(AU) Climate Change Made Australia's Devastating Bushfires More Likely, Scientists Confirm

TIME - Amy Gunia



Human-caused climate change made the bushfires that ravaged Australia during the most recent fire season more likely, according to a study published Wednesday.
Researchers at the World Weather Attribution consortium say that climate change increased the risk of the weather conditions that drove the fires by at least 30%.
The full influence of climate change was likely even greater, the study says, since models tend to underestimate trends in extreme heat.
The coalition of scientists from around the world looked at bushfire conditions in southeastern Australia using a measurement called the Fire Weather Index, which takes into account temperature, humidity, rainfall and wind to determine fire risk.
The group also analyzed extreme temperatures and drought, and found that human activity doubled the chances of heatwaves. They did not find significant trends related to drought conditions.
The study “nails down the linkage of the bushfires to climate change,” says David Bowman, director of the Fire Centre Research Hub at the University of Tasmania, who was not involved in the analysis.
“Probably the study is conservative,” he tells TIME via email.
Bushfires are an annual occurrence in Australia, but the most recent fire season, which was intensified by drought conditions and unprecedented heat, was one of the worst in the country’s history. Last year was the hottest and driest on record in Australia, according to a report released in January by the country’s Bureau of Meteorology.
The fires, which ripped across large parts of the country in 2019 and early 2020, scorched more than 44 million acres and killed more than two dozen people. Over a billion animals may have died in the blaze, according to an estimate by an ecologist at the University of Sydney.
The bushfire crisis reignited debate over climate change in the country, with some Australians calling for their government to take a tougher stance on the issue.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has acknowledged that climate change may be impacting the bushfires, but he has rejected the link between his country’s emissions and the fires.
“To suggest that with just 1.3% of global emissions, that Australia doing something differently, more or less, would have changed the fire outcome this season…I don’t think that stands up to any credible scientific evidence at all,” he said in a radio interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Links

• Australia’s Bushfires Show the Wicked, Self-Destructive Idiocy of Climate Denialism Must Stop
• Climate Change Made Australia's Devastating Bushfires More Likely, Scientists Confirm
• A Forecast for a Warming World: Learn to Live With Fire
• The Amazon, Siberia, Indonesia: A World of Fire
• ‘Like Licking an Ashtray’: Fires’ Invisible Threat to Australia’s Wines
• (AU) Matt Canavan’s Bushfire Climate Skepticism Disproved As Studies Point To Human Impact
• (AU) After A Summer Of Extremes, Here’s What To Expect This Autumn
• Australia's Summer Of 2019-20 Country's Second-Hottest On Record
• (AU) Climate Crisis Cutting Short Australia's Winters And Extending Summers

(AU) Climate Change Affected Australia’s Wildfires, Scientists Confirm

New York Times - Henry Fountain

The Dunn Road fire burned in southeastern Australia in January. Credit...Sam Mooy/Getty Images

Confirming what had been widely suspected, researchers have found that human-caused climate change had an impact on Australia’s recent devastating wildfires, making the extremely high-risk conditions that led to widespread burning at least 30 percent more likely than in a world without global warming.The researchers said the full influence of climate change on the fires was probably much greater, but that climate simulations, which form the basis of this type of study, underestimate trends in extreme heat in Australia compared with real-world observational data.

