21/01/2019

Business, Insurers At Odds With Coalition's 'Problematic' Climate Policy

AFR - Ben Potter

Last week global business leaders warned the World Economic Forum in a survey organised by insurance giants that climate change was the gravest risk facing the plant, eclipsing short term risks of political and economic instability.
"Of all risks, it is in relation to the environment that the world is most clearly sleepwalking into catastrophe," the survey of 1000 business people, policymakers and academics conducted by Zurich Insurance Group and Marsh & McLennan warned ahead of the forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
If that reflects the views of Australian business leaders, the Morrison government - which downgraded climate targets as a priority in August - could become the second Coalition government in little more than a decade to be wrong-footed by the politics of climate change during a bout of extreme weather.
Wrongfooted on climate change, 12 years apart: Former Prime Minister John Howard (left) and Prime Minister Scott Morrison (right).  Alex Ellinghausen 
In late 2006, the Howard government took its cue from Business Council president Michael Chaney, who redefined climate change as a business risk, and from Coalition polling showing voters were being "catalysed by the drought", said Mark Triffitt, a political scientist who worked for the BCA at the time.
But it was too little too late, raising questions about whether it was a credible policy switch or a political bandaid in the face of Labor leader Kevin Rudd's climate policy onslaught, said political scientist Paul Strangio, of Monash University. Labor won the 2007 election so easily that Howard lost his seat.
"It became one of the issues [suggesting] that the Howard government was losing touch with the contemporary concerns of the electorate," Mr Strangio said.
Now there's another big dry and last week brought five of Australia's 10 highest mean maximum temperatures, a record 45.3 degrees Celsius for Albury, and record overnight minimums in Noona and Borrona Downs in NSW.
There's also an environmental disaster on the Murray Darling River with the deaths of a million fish being blamed on government mismanagement.

Government not doing enough
The Morrison government elevated cheap power over climate change as a priority when it ousted former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in August, and faces a Labor Opposition arguing voters don't have to choose between lower prices and emissions cuts because of falling clean energy costs.
Polling by Essential Media shows voters are more than twice as likely to think the government isn't doing enough on climate change than to think it is doing enough. Essential Media
An Ipsos poll for The Australian Financial Review in November found 47 per cent of voters prioritised lower energy prices, ahead of 39 per cent prioritising emissions reductions.
But MPs from prosperous heartland Liberal seats in the inner eastern and southeastern suburbs of Melbourne - such as outgoing member for Higgins Kelly O'Dwyer, Goldstein MP Tim Wilson and beaten MP for the state seat of Hawthorn John Pesutto - didn't mention prices when they said the lack of a credible climate change policy was a big problem for the Coalition in the Victorian election.
Polling by Essential Media also shows that for at least three years, voters have been more than twice as likely to think that the government isn't doing enough on climate change than they are to think it is doing enough.
What can change is where climate change sits in voters' priorities, and its impact shouldn't be exaggerated, Mr Strangio said.
Climate change, which will likely cause more bushfires and extreme weather events, is increasingly considered the major long-term risk by business. Dean Sewell
"If concerns about climate change intensify I don't think there is any doubt that it will be problematic for the Coalition government," Mr Strangio said.
But Nick Economou, also from Monash University, said that while it was true the Coalition was struggling to reconcile the attitudes of its inner city "elites" to climate change with those of its rural and regional constituents, "the appalling treatment of Malcolm Turnbull" was far more important in recent elections than climate change.
In Australia, Sean Walker, Zurich's chief underwriting officer in the general insurance division, warned the effects of climate change would have real impacts on business.
"Australian businesses should be building climate-change resilience and adaptation strategies into their broader business plans. These plans need to be real and tangible, not treated as some 'horizon three' or 'black swan' conceptual event but as something to be addressed as part of a new operating environment," he said.
The insurance industry has spoken out with increased urgency on the issue. In November, IAG's Jacki Johnson warned that if global temperatures rise 4 degrees on pre-industrial levels – as some models suggest they are on track to do – then the world could become "pretty much uninsurable".
Back in November 2006, after Chaney had said that business needed to tackle climate change, Howard told the BCA's annual dinner that the government now accepted the science of climate change and would set up an inquiry into a carbon emissions trading system.

