Study: One-Third Of Plant And Animal Species Could Be Gone In 50 Years

University of Arizona - Daniel Stolte

University of Arizona researchers studied recent extinctions from climate change to estimate the loss of plant and animal species by 2070. Their results suggest that as many as one in three species could face extinction unless warming is reduced.

The common giant tree frog from Madagascar is one of many species impacted by recent climate change. (Photo: John J. Wiens)

Accurately predicting biodiversity loss from climate change requires a detailed understanding of what aspects of climate change cause extinctions, and what mechanisms may allow species to survive.
A new study by University of Arizona researchers presents detailed estimates of global extinction from climate change by 2070. By combining information on recent extinctions from climate change, rates of species movement and different projections of future climate, they estimate that one in three species of plants and animals may face extinction. Their results are based on data from hundreds of plant and animal species surveyed around the globe.

A dead Alligator Juniper from Arizona. Unable to cope with rising temperature extremes, repeated surveys have shown that this species is literally being pushed up the mountain slopes under the impact of climate change. (Photo: Ramona Walls)

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study likely is the first to estimate broad-scale extinction patterns from climate change by incorporating data from recent climate-related extinctions and from rates of species movements.
To estimate the rates of future extinctions from climate change, Cristian Román-Palacios and John J. Wiens, both in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, looked to the recent past. Specifically, they examined local extinctions that have already happened, based on studies of repeated surveys of plants and animals over time.
Román-Palacios and Wiens analyzed data from 538 species and 581 sites around the world. They focused on plant and animal species that were surveyed at the same sites over time, at least 10 years apart. They generated climate data from the time of the earliest survey of each site and the more recent survey. They found that 44% of the 538 species had already gone extinct at one or more sites.
"By analyzing the change in 19 climatic variables at each site, we could determine which variables drive local extinctions and how much change a population can tolerate without going extinct," Román-Palacios said. "We also estimated how quickly populations can move to try and escape rising temperatures. When we put all of these pieces of information together for each species, we can come up with detailed estimates of global extinction rates for hundreds of plant and animal species."
The study identified maximum annual temperatures — the hottest daily highs in summer — as the key variable that best explains whether a population will go extinct. Surprisingly, the researchers found that average yearly temperatures showed smaller changes at sites with local extinction, even though average temperatures are widely used as a proxy for overall climate change. 
"This means that using changes in mean annual temperatures to predict extinction from climate change might be positively misleading," Wiens said.
Previous studies have focused on dispersal — or migration to cooler habitats — as a means for species to "escape" from warming climates. However, the authors of the current study found that most species will not be able to disperse quickly enough to avoid extinction, based on their past rates of movement. Instead, they found that many species were able to tolerate some increases in maximum temperatures, but only up to a point. They found that about 50% of the species had local extinctions if maximum temperatures increased by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius, and 95% if temperatures increase by more than 2.9 degrees Celsius.
Projections of species loss depend on how much climate will warm in the future.
"In a way, it's a 'choose your own adventure,'" Wiens said. "If we stick to the Paris Agreement to combat climate change, we may lose fewer than two out of every 10 plant and animal species on Earth by 2070. But if humans cause larger temperature increases, we could lose more than a third or even half of all animal and plant species, based on our results."
The paper's projections of species loss are similar for plants and animals, but extinctions are projected to be two to four times more common in the tropics than in temperate regions.
"This is a big problem, because the majority of plant and animal species occur in the tropics," Román-Palacios said.

Links

• Recent responses to climate change reveal the drivers of species extinction and survival
• A growing need for species to adapt to a changing world
• Extinction risk from global warming
• First mammal species recognized as extinct due to climate change
• Recent responses to climate change reveal the drivers of species extinction and survival
• Joel Sartore on saving endangered species – and ourselves
• Last month was the hottest January on record, according to scientists
• Arctic permafrost is thawing so fast it's leaving sinkholes
• World needs to break its addiction to coal to fight climate change, U.N. chief says
• Scientists alarmed to discover warm water at "vital point" beneath Antarctica's "doomsday glacier"
• 2,000 years of Earth's climate in one simple chart
• Does planting a tree really offset your carbon footprint?