“We’re very sure that is a definite number we can scientifically defend,” said the lead author of the study, Geert Jan van Oldenborgh of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, referring to the 30 percent figure.
But the real influence of climate change on the recent fire season in Australia is greater, he added. “We think it is much larger than that, but we can’t prove that until we find out why there is this discrepancy between the observations and the climate models.”
The research is the latest in a growing subfield of climate science: attribution studies that look for links, or the lack of them, between climate change and specific weather-related events, often within weeks of an event. The studies usually compare models of current conditions to those of the world around 1900, before large-scale emissions of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases began.The Australian study was conducted, like many others, by an international group of scientists called World Weather Attribution. It was made public on Wednesday before being peer reviewed and published in a scientific journal, but scientists with the group said it followed what are now well-established practices for such studies.
Record warmth and dryness last year led to a severe wildfire outbreak in Australia, with an estimated 50 million acres burned, including more than 16 million acres in the southeastern part of the country, which was most affected. All told, at least 34 people were killed and nearly 6,000 homes and other structures were destroyed.
Dr. van Oldenborgh said the study was the most complicated the group had ever conducted because wildfires are a complex phenomenon affected not only by heat and precipitation but also by wind, humidity and other factors.
The researchers looked at the influence of climate change using a measurement standard called the Fire Weather Index, which takes all those factors into account to determine the risk of wildfire in a specific area at a specific time. They calculated the index values across southeastern Australia during the peak burning period of December and January.
Those values were extremely high, and were 30 percent more likely to be that high now than before 1900. Put another way, the researchers said, such high values are about four times more likely now than they were before.
The study also separately analyzed the influence of climate change on the extreme heat that Australia experienced during the fire season, and on the lack of rainfall during the same period. It found that extremely hot weeks like the fourth week of December, the country’s hottest on record, were at least twice as likely now than before 1900. The analysis of lack of rainfall found no significant trend related to climate change.
Benjamin M. Sanderson, a researcher at the European Center for Research and Advanced Training in Scientific Computing in Toulouse, France, who was not involved in the study, said the findings were reasonable.
“You can quite solidly say that extreme high temperatures play a role in fire risk,” he said. “And anthropogenic influences are easily detectable in terms of extreme temperatures.”
But he agreed with the researchers that wildfire is complex, and said the Australian disaster exposed the weaknesses of today’s climate models: they have difficulty drawing the connections between climate and fire.
“There are some events on the ground that have huge human and ecological impacts,” he said. “This was one of them. You look at what came out of the models and realize they were not very good at representing the severity of this process.”
Dr. Sanderson, together with a colleague, Rosie A. Fisher, wrote a commentary in Nature last month arguing that improvements in modeling are needed to better capture the severity of wildfires as they evolve in a changing climate.
“This is really a case where the real world is beginning to throw events at us before science is realized,” he added. “Which is a scary place to be.”

A thirsty koala near Moree, New South Wales, in January. Credit...Pamela Schramm, via Reuters

Links

• Climate Change Made Australia's Devastating Bushfires More Likely, Scientists Confirm
• A Forecast for a Warming World: Learn to Live With Fire
• The Amazon, Siberia, Indonesia: A World of Fire
• ‘Like Licking an Ashtray’: Fires’ Invisible Threat to Australia’s Wines
• (AU) Matt Canavan’s Bushfire Climate Skepticism Disproved As Studies Point To Human Impact
• (AU) After A Summer Of Extremes, Here’s What To Expect This Autumn 
• Australia's Summer Of 2019-20 Country's Second-Hottest On Record 
• (AU) Climate Crisis Cutting Short Australia's Winters And Extending Summers 

(AU) Climate Change Made Australia’s Devastating Fire Season 30% More Likely

Nature - Nicky Phillips

A fire engine surrounded by bush-fire smoke in February near the town of Bumbalong, south of Canberra, Australia. Credit: Peter Parks/AFP/Getty

The extreme fires that razed more than 18 million hectares of bush in Australia late last year were significantly more likely because of human-induced climate change, say an international group of climate scientists who have analysed the disaster.
The researchers’ results, released today, suggest that human-induced climate change increased the risk of the weather conditions that drove the fires by at least 30%.
Australia experiences bush fires almost every summer, but the latest event was unprecedented in its severity and scale. The World Weather Attribution (WWA) project sought to measure global warming’s contribution to the dangerous bush-fire conditions experienced in southeast Australia over several months. Fires in the region were particularly severe, and killed dozens of people and destroyed thousands of homes.
“This is a highly conservative assessment,” says David Karoly, a climate scientist based in Melbourne at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation who was not involved in the analysis.

