Coal Miners Derided Climate Action 'Sideshow'. Now It's The Main Event

Fairfax - David Morris | Brendan Dobbie

Authors David Morris is CEO of the NSW Environmental Defenders Office Brendan Dobbie is its acting principal lawyer

The nascent field of climate litigation in Australia came of age on Friday. The Chief Judge of the NSW Land and Environment Court, Brian Preston, delivered a landmark judgment refusing to approve a new coal mine because of its impacts on climate change. In the Chief Judge’s words, the mine proposal was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

When we first argued that our client, the Groundswell Gloucester, should be a party to this case and put a climate-change ground before the court, the mining companies thought it a laughable proposition, and said it would be “a sideshow”. As it happens, climate change became the main event in this court, as it is elsewhere.

A protest sign in Forbesdale, near Gloucester, opposing the proposed Rocky Hill coal mine. CREDIT: LIAM DRIVER

The ramifications are likely to ripple out across Australia and possibly the world. This is climate litigation writ large.
The Chief Judge refused the Rocky Hill Coal Project,  near the mid-north coast town of Gloucester, on a range of grounds, all of which are important, but what his judgment says about climate change is of greatest significance. The court accepted the evidence put by Professor Will Steffen about the global carbon budget – that is, there is a limit on the amount of fossil fuels that can be burnt if we are to meet the Paris Agreement targets and avoid dangerous climate change.
The challenge of remaining within the global carbon budget presents a major barrier for new fossil fuel developments. They must overcome what we characterise as the Chief Judge’s “wrong time test”. To pass that test, a fossil fuel proponent must now establish why their project should be allowed to proceed at this time in history, when it is clearly recognised that there is an urgent need for rapid and deep decreases in greenhouse gas emissions. To achieve this, most fossil fuel reserves need to remain in the ground unburned.
The Rocky Hill project failed this test. It failed because its impacts on climate change were adjudged to be unsuitable at this time. It failed notwithstanding it was a relatively small project, with comparatively fewer emissions, and one proposing to mine coking coal for steel making rather than the more frequently discussed thermal coal for energy. That would indicate that future fossil-fuel projects, which are either larger, produce more emissions, or seek to generate fuel for energy rather than steel making, face an even steeper challenge in passing the “wrong time test”.
In the Rocky Hill case, the mining company put forward four arguments as to why its project should be allowed to pass the “wrong time test”. First, the emissions could theoretically be offset by alternate mitigation measures at some point in the future. The court rejected this as speculative and hypothetical.
Second, it argued refusal of the project was not the most cost-efficient way to meet the global carbon budget. This was rejected, as it is not the court’s role to determine the least-cost way of achieving global emissions reduction (as an aside, that is the role of leadership and policy – in which we are sadly lacking).
Third, the company mounted, effectively, the drug dealer’s defence: if we don’t mine it here, they’ll mine it somewhere else. This was rejected because there is “no inevitability that developing countries … will instead approve a new coking coal mine … rather than following Australia’s lead to refuse a new coal mine”.
Fourth, the company argued the mine was necessary for the steel production industry. This was rejected on the basis that the mine is not in fact necessary to maintain worldwide steel production and therefore its impacts on climate change could not be justified.

Gloucester residents were jubilant after their win in the Land and Environment Court. CREDIT: JANIE BARRETT

These arguments are standard fare for fossil fuel companies. Until Friday, they had proven incredibly successful in frustrating attempts to address the cumulative impacts of multiple smaller projects on global climate change. The companies’ success had been enabled by policy settings that create no meaningful nexus between our international commitments to emissions reductions, and the approval of fossil fuel projects at a local level, where those emissions are actually produced.
Now the Land and Environment Court’s most senior judge has accepted the causal link between a project’s contribution to cumulative greenhouse gas emissions and global climate change. That, in and of itself, is a matter of great importance.
In one sense this case says the starting point for a new fossil fuel project is “no” because of climate change. A fossil fuel development may argue its unique circumstances justify approval, but it must do so in light of climate change science telling us that there are already sufficient fossil fuel projects approved to exceed the target limit agreed in Paris of a 1.5C rise on the pre-industrial global average  temperature.
We suspect we are only beginning to understand how profoundly influential this judgment will be on the legal landscape in Australia. This won’t be the last project consigned to the dust-bin of history on the grounds of climate change. It is just the first.

Links

• 'New weapon': courts offer hope for driving serious climate action
• See You In Court, Citizens Tell Governments On Climate Change
• A Surge Of Climate Lawsuits Targets Human Rights, Damage From Fossil Fuels
• 2018 In Climate Liability: When A Trend Became A Wave
• Big Coal And Friends On Track To Shut Down Your Climate Activism
• Children Demand Climate Change Action Through Protests And Lawsuits
• 'New Weapon': Courts Offer Hope For Driving Serious Climate Action
• Vanuatu Says It May Sue Fossil Fuel Companies And Other Countries Over Climate Change

Plummeting Insect Numbers 'Threaten Collapse Of Nature'

The Guardian - Damian Carrington

Insects could vanish within a century at current rate of decline, says global review

The rate of insect extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. Photograph: Courtesy of Entomologisher Verein Krefeld 

The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review.
More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.
The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported in larger animals that are easier to study. But insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times. They are “essential” for the proper functioning of all ecosystems, the researchers say, as food for other creatures, pollinators and recyclers of nutrients.

Scarce copper butterflies. Photograph: Marlene Finlayson/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy 

Quick guide Insect collapse: the red flags Butterflies and moths There has been a “severe reduction” in butterflies and moths in the Kullaberg Nature Reserve in Sweden compared to 50 years ago. Scientists found over a quarter of the 600 species once found had been lost. Butterflies were hardest hit, losing almost a half of species, including the large tortoiseshell and scarce copper. In England, two-thirds of 340 moth species declined from 1968-2003. Bumblebees Museum records enabled scientists to assess the fate of 16 species of bumblebees in the US midwest from 1900 to 2007. They found four had completely died out, while eight were declining in number, and blamed intensive agriculture and pesticides. Dragonflies Red dragonfly populations have fallen sharply in Japan since the mid-1990s, which scientists link to insecticides in rice paddies that stop the water-living nymphs emerging into adults. In the US, recent surveys across California and Nevada found 65% of dragonflies and damselflies had declined in the 100 years since 1914. Leafhoppers Leafhoppers and planthoppers often make up a large proportion of the flying insects in European grasslands. But scientists found their abundance in Germany plunged by 66% in the 50 years to 2010. Soil acidification, partly due to heavy fertiliser use, was the main cause. Ground beetles In the UK, dramatic declines in ground beetles have been seen in almost three-quarters of the 68 carabid species studied from 1994-2008. A few species increased, but overall one in six of all the beetles was lost in that time.

