06/11/2019

Climate Crisis: 11,000 Scientists Warn Of ‘Untold Suffering’

The Guardian - 

Statement sets out ‘vital signs’ as indicators of magnitude of the climate emergency
A man uses a garden hose to try to save his home from wildfire in Granada Hills, California, on 11 October 2019. Photograph: Michael Owen Baker/AP 
The world’s people face “untold suffering due to the climate crisis” unless there are major transformations to global society, according to a stark warning from more than 11,000 scientists.
“We declare clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency,” it states. “To secure a sustainable future, we must change how we live. [This] entails major transformations in the ways our global society functions and interacts with natural ecosystems.”
There is no time to lose, the scientists say: “The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity.”
The statement is published in the journal BioScience on the 40th anniversary of the first world climate conference, which was held in Geneva in 1979. The statement was a collaboration of dozens of scientists and endorsed by further 11,000 from 153 nations. The scientists say the urgent changes needed include ending population growth, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, halting forest destruction and slashing meat eating.
Prof William Ripple, of Oregon State University and the lead author of the statement, said he was driven to initiate it by the increase in extreme weather he was seeing. A key aim of the warning is to set out a full range of “vital sign” indicators of the causes and effects of climate breakdown, rather than only carbon emissions and surface temperature rise.
‘Profoundly troubling signs’ – drivers of the climate emergency
Guardian graphic. Source: Ripple et al, BioScience, 2019
‘Encouraging signs’ – trends tackling the climate emergency
Guardian graphic. Source: Ripple et al, BioScience, 2019
“A broader set of indicators should be monitored, including human population growth, meat consumption, tree-cover loss, energy consumption, fossil-fuel subsidies and annual economic losses to extreme weather events,” said co-author Thomas Newsome, of the University of Sydney.
Other “profoundly troubling signs from human activities” selected by the scientists include booming air passenger numbers and world GDP growth. “The climate crisis is closely linked to excessive consumption of the wealthy lifestyle,” they said.
As a result of these human activities, there are “especially disturbing” trends of increasing land and ocean temperatures, rising sea levels and extreme weather events, the scientists said: “Despite 40 years of global climate negotiations, with few exceptions, we have have largely failed to address this predicament. Especially worrisome are potential irreversible climate tipping points. These climate chain reactions could cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable.”
“We urge widespread use of the vital signs [to] allow policymakers and the public to understand the magnitude of the crisis, realign priorities and track progress,” the scientists said.
‘Especially disturbing’ – the impacts of the climate emergency
Guardian graphic. Source: Ripple et al, BioScience, 2019
“You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to look at the graphs and know things are going wrong,” said Newsome. “But it is not too late.” The scientists identify some encouraging signs, including decreasing global birth rates, increasing solar and wind power and fossil fuel divestment. Rates of forest destruction in the Amazon had also been falling until a recent increase under new president Jair Bolsonaro.
They set out a series of urgently needed actions:
  • Use energy far more efficiently and apply strong carbon taxes to cut fossil fuel use
  • Stabilise global population – currently growing by 200,000 people a day – using ethical approaches such as longer education for girls
  • End the destruction of nature and restore forests and mangroves to absorb CO2
  • Eat mostly plants and less meat, and reduce food waste
  • Shift economic goals away from GDP growth
“The good news is that such transformative change, with social and economic justice for all, promises far greater human well-being than does business as usual,” the scientists said. The recent surge of concern was encouraging, they added, from the global school strikes to lawsuits against polluters and some nations and businesses starting to respond.
A warning of the dangers of pollution and a looming mass extinction of wildlife on Earth, also led by Ripple, was published in 2017. It was supported by more than 15,000 scientists and read out in parliaments from Canada to Israel. It came 25 years after the original “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” in 1992, which said: “A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided.”
Ripple said scientists have a moral obligation to issue warnings of catastrophic threats: “It is more important than ever that we speak out, based on evidence. It is time to go beyond just research and publishing, and to go directly to the citizens and policymakers.”

