08/03/2019

Climate Change Sceptics Push To Ban Teaching Global Warming Facts

NEWS.com.au

A growing number of politicians in the US are trying to introduce laws that would allow teachers to dismiss the scientific consensus that global warming is man-made.


World leaders have been warned that civilisation could collapse

In Australia and many other countries, school students have been taking to the streets to demand their nation’s leaders take action on climate change.
But in America, perhaps in an effort to stop similar student protests, some politicians are working to introduce legislation that would allow teachers to dismiss the scientific consensus that global warming is man-made.
In Connecticut, a politician wants to strike climate change from state science standards. Meanwhile in Virginia, a legislator worries teachers are indoctrinating students with their personal views on global warming. And an Oklahoma state senator wants educators to be able to introduce alternative ideas without fear of losing their jobs.
Students gather to demand the government take action on climate change at Martin Place on November 30, 2018 in Sydney, Australia. Picture: Getty Images Source: Getty Images
 Of the more than a dozen such measures proposed so far this year, some already have failed. But they have emerged this year in growing numbers, many of them inspired or directly encouraged by a pair of advocacy groups.
One group is The Heartland Institute, a conservative think-tank group based in Illinois best known for working with the tobacco company Philip Morris in the 1990s to attempt to discredit the health risks of smoking cigarettes.
The Heartland Institute does not disclose its funding sources.
Climate scientists have blasted such proposals for sowing confusion and doubt.
As climate change becomes a hotter topic in American classrooms in 2019, some politicians are pushing back against the scientific consensus that global warming is real. Picture: AP Source: AP
The efforts in North America to teach alternative theories to climate science follow high-profile protests by school students around the world.
Australian students striking for climate change want adults to join them for a global event on March 15, and organisers say they already have support from a growing number of unions.
Despite the criticism strikers copped from Prime Minister Scott Morrison for skipping classes last year, school students around Australia are planning to walk out of school again for another rally ahead of the federal election.
This time they are also urging adults to back the strike and also walk out for the day in solidarity.
Students hold a climate march at Martin Place. Picture: Jenny Evans Source: News Corp Australia
This year’s event is already being supported by a growing number of unions including the National Union of Workers, National Tertiary Education Union, United Firefighters Union, Hospo Voice, the Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association and the National Union of Students.
The National Union of Workers, one of the most powerful unions in the Labor Party and part of its right-wing faction that supports Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, said it was supporting the strike and the students standing together collectively for their future.
“They are inspiring leaders, and we support them in making our political leaders listen,” the union said.
Students demonstrate in Paris on March 1, 2019 to protest against climate change, part of a Europe-wide movement that has seen walkouts across the continent. Picture: AFP Source: AFP
More than 300 academics have also signed an open letter in solidarity with the student strikers supporting their stance against Adani’s Carmichael mine and a ban on gas mining.
The strikes created headlines last year when more than 15,000 students took the day off school to protest the lack of action on climate change, rallying in public spaces in Melbourne, Sydney and about 30 other cities and towns in Australia.
This year’s event, coming ahead of the federal election, is expected to be even bigger with organisers telling news.com.au students are extending an open invitation to everyone in the community to join them.
The school strike is gaining traction around the world. Australia’s March 15 event will also coincide with school protests in more than 40 other countries.

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Climate Change Will Expose Half Of World’s Population To Disease-Spreading Mosquitoes By 2050

Yale Environment 360


The yellowfever mosquito Aedes aegypti.
PHIL/CDC PHIL, CDC 
Scientists and public health officials have documented an increasing number of outbreaks of mosquito-borne illnesses across the globe in recent years, including yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya, and Zika.
 Now, an international team of researchers has found that by 2050, two key disease-spreading mosquitoes — Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus — will significantly expand their range, posing a threat to 49 percent of the world’s population.
“If no action is taken to reduce the current rate at which the climate is warming, pockets of habitat will open up across many urban areas with vast amounts of individuals susceptible to infection,” said Moritz Kraemer, an infectious disease scientist at Boston Children’s Hospital and the University of Oxford and a co-author of the new research, published in the journal Nature Microbiology,.
The researchers analyzed historical distribution data from more than 3,000 locations in Europe and the United States, dating back to the 1970s.
They then modelled future distribution using projections for climate change, urbanization, and human migration and travel. Kraemer and his colleagues found that in the last five years, Aedes aegypti has spread northward in the U.S. at about 150 miles per year.
In Europe, Aedes albopictus has spread at a rate of 93 miles per year.

