If You're Not Terrified by Climate Change, Just Consider the Great Barrier Reef

Pacific Standard - Lane Severson

Climate change is set to erode the reef at a record pace. What used to take centuries is now happening in less than a generation.

The Great Barrier Reef, Cairns, Australia (Photo: Phil Walter/Getty Images)

The Googanji people on the northeastern coast of Australia tell of a time when they could follow a river 25 miles through what is now ocean to the current location of the Great Barrier Reef. This story has been preserved without being written down for over 12,000 years, from when sea levels were 200 feet lower than they are today and the Great Barrier Reef was not a reef but groups of cave-pocked hills. The Great Barrier Reef is the best-protected reef in the world: a World Heritage site and an Australian marine park, home to hundreds of species of fish, coral, and sharks. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has successfully reduced threats to the reef from major industrial ports, agriculture, and poachers, and plans to spend over two billion dollars over the next decade to preserve the reef.
Despite this high degree of national protection and funding devoted to the reef, the leading expert on coral, Charlie Veron, told the Royal Society in 2009 that it is on track to be eviscerated within the next generation. Between 1985 and 2012, nearly half the coral in the Great Barrier Reef was lost to cyclones, crown of thorns star fish, and bleaching events. But Veron has described in detail how modern climate change is on track to change the ocean so drastically that corals and the reefs they build will be driven to extinction faster than in any previous mass extinction event.
The popular notion that climate change happens slowly and in small increments is a failure of human perspective. The rate of change happening in our environment is unprecedented over the past 450 million years of geological history.

Until the modern age, it used to take millennia to destroy a species completely. Today we can destroy natural habitats much more efficiently.

If the Great Barrier Reef is wiped out, it wouldn't be the first time. Each of the five mass-extinction events have wiped coral out, after which coral re-evolved again from scratch. Corals and the marine life they support have battled changes in temperature, water levels, and weather events like cyclones and tsunamis. They have lost, died, and evolved again over periods of millions of years.
But the similarity between previous mass extinction events and what is happening today only sounds similar because we use the word extinction without much context for how extinction happens. Scientists call extinction an "event," but the environmental changes of the past have occurred over tens of thousands—or in the case of the Devonian and Jurassic extinctions, millions—of years. Populations of animals, plants, etc. weren't destroyed overnight or over centuries.
Until the modern age, it used to take millennia to destroy a species completely. Today we can destroy natural habitats much more efficiently. The challenge here is that, to a casual observer, it doesn't appear that the world is ending. The world seems to exist today in much the same way it did yesterday.
This is the case with the impending annihilation of the Great Barrier Reef. We don't immediately grasp the importance of limiting climate change to a couple of degrees over the next few decades. The change can seem small, inconsequential. If we do happen to experience a moment of climate clarity, it is exceptionally difficult to use that information in a meaningful way—especially when what is required of us is a change to our way of life, a change that might require great cost (or at least great inconvenience) and still not be enough to save the reefs unless millions of others make those same sacrifices—and teach their children to do the same.
And so a growing amount of carbon dioxide will be contributed to the atmosphere this year as countries like America and China continue to use coal as a primary source of power generation and gasoline for transportation. Oceans will continue to act as a sponge for carbon dioxide, and surface temperatures will rise around the world. The increased water temperature will cause symbiotic bacteria in corals of the Great Barrier Reef to produce toxically high levels of oxygen, which will kill colonies of coral that are centuries or even millennia old and occupy the equivalent of Japan's landmass under water. Even as leading carbon emitters find a path toward sustainable levels of carbon emissions, the allure of coal-powered energy is too powerful for developing nations to forgo.
If the Great Barrier Reef dies, something else dies with it. The most diverse marine ecosystem on our planet does not go gentle into that good night. The impact of a marine extinction event would likely mean the extinction of major elements of terrestrial life. The Great Barrier Reef is a canary in the mineshaft that can be seen from outer space.
A mere handful of human generations will destroy an ecosystem that has existed since the Ice Age unless we can develop lifelong commitments to atone for the sins of our parents. The tragedy of modern American life is that most of the communities that used to support lifelong commitments are in their own final stages of extinction. The ones that aren't, primarily evangelical churches, don't traditionally identify climate change as part of their mission, though this is slowly changing. The idea of making a lifelong commitment is antiquated. But this is exactly what is required of us, because a human life is very short, and it will be a long time before we can heal the damage that has been done.