Insect population collapses have recently been reported in Germany and Puerto Rico, but the review strongly indicates the crisis is global. The researchers set out their conclusions in unusually forceful terms for a peer-reviewed scientific paper: “The [insect] trends confirm that the sixth major extinction event is profoundly impacting [on] life forms on our planet.
“Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades,” they write. “The repercussions this will have for the planet’s ecosystems are catastrophic to say the least.”
The analysis, published in the journal Biological Conservation, says intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides. Urbanisation and climate change are also significant factors.
“If insect species losses cannot be halted, this will have catastrophic consequences for both the planet’s ecosystems and for the survival of mankind,” said Francisco Sánchez-Bayo, at the University of Sydney, Australia, who wrote the review with Kris Wyckhuys at the China Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing.
The 2.5% rate of annual loss over the last 25-30 years is “shocking”, Sánchez-Bayo told the Guardian: “It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none.”
One of the biggest impacts of insect loss is on the many birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish that eat insects. “If this food source is taken away, all these animals starve to death,” he said. Such cascading effects have already been seen in Puerto Rico, where a recent study revealed a 98% fall in ground insects over 35 years.
The new analysis selected the 73 best studies done to date to assess the insect decline. Butterflies and moths are among the worst hit. For example, the number of widespread butterfly species fell by 58% on farmed land in England between 2000 and 2009. The UK has suffered the biggest recorded insect falls overall, though that is probably a result of being more intensely studied than most places.

Surveying butterflies in Maine, US. Photograph: Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Getty Images

Bees have also been seriously affected, with only half of the bumblebee species found in Oklahoma in the US in 1949 being present in 2013. The number of honeybee colonies in the US was 6 million in 1947, but 3.5 million have been lost since.
There are more than 350,000 species of beetle and many are thought to have declined, especially dung beetles. But there are also big gaps in knowledge, with very little known about many flies, ants, aphids, shield bugs and crickets. Experts say there is no reason to think they are faring any better than the studied species.
A small number of adaptable species are increasing in number, but not nearly enough to outweigh the big losses. “There are always some species that take advantage of vacuum left by the extinction of other species,” said Sanchez-Bayo. In the US, the common eastern bumblebee is increasing due to its tolerance of pesticides.

Guardian graphic. Source: Sánchez-Bayo & Wyckhuys, Biological Conservation, 2019

Most of the studies analysed were done in western Europe and the US, with a few ranging from Australia to China and Brazil to South Africa, but very few exist elsewhere.
“The main cause of the decline is agricultural intensification,” Sánchez-Bayo said. “That means the elimination of all trees and shrubs that normally surround the fields, so there are plain, bare fields that are treated with synthetic fertilisers and pesticides.” He said the demise of insects appears to have started at the dawn of the 20th century, accelerated during the 1950s and 1960s and reached “alarming proportions” over the last two decades.
He thinks new classes of insecticides introduced in the last 20 years, including neonicotinoids and fipronil, have been particularly damaging as they are used routinely and persist in the environment: “They sterilise the soil, killing all the grubs.” This has effects even in nature reserves nearby; the 75% insect losses recorded in Germany were in protected areas.

German conservation workers inspect an urban garden for insects. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images 

Why are insects in decline, and can we do anything about it? What is the sixth mass extinction? Many scientists think the current worldwide annihilation of wildlife is the beginning of a huge loss of species on Earth. It has happened five times in the last 4bn years, as a result of meteorite impacts, long ice ages and huge volcanic eruptions. But this one is the result not of natural causes, but of humanity’s actions. How bad is it? Extremely. By some measures, the biodiversity crisis is even deeper than that of climate change. Since the dawn of civilisation, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals. In the last 50 years alone, the populations of all mammals, birds, reptiles and fish have fallen by an average of 60%. How about insects? The new global review says it’s even worse for bugs, with the proportion of insect species declining being double that for vertebrates. The insect decline is at least a century old, but seems to have accelerated in recent decades. Does that matter? Yes. There are more than a million species of insect, compared with just 5,400 mammals, and they are the cornerstone of all terrestrial ecosystems. Without them, you get what scientists call a “bottom-up trophic cascade”, in which the knock-on effects of the insect collapse surge up through the food chain, wiping out higher animals. And without healthy ecosystems, there is no clean air and water. Why are we only really noticing the insect collapse now? The lack of bugs on car windscreens after a drive in the country, compared with a few decades ago, is real. But hard scientific data requires careful and long-term research, and relatively little has been done. Insects are small and often hard to identify, and they are certainly much less charismatic than elephants or eagles. Worse, just when we need more information, researchers say entomology courses are being cut. What can be done? Ultimately the size of the human population and how much land it uses for the food, energy and other goods it consumes determine how much wildlife is lost. Protecting wild spaces is important, as is reducing the impact of industrial, chemical-based farming. Fighting climate change is also vital, particularly for the many insect species in the tropics. So demanding political action, eating fewer intensively farmed meat and dairy products, and flying less could all help.