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(AU) The Wealthy Australians Funding Climate Change Candidates

AFR - Andrew Tillett

Wealthy climate change activist Simon Holmes a Court wants to assemble a $1 million war chest to bankroll independent candidates at the next election after funding disclosures showed the organisation he and rich-lister Mike Cannon-Brookes backed emerged as one of 2019's biggest donors.
Mr Holmes a Court's Climate 200 initiative donated about $450,000 to 12 independent and crossbench political candidates in the run up to the May 18 poll, helping independent Helen Haines prevail. Two incumbent MPs Climate 200 helped, Adam Bandt and Rebekha Sharkie, were re-elected.
Independents Zali Steggall and Helen Haines were helped by wealthy donors attracted by their stance on climate change. Alex Ellinghausen
Nevertheless, candidate donations returns released by Australian Electoral Commission on Monday revealed just how potent climate change had become as for political fundraising.
Independent Zali Steggall disclosed receiving a whopping $1.1 million in donations for her successful bid to unseat former prime minister Tony Abbott in the northern Sydney electorate of Warringah.
One of the key promises of Ms Steggall's campaign was the need to act on climate change, drawing a sharp contrast to Mr Abbott who as PM dismantled Labor's carbon pricing regime.
Businessman and environmental philanthropist Robert Purves donated $67,000 each to Ms Steggall's campaign while his sister Sandra gave $37,000.
Given how well she was resourced, Climate 200 opted not to donate to Ms Steggall, instead spreading its money around other independent candidates in other seats.
But Climate 200 gave $145,000 to the former head of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation Oliver Yates for his campaign against Treasurer Josh Frydenberg in the seat Melbourne seat of Kooyong, out of $363,000 he disclosed receiving.
Kerryn Phelps received $47,500 from Climate 200 (out of $219,000 in total donations) for her failed bid to hold Wentworth in Sydney's east while Dr Haines included $35,000 from the group in her list of $421,000 in donations.
All up, candidates disclosed receiving $354,500 in donations from Climate 200 but the real figure is higher because donations under $13,800 do not have to be publicly declared.
Mr Holmes a Court told The Australian Financial Review Climate 200 received $495,000 from donors and distributed about 90 per cent of this to candidates and used the rest for distributing a social media video on the candidates to supporters.
Mr Cannon-Brookes gave $50,000 and Mr Holmes a Court $25,000, while $195,000 came from the Climate Outcomes Foundation. All other donations were below the $13,800 threshold.
Mr Holmes a Court said he had been contacted by a handful of philanthropists in recent days looking to donate for the next election campaign.
He said doubling the amount of the money Climate 200 has to disperse was a "realistic" aim, with the group looking to support candidates who wanted action on climate change as well as advocate for an integrity commissioner.
"We will almost certainly go again in 2022," he said.
"Politics is a long game, especially in Australia. [This year] was a modest attempt. I'm confident we will be able to get more bang for our bucks and get more bucks."
Kilara Capital managing director Ben Krasnostein - a member of Melbourne's Smorgan family - said he and family members donated a "five figure" sum to Climate 200 and he planned to do so again.
He said he believed climate change action would both preserve the environment for future generations as well as offered new opportunities for investors to make a return.
"I'm not red, blue or green," Mr Krasnostein said, a reference to the colours associated with the major parties.
"There is not that much of an outlet for people who want to make a difference, who can write a decent-sized cheque and who don't want to be partisan."

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(US) Trump Thought The Paris Deal Was Too Expensive. Wait’ll He Sees The Cost Of Climate Change.

MIT Technology Review



The Trump administration officially began the process of withdrawing the US from the landmark Paris climate agreement on Monday, in a move that surprised no one.

The details
The step, which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Twitter, starts the clock on a one-year waiting period that will end the day after the next presidential election.
At that point, the US will be the only nation on the planet that isn’t a party to the compact, forcing the rest of the world to figure out how to combat the escalating dangers of climate change without the second largest greenhouse gas emitter.
In first announcing plans to exit the deal two years ago, President Trump argued the agreement would undermine the nation’s economic growth and international competitiveness. Evidence suggests, however, that exactly the opposite is true.
Missed opportunities
By actively working against the shift to clean energy—and by extension, the companies and markets needed to bring it about—the US has ceded economic opportunities to develop the next generation of clean technologies to its economic rivals.
China, in particular, has happily seized the mantle, asserting itself as an increasingly dominant leader on batteries, electric vehicles, long-range transmission, wind turbines, solar panels, and more.