Links

• Saving the Paris Agreement From the Supreme Court
• The Inexact Science of Climate Economics
• Climate Change? What's That?
• Bumblebees Are Climate Change Deniers
• Climate Change Is Upending the Ecology of Lakes

Commercial Benefits Won't Flow Without Commitment To Long-Term Research

Canberra Times Editorial

There is now enough solar power generators installed in Australia to light up 1.25 million homes. Photo: Paul Rovere

Australia reached a significant milestone last week, passing the 5 gigawatts of installed solar power across the country. According to solar energy consultancy SunWiz, that represents enough solar power to light up 1.25 million Australian homes – the equivalent of every household in Brisbane and Perth combined.
Nationally solar now accounts for 9 per cent of total electricity generation, according to analysis of data from the Renewable Energy Certificate Registry. While much of the recent growth in solar energy generation has come from larger facilities, rooftop solar continues to play a significant role, and in Canberra, 16,000 homes now have panels on their roof. A major new industry has emerged thanks in part to the rapid advances in solar panel efficiency and the lowering of costs.
Yet in the same week Australia passed that impressive milestone, the head of the powerhouse behind many of the country's most promising innovations, the CSIRO, was attempting to convince staff that the loss of 350 jobs would be good for the organisation.

Many of the deepest cuts are set to come from the climate modelling and monitoring areas, with chief executive Larry Marshall explaining that after 20 years of work in that area it was time to move on to other priorities.

Mr Marshall is correct when he says that the notion of a customer is often a new one for scientists. There is a growing attitude that in order to pay its way, research must be linked to tangible, commercial outcomes.

Yet impressive milestones like wide scale take-up of solar panels do not happen without the pure science that lead to technological advances. As has been noted elsewhere, some of the CSIRO's most commercially important breakthroughs like wireless internet technology have been accidents discovered while conducting research in other areas like radio astronomy.
Australian scientists and researchers can hold their heads high as some of the best in the world. This week we heard for the first time what gravitational waves sound like, thanks in part to the involvement of Australian National University researchers. Would this breakthrough, that after 100 years validates one of Albert Einstein's most important theories, have happened, had those researchers been pushing for a commercial outcome?
It will be impossible for Australia to benefit from commercial breakthroughs unless we continue to support research for research's sake in fields like climatology that help us improve our understanding of our world. If, as former prime minister Kevin Rudd said in 2007, climate change is the great moral challenge of our generation, how can we hope to solve it while cutting hundreds of jobs from the bodies charged with researching it?
2800 scientists from nearly 60 countries have now signed an open letter to the CSIRO stating, "The capacity of Australia to assess future risks and plan for climate change adaptation crucially depends on maintaining and augmenting this research capacity.
"Without committing to the continued development of next generation climate monitoring and climate modelling, billions of public investment dollars for long term infrastructure will be based on guesswork rather than on strategic and informed science-driven policy. "
Despite the legislative and political uncertainty around renewable energy, Australia has managed to claim a place at the forefront of innovation. Whether we are able to maintain that position in the coming years will be an issue CSIRO management will have to think deeply about as they set their future priorities.

Link

• More than 16,000 homes in the ACT have rooftop solar

Climate Risks Could Wreak Havoc On Financial Markets, EU Watchdog Warns

The Guardian - Arthur Neslen

Banking advisory group calls for risk disclosure and stress tests to protect against climate inaction should move to low carbon economy happen too late

If fossil fuels aren’t taken offline in time, a sudden switch to clean energy would trigger a collapse on the stock markets and trigger a global economic crisis. Photograph: Franck Robichon/EPA

The EU's financial watchdog has called for governments to consider imposing asset disclosures on industry and stress tests on banks as a guard against the economic crisis that could be caused by an emergency switchover to clean energy.
The European Systemic Risk Board – set up by the EU in the wake of the 2008 crash to monitor risks to financial markets – has warned in a new report of economic "contagion" if moves to a low carbon economy happen too late and abruptly.
A scramble to take fossil fuels offline could reduce energy supplies, while increasing their cost and exposing investors to the worst effects of 'stranded assets', or fossil fuel holdings that may never be recouped without causing climate disaster.
Nearly 200 governments at the Paris climate summit in December agreed to bring greenhouse gas emissions down to net zero in the second half of the century, to tackle global warming.
But if governments dither and are then forced to green their economies in a rush, the study warns that banks which are exposed to 'carbon-intensive' or CO2-heavy assets could face systemic risks.
To quantify the dangers, "policymakers could aim for enhanced disclosure of the carbon intensity of non-financial firms," says the board's report, 'Too late, too sudden', published on Thursday. "The related exposure of financial firms could then be stress-tested under the adverse scenario of a late and sudden transition."
The study comes as the debate on carbon disclosures moves from the question of 'if' to 'how'. A warning last December by the governor of the Bank of England that investors face huge losses from climate change was quickly followed by the creation of a new global taskforce.
Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York is leading the task force which aims to produce a voluntary industry-led code for disclosures under the rubric of the G20's Financial Stability Board.
But the new ESRB report appears to go further, by advocating new forms of regulation.
Ben Caldecott, the director of sustainable finance at Oxford University's Smith School, is currently researching how to locate and analyse data on firms' carbon assets, and how to design stress tests for them.
"We need to find an answer to these questions pretty damn fast," he told the Guardian. "Without better data on asset-level and company-level exposure to these risks, effective stress testing will be challenging. Correcting this major flaw in our understanding is now an urgent priority."
Mandatory climate disclosure obligations were strengthened in France last July, under the country's energy transition and green economy law. It responded to a fear that fossil fuel firms are hugely over-valued because they may never fully exploit their carbon assets without causing dangerous global warming.
A market 'correction' could wipe trillions of dollars off the global economy, experts say.
The Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, whose members represents over €13tn in assets, already asks businesses to address the carbon intensity of their assets and potential impacts of global warming on their operations.
"The longer we wait to engage with this challenge, the greater the risk of abrupt change and far more costly economic adjustments later on," said the group's chief executive, Stephanie Pfeifer.
Companies already have a legal duty to disclose the principal risks, according to Alice Garden, an attorney for the green law firm ClientEarth. "We expect to see carbon intensive companies reporting on these risks in their annual reports this year so investors can make informed decisions about where to invest their money," she said.

Links

• Stock markets hit by global rout raising fears for financial sector
• We print money to bail out banks. Why can't we do it to solve climate change?
• Global markets turmoil echoes 2008 financial crisis, warns George Soros
• Carney warns of risks from climate change 'tragedy of the horizon'

The Oil Industry Got Together and Agreed Things May Never Get Better

Bloomberg Business - Andy Hoffman   Grant Smith   Javier Blas   Angelina Rascouet

Thousands of industry participants gathered in London for their annual get-together, only to find a world awash in crude and hardly a life jacket in sight.



The thousands of attendees seeking reasons for optimism didn’t find them at the annual International Petroleum Week. Instead they were greeted by a cacophony of voices from some of the largest oil producers, refiners and traders delivering the same message:
There are few reasons for optimism. The world is awash with oil. The market is overwhelmingly bearish.

No Hope
Producers are bracing for a tough year. Prices will stay low for up to a decade as Chinese economic growth slows and the U.S. shale industry acts as a cap on any rally, according to Ian Taylor, chief executive officer of Vitol Group, the world’s largest independent oil trader. Even refiners, whose profits have held up better than expected, are seeing a worsening outlook.