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Ice Loss From Antarctica Has Sextupled Since The 1970s, New Research Finds

Washington Post - Chris Mooney | Brady Dennis

An alarming study shows massive East Antarctic ice sheet already is a significant contributor to sea-level rise


Scientists say global warming nears an irreversible level, President Trump has been promoting business growth instead of climate change. (Jenny Starrs /The Washington Post)

Antarctic glaciers have been melting at an accelerating pace over the past four decades thanks to an influx of warm ocean water — a startling new finding that researchers say could mean sea levels are poised to rise more quickly than predicted in coming decades.
The Antarctic lost 40 billion tons of melting ice to the ocean each year from 1979 to 1989. That figure rose to 252 billion tons lost per year beginning in 2009, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That means the region is losing six times as much ice as it was four decades ago, an unprecedented pace in the era of modern measurements. (It takes about 360 billion tons of ice to produce one millimeter of global sea-level rise.)
“I don’t want to be alarmist,” said Eric Rignot, an Earth-systems scientist for the University of California at Irvine and NASA who led the work. But he said the weaknesses that researchers have detected in East Antarctica — home to the largest ice sheet on the planet — deserve deeper study.
“The places undergoing changes in Antarctica are not limited to just a couple places,” Rignot said. “They seem to be more extensive than what we thought. That, to me, seems to be reason for concern.”
The findings are the latest sign that the world could face catastrophic consequences if climate change continues unabated. In addition to more-frequent droughts, heat waves, severe storms and other extreme weather that could come with a continually warming Earth, scientists already have predicted that seas could rise nearly three feet globally by 2100 if the world does not sharply decrease its carbon output. But in recent years, there has been growing concern that the Antarctic could push that even higher.
That kind of sea-level rise would result in the inundation of island communities around the globe, devastating wildlife habitats and threatening drinking-water supplies. Global sea levels have already risen seven to eight inches since 1900.



The ice of Antarctica contains 57.2 meters, or 187.66 feet, of potential sea-level rise. This massive body of ice flows out into the ocean through a complex array of partially submerged glaciers and thick floating expanses of ice called ice shelves. The glaciers themselves, as well as the ice shelves, can be as large as American states or entire countries.
The outward ice flow is normal and natural, and it is typically offset by some 2 trillion tons of snowfall atop Antarctica each year, a process that on its own would leave Earth’s sea level relatively unchanged. However, if the ice flow speeds up, the ice sheet’s losses can outpace snowfall volume. When that happens, seas rise.
That’s what the new research says is happening. Scientists came to that conclusion after systematically computing gains and losses across 65 sectors of Antarctica where large glaciers — or glaciers flowing into an ice shelf — reach the sea.
West Antarctica is the continent’s major ice loser. Monday’s research affirms that finding, detailing how a single glacier, Pine Island, has lost more than a trillion tons of ice since 1979. Thwaites Glacier, the biggest and potentially most vulnerable in the region, has lost 634 billion. The entire West Antarctic ice sheet is capable of driving a sea-level rise of 5.28 meters, or 17.32 feet, and is now losing 159 billion tons every year.
The most striking finding in Monday’s study is the assertion that East Antarctica, which contains by far the continent’s most ice — a vast sheet capable of nearly 170 feet of potential sea-level rise — is also experiencing serious melting.
The new research highlights how some massive glaciers, ones that to this point have been studied relatively little, are losing significant amounts of ice. That includes Cook and Ninnis, which are the gateway to the massive Wilkes Subglacial Basin, and other glaciers known as Dibble, Frost, Holmes and Denman.
Denman, for instance, contains nearly five feet of potential sea-level rise alone and has lost almost 200 billion tons of ice, the study finds. And it remains alarmingly vulnerable. The study notes that the glacier is “grounded on a ridge with a steep retrograde slope immediately upstream,” meaning additional losses could cause the glacier to rapidly retreat.
“It has been known for some time that the West Antarctic and Antarctic Peninsula have been losing mass, but discovering that significant mass loss is also occurring in the East Antarctic is really important because there’s such a large volume of sea-level equivalent contained in those basins,” said Christine Dow, a glacier expert at the University of Waterloo in Canada. “It shows that we can’t ignore the East Antarctic and need to focus in on the areas that are losing mass most quickly, particularly those with reverse bed slopes that could result in rapid ice disintegration and sea-level rise.”
The new research is consistent in some ways with a major study published last year by a team of 80 scientists finding that Antarctic ice losses have tripled in a decade and now total 219 billion tons annually. That research did not find similarly large losses from East Antarctica, though it noted that there is a high amount of uncertainty about what is happening there.
“More work is needed to reconcile these new estimates,” said Beata Csatho, an Antarctic expert at the University at Buffalo who was an author of the prior study.
The bottom line is that Antarctica is losing a lot of ice and that vulnerable areas exist across the East and West Antarctic, with few signs of slowing as oceans grow warmer. In particular, Rignot says, key parts of East Antarctica, the subject of less focus from researchers in the past, need a much closer look, and fast.
“The traditional view from many decades ago is that nothing much is happening in East Antarctica,” Rignot said, adding, “It’s a little bit like wishful thinking.”
Icebergs and sea ice, seen from NASA's Operation IceBridge aircraft, off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula in November 2017. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
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Australia Heatwave: Mass Animal Deaths And Roads Melting As Temperatures Reach Record High