(AU) Mammal That Mates Itself To Death Will Struggle Under Climate Change, Scientists Say

Newsweek - Aristos Georgiou



A small Australian mammal that mates itself to death will struggle under climate change, scientist have said.
For a study published in the journal Frontiers in Physiology, a team of researchers investigated how climate change may affect the yellow-footed antechinus, or Antechinus flavipes—a marsupial that has a rare and unusual mating behavior known as "male semelparity." This is where a whole generation of males die in their first mating season.
In the case of the yellow-footed antechinus, the mating season may last two to three weeks and takes place in the Australian winter and spring months, depending on where in the country a given population is located. In this time the males succumb to stress and exhaustion after having copulated with so many female partners.In the latest paper, the scientists found that if this marsupial experiences warmer temperatures during the early stages of its life, it may be less capable of adapting to and surviving the winter. The marsupials are born between September and November and so they spend their first months in the Australian summer and autumn, which are expected to become hotter under climate change. This could mean that many males will be unable to survive the winter in future, so would be incapable of mating.
The scientists, led by Clare Stawski from the University of New England and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, exposed captive-bred juveniles to either "cold" or "warm" temperatures—17 and 25 degrees Celsius (63 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit.) The mammals were about 100 days old at the beginning of this experiment, and had just finished being weaned by their mothers.
Stawski and colleagues then monitored various factors such as body mass and the activity levels of the animals.
Once the juveniles had reached adult size, at around 220 days of age, the scientists conducted a series of temperature tests and measured the basal metabolic rate—the number of calories required to keep the body functioning at the most basic level while it is resting—of the animals.
In one test, the mammals were placed in a chamber where the temperature was 18 degrees Celsius. This was then increased by 4 degree Celsius increments every two hours, until the temperature reached 30 degrees.
In the second test, the initial temperature in the chamber began at 14 degrees Celsius and was reduced to 10 degrees after three hours.
The results showed that temperatures experienced by juvenile yellow-footed antechinuses during development can impact the behavior and physiology of the animal.
Juveniles placed in the "cold" group just after being weaned were able to adapt their metabolic rate as the temperature around them changed. But the metabolic rate of those juveniles that had initially been placed in the warm group did not change when exposed to colder temperatures.

Stock photo: A yellow-footed antechinus. iStock

According to the researchers, this indicates that the juveniles raised in warm conditions may have less "phenotypic plasticity"—the ability of an organism to adapt to environmental influences.
This has significant implications for the yellow-footed antechinus given temperatures in Australia are expected to rise with climate change, according to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)—an Australian government agency.
"We hypothesize that as individuals raised in warm conditions appear to have less phenotypic flexibility, they may not be able to respond effectively to prolonged increases in temperature and therefore struggle throughout winter," Stawski told ABC News.
This lack of phenotypic plasticity in juveniles raised in warm conditions does not bode well for a species that is dependent on a single breeding event and experiences "a complete population turnover," the authors wrote in the study.
This makes the species particularly vulnerable to potentially deadly environmental events, such as heatwaves, which are expected to become more common under climate change, according to CSIRO.
If these events occur in the periods when there are no males, and only pregnant or lactating females, there is a chance that significant numbers of females could die, meaning fewer offspring, leading to a subsequent reduction in the population.
While the latest study focused only on the yellow-footed antechinus, which has a relatively wide distribution across Australia, other species in the same genus (group of species) with smaller ranges may be even more severely affected by climate change, Andrew Baker from the Queensland University of Technology, Australia, who was not involved in the paper, told ABC.
Scientists only know about a handful of species that display male semelparity. Most of these are invertebrates, or animals without a backbone, making Antechinus an unusual case.
The Frontiers in Physiology paper is not the only recent piece of research to highlight the plight of animals in Australia under climate change.
One study published in the journal Biological Conservation found that populations of the iconic platypus were at risk in the face of increasingly dry conditions. The researchers found that under current climate projections, platypus numbers could decline by up to 73 percent by 2070.

Links

• Study: One-Third Of Plant And Animal Species Could Be Gone In 50 Years
• Starry Night Harlequin Toad Rediscovered After Being Lost to Science
• Australia's Severe Wildfires Were Predicted by Government Over 10 Years Ago
• Platypuses Are at Risk of Extinction, Experts Warn
• Recent responses to climate change reveal the drivers of species extinction and survival
• A growing need for species to adapt to a changing world
• Extinction risk from global warming
• First mammal species recognized as extinct due to climate change
• Recent responses to climate change reveal the drivers of species extinction and survival
• Joel Sartore on saving endangered species – and ourselves
• Last month was the hottest January on record, according to scientists
• Arctic permafrost is thawing so fast it's leaving sinkholes
• World needs to break its addiction to coal to fight climate change, U.N. chief says
• Scientists alarmed to discover warm water at "vital point" beneath Antarctica's "doomsday glacier"
• 2,000 years of Earth's climate in one simple chart
• Does planting a tree really offset your carbon footprint?

