29/12/2019

The Big Science And Environment Stories Of 2019

BBC News - Paul Rincon

This year, millions of people around the world mobilised in protest to highlight the dire emergency facing our planet. Could 2019 prove to be the year when talk turned to action on the climate crisis? We looked back at some of the biggest stories of the year in science and the environment.

The year the world woke up?
Greta Thunberg (centre) is surrounded by demonstrators at a climate strike march in Vancouver, Canada in October. Reuters
In 2019, the reaction to the ongoing climate crisis switched up another gear. Inspired by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, the climate strike movement exploded this year. Millions took part in mass protests during the course of the year in countries as diverse as Australia, Uganda, Colombia, Japan, Germany and the UK.
Greta chose to make a statement when she sailed - rather than flew - to a UN climate meeting in New York. Summing up the trajectory for many who have joined popular climate movements, she told chief environment correspondent Justin Rowlatt: "I felt like I was the only one who cared about the climate and ecological crisis... it makes me feel good that I'm not alone in this fight."

 Greta Thunberg: "I feel like what I am doing is meaningful."

 The UK's Extinction Rebellion (XR) was making its point through non-violent direct action in 2019. The group, which aims to compel government action on climate change, occupied five prominent sites across central London in April 2019. Notably, they parked a pink boat in the middle of busy Oxford Circus bearing the phrase "Tell the Truth".
This year also saw the UK's Parliament - along with individual councils around the country - declare a climate emergency, granting what had been one of XR's key demands.
But there were also setbacks to political efforts aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The US - one of the world's top emitters - began the process of pulling out of the Paris Agreement. This deal was conceived in 2015 with the intention of keeping the global average temperature to below 2C. President Donald Trump said the pact was bad for the US economy and jobs.
This year's UN climate meeting - COP25 - ended in a deal many described as disappointing. The result means that the onus now falls on the UK to resolve many of the most challenging questions at COP26 in Glasgow in 2020.

'Ring of fire'
The first ever picture of a black hole: It's surrounded by a halo of bright gas pulled in by the hole's gravity. EHT Collaboration
In April, astronomers released the much anticipated first image of a black hole. This is a region of space from which nothing, not even light, can escape. The picture was taken by a network of eight telescopes across the world and shows what was described as "the heavyweight champion of black holes".
The 40 billion km-wide, spacetime-warping monster features an intense halo, or "ring of fire", around the black hole caused by superheated gas falling in.
The image caused a sensation and raised the profile of one computer scientist working on the project. 29-year-old Dr Katie Bouman helped develop an algorithm that allowed the image to be created. A picture of her with hands clasped over her mouth, barely containing her excitement at the astronomical picture on her laptop, quickly went viral.
But her fame led to trolling, with some accusing her of hogging credit for a male colleague's work. That team member, Dr Andrew Chael, quickly came to her defence. In an interview for the BBC 100 Women series, Dr Bouman said: "At first I was really taken aback by it. But... I do think it is important that we highlight the women in these roles."


Katie Bouman: "I wasn't expecting the attention I got."

Land and oceans under threat
Two major reports from the UN's climate science body revealed in sharp relief the extent to which humanity is ravaging Earth's land surface and her oceans. The first of these documents from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) warned that we must stop abusing the land if catastrophic climate change is to be avoided.
The report outlined how our actions were degrading soils, expanding deserts, flattening forests and driving other species to the brink of extinction. Scientists involved in the UN process also explained that switching to a plant-based diet could help combat climate change.
Even 1.5C of warming could devastate coral reefs. Getty Images
The second report, dealing with the world's oceans and frozen regions, detailed how waters are rising, ice is melting and species are being forced to move. As co-ordinating lead author Dr Jean-Pierre Gattuso said, "The blue planet is in serious danger right now, suffering many insults from many different directions and it's our fault." The authors believe that the changes we've set in motion are coming back to haunt us. Sea level rise will have profound consequences for low-lying coastal areas where almost 700 million people live.

Far-out fly-by
NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI/Roman Tkachenko
On 1 January, Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft made the most distant ever exploration of a Solar System object. Launched all the way back in 2006, it performed its primary task - a flyby study of the Pluto system - in 2015. But with plenty of gas still in the tank, mission scientists directed the spacecraft towards a new target, an object called 2014 MU 69.
MU 69, later dubbed Ultima Thule, and more recently Arrokoth, may be fairly typical of the primitive, icy objects occupying a distant zone of our Solar System known as the Kuiper Belt.
There are hundreds of thousands of objects out there like it, and their frigid state holds clues to how all planetary bodies came into being some 4.6 billion years ago.
Earlier this year, scientists presented details of what they had found at a major conference in Houston. They had determined that Arrokoth's two lobes formed when distinct objects collided at just 2-3m/s, about the speed you would run into a wall, according to team member Kirby Runyon.