“The oil industry is facing a crisis,” said Patrick Pouyanne, CEO of Total SA, Europe’s biggest refiner. BP Plc boss Bob Dudley described himself as “very bearish” and joked that the surplus is so extreme that people will soon be filling swimming pools with crude.
As the world runs out of places to store oil, “I wouldn’t be surprised if this market goes into the teens,” said Jeff Currie, head of commodities research at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Cuts? What Cuts?
Crude prices surged briefly last month on speculation the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries would team up with Russia to cut production. The head of the nation’s biggest oil company had other ideas.
“Tell me who is supposed to cut?” said Igor Sechin, CEO of Rosneft. "Will Saudi Arabia cut production? Will Iran cut production? Will Mexico cut production? Will Brazil cut production? Who is going to cut?”
Supply exceeds demand by as much as 1.7 million barrels a day, so cutting 1 million from production would in theory make prices more “reasonable,” Sechin said. Nevertheless, Rosneft is focused on preserving its traditional markets against the competition, he said.
Cuts on the scale required to balance the market just aren’t happening. While some fields have started to fall victim to low prices, only 0.1 percent of global output has been curtailed because it’s unprofitable, researcher Wood Mackenzie estimates.

A Profitable Opportunity
Traders are the only ones enjoying the slump as they profit from sky-high volatility and a market structure called contango - where prices in the future are higher than today - that means they can make money just by keeping oil in storage tanks.



As the price of U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude slumped close to 12-year lows this week, another opportunity emerged: super-contango. Places to store oil on land are running out in some places, and the contango is getting so steep that it’s becoming profitable to hire supertankers, fill them with crude and anchor them offshore.

Terrible Market, Great Party
Throughout the gloom, champagne flowed, backed by a jazz quartet.
If it's hard times for the industry, that wasn't obvious from the cocktail party circuit. Kuwait Petroleum Corp. welcomed guests to ballroom of the Four Seasons hotel in London’s exclusive Mayfair district with hospitality as if nothing had changed since 2014, when oil was $100 a barrel. Tables were laden with shashlik, oysters and even a whole lamb carved by a chef. In the dessert room, a chocolate fountain bubbled alongside bowls of strawberries.
The State Oil Co. of the Azerbaijan Republic - where a currency crisis has provoked street protests - offered four whole roast lambs, a sushi bar and chocolate truffles to thousands of guests at Park Lane’s Grosvenor House Hotel.
“We didn’t cut back,” said Elshad Nassirov, the company’s vice-president of marketing and investments, “in order not to spoil the mood.”

From Liquid Air To Supercapacitors, Energy Storage Is Finally Poised For A Breakthrough

The Guardian - Damian Carrington

Banks of batteries and other technologies could lower energy bills and help renewable power, says energy storage industry as it gears up for bumper year

Tesla's Powerwall captured attention at its launch, but the lithium-ion batteries it's based on are just one of a host of energy storage technologies taking root in the UK. Photograph: Patrick T. Fallon/REUTERS

"It doesn't always rain when you need water, so we have reservoirs - but we don't have the same system for electricity," says Jill Cainey, director of the UK's Electricity Storage Network.
But that may change in 2016, with industry figures predicting a breakthrough year for a technology not only seen as vital to the large-scale rollout of renewable energy, but also offering the prospect of lowering customers' energy bills.
Big batteries, whose costs are plunging, are leading the way. But a host of other technologies, from existing schemes like splitting water to create hydrogen, compressing air in underground caverns, flywheels and heated gravel pits, to longer term bets like supercapacitors and superconducting magnets, are also jostling for position.
In the UK, the first plant to store electricity by squashing air into a liquid is due to open in March, while the first steps have been taken towards a virtual power station comprised of a network of home batteries.
"We think this will be a breakthrough year," says John Prendergast at RES, a UK company that has 80MW of lithium-ion battery storage operational across the world and six times more in development, including its first UK project at a solar park near Glastonbury. "All this only works if it reduces costs for consumers and we think it does," he says.
Energy storage is important for renewable energy not because green power is unpredictable - the sun, wind and tides are far more predictable than the surge that follows the end of a Wimbledon tennis final or the emergency shutdown of a gas-fired power plant. Storage is important because renewable energy is intermittent: strong winds in the early hours do not coincide with the peak demand of evenings. Storage allows electricity to be time-shifted to when it is needed, maximising the benefits of windfarms and solar arrays.