These maps show the predicted global ranges of Aedes aegypti (above) and Aedes albopictus (below) in 2050 assuming a 'medium' climate scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions peak in 2080 and then begin to decline. The darker areas have the highest predicted prevalence of mosquitos.
Moritz Kraemer for Nature Microbiology
The scientists also found that within the next 5 to 15 years, human travel and migration will be the largest factors driving the spread of mosquitoes. After that, however, climate change and accelerating urbanization will create new mosquito habitats. Aedes aegypti could reach as far north as Chicago and Shanghai by 2050.
However, the species will likely decline in parts of the southern U.S. and Eastern Europe, which are expected to become more arid as global temperatures rise.
Aedes albopictus, on the other hand, is forecast to spread widely throughout Europe over the next 30 years, as well as establish small populations in parts of the northern U.S. and the highland regions of South America and East Africa.

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'Whole Thing Is Unravelling': Climate Change Reshaping Australia's Forests

The Guardian - 

Droughts, heat waves, bushfires and rising temperatures are driving ecosystems towards collapse
Researchers have found that big eucalypts grow slower as temperatures rise thanks to climate change.
Photograph: N Cirani/De Agostini/Getty Images
Australia’s forests are being reshaped by climate change as droughts, heat waves, rising temperatures and bushfires drive ecosystems towards collapse, ecologists have told Guardian Australia. Trees are dying, canopies are getting thinner and the rate that plants produce seeds is falling. Ecologists have long predicted that climate change would have major consequences for Australia’s forests.Now they believe those impacts are unfolding.
“The whole thing is unravelling,” says Prof David Bowman, who studies the impacts of climate change and fire on trees at the University of Tasmania. “Most people have no idea that it’s even happening. The system is trying to tell you that if you don’t pay attention then the whole thing will implode. We have to get a grip on climate change.”
According to the 2018 State of the Climate Report, produced by CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology, large parts of the country are experiencing increases in weather patterns favourable to fires. The report found that rainfall has dropped in the south-east and south-west of the country, temperatures have warmed by an average of 1C, and a “shift to a warmer climate in Australia is accompanied by more extreme daily heat events”.
Dr Joe Fontaine, an ecologist at Murdoch University, says forests across Australia are changing. “Impacts are direct – trees dying from heat and drought – as well as indirect – more fire, fewer seeds and a raft of associated feedbacks.”
Fontaine says leaves are the “machinery that makes the plant work” and how those leaves cope with heat depends on moisture reserves. “The question then is, how much do you have in reserve? A lot of us are really concerned about that.”
Fontaine has studied one large shrub species – the south-western native Hooker’s banksia – and found seed production has “halved in the last 30 years”, which was “definitely a climate-driven problem with increased drought”.
Last spring, Fontaine and colleagues inspected an area 300km north of Perth where the banksias had been hit by fire several years earlier. He wanted to know if they could cope with fire on top of the area’s long-term reduction in rainfall.
“At this stage, years after fire, those plants should be recovering and really going for it,” he says. “Except instead these banksias weredead and falling over left and right. The young plants were dying too – this area was losing all their young vigorous plants. With more bushfire, this species is at real risk of being wiped off the map.”