Landing A Blow Against Climate Change

Project Syndicate - Ibrahim Thiaw

For the last decade, bioenergy has been confined to the sidelines of climate-policy debates, owing to the environmental problems associated with its production. But recent innovations have made this option for supplying sustainable, renewable energy not just viable, but necessary.

Kambou Sia/AFP via Getty Images

BONN – In the face of climate change, providing reliable supplies of renewable energy to all who need it has become one of the biggest development challenges of our time. Meeting the international community’s commitment to keep global warming below 1.5-2°C, relative to preindustrial levels, will require expanded use of bioenergy, carbon storage and capture, land-based mitigation strategies like reforestation, and other measures.
The problem is that these potential solutions tend to be discussed only at the margins of international policy circles, if at all. And yet experts estimate that the global carbon budget – the amount of additional carbon dioxide we can still emit without triggering potentially catastrophic climate change – will run out in a mere ten years. That means there is an urgent need to ramp up bioenergy and land-based mitigation options. We already have the science to do so, and the longer we delay, the greater the possibility that these methods will no longer be viable.
Renewable energy is the best option for averting the most destructive effects of climate change. For six of the last seven years, the global growth of renewable-energy capacity has outpaced that of non-renewables. But while solar and wind are blazing new trails, they still are not meeting global demand.
A decade ago, bioenergy was seen as the most likely candidate to close or at least reduce the supply gap. But its development has stalled for two major reasons. First, efforts to promote it had negative unintended consequences. The incentives used to scale it up led to the rapid conversion of invaluable virgin land. Tropical forests and other vital ecosystems were transformed into biofuel production zones, creating new threats of food insecurity, water scarcity, biodiversity loss, land degradation, and desertification.
In its Special Report on Climate Change and Land last August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed that scale and context are the two most important factors to consider when assessing the costs and benefits of biofuel production. Large monocultural biofuel farms simply are not viable. But biofuel farms that are appropriately placed and fully integrated with other activities in the landscape can be sustained ecologically.
Equally important is the context in which biofuels are being produced – meaning the type of land being used, the variety of biofuel crops being grown, and the climate-management regimes that are in place. The costs associated with biofuel production are significantly reduced when it occurs on previously degraded land, or on land that has been freed up through improved agriculture or livestock management.
Under the 1.5°C warming scenario, an estimated 700 million hectares of land will be needed for bioenergy feedstocks. There are multiple ways to achieve this level of bioenergy production sustainably. For example, policies to reduce food waste could free up to 140 million additional hectares. And some portion of the two billion hectares of land that have been degraded in past decades could be restored.
The second reason that bioenergy stalled is that it, too, emits carbon. This challenge persists, because the process of carbon capture remains contentious. We simply do not know what long-term effects might follow from capturing carbon and compressing it into hard rock for storage underground. But academic researchers and the private sector are working on innovations to make the technology viable. Compressed carbon, for example, could be used as a building material, which would be a game changer if scaled up to industrial-level use.
Moreover, whereas traditional bioenergy feedstocks such as acacia, sugarcane, sweet sorghum, managed forests, and animal waste pose sustainability challenges, researchers at the University of Oxford are now experimenting with the more water-efficient succulent plants. Again, succulents could be a game changer, particularly for dryland populations who have a lot of arid degraded land suitable for cultivation. Many of these communities desperately need energy, but would struggle to maintain solar and wind facilities, owing to the constant threat posed by dust and sandstorms.
In Garalo commune, Mali, for example, small-scale farmers are using 600 hectares previously allocated to water-guzzling cotton crops to supply jatropha oil to a hybrid power plant. And in Sweden, the total share of biomass used as fuel – most of it sourced from managed forests – reached 47% in 2017, according to Statistics Sweden. Successful models such as these can show us the way forward.
Ultimately, a reliable supply of energy is just as important as an adequate supply of productive land. That will be especially true in the coming decades, when the global population is expected to exceed 9.7 billion people. And yet, if global warming is allowed to reach 3°C, the ensuing climatic effects would make almost all land-based mitigation options useless.
That means we must act now to prevent the loss of vital land resources. We need stronger governance mechanisms to keep food, energy, and environmental needs in balance. Failing to unleash the full potential of the land-based mitigation options that are currently at our disposal would be an unforgiveable failure, imposing severe consequences on people who have contributed the least to climate change.
Bioenergy and land-based mitigation are not silver bullets. But they will buy us some time. As such, they must be part of the broader response to climate change. The next decade may be our last chance to get the land working for everyone.