Future concerns
The group assessed bush-fire conditions with a index that tracks ‘fire weather’. This calculates the chance of fire in a location based on variables such as temperature, humidity, wind and rainfall. The analysis did not consider non-weather factors, such as how a fire started.
The researchers also say the result is conservative. Models have mostly underestimated the rise in temperatures that has been observed since the Industrial Revolution, says Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, a climate researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute in De Bilt, the Netherlands, and co-author of the WWA analysis.
Even accounting for model uncertainties, Karoly says that the fire conditions experienced in Australia this summer are a baseline for what is possible in the world’s current climate, which has warmed by around 1ºC compared with pre-industrial levels. But conditions are going to get a lot worse as the planet warms by another degree or two, as is expected, he says.
The team also examined whether climate change influenced two of the components that are used to measure fire-weather: extreme temperatures and drought. The results, which have not been peer reviewed, suggest that while human activity doubled the chance of heatwave conditions during the fires, the models did not show that climate change contributed to the extremely dry conditions that Australia experienced.

Observed trend
In a second analysis that used real-world observations, rather than models, the WWA project looked at changes in observed fire risk since 1979. The researchers found that the likelihood of the extreme fire risk experienced in 2019–20 has increased fourfold — and possibly by more than ninefold — between 1900 and today. The reason that the observed trend is higher than the modelled trend is because factors other than climate change, such as changes in land use, might have also contributed to increased fire risk, say the authors.
Climate change definitely played a part in the catastrophic fires, says Andy Pittman, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. But he questions whether the modelling results are accurate and meaningful given that models have a limited ability to simulate fire events. For instance, models can’t simulate the drought that much of Australia has experienced over the past two and a half years or the huge amount of fuel that fed the fires — probably two major influencing factors of the event, says Pittman.
“I’ve used climate models for 30 years and I think they are hugely valuable, but this sort of study uses them in ways that I think are beyond their capability,” he says. He also thinks that fire indices, such as the fire-weather index, overemphasize temperature’s effect on fire-weather.
Friederike Otto, a climate modeller at the University of Oxford, UK, and a co-author of the WWA analysis, acknowledges that models struggle to simulate temperature extremes or droughts at a regional and local scale, but the results are conservative compared with those based on observations. “If we wait until we have perfect models, we will have a 4 ºC [warmer] world or more until we start saying anything about the real-world impacts of climate change today,” she says.
Otto also notes that such analyses help to identify problems with the models, which allows the science to evolve. “If we would continue to just do projections but never test the models against real-world events we would make slower progress. That, in my view, is the true power of event attribution,” she says.

Links

• Emissions: world has four times the work or one-third of the time
• EU champions bold new climate law
• Tropical carbon sinks are saturating at different times on different continents
• The race to decipher how climate change influenced Australia’s record fires
•  Climate change made European heatwave up to 3°C hotter
•  Droughts, heatwaves and floods: How to tell when climate change is to blame
•  Pinning extreme weather on climate change is now routine and reliable science

Why The Climate Crisis Is Harming Women More Than Men

British Telegraph - Helen Pankhurst

This weekend's International Women's Day is an opportunity for women to take a stance against arguably their biggest man-made challenge

A portrait of Greta Thunberg, painted by schoolchildren and artists in Yorkshire to celebrate International Women's Day. Credit: Ben Lack

Helen Pankhurst Dr Helen Pankhurst CBE is an international development and women's rights activist and writer. She is currently CARE International's senior advisor working in the UK and Ethiopia. Dr Pankhurst is the great-granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst and granddaughter of Sylvia Pankhurst, who were both leaders in the British Suffragette movement.

Every year, on 8th March, International Women’s Day brings an opportunity for feminists to celebrate how far we have come in terms of women’s rights, to speak out about the most pressing issues rising to the top of the social change agenda – and to work out ways to tackle these together.

Last year, sexual harassment in the workplace was high on the news agenda. That’s why the women’s movement around the world joined together to demand a global law addressing sexual harassment and violence in the workplace. And we succeeded: a new global convention to end violence, harassment and abuse in the world of work was agreed. Work continues in every country to ensure the convention is ratified, to ensure that from now on, there will be nowhere to hide for the Harvey Weinsteins of this world: their time is up.

We achieved this massive victory because thousands, even millions, of women and girls – a global force – spoke up and demanded significant change. It shows that solidarity really does matter, and can achieve great things. And right now, it is this belief that is bringing together people all over the world to speak up and demand action on the biggest challenge facing the world: the climate crisis. In 2020, this is the dominant agenda, the issue emerging as the greatest concern to women and girls worldwide.

No-one can fail to have been inspired by the courage and determination of climate change activists. Their youthful ambition, their clear focus, the magnitude of their reach. They are shaking things up, they are winning hearts and changing minds. Youngsters, right around the world, are teaching adults what matters. Their movement is fresh, their tactics innovative.

And who are the leading voices of this movement? Young people, particularly young girls. Many activists, motivated by the crisis facing our planet, have felt connected to and drawn inspiration from the women’s movement, including from the Suffragettes. They are speaking up on what matters to them, making sure their voices are heard, and making their voices count.

On International Women's Day, Dr Helen Pankhurst is calling for women to work together in the face of the climate crisis

On International Women’s day 2020, #March4Women – the global movement for gender equality – will be bringing the links between feminism and environmentalism to the fore. This is partly because of similarities between the two in terms of activism resulting from frustration with the status quo and lessons around tactics linked to direct action. It is also because women and girls are disproportionately affected by the devastating impacts of climate change.

Women and girls are the ones who trudge further and further, mile after back-breaking mile, to fetch water when their community is ravaged by drought. They are the ones who take responsibility for looking after the young, the old, the disabled.

When pressures increase on a family, it is the girls who miss out on school in order to help out in the home and on the land. Daughters are dispatched to early marriage when there are too many mouths to feed.

When regions are flattened by cyclones and deluged with floods, when families lose their homes and their livelihoods – when all is lost, women and girls are sometimes forced to turn to ‘transactional sex’ to feed their families. It is they who are exposed to the risk of rape and sexual exploitation in the refugee and displaced people’s camps. It is they that human traffickers prey on – their vulnerability increased at times of crisis.

We can argue about the extent to which the climate emergency is man-made or not. And I mean man-made in its literal sense of ‘made by men’ – because we could look at who is making the decisions at a national and international level in the structures of economic, political and social power. However, whether ‘man made’ or not, there is no disputing that the climate crisis magnifies each and every brutal facet of gender inequality. We cannot achieve climate justice without gender justice.

If there is hope for the future, it lies in the voices of those who stand up to say 'this is not good enough and we can do better'. We need to reach a tipping point where those in power move from empty words to deeds. And that exactly is what we must create, and what we are creating, right now.

This International Women’s day – in advance of the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow – we are highlighting that there will be no climate justice without gender justice. We are calling for both climate justice and gender justice – the two go hand in hand. Join us.

Links

• Women Take The Lead On Climate Change
• The Misogyny Of Climate Deniers
• Can Women Save Planet Earth? 4 Women Fighting Climate Change Say They Can — And Must
• From Antarctica To Costa Rica, Women Team Up To Build A Climate-Safe Future
• 25 Female Climate Leaders Shaping 2019
• Birth Control And Books Can Slow Down Climate Change
• 'You Need To Act Now': Meet 4 Girls Working To Save The Warming World
• Women In Climate Change Hotspots Face Greater Burdens When Under Environmental Stress
• Our Young Girls Are Bearing The Burden Of Climate Action. But Should They Be?

(AU) Science Is Already Being Disrupted By Climate Change, And We're Woefully Unprepared

ScienceAlert - Carly Cassella

The climate crisis poses an escalating threat to scientists everywhere and research of all kinds, scientists in Australia are now warning.
The unprecedented wildfires sweeping their nation have been a "brutal wake-up call" to a simple fact: their work is "far from immune" to climate change.
In all its physical and practical glory, science is just as vulnerable as any other industry on this planet. And yet very few universities, institutions or governments are prepared for that reality.
"Academics have analysed the climate change preparedness of almost every sector," the authors write.
"Ironically, this does not include the research sector, about which very little is known when it comes to climate change, despite those involved having privileged access to climate change information."
Today in Australia, scientists are facing a myriad of challenges tied to the climate crisis. Not only are researchers dealing with devastated landscapes, they are also grappling with disrupted services, ruined belongings, insurance costs, and mental health distress.
Many of the fires have wiped out precious ecological field work, and some scientists are now facing the grim reality that many of the habitats and species they once researched no longer exist in the same way.
"As an ecologist," an Australian entomologist recently told The New York Times, "it's a very tragic thing to find yourself having to think about: What if my species is now extinct?"

Researcher Guy Ballard from the University of New England, Australia, in one of his long-term ecological research sites devastated by the fires. (Heath Milne)

Even research untouched by flames have been impacted by the recent fires. Some researchers, for instance, are concerned that the consequences on the surface will seep down and alter the temperature and hydrology of Australia's caves.
Meanwhile, a cataclysmic hail storm that battered Canberra in January damaged 65 greenhouses and destroyed years of experiments and projects kept inside. The storm has not been directly tied to climate change, however, it does show the destructive potential of a future marked by more intense weather events.

Damage to greenhouses and related experiments in January 2020. (Saul Justin Newman)

Still, it's not just extreme cases like these that will cause trouble in the future. Hotter temperatures are already impeding scientific research in Australia, meaning scientists can only do fieldwork at cooler times of the year.
"On the other side of the world, research in the Arctic is being affected directly by warming," the authors add, "with the melting of permafrost leading to some scientific equipment being 'literally swallowed up by the land', and mobile sea ice making some expeditions too dangerous."
What's more, this thawing permafrost can also threaten work on precious archaeological sites, as can rising sea levels.
Still, perhaps the ultimate irony is when climate research is cancelled because of climate change. In 2017, for instance, a multi-year climate study had to be put on hold for a whole year due to extreme ice conditions on the water.
"Researchers are more accustomed to writing about climate change than adapting their work to it," the authors acknowledge.
"But as climate change impacts on the research sector become more evident, rapid adaptation is needed."
This means more universities and research institutions regardless of discipline, location or topic, should consider the risks of climate change in their strategic plans and adapt accordingly.
If we don't, the authors warn, the value of scientific research "will be eroded", including its ability to help us adapt to our uncertain future.
The study was published in Nature Climate Change.

Links

• Nature Climate Change: Research is not immune to climate change
• Indigenous Ecological Survivance: Youth in Community and Cultural Sustainability
• A Scary Year For Climate Change
• (AU) Climate Change Could Lead To Increase In Dangerous Firestorms That Were Once 'Rare'
• (AU) Scientists Sign Open Letter To Australian Government Urging Action On Climate Change
• Top Academics Write To Morrison Government Asking For 'Deep Cuts' To Australia's Greenhouse Gas Emissions
• (AU) Scientists Fear Surge In Supersized Bushfires That Create Their Own Violent Thunderstorms 

(AU) Inside The Liberal State Stepping Into A Low-Emissions Future

The Guardian - Adam Morton

Tasmania’s conservative government is embracing green hydrogen as it positions itself as a ‘renewables powerhouse’

Tasmanian premier Peter Gutwein (right, at a press conference in January) is vowing to kickstart the production of green hydrogen in the state. Photograph: Eddie Safarik/AAP 

This week a Liberal government set an ambitious 200% renewable energy target for 2040, a goal that foresees the creation of an extensive clean export industry.
It vowed support to kickstart production of “green” hydrogen – a potentially revolutionary fuel touted as a zero emissions fossil fuel replacement – with a plant promised for local use no later than 2024, and an export industry by 2030. And it said it would install fast-charging equipment for electric vehicles at 12 sites this year.
The government also announced a review of what would need to be done to reach net zero emissions before 2050.
The Liberal administration in question was not the Morrison government in Canberra, where the climate policy debate remains focused on the cost of acting above all else, but the Tasmanian state government in Hobart.
Peter Gutwein, a long-time treasurer who became Tasmanian premier in January after the surprise resignation of Will Hodgman, used his first “state of the state” address to set out what, by national standards, were a striking series of commitments that could put the state at the forefront of the shift to an emissions-free world.
Gutwein, who has retained responsibility for treasury and also taken on the climate change portfolio, said it was time for the state to “showcase our innovation to the world and stake our claim as a renewables powerhouse”.
“Tasmania has the opportunity to ensure that the most compelling 21st century competitive advantage that industry and consumers want – renewable energy – underpins our economy,” he said.
Tasmania starts well ahead of other Australian states in the shift to low emissions. It mostly runs on clean hydro power and has already reached 100% renewable energy generation in some years. But analysts said, if delivered, the shift in Tasmania could provide an example for others to follow.
Anna Skarbek, chief executive of research organisation ClimateWorks, said the new Tasmanian commitments were consistent with what other countries and jurisdictions that ran on hydro were doing. They are also in line with what analysts have found: that Australia had great potential to be a clean energy industrial hub.
“It is a good example of a government looking at opportunities for future clean energy markets,” Skarbek said. “What we’ve found is, when the intent is signalled, international technology providers are looking for opportunities to invest in other jurisdictions.”
The most fleshed-out element of the Tasmanian commitment is a promise to offer $50m in funding, concessional loans, subsidised power and tax breaks for green hydrogen development over the next decade. Making hydrogen is an electricity-hungry process that involves using an electrolyser to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
With a report for the Australian Renewable Energy Agency having estimated an Australian industry could be worth up to $10bn a year by 2040, Gutwein said hydrogen was “one of the most extraordinary sunrise opportunities Tasmania could ever step into”.
He said the state had already received interest from companies in Japan, Korea and Singapore, and cited forecasts hydrogen produced with clean power would have about a 15% price advantage over fossil fuel-derived hydrogen. “We know that with our renewable energy that we can generate green hydrogen cheaper than what they will be able to on the mainland,” he said.
The other elements Gutwein announced remain little more than dot points. He has promised a renewable energy action plan in April, and a plan in the state budget for the government to have more electric cars in its fleet.
Locally, the commitments received a largely, but not universally, positive response. Politically, Tasmanian Labor said they were welcome but long overdue; the Greens said they were welcome but nothing like enough to take the climate emergency seriously, and said they would introduce a bill that would go further.
Outside parliament, the Wilderness Society described the new pledges as refreshing, while the Australia Institute, a progressive thinktank, said the green hydrogen vision was a “forward thinking plan for the state”.
“It’s great to see the Tasmanian government backing our renewable energy sector by investing in this emerging industry,” said Leanne Minshull, the Australia Institute’s Tasmanian director.
But both organisations had caveats. Minshull said the massive clean energy expansion should be used to drive Tasmania to zero emissions, including by moving the state’s vehicles and farms to running on electricity and attracting further clean industries to the state, before more was exported to the mainland via new undersea cables, including the proposed Marinus Link with Victoria.
Tom Allen, from the Wilderness Society, said the state’s first step in cutting emissions should be to end native forest logging. He said the government still intended to log 226 forest reserves that contained more than 10m tonnes of carbon.
“If this logging happens it would obliterate all the environmental policies he announced this week,” he said. “The quickest, easiest, lowest-cost way to boost Tasmania’s carbon stocks, protect wildlife and provide new, badly needed nature recreation spaces is to permanently protect these outstanding reserves.”

Links

• New Liberal premier of Tasmania Peter Gutwein says we must ‘do more’ on climate change
• 'Extinction is a choice’: Margaret Atwood on Tasmania's forests and saving the swift parrot
• (AU) Ancient Australian Trees Face Uncertain Future Under Climate Change, Study Finds
• Huon Pine Trees Live For 3,000 Years But Climate Change Could Wipe Them Out In The Next 50
• How Much Has Tasmania's Climate Changed In The 100 Years To Now?
• Astounded': Former Fire Chief Unloads On Politicians Over Climate Change Inaction
• Tasmania Is Burning. The Climate Disaster Future Has Arrived While Those In Power Laugh At Us

A Scary Year For Climate Change

Scientific American - Cristine Russell

Scientists’ warnings about climate change have intensified over the past 12 months. Will world leaders finally listen?

Greta Thunberg outside the Swedish Parliament. Credit: Anders Hellberg Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

One year ago, the international scientific community could hardly have expected that Greta Thunberg, a teenager from Sweden, would become one of its greatest allies. Since beginning her weekly “School Strike for the Climate,” the petite 16-year-old has skillfully used her public appearances and powerful social media presence to push for bolder global action to reduce carbon emissions.

“Again and again, the same message,” she tweeted recently. “Listen to the scientists, listen to the scientists. Listen to the scientists!”

Well, what are the scientists saying? The answer, of course, is that they have been warning about severe global impacts from climate change for more than three decades. But over the past 12 months those warnings have intensified. Reports detailing the massive environmental, economic, and human consequences of unfettered global warming have come at a fast and furious pace. And, collectively, they are far scarier than the sum of their parts. (Click here to see a rundown.)

The deluge began last October, with the release of a special report from the United Nations’ global climate science authority, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on the potential impacts of a rise in global temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius or more. Three international IPCC working groups with 91 authors and editors from 40 countries examined 6,000-plus scientific studies and called for “global carbon dioxide emissions (to) start to decline well before 2030” to avoid the most severe consequences of global warming. It said “global warming is likely to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate.”

The release of the report provided a “breakthrough” moment in public consciousness and press coverage, with countless soundbites, headlines, and images warning of a “12-year” deadline to head off “climate change catastrophe.” The “12-year” catchphrase was even more alarming than the IPCC’s already strong admonitions. The planet won’t implode in 2030, but further delays in major global actions will make it increasingly difficult to move to a low-carbon world.

In November, the United States’ Fourth National Climate Assessment, produced by government and outside experts, reinforced the gloom-and-doom message of the October IPCC report. “Climate change creates new risks and exacerbates existing vulnerabilities in communities across the United States, presenting growing challenges to human health and safety, quality of life, and the rate of economic growth,” it warned. The Trump administration’s attempt to minimize media coverage of America’s climate report card by releasing it on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, backfired: The congressionally mandated report got double coverage as both an environmental and a political story.

The dire news didn’t abate as 2018 drew to a close. A December report from the World Health Organization (WHO) said that emissions from fossil fuel-powered electricity, transportation, and other sources are “a major contributor to health-damaging air pollution, which every year kills over seven million people.” It called extreme weather events linked to human-caused climate change “a clear and present danger to health security” and concluded the health benefits of addressing climate change “far outweigh the costs of meeting climate change goals.”

Just as the disastrous future impacts of climate change were coming into clearer focus, we also received sobering news about the present. Last December, the Global Carbon Project projected that carbon dioxide emissions worldwide reached an all-time high in 2018, up more than two percent after three years of almost no growth. A January 2019 U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) report estimated an increase of nearly 3 percent in 2018 energy-related carbon dioxide emissions, the largest jump since 2010 — reversing a trend that had seen three consecutive years of decline. The EIA estimated that total U.S. emissions would fall in 2019, and that prediction appears to be bearing out, due to a drop in coal consumption. However, total global carbon dioxide emissions will see a rise again for 2019, says Stanford University’s Rob Jackson, who chairs the Global Carbon Project’s Scientific Steering Committee.

Alarm bells about climate change impacts in the Arctic sounded throughout the year. In April, a NASA-funded study of the Greenland ice sheet, published online on Earth Day, found the mass loss of ice discharged into the ocean from glaciers on the world’s largest island had increased six-fold since the 1980s. Meanwhile, sea level had risen nearly 14 millimeters since 1972, with half of that in the last eight years. (Later, a severe mid-summer Arctic heat wave contributed to historic melting of the Greenland ice sheet, with 12.5 billion tons of ice melting into the ocean on a single day — the “biggest single-day volume loss on record,” according to the Washington Post).

A little-publicized Stanford University study, also released on Earth Day, found that global warming from fossil fuel use “very likely exacerbated global economic inequality” over the past 50 years. The study’s authors found that warming has likely enhanced economic growth in cooler, wealthier countries while dampening economic growth in hotter, poorer countries.

In May, a landmark U.N. biodiversity report provided another stark statistic: One million animal and plant species on Earth are threatened with extinction, and rates of extinction are “accelerating.” The report gave a devastating assessment of how climate change and global economic development over the past 50 years have impacted nature and threatened the health of ecosystems important to humans and all other species. The report’s research underpinnings are strong: a systematic review of some 15,000 scientific and government sources that also includes indigenous and local knowledge.

In August, on the heels of record-breaking global heat waves, from South Korea to northern Norway, another major IPCC special report called attention to land-related climate change threats. It found that “climate change, including increases in frequency and intensity of extremes, has adversely impacted food security and terrestrial ecosystems as well as contributed to desertification and land degradation in many regions” of the world. The report recommended sustainable land development and adaptation practices to combat further destruction.

The highly anticipated September 23rd U.N. Climate Action Summit in New York brought additional climate reports. On September 22nd, the U.N. Summit’s Science Advisory Group released United in Science, an ambitious synthesis connecting the dots between “the very latest authoritative” science and “concrete actions” to “halt the worst effects of climate change.” The IPCC released a post-summit blockbuster report outlining profound changes underway in the Earth’s oceans and frozen regions, including glaciers and ice sheets. The report concluded that warming oceans, melting ice, and rising sea levels are already affecting everything from coral reefs to the nearly 10 percent of the global population living in low-lying coastal areas — and negative impacts will greatly worsen in the future.

The oceans report capped 12 months of overwhelming scientific evidence of global climate change hazards. The consistent message is that severe climate-change damage is already well underway; some impacts will be long-lasting or irreversible; the damage disproportionately hits vulnerable populations; and combatting climate change will require unprecedented economic, social, and technological transformation. But, crucially, the reports say it is likely not too late to prevent the worst effects of global warming by adopting meaningful adaptation and mitigation strategies.

So, where does this leave us? I’d argue that, more than anything, we’re left with a heightened sense of urgency, as well as uncertainty, about immediate and forthcoming climate dangers. For many years, coverage of climate science reports had an implicit future tense, as in, “It’s a problem for your grandchildren.” Alas, the future came faster than science had predicted, and the world is now confronted with the reality of climate change-related extreme weather events and other threats. The frightening wildfires now racing through Southern and Northern California show what this climate-related new reality looks like for the country’s most populous state.

The upcoming U.N. Climate Change Conference — the 25^th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP25) to the U.N. climate treaty — will once again put pressure on delegates from nearly 200 nations to deliver concrete action on promises made under the 2015 Paris Agreement. (COP25 was set to be held in Santiago in early December before the Chilean government abruptly pulled out of hosting the event.) The disappointing substantive and political outcomes of the September summit in New York, particularly the lack of stronger commitments from big carbon emitters like China, India, and the U.S., mean expectations are low. The leadership vacuum left by American President Trump, with his strident pro-fossil-fuel rhetoric and planned exit from the Paris Agreement, makes things worse.

But don’t underestimate the persistence of Greta Thunberg and the growing Fridays for Future youth movement she inspired. An estimated 7.6 million people protested worldwide during September’s U.N. Climate Week. Strike organizers are planning a major global protest on Black Friday directed at COP25 decision-makers.

In her emotional speech at the U.N. Climate Action Summit, Thunberg chastised world leaders for failing to act on climate change: "For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.” Her angry phrase “How Dare You?” went viral on social media, and millions viewed the video of Thunberg’s speech on YouTube. This plucky young activist is likely to deliver a similarly strong message at COP25, pushing the scientific case for significant government action now to help protect her generation and others in the future.

Will the world leaders at COP25 be listening, and what will they do?

Links

A YEAR OF DEVASTATING CLIMATE REPORTS

October 2018 – October 2019

• United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C, October 2018.
• U.S. Global Change Research Program. Fourth National Climate Assessment, November 2018.
• World Health Organization. COP24 Special Report: Health and Climate Change, December 2018.
• Global Carbon Project. Carbon Budget 2018, December 2018.
• U.S. Energy Information Administration. Short-term Energy Outlook, January 2019.
• Jérémie Mouginot et al. “Forty-six years of Greenland Ice Sheet mass balance from 1972 to 2018.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, April 2019.
• Noah S. Diffenbaugh and Marshall Burke. “Global warming has increased global economic inequality.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, April 2019.
• United Nations Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, Summary for Policy Makers, May 2019.
• Andrew Freedman and Jason Samenow. “The Greenland ice sheet poured 197 billion tons of water into the North Atlantic in July alone.” The Washington Post, August 2019.
• IPCC. Special Report on Climate Change and Land, August 2019.
• World Meteorological Organization and the Science Advisory Group of the UN Climate Action Summit 2019. United in Science, September 2019.
• IPCC. Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, September 2019.