(UK) Patriotism Could Be The Unlikely Answer To Solving The Climate Crisis

The Guardian - Anatol Lieven

Last week’s (UK) budget was a missed opportunity: we need to mobilise our attachment to country

Global heating is being blamed for the wildfires that devastated much of New South Wales in Australia in recent months. Photograph: Dean Lewins/AAP

Anatol Lieven Anatol Lieven is a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and a fellow of the New America Foundation. He worked as a British journalist in Pakistan, Afghanistan, the former USSR and Eastern Europe. Anatol Lieven is the author of Climate Change and the Nation State: The Realist Case.

When it comes to fighting climate change and its effects, both greens and conservatives pay far too much attention to localism, voluntarism, and corporate responsibility. All are valuable; none are adequate.

If, as many environmentalists say, the struggle against global heating requires a sense of wartime emergency, then fighting it while chiefly relying on these assets is as if Britain fought the Second World War relying on the Home Guard.

Last week’s budget contained some useful steps to limit carbon emissions; but they are far too small, and offset by road construction and the failure to lift the freeze on fuel taxes brought in 10 years ago.

Climate change, if unchecked, threatens the destruction of Britain; yet the new money allocated to combat it is less than one fifteenth of the annual defence bill and well under half the cost of the two Royal Navy aircraft carriers – which increasingly seem to have no national strategic purpose.

The best way of looking at the idea of state-led national green new deals is to see them as the latest episode in the 200-year-old history of efforts to save capitalism from itself. The difference is that in the past, unrestrained capitalism could only destroy one country’s political and economic order. Today, by continuing to boost carbon emissions, it can destroy the whole of modern civilisation.

Capitalism, when left alone, cannot regulate itself. If we did not know that before 2008, we know it now

Throughout modern history, just as today, there have been capitalists, such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, who have called for the reform of capitalism, whether from conscience or fear of revolution, but, in the end, parliaments still had to pass the laws and states had to implement them. If we had left it to capitalism to regulate itself, seven-year-olds would still be working down coal mines – or, more likely, Britain would have collapsed into communism. Capitalism, when left alone, cannot regulate itself. If we did not know that before the crash of 2008, we certainly know it now.

Central to the taming of capitalism has always been the creation of welfare states. Enhanced social security and state healthcare as part of any green new deal are essential to the fight to limit carbon emissions for three reasons:

• to compensate those workers and sections of society that will suffer as a result of the abandonment of fossil fuels; 
• to make the necessary sacrifices politically possible by sharing those sacrifices through progressive taxation; and 
• to build the social and national resilience which we will need if our democratic orders are to survive the shocks of the decades to come – including the spread of tropical diseases as a result of climate change.

This need for social solidarity links the green new deal to the patriotic origins of the welfare state. Both conservatives and socialists have agreed in attributing the welfare state to socialism; conservatives because they have come to dislike it, the left because they want to claim all credit for it.

In fact, the origins of the British welfare state lie very largely in the social imperialism movement in the years before 1914. The supporters of this movement were an extraordinarily varied bunch: H G Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb on the left; liberal imperialists such as Winston Churchill and William Beveridge; patriotic writers including Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle; imperial bureaucrats such as Lord Milner and John Buchan; and soldiers including Field Marshal Lord Roberts. Their thinking echoed, in key respects, Bismarck’s social security programme in Germany and the reformist “new nationalism” of Theodore Roosevelt in the US.

As Lord Roberts declared: “To tens of thousands of Englishmen engaged in daily toil, the call to ‘sacrifice’ themselves for their country must seem an insult to their reason; for those conditions amid which they work make their lives already an unending sacrifice.”

What all these figures had in common was a fear of social disintegration and revolution; a belief (right or wrong) in the British Empire as a force for progress; and a belief that social solidarity, “national efficiency”, and a degree of national self-sufficiency were essential to survive what they (correctly) saw would be the colossal social, economic and political strains of a new European war.

My own thinking about this has also been shaped by my experience of working in Qatar, which has engaged in an intense and successful state-led effort at national self-sufficiency in response to the blockade by Saudi Arabia and other neighbours.

The social imperialist tradition flowed into the later development of the welfare state as a result of the Second World War. In the course of these conflicts most of the Labour party became intensely patriotic, while the Conservatives became one-nation Tories, committed to social solidarity and state involvement in the economy.

When, in 1960, Bernard Semmel wrote his classic study of social imperialism, Imperialism and Social Reform, he took for granted its victory on both sides of the political spectrum: “Today, the Cobdenites [ie radical free-market liberals] and the international socialists are virtually extinct breeds.”

This is the spirit we need to recover in response to the climate emergency and associated menaces. International agreements and protest movements are valuable and necessary but they can’t do anything themselves. Their purpose is to nudge and shame states into taking action. And state governments, in the end, take action on behalf of their national populations. That is their duty, and it is also what those populations expect and vote for.

The task then is to mobilise patriotism by convincing national populations that global heating is a threat, not just to humanity and the planet but to the interests and the future survival of their own countries; and that society, as a whole, will pull together, alleviate suffering and make sacrifices as part of a common effort.

If we can’t manage this I very much doubt that liberal democracy will survive what is coming at us down the line.

Links

• Coronavirus Should Give Us Hope That We Are Able To Tackle The Climate Crisis
• Report Finds 76 Solutions Available Right Now To Slow Down Climate Change
• 50 Simple Ways To Make Your Life Greener
• Climate Change: How Do I Cope With Our Planet’s Inevitable Decline?
• Facing Extinction

(UK) Climate Change: Will Planting Millions Of Trees Really Save The Planet?

BBC - David Shukman

Jeff Overs

David Shukman David Shukman is the BBC News science editor.

From Greta Thunberg to Donald Trump and airlines to oil companies, everyone is suddenly going crazy for trees.
The UK government has pledged to plant millions a year while other countries have schemes running into billions.
But are these grand ambitions achievable? How much carbon dioxide do trees really pull in from the atmosphere? And what happens to a forest, planted amid a fanfare, over the following decades?

How many will the UK plant?
Last year's UK general election became a contest to look green.
The Conservatives' pledge of planting 30 million trees a year, confirmed in the Budget this week, is a big step up on current rates. Critics wonder whether it's possible given that earlier targets were far easier and weren't met.
If the new planting rate is achieved, it would lead to something like 17% of the UK becoming forested, as opposed to 13% now.
Tree planting is a popular idea because forests are not only beautiful but also useful: they support wildlife, help with holding back floodwater and provide timber.


At top speed, Canadian Shelby Barber can plant more than 4,000 trees a day.

And trees absorb carbon dioxide - the main gas heating the planet - so planting more of them is seen by many as a climate change solution.

At the moment, the UK's forests pull in about 10 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year but the hope is to more than double that.
It would involve potentially sensitive decisions about where to turn fields into forests: for example, should trees be planted where crops are grown or where cattle or sheep are grazed?
And because it can take decades to get a financial return from trees, many farmers and landowners are waiting for the government to announce new incentives.

Can you plant that many?

Yes, with the right people.I watched a team of people in their 20s working on a project for the Forestry Commission, in Norfolk, and their speed was phenomenal. When they got going, I timed each of them planting a tree roughly every four seconds.
During the course of a day, they could plant between 2,000 and 4,000 trees, piercing the soil with a shovel, stooping down to bury the roots of a tiny Douglas Fir, pressing the sapling in with a boot, and then pacing out the gap to the next one.

There are machines that can do the job - and even drones - but people power is the tried and tested method. And good money can be earned - about 7p for every tree.
For years, it's been popular among students in Canada as a summer job. But inspiring the same enthusiasm among British people is a different story.
Liz Boivin, whose company Tomorrow's Forests employs the team I visited, finds it is Canadians, Australians and eastern Europeans who most regularly sign up for a season's work.
She doubts whether there are enough trained staff in Britain to support the government's plans for a huge increase in planting.
"You need to have the workforce to hit those numbers, which at the moment you don't have," she says.

What problems could there be?
Trees grow very slowly so it's not enough just to plant them and then walk away.
In their early years, saplings are extremely vulnerable to a long list of threats: droughts, storms, pests and diseases. So it's possible that around a quarter of a newly-planted forest will die young.
Only when the survivors make it to an age of 20-30 years do they draw in significant amounts of carbon dioxide. By this stage, the forest will only thrive if some trees are removed or "thinned" to allow more room for others to develop.
If the timber from the cleared trees is then used in buildings, the carbon will remain locked up for as long as the structure stands. But if the trees are left unattended and end up dying and rotting, all the carbon that had been stored will then be released.

Many of Britain's tree planters come from countries like Canada and Australia.

So the key is a plan for careful management, according to Stuart Goodall, who runs Confor, a forest industries association. He's worried that the mania for trees may turn out to be a passing fashion, with investors excited by the planting but not by the long years that follow.
"We don't want to be rushed by others who have taken a sudden interest and may run away in 5-10 years' time," he says.
For a big increase in tree planting, Mr Goodall says there will need to be far greater supply of saplings but British nurseries are wary of scaling up until they're sure the government is serious.

Can trees stop climate change?
The answer is more complicated than you might think.
Trees use carbon dioxide as part of the process of photosynthesis - with the carbon ending up in the branches, trunk and roots. But at the same time they rely on respiration, which releases some carbon dioxide.
That's why, over the years, people have described trees as "breathing" - inhaling and exhaling a flow of gases. And it turns out that understanding exactly how that flow works is extremely hard.
Prof Rob MacKenzie, of the University of Birmingham, is honest about the lack of knowledge. "There are lots of things we don't know about the precise movement of carbon."

We're in a hi-tech outdoor laboratory that he runs in a forest in Staffordshire.
Instruments are mounted on tree trunks and on the ground to measure every aspect of how the trees are functioning. Research so far has shown that every square metre draws in about 1,700g of CO2 every year - while also releasing up to 1,200g.
And as a forest gets older, those flows are likely to become more balanced. Prof MacKenzie says it would be a "disaster" if governments and companies rely on forests to "clear up the mess" of carbon pollution.
And he paints a grim picture of what could go wrong. "We plant lot of trees, we think we've done the job, we forget about them, and what we're left with is a really desolate dying diseased landscape that no one cares about."

So what are the solutions?
Partly, they involve choosing the right trees and partly it's about making sure that local people benefit.
In the sprawling forest of Thetford, in Norfolk, much of it planted in a rush after the First World War, Eleanor Tew has researched the best options.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, a government-encouraged rash of planting ended up with regimented rows of the same species of conifers - which meant they were susceptible to the same pests and diseases.

Planting trees without a plan can end up doing "more harm than good".

For Eleanor, it's important to make sure that future forests are more resilient.

"It's a bit like making sure you don't put all your eggs in one basket," she says. "It may seem that the obvious thing is to plant one species that's really good for timber or another species that's good for carbon but if they don't cope with a disease, then the whole forest fails."

And for Nathalie Seddon, professor of biodiversity at the University of Oxford, it's vital that forestry schemes, particularly in developing countries, aren't imposed on the people there, but instead involve them.
She points to a project in the Humbo region of Ethiopia where farmers were encouraged to regenerate woodland by being given legal rights over the trees and also by getting training in forest management.
By contrast, a forestry scheme in northwest China successfully protected people living there from dust storms - a positive development - but the growth of the trees then led to water shortages in villages downstream.
She says: "There is an idea that you can just buy land and plant trees but that's too simplistic - there is a risk of doing more harm than good."

Links

• How many trees can you plant?
• What if everybody in the world planted a tree?
• Tree planting: Where can I do it and which type is best?
• (AU) Ancient Australian Trees Face Uncertain Future Under Climate Change, Study Finds
• UK's Kew Gardens To Help Protect Australia's Plants After Wildfire
• Greta Thunberg Tells Davos Leaders That Planting Trees Isn't Enough As Donald Trump Talks Up Economy
• Examining The Viability Of Planting Trees To Help Mitigate Climate Change
• Why Keeping Mature Forests Intact Is Key to the Climate Fight
• Opinion: Current Proposals To Plant Trees To Fight Climate Change Are Badly Misguided
• CLIMATE CHANGE: A really simple guide
• A TO Z: Climate-related words and phrases explained
• YOUR HOME: How much warmer is your city?
• FOOD: What is your diet's carbon footprint?
• IN CHARTS: How warm has the world got?

(AU) Risk And Reward In Decarbonising NSW Economy, Says Chief Scientist

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

Shifting NSW's $600 billion economy towards net zero carbon emissions will generate many opportunities as new industries emerge, but also require careful policy co-ordination and communication.
As part of a Decarbonisation Innovation Study, NSW Chief Scientist and Engineer Hugh Durrant-Whyte said climate change was "one of the most significant global challenges of the 21st century - posing risks to existing industries, communities and ecosystem", according to a scoping paper obtained by the Herald.

Hugh Durrant-Whyte, NSW Chief Scientist and Engineer, has been leading a panel examining the opportunities and challenges of shifting the state's economy towards net zero carbon emissions. Credit: Damian Bennett

The paper, which will be followed within months by a final report, identifies which parts of the economy are best placed to develop and benefit from emerging technologies that generate little or no greenhouse gases, such as hydrogen.
"Effective transitions not only make communities and jobs resilient, but also provide increased prosperity," the paper finds.
However, the authors, which include the chief scientist and an expert panel, also signal that one of the government's biggest challenges will be keeping public support for what will be disruptive shifts.
"The case for, and progress of, transitions should also be clearly communicated to stakeholders to maintain understanding and support for change," they said.
The report comes days after state Energy and Environment Minister Matt Kean unveiled the first stage of his government's Net Zero Plan. The policy, covering the 2020-30 decade on the way to a carbon neutral economy by 2050, would draw in an estimated $11.6 billion of new investment and 2400 jobs.
Mr Kean said the government would continue to assist the development of low-emissions technologies and services to help make NSW more climate resilient, as outlined in the chief scientist's report.
"We’re already developing programs that will support the commercialisation of promising technologies that can help our high-emissions industries remain competitive as the world reduces emissions," Mr Kean said.
"We’re also taking action to gradually decarbonise the state’s largest carbon emitter, the energy generation sector."
The financial and insurance industry, with an annual gross value of more than $70 billion, is also among the best placed to benefit from and drive the carbon-reduction effort, the scoping paper found.
Direct physical risks from climate change, such as from more extreme weather, were also moving investments, as were rising risks "for carbon intensive goods ... like fossil fuels", it said.
The energy sector, the state's and Australia's largest source of emissions, has among the best prospects with wind and solar farms already "more cost-effective" than new black coal-fired power plants.
Depending on policy interventions and other factors, NSW may source as much as 58 per cent of its power from renewables by 2030, the paper found.
Electrification of transport offered many opportunities, too, although policies will be needed to ensure the take-up of such technology "does not lead to greater fossil fuel generation".
Similarly, the use of technology to manage the timing when people charge their electric cars could decrease the potential peak power load by as much as 450 per cent by 2040.
The paper, though, makes only limited reference to the risks and opportunities facing coal, the state's largest export industry with shipments worth about $17 billion a year.
Expertise in detection of fugitive emissions offers one opportunity to cash in, while carbon capture and storage technologies may provide growth "in some hard-to-abate sectors", it said.
Carbon dioxide removal, such as by planting trees, will also provide growth prospects, particularly for rural areas.
Similarly, synthetic biology, which can increase the efficiency of food and other crops, will likely help efforts to cut emissions in a range of sectors, the paper said.

Links

• NSW to lead the country in reaching net zero emissions by 2050
• Net Zero Plan Stage 1: 2020-2030
• NSW unveils first stage of Net Zero climate strategy, two new Renewable Energy Zones
• NSW announces 3,000MW renewable energy zone, and energy security target
• NSW Electricity Strategy (pdf)
• Win for energy “disenfrachised” as Orange community solar
• NSW unveils plan to switch Sydney’s 8,000 buses to all-electric
• Renewables to make $1 trillion in new coal-fired plants uncompetitive

Women Shouldering The Burden Of Climate Crisis Need Action, Not Speeches

The Guardian - Patricia Scotland

From loss of livelihoods to domestic abuse, women bear the brunt of natural disasters. Without change, progress on gender equality will be undone

A woman wades through flood waters in the aftermath of Cyclone Aila in Harinagar, Satkhira, Bangladesh in 2009. Photograph: Abir Abdullah/EPA

Milikini Failautusi, 30, lives on the Pacific island of Tuvalu. She has become virtually a nomad in her own country after rising tides forced her to leave her ancestral atoll and move to the main island, Funafuti.

She is now a climate activist. She can no longer visit her home island, yet remains committed to her country with a burning desire to prevent her own children from inheriting an underwater ghost town. This is not just Milikini’s story.

While climate change threatens livelihoods and security around the world, it is women who are bearing the brunt. Women predominate in the workforces of many sectors that are most vulnerable to climate change such as agriculture, livestock and fishing.

To make things worse, inequalities mean women are more likely to suffer dislocation to their lives as a result of flooding and drought. According to the UN, about 80% of people displaced by climate change are women. More than 70% of those displaced by the 2010 flooding in Pakistan were women and children.

Among those who lost their lives in India, Indonesia and Sri Lanka as a result of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, three times more women died than men. But why?

Rigid gender roles in the region meant men in the region were more likely to be able to swim than women. Furthermore, women were more likely to be caring for children and family members during the critical evacuation time.

Women who do survive such disasters often end up in unclean evacuation centres where they can be exposed to gender-based violence and cannot access health services. Research by the International Union for Conservation of Nature found climate change and environmental impacts are increasing violence against women and girls including domestic abuse, child marriage and sexual assault.

In many societies, encouraging progress is being made towards gender equality, but climate change can stop or even reverse this progress.

If business-as-usual climate action continues, there are dangers that the gains of gender equality will be lost. There is a risk that as climate change accelerates, gender roles could become more entrenched.

More men may be forced to move in search of better job opportunities, while women are left behind to care for members of their extended families and bear the burden of household responsibilities. Those who have to remain in more disaster-prone or vulnerable locations as a result are then likely to experience greater poverty, have their livelihoods destroyed and suffer increasing health issues.

We know that any attempts to restore environmental degradation and lower the risks posed by global heating are likely to fail if they do not take into account gender inequality.

We know, from a report published last week by WaterAid, that climate finance is still not reaching the poorest and most vulnerable people, who are likely to be most affected by climate change. – about half of all countries receive less than $5 (£3.86) a year for each person.

In 2016, a UN report found that only 0.01% of all worldwide funding went towards projects addressing both climate change and gender, despite specific provisions in the 2015 Paris agreement for women’s empowerment.

Such statistics are sobering, but there are some encouraging signs of progress. Developed countries have pledged $100bn a year in climate finance by 2020 to help developing nations cut emissions and adapt to problems such as worsening droughts, flooding and sea-level rise. The Green Climate Fund, the main channel through which climate finance is dispersed, stipulates that all grants must treat women’s needs as a priority.

The Commonwealth Climate Finance Access Hub, based in Mauritius, is already making impressive progress in unlocking much-needed resources for countries and communities that would not otherwise have the capacity to lodge successful applications for funding already pledged.

At the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Rwanda in June, we can expect leaders to consider further innovative approaches to tackle environmental priorities, including the strategy proposed by women’s affairs ministers, which focuses on gender and climate change.

The strategy is designed to encourage countries to collect and analyse data disaggregated according to criteria such as sex and age in order to devise improved climate solutions and to target them more accurately.

Women like Milikini need more than speeches, however sincere. They need urgent collective action to tackle all aspects and impacts of the global climate crisis. Women on the frontline must be on an equal footing at all levels so that they, their families, their communities and the nations in which they live and work can survive and thrive. In the Commonwealth, we are working towards just that.

Links

• Climate breakdown 'is increasing violence against women'
• Women Fighting Climate Change Are Targets For Misogynists
• Why The Climate Crisis Is Harming Women More Than Men
• 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
• (US) Her Message About Climate Change: It’s Not Too Late
• Our Young Girls Are Bearing The Burden Of Climate Action. But Should They Be?
• Want To Go For Inclusive Climate Action? Then Start With Integrating Gender Equality Into Climate Finance

While We Self-Isolate, It’s A Good Time To Reflect On The Urgency Of The Climate Crisis

RenewEconomy - Sophie Vorrath

AAP Image/Paul Braven

Sophie Vorrath Sophie is editor of One Step Off The Grid and deputy editor of its sister site, RenewEconomy. Sophie has been writing about clean energy for more than a decade.

As Australian governments scramble to formulate the appropriate response to the pandemic proportions of the Coronavirus, a new report from the Climate Council has reminded us of the burningly urgent need to address that other global crisis, climate change.
The report, titled Summer of Crisis, says – unequivocally – that Australia’s devastating and unprecedented 2019-2020 bushfire season was fuelled by the climate impacts that are, in turn, being fuelled by the burning of coal, oil and gas.
The Climate Council says the horror bushfire season, which in some parts of Australia started in winter, not only cost lives, wiped out livelihoods and decimated Australia’s native animal, bird and insect populations, but will also leave a serious dent in the economy.
The tourism sector alone, the report says, is set to lose at least $4.5 billion because of the bushfires, and is estimated to have led to a 10-20 per cent drop in international visitors booking holidays to Australia.
The smoke that blanketed Sydney, meanwhile, is estimated to have cost that city $12-50 million per day, while more than 23,000 bushfire-related insurance claims lodged nation-wide have been totted up to an estimated total value of $1.9 billion.
As for the carbon budget, that was blown out of the water with the fires estimated to have contributed between 650 million and 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere – equivalent to the annual emissions from commercial aircraft worldwide and far higher than Australia’s annual emissions of around 531 million tonnes.



In light of all this, the report says, Australia’s continued shirking of its international responsibility to take actual action to drive down its greenhouse gas emissions is morally and economically reprehensible – particularly as the world braces for a new hit from the novel Coronavirus.
“Australia urgently needs a plan to cut our domestic greenhouse gas emissions to net zero and to phase out fossil fuel exports, because we are one of the world’s largest polluters,” the report says.
“We are the 14th largest emitter of greenhouse gases globally and emit more per person than any other developed country.
“We are also the third largest exporter of fossil fuels … Clearly, what Australia does matters and the longer we delay, the harder the problem will be to solve.
“We cannot call on other countries to take action if we fail to do so. We simply cannot leave this mess for our children to try to fix.”
The report is particularly scathing about the federal Coalition government, which it says has ignored repeated warnings from scientists over at least a decade, and more recently from fire and emergency experts about impending bushfire disaster.
“Simplistic arguments about arson, hazard reduction and ‘green tape’ do not stand up to scrutiny, and are not responsible for what was clearly a series of weather-driven disasters,” the report says.
“Worsening extreme weather is clearly driven by a warming climate. Further denial and delay in taking action on emissions guarantees a worsening of disasters into the future.
“Taking action now will provide a chance to stabilise, then eventually reduce disaster risks for future generations.”
This week, the public and policy focus is almost entirely trained upon the spread of COVID-19, and how to keep this at bay, without bringing the economy to its knees.
As we wait for further advice from health minister Greg Hunt – who in his previous role as environment minister gave the green light to the Adani Group’s massive Carmichael coal mine in northern Queensland – we must not forget about one of the biggest threats to the health of humankind.
While we humans obsessively check our body temperatures, scientists have been checking the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere and waters for decades now, and warning that these are rising to levels that will not support life.



As the Bureau of Meteorology has told us, 2019 was the hottest year on record across Australia with mean temperature 1.52°C above average and mean maximum temperature 2.09°C above average. It was also the driest year on record, with rainfall 40 per cent below average.
Setting a clear pathway to end fossil fuel production and generation, and a more ambitious and longer-term target for emissions reduction, is the least Australia can do.

Links

• (AU) Summer Of Crisis
• Government Must Fund Ongoing Bushfire Research
• How does climate change affect bushfires?
• Dangerous Summer
• International Women’s Day: Inspirational Women of the Climate Council
• 12 Climate Actions to Make an Impact

Climate Change: The State Of Our Atmosphere

Al Jazeera News

Last seen three million years ago, the amount of the Earth's warming will get greater, even if it falls again.

Download report
(PDF | 1.73 MB)

The "Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2019" has been issued by the World Meteorological Office.

It stated 2019 ended with a global average temperature of 1.1 degree Celsius above estimated pre-industrial levels, second only to the record set in 2016, a year influenced by a strong El Nino event.

In 2018, greenhouse gas ratios reached new highs with carbon dioxide (CO2) at 407 parts per million (ppm). Preliminary data indicates that greenhouse gas concentrations continued to increase in 2019.

The usefulness of greenhouse gases
This needs some context to understand. The reason we can live on this planet is because greenhouse gases keep it warmer than an atmosphere without them would provide.

 However, if the amount of the most effective heat-trapping greenhouse gases is increased too much, we will simply overheat, in an out-of-control manner.

Since the dawn of humanity, we have never seen such a high concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. At the start of the industrial revolution, it was at 275ppm. In prehistory, there have been higher levels.

Historic warming
A paper published by Yale University in 2017 lays out the following points: The last time the atmosphere contained 400ppm of CO2 was about three million years ago, the mid-Pliocene, recently enough for the planet to be not radically different than it is today.

Back then, temperatures were 2 to 3C (3.6 to 5.4F) above pre-industrial temperatures. The Arctic was more than 10C hotter, and sea levels were 15-25 metres higher.

Homo habilis (aka "handy man"), the first species in the Homo line and probably the first stone-tool users, got a taste of this climate as he arrived on the scene 2.8 million years ago (Homo sapiens didn't show up until 400,000 years ago at the earliest).

Record reliability
There's a lot of debate about both temperatures and CO2 levels from millions of years ago. But the evidence is much firmer for the last 800,000 years, when ice cores show that CO2 concentrations stayed between 180 and 290 ppm. There have been eight glacial cycles over these past 800,000 years, mostly driven by regular and understood wobbles in the Earth's orbit. This is the benchmark against which scientists usually note the unprecedented modern rise of CO2. 

Beyond just the concentration of greenhouse gases, the rate of increase in concentration appears to be unprecedented. Dana Royer, a climatologist at Wesleyan University said during the end-Triassic extinction, 200 million years ago, CO2 values jumped from about 1,300ppm to 3,500ppm. That took somewhere between 1,000 to 20,000 years and was caused by massive volcanic eruptions in what is now the central Atlantic.

Current risk
Today, we could conceivably change our atmosphere by thousands of parts per million in just 200 years. There is nothing anywhere near that in the ice core records. Though 400 seems a big number now, CO2 concentrations could easily pass 500ppm in the coming decades, and even reach 2,000 by 2250 if emissions are not brought under control.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report from 2013 shows the projected outcome depending on our actions:

• In the most pessimistic scenario, where the population booms, technology stagnates, and emissions keep rising, the atmosphere gets to a startling 2,000 ppm by about 2250. That gives us an atmosphere last seen during the Jurassic when dinosaurs roamed, and causes an apocalyptic temperature rise of perhaps 9C (16F).
• In the most optimistic scenario, where emissions peak now (2010-2020) and start to decline, with humans actually removing carbon from the air by 2070, the atmosphere dips back down below 400ppm somewhere between 2100 and 2200.

Even assuming a scenario of zero emissions from very soon, getting back to pre-industrial levels of 280ppm is "sort of a 10,000-year proposition", said Ralph Keeling, director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography's CO2 programme in San Diego. It was Ralph's father who set up the Mauna Loa CO2 well-positioned measuring site in Hawaii in 1958. At that time, the concentration of CO2was 316ppm.

"If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed and to which life on Earth is adapted ... CO2 will need to be reduced ... to at most 350 ppm," Columbia University climate guru James Hansen has said.

We sailed past that target in about 1990, and it will take a gargantuan effort to turn back the clock.

Links

• WMO Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2019 (pdf)
• Eight glacial cycles from an Antarctic ice core
• Are we heading into a new Ice Age?
• Climate Sensitivity in the Geologic Past
• Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis
• Greenhouse Gas Levels Have Hit A Record High And There's No Sign Of A Slowdown
• Climate Change Is Accelerating, According To A New UN Report
• Ahead Of UN Summit, Leading Scientists Warn Climate Change ‘Hitting Harder And Sooner’ Than Forecast
• Climate Change: Global Impacts 'Accelerating' - WMO
• 'Great Concern': World Meteorology Agency Reports Bad Climate Tidings
• State of the Climate: Record Heat and Weather Extremes
• World Meteorological Day: Hotter, Drier, Wetter. Face the Future

(AU) Summer Of Crisis

Climate Council

Australia’s Black Summer of 2019-2020 was characterised by catastrophic bushfires. The bushfire season started in winter and was the worst on record for New South Wales in terms of its intensity, the area burned, and the number of properties lost. It was also the worst season on record for properties lost in Queensland.
The Summer of Crisis report is the first comprehensive overview of the devastating climate impacts Australians experienced this summer. It focuses on New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, because the effects of the bushfires were most severe in these areas, but we acknowledge that the bushfires affected Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania.

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KEY FINDINGS

1. Climate change fuelled Australia’s devastating Black Summer

• Extremely hot, dry conditions, underpinned by years of reduced rainfall and a severe drought, set the scene for this summer’s unprecedented fires.
• Cool season rainfall has declined in southeast Australia over the last two to three decades, while temperature records have been broken over and over. 2019 was Australia’s hottest, driest year on record. 2018-2019 was southeast Australia’s driest two-year period on record.
• The Australian fire season has lengthened in NSW, decreasing the ability of land managers to conduct hazard reduction burns and increasing the number of fire danger days.

2. Australia’s Black Summer was unprecedented in scale and harm. The bushfire season was the worst on record for New South Wales in terms of the scale of the bushfires, the number of properties lost and the amount of area burned.

• People and animals affected:
• Nearly 80 percent of Australians were affected either directly or indirectly by the bushfires. – One billion animals were killed by the bushfires, 800 million in NSW.

• Area burnt:
• The Gospers Mountain fire was the largest forest fire ever recorded in Australia, burning more than 500,000 hectares.
• This season’s fires were incredibly large in area, even compared to forests all around the world. Around 21 percent of Australian temperate broadleaf and mixed forests was burnt. The average annual area burnt for most continents, including Australia, is well below 5%, except for Africa and Asia, which have average annual areas burnt of 8-9%.

• Record breaking weather:
• Catastrophic fire danger ratings were experienced at locations and times of the year never before recorded.
• For the first time ever catastrophic fire conditions were forecast for Greater Sydney.

3. The bushfires are estimated to have spewed between 650 million and 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That is equivalent to the annual emissions from commercial aircraft worldwide and is far higher than Australia’s annual emissions of around 531 million tonnes.

• The amount of carbon dioxide released by the bushfires is also more than the annual emissions of Germany.

4. Climate change events are becoming increasingly economically devastating.

• The tourism sector alone is set to lose at least $4.5 billion because of the bushfires. It is estimated that there was a 10-20 percent drop in international visitors booking holidays to Australia.
• The bushfire smoke that blanketed Sydney is estimated to have cost the city $12-50 million per day.
• More than 23,000 bushfire related insurance claims were lodged across New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Victoria between November and February, totalling an estimated value of $1.9 billion.

5. The summer of 2019-20 saw unprecedented climate impacts fuelled by the burning of coal, oil and gas.

• The hot, dry conditions that fuelled these fires will continue to worsen without substantial, concerted action to rapidly phase out coal, oil and gas.
• Australia urgently needs a plan to cut our domestic greenhouse gas emissions to net zero and to phase out fossil fuel exports because we are one of the world’s largest polluters.
• Taking action now will provide a chance to stabilise, then eventually reduce disaster risks for future generations.
• Clearly, what Australia does matters and the longer we delay, the harder the problem will be to solve. We simply cannot leave this mess for our children to try to fix.

Links

• Government Must Fund Ongoing Bushfire Research
• How does climate change affect bushfires?
• Dangerous Summer
• International Women’s Day: Inspirational Women of the Climate Council
• 12 Climate Actions to Make an Impact
• Scott Morrison’s gas transition plan is a dangerous road to nowhere
• Gas: Dangerous, Expensive and Unnecessary