Links

• The Definition of Bioenergy
• The role of bioenergy in a climate-changing world
• Modern bioenergy is critical to meeting global climate change goals
• UN science reports show biofuels are essential to climate action
• Bioenergy can land a blow against climate change 
• Bioenergy plantations could fight climate change—but threaten food crops, U.N. panel warns

‘The Only Uncertainty Is How Long We’ll Last’: A Worst Case Scenario For The Climate In 2050*

The Guardian - Christiana Figueres | Tom Rivett-Carnac

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis, a new book by the architects of the Paris climate accords, offers two contrasting visions for how the world might look in thirty years (read the best case scenario here)

‘The air can taste slightly acidic, sometimes making you feel nauseated.’ Photograph: Arctic-Images/Corbis

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis is a passionate call to arms written by Christiana Figures and Tom Rivett-Carnac. Christiana Figueres was the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 2010-2016 and the public face of the most pivotal climate agreement in history, the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. Tom Rivett-Carnac was Christiana's political strategist. Together they are the co-founders of Global Optimism, an organization focused on creating environmental and social change. They outline two scenarios for our future: How life on Earth will be by 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris Agreement climate targets; or How it will look and feel to live in a carbon neutral, regenerative world.

It is 2050. Beyond the emissions reductions registered in 2015, no further efforts were made to control emissions. We are heading for a world that will be more than 3C warmer by 2100.
The first thing that hits you is the air. In many places around the world, the air is hot, heavy and, depending on the day, clogged with particulate pollution. Your eyes often water. Your cough never seems to disappear. You think about some countries in Asia, where, out of consideration, sick people used to wear white masks to protect others from airborne infection. Now you often wear a mask to protect yourself from air pollution. You can no longer simply walk out your front door and breathe fresh air: there might not be any. Instead, before opening doors or windows in the morning, you check your phone to see what the air quality will be.

Melting permafrost releases ancient microbes today’s humans have never been exposed to and have no resistance to

Fewer people work outdoors and even indoors the air can taste slightly acidic, sometimes making you feel nauseated. The last coal furnaces closed 10 years ago, but that hasn’t made much difference in air quality around the world because you are still breathing dangerous exhaust fumes from millions of cars and buses everywhere. Our world is getting hotter. Over the next two decades, projections tell us that temperatures in some areas of the globe will rise even higher, an irreversible development now utterly beyond our control. Oceans, forests, plants, trees and soil had for many years absorbed half the carbon dioxide we spewed out. Now there are few forests left, most of them either logged or consumed by wildfire, and the permafrost is belching greenhouse gases into an already overburdened atmosphere. The increasing heat of the Earth is suffocating us and in five to 10 years, vast swaths of the planet will be increasingly inhospitable to humans. We don’t know how hospitable the arid regions of Australia, South Africa and the western United States will be by 2100. No one knows what the future holds for their children and grandchildren: tipping point after tipping point is being reached, casting doubt on the form of future civilisation. Some say that humans will be cast to the winds again, gathering in small tribes, hunkered down and living on whatever patch of land might sustain them.
More moisture in the air and higher sea surface temperatures have caused a surge in extreme hurricanes and tropical storms. Recently, coastal cities in Bangladesh, Mexico, the United States and elsewhere have suffered brutal infrastructure destruction and extreme flooding, killing many thousands and displacing millions. This happens with increasing frequency now. Every day, because of rising water levels, some part of the world must evacuate to higher ground. Every day, the news shows images of mothers with babies strapped to their backs, wading through floodwaters and homes ripped apart by vicious currents that resemble mountain rivers. News stories tell of people living in houses with water up to their ankles because they have nowhere else to go, their children coughing and wheezing because of the mould growing in their beds, insurance companies declaring bankruptcy, leaving survivors without resources to rebuild their lives. Contaminated water supplies, sea salt intrusions and agricultural runoff are the order of the day. Because multiple disasters are often happening simultaneously, it can take weeks or even months for basic food and water relief to reach areas pummelled by extreme floods. Diseases such as malaria, dengue, cholera, respiratory illnesses and malnutrition are rampant.

