23/01/2019

Immediate Fossil Fuel Phaseout Could Arrest Climate Change – Study

The Guardian - 

The study found there is a 66% chance of staying below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels if immediate action is taken. Photograph: Alamy
Climate change could be kept in check if a phaseout of all fossil fuel infrastructure were to begin immediately, according to research.
It shows that meeting the internationally agreed aspiration of keeping global warming to less than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels is still possible. The scientists say it is therefore the choices being made by global society, not physics, which is the obstacle to meeting the goal.
The study found that if all fossil fuel infrastructure – power plants, factories, vehicles, ships and planes – from now on are replaced by zero-carbon alternatives at the end of their useful lives, there is a 64% chance of staying under 1.5C.
In October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the difference between 1.5C of warming and the earlier international target of 2C was a significantly lower risk of drought, floods, heatwaves and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.
Christopher Smith, of the University of Leeds, who led the research, said: “It’s good news from a geophysical point of view. But on the other side of the coin, the [immediate fossil fuel phaseout] is really at the limit of what we could we possibly do. We are basically saying we can’t build anything now that emits fossil fuels.”
Nicholas Stern, of the London School of Economics, who was not part of the research team, said: “We are rapidly approaching the end of the age of fossil fuels. This study confirms that all new energy infrastructure must be sustainable from now on if we are to avoid locking in commitments to emissions that would lead to the world exceeding the goals of the Paris agreement.”
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, used computer models to estimate by how much global temperatures would rise if a fossil fuel infrastructure phaseout began immediately. The lifespan for power plants was set at 40 years, cars an average of 15 years and planes 26 years. The work also assumes a rapid end to beef and dairy consumption, which is responsible for significant global emissions.
In this scenario, the models suggest carbon emissions would decline to zero over the next four decades and there would be a 66% chance of the global temperature rise remaining below 1.5C. If the phaseout does not begin until 2030, the chance is 33%.
The analysis did not include the possibility of tipping points such as the sudden release of huge volumes of methane from permafrost, which could spark runaway global warming.
The scientists accept their scenario is at the extreme end of ambition, but said it was important to know that meeting the 1.5C target was still physically possible and dependent on the choices made now and in the coming years. “The climate system is not stopping you [hitting the target], global society is stopping you,” Smith said.
Other work, using a different approach, has also shown that keeping within the 1.5C limit is possible if radical action is taken immediately. In some sectors, zero-carbon technology already exists, such as renewable energy. But in others, such as aviation, it does not. “Maybe the solution here is flying less,” Smith said.
Prof Dave Reay, of the University of Edinburgh, who also was not part of the research team, said: “Whether it’s drilling a new gas well, keeping an old coal power station open, or even buying a diesel car, the choices we make today will largely determine the climate pathways of tomorrow. The message of this new study is loud and clear: act now or see the last chance for a safer climate future ebb away.”
Smith’s personal belief is that global heating will surpass 1.5C. “We are going the right way, but I don’t think we will do enough, quickly enough. I think we are heading for 2C to 2.5C.”
But he added: “If you don’t have a goal, you are not going to get anywhere. If you have a target that is really hard to achieve and you miss it slightly, that is better than wandering aimlessly into a future climate that is no good for anybody.”

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:

Pentagon Warns Of Dire Risk To Bases, Troops From Climate Change

Bloomberg -  |  | 

▶ ‘Effects of a changing climate are a national security issue’
▶  The report to Congress is at odds with Trump’s position
Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Hampton, Virginia. Photographer: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
The U.S. Defense Department has issued a dire report on how climate change could affect the nation’s armed forces and security, warning that rising seas could inundate coastal bases and drought-fueled wildfires could endanger those that are inland.
The 22-page assessment delivered to Congress on Thursday says about two-thirds of 79 mission-essential military installations in the U.S. that were reviewed are vulnerable now or in the future to flooding and more than half are at risk from drought. About half also are at risk from wildfires, including the threat of mudslides and erosion from rains after the blazes.
“The effects of a changing climate are a national security issue with potential impacts to DOD missions, operational plans and installations,” Defense Department spokeswoman Heather Babb said Friday in an email.
The report contradicts the view of President Donald Trump, who has rejected the scientific consensus that climate change is real and man-made. The report’s premise echoes the findings of the National Climate Assessment, written by 13 federal agencies and released in November. It concluded that the effects of global warming are accelerating and will cause widespread disruption.
Trump rejected those findings. “I don’t believe it,” he said at the time.
The new Defense Department report, which was mandated by Congress, describes widespread impacts, dispersed across the U.S., with more coastal flooding along the East coast and Hawaii.
U.S. military facilities are already encountering some of the effects, the Pentagon says, noting that Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia has experienced 14 inches of sea-level rise since 1930. And Navy Base Coronado in California already is subject to flooding during tropical storms.
In the Washington area, several Defense Department sites -- including Joint Base Andrews, home of Air Force One -- are experiencing drought conditions that have been severe in the past 16 years, the report says. Those conditions can lead to ruptured utility lines and cracked roads, the Pentagon warns, as moisture disappears from soil.
The Defense Department stresses in its report that it is working with nations around the world “to understand and plan for future potential mission impacts” from climate change, describing it as “a global issue.”
But Democratic lawmakers said the Defense Department pulled its punches by listing what Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, called a “phone book” of threats without offering a plan of action.
“It fails to even minimally discuss a mitigation plan to address the vulnerabilities,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith said in a statement. Committee member Jim Langevin said the Defense Department “for no apparent reason” omitted the threat to U.S. bases abroad.