Relative costs
Moreover, if Trump truly thinks doing something about climate change is going to cost the economy too much—just wait until he gets a glimpse at the tab for doing nothing.
As study after study points out, the economic damages of unchecked climate change will be astronomical—indeed, far greater than the cost of reducing emissions.
In the US alone, climate change could add up to at least hundreds of billions of dollars per year in lost labor productivity, declining crop yields, early deaths, property damage, water shortages, air pollution, flooding, fires, and more.
Visitors chat in front of a giant screen featuring information related to global warning. (Patrik Stollarz/AFP/Getty Images)
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05/11/2019

(US) Naomi Oreskes: ‘Discrediting Science Is A Political Strategy’

The Guardian - Zoë Corbyn

The Harvard professor on science and scepticism – and why climate deniers have run out of excuses
Naomi Oreskes: ‘It is deeply problematic if the leadership of the US government is rejecting science.’ Photograph: Phil Penman
Why Trust Science?
Naomi Oreskes
Princeton University Press
In her new book Why Trust Science? Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard University, argues that if more people heard scientists talk personally about their values, it would help turn back the creeping tide of anti-science sentiment. The former geologist recently gave evidence both to a US House of Representatives subcommittee hearing, “Examining the Oil Industry’s Efforts to Suppress the Truth about Climate Change”, and a Senate Democrats special committee hearing looking at “Dark Money and Barriers to Climate Action”.

Your previous book, Merchants of Doubt, chronicled tactics used by professional climate deniers. What inspired this one?
During public lectures I would explain there was a scientific consensus on climate change and the contrarians were either outliers within the scientific community or paid shills of the fossil fuel industry. People would say: “Well that’s fine, but why should we trust the science?” I thought that was a legitimate question.

Do we have a crisis of public trust in science?
There has been exaggeration and even panic about this. Public opinion polls in the US consistently show that most people still trust science. And far more than they trust government or industry. However, there are certain areas – for example climate change, vaccination and evolution – where there is a high level of public suspicion. In these areas, people resist accepting what the evidence shows because of their values. The science can be seen to clash with their political, moral or religious worldviews, or their economic interests.
Discrediting science is also a political strategy – for example, the fossil fuel industry creating the impression that the science on climate change is unsettled stops action.
It’s fashionable to be sceptical of experts but we rely on them: dentists fix our teeth, plumbers unclog our drains
You could say the US president doesn’t trust science. Trump denies the climate crisis and has argued against vaccination in the past, and his vice-president, Mike Pence, demurs on evolution. How detrimental is this?
It is deeply problematic if the leadership of the US government is rejecting science, because it sends a signal to the American people and to business leaders that it is fine to reject science, and even to ride roughshod over scientists. It is also proof positive that this is not a question of people who simply don’t have access to good scientific information. The US president has access to more scientific information than probably anybody on the planet – but he actively rejects it on a number of issues because it conflicts with his own interests.

Why should we trust science? Is it because there is a “scientific method” that scientists follow?
There isn’t a single magic formula that guarantees results. We should trust science because it has a rigorous process for vetting claims. That includes the formal peer review of papers submitted to academic journals but also things like scientists discussing their preliminary results in conferences and workshops. Crucially, these practices are social in character. Consensus is key to when a scientific matter has been settled, and therefore when knowledge is likely to be trustworthy. We should also trust science because it is done by people who are experts in studying the natural world. It’s fashionable to be sceptical of experts but we rely on trained people every day for all kinds of things: dentists fix our teeth and plumbers unclog our drains. Science also has a substantial record of success – think of our medicines and technologies – suggesting scientists are doing something right.

You say we can learn from science gone awry. One example in the book is the eugenics movement, the odious crusade in the early part of the last century arguing for the improvement of the genetics of the human race by restricting the reproduction of “unfit” people, which particularly targeted the mentally ill and the poor…
Climate change deniers love to claim that because scientists were once wrong about eugenics, they may be wrong now about climate change. But I looked closely and there never was any consensus among scientists on eugenics. British geneticists and evolutionary biologists in particular – famous names like JBS Haldane and Thomas Huxley – who also happened to be socialists called out eugenics for its class bias targeting working-class people. It shows how diversity, in this case political diversity, can lead to assumptions being pointed out that otherwise would go unnoticed.

You also look at why it took so long for scientists to study whether the contraceptive pill can have mental health side-effects like depression.
A few years ago a big study came out that associated being on the pill with depression and it generated a lot of media attention. But we’ve known this for a very long time because millions of women have been telling us. Their self-reports were often discounted as unreliable by medical science. Lots of psychiatrists going back to the 1960s were aware and some took it seriously. But gynaecologists generally resisted that evidence for two reasons. One was because the pill really does work, so a lot were eager to prescribe it. But also, these were female patients and there is a long history of male doctors in particular discounting their reports. The lesson is scientists shouldn’t discount evidence simply because it’s not in their preferred form.
Do the benefits of flossing your teeth have scientific backing? Photograph: Julio Cortez/AP
You use a 2016 controversy around the effectiveness of flossing teeth as an example not of flawed science, but flawed journalism. What happened? 
The background is the US government took the view that its dietary guidelines should focus on diet and so removed a recommendation to floss. A journalist from the Associated Press noticed and decided to look at flossing’s scientific basis for preventing gum disease and cavities. He found that if you took the gold standard of evidence – the double-blind randomised controlled trial – it was lacking. But you can’t do that kind of trial: you know if your teeth are being flossed or not. If you make that the standard then, necessarily, there won’t be “hard” evidence to support flossing. There is a kind of fetishism about RCTs. But there are cases including in nutrition and exercise when you can’t do them, or it would be unethical. In those cases, other types of studies, like population or animal studies, can be valuable. Or if you have some other kind of information – for example dentists’ and our own experience that flossing does a lot of good for our teeth and gums – it shouldn’t be discounted.

How can we increase trust in science where it is warranted?
It isn’t by giving people more scientific information. Rather scientists need to talk about the values that motivate them and shape the science they do. In many cases, scientists’ values are less different from the people who are rejecting science than you might think. And where values overlap, trust can be built. We may think of people who reject vaccination as being “on the other side” but we all love our children. A scientist’s “biodiversity” might be a religious believer’s “Creation”, but they are cherishing the same thing. Scientists being willing to talk about themselves and their experiences can also go a long way. In my book, I talk about something deeply personal: my own experiences with the contraceptive pill and depression. It may not be persuasive to everyone, but people are much more likely to accept factual information from those they can relate to or have a human connection with.

Lots of scientists work for oil, energy, pharmaceutical, food and cosmetics companies, and often bury unwelcome results, massage their studies and so on – how do you feel about these people and are they contributing to the cynicism about science in the public?
This is a big question, hard to answer in a soundbite. In the early 20th century, a good deal of important science was done in industrial laboratories, for example at Westinghouse, General Electric, Bell Labs, and Eastman Chemicals. But after the war, many large corporations cut back on their support of basic research, and some – most famously the tobacco industry – became involved in product defence and distracting research. A good deal of product defence research is now channelled through academia, and this is deeply problematic. I know from my email and Twitter feed that this has stoked distrust among some people, and rightly so.
Many scientific journals and universities have been very sloppy about taking steps to ensure the integrity of academic findings, for example by having and enforcing full disclosure. Academics have to be very clear about the soures of their support, and they should never agree to non-disclosure agreements. It is essential in science that we let the chips fall as they may.

You’ve recently been testifying in Congress. What’s the message you most want to send to politicians?
Human-induced climate change is under way. It’s no longer a matter of trust; our scientists have been shown to be right. Climate change deniers have run out of excuses.

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(UK) Climate Change: Thousands Invited To Join Citizens' Assembly

BBC

The public are being asked for their views on how to tackle climate change. Brook Mitchell/Getty
Letters are being sent to 30,000 households across the UK inviting people to join a citizens' assembly on climate change.
Once participants are selected, the assembly will meet next year, with the outcome of their discussions reported back to Parliament.
The initiative, set up by cross party MPs, will look at what members of the public can do to reduce CO2.
The UK government has committed to cut carbon emissions to net zero by 2050.
Rachel Reeves, chair of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Committee, one of six select committees who commissioned the climate assembly, said a clear roadmap was needed to achieve this goal.
"Finding solutions which are equitable and have public support will be crucial," she said.
"Parliament needs to work with the people and with government to address the challenge of climate change."