The world must change the way it produces food, Sánchez-Bayo said, noting that organic farms had more insects and that occasional pesticide use in the past did not cause the level of decline seen in recent decades. “Industrial-scale, intensive agriculture is the one that is killing the ecosystems,” he said.
In the tropics, where industrial agriculture is often not yet present, the rising temperatures due to climate change are thought to be a significant factor in the decline. The species there have adapted to very stable conditions and have little ability to change, as seen in Puerto Rico.
Sánchez-Bayo said the unusually strong language used in the review was not alarmist. “We wanted to really wake people up” and the reviewers and editor agreed, he said. “When you consider 80% of biomass of insects has disappeared in 25-30 years, it is a big concern.”
Other scientists agree that it is becoming clear that insect losses are now a serious global problem. “The evidence all points in the same direction,” said Prof Dave Goulson at the University of Sussex in the UK. “It should be of huge concern to all of us, for insects are at the heart of every food web, they pollinate the large majority of plant species, keep the soil healthy, recycle nutrients, control pests, and much more. Love them or loathe them, we humans cannot survive without insects.”
Matt Shardlow, at the conservation charity Buglife, said: “It is gravely sobering to see this collation of evidence that demonstrates the pitiful state of the world’s insect populations. It is increasingly obvious that the planet’s ecology is breaking and there is a need for an intense and global effort to halt and reverse these dreadful trends.” In his opinion, the review slightly overemphasises the role of pesticides and underplays global warming, though other unstudied factors such as light pollution might prove to be significant.
Prof Paul Ehrlich, at Stanford Universityin the US, has seen insects vanish first-hand, through his work on checkerspot butterflies on Stanford’s Jasper Ridge reserve. He first studied them in 1960 but they had all gone by 2000, largely due to climate change.
Ehrlich praised the review, saying: “It is extraordinary to have gone through all those studies and analysed them as well as they have.” He said the particularly large declines in aquatic insects were striking. “But they don’t mention that it is human overpopulation and overconsumption that is driving all the things [eradicating insects], including climate change,” he said.
Sánchez-Bayo said he had recently witnessed an insect crash himself. A recent family holiday involved a 400-mile (700km) drive across rural Australia, but he had not once had to clean the windscreen, he said. “Years ago you had to do this constantly.”

Volunteers look for the wormwood moonshiner beetle in Suffolk, UK. Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian

Links

• Why are insects in decline, and can we do anything about it?
• What is biodiversity and why does it matter to us?
• Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers
• Earth's sixth mass extinction event under way, scientists warn
• Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, report finds
• Humans just 0.01% of all life but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals – study
• Asymmetric boundary shifts of tropical montane Lepidoptera over four decades of climate warming
• Paul Ehrlich: 'Collapse of civilisation is a near certainty within decades'

This Summer Is Angry: Are You?

Independent Australia - Dr Geoff Davies

We are hitting a boiling point in climate devastation. Now is the time for comprehensive action.

Flooding in Townsville (screenshot via YouTube)

Dr. Geoff Davies Dr. Geoff Davies is an author, commentator and scientist. He is a retired geophysicist at the Australian National University and the author of Desperately Seeking the Fair Go and The Little Green Economics Book. He blogs at BetterNature Books.

I STILL ENCOUNTER people who say "there’s always been climate change". 
They mean: don’t worry about global warming, it’s not our fault and there’s nothing we can do about it. You hear other excuses, too.
So, should we not worry about the Reef and the rivers, about Townsville, about Tasmania, about the kelp forests and the mangrove forests and the many other symptoms of a climate awry?
Do the "sceptics" think the scientists haven’t thought of all the "reasons" they find to ignore global warming? Evidently so. But of course, the scientists aren’t quite that stupid. They have thought of all those possible ways out of the conclusions, and a lot more besides.
They’ve checked them all out. They don’t work.
Global warming, caused by us, is still there, pretty much on the course predicted decades ago.
Except that it may now be accelerating.

"We've seen the federal government now in power for 5 years and their policy has been an abject failure on climate change. There is currently no national policy to deal with this as we see extreme weather events around Australia worsening" -@McKenzieAmanda https://t.co/cznJjofwWS pic.twitter.com/2o4oKD8Ix0

— Climate Council (@climatecouncil) February 6, 2019

Not only does the warming correlate with our greenhouse gas emissions, the atmosphere is also warming in the way you’d expect and the actual imbalance of heat coming in versus heat escaping back to space has been measured. The evidence is abundant and of many kinds, both direct and indirect. There is no wiggle room left. Global warming is real and we are the cause.
Many of the people who resist that conclusion may actually be worried that our society might change drastically, that we’ll regress to living in caves or something absurd like that. But we can have clean energy and we can fix many of the other problems while maintaining a comfortable life, even improving it. Unless, that is, we fail to change what we are doing. That is by far the biggest risk of regression, even collapse.
I don’t blame most of the people who wish global warming away. They have been deceived by the grievous omissions, gross distortions and outright lies pouring out of the media all the time. The media controllers, the opportunistic politicians and the self-interested bosses are the culprits.
Writer Richard Flanagan has called them out. He wrote, eloquently, but sadly:

'Laugh at us all, Scott Morrison, you and the others who sit with you, grinning fools at the entrance to hell. Laugh and laugh as the ash falls soft as silent despair.'

You may have noticed that I haven’t been saying "climate change", I’ve been saying "global warming". The latter is the more accurate term. Even more accurate is "anthropogenic global warming", human-caused global warming. Such is the power of those who manipulate our society that they deliberately changed our language, so most people now say "climate change". It’s then an easy step from that phrase to "there’s always been climate change".
It’s true there has always been climate change, but you might not have wanted to be around for a lot of it. Most of it was very slow, but even that caused many extinctions. The more rapid changes, triggered by big volcanic eruptions or meteorite strikes, caused mass extinctions. The present change is very rapid compared to most, and we are in the early stages of what can become a mass extinction unless we rapidly change our ways.

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Do you wish that risk for your grandchildren?
An irony is that we’ve had 10,000 years of remarkable climate stability during which our vaunted civilisation has arisen. The present global industrial system is extremely fragile and will very likely collapse into simpler forms even if we do pull back from the flames. Some form of "civilisation" will probably continue, but it’s not clear what.
Meanwhile around half of the Great Barrier Reef is dead. Surely you’ve heard that? The thing almost no one says is that global warming has momentum, it will continue for several decades almost regardless of what we do. It’s hard to see the Reef being more than a small southern remnant after that.
Several summers ago, we also lost vast tracts of mangrove forests across the north and vast kelp forests off the west coast. Now the ancient alpine heaths and Gondwana forests of Tasmania are burning. They haven’t burnt for thousands of years and they won’t easily recover. The Darling River and the Coorong were in big trouble during the millennium drought and now there are mass fish kills.

Our land is dying before our eyes. It is reverting to simpler, harsher forms. Many suffer now, and our children will suffer more.
Our firefighters and disaster managers, the ones who work on the ground, are speaking very clearly: we are experiencing unprecedented heat, floods and fires. It means we are in the early stages of a vastly greater calamity. We don’t know if we can turn it around, but if we don’t try it will come upon us remorselessly.
As this angry summer proceeds, reflect on what is really important. Do your tribal political affiliations really amount to much? Your vote is your power. If you use it the same old way you’ll get the same old result. If you want something better you have to change your vote.