Pentagon History
The Pentagon has long expressed concern over climate change and its military implications worldwide.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who resigned last month, had been at odds with Trump over climate change, telling Senate Armed Services during his confirmation process that “the Department of Defense must pay attention to potential adverse impacts generated by this phenomenon.”
“Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today," Mattis wrote in written responses to questions from the committee. “It is appropriate for the Combatant Commands to incorporate drivers of instability that impact the security environment in their areas into their planning.”
In 2013, Republican Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, who now is chairman of the Senate panel, pressed Admiral Samuel Locklear, who was head of U.S. Pacific Command, to say that his concerns about climate change were being misrepresented by “environmental extremists.”

Obama Administration
Instead, Locklear said about 280,000 people died in natural disasters in the Pacific region from 2008 to 2012. “Now, they weren’t all climate-change or weather-related, but a lot of them were,” the admiral said.
Under the Obama administration, responding to the effects of climate on the nation’s military was a top initiative, but the Trump administration has taken a different tack. Climate change was omitted in 2017 as a threat from the National Security Strategy, a list of the top dangers facing the nation.
“Given future global energy demand, much of the developing world will require fossil fuels, as well as other forms of energy, to power their economies and lift their people out of poverty,” the 2017 strategy said. “U.S. leadership is indispensable to countering an anti-growth energy agenda.”
Shortly after taking office, Trump revoked a memorandum that Obama signed in 2016, directing the Defense Department to account for climate change in its decisions about where to build new facilities and how it prepares for future threats.
Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking Democrat on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, responded by calling Trump’s decision to rescind the memorandum “a security disaster.”

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: ,

David Attenborough Tells Davos: ‘The Garden Of Eden Is No More’

The Guardian - 

Human activity has created a new era yet climate change can be stopped, says naturalist


‘The Garden of Eden is no more’, David Attenborough warns Davos summit

Sir David Attenborough has warned that “the Garden of Eden is no more”, as he urged political and business leaders from around the world to make a renewed push to tackle climate change before the damage is irreparable.
Speaking at the start of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, the 92-year-old naturalist and broadcaster warned that human activity has taken the world into a new era, threatening to undermine civilisation.
“I am quite literally from another age,” Attenborough told an audience of business leaders, politicians and other delegates. “I was born during the Holocene – the 12,000 [year] period of climatic stability that allowed humans to settle, farm, and create civilisations.” That led to trade in ideas and goods, and made us the “globally connected species we are today”.
That stability allowed businesses to grow, nations to co-operate and people to share ideas, Attenborough explained, before warning sombrely: “In the space of my lifetime, all that has changed.
“The Holocene has ended. The Garden of Eden is no more. We have changed the world so much that scientists say we are in a new geological age: the Anthropocene, the age of humans,” he declared.
In a stark warning to the world leaders and business chiefs flocking to the WEF this week, Attenborough warned that the only conditions that humans have known are changing fast.
“We need to move beyond guilt or blame, and get on with the practical tasks at hand.”
A survey conducted before the WEF found that environmental threats are now the biggest danger to the global economy, and concern is mounting that co-operation between countries on the issue is breaking down.
Attenborough admitted that even he has been surprised by the speed of the damage caused to the environment during his career making TV programmes showing life on earth.
In response, Attenborough – recently voted Britain’s most trustworthy celebrity – said humans must use their expert problem-solving skills. “If people can truly understand what is at stake, I believe they will give permission for business and governments to get on with the practical solutions,” he told the WEF.
Get it right, he argued, and humans can create a world with clean air and water, unlimited energy and sustainable fish stocks, but only if decisive action is taken now.
“Over the next two years there will be United Nations decisions on climate change, sustainable development and a new deal for nature. Together these will form our species’ plan for a route through the Anthropocene.
“What we do now, and in the next few years, will profoundly affect the next few thousand years,” he added.
Speaking to journalists after his speech, Attenborough warned that economic models needed to change. “Growth is going to come to an end, either suddenly or in a controlled way,” he explained, citing the old joke that anyone who thinks you can have infinite growth in finite circumstances is “either a madman or an economist”.
He is also hopeful that he can change hearts and minds during his trip to Davos, pointing out that some delegates have more power than a nation state. “The enormity of the problem has only just dawned on quite a lot of people ... Unless we sort ourselves out in the next decade or so we are dooming our children and our grandchildren to an appalling future.”
Before he spoke, Attenborough received the Crystal award from the WEF for his work. Saudi Arabia’s first female film-maker, Haifaa al-Mansour, and conductor Marin Alsop of the Baltimore Symphony were also honoured for their work.
Prince William is due to appear with Attenborough to discuss environmental issues at the WEF on Tuesday.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , ,

22/01/2019

10 Climate Change Books To Help You Understand Our Environment

Book Riot - 

In case you haven’t heard, a climate disaster is looming. The effects of climate change—like rising seas and intensifying weather patterns—are already here. Even though the worst is yet to come, there are still things that we can do to fight for our planet. One thing you can do right now is to educate yourself by reading climate change books.