The Independent - Jane Dalton

One town endures the highest minimum night-time temperature ever recorded anywhere in the country


Flying foxes swoop into lake water to cool off during Australia heatwave 

Roads melted and doctors warned people about heat stress as Australia notched five of its 10 hottest days on record amid a searing heatwave.
One town in New South Wales recorded a night-time low temperature of 35.9C – the highest minimum temperature ever recorded anywhere in Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology said.
The extreme heat, which has hit the country for a week, has caused dozens of bushfires and bat deaths on a “biblical scale” in Adelaide, South Australia. More than a dozen people in that state have been taken to hospital due to heat, reports said.
Temperatures soared past 46C in parts of New South Wales on Friday, setting new records.
The state’s Bureau of Meteorology said a run of highest ever maximum temperatures were set in various places in the past few days.
The overnight minimum of 35.9C was recorded at Noona. “That’s an all time Australian record for the warmest night at any time of the year,” the bureau’s Ann Farrell said.
New South Wales Health warned in a statement: “Signs of heat-related illness include dizziness, tiredness, irritability, thirst, fainting, muscle pains or cramps, headache, changes in skin colour, rapid pulse, shallow breathing, vomiting and confusion.”
Officials have made an explicit link between climate change and the increasingly extreme weather being experienced by Australians.
The Bureau of Meteorology’s State of the Climate 2018 report warned of “further increases in sea and air temperatures, with more hot days and marine heatwaves, and fewer cool extremes” and blamed global warming for the change.
It also said Australia’s oceans were acidifying and sea levels rising.
An extreme heatwave affected the tropical Queensland coast just two months ago, in late November.
Forecasters have compared it to the nation’s worst heatwave in 2013, when temperatures reached 39C for seven consecutive days.
The hottest day on record for Australia is 7 January 2013, when the national average maximum temperature was 40.3C.
Meteorology chiefs also revealed this week that Australia had its hottest December day on record last month and that it was also the warmest December ever, as the heatwave got under way.
A slight reprieve is forecast over the weekend before the heat starts to build up again early next week.