The best alternative to eating meat? ~ Michael Dello-Iacovo. https://t.co/DMsFCWDj9R

— IndependentAustralia (@independentaus) February 3, 2019

Links

• Lethal Consequences: Climate Change Impacts On The Great Barrier Reef
• Townsville floodwaters are easing but now the mould and mildew are setting in
• Tasmania is burning. The climate disaster future has arrived while those in power laugh at us - Richard Flanagan
• Since 2016, Half of All Coral in the Great Barrier Reef Has Died
• 'They died of thirst': Extreme conditions wipe out forest over 1000 kilometres
• Australia's vast kelp forests devastated by marine heatwave, study reveals

Australia Could Be 100% Renewables By 2032 At Current Rate Of Wind And Solar Installs

Renew Economy - Giles Parkinson

Giles Parkinson Giles Parkinson is founder and editor of Renew Economy, and is also the founder of One Step Off The Grid and founder/editor of The Driven. Giles has been a journalist for 35 years and is a former business and deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review.

A new study from the Australian National University school of electrical engineering says Australia could reach the equivalent of 100 per cent renewables by 2032, if the current rates of installation of wind and solar continued.
The research, led by Professor Andrew Blakers and Dr Matthew Stock, says the technology and infrastructure needed to support that amount of wind and solar can also be put in place within that time frame.
The most important thing the government of the day can do is to get out of the way, although it will need some considerable facilitation and co-ordination to get everything built and in place in time.
The ANU study says Australia is installing solar PV and wind 4-5 times faster per capita than China, Japan, the EU and the US, and is on track to reach 50 per cent renewable electricity by 2024 – far ahead of Labor’s federal target date of 2030, which the Coalition government describes as “reckless.”
Blakers says this has important implications for Australia. It would mean that not only would the electricity sector meet its “share” of the current Paris climate commitment within a few years, something that is already locked in, but could also meet the economy-wide target of 26-28 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030.
It’s important to note here that other experts question this assumption on economy wide emissions and whether this would be enough to deliver Australia’s weak Paris treaty emissions target,  and they point out that Australia will be under pressure to increase its target in coming years.

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See this Tweet above from Dylan McConnell from the Climate and Energy College, and a response from ANU climate expert Frank Jotzo below which worries about complacency, particularly given that energy minister Angus Taylor reacted to the research by claiming it was proof the government was doing enough.

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Jotzo writes in more detail here about the challenges facing Australia on emissions and what the government needs to do.
In any case the study’s authors make the point that because of the low cost of renewables, it could do achieve its emissions reductions at little or no additional cost to business as usual.



“There is a large PV and wind pipeline which augers well for continued deployment of PV and wind at rates above 6GW per year,” Blakers and Stock say in their report.
“We anticipate that this will continue for many years, provided that energy policy is not actively hindering development of renewables.”
That assumption that the government is minded to “get out of the way” and facilitate this deployment, is a very big “IF”.
The current Coalition government has done the opposite, and analysts warn that the industry risks “falling off a cliff” with the current government.
It engineered a capital strike and an investment trough from 2013 to 2016 by threatening to scrap the renewable energy target, and then finally reducing it. The current wind and solar boom has come despite the government’s intentions, rather than because of it.
And it appears keen to repeat the dose.
Energy minister Angus Taylor insists there is already too much wind and solar in the grid, and his policies – the “big stick” proposal to control prices and force divestment, and the proposed tender for 24/7 power – are being criticised by virtually everyone for being rushed, ill-thought-out and likely to delay investment rather than encourage it.
Blakers says that because of the falling cost of solar PV and wind energy, it is now clearly below the cost of building a new coal or gas plant, and similar to the cost of some existing coal plants – an assumption that is also shared by the CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator.
“The net cost of achieving deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions is approximately zero,” the researchers say, although they note that large-scale renewable transition entails tens of billions of dollars to be spent in rural Australia.”
Blakers and Stock say that stabilising the electricity grid when it has 50-100 per cent renewable energy is straightforward using off-the-shelf technologies already widely used in Australia, including storage (pumped hydro and batteries), demand management and stronger interstate transmission (to smooth out the effects of local weather).
The ANU researchers have previously produced studies that illustrate how that can be done, and have also prepared detailed reports on the prospect of pumped hydro across the country.
Numerous projects – including Snowy 2.0, Tasmania’s “battery of the nation”, and any number of smaller pumped hydro developments in Queensland, NSW, Victoria and South Australia – are on the drawing boards and having feasibility studies done.
“Most developing countries lie in the low-latitude sunbelt and can readily follow the Australian renewable energy path rather than go through a fossil fuel era – a bit like Africa skipping landline phones and transitioning directly to mobiles,” the researchers say.
“Renewable energy offers real hope for massive avoidance of greenhouse emissions and preservation of a livable planet.”
The ANU research notes that the current policy boost, the large-scale renewable energy target, will be met by 2020 (if not earlier), but deployment could still continue at rapid rates because:
Large-scale Generation Certificates (LGCs) will continue to be issued to accredited new generating capacity by the CER after 2020 out till 2030. (Although one has to question what value those LGCs will have).
Renewable investment opportunities are broadening beyond the wholesale market, with companies increasingly realising the economic and environmental credential benefits of renewable energy supply contracts.
For example, Sanjeev Gupta has announced that he will add 1GW behind the meter at the Whyalla steelworks and Sun Metals in Townsville has already installed 125 MW of solar generating capacity.
The price of wind and PV will continue to fall rapidly, opening up further market opportunities, as well as placing downwards pressure on electricity prices.
Increased deployment of electric vehicles in place of internal combustion vehicles and increased deployment of electric heat pumps in place of gas for water and space heating is expected to increase electricity demand.
Since nearly all new generation capacity in Australia is PV and wind, a sharp increase in demand is expected to be met by a large increase in the deployment rate of PV and wind.
Retiring existing coal power stations will be replaced by PV and wind.
“This paper demonstrates that Australia’s renewable energy industry has the capacity to deliver deep and rapid emissions reductions,” the authors say.
“Direct government support for PV and wind would help enhance industry capability but is no longer critical. What is crucial is government policy certainty that will enable the renewable industry to realise its potential to deliver deep emissions cuts.
“The most useful support that the government could provide is provision of high voltage interconnectors between states and to renewable energy zones (containing large numbers of PV and wind farms).
“This is akin to government provision of toll roads to resolve road traffic bottlenecks and the NBN to resolve internet traffic bottlenecks.
“Support for storage would also be very useful, for example through Snowy 2.0 or similar schemes.”
The scenario painted by ANU is based on capacity factors of 40 per cent for wind, just 21 per cent for solar (DC), and 15 per cent for rooftop solar. Blakers notes these are conservative estimates.
Behind-the-meter installations also play a crucial role, continuing at its current quick rates and accounting for around one-third of all generation by the early 2030s – again, this is quite consistent with other studies.
The ANU report says the techniques for balancing and managing a 100 per cent renewables grid are relatively straightforward, and not as expensive as many suggest.
“The cost of hourly balancing of the Australian electricity grid is modest: about $5/MWh for a renewable energy fraction of 50%, rising to $25/MWh for 100% renewables,” it says.
“Thus, the cost of the required storage and transmission is considerably smaller than the cost of the corresponding wind and solar farms. Australia’s coal power stations are old and are becoming less reliable, and transition to a modern renewable energy system can improve grid stability.”