Random selection
The invitees to Climate Assembly UK have been selected at random from across the UK. From those who respond, 110 people will be chosen as a representative sample of the population.
They will meet over four weekends from late January in Birmingham, and will discuss topics ranging from transport to household energy use.
A citizens' assembly has been a key demand of the environmental campaign group Extinction Rebellion, whose protests caused widespread disruption this year.
The group said they welcomed this as a first step, but warned that the assembly should be focussing on cutting carbon emissions to net zero by 2025 not 2050.
Spokesperson Linda Doyle said: "Waiting 30 years to reach zero net carbon emissions is a death sentence to people around the world and in the UK - it gives us a higher chance of breaching irreversible tipping points as the climate breaks down and it only serves short term 'business as usual'."

Complex issues
Environmental group Friends of the Earth said citizens' assemblies could play an important part in policy-making.
Dave Timms, head of political affairs at FOE, said: "Tackling the climate emergency with the speed required will require radical changes to our economy, infrastructure and even to society so it's important that there is a consensus among citizens.
"Much of what needs to be done already commands widespread public support and it is politicians that just need to bloody-well get on with it now."
Citizens' assemblies have been used in a number of countries around the world.
In Ireland, a panel of 99 people was established in 2016 to look at a range of political questions, including abortion.
They recommended that the country should overturn its ban and suggested a referendum, which went on to support repeal.
In Canada and the Netherlands, the approach has been used to discuss electoral reform.

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(AU) How Bad Is This Drought And Is It Caused By Climate Change?

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

How do we define drought? What causes them? And are they getting worse?
Animal tracks criss-cross the Southern Macquarie Marshes Nature Reserve in August. Credit: Wolter Peeters
Australia may well be a land of drought and flooding rain but so far this century it has been on the drier side. Drought has gripped large swathes of south-eastern Australia for the past three years, prompting fierce debate about the best policies to help farmers and regional communities, and sparking fears about just how dry future conditions will be.
How severe is this drought? Is this the new normal? And what is the role of climate change?

What is drought?
Drought is about what's missing – rain. Or, as the Bureau of Meteorology defines it, an "acute water shortage".
Unlike other extreme weather events such as heavy rain or heatwaves, though, droughts are tricky to measure.
Queensland's latest government estimate is that two-thirds of the state is affected by drought. In NSW, it is just about all of the state – 98.4 per cent, according to the government. Victoria hasn't declared drought, but says central and east Gippsland and Millewa in the north-west are its main dry regions. Western Australia has had its third-driest start to any year – and the driest since 1936 – and northern South Australia has not had a drier January-October on record.
The weather bureau uses "rainfall deficiencies" as its measure. It looks at where rainfall is less than 10 per cent of historical averages and deems them to have "serious" deficiency. Those at less than five per cent are rated as "severe".
Another kind of measure is a so-called hydrological drought, which measures periods of very low river flow.
Rainfall is below average or less in large parts of Australia
January 2017 to October 31, 2019
Source: Bureau of Meteorology
How bad is the current drought?
Australia's biggest dry spells include the Federation Drought (1895-1902), World War II Drought (1937-1945) and the Millennium Drought (1997-2009).
Measured on a range of time scales, the current drought is extreme. Some areas report record poor rains.
For Australia's food bowl, the Murray-Darling Basin, rainfall has averaged 887 millimetres over the 34 months to the end of October. That's "clearly the lowest on record", says David Jones, manager of climate services at the weather bureau.
Record heat has compounded the stress. The basin's mean temperatures for those 34 months is running at 1.65 degrees above the bureau's 1961-90 baseline, easily beating previous record highs, says Dr Jones.
Nationally, daytime temperatures for January to October are also at records highs, the bureau says. In the basin alone, mean temperatures were the hottest on record for that period too, for the third year in a row, says Dr Jones.
Perhaps the most unusual feature of the current drought, though, is the absence of cool season rainfall for three years running for much of the Murray-Darling Basin.
"That’s never happened in the instrumental record," says Michael Roderick, a climate researcher at the Australian National University. "They’ve never really had two failed winters in a row."
For the basin, just under 50 millimetres fell last winter, or less than half the 1961-90 average of 111 millimetres, weather bureau data reveals.