The interval squeeze
A study of the impacts of a heat wave in 2010 and 2011 in the south-west that followed long-term drops in rainfall found that the the large jarrah eucalypts and the area’s giant banksias were severely affected. A knock-on effect, another study found, was that the area became even more prone to fires.
Bowman says the impacts of the changing climate are “absolutely” happening. Bowman and colleagues have found that big eucalypts grow slower as temperatures rise and alpine ash forests were at risk of being wiped out because fires were coming along too often.
This is part of a phenomenon known as the “interval squeeze” where species that are adapted to cope with drought or fire, struggle when the time between impacts gets shorter.
Bowman says the idea that Australia’s forests are well adapted to the country’s variable climate and can withstand fire and drought, was incorrect. “A big misapprehension is that these things are climatologically flexible, but they’re just not,” he says, explaining that Australia’s dominant eucalypts have “fine-tuned their life history around assumptions of fire frequency”, but “climate change is just blowing that up”.
“All this is non-linear,” he says. “What will happen is the system will crash faster than we realise. Yes, it will reassemble and there will be forests, but they won’t look anything like what we have now. We are going to see this transformation before our eyes.”

Predicting the future?
The climate change impacts are not only restricted to old-growth forests – the changing climate is also causing problems for groups trying to reforest areas that have been previously cleared.
Usually, revegetation projects will gather seeds from the local area to sow or propagate in a practice known as provenance planting.
But two major groups are using climate projection tools to second-guess the changes in rainfall and heat expected in the areas where they are planting.
Landcare Australia and Bush Heritage Australia have started to source seeds from places that better match the climate conditions in coming decades.
Dr Matt Appleby, a senior ecologist at Bush Heritage Australia, says that in about 2014, the group began to see dead patches in a replanting project at Nardoo Hills in Victoria, and the problem worsened each year.
“We had a heat wave back in 2014 with about a week of temperatures well over 40C and that was combined with already low soil moisture,” he says. “We think that combination meant the trees were under so much stress they reach a critical point and were dying.”
Now the group has started a climate-ready revegetation project for the reserve. Even among the same species of tree, there can be subtle genetic variations that give the same species different tolerances depending on where they are growing.
The group has used climate tools to find areas in the country known as “climate analogues” that match the hotter and drier conditions expected at Nardoo.
“We are collecting seeds from those locations and bringing them to Nardoo Hills to propagate and plant out,” Appleby says. What happens then is that in 20 years the seeds of those plants will be better adapted to the area – they should have that little bit more resilience.”
Appleby is concerned the job of gathering seeds for rarer species could get more difficult. “Trying to get seed this past year has been incredibly difficult. What happens if in five years’ time we get a run of 49C days?” he says.
“How are we going to get seed then if everything is under pressure? People need to start thinking about seed banks and seed production areas so there’s enough seed down the track to sustain this.”
Dr Shane Norrish, the chief executive of Landcare Australia, says like many other organisations carrying out major revegetation works, climate change was presenting a challenge. For one major revegetation project at Dakalanta on the Eyre peninsula, Landcare Australia has also used this “climate-ready” approach when sourcing some of their seeds.
“What you will never be able to deal with is the run of extreme hot days that we’ve experienced in southern Australia – that level of extreme variability challenges everyone.”

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07/03/2019

Scientists Slap Down Australia Government Over Fake Climate Claims

Renew Economy - 

Federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor
AAP Image/Dan Himbrechts
Perhaps it was federal energy minister Angus Taylor repeatedly declaring on Sunday’s ABC Insiders program that national emissions were “coming down,” and that Australia would meet its Paris climate targets “in a canter.”
Perhaps it was the looming federal election and a feeling that now, more than ever, our most senior politicians should be held to account for what they say about such globally significant issues as climate change.
Perhaps it is because at the close of Australia’s hottest summer on record, Victoria is now burning through its hottest start to autumn in 30 years.
Whatever the trigger, the nation’s leading climate and energy experts have had enough.
A group of 28 climate scientists, academics and former heads of energy companies on Monday released a joint statement to correct the record, and remove any ambiguity on the subject:
  • Australia is NOT on track to meet its 2030 emissions reduction target;
  • Even if it was (it’s not), the target itself is woefully inadequate for what science says must be done to avert dangerous climate change.