Links

• Australia: the renewable energy superstar (Andrew Blakers, Matt Stocks, Bin Lu) pdf
• Australia is not on track to meet Paris emissions target – not without policy support
• Australia can meet Paris targets if government doesn't hinder progress, report claims
• Australia turns back on allies as it refuses to cut emissions above Paris pledge
• Australia isn't on track to meet its 2030 emissions target, UN report says
• PM claims Australia will meet Paris target 'in a canter' despite emissions climbing
• Paris climate deal doesn't stop us building new coal plants, Canavan says
• Australia will honour Paris climate agreement, Simon Birmingham says 
• Australia's emissions rise again in 2017, putting Paris targets in doubt
• Coalition watering down Finkel review climate ambitions, leaked document reveals
• Renewable energy spike led to sharp drop in emissions in Australia, study shows
• Energy efficiency employs more people than coal, oil or gas: report

The Truth About Big Oil And Climate Change

The Economist - Editorial

Even as concerns about global warming grow, energy firms are planning to increase fossil-fuel production. None more than ExxonMobil

Luca D'Urbino

In America, the world’s largest economy and its second biggest polluter, climate change is becoming hard to ignore. Extreme weather has grown more frequent. In November wildfires scorched California; last week Chicago was colder than parts of Mars.
Scientists are sounding the alarm more urgently and people have noticed—73% of Americans polled by Yale University late last year said that climate change is real. The left of the Democratic Party wants to put a “Green New Deal” at the heart of the election in 2020. As expectations shift, the private sector is showing signs of adapting. Last year around 20 coal mines shut. Fund managers are prodding firms to become greener. Warren Buffett, no sucker for fads, is staking $30bn on clean energy and Elon Musk plans to fill America’s highways with electric cars.
Yet amid the clamour is a single, jarring truth. Demand for oil is rising and the energy industry, in America and globally, is planning multi-trillion-dollar investments to satisfy it. No firm embodies this strategy better than ExxonMobil, the giant that rivals admire and green activists love to hate. As our briefing explains, it plans to pump 25% more oil and gas in 2025 than in 2017. If the rest of the industry pursues even modest growth, the consequence for the climate could be disastrous.
ExxonMobil shows that the market cannot solve climate change by itself. Muscular government action is needed. Contrary to the fears of many Republicans (and hopes of some Democrats), that need not involve a bloated role for the state.
For much of the 20th century, the five oil majors—Chevron, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP and Total—had more clout than some small countries. Although the majors’ power has waned, they still account for 10% of global oil and gas output and 16% of upstream investment. They set the tone for smaller, privately owned energy firms (which control another quarter of investment). And millions of pensioners and other savers rely on their profits. Of the 20 firms paying the biggest dividends in Europe and America, four are majors.
In 2000 BP promised to go “beyond petroleum” and, on the face of it, the majors have indeed changed. All say that they support the Paris agreement to limit climate change and all are investing in renewables such as solar. Shell recently said that it would curb emissions from its products. Yet ultimately you should judge companies by what they do, not what they say.
According to ExxonMobil, global oil and gas demand will rise by 13% by 2030. All of the majors, not just ExxonMobil, are expected to expand their output. Far from mothballing all their gasfields and gushers, the industry is investing in upstream projects from Texan shale to high-tech deep-water wells.
Oil companies, directly and through trade groups, lobby against measures that would limit emissions. The trouble is that, according to an assessment by the IPCC, an intergovernmental climate-science body, oil and gas production needs to fall by about 20% by 2030 and by about 55% by 2050, in order to stop the Earth’s temperature rising by more than 1.5°C above its pre-industrial level.
It would be wrong to conclude that the energy firms must therefore be evil. They are responding to incentives set by society. The financial returns from oil are higher than those from renewables. For now, worldwide demand for oil is growing by 1-2% a year, similar to the average over the past five decades—and the typical major derives a minority of its stockmarket value from profits it will make after 2030. However much the majors are vilified by climate warriors, many of whom drive cars and take planes, it is not just legal for them to maximise profits, it is also a requirement that shareholders can enforce.
Some hope that the oil companies will gradually head in a new direction, but that looks optimistic. It would be rash to rely on brilliant innovations to save the day. Global investment in renewables, at $300bn a year, is dwarfed by what is being committed to fossil fuels. Even in the car industry, where scores of electric models are being launched, around 85% of vehicles are still expected to use internal-combustion engines in 2030.
So, too, the boom in ethical investing. Funds with $32trn of assets have joined to put pressure on the world’s biggest emitters. Fund managers, facing a collapse in their traditional business, are glad to sell green products which, helpfully, come with higher fees. But few big investment groups have dumped the shares of big energy firms. Despite much publicity, oil companies’ recent commitments to green investors remain modest.
And do not expect much from the courts. Lawyers are bringing waves of actions accusing oil firms of everything from misleading the public to being liable for rising sea levels. Some think oil firms will suffer the same fate as tobacco firms, which faced huge settlements in the 1990s. They forget that big tobacco is still in business. In June a federal judge in California ruled that climate change was a matter for Congress and diplomacy, not judges.
The next 15 years will be critical for climate change. If innovators, investors, the courts and corporate self-interest cannot curb fossil fuels, then the burden must fall on the political system. In 2017 America said it would withdraw from the Paris agreement and the Trump administration has tried to resurrect the coal industry. Even so, climate could yet enter the political mainstream and win cross-party appeal. Polls suggest that moderate and younger Republicans care. A recent pledge by dozens of prominent economists spanned the partisan divide.
The key will be to show centrist voters that cutting emissions is practical and will not leave them much worse off. Although the Democrats’ emerging Green New Deal raises awareness, it almost certainly fails this test as it is based on a massive expansion of government spending and central planning (see Free exchange).
The best policy, in America and beyond, is to tax carbon emissions, which ExxonMobil backs. The gilets jaunes in France show how hard that will be. Work will be needed on designing policies that can command popular support by giving the cash raised back to the public in the form of offsetting tax cuts. The fossil-fuel industry would get smaller, government would not get bigger and businesses would be free to adapt as they see fit—including, even, ExxonMobil.