This alone would not be enough to justify the costs of storage, but it brings multiple other advantages. The UK's National Grid already spends £1bn a year on balancing the grid, switching power on or off to keep the lights on, and stored energy could play a big role. Storage can also be a much cheaper option than big new power stations that might be paid to lie idle for much of the year and only kick in on cold winter evenings. The widely distributed nature of storage also boosts energy security. "It's a 'no regrets' option," says Prendergast.
The most established form of energy storage is pumping water up mountains, and the UK has four such plants. But available mountains in useful places are now rare and Highview Power Storage is about to fire up an alternative: liquid air.
Its new £8m demonstration plant, at Pilsworth, near Manchester, and funded by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc), is set to start in March. By compressing air 700 times into a cold liquid, it stores power which is released by evaporating the liquid air into a high pressure gas to turn a turbine. The 5MW system will be able to power many thousands of homes for a few hours. Gareth Brett, CEO of Highview, says it is like pumped storage, but can be sited wherever it is needed.

Another technology backed by Decc is a home battery system from Moixa Group, a UK technology similar to Tesla's Powerwall. The £2,000 briefcase-sized battery can store surplus energy from rooftop solar panels but it also earns money by being part of a smart network of home batteries - a virtual power station - which the company uses to help balance the National Grid.
"You can turn houses on or off the grid, if the National Grid wants me to do it and pays me to do it," says Simon Daniel, Moixa founder and CEO. About 350 systems have been installed so far, and Daniel argues that rolling out a much bigger network could be much faster than waiting for planning permission for large energy storage sites.
"Sky installed satellite dishes in a third of UK homes in seven years," Daniel says. He also jokes his battery "is currently manufactured in [energy secretary] Amber Rudd's constituency, which is good politically."
The Moixa system uses lithium-ion batteries and these are the mainstay of the current grid-scale energy storage rollout around the world. In the past they were considered too expensive for larger scale storage but costs continue to fall and their proven track record in consumer electronics gives investors confidence.
The UK's biggest operating energy storage system is an £18m battery plant installed by UK Power Networks (UKPN) at Leighton Buzzard, a growing Bedfordshire town. UKPN's Martin Wilcox says the company, responsible for delivering electricity to homes in south-east England, had a choice: build a third main power line into the town from the National Grid or install 6MW of batteries. With the money it earns by balancing the grid, the latter looked cheaper and went live in 2015.
The UKPN project is set to be overtaken by AES, a global power company, with a 10MW lithium-ion plant at its Kilroot power station in Northern Ireland, while REDT is installing a £3.6m flow battery on the Scottish island of Gigha, to support its wind turbines.
Batteries are also at the heart of the Everest project in East Anglia, but it uses second-hand batteries from Renault electric cars. Ian McDonald, at Future Transport Systems, which is the technical lead for the project, says it buys the batteries - at a fraction of the new cost - after they are about 75% degraded by the "use and abuse" of normal stop-start driving. Because the batteries are then only charged and discharged slowly, as part of an electric car recharging network, they get another five to six years of life.

Electric cars, such as the BMW I3 pictured here, could one day be used as part of a smart energy storage network across the UK. Photograph: PR image

Using electric car batteries as a smart storage network while still in the cars is a promising option in the future, according to Mark Thompson at Innovate UK, a government agency. He says there could be 4GW capacity - a nuclear power station is about 1GW - by 2025 across the 300,000 electric cars projected to be on UK roads by then. He says cars are stationary for 95% of the time and using them could save billions of pounds, removing the need for new power stations and power lines.
But while interest in energy storage projects in the UK is surging - a recent call from National Grid for 200MW of short-term storage was oversubscribed six times - it is starting from a low base: just 24MW has been installed compared to the 5,000MW the government's official advisers, the Committee on Climate Change, envisages in a low-carbon nation in 2030.
"The UK and Europe really led the way on renewables, with the US following. But the opposite seems to be the case in the energy storage industry," says Audrey Fogarty, at Younicos, a German energy storage company with major operations in US. California alone has mandated 1,200MW of storage by 2020.
Sally Fenton, at Decc, said the government was still deciding how to deploy the £250m it now has for non-nuclear energy innovation, but said: "We certainly expect to have increased funding" for energy storage.
In November, energy secretary Rudd said: "Locally generated energy supported by storage, interconnection and demand response, offers the possibility of a radically different model ... We are looking at removing regulations that are holding back smart solutions, such as demand side response and storage."
That would be welcomed by UKPN's Wilcox: "Storage is absolutely at a tipping point. But [energy] regulation was designed 10-20 years ago for a different system." For example, he says, UKPN has to pay towards government social and green subsides when it buys electricity to charge its batteries, but then customers pay them again when they take the power from the discharging battery.
Brett, at Highview, praises Decc for its support - "they have really stuck with us as a British technology" - but says regulatory issues are having a "chilling effect" on the rollout of storage.
Cainey, director of the trade body Electricity Storage Network, says storage projects can be built very quickly. "A battery project can take 12-18 months from saying we will do it, to completion."
She said California's high ambition came from its commitment to tackling climate change: "California is aggressively pursuing a low-carbon agenda and they don't want diesel [generator back-up] on the system." The UK government has been criticised for recently awarding £175m of subsidy to highly polluting diesel generator farms.
"Amber Rudd is talking a lot about energy storage, but we need a clear regulatory steer," says Cainey. "The planes are circling, but there is no runway to land on."
Prof Ian Arbon, at the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, which in 2014 called energy storage the "missing link" in the UK's energy plans, is even more direct: "As a nation we are nowhere near where we should be on energy storage. There is a clear need for massive and urgent attention. Energy storage is one of the obvious solutions to the [decarbonisation] problems we face."
The government is keen to build new gas-fired power stations and develop fracking, but Arbon said: "The UK is the only country in the world who thinks it is going to hit its renewable targets by doing more fossil fuels."

Links

• The only way to beat the blackouts is smart, clean, affordable energy
• Energy secretary reassures households after power station fires
• Move over Golf, how about a VW home power plant?
• Government announces biggest energy reforms in 20 years

Sweden To Go Carbon Neutral By 2045

Climate Home - Megan Darby

Seven out of eight parliamentary parties back proposal for rapid greenhouse gas emissions cuts, boosted by Paris agreement

Sweden's parliament building in Stockholm (Flickr/Neil Howard)

Sweden is aiming to neutralise its greenhouse gas emissions by 2045.
The Scandinavian country will cut territorial emissions at least 85% from 1990 levels and offset the rest by investing in overseas green projects.
That was the proposal unveiled on Tuesday by a parliamentary committee responsible for environmental policy, backed by seven out of eight parties. Only the Sweden Democrats, who got 13% of votes in the 2014 election, are not represented on the committee. It is a speeding up of the low carbon transition, from a previous target to be carbon neutral by 2050.
Deputy prime minister Asa Romson, of the Green Party, told newspaper Svenska Dagbladet there was a good chance of going faster.
She said: "We actually have all the technology we need to be one hundred percent free of fossil fuels. What we do not have is a market for it. We do not have an economy that can do it, so far."
Sweden is set to publish the full legislative proposals next month. Government will be required to create a climate action plan every four years and establish an independent advisory body.
In June more details will follow on how to achieve the goal. With more than half of Sweden's energy already coming from renewable sources – notably hydropower – the focus will be on greening transport. Civil society is also calling for a strategy to deal with emissions from consumer goods imports.
The move follows an agreement between 195 countries in Paris last December to hold global warming "well below 2C". That means achieving a balance between emissions sources and sinks in the second half of the century.
In national contributions to the pact, Costa Rica repeated its goal to be carbon neutral by 2021. Norway is aiming for 2050, according to Climate Action Tracker.
The Paris deal "upped the momentum for climate policy," Asa Persson, researcher at Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) told Climate Home. "Business and industry is showing more and more interest in the climate."
That renewed enthusiasm has not been evident across Europe, however. The UK's independent climate advisors recommended no change to its targets post-Paris and Brussels appears more concerned with ratifying the deal than upping ambition.
"It was already clear that Sweden wants to be the best kid in class in the EU, and this development only reinforces that," said Harro van Asselt, also of SEI.
European leaders meet in March to decide whether to change the bloc's 2030 climate policy package in light of the Paris agreement.
"With some member states being heavily opposed it's difficult to see how the Council will agree on increasing ambition," said van Asselt. But Sweden's overachievement could leave flexibility for other EU members to underachieve, allowing for "slightly" tougher EU-wide targets.

Links

• Report: Sweden rated as 'world's greenest country' Report: EU faces two-year wrangle to ratify Paris climate deal Sweden calls on EU to agree 50% carbon cuts for 2030
• Nordic states eye 2050 carbon neutral energy system
• Sweden delays $45m Green Climate Fund contribution
• Sweden pledges $500m to Green Climate Fund 

Bushfire Seasons Are Becoming Longer And More Severe – Another Urgent Reason To Take Action On Climate

Climate Institute

NASA Earth Observatory

Ongoing scientific research shows that southern parts of Australia are becoming hotter and dryer, that climate change caused by carbon and other greenhouse gas pollution is influencing this transformation, and that our bushfire seasons are becoming longer and more extreme.
The Climate Institute says this evidence further highlights the urgent environmental, social and economic need to take action on climate.
“Global and Australian commitments made at the Paris conference in December, as well as a process to strengthen them, would significantly reduce projected levels of bushfire risk,” CEO, John Connor said.
“It points to the need for a two pronged strategy – to be working hard to cut carbon pollution while, at the same time, building greater resilience to bushfires caused by the global warming already locked in.
“We have brought together the most recent research undertaken by various bodies and scientists about factors influencing the bushfire season in Australia.
“It is showing that bushfire risk is increasing in bushfire-prone parts of Australia – generally, the south-east and south-west - and that climate change caused by human activity is a significant factor in the environmental changes that are creating these conditions.”
It also shows that the economic costs of bushfire and other climate change-related weather disasters continue to mount with each passing season.
“Even without factoring in the potential impact of climate change, the total economic cost of natural disasters, including bushfires, is expected to go from $6 billion a year in 2012 to over $23 billion a year in 2050,” he said.
“Add in the effects of climate change and it becomes truly alarming.”
The CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology have found a statistically significant increase in the occurrence and severity of bushfire weather in over 42 per cent of the parts of southern Australia measured since 1973.
“Findings by researchers in each of the southern states are all showing that fire weather officially categorized as ‘very high’, ‘extreme’ and ‘catastrophic’ is on the increase and will become more and more frequent as we move into the future,”  John Connor said.
“For example, with high levels of global warming, Tasmania is expected to see a 120 per cent increase in the number of fire days categorized above ‘very high’ by 2100. Western Australia can expect the number of annual severe fire danger weather days to double by 2090 if the planet does not manage to limit climate change. Likewise, in this scenario, research has also predicted Victoria could go from a ‘Black Saturday’ level bushfire event once every 30 years to once every three.”
John Connor also pointed out that scientific findings support the contention that climate change is playing a significant causative role in the frequency, duration and intensity of Australian heatwaves, the warming and drying of much of southern Australia, the reduction in cool season rainfall, the lengthening of the bushfire seasons and the concurrent increase in their severity.
"Scientists from the MET Office and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in the UK recently announced 2015 was the hottest year on record, while our own Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO reported that eight out of the hottest ten years in Australia have taken place since 2002, with 2013 being the hottest and 2015 the fifth hottest,” he said.
“Additionally, the University of Melbourne has found that natural climate variation cannot explain our record summer temperatures.
“The evidence from the scientific community and from our bushfires is clear – if we and other nations don’t take stronger action to reduce carbon pollution, extreme and extending bushfire seasons will be just one of the growing adverse outcomes for Australia’s environment, economy and community in the future.”

Link

• True or False? Facts and Myths About Bushfires and Climate Change Factsheet