“It is unbelievably misleading,” said signatory and Climate Councillor Greg Bourne on ABC Radio on Monday morning. “Anyone who goes into the data sets, and they’re really quite easy to look at, with some very nice graphs, show emissions rising ever since, basically, the Abbott government came in.”

The statement – signed by a slew of experts including ANU Professor and Climate Councillor Will Steffen, energy advisor Tim Forcey and APVI chair Renate Egan – notes that Australia’s greenhouse gas pollution has been rising for four years in a row, ever since the scrapping of the carbon price, as mapped out by the federal government’s own most recent data.
According to that data, the signatories say, direct combustion, transport and fugitives have all increased greenhouse gas pollution levels since 2005 and are projected to continue increasing emissions to 2030.
The joint statement also reminds those who need reminding that Australia’s 2030 target is economy wide, meaning that total greenhouse gas pollution must be reduced across all sectors: electricity, stationary energy, transport, fugitive emissions, industry, agriculture, waste and land use.
“The electricity sector has been going down… but the overall energy sector, if you take energy as a package, energy emissions for Australia have been going up continuously,” said Bourne, who is also the former CEO of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.
“Transport emissions have been going up continuously, and continue, just continue to go up. …Stationary energy and industrial processes – still going up; fugitive emissions – still going up.”
“It’s almost as if, if the politicians can get us to concentrate on the electricity sector, which has shown some downward slope, then we’ll forget all about the rest.”
Meanwhile, as The Australia Institute’s Richie Merzian explained on Sky News, the Morrison government will also be relying on “dodgy credits,” squirreled away through some tricks of accounting over a decade ago.

As Bourne explained it to Fran Kelly on the radio, when Australia used these credits back in the context of Kyoto, it was bad enough.
“Using those credits right now, and trying to bring them forward, will be seen by every other country as – this is just disgusting, just disgusting,” he said.
The timing of the joint statement – and fact check – is important. As the signatories note, global temperatures have risen 1°C in the era following mass industrialisation and this is already directly affecting humankind via worsening extreme weather events.
And Australia is in the firing line, facing increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather events including heatwaves, intense rainfall, and extreme bushfire conditions.
But the timing is also important in terms of the election. And the federal Coalition – of all parties – should be heeding the call, as evidence mounts that voters, even Liberal and National ones, care deeply about climate.
Even the Murdoch press can see that. An “exclusive” story by The Australian’s associate editor on Monday reports that former competitive skier Zali Steggall is set to steal the seat of Warringah from former PM Tony Abbott, from a platform of strong action on climate and renewables.
The story says Steggall’s campaign has scored the backing of “wealthy investors who want immediate action on climate change” and who have a financial stake in the shift away from coal, to renewables.
One of those backers is reported to be renewables industry veteran and founder of Solar Choice, Angus Gemmel, who announced on Facebook that he had “taken on the coal lobby” with a postcard drop in Mosman about “solar farm facts and figures.”
Renewables, of course, will be key to meeting Australia’s emission reduction obligations – but that, too, needs continued policy support to encourage the investment needed, the experts say. What we are getting instead looks rather like investment support for coal.
“Using another horse metaphor, (Taylor) is flogging a dead horse. That horse is not going to get there in a canter, not a chance at all. …There are no policies, yet, in the electricity sector beyond 2020 which will bring the emissions further down. Sure, there’ll be some more investment, but not by any policy in government.
“…The battery of the nation, that will help in terms of creating storage for whatever will be creating electricity… so it’s also encouraging for coal.
“It’s only when you actually take out the fossil fuel plants that the Tasmanian program actually begins to make economic sense. And we’re still not sure that Snowy 2.0 makes economic sense.”

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Support Is Surging For Teens’ Climate Change Lawsuit

National Geographic - Laura Parker

The U.S. Constitution protects the right to a safe climate, say 30,000 kids and eight members of Congress in support of the suit.
Lawyers and the youth plaintiffs lineup behind a banner after a hearing before Federal District Court Judge Ann Aiken between lawyers for the Trump Administration and the so called Climate Kids in Federal Court in Eugene, Ore. Wednesday July 18, 2018. The Trump administration has gone to the U.S. Supreme Court in its effort to stop a lawsuit filed by young activists who say the government is failing to protect them from climate change. Photograph by Chris Pietsch, The Register-Guard via AP
The 21 youths suing the federal government over climate change have gained a new round of supporters, including 30,000 youths who signed onto a legal brief asking an appeals court to allow the long-delayed case to go to trial.
The “Young People’s Brief” was among 15 new amicus briefs filed Friday by environmentalists, religious and women’s groups, business leaders and eight members of Congress– all in support of the case being tried in court.
The youth filing is noteworthy, as a growing youth movement calling for political leaders to act more urgently on climate change is rapidly spreading around the world. Young people in 50 nations have organized a strike from school on March 15 as part of a global protest.
“I’m part of an amazing group of plaintiffs who won’t put up with adults jeopardizing our futures any longer,” Miko Vergun, 17, of Beaverton, Oregon, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said in a statement. “…The amount of young people, in the United States and around the world, who added their names to support this brief is a representation of all the youth who know that their futures and their planet are at stake.”
The trial, originally scheduled to begin last October, has been delayed while government lawyers have sought to have the case dismissed before trial.
In court papers, the government said the “assertion of sweeping new fundamental rights” the youths claim “has no basis in the nation’s history and tradition”—and no place in a federal court. The government lawyers twice appealed to the Supreme Court, which returned the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Arguments in that appeal are scheduled to be heard the first week of June.

Four years so far
The lawsuit, Juliana v. United States,was originally filed against the government in 2015 during the Obama administration. The suit contends that the federal government pursued energy policies that caused climate change even though it knew for more than a half-century that carbon emissions would destabilize the climate. The government’s failure to forestall the effects of climate change, the suit alleges, violated future generations’ constitutional right to live in a “climate system capable of sustaining human life.”
The case hinges on the question of whether the Constitution guarantees such a right.
Both the Obama administration and now the Trump administration have argued repeatedly that the issues of climate change are more properly addressed by Congress and not by the courts.
In another amicus brief filed last week, eight Democrats in Congress disagreed and urged the court to hear the case. “[T]he intractability of the debates before Congress and state legislatures and the alleged valuing of short-term economic interest despite the cost to human life, necessitates a need for the Courts to evaluate the constitutional parameters of the action or inaction taken by the government,” the lawmakers wrote.
The Sunrise Movement Education Fund attached more than 20 testimonials to its brief, from youths in an assortment of states already suffering the effects of climate change.
“Until we force our government and our business owners to recognize that change needs to happen, it will not happen, and we will be unable to deal with the threats that await us…,” wrote Max Stefanescu, 15, of Alabama.
“As a citizen of America, I have the same right to life, liberty, and property as my forefathers,” wrote Leon Zha, 17, of California. “But what life do I have if I die twenty years early from carcinogenic smog? What liberty, if I must stay indoors all day to avoid the stroke-inducing heat? What property, if the land itself is burned to ash?”