Greenland's record melt
Climate scientist Steffen Olsen took this picture while travelling across melted sea ice in north-west Greenland. Steffen Olsen
In September, former UK chief scientist Sir David King said he was scared by the faster-than-expected pace of climate-related changes. One of the most shocking examples this year of the extreme events Sir David spoke of was surely the record ice melt in Greenland.
In June, temperatures soared well above normal levels in the Danish territory, causing about half its ice sheet surface to experience some melting. As David Shukman reported on his trip to the region, during 2019 alone, it lost enough ice to raise the average global sea level by more than a millimetre.
Underlining the rapid nature of the change, he returned to a glacier he had filmed in 2004 to find that it had thinned by as much as 100m over the period.


 A visit to the Sermilik glacier, which is rapidly melting.

Greenland's ice sheet stores so much frozen water that if the whole of it melted, it would raise sea levels worldwide by up to 7m. Although that would take hundreds or thousands of years, polar scientists told the American Geophysical Union meeting in December that Greenland was losing its ice seven times faster than in the 1990s.
Prof Andy Shepherd, of Leeds University, said: "The simple formula is that around the planet, six million people are brought into a flooding situation for every centimetre of sea-level rise."

Rocks from space
3D model of the asteroid Bennu, created using data from Nasa's Osiris-Rex mission. NASA
While civilisation-threatening asteroids are a staple of the movies, the probability of a sizeable space rock hitting our planet is very low. But as the dinosaurs found out, the risk does increase with time. Some 19,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) are being monitored, but many lurk undetected by telescopes, so there is always potential for a bolt-from-the-blue.
In March, Nasa scientists told the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) that a big fireball had exploded in Earth's atmosphere at the end of 2018. The space rock barrelled in without warning and detonated with 10 times the energy released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
Luckily, the rock blew up over the sea off Russia's remote Kamchatka Peninsula. But an outburst that size could have had serious consequences had it occurred nearer the ground, over a densely populated area.
Then in July, an asteroid the size of a football field buzzed Earth, coming within 65,000km of our planet's surface - about a fifth the distance to the Moon. The 100m-wide rock was detected just days before it passed Earth.
Meanwhile, two robotic spacecraft have been examining different NEAs close-up. Scientists working on Japan's Hayabusa mission reported that their asteroid, Ryugu, was made of rubble blasted off a bigger object. And the US Osiris-Rex spacecraft detected plumes of particles erupting from the surface of its target, Bennu.

 'Dirty secret' boosts warming
Electrical switchgear the world over often uses SF6 to prevent fires. Getty Images
The gas sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) isn't a household name. But as the most powerful greenhouse gas known to science, it could play an increasingly important role in discussions about climate change.
As environment correspondent Matt McGrath reported in September, levels are on the rise as an unintended consequence of the boom in green energy. The cheap, non-flammable gas is used to prevent short circuits and fires in electrical switches and circuit breakers known collectively as "switchgear".
As more wind turbines are built around the world, more of these electrical safety devices are being installed. The vast majority use SF6.
Although overall atmospheric concentrations are small for now, the global installed base of SF6 is expected to grow by 75% by 2030. Worryingly, there's no natural mechanism that destroys or absorbs the gas once it's been released.

Reigning supreme
Google
Quantum computers hold huge promise. The "classical" machines we use today compute in much the same way as we do by hand. Quantum computers promise faster speeds and the ability to solve problems that are beyond even the most powerful conventional types. But scientists have struggled to build devices with enough units of information (quantum bits) to make them competitive with classical computers.
A quantum machine had not surpassed a conventional one until this year. In October, Google announced that its advanced quantum processor, Sycamore, had achieved "quantum supremacy" for the first time. Researchers said it had performed a specific task in 200 seconds that would take the world's best supercomputer 10,000 years to complete.
IBM, which has been working on quantum computers of its own, questioned some of Google's figures. But the achievement represents an important step towards fulfilling some of the predictions.

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Report Shows 2019 Global Climate Problems