The aftermath of a wildfire in northern California, November 2018. Photograph: Noah Berger/AP

You try not to think about the 2 billion people who live in the hottest parts of the world, where, for upwards of 45 days per year, temperatures skyrocket to 60C (140F), a point at which the human body cannot be outside for longer than about six hours because it loses the ability to cool itself down. Places such as central India are becoming increasingly challenging to inhabit. Mass migrations to less hot rural areas are beset by a host of refugee problems, civil unrest and bloodshed over diminished water availability.
Food production swings wildly from month to month, season to season, depending on where you live. More people are starving than ever before. Climate zones have shifted, so some new areas have become available for agriculture (Alaska, the Arctic), while others have dried up (Mexico, California). Still others are unstable because of the extreme heat, never mind flooding, wildfire and tornadoes. This makes the food supply in general highly unpredictable. Global trade has slowed as countries seek to hold on to their own resources.
Countries with enough food are resolute about holding on to it. As a result, food riots, coups and civil wars are throwing the world’s most vulnerable from the frying pan into the fire. As developed countries seek to seal their borders from mass migration, they too feel the consequences. Most countries’ armies are now just highly militarised border patrols. Some countries are letting people in, but only under conditions approaching indentured servitude.

A young boy picks material from a rubbish dump in Taez, Yemen. Photograph: Ahmad Al-Basha/AFP via Getty Images

Those living within stable countries may be physically safe, yes, but the psychological toll is mounting. With each new tipping point passed, they feel hope slipping away. There is no chance of stopping the runaway warming of our planet and no doubt we are slowly but surely heading towards some kind of collapse. And not just because it’s too hot. Melting permafrost is also releasing ancient microbes that today’s humans have never been exposed to and, as a result, have no resistance to. Diseases spread by mosquitoes and ticks are rampant as these species flourish in the changed climate, spreading to previously safe parts of the planet, increasingly overwhelming us. Worse still, the public health crisis of antibiotic resistance has only intensified as the population has grown denser in inhabitable areas and temperatures continue to rise.The demise of the human species is being discussed more and more. For many, the only uncertainty is how long we’ll last, how many more generations will see the light of day. Suicides are the most obvious manifestation of the prevailing despair, but there are other indications: a sense of bottomless loss, unbearable guilt and fierce resentment at previous generations who didn’t do what was necessary to ward off this unstoppable calamity.

* This is an edited extract from The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis

Links

• ‘Air Is Cleaner Than Before The Industrial Revolution’: A Best Case Scenario For The Climate In 2050‘The Only Uncertainty Is How Long We’ll Last’: A Worst Case Scenario For The Climate In 2050
• The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis
• Christiana Figueres on the climate emergency: ‘This is the decade and we are the generation’
• Christiana Figueres: the woman tasked with saving the world from global warming
• This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate review – Naomi Klein’s powerful and urgent polemic
• Extreme weather is 'silver lining' for climate action: Christiana Figueres

‘Air Is Cleaner Than Before The Industrial Revolution’: A Best Case Scenario For The Climate In 2050*

The Guardian - Christiana Figueres | Tom Rivett-Carnac

The Future We Choose, a new book by the architects of the Paris climate accords, offers contrasting visions for how the world might look in thirty years (read the worst case scenario here)

‘The ambient feeling of living on what has again become a green planet has been transformative.’ Photograph: Ichiro/Getty Images

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis is a passionate call to arms written by Christiana Figures and Tom Rivett-Carnac. Christiana Figueres was the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 2010-2016 and the public face of the most pivotal climate agreement in history, the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. Tom Rivett-Carnac was Christiana's political strategist. Together they are the co-founders of Global Optimism, an organization focused on creating environmental and social change. They outline two scenarios for our future: How life on Earth will be by 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris Agreement climate targets; or How it will look and feel to live in a carbon neutral, regenerative world.

It is 2050. We have been successful at halving emissions every decade since 2020. We are heading for a world that will be no more than 1.5C warmer by 2100.

In most places in the world, the air is moist and fresh, even in cities. It feels a lot like walking through a forest and very likely this is exactly what you are doing. The air is cleaner than it has been since before the Industrial Revolution. We have trees to thank for that. They are everywhere.
It wasn’t the single solution we required, but the proliferation of trees bought us the time we needed to vanquish carbon emissions. When we started, it was purely practical, a tactic to combat climate crisis by relocating the carbon: the trees took carbon dioxide out of the air, released oxygen and put the carbon back where it belongs, in the soil. This, of course, helped to diminish climate crisis, but the benefits were even greater. On every sensory level, the ambient feeling of living on what has again become a green planet has been transformative, especially in cities.
Reimagining and restructuring cities was crucial to solving the climate challenge puzzle. But further steps had to be taken, which meant that global rewilding efforts had to reach well beyond the cities. The forest cover worldwide is now 50% and agriculture has evolved to become more tree-based. The result is that many countries are unrecognisable, in a good way. No one seems to miss wide-open plains or monocultures. Now we have shady groves of nut and orchards, timber land interspersed with grazing, parkland areas that spread for miles, new havens for our regenerated population of pollinators.