▶ CLIMATE CHANGE BOOKS ABOUT SCIENCE

By the year 2050, Earth’s population will be closing in on 10 billion people. That’s a lot of mouths to feed. Journalist Lisa Palmer’s book Hot Hungry Planet digs into the possibilities of famine and food scarcity and the innovations that might save us all from hunger.
What will the future look like? The past may have a clue. Over the ages of our planet’s history, there have been five mass extinction events, one of which all but wiped out the dinosaurs. In the Anthropocene period, the next casualty may be us. In The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a closer look at the past to tell us more about our future.

▶ CLIMATE CHANGE BOOKS ABOUT HEALTH

We’re getting more used seeing images of stranded polar bears and hearing about our dwindling bee population, but most reporting on climate change leaves out what it can do to our own health. Linda Marsa’s Fevered delves into the increasing rate of illnesses associated with global warming, like asthma, allergies, and mosquito-borne diseases, just to name a few.
The past few generations have taken advantage of the planet, polluting the oceans, ravaging the land, and filling our skies with smoke. What were we thinking? In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh argues that we weren’t, we have been deliberately blind to the disasters looming in our future—until now.

▶ CLIMATE CHANGE BOOKS ABOUT PEOPLE

One of the scariest things about plastic is that it’s kind of immortal. It can churn in the ocean for hundreds of years before it finally breaks down. Humans fell in love with this toxic material in 1950s, and since then, it has managed to work its way into almost everything we touch. Susan Freinkel recounts this love story in Plastic by digging deeper into the ways plastic affects our lives and the life of the planet.
Originally published in 1988, activist Vandana Shiva’s seminal work, Staying Alive, explores the relationship between women and our natural world. In many places, the freedom of the women is directly related to a country’s outlook. More recent research has shown that women’s rights directly impacts sustainability. You could say that Shiva is the mother of that idea.

▶ CLIMATE CHANGE BOOKS ABOUT POLITICS

Research has shown that climate denialists do, in fact, have brains. It’s just that they haven’t been using them. We have been manipulated, and logic has been twisted to distort the truth. In The Madhouse Effect, climate scientist Michael E. Mann comes together with cartoonist Tom Toles to create a funny, sad portrait of the mad world we’re living in.
From the author of The Shock Doctrine, this book delves into the war between capitalism and the planet. In This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein argues something that many of us already know: we have to change our destructive habits that are rooted in capitalism. It may be the only way we can save our environment before it’s too late.

▶ CLIMATE CHANGE BOOKS ABOUT RACISM

Not everyone will experience climate change equally. The poor and working class are already disproportionately affected by the problems of climate change. In Dumping in Dixie, Robert D. Bullard, a professor and environmental justice activist, asserts that living in a healthy environment is a right for all Americans, regardless of their race, class, or social standing.
For years, poor and minority communities have found themselves becoming the dumping ground for businesses hoping to get rid of waste on the path of least resistance. Shockingly, entrenched segregation and zoning laws have paved the way to make this possible, making communities of color sick for years—literally.

▶ FURTHER READING ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Vince travels the world to see what extraordinary things ordinary people are doing to adapt and innovate to a changing climate. Part science, part travelogue.
Journalist Simran Sethi explores the cultural importance of certain foods and how we are in danger of losing them. About monocultures and the dangers of an increasingly standardized diet.
Squarzoni offers an explanation of global warming and climate change in graphic novel form. An accessible approach to learning about the science.
An explanation of why people reject the science behind climate change and why even when they accept it, they do nothing about it. An exploration of psychology and science both.
Check out all of McKibben’s many books on the environment and climate change. Eaarth describes what climate change will do to us and the ways we will need to radically change our lives to adapt.
On the dangers of fracking to the environment and to human health. The book also explores the history of fracking and the technologies that make it possible.
On the environmental impact of corporate globalization. Shiva argues for a shift in our thinking toward an earth-centered politics and economics.
On how a group of scientists and advisors spread misinformation and doubt about a range of scientific subjects. A good explanation of how we got to where we are today.
A religious and spiritual call for a closer connection with the earth. Maathai writes about helping women in Kenya plant and sustain trees and find a sense of empowerment and how we can find our own commitment to the environment.
Suzuki asks what humans really need to find fulfilling, meaningful lives. He offers concrete suggestions for creating an ecologically sustainable future and meeting humans’ most fundamental needs.
A description of what we should expect to happen to the planet as the temperatures rise.
Stephenson argues that what we need to deal with the climate crisis is not so much environmentalism but a struggle for human rights and social justice. He tells his own story and the stories of those on the front lines of that struggle.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:

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.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , , , ,

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)
Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:

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

 Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )

Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative