(AU) The Green Recovery: This Builder Used To Be Sceptical About Green Homes. Now He’s A Convert

The Guardian - Lane Sainty | Adam Morton

Australia’s leaky homes are leaving millions of us vulnerable to extreme weather. In the first of a series of features on the Green Recovery, we look at how coronavirus stimulus could fix the problem

Builder Tony O’Connell from TS Constructions on site at The Cape, a sustainable residential development at Cape Paterson, Victoria. Photograph: Alana Holmberg/Oculi for The Guardian

Green Recovery The coronavirus pandemic has devastated the economy but also presented a unique opportunity: to invest in climate action that creates jobs and stimulates investment, before it’s too late. The Green Recovery features people on the frontline of Australia’s potential green recovery.

Tony O’Connell used to build whatever was put in front of him.

The 53-year-old from Wonthaggi, a coastal town in Gippsland, Victoria, has been in construction for 34 years. “What was on the plan was what was on the plan,” he says. “I wouldn’t question it.”

That is, until he attended a meeting for a proposed development in the area – one of a number of locals gearing up to run the interlopers out of town.

“We all went along thinking, yep, it’s going to be a greenwash and just someone else doing a cookie-cutter development to cut our lovely little town up,” O’Connell says.

Sand dunes at Cape Paterson separate The Cape from Bass Strait. Photograph: Alana Holmberg/Oculi for The Guardian 

But he left thinking they might have a point. More than a decade on, that development is The Cape, one of Australia’s leading eco-villages, in the nearby town of Cape Paterson. And O’Connell is one of a growing number of builders trying to improve Australian houses.

Now, when a plan lands in front of him, he’s the first to point out how it could improve, coaxing homeowners into making small changes that he calls “two percenters”. A window shifted to a different wall, a patch of concrete floor that soaks up the winter sun – these tweaks can make a big difference. “I get a lot of irate calls from architects,” says O’Connell.

The Australian home has a big problem: it's draughty, poorly insulated and costs a fortune to heat and cool. Most older homes have an abysmal energy efficiency rating – and we are paying the price. So what can be done to fix the problem? A lot, actually. And the government could play a role in retrofitting Australia's existing housing stock with its coronavirus stimulus spending. Here's how.

According to Trivess Moore, a senior lecturer and researcher into sustainable housing at RMIT, builders – and plumbers, electricians, people who sell appliances and others – are “critical intermediaries” in delivering sustainable housing.

Most people build new homes or do renovations rarely, Moore says, which leaves them reliant on tradies for information.

“Quite often it might be that someone is recommended to you, ‘Oh, my friend used that builder, I’ll trust whatever they say,’” he says. “[The ideal is] when you do have builders who are going the extra mile, and also going ‘If this was my house, this is what I’d want for a better outcome.’”

Tony O’Connell on site at one of the homes he and his team are constructing at The Cape, one of Australia’s leading eco-villages. Photograph: Alana Holmberg/Oculi for The Guardian

But green builders have a lot of work ahead of them. Building better houses from scratch is one thing. Improving Australia’s dismal existing housing is another.

The national building code currently requires new houses to have a six-star energy-efficiency rating. The majority of houses built before 2005 have ratings between 1.5 and two.

“They’re pretty shocking,” says Alan Pears, a senior industry fellow at RMIT who has been working in housing policy since the early 1980s. “[Problems with] windows, the building fabric, poorly insulated, poorly shaded and the houses leak like sieves.”

O’Connell says many older homes are so leaky, the air in the house changes over about 15 times each hour. As well, they are full of inefficient appliances, spanning from hot water systems to fridges to lightbulbs to televisions.

It all adds up – and exacerbates inequality. People on lower incomes are more likely to be living in older and poorer quality homes, and then either cannot afford or are not in control of upgrades.

People are starting to see sustainability as a long-term benefit instead of a drain on their bank accounts, Tony O’Connell says. Photograph: Alana Holmberg/Oculi for The Guardian

 According to Kellie Caught, senior advisor on climate and energy at the Australian Council of Social Services, low-income households spend 6.4% of their income on energy bills, against a national average of 2.4% and just 1.5% for high-income households.

Poor quality housing is also detrimental to people’s health, a factor likely to worsen as the climate crisis unfolds.

“We’ve got a lot of people who in winter are suffering from cold,” O’Connell says. “And in summer, we have a higher death toll from people living in heat who can’t afford air conditioning than we do out of bushfires.”

There are ways to make older homes more efficient, but some are harder than others.

It’s easy enough to put insulation in ceilings and sometimes under floors, to replace lightbulbs with LEDs, and to plug gaps to keep out the cold and heat. Other changes, like upgrading to double-glazed windows, putting insulation into the walls, and buying better appliances can be costly, difficult or both.

The poor standard of Australian buildings has prompted calls for a nationwide efficiency drive as part of federal and state coronavirus stimulus spending, which would also help tackle the climate crisis. About a quarter of national emissions are from buildings.

The Australian Council of Social Service and the Australian Industry Group are among those to have urged the Morrison government to support an efficiency and solar power package for low-income and social housing, finding it could create 60,000 jobs.

The chief scientist, Alan Finkel, has also highlighted the benefits of fixing the country’s leaky buildings, as have groups representing business, the energy industry, the property sector, unions and major investors.

Beyond Zero Emissions, a climate change thinktank, analysed what it would take to transform Australia’s building sector as part of what it calls a “million jobs plan”. It found there would be about 200,000 jobs in a five-year program to perform 2.5m “deep energy retrofits” on existing homes and construct 150,000 7.5 star-rated social houses.

Tony O’Connell at The Cape. He says many older homes are so leaky the air in the house changes over about 15 times each hour. Photograph: Alana Holmberg/Oculi for The Guardian

Separately, researchers from the Australian National University set out to test how Covid-19 stimulus spending could have lasting economic value, cut emissions and improve people’s lives. They found energy retrofits, particular for low-income households, ticked all boxes.

“You can just get the dollars out the door and into the community really quickly,” says Prof Frank Jotzo, director of ANU’s Centre for Climate and Energy Policy. “It would be a much better investment economically, socially and environmentally than the Homebuilder program, which is paying money to people who already have a project under way.”

Advocates are clear that a nationwide housing overhaul is needed. But it just hasn’t happened.

“We’ve been talking about regulating upgrading of older buildings since the 1980s,” Pears says, breaking into resigned laughter, “and we haven’t done it.

“I think it’s fair to say there is a lack of will and leadership to drive this because it is tricky.”

In the early 2010s, Heidi Lee was the project manager of Beyond Zero Emissions’ ambitious plan to retrofit every single building in Australia.

“If you committed to doing it wholesale, it’s much cheaper,” Lee, now the project lead on BZE’s “million jobs plan”, explains. But when it comes to upgrading inefficient homes, you have to spend money to save it, and lots of Australians don’t have the cash sitting around.

‘I think if you went back 10 years ago and talked about sustainable construction, people would think you were proposing to build an igloo somewhere.’ Photograph: Alana Holmberg/Oculi for The Guardian

Another big weak point is the rental market. “The landlord would have to spend the money to upgrade the building and the tenant is the one getting comfortable and having lower bills,” Pears says. “Why would a landlord do that?”

One way around this, and a major solution to unlocking mass retrofits, Lee says, is the expansion of environmental upgrade agreements across Australia. Under these agreements, owners can get low-interest loans that cover the upfront cost of energy retrofits and are paid back through council rates.

If you get the design right, it doesn’t cost a lot of money to build sustainable
Tony O’Connell

Such schemes are currently available in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia, but only for commercial buildings. Victoria recently passed legislation to extend the schemes to homes. The space is still developing, Lee says, but could be extended to social housing.

“We see upgrade agreements as a key plan for a green recovery, particularly coming out of Covid,” says Scott Bocskay, CEO of Sustainable Fund Australia.

Bocskay says there are a number of other energy-saving schemes and incentives out there – for instance, Solar Victoria offers interest free loans for solar panels – but generally the approach is “fragmented”.

Tony O’Connell inspects the masonry. Photograph: Alana Holmberg/Oculi for The Guardian

Another option for prompting retrofits, Moore and Pears suggest, is putting a minimum energy-efficiency standard on houses that are put up for lease or sale. The Australian Capital Territory intends to introduce such a law for rental properties in 2021.

“That’s a way of using the market to lift the bottom, but it also means if you choose not to sell your house for 10 or 15 years or whatever it might be, you don’t have to worry about that,” Moore says. “It doesn’t force everyone to make the change right now but it ensures that over time there is that lifting of standards.”

There’s also the question of how to gain public momentum. People building new homes are often pushing for sustainability in the long term, but decision-making for renters tends to be more multifaceted. Plus, a house’s energy performance isn’t exactly visible.

“It’s pretty hard to tell if there’s insulation in the walls. A lot of people don’t even know which way the house is facing,” Pears says.

“And look, to be honest, most Australians have never lived in a decent house in terms of energy performance. We’ve all grown up in 50- or 20-year-old buildings that are pretty awful, and we don’t even know what a good building is until we live in it.”

There’s no doubt homes being built in Australia today are better than those constructed last century. But experts and builders say the six-star requirement is already out of date, and leaves Australia in Europe’s dust.

“While that may have been a big step 10 years ago, now six stars is so easy to achieve for a builder,” O’Connell says. “We’re building a lot of homes at the moment that people can’t afford to live in through extremes of temperature. We’re not planning for the future.”

If you design a house well enough, O’Connell says, you can get to six stars with single-glaze windows and no insulation. Add a bit of insulation, and it rises to seven or eight. These are the kinds of dwellings he is working on at Cape Paterson, which he sees as a benchmark for better housing in Australia.

Tony O’Connell outside a home he and his team at TS Constructions built at The Cape. Photograph: Alana Holmberg/Oculi for The Guardian

“If you get the design right, it doesn’t cost a lot of money to build sustainable,” O’Connell says. “It’s when you don’t get the design right and you try to get your energy ratings by putting increasingly more expensive product in to try and achieve the rating, that it does cost a bit.”

There are hopes the 2022 revisions to the National Construction Code will see the minimum standard for new homes and significant renovations lifted to seven stars.

O’Connell delivers talks to other builders and to councils about building more sustainable homes. Change is slow, he says, but happening.

“I think if you went back 10 years ago and talked about sustainable construction, people would think you were proposing to build an igloo somewhere,” he says.

Now, people are starting to see sustainability as a long-term benefit instead of a drain on their bank accounts.

“It’s hip pocket. They get their quarterly power bill, they know how much it’s costing, you demonstrate how little it can cost,” he says. “I think the thinking has changed now, where people are considering a lot of these things to be a benefit rather than a cost.”

Links

• Business, unions and green groups call for sustainable Covid-19 recovery with clean energy transition
• The Green Recovery: how to fix Australia's energy-inefficient homes – video
• Plan that tackles recession and climate change could create 76,000 Australian jobs, report says
• NSW government says renewable energy zone in New England could power 3.5m homes
• Full Story The green recovery: what is it and will Australia miss a once in a lifetime opportunity?

(AU) Climate Change Litigation: The Australian Government Gets Sued

Scoop - Binoy Kampmark

“It’s time the government told the public about the impact climate change will have on our future and the economy.”
Katta O’Donnell, The Guardian, Jul 24, 2020

Katta O’Donnell
Photograph: Molly Townsend

Dr Binoy Kampmark holds a PhD in history from the University of Cambridge. He also has a Masters degree in history and honours degrees in Arts and Law from the University of Queensland. Dr Kampmark is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, teaching within the Bachelor of Social Science (Legal and Dispute Studies) program at RMIT University, Melbourne.

While coronavirus ravages life, dominates policy and clouds debate, that other pressing issue of addressing climate change has moved into a more modest gear.

That has not prevented some bubbling activity from taking place on the matter of litigation.

While climate change law suits remain in their swaddling clothes, some shape is discernible.

In countries where fossil fuels remain sovereign, legal actions have focused on restricting or preventing the approval of projects and holding companies accountable on environmental risks associated with their activities.

Short of the bare fisted force of legal action, people’s tribunals, community bodies and petitions have tended to urge change in the field, drawing attention to the predations of climate change policies. In December 2005, for instance, Sheila Watt-Cloutier filed a petition on behalf of the Inuit with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights claiming that US climate change policy had breached their human rights. As she stated at the time, “A declaration from the commission may not be enforceable, but it has great moral value…. Protecting human rights is ground occupied by both reasonable governments and civil society.”

In April 2019, the Australian legal firm Corrs, with unintended punning, predicted a “third wave” of climate change litigation. “In that wave, investors will seek to recover their losses from directors, auditors and advisers who have not confronted climate change risks.” Communities affected by the vicissitudes of climate change would also “litigate to try to force action by government and the largest emitters, and to seek damages from those they think might be held responsible for contribution, inaction, and obfuscation.”

In December 2019, a galvanic jolt passed through the field of ecological justice with a ruling by the Netherlands’ highest court in Urgenda Foundation v. Netherlands. The Dutch Supreme Court upheld the decision of the appellate court affirming the original decision that the government cut its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25% by the end of 2020 (compared to 1990 levels). While the Dutch State did not disagree with the threat posed by climate change, their argument rested on the primacy of political decision making: it was up to political representatives to decide on the levels of reduction.

In their judgment approving judicial scrutiny of such governmental actions, the justices noted that inadequate action in addressing climate change posed a “risk of irreversible changes to the worldwide ecosystems and liveability our planet” with a “serious risk that the current generation of citizens will be confronted with loss of life and/or a disruption to family life… that the State has a duty to protect against.” The European Convention of Human Rights reaffirmed the State’s obligation “to protect the life and the right to private and family life of its residents”.

The ruling gave Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, enough to suggest that “a clear path forward for concerned individuals in Europe – and around the world – to undertake climate litigation in order to protect human rights” had been made. “The potentially devastating effects of unchecked sea rise, heat waves, uncontrollable forest fires, hurricanes and other growing emergencies must spur us all to demand courage and decisiveness by Governments everywhere in responding to these threats.”

As of January 2020, the number of climate change cases filed was recorded at 1,444. A climate change litigation update furnished by Norton Rose Fulbright noted in February this year that suits had “been filed in 33 countries, in addition to cases brought in regional or international courts and commissions. The vast majority of these cases continue to be commenced in the United States (US), followed by Australia, United Kingdom, European Union, New Zealand, Canada and Spain.”

On July 22, university student Katta O’Donnell filed a civil action in the Australian Federal Court that may find itself in the same league as Urgenda, albeit with a somewhat more corporate flavour. She wished, in her words, to put the government “on trial for misconduct”.

The action makes the dangers of climate change, and a state’s obligation to inform investors of those dangers, a central theme. “At all material times,” the action observes, “there has existed a significant likelihood that the climate is changing, and will continue to change, as the result of anthropogenic influences.” To that end, “Australia is materially exposed and susceptible” to the risks posed by climate change.

Such risks loom large for the investor – in this case, the investor who seeks to trade in government bonds, a market in Australia worth A$700 billion. Such considerations “can have a serious material impact on a decision by an investor to invest in Sovereign bonds and on the value of Sovereign bonds.” In lending money to the government, investors were entitled to be appraised of these risks, being “material to [their] decision to trade in exchange-Australian government bonds (e-AGBs)”.

In “failing to disclose climate change risks to investors,” claim O’Donnell’s lawyers, “the Commonwealth of Australia is accused of breaching its duty of disclosure and misleading and deceiving investors.” The requisite standard of care and diligence was therefore not met. “The standard is equivalent to the legal standard imposed on company directors in Australia.”

The current Australian government, overly friendly to the fossil fuel sector, filled with barely closeted climate change denialists, will find O’Donnell’s action troubling. The voter turned demanding investor is a truly threatening prospect.

Links

• Doctrine of Public Trust
• (AU) 'World-First' Legal Case: Student Accuses Australia Of Misleading Investors On Climate Risk
• (AU) Review Of Australia’s Hopeless Environmental Laws Completely Ignores Climate Change
• (AU) Federal Environment Law Review Calls For Independent Cop, But Morrison Government Rules It Out
• The Law That Could Make Climate Change Illegal
• Climate Battles Are Moving Into The Courtroom, And Lawyers Are Getting Creative
• (AU) Climate Change Is The Next Health Crisis We Face
• (AU) Climate Change 'Threat Multiplier' Ignored In National Environment Laws

(US) Climate Change Poses ‘Systemic Threat’ To The Economy, Big Investors Warn

New York Times - Christopher Flavelle

Financial regulators should act to avoid economic disaster, according to a letter from pension funds and other investors representing almost $1 trillion in assets.

A letter signed by executives from pension plans and other major investors warned the Federal Reserve and other agencies of the financial risks of climate change. Credit...Leah Millis/Reuters

WASHINGTON — Climate change threatens to create turmoil in the financial markets, and the Federal Reserve and other regulators must act to avoid an economic disaster, according to a letter sent on Tuesday by a group of large investors.

“The climate crisis poses a systemic threat to financial markets and the real economy, with significant disruptive consequences on asset valuations and our nation’s economic stability,” reads the letter, which was signed by more than three dozen pension plans, fund managers and other financial institutions that together manage almost $1 trillion in assets.

That financial threat, combined with the physical risks posed by climate change, may create “disastrous impacts the likes of which we haven’t seen before,” the letter says. It urges the Fed, the Securities and Exchange Commission and other agencies to “explicitly integrate climate change across your mandates.”

Investors worry that if regulators do not act, climate change may cause the price of some companies to fall suddenly, the effects of which may ricochet through the economy. Providing more information about that risk — for example, by requiring companies to disclose more about their greenhouse gas emissions, or which of their facilities are at risk from rising seas — could help investors make better decisions.

That, in turn, might encourage companies to lower their emissions, or risk losing access to investment or affordable insurance coverage. “Every medium and large business has bank loans and has insurance,” said Steven Rothstein, managing director of the Ceres Accelerator for Sustainable Capital Markets, a group that works with investors and which organized the letter.

The letter calls on regulators to adopt the steps Ceres outlined last month in a report that makes 51 recommendations to eight federal agencies. At its core are two demands: that the agencies treat climate change as a systemic risk, and that the S.E.C. ensures mandatory and consistent disclosure of climate threats facing companies.

According to Ceres, regulators can adopt each of its recommendations without new legislation from Congress. Still, during the Trump administration, even agencies that are meant to have a degree of independence from the White House have been reluctant to address climate change. President Trump has called global warming a hoax, and he has reversed nearly 70 environmental rules, with another 30 in progress.

Nevertheless, Ceres’s recommendations offer a blueprint for how a Democratic administration might begin to tackle climate change, should former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. win the presidency in November. Last month, Democrats on the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis released a report that echoed some of the recommendations from Ceres, particularly ones regarding the disclosure of financial risks.

The letter on Tuesday suggests that those recommendations have significant support among investors as well.

The letter was signed by some of the largest pension funds in the country, including the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, or CalSTRS, which manages $246 billion; the New York City Comptroller’s Office, which oversees pension funds worth $206 billion; and the New York State Comptroller’s Office, which manages the state’s $211 billion retirement fund.

Liz Gordon, executive director of corporate governance for New York State’s fund, said that even large institutional investors with skilled researchers could not protect their holdings against climate risk. “We do a lot of engagement with companies individually,” Ms. Gordon said. “But that’s not going to solve the broader problem.”

She said the S.E.C., which regulates the stock market and requires publicly traded companies to regularly disclose information about a range of perils they face, should also require those companies to better disclose the financial risks they confront from climate change.

Other asset managers warned that climate change would increasingly disrupt businesses.

Julie Gorte, senior vice president for sustainable investing at Impax Asset Management, which manages $23 billion, said the S.E.C. should force companies to disclose the location of their physical assets, such as factories and other facilities. That way, investors can gauge the risks facing those facilities from wildfires, hurricanes or flooding, and push companies to address them. Investors would then be able to choose whether to invest based on that information.

“Regulators actually have the power to make the risks smaller,” she said. “That will help all investors.”

Another useful change, Mr. Rothstein said, would be for the Fed to require banks to examine the climate vulnerability of the companies they lend money to. Banks already do those tests for other types of financial risk, through a process that regulators and investors call “stress tests.”

Banks could then use the information from those climate-related stress tests to increase the amount of money they hold in reserve, to help them stay solvent if some of those companies defaulted. After the 2008 financial crisis and the collapse of the United States housing market, “we looked at stress tests for banks, focusing on housing,” Mr. Rothstein said. Now, he said, “think about the climate risks.”

Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Federal Reserve governor and deputy secretary of the Treasury who wrote the foreword to Ceres’s list of recommendations, said that regulators in the United States were falling behind their counterparts in other countries, which have already begun imposing stress tests for climate change as well as other steps.

“You see very credible central banks, like the Bank of England and the European Central Bank, taking the risk of a climate calamity into their mission in a very disciplined and structured way,” Ms. Raskin said. “These aren’t fringe ideas.”

While the changes don’t require congressional approval, the objections of some Republican lawmakers to acting on climate change have had a chilling effect on regulators, said former Representative Carlos Curbelo, Republican of Florida, who signed the letter.

“Some civil servants logically fear that certain legislators, certain committees would come after them or attack them,” Mr. Curbelo said. “By and large, regulators try to stay out of controversy.”

Still, Mr. Curbelo said the need to act was clear. “The risks are real,” he said, “and those of us who live here in South Florida observe them on a daily basis.”

Links

• (AU) Climate Council Unveils Plan To Create 76,000 Jobs In Three Years
• (AU) Australia Is About To Blow A Once-In-A-Generation Opportunity
• Study: Climate Change Crisis Requires Less Growth-Oriented Global Economy
• Our Pandemic Response Was A Disaster. We Can't Afford To Make The Same Mistakes With Climate Change
• The Economic Theory That Could Fuel A Climate Change Revolution
• Why It Doesn’t Make Economic Sense To Ignore Climate Change In Our Recovery From The Pandemic
• In The Midst Of An Economic Crisis, Can 'Degrowth' Provide An Answer?
• (AU) Want An Economic Tonic, Mr Morrison? Use That Stimulus Money To Turbocharge Renewables
• This Is How We Can Make A Global Green Recovery – That Also Boosts The Economy
• (AU) Minerals Council Slammed For “Woefully Inadequate” Climate Action Plan
• (AU) Australia's Climate Future To Evolve As Economy Is Rebuilt

Major New Climate Study Rules Out Less Severe Global Warming Scenarios

Washington Post - Andrew Freedman | Chris Mooney

An analysis finds the most likely range of warming from doubling carbon dioxide to be between 4.1 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit.

Flames ripped through trees as the Hog Fire jumped Highway 36 about five miles from Susanville, Calif., on Monday. (Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images). (Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)

The current pace of human-caused carbon emissions is increasingly likely to trigger irreversible damage to the planet, according to a comprehensive international study released Wednesday.

Researchers studying one of the most important and vexing topics in climate science — how sensitive the Earth’s climate is to a doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — found that warming is extremely unlikely to be on the low end of estimates.

These scientists now say it is likely that if human activities — such as burning oil, gas and coal along with deforestation — push carbon dioxide to such levels, the Earth’s global average temperature will most likely increase between 4.1 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit (2.3 and 4.5 degrees Celsius).

The previous and long-standing estimated range of climate sensitivity, as first laid out in a 1979 report, was 2.7 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 4.5 Celsius).

If the warming reaches the midpoint of this new range, it would be extremely damaging, said Kate Marvel, a physicist at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies and Columbia University, who called it the equivalent of a “five-alarm fire” for the planet.

The new range is narrower than previous studies, but shows at least a 95 percent chance that a doubling of carbon dioxide, which the world is on course to reach within the next five decades or so, would result in warming greater than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) relative to preindustrial temperatures.

That is the threshold beyond which scientists say the Earth will suffer dangerous effects — disruptive sea level rise, intolerable heat waves and other extreme weather and permanent damage to ecosystems.

Staying below that is still possible. If steep emissions cuts are made in the near-term, a doubling of carbon dioxide levels could be avoided. But if a doubling does occur, there would be a 6 to 18 percent chance of exceeding the upper bound defined by the study of 8.1 Fahrenheit (4.5 Celsius).

The study by 25 researchers from around the world and published in the journal Reviews of Geophysics is the result of a four-year effort sponsored by the World Climate Research Program. It includes a narrower projected sensitivity range that has a two out of three chance of occurring, of 4.7 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit (2.6 to 3.9 Celsius).

The “Holy Grail” of climate science

For decades, climate scientists have been seeking to answer the question of how much global temperatures would climb if the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere were to double.

This measure was estimated in a 1979 study from the National Research Council led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Jule Charney.

The “Charney Report” concluded that the planet’s climate sensitivity was most likely within the range of 2.6 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 4.5 Celsius).

Ever since, researchers have tried to narrow that range, contending with myriad uncertainties in how the oceans and atmosphere respond to historical changes in solar output, the planet’s orbit, past periods with higher amounts of carbon dioxide in the air as well as feedback, such as how various cloud types act to trap or reflect heat energy. In addition, scientists have wrestled with uncertainties in models that simulate past, present and future climate change.

“Constraining climate sensitivity has been something of a Holy Grail in climate science for some time,” said study co-author Zeke Hausfather, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute.

The climate sensitivity question has taken on new urgency as some of the newest computer models developed for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) , due in a report next year, show a higher climate sensitivity than earlier models.

The new result narrows the range from what Charney and his colleagues calculated while raising the lower bound.

Multiple lines of evidence pointing in the same direction

Global average temperature departures from average from January through June 2020. (Berkeley Earth)

To produce the study, the group of researchers worked like detectives, breaking up into teams that sifted through multiple sources of evidence.

Some of the data examined include instrument records since the industrial revolution, paleoclimate records from coral reefs and ice cores that provide evidence of prehistoric temperatures, as well as satellite observations and intricate models of how the climate system works.

To reach their new, authoritative estimates, the researchers required that multiple lines of evidence point to the same general conclusion and that this be explained without being the result of a bias that influences one or more sources of evidence.

“An important part of the process was to ensure that the lines of evidence were more or less independent,” said lead author Steven Sherwood, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales’s ARC Center of Excellence for Climate Extremes, in a news release.

“You can think of it as the mathematical version of trying to determine if a rumor you hear separately from two people could have sprung from the same source; or if one of two eyewitnesses to a crime has been influenced by hearing the story of the other one,” Sherwood said.

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University who was not involved in the study, called this “a tour de force of climate science.” He said via email that the study, “Really, really kills the skeptical argument that climate sensitivity is low.”

“It would have been great if the skeptics had been correct and climate sensitivity was, say, 1.5°C, but that’s not the world we live in.”

Knowing the climate sensitivity range could enable better decision-making

The term “climate sensitivity” might seem like an academic construct, a metric that matters more in the grand theories and computer models of scientists than it does in our everyday lives.

In fact, the study has a message that matters to us a great deal: There is basically little or no chance that we are going to get lucky and find that the warming caused by our activities turns out to be minor.

There are at least two main lines of evidence that lead to the conclusion, based on the study. The first is simply the warming that has already occurred since the industrial revolution.

Currently, with atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at 415 parts per million (compared with a preindustrial level of 280 parts per million), the world is about halfway toward doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide (560 parts per million). And already, the Earth has warmed by at least 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) preindustrial temperatures.

The new research finds that, in light of this, there is strong evidence refuting the notion that a doubling of carbon dioxide would only cause around 2.6 degrees (1.5 Celsius) of warming.

At the same time, researchers rejected the idea that there is any factor in the climate system that will counteract the warming trend in a meaningful way.

In the past, climate change contrarians and doubters have said that clouds might be such a factor. For instance, if as the planet warms the overall size, composition or surface area of clouds increases, they could reflect more sunlight from Earth, which would cool the planet some. But the study finds that isn’t likely to happen.

“We find that a negative total cloud feedback is very unlikely,” the authors write, concluding that for this reason the climate sensitivity cannot be very low.

“The uncertainty is really asymmetric here,” Marvel said in an interview. “We can be very confident in ruling out sensitivities on the low end. So basically what we’re saying here is that there is really no evidence for any sort of natural response, any sort of big, stabilizing feedback, that in the absence of human actions, is going to save us from climate change."

But Gavin Schmidt, the study’s co-author and Marvel’s colleague at NASA Goddard, offered some optimism, noting that collective action by nations could prevent the doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“The primary determinant of future climate is human actions,” Marvel said.

Links

• An assessment of Earth's climate sensitivity using multiple lines of evidence
• After 40 years, researchers finally see Earth’s climate destiny more clearly
• Global heating: best and worst case scenarios less likely than thought
• Millions of homeowners face flood risks without realizing it, and climate change is making it worse
• 2°C: BEYOND THE LIMIT - Extreme climate change has arrived in America
• Siberian heat streak and Arctic temperature record virtually ‘impossible’ without global warming, study says
• Arctic sea ice is in a downward spiral, and may break a record in 2020

(AU) In A World First, Australian University Builds Own Solar Farm To Offset 100% Of Its Electricity Use

The Conversation - Jake Whitehead | Andrew  Wilson | Peta Ashworth
                               Saphira Rekker | Tapan K Saha

Glenn Hunt

Limiting global warming to well below 2℃ this century requires carbon emissions to reach net zero by around 2050. Australian households have done much to support the transition via rooftop solar investments. Now it’s time for organisations to take a more serious role.

The University of Queensland’s efforts to reduce its electricity emissions provides one blueprint. Last week UQ opened a 64 megawatt solar farm at Warwick in the state’s southeast. It’s the first major university in the world to offset 100% of its electricity use with renewable power produced from its own assets. In fact, UQ will generate more renewable electricity than it uses.

The Warwick Solar farm shows businesses and other organisations that the renewables transition is doable, and makes economic sense.

The renewables transition makes economic sense. Glenn Hunt

A model for the future

UQ’s electricity decarbonisation journey started a decade ago when it installed a 1.2MW rooftop solar array across buildings at the St Lucia campus. At the time, it was the largest rooftop solar array in Australia.

In 2015 UQ launched the 3.3MW solar farm at Gatton – part of a world-class solar research facility open to researchers from around the world.

Building on this, last week UQ opened the Warwick solar farm, primarily funded through a A$125 million loan from the Queensland Government. The output – about 160 gigawatt-hours a year – is equal to powering about 27,000 homes or reducing coal consumption by more than 60,000 tonnes. This generation will more than offset the total amount of energy UQ’s sites use each year.

Money that would previously have been spent paying the university’s electricity bills will instead now pay off this loan, over about a decade. This shows how an organisation can redirect operating expenditure to invest in emissions reduction.

Three months ago, UQ also installed a 1.1MW Tesla battery at its St Lucia campus. As Queensland’s largest on-site battery, it saved UQ almost A$75,000 in electricity costs during the first three months of operation. It did this by buying power when it was cheap and selling it during peak demand periods, as well as helping support the grid during faults.

These projects provide a “living laboratory” for teaching and research. They also give crucial insights into how organisations can invest in renewable generation and energy storage assets today, to increase their commercial viability.

UQ has made data generated by its solar and battery assets publicly available so other organisations can learn from its efforts.


Opening of UQ’s Warwick Solar Farm in 2020.

Why organisations must act

About 2,000 companies are jointly responsible for more than half the world’s emissions. In many cases, investors are now calling on companies to demonstrate how their activities are compatible with a net-zero emissions target.

Organisations generate greenhouse gas emissions in different ways. “Scope 1” emissions come from assets owned or controlled by the organisation, such as company-owned vehicles or power plants. “Scope 2” emissions come from electricity consumed, and “Scope 3” involves a wide range of indirect emissions such as staff commuting or waste disposal.

Companies can also contribute to emissions produced overseas, but these are generally not captured by standard national emissions accounts.

A 2015 study was the first to translate global climate targets to a company level. Since then, more than 900 companies have committed to climate action through the Science Based Targets initiative.

Typically, companies are not yet evaluated in terms of their performance against climate goals. However, attention from investors on climate risk and impact is increasing. It’s only a matter of time before lagging companies will face greater scrutiny from investors, governments and the broader public. All the more reason to start acting today.

Public pressure is building on companies to reduce emissions. School Strike 4 Climate Australia

Over to you

An organisation must take a holistic view of all its activities, to fully understand the emissions it creates. From this they can develop a sustainability “action plan” which includes setting science-based targets . UQ is currently finalising a ten-year Sustainability Strategy based on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Other ways organisations can reduce emissions include:

• entering into power purchase agreements with renewable energy generators – basically a contract for the sale and supply of renewable energy
• investing in energy efficient equipment such as LED lighting and modern air conditioners
• transitioning to a low-emission vehicle fleet and supporting sustainable transport alternatives such as electric scooters, bikes, cars and buses
• minimising waste and recycling more
• supporting sustainable food practices.

The time for talk is over. Organisations must now actively play their part in achieving global net-zero emissions. The University of Queensland shows how it can be done.

Links

• Really Australia, it's not that hard: 10 reasons why renewable energy is the future
• A pretty good start but room for improvement: 3 experts rate Australia's emissions technology plan
• (AU) Climate Council Unveils Plan To Create 76,000 Jobs In Three Years
• (AU) Australia Is About To Blow A Once-In-A-Generation Opportunity
• (AU) Public Debut For Printed Solar
• (AU) City Of Sydney Completes Switch To 100 Per Cent Renewable Supply
• (AU) The Surprising Way Renewables Can Help Farmers Cope

(AU) Cyclones Can Be Predicted Four Months Ahead, Thanks To New Australasian Model

ABC News - Evan Wasuka | Elsie Lange

Category two Cyclone Sarai was one of the storms that battered the Pacific last season. (Supplied: Japanese Meteorological Agency / Himawari-8)

Key Points Cyclone modelling has traditionally been difficult due to complex interactions between the sea and atmosphere A new Australia-New Zealand forecast model now synthesizes these interactions simultaneously This could strengthen the Pacific's preparedness for its annual cyclone season

Cyclones have been notoriously hard to predict over decades, but a new scientific model could prove to be a circuit-breaker, particularly in the cyclone-battered Pacific.

Newcastle University, in collaboration with New Zealand's National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research, has released a new predictive tool call Long-Range Tropical Cyclone Outlook for the Southwest Pacific (TCO-SP), which can forecast cyclones up to four months in advance.

Current modelling only produces forecasts one month in advance, while actual cyclone paths may not necessarily follow predicted paths.

Traditionally, the severity and paths of tropical cyclones have been hard to predict because of the complex interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere, but this new tool manages to capture all of these interactions simultaneously.

The above graphic shows how evolving cyclone prediction technology would have mapped Cyclone Tracy's path. (Supplied: BOM)

"We consider the most recent changes in ocean and atmospheric variability, and that enables us to refine the outlooks based on what's just happened," Andrew Magee, a specialist in climate change's effects on extreme weather events at Newcastle University, told the ABC.

Dr Magee added this could buy Pacific governments lifesaving time to prepare for the region's annual cyclone season, which runs between November and April.

There are already nine tropical cyclones predicted in the south-west Pacific for the upcoming season.

New tool could be a Pacific life-saver


Cyclone Harold devastated parts of Vanuatu earlier this year.

Earlier this year, category five Cyclone Harold tore through Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, and the Solomon Islands, leaving a trail of ruin and killing more than 25 people.

For ship captains like Eddie Varou from the Solomon Islands, any progress in cyclone forecasting is exciting and would benefit many in the region.

"Those islands depend entirely on fruits, so if you can predict which months cyclones can come, then these people will have three months to prepare their food, their rice, so when the cyclone hits, they are already ready," Mr Varou said.

"I hope our Government can take this on."

Cyclone Harold struck Vanuatu this year with winds of up to 285 kph. (ABC News: Dan McGarry)

Neville Koop, a meteorologist from Na Draki Weather in Fiji, said the research was a "major step" in helping authorities solve community-based issues such as disaster preparedness leading up to cyclone season.

"This provides the expert level much more information about likely scenarios for cyclone activity, both short term … over the course of days and weeks, right out to seasonal and into annual [forecasts]," Mr Koop said.

He said the technology could potentially be used to predict events "several years ahead".

Links

• A new island-scale tropical cyclone outlook for southwest Pacific nations and territories
• Storm warning: a new long-range tropical cyclone outlook is set to reduce disaster risk for Pacific Island communities
• Vanuatu faces 12-month recovery as Cyclone Harold heads for Fiji
• Why are cyclone paths so difficult to predict?
• The ingredients that make up a recipe for disaster
• Winston strikes Fiji: your guide to cyclone science
• What makes the Bay of Bengal one of Earth's deadliest cyclone zones?

Biggest Ice Sheet On Earth More Vulnerable To Melting Than Thought

National Geographic - Douglas Fox

Shocking evidence suggests that the last time the East Antarctic ice sheet collapsed, it added over 10 feet to sea level rise, and that it’s likely to happen again.

A new study concludes that the East Antarctic ice sheet last collapsed much more recently than believed, and that it could happen again over the next centuries. Photograph by George Steinmetz, Nat Geo Image Collection

A rare, translucent, black-and-white crystal that sat in a box for 30 years has led scientists to a startling discovery: The East Antarctic ice sheet, which holds 80 percent of the world’s ice, may be even more vulnerable to warming than once believed.

Scientists had determined that this ice sheet last retreated about three million years ago. But a new paper in the journal Nature suggests—based on a study of crystals collected from the region—that a large part of it collapsed only 400,000 years ago. Most startling of all, the team’s calculations suggest that the dramatic change happened during an extended but relatively mild warm spell.

NG MAPS

During that time period, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere never rose very high, peaking at only about 300 parts per million (ppm), says David Harwood, who studies Antarctic glacial history at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.

“That’s the scary thing,” says Harwood. Modern carbon dioxide levels blew past 300 ppm way back in 1915—and they currently sit at 410 ppm. In the coming centuries, that extra carbon dioxide could raise temperatures, and sea level, well above what happened 400,000 years ago, he says. “This doesn’t bode well for the future.”

The world’s other ice sheets, including those in Greenland and West Antarctica, are already predicted to lose ice in the coming century. Greenland sits far from the North Pole, exposing it to warm air, and West Antarctica sits in a broad bowl that dips below sea level, exposing it to warm ocean currents. But the East Antarctic ice sheet was considered more secure, because it occupies the frigid South Pole, and most of it sits on land that shields it from the ocean’s warmth.

“For decades, the East Antarctic ice sheet has been dressed in this armor of invincibility,” says Slawek Tulaczyk, a glaciologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who took part in the research. To speak of it shrinking “was, until recently, unthinkable.”

If these new findings bear out, then East Antarctica may contribute to sea level rise sooner than expected. The greenhouse gases that humans have produced to date may have already locked in 42 feet of eventual sea level rise from all of the glaciers predicted to melt in the coming centuries, including the ones in East Antarctica.

Solving a mystery

This discovery stemmed from a study of the delicate layers of a black-and-white crystal from deep beneath the ice sheet. Tulaczyk and Terry Blackburn, a geochemist at UC Santa Cruz, happened upon the crystal while studying something else. It began in 2017, as they visited Taylor Valley, on the coast of East Antarctica, to investigate a mystery: Measurements by them and other scientists had shown that water seeping through the ground there was unusually high in uranium.

“This signal was coming from somewhere else” further up the valley, says Graham Edwards, Blackburn’s doctoral student who was also on that trip. And so they went looking for the source of the uranium signal, hoping it might reveal something interesting about the history of the ice sheet.

Although most people know uranium as a nuclear fuel, tiny traces of it are found throughout the world’s rocks, rivers, and oceans. Most of it exists in a heavy form, called uranium-238. But mixed in with it, scientists always find a few atoms of a lighter version, called uranium-234, which is produced when its heavier cousin undergoes radioactive decay. Across the world’s oceans, the ratio of these two forms is relatively constant—about one atom of uranium-234 for every 16,000 atoms of uranium-238.

Crystal layers like these, which formed 200,000 years ago beneath the East Antarctic ice sheet, reveal that it melted 400,000 years ago, much more recently than thought. Photograph by Michael Scudder

Scientists theorize that when an ice sheet covers a continent for a long time, the water trapped under it slowly accumulates uranium-234. This happens as uranium-238 in the rocks and gravel under the ice decays, tossing atoms of light uranium into the water, where they accumulate over time.

The water seeping through Taylor Valley is unusual because it holds two to five times the usual level of the lighter uranium-234. “Those fluids have been in contact with rock for a significant period of time,” speculates Blackburn.

Measuring the amount of uranium-234 under the East Antarctic ice sheet could therefore provide clues about how much time has passed since the ice sheet’s most recent retreat.

Unlocking the rocks

However, no one had ever measured uranium-234 under an ice sheet. So Blackburn, Edwards, and Tulaczyk set out to try to find minerals that formed in the water beneath the one in East Antarctica. Those rocks might record how much uranium-234 was in the water where they were created, which could, in turn, reveal when the sheet had last melted.

Finding rocks from under the ice sheet might sound like a pipe dream, but Tulaczyk and Blackburn knew of a place where rocks from beneath the ice make their way to the surface, an area called Elephant Moraine, just over the mountains from Taylor Valley.

Thousands of rocks cover the ice there. They are lifted from the bottom of the ice as it oozes over a buried mountain ridge, like a wave breaking at a glacial pace. Constant dry winds evaporate the ice surface by several inches a year, so the rocks eventually make their way to the surface.

At the end of Taylor Glacier, a hypersaline brine known as "Blood Falls" flows onto the ice surface. The red color comes from iron oxide. Researchers studied mineral deposits from such fluids and found surprising evidence of glacial retreat about 400,000 years ago. It was thought that the East Antarctic ice sheet had been stable for millions of years. Photograph by Terry Blackburn

During the 1980s, a scientist from Ohio State University collected hundreds of rocks from Elephant Moraine. Most were granites, sandstones, and basalts that formed before the ice sheet covered the continent. But among these, he found a few mysterious chunks of crystal, which sat in the collection for 30 years, until Blackburn read about them and acquired three from OSU’s Polar Rock Repository in 2019.

One of the rocks was especially striking, with paper-thin alternating bands of creamy-white opal and amber or black calcite stacked like tree rings throughout.

Blackburn chipped off individual layers and determined their ages by measuring their uranium-234 and another radioactive element, thorium-230, which the uranium decays into at a known rate. He found that the layers in the fist-sized rock had formed over a span of 120,000 years, starting about 270,000 years ago.

Next he measured the percentage of the lighter uranium-234 in each layer. He thought it would be constant from one layer to the next—because, he says, “there are these ideas that the East Antarctic ice sheet had been stable for millions of years.”

To his surprise, the crystals told him something very different: The amount of uranium-234 in successive layers actually grew by 50 percent. In the precise world of geochemistry, “this is a massive change,” says Blackburn. Two other layered crystals from Elephant Moraine showed similar results.

That finding could mean only one thing: The East Antarctic ice sheet had retreated more recently than anyone thought. When the ice disappeared, the water beneath it spilled into the ocean—resetting the amount of uranium-234 back down to a low level. Only after the ice sheet grew back did uranium-234 once again start to accumulate under it; it was that accumulation that was captured in the crystals.

This wasn’t a small retreat, either, says Tulaczyk. For seawater to approach Elephant Moraine, the ice would have had to retreat 400 miles from its present-day coastline. Elephant Moraine sits on the edge of a vast area, called Wilkes Basin, where the rocky, icy bed drops as far as 5,000 feet below sea level—exposing the ice to deep ocean currents that could have melted its underside.

Tulaczyk estimates that over an area of 115,000 square miles (about the size of Arizona), the ice sheet thinned by thousands of feet—until it peeled off its bed and floated on the ocean. Weakened, it couldn’t support as much ice upstream, and the Wilkes Basin lost more than 250,000 cubic miles of ice, enough to raise the sea level 10 to 13 feet.

It happened before

The new results fill in much-needed details, says Maureen Raymo, a marine geologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York. She studies ancient shorelines around the world that now sit high above the waves, complete with sand, shells, and fossil shrimp burrows. Those shorelines show multiple times when sea levels were higher in the past, including 400,000 years ago, when she estimates that they peaked somewhere between 33 and 42 feet higher than today’s levels.

Greenland, West Antarctica, and other glaciers globally might contribute 30 feet of rise if they melted. Adding another 10 to 13 feet from the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica “is completely consistent” with those estimates, says Raymo.

Links

• What An Ocean Hidden Under Antarctic Ice Reveals About Our Planet’s Future Climate
• Doomsday: By 2300, Global Sea Levels Could Rise by An Astounding 16 Feet
• Satellites Show Melting Ice Sheets In Antarctica And Greenland Have Contributed To 14 mm Sea Level Rise In 16 Years
• Guest Post: How Close Is The West Antarctic Ice Sheet To A ‘Tipping Point’?
• Past Antarctic Ice Melt Reveals Potential For 'Extreme Sea-Level Rise'
• If Warming Exceeds 2°C, Antarctica’s Melting Ice Sheets Could Raise Seas 20 Metres In Coming Centuries
• Iceberg The Size Of Sydney Breaks Off Amery Ice Shelf In Antarctica
• Glacial Melting In Antarctica May Become Irreversible
• Antarctic Sea Ice Declining ‘Precipitously’ Since 2014, Study Finds