Canberra Times - Emily Beament, Press Association

Devastating Queensland floods are among climate disasters on every continent in 2019, a report says.
Australia was among every populated continent in 2019 hit by climate change-related extreme weather events, harming and displacing millions of people and costing billions, a new report by Christian Aid says.
A report from the charity identifies 15 of the most destructive droughts, floods, fires, typhoons and cyclones of the past year, which each caused damage of more than a $US1 billion ($A1.4 billion).
All of the disasters identified in the Counting the Cost report, including floods and bushfires in Australia, are linked with human-caused climate change, Christian Aid said on Thursday.
In some cases, studies have shown that climate change made them more likely or stronger, such as Cyclone Idai in Africa and floods in India and the US.
In others, the event was the result of shifts in weather patterns, such as higher temperatures and reduced rainfall making wildfires more likely, or warmer water temperatures that "supercharged" tropical storms.
"If anything, 2019 saw even more profound extreme weather events around the world than last year, including wildfires from the Amazon through to the Arctic, devastating out-of-season, simultaneous wildfires in California and Australia, winter heatwaves and devastating superstorms," Professor Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Centre at Pennsylvania State University, said.
"With each day now we are seemingly reminded of the cost of climate inaction in the form of ever-threatening climate change-spiked weather extremes."
Of the 15 events identified in the report, seven cost more than $US10 billion each, the charity said, and warned that the figures were likely to be an underestimate as in some cases they only include insured losses.
The most financially costly disasters identified by the report were wildfires in California, which caused $US25 billion in damage, followed by Typhoon Hagibis in Japan, which cost $US15 billion.
The next most financially costly were floods in the American Midwest in March ($US12.5 billion) and in China between June and August ($US12 billion, the report said.
The events with the greatest loss of life were floods in northern India which killed 1,900 and Cyclone Idai, which killed 1,300, Christian Aid said.
Cyclone Fani in India and Bangladesh in May displaced 3.4 million people.
The UK did not escape the weather extremes, with Storm Eberhard hitting the country along with Belgium and the Netherlands in early March, before moving east to affect Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and Ukraine.
The storm caused damage across Europe costing $US1 billion to $US1.7 billion.
Analysis suggests severe wind storms will be increasingly likely to hit Europe as temperatures rise, and in the UK insurance claims from these kind of storms could increase by 50 per cent in some parts of the country.
The UK is set to host key UN climate talks in Glasgow in November next year.
At the talks, countries will be under pressure to increase their ambition in cutting greenhouse gases, to meet promises under the international Paris Agreement on climate change to curb temperature rises to 1.5C or 2C to avoid the worst impacts of global warming.
Dr Kat Kramer, Christian Aid's global climate lead and report co-author, said 2020 will be a "huge year" for how the world responds to the growing climate crisis.
"We have the biggest summit since the Paris Agreement was signed five years ago taking place in Glasgow, where countries must commit to further cut their emissions in line with the 1.5C temperature limit, and boost funding for poor countries suffering from the kind of impacts seen in this report.
"Last year, emissions continued to rise, so it's essential that nations prepare these new and enhanced pledges for action to the Paris Agreement as soon as possible."

The 15 climate-related extreme weather events identified in the report are:
  • January: Argentina and Uruguay, floods $US2.5 billion, five killed;
  • January-February: Australia, floods $US1.9 billion, three killed;
  • March: Europe, Storm Eberhard $US1-1.7 billion, four killed;
  • March: Southern Africa, Cyclone Idai $US2 billion, 1,300 killed;
  • March-June: Midwest and South US, floods $US12.5 billion, three killed;
  • March-April: Iran, floods $US8.3 billion, 78 killed;
  • May: India and Bangladesh, Cyclone Fani $US8.1 billion, 89 killed;
  • June-August: China, floods $US12 billion, 300 killed;
  • June-October: North India, floods $US10 billion, 1,900 killed;
  • August: China, Typhoon Lekima $US10 billion, 101 killed;
  • September-October: Japan, Typhoon Faxai $US5-$US9 billion, three killed) and Hagibis ($US15 billion, 98 killed);
  • September: North America, Hurricane Dorian $US11.4 billion, 673 killed;
  • September: Spain, floods $US2.4 billion, seven killed;
  • September: Texas, US, Tropical Storm Imelda, $US8 billion, five killed.
  • October-November: California, US, fires $US25 billion, three killed.
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(AU) The Bizarre, Apocalyptic Effects Of Australia’s Extreme Heat

Quartz - Alexandra Ossola

Thirsty Koala. Oakbank Balhannah CFS via AP
It’s just the beginning of Australia’s summer, and the heat has already been breaking records. On Dec. 18, temperatures rose to a national average of 40.9°C (105.6°F)—and it doesn’t look like the heat will relent anytime soon.
There are some predictable effects for extreme heat, such as drought, the increased frequency of wildfires, and poor air quality. And such heat is, of course, dangerous for humans, who risk heat stroke and dehydration.
But there are also other effects on animals and the environment that are already proving surprising. This is likely a sign of things to come, as researchers anticipate that climate change will make extremely hot periods like this one more common in Australia.

Koalas are dehydrated
The animals, of which there are only an estimated 100,000 left, live in what are now some of the hottest parts of the country. They consume water by eating leaves. As Fast Company reports, one effect of climate change is that those leaves now contain less water than they used to. Some koalas have reportedly come up to humans to drink water out of a bottle. Others have been trapped in habitats that have been subject to wildfires and have had to be treated for burns on their fur and paws.

Cows can no longer mate
In the Sydney Morning Herald, veterinarian Gundi Rhoades details the effects of extreme heat she has seen on the cattle industry in New South Wales. “They are becoming infertile from their testicles overheating. Mares are not falling pregnant, and through the heat, piglets and calves are aborting,” she writes.

Large numbers of wild animals are dying off
An incomplete list of animals that have died en masse in recent years: bats, fish, and horses. Many more were killed on purpose—after 90 feral horses were found dead next to a water source that had dried up, another 50 horses were so dehydrated that they were considered too weak to be relocated and had to be killed. Ranchers in western Australia shot at least 2,500 camels that, according to NPR, “threatened to drain ranchers’ [water] reserves for cattle.”

Birds are grounded
A garden designer told the New York Times earlier this month that he saw lots of birds seeking shade under trees instead of their typical position perched atop them. “I’ve been walking around the parklands, turning on the taps at the bottom of the trees. [The birds] with their beaks open, [were] all gasping for air,” he said.

Tropical fish are exploring new coasts
Last year, the Queensland grouper, which usually lives in the coral reefs off the coast of Australia’s northeast state, was seen off the uncharacteristically warm coast of New Zealand, 3,000 km (1,800 miles) away.

Fruit is baking on trees
It’s likely not surprising that crops aren’t doing well in the extreme heat. But earlier this year, Kris Werner, head of Dried Tree Fruits Australia, told ABC that his peaches and nectarines have been cooking on the tree branches where they grew.

A strange hot ocean blob appeared
Among the least explained phenomena is a patch of warm water, 1.5 times the size of Texas, that has appeared off the southeast coast of New Zealand. Researchers aren’t quite sure how it formed and what its effect is, according to the Guardian, but they suspect it’s a natural variation that hasn’t been dispersed because there hasn’t been much wind.

A man cooked pork in his car
Stu Pengelly, a resident of Perth, noticed that temperatures would get real hot in his Datsun Sunny. So he put a piece of pork on a pan on the seat of the car. Over the next 10 hours he monitored the temperature, which reached 81°C (178°F). “My warning is do not leave anyone or anything precious to you in a hot car, not for a minute,” he wrote on Facebook.