Drones organised along aerial corridors are now delivering packages, further reducing the need for vehicles

A major part of the shift to net-zero emissions was a focus on electricity; achieving the goal required not only an overhaul of existing infrastructure but also a structural shift. In some ways, breaking up grids and decentralising power proved easy. We no longer burn fossil fuels. Most of our energy now comes from renewable sources such as wind, solar, geothermal and hydro. All homes and buildings produce their own electricity – every available surface is covered with solar paint that contains millions of nanoparticles, which harvest energy from the sunlight, and every windy spot has a wind turbine. If you live on a particularly sunny or windy hill, your house might harvest more energy than it can use, in which case the energy will simply flow back to the smart grid. Because there is no combustion cost, energy is basically free. It is also more abundant and more efficiently used than ever.

Homes and buildings all over the world are becoming self-sustaining far beyond their electrical needs. For example, all buildings now collect rainwater and manage their own water use. Renewable sources of electricity make possible localised desalination, which means clean drinking water can now be produced on demand anywhere in the world. We also use it to irrigate hydroponic gardens, flush toilets and shower.

 ‘The electric motor is simply a better way of powering vehicles.’ Photograph: Lucinda Merano/Getty Images/EyeEm

Petrol and diesel cars are anachronisms. Most countries banned their manufacture in 2030, but it took another 15 years to get internal combustion engines off the road completely.
What’s strange is that it took us so long to realise that the electric motor is simply a better way of powering vehicles. It gives you more torque, more speed when you need it, and the ability to recapture energy when you brake and it requires dramatically less maintenance.
We also share cars without thinking twice. In fact, regulating and ensuring the safety of driverless ride sharing were the biggest transportation hurdles for cities to overcome. The goal has been to eliminate private ownership of vehicles by 2050 in major metropolitan areas. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re making progress.
We have also reduced land transport needs. Drones organised along aerial corridors are now delivering packages, further reducing the need for vehicles. Thus we are currently narrowing roads, eliminating parking spaces and investing in urban planning projects that make it easier to walk and bike in the city.
While we may have successfully reduced carbon emissions, we’re still dealing with the aftereffects of record levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The long-living greenhouse gases have nowhere to go other than the already-loaded atmosphere, so they are still causing increasingly extreme weather, though it’s less extreme than it would have been had we continued to burn fossil fuels.
Glaciers and Arctic ice are still melting and the sea is still rising. Severe droughts and desertification are occurring in the western United States, the Mediterranean and parts of China. Ongoing extreme weather and resource degradation continue to multiply existing disparities in income, public health, food security and water availability. But now governments have recognised climate crisis factors for the threat multipliers that they are. That awareness allows us to predict downstream problems and head them off before they become humanitarian crises.
Everyone understands that we are all in this together. A disaster that occurs in one country is likely to occur in another in only a matter of years. It took us a while to realise that if we worked out how to save the Pacific islands from rising sea levels this year, then we might find a way to save Rotterdam in another five years.
The zeitgeist has shifted profoundly. How we feel about the world has changed, deeply. And, unexpectedly, so has how we feel about one another.

‘All homes and buildings produce their own electricity.’ Photograph: Lari Bat/Getty Images/iStockphoto

When the alarm bells rang in 2020, thanks in large part to the youth movement, we realised that we suffered from too much consumption, competition, and greedy self-interest. Our commitment to these values and our drive for profit and status had led us to steamroll our environment. As a species, we were out of control and the result was the near-collapse of our world.
We emerged from the climate crisis as more mature members of the community of life, capable of not only restoring ecosystems but also of unfolding our dormant potentials of human strength and discernment. Humanity was only ever as doomed as it believed itself to be. Vanquishing that belief was our true legacy.

* This is an edited extract from The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis

Links

• ‘The Only Uncertainty Is How Long We’ll Last’: A Worst Case Scenario For The Climate In 2050
• The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis
• Christiana Figueres on the climate emergency: ‘This is the decade and we are the generation’
• Christiana Figueres: the woman tasked with saving the world from global warming
• This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate review – Naomi Klein’s powerful and urgent polemic
• Extreme weather is 'silver lining' for climate action: Christiana Figueres

(AU) Climate Summit Calls For Urgent Action After Australia's Fire-Hit Summer

The Guardian - Ben Doherty

Forceful declaration calls for governments to set short-term zero emissions target to avoid catastrophic warming

A firefighter near Potato Point on NSW south coast on 23 January. A Climate Emergency Summit held in Melbourne this weekend has called the bushfire crisis a ‘harbinger of life and death on a hotter earth’. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