Is climate change playing a role?
If droughts can be hard to pin down, explaining their connection to climate change adds to the complexity.
The facts are that scientists cannot say definitively that a specific drought is caused by climate change, but they can say definitively that climate change makes the effects of droughts stronger and more damaging.
Andy Pitman, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, recently ignited a brief firestorm over his comment to a business forum that "there is no link between climate change and drought".
Some media jumped on his views, prompting his centre to issue a belated correction saying he erred by leaving out one word, as in "there is no direct link between climate change and drought".
Indirect links should be cause enough for concern in a country with Australia's variable rainfall.
The indirect links, though, should be cause enough for concern in a country with Australia's variable rainfall.
The weather bureau and CSIRO are very confident that rainfall during the so-called cool season from April to October is trending lower for both the south-west and south-east of Australia, as noted in last year's State of the Climate report.
Farmers rely on that rain to grow the winter crops that make up the bulk of the nation's output. Where winter rain is on the rise – in parts of the north and interior – the extra moisture is typically on top of a low base and in sparsely populated regions.
Climate change is blamed for accelerating the winds that circle around Antarctica, drawing storm tracks further south so some miss the mainland.
By contrast, for some areas in southern Australia, rainfall is increasing during the warmer months. That shift, though, comes as little consolation for farmers now reliant on winter harvests.
In 20 years, cool season rainfall has been the lowest on record
in some places and above average in others.
April to October rainfall 1999-2018
Source: Bureau of Meteorology
Evaporation, which depends more on sunlight and relative humidity than temperature, is typically higher in summer so run-off into dams will be less than if it rained in winter.
More summer rain "should green up the landscape because plants have more water when they need it most but it will dry up our rivers", Professor Roderick says.
While it's not clear how annual rainfall totals will change in a warming world, future droughts will be hotter when they do arrive, says Ben Henley, a climate researcher at the University of Melbourne.
"We're really quite concerned in southern Australia," he says. "Even if we get the same degree of annual rainfall, if that’s falling in the hot time of the year, that’s more likely to be evaporated off."

Is this the new normal?
Cutting-edge research includes work to investigate whether droughts such as the current one are likely to become more prolonged and more frequent.
One area of study is looking at flash droughts, the unusually rapid intensification of some dry spells.
"This event is shorter at the moment [compared with some droughts in the past] but very sharp," Dr Jones says.
A paper out this year by researchers, including the weather bureau's Hanh Nguyen, has found most of eastern Australia "suddenly changed from wet conditions in December 2017 to dry conditions in January 2018". It cites sheep farmer Kym Thomas, from Cunnamulla in the northern Murray Darling Basin in Queensland, who was forced to sell all her livestock in early 2018. Local sheep numbers in her region dived to their lowest in 100 years.
One smoking gun is that rainforests are now burning.
"By June 2018, they reported that all types of trees were dying, leaving a desert-like landscape of sand dunes replacing the normally vegetated scene," the paper says.
As plants dry or die,the risk of major bushfires increases. And, as plants also help moderate the local climate through a process called evapotranspiration, when they die another hand brake on the heat is removed.
The dried-out Southern Macquarie Marshes nature reserve in August. Credit: Wolter Peeters
Some researchers believe the ambient conditions that led to the Millennium Drought have not yet broken down, says Greg Holland, an emeritus senior scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research and formerly with the bureau.
"It's quite possible ... we never came out of it," he says, adding a couple of wet years in 2010 and 2011 may have been "a bit of an hiatus in the middle".
Indeed, while drought is measured against historical averages, it may be time to redefine what we considered as normal. "One smoking gun is that rainforests are now burning," he says.

How much longer will this drought last?
Weather in Australia is being influenced by a pattern known as a positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), which reduces the chances for convection and the formation of north-west cloud bands that typically bring good rains to inland Australia, especially the Murray-Darling Basin.
This IOD pattern typically starts to break down by November's end as the northern monsoon arrives. While this year's seasonal cycle may be later than usual, at least one curb on rainfall should soon be wound back.
The weather bureau's three-monthly rainfall outlook indeed starts to shift the odds in favour of closer-to-average rains over much of the country by the tail end of summer. Before then, though, most of Australia is highly likely to have a drier and hotter than average November-February.
And it will probably take a lot more than near-normal rain to have this drought declared broken. As Professor Roderick says, the Millennium Drought had really only two very dry years – 2002 and 2006 – but is considered to have lasted about a decade.
While places such as Sydney have seen a steep fall in dam levels, 50 per cent faster over the past two years than during the Millennium Drought, its ability to tap a desalination plant for 15 per cent of its needs means it is "effectively immortal for water", says Professor Roderick.
Not so for towns such as Guyra in northern NSW, which has just eight months' supply, even with full dams. Many other towns had just one to two years worth of water, a problem that this drought has exposed, he says.