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06/03/2019

The Best And Worst Airlines At Fighting Climate Change

SBS

A report has found EasyJet is the best airline at cutting its carbon emissions, but all carriers could do more. 
The report ranked 20 airlines.
AAP
The world's major airlines are doing far too little in the fight against global warming, according to a new report.
Research from the London School of Economics into 20 of the largest listed airlines found that all of their long-term targets "appear to fall short of the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to below 2 degrees".
"None of the 20 airlines have a target that clearly specifies how it will reduce its own flight emissions after 2025," the report said.
The airline sector currently accounting for 2 per cent of global CO2 emissions.
Getty
Europe's EasyJet was the only airline with a CO2 emissions intensity of flights below the 2 degrees benchmark after 2020.
By 2020, the airline's emissions per passenger kilometre will be less than half of some of its competitors.
Alaska Air and Qantas also rated highly on this front.
EasyJet was ranked highly.
Getty
On the other end of the spectrum, ANA Group, Japan Airlines, Korean Air and Singapore Airlines were found to have the highest emissions intensities.
By comparison, EasyJet will be emitting 75g of CO2 per passenger km in 2020 while Korean Air will be emitting 172g.
How the airlines performed.
Transition Pathway Initiative
But ANA Group, Delta, United and Lufthansa were cited as the best performers at managing the business risks and opportunities of climate change in the future.
Researchers said that the airline sector "makes a significant and fast-growing contribution to climate change", currently accounting for 2 per cent of global CO2 emissions and 12 per cent of transport-related CO2.
Faith Ward of the Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI), which produced the report, said "the aviation sector is doing the basics when it comes to carbon performance, but investors are urging them to take more significant steps".
"That means setting stretching emissions reduction targets to 2030 and beyond, and ending a reliance on offsetting. It's clear from TPI’s research that this is not currently the case," she said.
The group claims that more fuel-efficient planes, ensuring that planes fly at full capacity and increased use of biofuels would help to reduce emissions.

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Suffering In The Heat: The Rise In Marine Heatwaves Is Harming Ocean Species

The Conversation -  | 

Recent marine heatwaves have devastated crucial coastal habitats, including kelp forests, seagrass meadows and coral reefs. Dan Smale, Author provided
In the midst of a raging heatwave, most people think of the ocean as a nice place to cool down. But heatwaves can strike in the ocean as well as on land. And when they do, marine organisms of all kinds – plankton, seaweed, corals, snails, fish, birds and mammals – also feel the wrath of soaring temperatures.
Our new research, published today in Nature Climate Change, makes abundantly clear the destructive force of marine heatwaves. We compared the effects on ecosystems of eight marine heatwaves from around the world, including four El Niño events (1982-83, 1986-87, 1991-92, 1997-98), three extreme heat events in the Mediterranean Sea (1999, 2003, 2006) and one in Western Australia in 2011. We found that these events can significantly damage the health of corals, kelps and seagrasses.
This is concerning, because these species form the foundation of many ecosystems, from the tropics to polar waters. Thousands of other species – not to mention a wealth of human activities – depend on them.
We identified southeastern Australia, southeast Asia, northwestern Africa, Europe and eastern Canada as the places where marine species are most at risk of extreme heat in the future.
Marine heatwaves are defined as periods of five days or more during which ocean temperatures are unusually high, compared with the long-term average for any given place. Just like their counterparts on land, marine heatwaves have been getting more frequent, hotter and longer in recent decades. Globally, there were 54% more heatwave days per year between 1987 and 2016 than in 1925–54.
Although the heatwaves we studied varied widely in their maximum intensity and duration, we found that all of them had negative impacts on a broad range of different types of marine species.
Marine heatwaves in tropical regions have caused widespread coral bleaching.
Humans also depend on these species, either directly or indirectly, because they underpin a wealth of ecological goods and services. For example, many marine ecosystems support commercial and recreational fisheries, contribute to carbon storage and nutrient cycling, offer venues for tourism and recreation, or are culturally or scientifically significant.
Marine heatwaves have had negative impacts on virtually all these “ecosystem services”. For example, seagrass meadows in the Mediterranean Sea, which store significant amounts of carbon, are harmed by extreme temperatures recorded during marine heatwaves. In the summers of both 2003 and 2006, marine heatwaves led to widespread seagrass deaths.
The marine heatwaves off the west coast of Australia in 2011 and northeast America in 2012 led to dramatic changes in the regionally important abalone and lobster fisheries, respectively. Several marine heatwaves associated with El Niño events caused widespread coral bleaching with consequences for biodiversity, fisheries, coastal erosion and tourism.
Mass die-offs of finfish and shellfish have been recorded during marine heatwaves, with major consequences for regional fishing industries.
 All evidence suggests that marine heatwaves are linked to human mediated climate change and will continue to intensify with ongoing global warming. The impacts can only be minimised by combining rapid, meaningful reductions in greenhouse emissions with a more adaptable and pragmatic approach to the management of marine ecosystems.

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