The megafires of Australia’s summer “are a harbinger of life and death on a hotter Earth”, a climate summit has said in a forceful declaration for urgent and dramatic climate action.
The Climate Emergency Summit, held in Melbourne this week and of which Guardian Australia was a partner, released a declaration saying the warming world was a clear threat to Australian society and civilisation.
“The climate is already dangerous – in Australia and the Antarctic, in Asia and the Pacific – right around the world. The Earth is unacceptably too hot now,” the declaration said.
“If the climate warms 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, the Great Barrier Reef will likely be lost, sea levels could rise metres and massive global carbon stores such as the Amazon and Greenland, will hit tipping points, releasing millions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.”
Signatories to the declaration included Ian Dunlop, Carmen Lawrence, John Hewson, Tim Costello and Kerryn Phelps. It warned that even the Paris agreement emissions reduction targets would put the world on a path to 3.5C warming by 2100, and 4C to 5C warming “when long-term climate-system feedbacks were factored in”.
“National security analysts warn that 3C may result in “outright social chaos”, and 4C is considered incompatible with the maintenance of human civilisation.
“Climate change must be accepted as an overriding threat to national and human security, with the response being the highest priority at national and global levels.”
The declaration called on governments to commit to rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero, to drawing down carbon concentrations already in the atmosphere, and to integrating adaptation and resilience measures into restructured national and global economies.
The executive director of Micah Australia, Tim Costello, told the Guardian the declaration was a rallying cry to emphasise the critical nature of the climate challenge.
“This summit was people from military, agriculture, from politics, from economics: we’re all frustrated, we want to see action and a breakthrough, we’re all working hard in our areas, but none of us actually know what will be the tipping point, when it will finally be widely realised that this is an emergency and we have to decarbonise,” Costello said.
“Like people understood the emergency of war, there will be a suspension of politics and human rights if we don’t deal with climate.”
He said party politics had failed Australia, and shown itself incapable of dealing with the climate emergency.
And, he argued, climate change as an existential threat had long been a reality for communities across Australia’s region.
“I have seen the poorest communities already losing lives and livelihoods for years from climate change. Now it is our existential challenge after these bushfires, whereas at the Pacific Islands Forum our prime minister was told ‘it is only economic for you, it is existential survival for us’.”
The declaration said Australia’s political leaders were especially culpable, guilty of short-term political expediency, which had left Australians acutely exposed to the impacts of climate change.
“The first duty of a government is to protect the people, their well-being and livelihoods. Instead, Australian governments have left the community largely unprepared for the disasters now unfolding, and for the extensive changes required to maintain a cohesive society as climate change impacts escalate.”
The declaration argued it was in Australia’s self-interest to demand greater global action on climate change, and a continued reliance on fossil fuel resources was unsustainable, both economically and environmentally.
Australia was the world’s fourth largest carbon polluter, exports included, and one of the countries most exposed to climate change, the declaration said.
“It makes no sense to build our economy on fossil fuel resources, practices and technologies which are unsustainable, particularly when Australia has some of the best clean energy resources and opportunities in the world.”

Links

• Living in the climate emergency: Australia's new fire zone
• I enjoy taking climate deniers to task but here's the question Q&A should have answered
• David Attenborough calls Australia's bushfires 'the moment of crisis' to address climate change
• Scott Morrison rejects criticism of climate policies as MPs call for more action
• Labor MP urges war-like national mobilisation to tackle Australia's existential threat of climate crisis
• 'You have utterly no clue': why 'climate emergency' is Australia's ultimate outrage trigger
• Home affairs warned Australian government of growing climate disaster risk after May election
• Former Australian fire chiefs say Coalition ignored their advice because of climate change politics
• Australia's east coast threatened by blazes ahead of catastrophic danger day – as it happened

The Trio Of Obstacles On Climate Change

AFR - Willem Buiter

It's not denialism but the economics of emissions reductions that is the real barrier to mitigating the climate crisis.

Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket via Getty Images

Willem Buiter Willem Buiter, a former chief economist at Citigroup, is a visiting professor at Columbia University