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28/12/2019

The Biggest Lesson About Climate Change From 2019

OneZero - Bryan Walsh

We need to change how our economy is powered — and that will require politics



On December 11, two things happened that caught the attention of those invested in the fight against climate change, which at this point should include all of us. TIME magazine named 16-year-old Greta Thunberg its 2019 person of the year, lauding her for “creating a global attitudinal shift, transforming millions of vague, middle-of-the-night anxieties into a worldwide movement calling for urgent change.” And, Saudi Aramco — Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company and the largest producer of crude oil in the world — had the biggest initial public offering on record, raising more than $25 billion and ending its first day of trading with a valuation of $1.88 trillion, $600 billion more than its nearest competitor, Apple.
More than anything else, these two events — the recognition of a truly fresh voice and the market’s embrace of the company with the single largest carbon footprint in the world — tell us where the world stands on climate change. Thunberg, who this time last year was holding a lonely vigil outside the Swedish Parliament as part of the nascent “School Strike for Climate,” represents the rise of a strong climate activist movement, one that has embraced increasingly radical tactics and is backed up by growing public support. Aramco represents how entrenched fossil fuels remain in the global economy, despite all that effort. Thunberg shows us how far we came in 2019, while Aramco’s multi-trillion dollar valuation shows us how far we still have to go.
Spend long enough reporting on climate change, and you can develop a nasty case of deja vu. Every year ends with a UN climate summit — 2019’s edition stumbled to a close in Madrid in mid-December — where the same fights are had between developed and developing countries, between Europe and the United States. Carbon dioxide emissions will likely they hit a record high in 2019, and with them, the same warnings that we have only a few years left to drastically cut CO2 emissions or face global catastrophe. Scientists and environmentalists employ the same messages, doomsaying marbled with glimmers of hope. There are a few extreme weather events linked to climate change, like December’s record-breaking heat in Australia, presaging worse to come. And the next year, the cycle renews, as atmospheric carbon concentrations keep ticking up, now higher than they’ve been in millions of years.
There’s a reason that the Oxford Dictionaries named “climate emergency” as the word of the year for 2019.
The scientific news about climate change in 2019 was mostly bad, as it tends to be. The 2010s will almost certainly go down as the hottest decade on record, and July 2019 was the single hottest month on record. Sea ice levels in the Arctic — a key symptom for the rate of warming — keep dropping, with 2019 tied for the second-lowest levels on record. Ice in Greenland is melting seven times as fast as it was in the 1990s, directly contributing to rising oceans and putting the world on track for the highest projected figures for sea level rise by the end of this century. As the seas become hotter and more acidic, coral reefs — the nurseries of the oceans — suffer, and could be essentially gone by 2050. Extreme rainfall — one of the clearest effects of global warming — pounded much of the world, with the lower 48 U.S. states experiencing what’s likely to be the wettest year on record. Animal extinctions, droughts, wildfires — there’s a reason that the Oxford Dictionaries named “climate emergency” as the word of the year for 2019.
But more notable than the raw meteorological records broken in 2019 was the way that the knock-on effects of climate change on human society began to become clear. In October, amidst unusually hot and dry weather, California’s largest utility PG&E made the unprecedented decision to proactively cut off power to hundreds of thousands of customers, with little warning, to reduce the risk that live power lines could spark wildfires, as happened catastrophically in 2018. Teasing out the influence of warming temperatures on wildfires is tricky, and other factors — like growing human population in fire-prone areas — may play a larger role than climate change. But a hotter world is one that will likely experience more extreme weather, and the preemptive blackouts in California show what happens when the rickety infrastructure designed for a calmer climate meets a wilder future.
So that’s the bad news on the scientific front — and things weren’t much better politically. In November, President Trump began the process of formally withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, the 2015 international deal in which nearly 200 nations pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and support poorer nations as they dealt with the effects of climate change. Trump’s move was a long time coming, and it was merely one part of his administration’s efforts to backtrack on climate action whenever possible, whether that meant working to revoke California’s authority to regulate emissions from automobiles or rolling back Environmental Protection Agency rules on greenhouse gases.
But while Trump may be willfully pulling the United States in the opposite direction of meaningful climate action, those countries that have remained faithful to the Paris Agreement haven’t done much better. Only seven countries — based on their carbon emission reduction pledges and current policies — are on track to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius, which is the overall goal of the agreement. And when the nations of the world met at the annual year-end UN climate talks in Madrid, little was achieved. The United States and other large polluters like Australia, India, and China blocked even a nonbinding measure that would have encouraged — not mandated — countries to take on tougher emission reduction pledges next year. The bar had been set low for the negotiations, officially called the 25th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change. It still wasn’t cleared.
******
Ten years ago, the near-collapse of the UN climate talks would have fed a narrative of failure on global warming action. I know, because I was at the 2009 Copenhagen summit, where expectations for a true global deal on climate change were high, only to be dashed when those expectations met the reality of global politics. The U.S. president was different then, but the essential issue was largely the same — domestic politics, not international ones, ultimately drive what countries are willing to do on climate change.
And this is where the good news begins to trickle in, ever so slowly. Despite Trump’s pledges that he would bring back coal, global demand for the single biggest source of human-made greenhouse gas emissions fell for the first time in two years, thanks in large part to the continued closure of coal plants in the United States. (Less good is the fact that new coal plants continued to be opened in Asian countries like India and China, where the demand for new electricity generation is ravenous.) Solar power is getting cheaper — the average cost has declined 65% over the past five years — and is growing rapidly, as are other renewable sources of energy. Cheaper clean energy makes climate action more painless, and in turn more popular, enabling policies like Canada’s move to establish a federal price on carbon.
So too does the steady movement of public opinion in favor of climate action. A 2019 Pew poll found that people in most countries listed climate change as one of the two top global threats, while another recent Pew survey concluded that the percentage of Americans who believed climate change was a major threat to the well-being of the United States grew from 40% in 2013 to 57% this year. In Greta Thunberg, the climate movement has found a symbol to rally around, one whose genius lies in her ability to articulate the key injustice of climate change: the mortgaging of the future by the present. “The eyes of all future generations are upon you,” Thunberg told delegates at a UN climate summit in New York in September. “And if you choose to fail us, I say — we will never forgive you.”
The real obstacle to meaningful climate change action in 2020 and beyond is power — and I mean power in two ways. The first is power in the technical sense: How do we create new kinds of cleaner power production that will rapidly reduce carbon emissions while ensuring everyone on the planet has the resources needed to live a developed lifestyle? It’s an exceedingly tough problem, because it requires us to replace an entire global industrial energy system, and do it while the clock is running. It will require innovation on a scale we haven’t yet begun to approach. For all the growth in renewable energy in recent years, we’re not making progress nearly fast enough, in part because while clean power is on the rise, the world still remains highly dependent on energy from dirty sources like oil and coal. The fact that a company like Aramco, which exists to pull a highly polluting substance out of the ground, can be worth more than Apple and Facebook combined proves that fact.
If that’s going to change, it will require power of a different source — political power. In 2019, it became impossible to ignore that climate change had become an utterly partisan issue. Those Americans in the Pew survey who now believe that climate change is a major threat? Nearly all of them are self-identified Democrats. Republican attitudes were largely unchanged — 43% of moderate to liberal Republicans said they were worried about climate change, a figure that dropped to just 19% of conservative Republicans. By comparison, 94% of liberal Democrats and 75% of moderate to conservative Democrats saw climate change as a major threat.
But general public opinion matters less than the opinion of those actually making policy. Here, the partisan divide is much greater. According to data collected by the nonpartisan League of Conservation Voters (LCV), since Trump’s election Republicans in Congress have voted for pro-environment legislation just 5% of the time, compared to 92% of the time for Democrats. That’s not a political divide — that’s the Grand Canyon.
2019’s climate legacy will ultimately be decided by what happens in the elections of 2020, and beyond.
It wasn’t always this way. As the LCV’s data shows, back in the 1970s the two parties generally voted along the same lines for clean air and water protection. The EPA was created under and the Endangered Species Protection Act was signed by Republican President Richard Nixon. And many green groups, I think, still picture a country where the environment and climate is nonpartisan issue. But those days are long gone, and they’re no more likely to come back than we’ll see global carbon concentrations dip back below 400 ppm.
What’s true in the United States is true of the rest of the world. The Conservatives who just solidified their grip on power in the U.K. may not be as uniformly opposed to climate action as their Republican counterparts, but they won’t be as motivated to do something as the opposition Labour party. In Australia, one of the world’s biggest carbon emitters on a population basis, the country’s conservative government refuses to admit the reality of climate change — even as the nation is literally on fire. In Brazil, home to more of the Amazon than any other nation, President Jair Bolsanaro has slashed protections against deforestation.
The reality is that the most important action that can be taken isn’t putting solar panels on your roof or switching to paper straws or sharing a hashtag on social media. It’s not even marching through the streets with Greta Thunberg. It’s supporting efforts to put politicians who are willing to act on climate change into office. 2019’s climate legacy will ultimately be decided by what happens in the elections of 2020, and beyond.