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04/11/2019

(US) Suing Big Oil Is How States Tackle Climate Change

Bloomberg - 

It’s not the best approach, but it’s better than none.
We’ve reached the “blame” stage in the climate grief cycle. Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
A growing number of cities and states want to turn climate change lawsuits against oil companies into the next tobacco or opioid litigation. In principle, that seems like a truly terrible idea. Such lawsuits will likely do even less to remedy the effects of climate change than similar suits did for lung cancer or opioid addiction. Yet on closer analysis, the climate change lawsuits may be the worst solution to mitigating climate change — except for all the others.
The analogy to Winston Churchill’s notorious defense of democracy isn’t an accident. In the American form of democracy, oil companies enjoy an almost unparalleled capacity to influence Congress and federal government regulators.
Local governments aren’t quite so captured. Recently, New York state’s lawsuit against Exxon began its trial; Massachusetts filed its own suit; and the Supreme Court declined an admittedly unusual request to stay suits being brought in state courts in Maryland, Rhode Island and Colorado.
Paradoxically, it’s precisely the splintered, self-interested nature of state and local lawsuits for damages that makes such litigation a potentially useful tool against big oil.
The proliferation of suits increases the likelihood that the oil companies will lose some suits, somewhere. That should be enough for analysts who cover oil companies to adjust their assessments of the probability of a lawsuit cascade like the one that culminated in the tobacco litigation settlement, and the one over opioids that is currently making its way towards a similar resolution.
And once enough states and localities start getting money out of the oil companies, the rest will jump on the bandwagon. Even if their political leaders would prefer to stay on the good side of big oil, the temptation of easy money will come to outweigh any instinct of restraint. Oil companies might respond by trying to get Congress to pass legislation protecting them from lawsuits. But by then, the states and municipalities will be lobbying in the other direction.
As I’ve noted before in the context of the opioid litigation, this is no way to run a railroad. Addressing major social crises by post-hoc lawsuits is not an efficient or logical — or indeed, particularly just — way to right wrongs on a large scale. The Anglo-American tort system was designed to resolve small-scale conflicts, not large ones, yet we’ve tried to reverse-engineer the system to deal with more fundamental social crises. The results have been mixed at best.
Nevertheless, the truth is that it’s particularly difficult to hold the energy companies responsible for the consequences of their conduct. Going back to John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, which at its peak controlled more than 90% of all oil refining in the U.S., perhaps no other industry in American history has been as resistant to regulation designed to dilute its power and lawmaking aimed at meaningful taxation. The enduring lobbying power of the big oil companies has long affected U.S. policy, foreign and domestic. And, of course, oil remains necessary to lubricate the U.S. economy.
But all that might is of limited utility against radically decentralized adversaries. For a glimpse into how this could play out, look at what’s currently underway in opioid litigation: not only states but also local governments — frustrated by state-level distribution of the tobacco settlement money and eager to get in on the action — have brought scores of suits of their own. The local suits have also brought in the for-profit, contingency-fee driven plaintiff’s bar.
This decentralization is a vice when it comes to rational, organized policymaking. But it’s a virtue when it comes to subverting the lobbying power of the energy industry in Washington.
Sprawling litigation like this usually turns into a cascade of self-interested municipalities trying to get a piece of the pie. At some point, failing to bring a lawsuit starts to seem like governmental malpractice. There’s money on the table, and local government that doesn’t try to get some of it is doing harm to its own citizens.
The upshot is that, while decentralized litigation isn’t an ideal way to address fundamental social problems, it could at least drive the oil industry to internalize some of the costs of the tremendous externalities that the burning of fossil fuels has imposed on the public. That isn’t cause for celebration. But it’s probably better than nothing.

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Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative