Southern Ocean Acidification Increases: Report

ABC News - Jane Ryan

Photo: The Aurora Australis taking carbon measurements from the Southern Ocean near the Mertz Glacier. (Supplied: G. Cresswell, CSIRO)

The Southern Ocean has surprised scientists by increasing its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide emissions, but they are warning it could come at a cost to marine life.
About a quarter of the world's carbon emissions are absorbed into the ocean each year, with 40 per cent of that going into the Southern Ocean.
Ten years ago the ocean's ability to absorb CO2 began to decline, meaning emissions were instead being absorbed into the atmosphere.
A report published in the journal Science today shows the Southern Ocean carbon reservoir, or "sink", has since increased, but scientists warn it will lead to further ocean acidification.
CSIRO and Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC scientist Bronte Tilbrook, who collaborated with scientists from America and Europe on the research, said the sink had increased again by about 0.6 billion tonnes of carbon per year — about six times Australia's emissions.
"What it's shown is while the sink did weaken in the 1990s, it looks like it's coming back since about 2002," he said.
"So it's returning to the levels that we expect, which is a big relief."
"It means that the Southern Ocean is continuing to take up large amounts of carbon dioxide, but there is a concern there's a lot more variability than we understood.
"So it's not clear that that sink will continue, it could revert back to lower values, we just don't know."
Dr Tilbrook said the changes in the sink are believed to be caused by changes in the weather.
"Wind and weather patterns around the Antarctic are having a big impact on the variability of the sink," he said.
"Predictions now are that there's a big El Nino coming so it's really important for us to understand how the Southern Ocean sink is changing."
He warned of growing levels of acidification caused when carbon dioxide dissolves in salt water.
"The changes we expect to see in ocean acidification in this century are likely to be bigger than anything these marine organisms have seen in the ocean for the last 20 million years," he said.
"We're changing the system really dramatically.
"The problem with ocean acidification is that a lot of the organisms in the Southern Ocean, and even in tropical systems including coral reefs, are going to have trouble growing shells and skeletal material.
"They're taking energy from normal life processes like growing and defending themselves against viruses and diseases to growing their shells and skeleton."
Dr Tilbrook said ocean acidification also affects the metabolic and physiological processes inside organisms including development, growth, reproduction and respiration.
"What we're doing is putting stress on parts of the ecosystem that will have flow-on effects that we don't really understand," he said.
"It's a major concern for the future of marine ecosystems."

Links

Related Story: Southern Ocean close to acid tipping point

Related Story: Ocean study reveals carbon not sinking

Map: Hobart 7000

Australia's Climate Change

Fairfax

As Fairfax reported, new research by the ARC Centre of Climate System Science shows how days of heat extreme heat since 2000 now outnumber cold ones by a ratio of 12 to one.
Taking the past 15 years as a single period, almost all of the country has had above-average to highest-on-record temperatures compared with any other 15-year stretch, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.



The rainfall over the 2000-14 period helps to explain why much of the Northern Territory missed out on the warmer temperatures.
As shown below, the middle third of Australia - where relatively few people live - has been wetter than most other rolling 15-year periods.



The extra moisture means more evaporative cooling, and hence the milder temperatures over parts of the interior, one climatologist said.
Perhaps of more impact has been the record-low rainfall along the western edge of the country, which is also showing up in a sharp drop in water run-off into reservoirs in that region.
Similarly of note is the relatively dry period for most of Victoria and Tasmania. It's a trend that continues to play out in 2015, with parts of western Victoria experiencing their driest 12 months on record.

Climate Change Deniers Ignore Basic Scientific Facts

BUSINESS INSIDER



About 97% of scientists agree not only that climate change is real, but also that human activity, like driving a fossil fuel-burning car, is making it worse.
That agreement stems from nearly 4,000 studies that suggest humans are culpable, compared to only about 80 that say we have nothing to do with the problem.
Those numbers should leave us pretty confident that humans are indeed fuelling climate change. However, you could argue there’s a (really) small chance those 2% of studies actually have it right.
So, a team of seven climate scientists and meteorologists decided to give climate contrarians the benefit of the doubt, picked half of their more popular studies, and tried to redo them. (The hallmark of a good scientific paper is that it’s reproducible, meaning another scientist can do the same experiment and get the same or similar results.)
What happened? Beyond being unable to replicate most of the results, the team discovered major flaws in the papers. In fact, many papers left out essential data, and some even ignored basic physics.
Dana Nuccitelli, one of the scientists who helped analyse the climate denier papers for the journal Theoretical and Applied Climatology, summed up what his team found in a blog post for The Guardian.
Below are the three biggest, most common problems Nuccitelli and the team found with the small minority of studies that dispute human involvement in climate change.

Climate change deniers cherry-pick the data
Nuccitelli and his colleagues examined 38 widely referenced papers that dispute human involvement in climate change. The team learned that these papers often ignored critical background information or left out big sets of climate data.
In one example, the authors of a 2011 paper tried to show the lunar and solar cycle are responsible for climate change, but they ignored 6,000 years’ worth of data that didn’t jibe with their idea. Nuccitelli summed up the issues well in his post for The Guardian:

When we tried to reproduce their model of the lunar and solar influence on the climate, we found that the model only simulated their temperature data reasonably accurately for the 4,000-year period they considered. However, for the 6,000 years’ worth of earlier data they threw out, their model couldn’t reproduce the temperature changes. The authors argued that their model could be used to forecast future climate changes, but there’s no reason to trust a model forecast if it can’t accurately reproduce the past.

That 2011 study wasn’t alone. Cherry-picking or downright manipulating data to get a desired result — no evidence of human-caused climate change — was the most common flaw among the climate denier papers examined by the team.

Climate change deniers ignore basic scientific facts
While most papers misconstrued or left out data, some simply ignored core scientific facts.
A handful of papers blamed climate change on the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, but the researchers didn’t offer any explanation for how that would be possible in the first place.
Other studies argued the greenhouse gases that fuel climate change, including carbon dioxide, don’t drive global warming much beyond a particular saturation point — which would let humans off the hook for adding more and more to the atmosphere. However, that idea wasdisproved as far back as the early 1900s.

Climate change deniers can’t agree on an alternative theory
While 97% of experts agree that humans are worsening climate change, the other 3% couldn’t settle on an alternative explanation. Here’s Nuccitelli again:

[T]he 2 — 3% of papers that reject that consensus are all over the map, even contradicting each other. The one thing they seem to have in common is methodological flaws like cherry picking, curve fitting, ignoring inconvenient data, and disregarding known physics.

The researchers say science is constantly evolving and changing, so no area of research is ever really “finished.” However, science is based on evidence. Enough evidence leads to a theory, and a theory survives when it is tested over and over again and the evidence continues to support it. Then the scientific community comes to a consensus on that theory.
That’s how 97% of experts came to agree on the theory that climate change is fuelled by human activity, a conclusion that’s been over a century in the making.
And right now there is no compelling evidence and no clear theory for an alternative to human-caused climate change, Nuccitelli concludes in his blog post.

Report: Australia's Record 'Poor' on Combating Climate Change

Fairfax - Lucy Cormack

Poor report card: Australia's record on combating climate change and carbon emissions is unsatisfactory, report says.

One Australian produces more than three times the amount of carbon dioxide produced by individuals in leading industrialised countries on average, a report into the readiness of the world's richest countries to combat climate change has found.
The Sustainable Development Goals: Are the rich countries ready?report revealed that most OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries are a long way off reaching United Nations development goals, with Australia 18th out of the 34 OECD nations.
It said that while Australia falls somewhere in the middle of industrialised countries when it comes to environmental sustainability, its record on combating climate change and carbon emissions is poor.

Messages in support of action to combat climate change are projected onto the side of the UN building in New York, ahead of the international summit that begins this month. Photo: AP

"It's shocking but it's expected. We are, along with Canada, the world's pariah with international climate policy at the moment and this is something the report finds," said Dr Donna Green, senior researcher at the Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales.
"It's a result of our dysfunctional climate policies. We're currently hemorrhaging jobs, not only in the renewables sector, also in the mining sector. It's really a very serious situation."
However Dr Green said, one way to look at it is to be optimistic that it "feels almost like we're seeing the last death throes of an increasingly desperate fossil fuel industry".

"We're currently hemorrhaging jobs, not only in the renewables sector, also in the mining sector. It's really a very serious situation:" Dr Donna Green. Photo: Paul Jones 

In his forward for the report, former secretary-general of the United Nations Kofi Annan said the new Sustainable Development Goals would be a universal set of goals for all countries, including the rich nations of this world.
"High-income nations must become leading examples of truly sustainable development. The Sustainable Development Goals should be workable and understandable by people so they can ask governments to act," he said.
"Civil society must be able to put pressure on governments to hold them to account for what they pledge at the UN summit."

Former secretary-general of the United Nations Kofi Annan said the new Sustainable Development Goals would be a universal set of goals for all countries.

The report has been released ahead of the United Nations Global Sustainable Summit this month, and measures the preparedness of OECD nations for the imposition of the UN's new sustainability development goals for 2030.
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Switzerland are the best performing countries, the report says.
Mexico is the lowest ranked nation, followed by Turkey, Hungary, Chile and Greece.
On both greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide emissions, Australia ranked 33rd out of the 34 and it has the OECD's highest rates of domestic materials consumption, at 47 tonnes a person.
Australia came in 30th in the OECD for domestic municipal waste output (647 kilograms a person) and on its efforts to combat climate change.
It was not all bad news for Australia, which was among the top-ranked nations for average life expectancy in full health (73 years), household space (2.4 rooms a person), clean air and the safety, resilience and sustainability of its cities and towns.
It also scored in the top five for sustainable use of its ocean and marine resources, even though 15 per cent of its fish stocks are over-exploited.
Despite some of the damning results in the report, Dr Green said she does not expect it to garner any great response from the Australian government, ahead of December's 21st Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
"I would say it probably washes over them. They've already decided what they're taking to Paris. What they are taking to Paris is exactly the same level as what we see in this report," she said.
"This just reconfirms everything we've always known. It's unfortunate it's reconfirmed it in such an iron-clad way that we're at the bottom of the heap, in terms of climate policy. The frustration is it's not we don't know there are ways to get out of this, we're choosing not to take them."
The report was prepared by the Bertelsmann Foundation, the non-profit foundation established by German media corporation Bertelsmann.
It came one day before Wednesday's announcement that Australia will get up to 10 new large solar power stations as part of an unprecedented $350 million tie-up between the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, who will collaborate to offer, respectively, grants and loans to get major solar projects off the ground to feed into the energy grid.

Fraser Resigns Climate Change Authority Chair

Sydney Morning Herald

Bernie Fraser, chair of the Climate Change Authority, has resigned.
Photo: Alex Ellinghausen / Fairfax

The chair of the Abbott government's climate change advice agency, Bernie Fraser, has resigned without explanation.
It comes less than a month after Mr Fraser issued a strong rebuke to Abbott government over its justifications of its post-2020 greenhouse emissions targets.
A statement issued by the Climate Change Authority late on Tuesday said Mr Fraser, a respected former Reserve Bank governor, had quit as chair.
"The authority members thank Mr Fraser for his enormously valuable contribution to the authority's work in providing independent expert advice to the Australian government and Parliament on climate change," it said.
"Arrangements have been made to ensure the authority's work will continue uninterrupted."
No further explanation was provided. It is understood Mr Fraser had a difficult relationship with Environment Minister Greg Hunt.
Fairfax Media understands Mr Fraser announced his decision on Tuesday after an all-day meeting of the authority.
Many of his colleagues are believed to be deeply saddened by his departure. He is not believed to have quit due to personal problems such as a health issue.
A spokeswoman for the authority said Mr Fraser did not wish to comment on his resignation.
The government sought to abolish the authority last year but was blocked in the Senate.
In September last year Mr Fraser said morale at his agency had been hit hard by the government's attempt to cull it.
"It's understandably having a pretty devastating effect," he said.
He said even with some staff departures, the authority retained a "core capacity" to help the government develop a policy to restore bipartisan support for renewable energy.
But Mr Fraser said despite this "we have not been invited" to assist the government on the issue.
In a statement late on Tuesday, Mr Hunt thanked Mr Fraser for his work.
"He has had an outstanding career in public service, which I deeply respect and acknowledge," he said.
"In particular, I thank Mr Fraser for his assistance with the crossbench in the passage of the Emissions Reduction Fund."
The authority had urged the government to impose extra scrutiny on polluters to ensure that, under that fund, billions of taxpayer dollars are not spent on emissions cuts that would have occurred anyway.
Mr Fraser was an outspoken advocate of renewable energy and climate change action. In a strongly worded statement last month he directly contradicted government claims about emissions targets it would take to global climate talks in Paris later this year.
In the statement, Mr Fraser said Prime Minister Tony Abbott government's assertion that its emissions cuts were akin to the United States were incorrect, and in fact Australia's targets put the nation "at or near the bottom" of comparable countries.
He said on the basis of the government's current targets, Australia "would slip further behind the efforts being made by comparable countries and likely face large catch-up adjustments down the track".
Mr Fraser said Labor's proposed emissions trading scheme does not equate to a new carbon tax, contrary to the government's characterisation.
The government intends to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas released into the atmosphere by 26-28 per cent by 2030, based on 2005 levels.

France's Hollande Says Risk Climate Talks Could Fail

Reuters

French President Francois Hollande warned on Monday that climate change talks in Paris later this year could fail especially if the issue of financing for emerging nations was not resolved.
The United Nations said on Sept. 4 that talks were on track for the Nov. 30-Dec. 11 summit after a week of negotiations in Bonn made progress in clarifying options about everything from cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to raising aid to developing nations.
"Good intentions are there, but we are still far away from a legally binding agreement and financing that is up to the levels needed," Hollande told a news conference. "There is even a risk of failure."
Almost 200 governments agreed in 2010 that a 2 degree Celsius rise was the maximum allowable to avert the heaviest impact of climate change, including floods, droughts and rising sea levels. About 100 developing nations favour a tougher ceiling of 1.5 degrees.
The plans submitted so far to the United Nations by about 60 nations represent 70 percent of world emissions and are deemed too weak to keep temperatures below the agreed ceiling of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times needed to avoid the worst effects of warming.
Some emerging nations do not want to commit themselves until they are assured that developing nations will receive $100 billion per year from 2020 to adapt to the impact of climate change.
Hollande said France would focus over the next three months on firming up assurances on this sum.
"It is the key. There has to be a pre-accord on the question of financing so that leaders come to Paris knowing there is certainty we will be able to conclude," Hollande said.
"If we don't conclude, and there are no substantial measures to ensure the transition, it won't be hundreds of thousands of refugees in the next 20 years, it will be millions."
Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who hosted some 60 countries in the French capital on Monday to add impetus to the negotiations, said he would convene a larger ministerial meeting by mid-November to ensure that much of the work was completed before the Paris summit.

Climate Change: Refugee Crisis

The Guardian - Craig Bennett

Failure to act on climate change means an even bigger refugee crisis. Global warming does not cause the conflicts that have caused mass movement of people, but it would be wrong to say it does not contribute.

Refugees and migrants wait to pass the borders from the northern Greek village of Idomeni, to southern Macedonia, on 7 September 2015. Photograph: Giannis Papanikos/AP

As I looked in on my own children sleeping safely last Thursday night before I went to bed, I did so with added poignancy as I reflected that this was something Abdullah Kurdi was not able to do. I’m sure millions of parents of young children right across Europe have felt similar emotions these last few days.
We’re all human, and so it’s perhaps not surprising that it takes a single photograph and an individual’s story to shake a society, all too belatedly, into glimpsing at one horrific aspect of Europe’s refugee crisis and demanding action.
But if we really want to reduce the future suffering of millions of refugees, and politicians want to avoid more shameful paralysis in the years ahead, we also need to look at the bigger picture.
Armed conflict will always be a risk in a world with oppressive dictators, terrorist groups, ideological extremism, the militarisation of sensitive regions by world powers, and an arms trade on the constant look out for new business. All of these factors, and more, are behind the appalling conflict in Syria, and the reason Europe is now struggling to cope with tens of thousands of refugees.

Global warming contributed to Syria's 2011 uprising, scientists claim

But it would seem that one of the key triggers for the 2011 Syrian uprising was the 2006 to 2010 drought, the most severe on record in this fertile region, itself probably caused or exacerbated by climate change.
As the abstract of an academic paper published this March in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences puts it: “There is evidence that the 2007−2010 drought contributed to the conflict in Syria. It was the worst drought in the instrumental record, causing widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to urban centres.
“Century-long observed trends … strongly suggest that anthropogenic forcing has increased the probability of severe and persistent droughts in this region. We conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict”.
Scientists have similarly suggested that climate change may have played a role in the drought in north Africa that fuelled food price rises ahead of the Arab Spring, while back in 2007, a UN report concluded that climate change and environmental degradation was a key trigger in the conflict in Darfur a few years earlier.
To be clear; there will always be a multitude of drivers behind of social unrest and armed conflict. It would be wrong to say climate change “caused” these conflicts, but equally the evidence suggests it would be wrong to say it didn’t play a contributing role. And, if this is what is possible when average global temperatures have risen less than 1C, then goodness help future generations if/when it reaches 2C, 4C or even 6C.
In these circumstances, mass migration will be occurring in many regions of the world, with or without armed conflict. In 2014, the World Bank reported that climate change is going to lead to far more heat-waves and drought, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, exacerbating crop failure, food and water shortages, conflict and dislocation of people. Right now, Baghdad has eight extreme heat days a year. With 2C global warming they say there will be 90 extreme heat days. With 4C warming, over 115. It is a similar story for Amman, Damascus, Beirut, Riyadh.

Friends of the Earth CEO Craig Bennett: 'Now is the time to listen to ordinary people again'

The failure of the global community, and principally the rich countries, to tackle climate change means we are still on trajectory to these sort of temperatures.
This is why climate adaptation – action to reduce the vulnerability of ecological, social and economic systems to adverse effects of climate change – is now such a hot topic in the international climate talks. This is also why the countries that will suffer the worst impacts of climate change (predominantly the poorer countries) are quite rightly demanding at least $200bn a year in new and additional public finance from richer countries to help adapt.
But with or without climate adaption schemes, it would be naïve in the extreme to assume millions of people suffering the worst effects of climate change aren’t going to want to move, and morally bankrupt to deny them this possibility if they’ve contributed next to nothing to the causes. Throw armed conflict back into the mix, and the problems currently being experienced in Budapest or Calais are far from the full extent of the problem.
There are no simple solutions, but rich countries should be providing the financing and other assistance right now to help vulnerable countries and communities adapt to climate change while doing much more to cut greenhouse emissions, by investing in energy efficiency and clean energy, and leaving fossil fuels in the ground.

The nine green policies killed off by the Tory government

Sadly, in the past few months, the UK government has moved in the wrong direction as it’s torn up a long list of climate policies that have been put in place over many years, while at the same time championing brand new fossil fuel infrastructure in the form of fracking.
People from across the political spectrum have come together in the last week to demand a much stronger response from David Cameron to the refugee crisis, and rightly so.
But if the government continues to move backwards on climate change, then we should get ready for a much bigger refugee crisis before very long.