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(AU) Cattle Have Stopped Breeding, Koalas Die Of Thirst: A Vet's Hellish Diary Of Climate Change

Sydney Morning Herald - Gundi Rhoades

Gundi Rhoades
Gundi Rhoades is a veterinarian, scientist, mother, beef cattle farmer and member of Veterinarians for Climate Action. 
Bulls cannot breed at Inverell. They are becoming infertile from their testicles overheating. Mares are not falling pregnant, and through the heat, piglets and calves are aborting.
My work as a veterinarian has changed so much. While I would normally test bulls for fertility, or herds of cattle for pregnancy, I no longer do, because the livestock has been sold. A client’s stud stock in Inverell has reduced from 2000 breeders to zero.
Gundi Rhoades is a member of Veterinarians for Climate Action based in Inverell.
I once assisted farmers who have spent their lives developing breeding programs, with historic bloodlines that go back 80 years. These stud farmers are now left with a handful of breeders that they can’t bear to part with, spending thousands keeping them fed, and going broke doing it.
Cattle that sold for thousands are now in the sale yards at $70 a head. Those classed as too skinny for sale are costing the farmer $130 to be destroyed.
They are all gone and it was all for nothing. The paddocks are bare, the dams dry, the grass crispy and brown. The whole region has been completely destocked and is devoid of life.For 22 years, I have been the vet in this once-thriving town in northern NSW, which, as climate change continues to fuel extreme heat, drought and bushfires, has become hell on Earth.
Here, we are seeing extreme weather events like never before. The other day we had about eight centimetres of rain in 20 minutes. These downpours are like rain bombs. They are so ferocious that a farmer lost all of his fences, and all it did was silt up the dam so he had to use a machine to excavate the mud.
Most farmers in my district have not a blade of grass remaining on their properties. Topsoil has been blown away by the terrible, strong winds this spring and summer. We have experienced the hottest days that I can remember, and right now I can’t even open any windows because my eyes sting and lungs hurt from bushfire smoke.
For days, I have watched as the bushland around us went up like a tinderbox. I just waited for the next day when my clinic would be flooded with evacuated dogs, cats, goats and horses in desperate need of water and food.
The impact of the drought on wildlife is devastating to watch, too. Members of the public are bringing us koalas, sugar gliders, possums, galahs, cockatoos and kangaroos on a daily basis.
The koalas affect me the most. To see these gorgeous, iconic animals dying from thirst is too hard to bear. We save some, but we lose just as many.
The whole town is devastated. My business has halved. But with no horses to breed, no cattle to test and care for, what am I going to do? I have worked day and night to build a future for my family, but who would want to buy our property out here? Who would want to buy a vet clinic in a town where there are no animals to treat because it’s too hot and dry? Where the cattle become infertile from the 40-degree heat. All this on black, baked ground.
I am 53 years old. Can I start again?
Climate change for us is every day, and I am not suffering on the same level as my friends, my clients and the helpless animals I treat. As a veterinarian I am becoming more and more distressed, not just about the state of my town, but the whole world.
Bushfire smoke moves over Inverell. 
Personally, I have had weeks when I just cry. It just bloody hurts me. I also have times when I get really angry and I start to swear, which I have never done in my life.
I also have times when I think about the potential this country has to create a renewable future with clean, green energy, and end our reliance on fossil fuels.
You only have to look at how resilient our farmers are in the face of devastating, extreme weather conditions to understand that we can make a powerful, meaningful difference to our future.
The government has no idea what it’s like for us. It has no empathy. Its members don't know how much it hurts when they just say yes to another coal mine.
I would invite Scott Morrison to come and see what life in Inverell is like. In case he chooses not to, I'll paint this picture for the country and hope people can start to realise and understand the devastating impact climate change is having. I hope they will take a stand for the people, the places and the animals whose voices are too small for him to hear.

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A Year Of Resistance: How Youth Protests Shaped The Discussion On Climate Change

The Conversation -  | 

Millions of youth have participated in climate strikes, negotiations, press conferences and events, demanding urgent climate action this year. (Shutterstock)

Greta Thunberg made history again this month when she was named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. The 16-year-old has become the face of youth climate action, going from a lone child sitting outside the Swedish parliament building in mid-2018 to a symbol for climate strikers — young and old — around the world.
Thunberg was far from the first young person to speak up in an effort to hold the powerful accountable for their inaction on climate change, yet the recognition of her efforts come at a time when world leaders will have to decide whether — or with how much effort — they will tackle climate change. Their actions or inactions will determine how much more vocal youth will become in 2020.
Thunberg coined the hashtag #FridaysforFuture in August 2018, inspiring students globally to hold their own climate strikes. Many of them argued that adults were not doing enough to address the climate catastrophe. Today’s youth saw themselves on the generational front lines of climate change, so they walked out of their schools to demand transformative action.
Students take part in a climate protest in London in March 2019. AP Photo/Matt Dunham
The strikes spread throughout the fall and winter, and spilled over to 2019. Students in the United Kingdom joined the movement on Feb. 15, 2019 with a mass mobilization, on the heels of Australia, Switzerland, Germany, Japan and many other countries around the world. They skipped school because they felt there was no point to school without a future, and their resistance took their grievances around generational injustice directly to elected officials.
Fridays for Future now estimates that more than 9.6 million strikers in 261 countries have participated in climate strikes. And Thunberg herself has met with hundreds of communities and numerous heads of state. While Thunberg’s celebrity has paved the way for the climate strikes to scale up — her work rests on decades of climate activism that have made this year’s mobilizations possible.

Environmental justice momentum
Youth climate activist Isra Hirsi will be 27 in 2030, the year that scientists say the planet will be stuck on a path towards dangerous warming.
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
Indigenous activists like Vanessa Gray, Nick Estes, Autumn Peltier, Kanahus Manuel and many others whose work bridges sovereignty and environmental damage have also played an important role. They have helped shift the climate movement toward the framework of climate justice, which acknowledges the intersections of colonialism, racialization, capitalism and climate change.
This moment also builds on environmental justice movements. Young activists like Isra Hirsi, Cricket Cheng, Maya Menezes and others have been building movements where a racial justice lens brings the climate movement into focus.
While these leaders may not have been recognized with Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, their work has significantly reshaped the climate movement. They are helping politicize a new generation of climate activists who understand climate change not as an isolated phenomenon, but one with roots in a capitalist system that is inherently racist, colonial, sexist and ableist.

Indigenous-led resistance
This year has also seen Indigenous-led resistance to climate change and the related oil, gas, fracking, hydro and other natural resource extraction too.
Secwepemc leaders and their allies have built tiny houses to prevent the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion from being forced through unceded Secwepemc territory. In Mi'kmaqi and Wolastoqey territory, there’s been resistance to fracking. Across northern Manitoba, Cree and Nishnaabe communities are resisting hydro projects they say will devastate their communities.
In British Columbia, nations have fought the Site C dam, which threatens to flood communities, change watersheds and escalate violence against women through work camps filled with men. Inuit and Cree communities in Labrador have resisted the Muskrat Falls hydro project.
The construction site of the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric facility in Newfoundland and Labrador in 2015. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan
This mirrors Indigenous-led environmental action against colonial energy projects around the world, including work in Karen communities in Thailand, Indigenous peoples in Colombia, Waorani peoples in Ecuador, among Saami peoples and countless other Indigenous nations.

Rejecting adult inaction
The climate strikes are an example of youth becoming politicized, rejecting adult inaction and demanding more from governments. In the coming years, we can expect the climate movement to keep growing, become even more politicized and escalate the intensity of tactics.
When governments resist reasonable requests, decades of social movements teach us that activists escalate. We can look at the histories of the HIV/AIDS movement, the Civil Rights movement, African liberation struggles and “poor people’s movements,” which show us that when people get pushed out, they turn up the pressure.
That escalation is necessary to win substantive change. Escalation is not usually seen by the public as nice as polite entreaties, but research clearly shows that direct action leads to change.
Greta’s recognition by Time Magazine will continue to inspire more young people to join their peers in demanding bold climate action like the Green New Deal and to use the legal system as a tool by suing governments over climate inaction.
If elected officials fail to act, we can expect these young people to adopt more disruptive tactics and do the work on the ground to elect new leaders. Even if they can’t yet vote themselves, there are many ways they can- and will continue to- shape our politics and our future.

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27/12/2019

5 Key Questions About Climate Change In The 2020s

CBS News - Jeff Berardelli*

Climate change and its impact on lives and livelihoods worldwide will no doubt be one of the biggest issues confronting us in the decade ahead. Here are five key questions and answers about the problem and what can be done about it.


Climate Change Brings Opportunities And Risk

Can we stop climate change and how will innovation help?
In short, yes, there are things we can do to help stop climate change, but it won't happen overnight. The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that we need to reduce our emissions 45% by 2030 if we want to keep global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. There is very little chance of that happening. However, there is no cliff at 1.5 degrees Celsius — meaning the closer we keep warming to 1.5 degrees, even if we overshoot, the better off we'll be. The bottom line is we can still avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
Here is the good news: Unlike many other big problems in life, we know how to fix this — by reducing our use of fossil fuels. And by aggressively combating this problem we can make an even better life for ourselves and future generations. Instead of focusing on denial or avoidance, we can embrace this as an opportunity. Combating climate change will inevitably create vast new industries — it already has — and millions of jobs, a rebirth of American ingenuity and a jolt to the U.S. and world economies.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the fastest growing occupations in this upcoming decade are solar and wind technician. With median salaries of $42,000 to $55,000 per year, these are good paying jobs, already being created right now all over the nation. Per unit of energy, for every one job in fossil fuels you need several jobs in solar — so this is a net creator of opportunity. Even with larger employment, because solar and wind are technologies and not commodities like oil, the prices keep falling. In many cases sustainable energy is already cheaper, and certainly cleaner, than fossil fuels.

Where could we see rapid change over the next decade?
One big concern is tipping points. There are three primary areas climate experts are watching:
  1. The Amazon rain forest is close to a tipping point because of the way land is being abused, combined with climate change. The forest is drying out. That is because rain forests create their own rainfall. The more they are fragmented and burned, the more they dry out and lose the ability to create their own source of rainfall. This means the Amazon is in danger of turning into a savanna — an ecosystem with far less tree-cover. If that happens, the capacity of the forest to absorb heat-trapping carbon dioxide is lost. We really need the Amazon to help lessen the impact of climate change worldwide.
  2. Permafrost, the frozen ground in the Arctic, is thawing fast and releasing carbon that has been locked up for thousands of years. Just this year it seems to have crossed a threshold from being a sink, storing carbon, to being a net emitter of carbon, acting as a feedback to warm the Earth even faster. This feedback will be critical to monitor this decade to see how fast permafrost melts.
  3. Loss of ice — both sea ice in the Arctic and land ice in Greenland and South Pole — is accelerating. Ice helps cool the Earth. The more we lose the faster the climate heats up which is another feedback loop. In addition, monitoring ice shelves on glaciers for instability will be a big telltale sign of how fast sea level will rise in the coming decade.

Arctic Report Card Reveals Alarming Effects Of Climate Change

 What does this mean for the economy and homeowners?
This is where climate change hits us in the wallet. As CBS News correspondent Carter Evans reported in November, homeowners are already seeing situations in California where insurance companies will not insure homes in the fire zone, or they are charging exponentially higher, unaffordable rates. As the impacts of extreme weather and sea level rise get worse, it is going to become more difficult for people who are exposed to risk to obtain 30-year mortgages to buy homes.
This pertains not only to fire-prone areas, but also to homes near sea level and along river basins at risk of flooding. When sellers or buyers can no longer obtain a reasonable mortgage or insurance, home values will plummet.


Wildfire Evacuations

Can the younger generation turn their ambition into policy?
This is what gives me hope. The younger generation is energized and engaged by this issue. They realize they will have to deal with what we adults helped cause. And they are not likely to give up until they get what they want. In one year, youth activists organized tens of millions of people all over the world in protest. They accomplished in one year what adults were not able to do in 30 years. Imagine what they can do in a decade!


Time Person Of The Year

 What impacts are people most concerned about?
I asked people on Twitter about their climate-related concerns. The No. 1 answer was migration and refugees. I agree. Climate change is going to continue to cause more extreme heat waves and droughts. Farms in vulnerable areas will turn from crop producing into deserts. Later this century, parts of the Earth near the equator will become so hot as to be uninhabitable, or at the very least not supportive for people to make a living. Millions will be forced to move to survive. Some scientists say we are already witnessing this happen. The concern is that even more widespread migration will create a massive international humanitarian and security issue.

*Meteorologist Jeff Berardelli is a CBS News Climate & Weather Contributor.

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