Despite the buzz around climate action at this year’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, the world’s current environmental prospects look grim. There are three obstacles: climate-change denial; the economics of reducing greenhouse-gas (GHGs) emissions; and the politics of mitigation policies, which tend to be highly regressive.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global carbon-dioxide emissions must be cut 45 per cent from 2010 levels by 2030, and then eliminated entirely by 2050, to have even a reasonable chance of preventing global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. “We need quick wins,” warns the United Nations Environment Program in its latest Emissions Gap Report, “or the 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement will slip out of reach.”
That is an understatement. Even if the current Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the 2015 Paris accord are met, emissions in 2030 will be 38 per cent above where they need to be. Global average temperatures will be on track to rise by a disastrous 2.9-3.4°C by 2100, with continuing increases thereafter. The NDC targets would need to be roughly tripled just to limit warming to 2°C, and would have to increase fivefold to achieve the 1.5°C goal.
That is not going to happen. The only time in recent history when CO2 emissions have looked as though they might plateau was in 2014-2016, owing to weak global growth. According to the Global Carbon Project, emissions have since increased again, by 2.7 per cent in 2018 and 0.6 per cent in 2019. Making matters worse, the December 2019 UN Climate Change Conference (COP25) was a dismal failure, resulting in no new climate pledges or clear messages of intent for this year’s COP26 summit in Glasgow.

To limit global warming to less than 2°C, however, would require an average effective price of $75 per ton by 2030.

Why is humanity so reluctant to save itself? First, many people simply do not accept the predictions issued by climate scientists. But denialism is the least serious of the three main obstacles. There will always be a minority for whom facts and logic are unwelcome distractions. Yet even US President Donald Trump must realise by now that climate change will undermine the future viability and profitability of Mar-a-Lago.
As the real-world costs of climate-driven disasters mount over time, denialism will become less of an issue. Indeed, a November 2019 Yale University survey finds that 62 per cent of registered voters in the United States already would support a president “declaring global warming a national emergency if Congress does not act”.

The second major challenge is that GHG emissions are the quintessential global economic externality. Climate change doesn’t respect borders; GHGs emitted anywhere will affect everyone eventually. That means there is a massive free-rider problem. Under current circumstances, it will always be individually rational to let others cut back on their emissions rather than doing so yourself. The only way to correct this problem is through collective rationality or enlightened self-interest. But given the current state of multilateralism, expecting a truly global effort in pursuit of the common good is a tall order.

The third obstacle is that effective policies to reduce GHG emissions disproportionately hurt the poor (both globally and within countries). The International Monetary Fund recently calculated that the current effective global price of CO2 emissions is a mere $2 per ton. To limit global warming to less than 2°C, however, would require an average effective price of $75 per ton by 2030.

In India, China, and many other countries, coal-fired power plants will likely continue to be built for years to come.

I agree with Harvard University economist Kenneth Rogoff that a uniform global carbon-emissions tax is likely to be the best solution to the climate challenge, at least from an environmental perspective.
But with such a tax in place, average household electricity prices over the next decade would increase cumulatively by 45 per cent, and gasoline prices by 15 per cent. Hence, even within rich countries, the distributional consequences would be difficult to handle, as France’s government found out after it tried to introduce a modest fuel tax in 2018. Worse, since the 1980s, effective redistributive fiscal mechanisms in most advanced economies have been emasculated.
Moreover, the larger distributional burden of a global carbon tax would fall disproportionately on poor countries that are hoping to pursue rapid development in the coming decades. Around 570 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa alone lack access to basic electricity; globally, the number is closer to 1.2 billion.
Needless to say, long-overdue growth in developing and emerging economies will bring massive increases in energy consumption and GHG emissions.
In India, China, and many other countries, coal-fired power plants will likely continue to be built for years to come. Clean and renewable energy from solar and wind will complement, but not displace, fossil fuels in these countries. Despite the strides made in battery storage technology, the intermittency problems associated with wind and solar imply a continuing role for fossil fuels and nuclear power.
Consider India, which accounts for 7 per cent of annual global GHG emissions, making it the world’s fourth-largest emitter, after China (27 per cent), the US (15 per cent), and the European Union (10 per cent). That is despite the fact that India’s per capita energy consumption is around one-tenth of America’s. And even if that figure doubles by 2030, it will still be only half of what China’s was in 2015.
Countries like India and those in Sub-Saharan Africa are not going to sacrifice their economic development for the sake of emissions reductions. The only way to square the circle is to extend financial aid to developing and emerging economies undergoing unavoidably energy-intensive development, so that they can afford to internalise the GHG externality through an appropriately steep tax on emissions.
Unfortunately, sustained large-scale international aid programs are deeply unpopular. And given that domestic fiscal solidarity is already wanting, cross-border fiscal solidarity seems like a non-starter. Unless and until that changes, an existential crisis of our own making will only worsen.

Links

• The Case for a World Carbon Bank
• Global Carbon Budget 2019
• UNEP: 1.5C climate target ‘slipping out of reach’
• Politics & Global Warming, November 2019
• Fiscal Monitor: How to Mitigate Climate Change
• Landing a Blow Against Climate Change