Links

• Fresh Thinking: The Carbon Tax That Would Leave Households Better Off
• Climate Change: $4 Trillion Carbon Tax Is Needed To Save Humanity From Global Warming, Say Economists
• Sky High Carbon Tax Needed To Avoid Catastrophic Global Warming, Say Experts
• Direct Action Not As Motivating As Carbon Tax Say Some Of Australia’s Biggest Emitters
• Now 'Right Moment' For Carbon Tax, IMF Chief Christine Lagarde Says

Floods, Fire And Drought: Australia, A Country In The Grip Of Extreme Weather Bingo

The Guardian - Adam Morton | Ben Smee

Amid record temperatures, severe flooding and devastation of wilderness, the political message from the government is business as usual

Residents wade through floodwaters in the suburb of Hermit Park in Townsville this week. Photograph: Dan Peled/EPA

The people of Townsville know about heavy rain, but this was new. Over the past fortnight, the northern Queensland city’s 180,000 residents have been hit by a monsoon strengthened by a low-pressure front that dragged moist air south from the equator to Australia’s top end.
It dumped an unprecedented 1.4 metres of rain in less than two weeks – roughly double what falls on London in a year.
The ensuing chaos has wrecked homes and caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to property. Two men have drowned and videos posted to social media have shown crocodiles climbing trees and taking to elevated highways in search of shelter.
But amid the deluge, not everyone heeded the evacuation advice.
Mark Parison was one of those who stayed. The tide where he lives in Hermit Park peaked at least two metres high on some homes and the road was decorated with debris – furniture, white goods and children’s toys – pulled from homes as the water receded. But Parison’s traditional Queenslander home, elevated on concrete pillars, remained largely intact.

If anyone mentions [climate change], I’ll punch ‘em.
Mark Parison

As he moved piles of damaged property to the roadside for local authorities to collect, he told Guardian Australia why he ignored the advice to run.
“It was a scary old night [but] this house has been here for a long time. We decided … it’s been here that long, it’s been through some big floods,” he said.
Asked if he was concerned that climate change was making floods more extreme, he was clear: “If anyone mentions that, I’ll punch ‘em.”
“The weather events seem to be getting more extreme. Whether it’s manmade or natural or who knows.
“These people crying about climate change, they’ve got to look at how they live themselves. They’re still driving around in cars, they’re still wearing nice clothes. They’re using mobile phones. So give that up, I’ll start listening to you.
“City people are stalling us. We need the economy here to be boosted.”
In a city with nearly one in ten unemployed his view holds purchase. And so goes some of the public debate in Australia about the impact of rising greenhouse gas emissions.

A historically hostile summer
The north Queensland flooding is far from the only punishing event in what has been, even by the standards of the continent, a historically hostile summer. Internal polling for political parties and environment groups suggests Australians are increasingly concerned that this is linked to climate change and want to see action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as a priority at this year’s federal election. It matches public polling that has found a comfortable majority accept it is a significant problem that needs to be addressed.

Mark Parison’s traditional Queenslander home, elevated on concrete pillars, remained largely intact during the floods. Photograph: Ben Smee/The Guardian

But after a decade of political fights and ideological warfare, discussion on the subject is often still a combat zone. The Coalition government would prefer not to talk about it at all.
Australia is, of course, no stranger to extreme weather - bushfire, flooding, rains and skin-peeling heat are central to its history and mythology - but the contrasts this southern summer have been particularly stark. Lesley Hughes, a professor of biology at Macquarie University and councillor with publicly funded communication body the Climate Council, says few parts of the continent have not experienced an extreme weather event in recent months.
More than 3000 kilometres to Townsville’s south, Tasmania is burning. For the second time in four years, dry lightning strikes sparked a series of blazes on the usually cool, temperate island, many of them in the vast world heritage wilderness area that covers nearly half its territory. In one 30-hour period in mid-January, an extended electrical storm danced across the summer sky, sending down more than 2400 lightning strikes without rain.
About 200,000 hectares - 3% of the state’s surface - has been burned, including unique alpine heath landscapes that had not been touched by fire for centuries. The fires are expected to burn for another month at least. Hundreds of people, many of them from in and around the southern town of Geeveston, spent the best part of two weeks camping at evacuation centres. Six homes were destroyed before rain late in the week reduced the threat to communities.

The prime minister is still pandering to the right-wing sceptics in his party
Lesley Hughes

Elsewhere, communities in the sparsely populated Australian outback continue to deal with the fallout from a long-term drought. On social media, a Greens MP in New South Wales, David Shoebridge, highlighted a constituent forced to pay $70 a week on drinking water for her and her son after the raw water supply in the town of Walgett was turned off.

A political battle is also raging over the use of water in the vast Murray-Darling river system that fans across the country’s eastern state agricultural districts, with drought-afflicted downstream communities arguing they are being denied water by a national river plan that did not factor in climate change and has been designed to keep dams full at water-hungry industrial agriculture sites in northern states.
This claim has been backed by a royal commission convened by the state of South Australia, which lies at the end of the river system, and the continuing disaster of up to a million fish having perished in three mass kills in the west of New South Wales due to water deoxygenation, with more deaths predicted.

Inquiry into Townsville flooding
The sense of a country playing extreme weather bingo has heightened as flood and drought collided this week, requiring the defence force to be called in to distribute fodder to cattle that had suddenly found their long-parched home under water. By Friday, it was clear that up to 300,000 cattle had been killed in the floods. With evidence mounting that authorities were unprepared for the extent of the rainfall, the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, announced an independent inquiry.

Australia is no stranger to bushfires but the contrasts this southern summer have been particularly stark. Photograph: William West/AFP/Getty Images 

For most, the most obvious extreme weather shift has been the heat. January was Australia’s hottest month on record by a wide margin, with average national temperatures nearly a degree beyond the previous benchmark and 2.9 degrees warmer than the long-term mean. In New South Wales, the average temperature was nearly 6 degrees hotter than what has been considered normal for the past century.
Blair Trewin, senior climatologist with the Bureau of Meteorology, says: “Even taking into account the sustained long-term warming trend of a degree or so over a century, this is certainly at the far end of expectations.”
It is the heat that seems to be shifting public concern about climate change. Political polling suggests it is registering in the top two or three issues of concern for voters in a way it has not since the 2007 election, when the country was enduring a decade long drought, if not ever. The trend is headed in this direction even in some outer suburban electorates, which have traditionally been more driven by jobs and cost-of-living issues.
But the shift is not universal. The government is hearing similar messages, but there has been no change in messaging from prime minister Scott Morrison. He visited the Tasmanian fires and Queensland floods within a 24-hour period, speaking with people who had been forced to flee their homes, thanking emergency service workers and, in Townsville, was photographed climbing into a tank. He drew no link between the extreme weather and emissions in his public comments and he dismissed as a stunt a suggestion by the Greens that he should apologise for backing coal given there was evidence it was making natural disasters worse.
The Nationals leader and deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, went a step further while visiting the site of the Menindee Lake mass fish kill, choosing language that suggested outright scepticism about climate science.

Dead fish in the Darling River weir pool in Menindee. Photograph: Graeme Mccrabb/EPA

“We are looking at climate, of course, (but) climate has been changing since year dot,” he said, before adding: “We don’t want to go down a path of renewables, which is not going to solve anything apart from de-industrialising Australia and making sure we don’t do manufacturing here and pushing electricity bills into the unaffordable state.”
While concern about climate change is growing, there is evidence this position retains support – Essential Media polling late last year, for instance, suggested a slim majority of voters may back public financial support for a new coal power development than would oppose it, though more than quarter said they did not know what they thought.

Dependent on mining
The suggestion governments may force coal industries to close are particularly challenging issues in Townsville, which is the centre of support for the Carmichael coalmine, the long-stalled greenfield project proposed by Indian billionaire Gautam Adani that has become a proxy for debate over climate change. The mining industry posits itself as a jobs saviour. But, as always, views are split.
Katie McGrath was among the lucky ones in the Queensland floods, having got caught up and seeing her car in a metre of water. A nurse who works in Townsville but lives on nearby Magnetic Island, she had not realised how great the threat was before getting into trouble. “I’ve never seen the island flood like this before,” she said.

Up to 300,000 cattle have been killed in the western Queensland floods. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

McGrath has little doubt that what Townsville has been experiencing is part of a bigger picture, but acknowledges she is out of step with many in her community.
“There’s clearly things happening around the world that are alarming,” she says. “It’s like anything, if you don’t know enough about it then you seek advice from experts, and what they’re telling us is that we’ve got a real problem with climate change and we need to do something about it.”
But despite the experts, Townsville is the epicentre of support for the Adani coalmine. For every flood affected resident who is concerned about climate change, several others share Parison’s views.
Roughly one in 10 people in Townsville are unemployed. About 16% of the population is university educated, compared with 22% Australia wide. People want economic growth and employment opportunities. And, for all the boom and bust cycles places such as Townsville have endured in the past, the mining industry still posits itself as a jobs saviour.
But McGrath believes adequate communication about the opportunities that come with a cleaner economy is missing.
“For those people, work’s been hard to come by for a while and that’s been a real issue for people in Townsville,” she said.
“There’s not really been much put forward, and this region is really dependent on mining. People want to see jobs in mining, they want to see Adani go ahead. That’s the priority for people at the moment. Whether they agree with climate change, care about it or whatever, that’s a secondary priority to making ends meet now.
“I don’t necessarily think people are addicted to coal, or think that coal’s great. We haven’t been offered different information or alternatives about different jobs that are available. At the moment that’s not there.”
Her observations underline the challenge in some parts of the country for the Labor party, which is favoured to win the election with a platform of taking climate change seriously, but beyond the electricity sector is yet to explain what meeting its more ambitious greenhouse targets would mean.
Part of the challenge of communicating climate change is explaining the science, particularly the extent to which any extreme event can be linked to increasing emissions.
Attribution science is a rapidly evolving field. Lesley Hughes, who helped launch a Climate Council report called Weather Gone Wild, says emissions are effectively loading the dice to increase the likelihood of an extreme weather event. “What we are now observing is consistent with the climate science – as the Earth warms up, more extreme weather is inevitable,” she says.
In the case of the floods, a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, which in the event of a storm can mean heavier rain in a shorter space of time.
In the case of the Tasmanian fires, not only has the state become warmer (2.5 degrees above average in January) but low-pressure weather patterns that used to produce rain over the state have also moved further south as the climate has warmed, and evaporation rates have increased. Both increase the risk of dry lightning strike causing a blaze. Hobart, the Tasmanian capital, recorded just 0.4 millimetres of rain in January, the lowest on record.
Hughes says governments can obfuscate for only so long before publicly accepting that climate change is now both a mitigation and adaptation challenge. Failing to acknowledge the role humans are playing is holding back conversations about, for instance, whether Australia needs to invest in fire-fighting aircraft rather than sharing with the US, given the northern and southern fire seasons are increasingly overlapping.
“The prime minister is still pandering to the right-wing sceptics in his party by not talking about climate change. But arguing black is white doesn’t make it so,” she says. “The government has to accept these events are going to get worse over the next few decades and plan accordingly – both to adapt and to be part of the solution instead of the problem.”

Links

• Townsville flood inquiry announced, as up to 300,000 cattle die in western Queensland
• 'I’ve got nothing valuable left': the heart-wrenching return to Townsville's flooded homes
• Tasmania is burning. The climate disaster future has arrived while those in power laugh at us
• Australia extreme heatwave: power outages in Melbourne amid 'load shedding' – as it happened
• Cyclone and storms: two extreme weather systems to lash eastern Australia
• Longer fire seasons threaten to disrupt US-Australia firefighting cooperation
• Australia had third-hottest year ever in 2017, weather bureau says
• Australian weather: extreme heat sends bushfires raging across south-east – live
• Record-breaking extreme weather in Australia in 2016 devastates ecosystems
• Australia braces for extreme weather as summer gets off to sweltering start

It’s Official: 2018 Was The Fourth-Warmest Year On Record

New York Times - John Schwartz | Nadja Popovich

Rising Global Temperature
How much cooler or warmer every year was compared with the average temperature of the late 19th century

Source: NASA | By The New York Times

NASA scientists announced Wednesday that the Earth’s average surface temperature in 2018 was the fourth highest in nearly 140 years of record-keeping and a continuation of an unmistakable warming trend.
The data means that the five warmest years in recorded history have been the last five, and that 18 of the 19 warmest years have occurred since 2001.
The quickly rising temperatures over the past two decades cap a much longer warming trend documented by researchers and correspond with the scientific consensus that climate change is caused by human activity.
“We’re no longer talking about a situation where global warming is something in the future,” said Gavin A. Schmidt, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the NASA group that conducted the analysis. “It’s here. It’s now.”
While this planet has seen hotter days in prehistoric times, and colder ones in the modern era, what sets recent warming apart in the sweep of geologic time is the relatively sudden rise in temperatures and its clear correlation with increasing levels of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane produced by human activity.
The results of this rapid warming can be seen from the heat waves in Australia and extended droughts to coastal flooding in the United States, in disappearing Arctic ice and shrinking glaciers.
Scientists have linked climate change to more destructive hurricanes like Michael and Florence last year, and have found links to such phenomena as the polar vortex, which last week delivered bone-chilling blasts to the American Midwest and Northeast.

Source: NASA | By The New York Times

The Earth’s temperature in 2018 was more than one degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, above the average temperature of the late 19th century, when humans started pumping large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Scientists say that if the world is to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, global temperatures must not rise by more than two degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial levels.
It appears highly likely, at least from today’s perspective, that that line will be crossed, despite the fact that more than 190 countries have signed the Paris climate agreement, which sets targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. (The United States is still technically a party to the accord, though President Trump has pledged to withdraw.)
Even an increase of 1.5 degrees will have dire consequences, according to the United Nations science panel on climate change.
Dr. Schmidt spoke of these markers not as cliffs that the world would plunge over, however, but part of a continuing slide toward increasing levels of harm. “Symbolically, it’s important,” he said.
With concerted effort to reduce greenhouse gases worldwide, scientists say, a slide could be slowed or even, eventually, reversed.

Clockwise from top left: A wildfire in Paradise, Calif., in November; a dry part of the Rhine in Düsseldorf, Germany, in July; James City, N.C., during Hurricane Florence in September; and a melting glacier in Yunnan Province, China, in September.
Credits: Josh Edelson/Agence France-Presse – Getty Images; Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters; Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images; Sam Mcneil/Associated Press

The warmest year was 2016, its record-setting temperature amplified by the Pacific Ocean phenomenon known as El Niño.
In 2018, the world experienced the opposite phenomenon, a cooling La Niña, with a weak El Niño toward the end of the year.
The effects of the El Niño late last year are likely to be felt in 2019, said Zeke Hausfather, an analyst with Berkeley Earth, an independent climate research group.
He said that 2019 would probably be the second warmest year on record. Last month, Mr. Hausfather issued figures correctly ranking 2018 as the fourth warmest.
The publication of the NASA temperature data came in tandem with a similar announcement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which uses a slightly different methodology to determine overall changes in the planet’s temperature but also ranked 2018 as the fourth warmest year.
The two federal agencies, while broadly consistent, have disagreed on the relative rankings for some years; NASA called 2017 the second warmest year, while NOAA said it was the third, after 2016 and 2015.
In related research, two new studies published Wednesday in the journal Nature suggested that melting polar ice caps could lead to even more extreme weather.
One study, led by Tamsin L. Edwards, a climate scientist at King’s College London, focused on the impact of Antarctic ice-shelf collapse.
It estimated that sea level rise caused by melting in Antarctica would be close to 10 inches, much lower than a 2016 study based on much of the same data that forecast a rise of five or six feet by 2100.
But even this lower estimate for sea level rise would be enough to trigger an increase in extreme weather events, according to a companion study led by Nicholas Golledge, an associate professor at the Victoria University of Wellington’s Antarctic Research Centre in New Zealand.
For example, Dr. Golledge said, an influx of fresh water from Greenland could slow the circulation of the Atlantic Ocean, which, among other things, would lead to warmer waters in the Gulf of Mexico and, subsequently, more hurricanes.
In addition to the fourth warmest year on record, 2018 was also the fourth-costliest for weather disasters in the United States.
Last year’s total was $91 billion, less than 2017, when disasters inflicted a record breaking $306 billion of damage. But it reflects a broader trend of more frequent and intense extreme weather events including hurricanes, floods, droughts and wildfires that scientists say are to be expected with a warming climate.
According to NOAA, 2018 was the first time on record when wildfires have exceeded average hurricane costs in the United States.
Dr. Schmidt of NASA said that the new global temperature figures helped to validate the scientific models that have predicted such warming over time.
“People say, ‘How do we know the science is any good? How do we trust the models? They’re so complex!’ ” But, he said: “That’s the essence of science. You think you understand how something works, you make models and you make predictions and see if they come true. Unfortunately, we’re in a situation where we see it’s come true.”
The annual global temperature ranking is usually announced in mid-January, but it was delayed when the government shutdown prevented federal scientists from completing the analysis.

Links

• The last five years were the hottest ever recorded
• Climate change: World heading for warmest decade, says Met Office
• UN warns world on track to breach 3C rise by 2100; last year was fourth warmest on record
• Last year was the fourth hottest on record, according to the UN
• Collapsing ice cliffs may not contribute to sea level rise 
• Australia can meet Paris targets if government doesn't hinder progress, report claims
• Wildfires, hurricanes and other extreme weather cost the nation 247 lives, nearly $100 billion in damage during 2018