Sir David Attenborough delivers The People’s Seat Address, COP24, Katowice, Poland

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20/01/2019

‘It’s Like Hell Here’: Australia Bakes As Record Temperatures Nudge 50c

The Guardian - 

Fears rise for homeless and vulnerable people as communities brace for another week of relentless hot weather
A sign warns bathers of the extreme heat on Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia.
Photograph: Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images
It was 48.9C last Tuesday in Port Augusta, South Australia, an old harbour city that now harvests solar power. Michelle Coles, the owner of the local cinema, took off her shoes at night to test the concrete before letting the dogs out. “People tend to stay at home,” she said. “They don’t walk around when it’s like this.”
It’s easy to see why: in the middle of the day it takes seconds to blister a dog’s paw or child’s foot. In Mildura, in northern Victoria, last week gardeners burned their hands when they picked up their tools, which had been left in the sun at 46C. Fish were dying in the rivers.
Almost every day last week a new heat record was broken in Australia. They spread out, unrelenting, across the country, with records broken for all kinds of reasons – as if the statistics were finding an infinite series of ways to say that it was hot.
The community of Noona – population 14 – reached the highest minimum ever recorded overnight in Australia – 35.9C was the coldest it got, at 7am on Friday. It was 45C by noon.
A record fell on Tuesday in Meekatharra in Western Australia – the highest minimum there ever recorded (33C). Another fell on Wednesday, 2,000 miles away, in Albury, New South Wales – their hottest day (45.6C).
It was 45C or higher for four consecutive days in Broken Hill – another record – and more than 40C for the same time period in Canberra, the nation’s capital. Nine records fell across NSW on Wednesday alone. Back in Port Augusta, Tuesday was the highest temperature since records began in 1962.
Temperatures peak in towns across Australia
as heatwave shows no sign of letting up
Maximum daytime temperatures
Guardian graphic
In the Niagara Cafe in Gundagai, whose claim to fame is that the former Australian prime minister John Curtin once popped in during the second world war, Tina Loukissas turned off the deep fryer, then the grill.
“It feels like you’ve walked into a sauna,” she said. “When it’s getting up to 43C or 44C, because you have all these machines going, the air conditioning isn’t coping very well.
“We’ve got tables outside that nobody has sat at for the last couple of days … You’d be crazy to sit outside on a day like today.”
In Mildura, Tolga Ozkuzucu, owner of Top Notch Gardens, had the misfortune to be working outdoors.
“It’s been like hell,” he said. “You have to try to leave your tools in the shade. If you don’t, it burns your fingers. There’s not much you can do.
“I try to start as early as I can. I’m not going to risk my body and health. People here are very understanding of that because they know how hot it is … nobody wants to be outside when it’s 46C.”
In South Australia, they declared a “code red” across Adelaide, the state capital. Homelessness services were working overtime and the Red Cross started calling round a list of 750 people who were deemed especially vulnerable.
At the Australian Open in Melbourne, only the sea breeze kept the temperature below 40C. At Adelaide’s Tour Down Under, a bike race, it was 41C.
On Monday last week the hottest spot in New South Wales was Menindee, a river town that feeds the country’s largest water system, the Murray-Darling basin. It was 45C. It climbed to 47C on Wednesday, and by Thursday the fish were gasping.
Australia’s native Murray cod can live for decades under normal conditions, growing all the while. The oldest are a metre long, with heavy white bellies that have to be held with both hands. Last week, hundreds died, choked of oxygen due to an algal bloom that fed and grew in the heat, and collapsed when temperatures dipped.


'Bloody disgrace': '100-year-old' fish die in Darling River

Blue-green algae flourishes in hot, slow-moving water. Then, when temperatures inevitably drop, the algae dies and becomes a food source for bacteria, who multiply and starve the river of oxygen. The fish rise to the surface.
The mass fish death has reignited a debate over water management in the region, where cotton farmers upstream have been accused of taking more water than they should.
The heat is not the root cause, the locals stress. But the five punishing days settling over the river have not made it better. Last Thursday the cod were up near the surface and struggling. On Friday, it was 45C again. In Menindee, the locals believe the fish kill will happen again, with temperatures in the 40s expected to continue into this week. The water will be running hot.
But away from the Darling, Michelle Coles from Port Augusta says she is used to the heat.
“I didn’t think it was that hot yesterday, if you want an honest answer,” she said last Wednesday, the day after the temperature hit 48.9C.
“Yesterday at the cinema, it was very quiet. People tend to stay home. We’re quite used to it. Once it’s over 40, it’s hot.
“We’re conditioned to it. Honestly, I’d much rather be in 48C heat in Port Augusta than in the city. You’ve got so much concrete and it’s closed in, but here it’s quite open.
“You just don’t stand out in the sun though. That would be stupid.”

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19/01/2019

2018 Was The Ocean's Hottest Year. We'll Feel It A Long Time.

National Geographic - Alejandra Borunda

 The ocean soaks up 93 percent of the heat of climate change. But that heat has a big and long-lasting impact.
The Arctic Ocean in Barrow, Alaska in June 2015, after the warmest winter on record in Alaska.
Photograph by KATIE ORLINSKY, Nat Geo Image Collection
Earth’s oceans are warmer now than at any point since humans started systematically tracking their temperatures, according to research published on January 16 in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. The oceans have sopped up more than 90 percent of the heat trapped by human-emitted greenhouse gases, slowing the warming of the atmosphere—but causing many other unwelcome changes to the planet’s climate.
Even a slightly warmer ocean can have dramatic impacts. Other new research shows that warmer oceans make waves stronger. Warmer waters fuel stronger storms, increasing the damage that hurricanes and tropical storms inflict. The added warmth hurts coral habitats and stresses fisheries. Around Antarctica, yet another new study suggests, ice is melting about six times faster than it was in the 1980s—an increase due in part to the warmer waters lapping at the continent’s edge.
“The oceans are the best thermometer we have for the planet,” says Zeke Hausfather, an energy and climate scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who used the ocean heat data published today in an analysis published last week in Science. “We can really see global warming loud and clear in the ocean record.”


Antarctica Is Melting at a Dangerous Pace—Here's Why

Missing heat is now found
As early as the 1800s, scientists suspected that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere would cause air temperatures around the planet to rise. By the 1960s, once they started keeping careful track of both air temperatures and carbon dioxide levels around the world, their predictions were borne out.
The atmosphere didn’t seem to be warming quite as much as model calculations indicated it should, however. Where could the extra heat be going?
Some oceanographers suspected that the “missing” heat was being absorbed into the oceans—but measuring that heat was much harder than measuring air temperatures. Although research ships crossing the ocean would occasionally dip a probe into the water to test the temperature, those data were tiny blips in the wide expanse of the sea.
So scientists pulled together all data they could find, from observations from commercial ships to naval data to historical records. And when all that was compiled, the scientists realized that the oceans were, in fact, acting as an enormous buffer for the climate system, like a giant pillow softening the hard landing of climate change.
In the last decade, measurements of the ocean's heat content have been improved dramatically by a new tool: Some 3,000 autonomous sensors, called Argo floats, have been scattered around the ocean. They regularly record temperatures in the top 6,500 feet of the water column and have immensely improved the quality of the data scientists have to work with for these estimates.
Thanks to those measurements, it's now clear that the oceans are absorbing some 90 percent of the heat our carbon emissions have trapped in the atmosphere—the most recent estimate, published last week, pegs that number at 93 percent. If all the heat the ocean absorbed from 1955 onward were suddenly added to the atmosphere, air temperatures would rocket by more than 60 degrees.
In other words, the oceans are acting as a giant thermal buffer, protecting us from feeling all the heat of climate change directly. But the heat isn't going away.

The warming is speeding up
In 2018, the entire top slice of the ocean, from the surface down 6,500 feet, was warmer than ever before, just over one tenth of a degree Celsius warmer overall than the long-term average. Even that tiny bump was enough to nudge sea levels about an eight of an inch higher, simply because warmer water takes up more space.
But 2018 caps off nearly three decades of smooth, consistent warming, the cumulative results of which can be felt more keenly.
“The warming seems small on a day-to-day basis, but it adds up over time,” says Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and an author of today’s report. The extra energy pooling in the atmosphere slowly percolates into the ocean, and “and that’s why we keep breaking records year after year,” he says.
More alarmingly, over those last few decades, oceans warmed nearly 40 percent faster than they did in the middle of the last century, say the authors of the Science analysis from last week.
Since the Industrial Revolution, says Laure Zanna, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford who recently inventoried the ocean's growing absorption of extra heat, the amount of extra energy trapped in the ocean as a result of our greenhouse gas emissions is about 1,000 times as great as the amount of the energy humans use each year, worldwide.

What happens now lasts centuries
There’s essentially no limit to how much more heat from the atmosphere the oceans can absorb: they’re huge and deep. But the ocean has a long memory, and the heat it sucks up now will be stuck in the system for hundreds or even thousands of years: The ghost of a cold phase from a few hundred years ago in the North Atlantic is still floating through the world’s oceans, a study published in Science in early January showed.
So the decisions we make now will affect us far into the future, says Susan Wijffels, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod. “The ability of the deep ocean to take up heat on that very long timescale is great. But it's also locking in a commitment in the system,” she says. So even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, the ocean will continue to warm for centuries—and will take even longer to shed the extra heat.
The effects, say the authors of the new heat assessment, are likely to disrupt both marine physics and marine life. Warmer oceans hold less oxygen, which could hurt biota from plankton to whales. A warmer baseline temperature makes the likelihood of marine heat waves more likely, like the one that swept through the waters off northeast China last summer, ruining the sea cucumber harvest across the shallow seas. Zanna and her colleagues also see evidence that the major currents that carry heat and nutrients around the ocean are changing.
The full magnitude of the changes will take hundreds of years to play out, Wijffels says.
“Every molecule of CO2 that we don’t put into the atmosphere now is saving us from warming potential in the future,” she says. “This really drives home that we need to reduce emissions now, as much as we can.”

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Vaccinate Public Against Science Misinformation, Researchers Urge

Cosmos - Andrew Masterson

If the battle for hearts and minds over climate change is to be won, simply being right is not enough.
The actions of then-EPA chief Scott Pruitt generated many protests, such as this one in New York in June 2018.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Setting up an information-based “inoculation” program may be an effective way of combating the deliberately misleading messages of the fossil fuel industry and its representatives, researchers say.
In a detailed essay in the journal Nature Climate Change, Justin Farrell and Kathryn McConnell from Yale University, and Robert Brulle from Brown University, both in the US, explore strategies that scientists and advocacy bodies can employ to ensure evidence, rather than ideology and financial self-interest, once more informs environmental and climate policy.
Key to this approach is the brutal realisation that there is no value in climate scientists and advocates simply repeating that the evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable, even though it is. It is not sufficient to have faith in the ultimate triumph of the good guys.
“It is not enough simply to communicate to the public over and again the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change,” the authors write.
“Nor is it ultimately effective to repeatedly engage in scientific debate with industry-funded scientists … or political pundits, hoping to debunk their spurious findings so that the public will finally see the light.
“Because, paradoxically, the partisan divide on climate change grew most rapidly at the very point at which the scientific community became virtually unanimous in its conclusions about the reality and risks of anthropogenic climate change.”
Climate change contrarians, and policy based on their industry-funded positions, at least in the US, are very much in the ascendant. Farrell and colleagues cite examples such as the decision by then-director of the Environmental Protection Authority Scott Pruitt to dramatically cut research – a position publicly advocated by coal industry lobbyist Steve Milloy, who called it “one of my proudest achievements”.
Milloy and Pruitt are just two of a host of people who in recent years have come to exert enormous influence on US policy – but dismissing them as hopelessly compromised buffoons, the authors caution, is a mistake.
“Many, especially climate scientists who have seen the evidence of warming first hand, wondered how we had reached this point,” they reflect.
“How had these once fringe actors, who tended to be overlooked and at times even laughed off as irrelevant bloggers, managed to embed their ideas so deeply into mainstream US politics?
“And how, over the course of the 1990s and 2000s, did half of the American public — and the large majority of the Republican Party and its supporters — increasingly lose trust in, and become so antagonistic towards, robust scientific facts with such dire consequences?”
Farrell and colleagues quickly answer their own question, taking two approaches.
First, they note a growing body of research that finds that evidence-integrity is only one of a range of factors that condition whether scientific studies are believed. Matters such as a person’s religious and political beliefs, ideas about the role of scientists, and trust – or absence thereof – in mainstream media outlets weigh heavily.
Second, they outline the careful and controlled strategies employed by the fossil fuel industry, the parliamentarians who accept funding therefrom, and the web of PR agencies and lobbyists paid by them to sow discord, division and uncertainty into the public discourse.
Much of this, they note, revolves around, pushing “scientific misinformation [that] can seem to be so accurate and reliable, or even part of a legitimate ‘grassroots’ movement”.
This is achieved, in large part, “via various communication channels, including academic journals, policy papers, press briefings, steering the media towards ‘false-balance’ coverage under the guise of presenting ‘both sides’ of an alleged ‘scientific debate’, personal attacks against prominent climate scientists and advertising to reach targeted audiences”.
Taking the need to counter this activity as self-evident, the writers explore four inter-related strategies.
Two of these, perhaps not surprisingly, involve using legal and political avenues – the first to expose, and thus devalue, the ties between industry and climate change contrarians, the second to better highlight positive developments such as large corporate and advocacy bodies divesting themselves of fossil fuel industry holdings, for either economic or ethical reasons.
The third approach, linked to the first two, revolves around financial transparency. It works on the assumption that exposing the complex financial arrangements between fuel companies and lobbyists will lessen the impact of the messages delivered.
The fourth, though, takes it start from public health policy and, if it works, has the potential to be self-sustaining. The writers term the strategy “public inoculation” or “vaccination”.
The idea – backed up, they say, by some small-scale studies – works “against misinformation by exposing people to a dose of refuted arguments before they hear them”.
“Similar to how a vaccine builds antibodies to resist a virus a person might encounter, attitudinal inoculation messages warn people that misinformation is coming, and arm them with a counter-argument to resist that misinformation.”
One approach to this, the writers suggest, involves making sure people hear that particular climate change contrarian messages – and messengers – are funded by coal corporations before they encounter them.
Early research, they note, has found that this method works on people from a wide range of backgrounds, and might thus be effective in breaking down political or religious opposition.
However, they add, these are early days in the attitudinal vaccination business.
“Inoculating the public may be an especially promising strategy for heading off misinformation campaigns before they take root, but future research on inoculation is needed to assess whether or not — and precisely how — this practice can be extended beyond experimental settings and applied more broadly to build up resistance to misinformation within large segments of the public,” they write.
Farrell and colleagues conclude that they are “hopeful” their suggested quartet of strategies “will prove to be successful in the long run”.
Many people, disheartened by current policy directions in the US, as well as in several other countries, including Australia, might feel that such hope is more quixotic than rational.
The writers, however, present their case with a sense of urgency, and a confidence that their approach will produce results “not only for turning the tide on the critical issue of climate change action, but also for preventing future cases of large-scale manipulation from taking root”.

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See You In Court, Citizens Tell Governments On Climate Change

Reuters - Megan Rowling

Legal actions are based on the principle that governments must meet their obligations under human rights law and the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change
Environmental activists gather to urge world leaders to take action against climate change in Marseille, France, September 8, 2018. The placard reads No nature no future. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier
BARCELONA - Environmentalists in France and Ireland are pushing forward with legal cases aimed at forcing their governments to step up action on climate change, motivated by a 2018 flagship ruling that the Netherlands must cut emissions faster to keep its people safe.
In October, a Dutch appeals court said the government had "done too little to prevent the dangers of climate change and is doing too little to catch up", ordering it to ensure planet-warming emissions are at least 25 percent below 1990 levels by the end of 2020.
Tessa Khan, a lawyer with the Urgenda Foundation which brought the Dutch case on behalf of nearly 900 citizens, said this and other ongoing climate legal actions are based on the principle that governments must meet their obligations under human rights law and the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.
"(These cases) all spring from the same sort of inspiration and the broad notion that our governments have the duty to protect us from threats of this scale that they have contributed to knowingly," said Khan, who is co-director of the Climate Litigation Network.
In France, four non-governmental groups, including Greenpeace and Oxfam, fired the starting gun on Dec. 17.
They sent a "preliminary request for compensation" in a 41-page letter to the French prime minister and a dozen government ministers, denouncing the state for failing to take concrete and effective measures to combat climate change.
The government has two months to respond, and if it fails to give a satisfactory answer, the groups are preparing to file a full legal action with the Paris Administrative Court in March.
Armelle Le Comte, climate and energy advocacy manager at Oxfam France, said the ripple of lawsuits on climate action around the world - from Europe and North America to Pakistan and Colombia - reflected growing urgency as the impacts of extreme weather and rising seas become more visible.
Governments, including France, have talked a lot about tackling climate change, but have not done enough in practice, she noted.
"So I think it is not surprising that more citizens, charities and NGOs ... decide that legal action is maybe the answer," she said.

Celebs on camera
In the meantime, the NGOs have been raising awareness about the case and the need for stronger climate action in France through a YouTube video featuring celebrities such as actress Juliette Binoche, and writer and film director Cyril Dion.
They also launched an online petition in support of what they are calling the "Case of the Century" that has garnered nearly 2.1 million signatures in about a month.
Le Comte said wide public support for the legal action was important in providing a sense of legitimacy to the approach.
The case is particularly poignant in France, which has been rocked in recent months by "yellow vest" protests over social inequality and the high cost of living that were initially sparked by planned hikes in fuel tax.
French President Emmanuel Macron launched a national policy debate this week that includes how the country could shift to using more clean energy.
Urgenda's Khan said the court cases were aimed at ensuring emissions targets are met, not telling states how to do it.
"Then it's up to the governments and the public to make sure the policies that are put in place are ones that ensure a just (energy) transition and ... the poorest aren't the ones who bear the burden of that transition," she said.
Oxfam's Le Comte said the "Case of the Century" social media campaign was meant to provide more information, especially to young people, on the measures that could be taken.

Irish emissions rise
In Ireland, backers of the climate change case, scheduled to begin in the High Court on Jan. 22, are organising a children's rally in Dublin on Saturday to urge leaders that "2019 must be the year of ambitious climate action".
About 12,600 members of the public have backed "Climate Case Ireland" with online messages of support. Spokeswoman Sadhbh O Neill said awareness was growing in the country which has among the highest emissions per capita in the European Union.
"That helps us show the court that we have standing, that we're not doing it in a self-interested way and that we are trying to be representative of concerned citizens," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Friends of the Irish Environment, a company set up by environmental activists, will argue in the case that the government's approval of the National Mitigation Plan in 2017 violated national legislation on climate action, as well as its constitution and human rights obligations.
It will also claim the plan falls far short of the steps required by the Paris Agreement.
O Neill noted that Ireland's emissions had risen since 2014, as its economy recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, and its dairy industry expanded. They dropped back slightly in 2017, government figures show.
A spokesman for Ireland's Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment said by email that the government would defend the case, but noted the National Mitigation Plan recognised a detailed roadmap would be required to decarbonise the economy.
That is now being put in place, he added, and includes a government-wide climate action plan "intended to make Ireland a leader in responding to climate disruption".
The verdict in the Irish case, a judicial review, is expected to be issued in a few months, while the French legal process could last two to three years, Le Comte said.
In the Netherlands, it took three years for an initial ruling to be confirmed by the appeals court, and the government said in November it would request a review of the judgement.
Khan said one key advantage of pursuing states in court was judicial scrutiny of the evidence on climate change.
"Just by putting the facts on the record - that in itself is a really important communication tool, and helps to mobilise the public around climate change," she said.

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Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative