity rates brings more obvious pain, and hence is more likely to garner opposition.
A case in point: In 2012, the Australian government enacted a cap-and-trade program that effectively set a price on carbon of $23 per ton. Emissions fell nationwide under the program. Yet the policy faced a fierce political backlash from industry groups and voters, and when the nation’s more conservative Liberal Party swept into power in 2013, it quickly moved to repeal the program.
A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that the average carbon price across 42 major economies was around $8 per ton in 2018, far below the level most experts say is necessary to address climate change. Those low prices, some researchers have argued, may reflect political constraints on pricing carbon directly.
For comparison, the United Nations report estimated that governments would need to impose effective carbon prices of $135 to $5,500 per ton of carbon dioxide pollution by 2030 to keep overall global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.
The O.E.C.D. report did mention, however, that carbon pricing is starting to show signs of momentum in many parts of the world. Portugal launched its own carbon tax in 2015, and Chile followed suit in 2017. China has launched an early carbon-trading program in several of its provinces. California recently expanded its own cap-and-trade program to cover 85 percent of its statewide emissions. This fall, voters in Washington State will decide whether to enact their own statewide carbon tax.
Some scientists hope that the new United Nations report on the dangers of further climate change may spur nations to step up efforts like these. “If the report works and governments take it seriously, it should increase their ambition for expeditiously reducing emissions,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton.
But getting anywhere near the high levels of carbon pricing envisioned by the report may take creative new strategies, said Mr. Jenkins, the researcher at Harvard. In the short term, policies that are widely popular with voters, such as mandates for renewable energy, can help reshape the political landscape to make more ambitious climate action feasible. And policies that spur innovation and drive down the cost of cleaner alternatives to fossil fuels, such as electric vehicles, could potentially make higher carbon prices more palatable.
But whether they ultimately rely on carbon pricing, direct subsidies for clean energy or other types of policies, nations will have to do far more than they are currently doing for the world to have hope of avoiding drastic climate change.
In an interview with the Nobel committee on Monday, Dr. Nordhaus said he was “concerned about the fact that we’re doing so little.” He added: “The policies are lagging very, very far — miles, miles, miles — behind the science and what needs to be done.”

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09/10/2018

Mining Sector, Morrison Government On The Defensive Over IPCC Report

Fairfax - Peter Hannam | Cole Latimer

Australia's mining industry and the Morrison government have rejected an international climate report that demands nations phase out all coal-fired power by mid-century and leave most fossil fuel reserves untapped to avoid dangerous global warming.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's special report, released on Monday, said average temperature increases could still be kept to 1.5 degrees but would require a "global transformation" of all sectors of the economy.
Sunset for coal and other fossil fuels? Not yet, says the Morrison government. Credit: Nic Walker
Prime Minister Scott Morrison led his government's defence of miners, saying the IPCC report did not "provide recommendations to Australia" and that his government's focus would be "to ensure that electricity prices are lower" for households and businesses, alike.
Resources companies, though, fell on the Australian Stock Exchange, led by South32, the mainly coal miner spun-off from BHP. Its price sank 5.4 per cent or more than triple the overall market's slide of 1.4 per cent.
Industry groups, such as the Queensland Resources Council, dismissed the prospect of an early demise for the country's coal sector, saying Australian coal boasted relatively low emissions.
"There is a role for high-quality Australian coal and it's compatible with meeting Paris emissions reductions targets," Ian Macfarlane, council chief executive and a former Coalition energy minister.
"Our economy depends on the coal industry, and we can have both a strong coal industry and reduce carbon emissions."
The NSW Minerals Council likewise said coal had "very positive" future in the state, with strong demand from traditional and emerging export markets, a spokesman said.
"There are positive signs that these good conditions will continue in coming decades," he said, citing a recent industry forecast that annual Asian demand for coal burnt in power plants would jump by half from about 740 million tonnes to 1.147 billion tonnes by 2030.

Carbon budgets
However, the IPCC report's authors said the world would face severe consequences if the great bulk of fossil fuels including coal, oil and gas, weren't left in the ground.
At 1.5 degrees of warming, compared with pre-industrial levels, as much as 90 per cent of the world's coral reefs will die, and virtually all would be lost if temperatures rose two degrees, or about twice the increase so far.
Mark Howden, head of the Australian National University's Climate Change Institute, said emitting the equivalent of about 420 billions of carbon dioxide would exhaust the remaining carbon budget to cap warming at 1.5 degrees. Current annual emissions are about 42 billion tonnes, implying about a decade of pollution before "the need to go vertical" to zero emissions to keep within the temperature limit.



Emissions will need to fall 45 per cent from 2010 levels - or 58 per cent from 2015 totals - by 2030, the IPCC said.
Melissa Price, the federal Environment Minister, said the government would consider the IPCC report, saying the government "is committed to the Paris Agreement and takes its international obligations seriously".
"We’re particularly concerned about the implications for coral reefs, with the report finding climate
change will impact reefs across the world, including Australia," she said.
The Paris accord was signed three years ago by almost 200 nations, who pledged to keep warming to 1.5-2 degrees. Australia's pledge is to cut 2005-level emissions 26-28 per cent by 2030, a target environmental groups such as the Climate Action Tracker describe as "insufficient".

Labor, Greens
Both Labor and the Greens attacked the Coalition government, signalling the likelihood that climate change will become a major issue at the next federal poll due by mid-2019.
"At 1.5 degrees, we will see the consequences of climate-related risks to our health, our livelihoods, our food security, water supply, human security, and economic growth," Penny Wong, Labor's acting spokeswoman for climate change, said.
Senator Wong said "the government’s own data shows they will fail to meet their already inadequate Paris targets with pollution rising all the way to 2030".
Labor has pledged to increase Australia's carbon reduction effort to 45 per cent from 2005 levels and roughly triple the current share of renewable energy to 50 per cent by 2030.

Adam Bandt, the Greens climate spokesman, said the IPCC report showed it was "time to hit the climate emergency button", and that neither major party was prepared to take the necessary steps.
"If we don’t quit coal, we are screwed," said Mr Bandt. "Business as usual under Liberal and Labor is a death sentence."

Shutting down
Market forces, at least in Australia, indicate an exit from coal in the electricity sector is likely for all major plants by 2050 - unless governments intervene to extend their lives.



Origin Energy, for instance, plans to shut the Eraring coal-fired power station in NSW - Australia's largest - by 2032.
"We believe that net-zero emissions for the electricity sector by 2050 or earlier is achievable," Origin chief executive Frank Calabria said in the company’s 2018 Sustainability report.
One industry hoping to benefit from any shift towards low emissions in the carbon capture and storage (CCS) industry, a sector singled out by the IPCC as necessary if global temperatures are to avoid "overshooting" the targets.
"It’s obviously very pleasing the panel is endorsing the necessity for CCS," Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute spokesman Antonios Papaspiropoulos told Fairfax Media.
"This is a pivotal part of turning back the climate change siege," he said. "We’re starting to see a wider acceptance that more needs to be done to fight climate change, and CCS is part of this 'more'."

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Major Climate Report Describes A Strong Risk Of Crisis As Early As 2040

New York Times - Coral Davenport

Harry Taylor, 6, played with the bones of dead livestock on his family’s farm in New South Wales, Australia, an area that has faced severe drought. Credit Brook Mitchell/Getty Images
INCHEON, South Korea — A landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has “no documented historic precedent.”
The report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders, describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.
The report “is quite a shock, and quite concerning,” said Bill Hare, an author of previous I.P.C.C. reports and a physicist with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit organization. “We were not aware of this just a few years ago.” The report was the first to be commissioned by world leaders under the Paris agreement, the 2015 pact by nations to fight global warming.
The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040, inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty. Previous work had focused on estimating the damage if average temperatures were to rise by a larger number, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), because that was the threshold scientists previously considered for the most severe effects of climate change.
The new report, however, shows that many of those effects will come much sooner, at the 2.7-degree mark.
Why Half a Degree of Global Warming
Is a Big Deal
It may sound small, but a half-degree of temperature change could lead to more dire consequences in a warming world, according to a sweeping new scientific assessment.
Avoiding the most serious damage requires transforming the world economy within just a few years, said the authors, who estimate that the damage would come at a cost of $54 trillion. But while they conclude that it is technically possible to achieve the rapid changes required to avoid 2.7 degrees of warming, they concede that it may be politically unlikely.
For instance, the report says that heavy taxes or prices on carbon dioxide emissions — perhaps as high as $27,000 per ton by 2100 — would be required. But such a move would be almost politically impossible in the United States, the world’s largest economy and second-largest greenhouse gas emitter behind China. Lawmakers around the world, including in China, the European Union and California, have enacted carbon pricing programs.
People on a smog-clouded street in Hebei Province, China, in 2016. China is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, followed by the United States. Credit Damir Sagolj/Reuters
President Trump, who has mocked the science of human-caused climate change, has vowed to increase the burning of coal and said he intends to withdraw from the Paris agreement. And on Sunday in Brazil, the world’s seventh-largest emitter of greenhouse gas, voters appeared on track to elect a new president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has said he also plans to withdraw from the accord.
The report was written and edited by 91 scientists from 40 countries who analyzed more than 6,000 scientific studies. The Paris agreement set out to prevent warming of more than 3.6 degrees above preindustrial levels — long considered a threshold for the most severe social and economic damage from climate change. But the heads of small island nations, fearful of rising sea levels, had also asked scientists to examine the effects of 2.7 degrees of warming.
Absent aggressive action, many effects once expected only several decades in the future will arrive by 2040, and at the lower temperature, the report shows. “It’s telling us we need to reverse emissions trends and turn the world economy on a dime,” said Myles Allen, an Oxford University climate scientist and an author of the report.
To prevent 2.7 degrees of warming, the report said, greenhouse pollution must be reduced by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and 100 percent by 2050. It also found that, by 2050, use of coal as an electricity source would have to drop from nearly 40 percent today to between 1 and 7 percent. Renewable energy such as wind and solar, which make up about 20 percent of the electricity mix today, would have to increase to as much as 67 percent.
“This report makes it clear: There is no way to mitigate climate change without getting rid of coal,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University and an author of the report.
President Trump has vowed to increase the burning of coal and said he intends to withdraw from the Paris agreement. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
The World Coal Association disputed the conclusion that stopping global warming calls for an end of coal use. In a statement, Katie Warrick, its interim chief executive, noted that forecasts from the International Energy Agency, a global analysis organization, “continue to see a role for coal for the foreseeable future.”
Ms. Warrick said her organization intends to campaign for governments to invest in carbon capture technology. Such technology, which is currently too expensive for commercial use, could allow coal to continue to be widely used.
Despite the controversial policy implications, the United States delegation joined more than 180 countries on Saturday in accepting the report’s summary for policymakers, while walking a delicate diplomatic line. A State Department statement said that “acceptance of this report by the panel does not imply endorsement by the United States of the specific findings or underlying contents of the report.”
Climate Change Is Complex.
We’ve Got Answers to Your Questions.
The State Department delegation faced a conundrum. Refusing to approve the document would place the United States at odds with many nations and show it rejecting established academic science on the world stage. However, the delegation also represents a president who has rejected climate science and climate policy.
“We reiterate that the United States intends to withdraw from the Paris agreement at the earliest opportunity absent the identification of terms that are better for the American people,” the statement said.
The report attempts to put a price tag on the effects of climate change. The estimated $54 trillion in damage from 2.7 degrees of warming would grow to $69 trillion if the world continues to warm by 3.6 degrees and beyond, the report found, although it does not specify the length of time represented by those costs.
The report concludes that the world is already more than halfway to the 2.7-degree mark. Human activities have caused warming of about 1.8 degrees since about the 1850s, the beginning of large-scale industrial coal burning, the report found.
The United States is not alone in failing to reduce emissions enough to prevent the worst effects of climate change. The report concluded that the greenhouse gas reduction pledges put forth under the Paris agreement will not be enough to avoid 3.6 degrees of warming.
The report emphasizes the potential role of a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. “A price on carbon is central to prompt mitigation,” the report concludes. It estimates that to be effective, such a price would have to range from $135 to $5,500 per ton of carbon dioxide pollution in 2030, and from $690 to $27,000 per ton by 2100.
By comparison, under the Obama administration, government economists estimated that an appropriate price on carbon would be in the range of $50 per ton. Under the Trump administration, that figure was lowered to about $7 per ton.
The World Coal Association disputed the conclusion that stopping global warming calls for an end of coal use. Credit Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Americans for Prosperity, the political advocacy group funded by the libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch, has made a point of campaigning against politicians who support a carbon tax.
“Carbon taxes are political poison because they increase gas prices and electric rates,” said Myron Ebell, who heads the energy program at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an industry-funded Washington research organization, and who led the Trump administration’s transition at the Environmental Protection Agency.
The report details the economic damage expected should governments fail to enact policies to reduce emissions. The United States, it said, could lose roughly 1.2 percent of gross domestic product for every 1.8 degrees of warming.
A wildfire in Shasta-Trinity National Forest in California last month. The new I.P.C.C. research found that wildfires are likely to worsen if steps are not taken to tame climate change. Credit Noah Berger/Associated Press



In addition, it said, the United States along with Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam are home to 50 million people who will be exposed to the effects of increased coastal flooding by 2040, if 2.7 degrees of warming occur.
At 3.6 degrees of warming, the report predicts a “disproportionately rapid evacuation” of people from the tropics. “In some parts of the world, national borders will become irrelevant,” said Aromar Revi, director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements and an author of the report. “You can set up a wall to try to contain 10,000 and 20,000 and one million people, but not 10 million.”
The report also finds that, in the likelihood that governments fail to avert 2.7 degrees of warming, another scenario is possible: The world could overshoot that target, heat up by more than 3.6 degrees, and then through a combination of lowering emissions and deploying carbon capture technology, bring the temperature back down below the 2.7-degree threshold.
In that scenario, some damage would be irreversible, the report found. All coral reefs would die. However, the sea ice that would disappear in the hotter scenario would return once temperatures had cooled off.
“For governments, the idea of overshooting the target but then coming back to it is attractive because then they don’t have to make such rapid changes,” Dr. Shindell said. “But it has a lot of disadvantages.”

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The Political Will To Prevent Climate Change Is Lacking, Even As The Cost Climbs

Fairfax - David Crowe

Australians are being presented with another startling contrast between colossal risk and paltry action over climate change.
The latest scientific advice is that human activity has already caused an increase of 1 degree in world temperatures, with global warming estimated to reach 1.5 degrees by 2052 on current trends.
The cost is astronomical. The damage over the years to 2100 would reach $US54 trillion in today’s dollars if warming was kept to 1.5 degrees. The cost would climb to $US69 trillion if warming reached 2 degrees.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

The obvious message from the report is to stop the 2 degree scenario. The scientists say this means halting the use of coal by 2050, accelerating the use of renewables and making mammoth investments to change the economy.
This cost is just as draw-dropping. The report says the investment would need to be $US2.4 trillion a year by 2034 across the global economy. There is no country-by-country analysis of what this means but Australia makes up about 1 per cent of global emissions, so it may have the same share of the expense.
Can Australia invest $US24 billion a year to avert dangerous climate change? That is more than the federal government spends on public hospitals.
Island life. Credit: Matt Golding
The answer from the Greens is to shut down coal-fired power stations and stop coal exports, but only about 10 per cent of Australian voters supported this position at the last election by giving the Greens their primary vote.
The two major parties will not rush the closure of coal-fired power stations.
The answer from the government is to ask for more time to come up with a policy. The leadership turmoil in August left the Liberals and Nationals without a plan to reduce emissions.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison insisted on Monday that Australia would meet its emission targets "in a canter" but this is disputed by climate experts. It is a laughable message – nothing more than saying "trust us" – when the demise of the National Energy Guarantee proved again that the Coalition party room is incapable of reaching a consensus and then holding its nerve on energy and climate policy.
Labor has a 50 per cent target for renewable energy by 2030 but is yet to spell out how it would reduce emissions in government. One approach is to rebuild a policy from the wreckage of the NEG but this is easier said than done.
It is telling that Opposition Leader Bill Shorten signalled it was too risky to be too ambitious. "We are not saying that there won't be fossil fuel as part of our energy mix going forward," he said on Monday.
Political leaders are making a pragmatic assessment of the will of the Australian people.
The dismal assessment from the scientists is that even a political success on energy would not save the Great Barrier Reef as we know it today. The trend towards 1.5 degrees means damaging 70 to 90 per cent of the world's coral reefs.
It is hard to see an agreement in Canberra, let alone the world, that is strong enough to stop that happening.

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08/10/2018

Coal Must Go To Save Great Barrier Reef, IPCC Says In Dire Climate Warning

ABC Science - Michael Slezak | Nick Kilvert

Coal power needs to drop to below 2 per cent of current usage to keep the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. (Flickr: UniversityBlogSpot)
Key points
  • Greenhouse gas pollution must reach zero by about 2050 to stop global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, a report by the UN climate body warns
  • A 1.5C coral reefs are expected to decline by a further 70 to 90 per cent, the report says
  • Experts say coal power needs to drop to between 0 and 2 per cent of existing usage 
Australia and the rest of the world must virtually eliminate the use of coal for electricity within 22 years if there is to be a chance to save even some of the Great Barrier Reef, the world's most authoritative climate science body has warned.
In a report authored by more than 90 scientists, and pulling together thousands of pieces of climate research, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said global emissions of greenhouse gas pollution must reach zero by about 2050 in order to stop global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius.
At current rates, they said 1.5C would be breached as early as 2040, and 2C would be breached in the 2060s.
If that happens, temperatures over many land regions would increase by double that amount. And at 2C of warming, experts said the world would risk hitting "tipping points", setting the world to uncontrollable temperatures.
With the world already 1C warmer than pre-industrial times, experts said this report, released by the IPCC in Incheon, Korea, was likely the last warning before it would be impossible to keep warming at 1.5C.
"We're not on track, we're currently heading for about 3 degrees to 4 degrees of warming by 2100," report contributor Professor Mark Howden from ANU said.
"To limit temperature change to 1.5 degrees we have to strongly reduce carbon dioxide emissions. They have to decline about 45 per cent by 2030 and they have to reach zero by 2050.
"On a global basis, coal will have to drop between 0 and 2 per cent of existing usage."
Coral reefs are expected to decline by a further 70 to 90 per cent under 1.5C, but that rises to more than 99 per cent reef loss as temperature rises hit 2C.
In Australia, that means the vast majority of the Great Barrier Reef will undergo significant upheaval or collapse.
Combined with increased ocean acidification due to higher carbon dioxide concentrations, this is expected to heavily affect fish stocks and diversity.
A rise of 2C would mean three times as much of the earth's terrestrial ecosystems would undergo transformations compared to a rise of 1.5C, significantly increasing species extinctions.
We'll see an ice-free Arctic every 10 years under 2 degrees of warming. (UN Photo: Mark Garten)
Modern humans have never seen an ice-free Arctic, but at 2C that would happen once a decade, compared to once a century at 1.5C.
A 2C rise would mean an extra 10 centimetres of sea-level rise by the end of the century, affecting an extra 10 million people. And it would double the number of people experiencing water scarcity.
And we would be hit with more extreme hot weather events in every part of the world, more floods in most, and more drought in some.
Those extreme events would be "far worse" as temperature increases go beyond 1.5C, according to Will Steffen from ANU's Climate Change Institute.
"Loss of the Amazon forests, melting of the permafrost, loss of ice in West Antarctic and Greenland, they are much riskier at 2 degrees than they are at 1.5," Professor Steffen said.
"They could lead to a tipping cascade where the system will get hotter and hotter even if we bring our emissions down."

Coal use needs to drop to '0 to 2 per cent': expert
In 2015, almost every country agreed to stop global warming at "well below" 2C under the Paris Agreement, and to try to limit it to just 1.5C.
But 1.5C is a global average, which is dampened by ocean temperatures and doesn't represent regional extremes, according to report contributor Jatin Kala from Murdoch University.
"Even some world leaders seem to think that 1.5 degrees is a small number, why do we care?" Dr Kala said.
"Warming over the land is at a higher level of magnitude. We care because when the global average is 1.5 degrees warmer, that means that several regions of the world are warming at much higher magnitudes — they'll be a lot warmer than 1.5."
To limit warming to 1.5C, there needed to be "deep changes in all aspects of society", according to Professor Howden.
"It does actually require major transformations in many aspects of society and to do those transitions, the next 10 years is critical," Professor Howden said.
"Electricity will have to be supplied by renewables on a global basis by the tune of about 70 to 85 per cent of electricity supply.
"Coal would have to drop to within 0 and 2 per cent of existing usage, and gas down to about 8 per cent of existing usage, and only if there was carbon dioxide capture and storage associated."
Although renewables like solar and wind are rapidly disrupting energy systems around the world, freight, aviation, shipping and industry are lagging behind in emissions reduction.
LNG processing is contributing significant greenhouse gas emissions and carbon sequestration is "virtually not happening", according to contributor Peter Newman from Curtin University.
But Professor Newman said there was some movement in the right direction.
"Electric vehicles are rapidly happening around the world," he said.
"[In Australia], the industrial systems are not good, but the land systems however are a good sign. There has been significant reforesting of the landscape."

'No easy way' to avoid reaching tipping point
There is a limit to the amount of carbon we can pump into the atmosphere, after which point restricting the temperature rise to 1.5C becomes impossible.
Researchers say at current emissions rates the world will hit that point between 10 and 14 years from now. Overshooting that mark means that our only option may be to employ "experimental and untested" carbon removal technologies.
These technologies are yet to be proven at scale, and critics say they have been used to fuel "magical thinking".
"There isn't an easy way to do this," said Associate Professor Bronwyn Hayward from the University of Canterbury.
"If we don't make these really difficult, unprecedented cuts now, there's fewer options for sustainable development. We'll be forced to rely more on these unproven, risky and potentially socially undesirable forms of carbon removal."
Minister for the Environment Melissa Price released a statement in response to the report, in which she said the Government was "particularly concerned" about the implications for coral reefs.
"More than ever this report shows the necessity of the Morrison Government's $444 million investment in the Great Barrier Reef's management," the Minister said.
"While Australia only contributes about 1 per cent of global emissions, we will deliver on our commitment to reduce emissions by 26 to 28 per cent of 2005 levels by 2030."
Labor has vowed to take back the Government's $444 million Great Barrier Reef Foundation funding — which was granted without a competitive tender process and without the foundation asking for it — if it wins the next federal election.
Ms Price's statement also said that Australia's emissions intensity is at its lowest level for 28 years. But according to the Government's own data, Australia's overall emissions have increased for the third year in a row.
The Government was criticised for sitting on that data for nearly two months, before releasing it on a Friday afternoon on the eve of football grand finals and a long weekend.

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