Turnbull’s Sleight Of Hand On Clean Energy Investment

Renew Economy - Giles Parkinson

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has put his own stamp on clean energy investment in Australia, dumping Coalition plans to scrap the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, but announcing new plans to essentially de-fund the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and replace it with a new “Clean Energy Innovation Fund.”
The retention of the CEFC will be welcome and signals a potential shift from the anti-renewable policy stance of the Abbott regime that preceded him.
But the move to de-fund ARENA and create a “new” fund using money already allocated to the CEFC is nothing but a sleight of hand, and an elaborate ruse by Turnbull to save more than a $1.3 billion and get his new pet-word “innovation” included in a financing scheme. It may also be designed to meet Australia’s Paris commitment to invest “new money” in clean energy innovation.
But the move may back-fire, because although the new set-up will continue to support near commercial projects, the technologies and ideas at the formative stage of the innovation process may be left stranded, without funding. According to the former chairman of ARENA, Greg Bourne, Australian innovation may move overseas to get the necessary support. So much for the innovation nation.
The Turnbull government has been showing less interest in ARENA, and its cost to the budget, and over the last few months has not renewed contracts for directors, and allowed it to narrow to a single director, the head of Greg Hunt’s environment department.
ARENA will continue to manage its current projects, and complete its $100 million funding program for large scale solar projects. But after that its funding will be stopped and it will effectively be morphed – along with its staff – into an annexe of the CEFC and the new fund.
Under the new plan hatched by Turnbull and Hunt, ARENA’s grants-based funding strategy will be replaced by “innovative” finance such as debt and equity funding – effectively lending money and buying shares in the investments.
The remit under the new CEIF banner will also move beyond renewable energy and include energy efficiency, already a major focus of the CEFC, and “low carbon investment”.
Hunt said the CEIF will mostly invest in “storage, in new  battery technology, in smart  grids, in some of the exciting  solar visions that people have  hoped for and imagined for  Australia but which are only  now really becoming reality.” The sort of thing that ARENA was already doing, but may now happen under a fund rebranded by the Coalition.
The new fund will have $100 million a year to invest, but this money will come from funds already allocated to the CEFC. It is being drip fed over 10 years so as “not to overwhelm the market”.
The long term unallocated ARENA budget – amounting to around $1.3 billion – has been withdrawn. This, however, needs approval from parliament, and Turnbull may have a fight on his hands to achieve this once Labor and the Greens see through the proposal, unless it occurs in a joint sitting post a double dissolution.
The Coalition effectively killed ARENA’s unallocated $1.3 billion funding in last year’s budget, excluding it from the forward estimates. But if the Coalition wants that money to disappear completely it needs to change the act, and that will require support from the Senate.
Turnbull said the new fund would target early-stage clean energy projects that had trouble growing to the size and maturity needed to attract private equity. He cited one project that could be supported as the solar tower plus storage facility proposed for Port Augusta by US company SolarReserve.
“We are promoting innovation and new economic opportunities, enhancing our productivity, protecting our environment and reducing emissions to tackle climate change,’’ Turnbull said in a statement. “An example of a project could be a large scale solar facility with storage in Port Augusta.”
That comment drew  enthusiastic support from local community groups pushing for those solar towers – although less so from the CEFC itself. But again Turnbull appears to be giving with one hand and taking with another.
One major concern is the future of the “research” component of ARENA, which has been playing a critical role in providing data, information and knowledge on new technologies, such as grid integration, mapping solar and wind resources.

The Government will also set a target rate of return of one per cent above the government bond rate – compared to the CEFC’s target of 4 per cent above the government bond rate – effectively turning it into a venture capital fund, although one already exists in the form of the Southern Cross Ventures.
“We hope that they do better but that’s their target, so instead of giving  100 per cent of the taxpayers’ money  away, our goal is to receive 100 per cent of the taxpayers’ money  back but with an additional return,” Hunt said at a news conference.
Hunt was particularly critical of ARENA, saying that grants had been made “without a lot  of follow-up as to whether it’s effective.” Others noted that ARENA had recouped $600 million in projects that had been approved by the Howard and Labor governments but did not look promising.
Still, it appears that the government did not approve of large grants to individual projects that offered no return to the taxpayer.
While technically ARENA will not be “merged”, it will be stripped of all its powers. Its few remaining executives will help assess projects for the new fund, but will not be involved in decision making, which will lie entirely with the CEFC board.

Clean Energy Council CEO Kane Thornton said the move effectively took with one hand and gave with another, by reducing ARENA’s access to capital grants and replacing it with new mechanisms using CEFC’s existing money.
Thornton said the new fund will be able to provide both debt and equity, but the question remained to what extent debt and equity can replace the gap previously filled by grants.
“We are pleased that the CEFC is going to live on, but we are disappointed that the government will press on and reduce the budget for ARENA and its ability to provide capital grants.
“These have been critical to ARENA’s success to date, not only in funding large scale solar projects but also in its significant R&D support.”
Staff within ARENA are believed to be horrified by the changes, particularly the decision to bring a halt to funding to start-up technologies and research. They say the focus on the new fund, and the need for it to get a return on investment, will effectively rule out a whole category of funding requirements.
“How many early stage renewable energy projects out there are in a position to one, pay back the money, and give a return on investment,” said one.
Mark Butler, Labor’s climate change spokesman, said Turnbull was trying to make his government look different to Tony Abbott’s, “but he has failed again.”
He accused Turnbull and Hunt of “hitting renewables at the CSIRO” while giving money for research into ‘health effects of wind farms’, and noted Turnbull continued to support Abbott’s direct action policy, which Turnbull had called” fiscal recklessness on a grand scale.”
“Malcolm Turnbull is a sell out on renewable energy just like he is on climate change,” Butler said. “How can we trust them? No new ideas, no new money, just smoke and mirrors.”
John Grimes, the head of the Australian Solar Council, was even more damming.
“Malcolm Turnbull’s Clean Energy Investment Fund is like an exquisitely decorated Easter Egg. It looks great on the outside, but inside it’s a rotten egg,” he said in statement.
“By its very nature early stage research is speculative.  Almost no projects will be fundable under this model.  This will cut the guts out of renewable innovation in Australia”.

Links

• The argument for divesting from fossil fuels is becoming overwhelming | Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian
• Carbon Capture: Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation? | Jonathan Franzen, New Yorker
• Is Jonathan Franzen really asking us to shrug off the detruction of our world? | Robert Manne, The Guardian
• Fossil industry faces a perfect political and technological storm | Telegraph.co.uk
• Fossil fuel industry must 'implode' to avoid climate disaster, says top scientist | Guardian
• My Tesla Powerwall: Tales of an early adopter
• How can global CO2 levels soar when emissions are flat?
• Ex ARENA chair says Turnbull risks pushing clean energy innovation overseas
• Australia offered first chance to reserve Tesla Model 3 mass market EV

Mass Extinctions And Climate Change: Why The Speed Of Rising Greenhouse Gases Matters

The Conversation - Katrin Meissner | Kaitlin Alexander

Coral bleaching in March 2016. Rapid rises of greenhouse gases in the past have been linked to major extinctions in the oceans. XL Catlin Seaview Survey

We now know that greenhouse gases are rising faster than at any time since the demise of dinosaurs, and possibly even earlier. According to research published in Nature Geoscience this week, carbon dioxide (CO₂) is being added to the atmosphere at least ten times faster than during a major warming event about 50 million years ago.
We have emitted almost 600 billion tonnes of carbon since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and atmospheric CO₂ concentrations are now increasing at a rate of 3 parts per million (ppm) per year.
With increasing CO₂ levels, temperatures and ocean acidification also rise, and it is an open question how ecosystems are going to cope under such rapid change.
Coral reefs, our canary in the coal mine, suggest that the present rate of climate change is too fast for many species to adapt: the next widespread extinction event might have already started.
In the past, rapid increases in greenhouse gases have been associated with mass extinctions. It is therefore important to understand how unusual the current rate of atmospheric CO₂ increase is with respect to past climate variability.

Into the ice ages
There is no doubt that atmospheric CO₂ concentrations and global temperatures have changed in the past.
Ice sheets, for example, are reliable book-keepers of ancient climate and can give us an insight into climate conditions long before the thermometer was invented. By drilling holes into ice sheets we can retrieve ice cores and analyse the accumulation of ancient snow, layer upon layer.
These ice cores not only record atmospheric temperatures through time, they also contain frozen bubbles that provide us with small samples of ancient air. Our longest ice core extends more than 800,000 years into the past.
During this time, the Earth oscillated between cold ice ages and warm “interglacials”. To move from an ice age to an interglacial, you need to increase CO₂ by roughly 100 ppm. This increase repeatedly melted several kilometre-thick ice sheets that covered the locations of modern cities like Toronto, Boston, Chicago or Montreal.
With increasing CO₂ levels at the end of the last ice age, temperatures increased too. Some ecosystems could not keep up with the rate of change, resulting in several megafaunal extinctions, although human impacts were almost certainly part of the story.

Nevertheless, the rate of change in CO₂ over the past million years was tame when compared to today. The highest recorded rate of change before the Industrial Revolution is less than 0.15 ppm per year, just one-twentieth of what we are experiencing today.

Temperature has oscillated with greenhouse gases. Kaitlin Alexander, data from: Luthi et al., 2006: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7193/full/nature06949.html Loulergue et al., 2008: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7193/full/nature06950.html Etheridge et al., 1996: http://onlinelibr

Looking further back
To find an analogue for present-day climate change, we therefore have to look further back, to a time when ice sheets were small or did not exist at all. Several abrupt warming events occurred between 56 million and 52 million years ago. These events were characterised by a rapid increase in temperature and ocean acidification.
The most prominent of these events was the Palaeocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). This event resulted in one of the largest known extinctions of life forms in the deep ocean. Atmospheric temperatures increased by 5-8C within a few thousand years.
Reconstructions of the amount of carbon added to the atmosphere during this event vary between 2000-10,000 billion tonnes of carbon.
The new research, led by Professor Richard Zeebe of the University of Hawaii, analysed ocean sediments to quantify the lag between warming and changes in the carbon cycle during the PETM.
Although climate archives become less certain the further we look back, the authors found that the carbon release must have been below 1.1 billion tonnes of carbon per year. That is about one-tenth of the rate of today’s carbon emissions from human activities such as burning fossil fuels.

What happens when the brakes are off?
Although the PETM resulted in one of the largest known deep sea extinctions, it is a small event when compared to the five major extinctions in the past.
The Permian-Triassic Boundary extinction, nicknamed “The Great Dying”, wiped out 90% of marine species and 70% of land vertebrate families 250 million years ago. Like its four brothers, this extinction event happened a very long time ago. Climate archives going that far back lack the resolution needed to reliably reconstruct rates of change.
There is, however, evidence for extensive volcanic activity during the Great Dying, which would have led to a release of CO₂ as well as the potential release of methane along continental margins. Ocean acidification caused by high atmospheric CO₂ concentrations and acid rain have been put forward as potential killer mechanisms.
Other hypotheses include reduced oxygen in the ocean due to global warming or escape of hydrogen sulfide, which would have caused both direct poisoning and damage to the ozone layer.
These past warming events occurred without human influence. They point to the existence of positive feedbacks within the climate system that have the power to escalate warming dramatically. The thresholds to trigger these feedbacks are hard to predict and their impacts are hard to quantify.
Some examples of feedbacks include the melting of permafrost, the release of methane hydrates from ocean sediments, changes in the ocean carbon cycle, and changes in peatlands and wetlands. All of these processes have the potential to quickly add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
Given that these feedbacks were strong enough in the past to wipe out a considerable proportion of life forms on Earth, there is no reason to believe that they won’t be strong enough in the near future, if triggered by sufficiently rapid warming.
Today’s rate of change in atmospheric CO₂ is unprecedented in climate archives. It outpaces the carbon release during the most extreme abrupt warming events in the past 66 million years by at least an order of magnitude.
We are therefore unable to rely upon past records to predict if and how our ecosystems will be able to adapt. We know, however, that mass extinctions have occurred in the past and that these extinctions, at least in the case of the PETM, were triggered by much smaller rates of change.

Links
As carbon dioxide hits a new high, there's still no Planet B
Another link between CO2 and mass extinctions of species
As emissions rise, we may be heading for an ice-free planet
Is another mass extinction event on the way?

Easter Is A Reminder That Climate Change May Be Our Most Deadly Sin

Fairfax - Elizabeth Farrelly

I've never been strong on belief. Sin, virtue, damnation, eternity; none of it has had me altogether persuaded. But one question I can't walk round. Is climate change proof of sin? Not punishment; evidence. Is it final, irreducible proof (for us diehard boneheads) that that the seven deadly sins are exactly that?
Easter bears this question aloft like the sword from the lake. Easter is the loveliest of the religious festivals; nuanced, paradoxical, hauntingly mysterious. It has always been a seasonal turn-point, a "thank god" moment in Australia as temperatures fall back into the realm of the tolerable. But last month's news of a catastrophic climate-change spike – making that thermal relief increasingly improbable – underscores Easter's other role, as a profound and magical moral mnemonic. In short, voodoo.
Our ongoing inertia on climate change suggests that the problem is deep; not at root technical or political but spiritual, a direct consequence of the seven deadly sins run every bit as wild as the carbon we spew into the air. Easter, properly understood, is still the best antidote but its healing powers (since we're in Harry Potter land here) are neutralised by the patriarchal corporation – the church – that holds it captive.

Illustration: Rocco Fazzari

Most religious festivals are Shakespearean comedies; simple, upbeat and celebratory. We try to tuck Easter, too, into this bunny-and-chicken basket, a pagan rite of spring accidentally shipped by history to the wrong hemisphere. But Easter belongs in autumn. Easter is very noir.
I mean sure, Easter celebrates life. But it pivots on the paradoxical necessity to life of death. Yes, its dramatic trajectory ends with the return to hope. But its power inheres in the week-long irony-entwisted plunge from hope (the palm-fringed Hosannas) through rejection and humiliation to fathomless despair. Like a Colin McCahon waterfall, the Easter story stores its energy in that straight, bleak, black, vertical drop.
For me it's this, the misery bit, that makes Easter compelling. Eternal life doesn't tempt me. I'm way more interested in this one, and the implied eternity of the planet in our care. Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? (My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?) The heartbroken cry of the man on the cross gives us Jesus at his most human, and his most here.
The radical openness so revealed, the plea wrenched against a black sky from the torn soul of a dying man, directly opposes the life-diminishing behaviours we once called deadly sins. If we could emulate it, even in small part, this openness would save us and our mothership, Earth.
People argue that Christianity's fatal flaw is making faith alone sufficient for salvation (whatever that is). They say this means you needn't do good; you need only believe. (Here they generally cite Pell, Baird, Abbott, Turnbull.)
But I think that's a misunderstanding. Jesus' radical openness – we're told he "emptied himself … and became obedient to the point of death" – is a Zen thing, like the poetic self-emptying that Keats called negative capability. It's a total trust that makes "sin" impossible.
Why? Because an "empty" self is all subject. Ego is all object, and sin is ego incontinent. Yet if you can even name the sins, it's likely via a 2002 marketing ploy by Magnum ice creams.
Under the tag-line "give in to it", Magnum offered Vanity (champagne), Envy (pistachio), Sloth (caramel), Revenge (raspberry), Greed (tiramisu), Gluttony (double-choc) and Lust (vanilla-strawberry). The church was miffed, but more for misplaced territorial reasons than because it should have been gluttonies 1-to-7.
Sins, after all, are only wisdom codified into portable, foil-wrapped pill-form. The seven deadlies act out our inner spoilt-brat, thus undermining long-term, big-picture wellbeing – such as planetary survival. How does it work?
Lust is the least. Now almost a virtue, a workout, lust is also the least obvious climate contributor, except insofar as it expands the population burden.
Greed (or avarice) is the most obviously implicated, since our insatiable appetite for stuff decimates planetary resources and sends carbon skyrocketing (yet even this is made a virtue by governments intent on economic growth).
Envy is greed's root and enabler. Envy, which makes us self-measure against others' achievements instead of our own evaluated need, is the core of all advertising, most consumption and vast proportion of climate-change.
Gluttony is almost a subset of greed. More people now overeat than under-eat and amputations from diabetes have risen (in NSW) 25 per cent in two years, yet still we genetically engineer broccoli to increase sugar content. Gluttony exacerbates climate-change by the growing, the transport, the food-science, the cooking and the tsunami-like consequences for health.
Those are sins of desire; sins, if you like, of commission. The rest – sloth, wrath and pride – incline us to boneheadedness, inuring us to exigencies that would otherwise drive change.
Wrath (anger, revenge) is the direct opposite of love or radical openness, making us close our hearts to humans and planet, both. Sloth seems innocent. Lying round in trackies? Pretty harmless, right? But its our persistent inaction on climate change that shows sins of omission are still sins.
Pride is the most interesting sin; ambiguous, insidious, destructive. Like lust, pride has become a virtue – I'm gay/black/racist/right-wing/fat and proud of it. But pride also lets us set ourselves above nature, seeing her as our plaything and our tool.
We all have our defining sin. Mine is mainly envy, with a touch of greed. But corporations also sin, and the church's sin is pride.
Many see pride (or hubris) as inherent in the shift from pantheism to monotheism: one god stands above the world, whereas many gods were embedded. But the church, with its chosen people-ism, its patriarchal rigidity, its systemic refusal to care properly for children, women or nature, has trapped Jesus inside a rigid cage of judgment, hypocrisy and cliche.
It makes you wonder. Perhaps, when the crowd welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem with Hosanna! (meaning Liberate us! Save us!) what they meant was: Please. Open our hard hearts! Fill us with radical empty. Save our lovely planet from the boofheads.

New CSIRO Document Reveals Scale Of Planned Cuts To Climate Programs

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

One of CSIRO's main climate science units planned to slash four out of five researchers, all but eliminating its monitoring and climate modelling research, a new document reveals.
The cuts are contained in an analysis for the Oceans & Atmosphere division, dated January 25, 2016. CSIRO handed over the document to the Senate committee investigating plans to slash 350 staff overall, and it has been made public on the Senate's website.

Larry Marshall, chief executive of CSIRO, is trying to shed 350 jobs, including many climate researchers. Photo: Pat Scala

Doubts over the rationale and planning of the cuts flared on Tuesday in another CSIRO section facing deep job losses, with many Land & Water staff walking out of a meeting with chief executive Larry Marshall.
"People got fed up of having their questions marginalised, trivialised, and with being lied to," one senior researcher told Fairfax media. He added that about half those attending walked out, with division's head, Paul Hardisty, among them.
"We understand CSIRO scientists are passionate about their science and also about some of the changes to the structure of their organisation," a CSIRO spokesman said, declining to elaborate on the meeting. "CSIRO is committed to continuing to have open and transparent dialogue with staff and hearing staff views and concerns."

Stocking 40 years of gas samples from Cape Grim, at CSIRO's Aspendale centre. Photo: Supplied

The new document, though, highlights the extent of the original cuts being considered by CSIRO before pressure – including from thousands of international scientists – prompted a scaling back of the job losses.
The Earth System Assessment unit – which includes the climate models used by the Bureau of Meteorology and the team analysing greenhouse and other gases at Tasmania's Cape Grim research station – was to have its 81-strong staff slashed to 16, the analysis shows.
The remaining tally included as many as six post-doctoral researchers, and would have left just the aerosols and air-quality teams, Fairfax Media has been told.
The Oceans & Climate Dynamics unit, which includes sea-level research and ocean observations, was to lose 31 of its 71 staff, the document shows.
"Some long-standing government clients will be impacted by this realignment," the document cites as among the "key risks" of the plan. "This will require some management given that we are electing to make these changes rather than [be] forced by government funding changes."
A spokesman for CSIRO said the organisation stood by comments made by executives including Dr Marshall to Senate estimates. These include an estimate that half of the 140 staff in the main climate units would be retained.
The document "only partly" reflects the situation and that conversations had been many and are ongoing, the spokesman said.
Greens Senator Janet Rice, however, said the document reveals the original plan, "and they've been back-pedalling ever since".
"Not only did they not have any consultation with the Bureau of Meteorology, the Australian Antarctic Division [and other agencies], they had no idea of the impacts," Senator Rice said.
The analysis also omitted from the list of risks the contribution that would be lost to international science and the value to the Australian economy of being able to predict climate change, she said.
Dr Marshall has said CSIRO plans to hire 350 new staff over the next two years to tap new growth areas. These sectors include climate mitigation – or cutting carbon emissions – and adapting to the climate changes that are inevitable.
Scientists, though, have told the Senate committee investigating the CSIRO that adaptation work would be much harder to do unless Australia is able to predict the rate of change and where its impacts will hit the hardest.
The document shows the net reduction in full-time staff in the O&A division would save just $6.5 million a year. That calculation was based on $8.8 million in salaries and $2.7 million in lower operating costs, with the gains set against $5 million in lost revenue.
"It's a pretty bad deal – you cut about 110 staff all together and you recover almost nothing," one senior scientist told Fairfax Media. "You also ruin the reputation [of CSIRO] and the lives" of the staff let go.
Dr Marshall is expected to be grilled on the document when he fronts the Senate committee, now planned for April 7.

Links

• How Fairfax Media broke news of the cuts
• CSIRO pares back climate cuts
• Grim prospects: the shake-up of Australia's climate science

Malcolm Turnbull's Green Shift Another Blow To Tony Abbott

Fairfax - Mark Kenny

In happier times: Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

Malcolm Turnbull has added to the growing differences between his administration and the previous Abbott government by reversing Coalition hostility to forward-leaning climate change policy through the creation of a new $1 billion clean energy innovation fund.
And he has bolstered that move with a formal commitment to keep the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, both of which had been set for abolition under Mr Abbott's leadership.
"Clean energy is central to the government's strategy to address climate change and meet our emissions reduction targets," Mr Turnbull said.
The policy is the culmination of extensive background work by Environment Minister Greg Hunt over a period of two months.
The green shift marks a significant policy departure from the minimalist climate platform of the Abbott government and came as tensions between the two figures reached Rudd-Gillard levels on Tuesday, playing directly into the opposition's hands.
On what was the first day of an extended quasi-election campaign, which could yet end with a Senate deadlock and a double dissolution election on July 2, Cabinet resolved to overturn the longstanding Abbott government antipathy to the CEFC - sometimes referred to as the "green bank" - and to add another body to the nation's climate change architecture in the form of the entirely new Clean Energy Innovation Fund.
The government says the $1 billion CEIF will "drive innovation and create the jobs of the future, while delivering a financial benefit from the investment of public money".
It will be financed with an annual allocation of $100 million from the CEFC over each of the next 10 years.
But it will not disburse grants. Instead it will offer a mix of "innovative equity and debt products" - code for buying shares in and lending money to, new technology renewable energy ventures.
It is intended that the CEIF will target everything from smart grids, and bio fuels to large-scale solar energy projects with storage capacity.
The new body will commence operations as soon as July. It will sit between the existing $10 billion green bank, and draw expertise from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency - another body which had been on political death-row under the Abbott government.
The government believes the new CEIF will "fill a gap", providing equity and debt financing to projects that are designed to return a profit and which have not been eligible for funding under the models of the two parent bodies to this point.
It coincided with a dangerous tit-for-tat exchange with Mr Abbott conducted via duelling broadcast interviews, which has government MPs warning it must not be allowed to continue during an election year.
The spat saw Mr Turnbull slap down the Abbott claim that the government was merely running on the Abbott record.
Government MPs are under no illusion as to the electoral risks arising from having a leader and ex-leader at war, citing the recent bitter divisions between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard on the Labor side, to argue Mr Abbott must now desist in the interests of the party.
However, there are no signs of peace breaking out any time soon.
Mr Abbott used a Sky News interview from London, apparently calculated to steal the headlines on the very same day as Mr Turnbull's daring double-dissolution ultimatum to the Senate, to declare: "It's very easy for me to campaign for the election of the Turnbull government because the Turnbull government is running on the Abbott government's record and it's a very strong record."
The comments angered the Prime Minister, prompting him to dismiss Mr Abbott's signature achievement of stopping asylum-seeker boats during his time in office.
"This is not something that was invented by Tony Abbott, this has been a continuum," Mr Turnbull said on Melbourne radio, reminding voters that the policy of mandatory off-shore detention had been in place in the Howard years, and had remained as core Coalition policy during 2008-09, when Mr Turnbull had been leader of the opposition.
MPs, many of whom are sitting on small margins in their electorates, believe the government can ill afford distractions, with even committed Abbott loyalists calling on him to desist as an election approaches.
"You can't be seen to help Labor," said one former Abbott loyalist. "It's battle-faces on now, and this thing is getting silly.
"There is a commonly held view that enough is enough," the MP said.
"He (Mr Abbott) is regarded very fondly but he is not going to endear himself with these kinds of comments."
Another source said Mr Abbott "would not be doing this to help Labor, but that is the result".
As if to validate that assessment, opposition leader Bill Shorten surprised few by immediately agreeing with the Abbott assessment.
"The legislation Mr Turnbull has in the Parliament, 80 per cent of it was designed, dreamed up, and driven by Tony Abbott when he was leader," Mr Shorten said.
"Now, under Mr Turnbull's leadership, we still see the same cuts to Medicare, we still see the same cuts to schools and hospitals, we see the same inaction on renewable energy and climate change.
"It doesn't matter who's running the Liberal Party, Tony Abbott or Malcolm Turnbull, it's all continuity, no change."
But having Labor and the former prime minister running the same criticism, did not appear to worry Finance Minister Mathias Cormann.
The unflappable conservative, who has successfully straddled the leadership ructions to remain highly influential in both cabinets, argues the election will be based on voters' assessment of what the government has planned for the nation, buttressed by an established record of delivery.
"As the Prime Minister said, there is inevitably a lot of continuity; from the Prime Minister down, a whole number of us were senior members of the Abbott government.
Inevitably, there is a level of continuity but, what people across Australia will be interested in when they pass judgement on who to support in the lead-up to the next election is obviously assessing the plans of the respective teams about the next three years," he said.

Links

• Malcolm Turnbull's big spend on clean energy
• Malcolm Turnbull: 'There has been change'
• Malcolm Turnbull's climate policy boost

Scientists Warn of Perilous Climate Shift Within Decades, Not Centuries

New York Times - Justin Gillis

A massive boulder on a coastal ridge in North Eleuthera, the Bahamas. A new research paper claims it was most likely moved there by powerful storms during the last warm period of Earth history, 120,000 years ago, and warns that such stormy conditions could recur because of human emissions of greenhouse gases. Credit Charles Ommanney/The Washington Post, via Getty Images        

The nations of the world agreed years ago to try to limit global warming to a level they hoped would prove somewhat tolerable. But leading climate scientists warned on Tuesday that permitting a warming of that magnitude would actually be quite dangerous.
The likely consequences would include killer storms stronger than any in modern times, the disintegration of large parts of the polar ice sheets and a rise of the sea sufficient to begin drowning the world's coastal cities before the end of this century, the scientists declared.
"We're in danger of handing young people a situation that's out of their control," said James E. Hansen, the retired NASA climate scientist who led the new research. The findings were released Tuesday morning by a European science journal, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
A draft version of the paper was released last year, and it provoked a roiling debate among climate scientists. The main conclusions have not changed, and that debate seems likely to be replayed in the coming weeks.
The basic claim of the paper is that by burning fossil fuels at a prodigious pace and pouring heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, humanity is about to provoke an abrupt climate shift.
Specifically, the authors believe that fresh water pouring into the oceans from melting land ice will set off a feedback loop that will cause parts of the great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica to disintegrate rapidly.
That claim has intrigued some experts who say the paper may help explain puzzling episodes in Earth's past when geological evidence suggests the climate underwent drastic shifts. Yet many other scientists are unconvinced by some of the specific assertions the authors are making.
"Some of the claims in this paper are indeed extraordinary," said Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. "They conflict with the mainstream understanding of climate change to the point where the standard of proof is quite high."
Despite any reservations they might have about the new paper, virtually all climate scientists agree with Dr. Hansen's group that society is not moving fast enough to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, posing grave risks. An agreement reached late last year in Paris seeks to cut emissions, but it is not remotely ambitious enough to limit global warming to the degree Dr. Hansen regards as necessary.
Among Dr. Hansen's colleagues, some of the discomfiture about the new paper stems from his dual roles as a publishing climate scientist and, in recent years, as a political activist. He has been arrested at rallies, and he has joined with a group of young people who sued the federal government over what they said was its failure to limit global warming.
Dr. Hansen argues that society is in such grave peril that he feels morally compelled to go beyond the normal role played by a scientist and to sound a clear warning.
That stance has made him a hero to college students fighting climate change, but some fellow scientists fear he has opened himself to the charge that he is skewing his scientific research for political purposes.
In 2009, nations agreed to try to limit the planetary warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius, above the preindustrial level. The Earth has already warmed by about half that amount. The climate appears to be destabilizing, virtually all land ice on the planet has started to melt, and the oceans are rising at an accelerating pace.
The paper, written by Dr. Hansen and 18 other authors, dwells on the last time Earth warmed naturally, about 120,000 years ago, when the temperature reached a level estimated to have been only slightly higher than today. Large chunks of the polar ice disintegrated then, and scientists have established that the sea level rose 20 to 30 feet.
Climate scientists agree that humanity is about to cause an equal or greater rise in sea level, but they have tended to assume that such a large increase would take centuries, at least. The new paper argues that it could happen far more rapidly, with the worst case being several feet of sea-level rise over the next 50 years, followed by increases so precipitous that they would force humanity to beat a hasty retreat from the coasts.
"That would mean loss of all coastal cities, most of the world's large cities and all their history," Dr. Hansen said in a video statement that accompanied the new paper.
The paper identifies a specific mechanism that the scientists say they believe could help cause such an abrupt climate shift.
Their idea is that the initial melting of the great ice sheets will put a cap of relatively fresh water on the ocean surfaces near Antarctica and Greenland. That, they think, will slow or even shut down the system of ocean currents that redistributes heat around the planet and allows some of it to escape into space. Warmth will then accumulate in the deeper parts of the ocean, the scientists think, speeding the melting of parts of the ice sheets that sit below sea level.
In addition, a wider temperature difference between the tropics and the poles will encourage powerful storms, the researchers contend. The paper cites evidence, much of it contested, that immense storms happened during the warm period 120,000 years ago.
For instance, the paper says such storms might have thrown giant boulders onto coastal ridges in the Bahamas, though other experts think a tsunami might have been responsible.
The idea of a shutdown in the ocean circulation because of global warming was considered more than a decade ago, and while scientists concluded that a weakening of the currents was possible, they said a complete shutdown was unlikely to happen in this century.
That did not stop a distorted version of the idea from becoming the premise of the disaster movie "The Day After Tomorrow," released in 2004.
The new paper may reopen that debate, requiring scientists to re-examine the idea with the more sophisticated computer models of the climate that are available today. It could take several years for the experts to come to a consensus, though.
Dr. Hansen spent decades heading NASA's climate research unit in Manhattan, before retiring in 2013. He now heads a center created for him at Columbia University.
He gained fame in 1988 when he warned Congress that global warming had already begun. He was ahead of the scientific consensus at the time, but it became clear in retrospect that Earth had been in the midst of a period of rapid global warming at the time he testified.
Even scientists wary of the specific claims in the new paper point to Dr. Hansen's history to argue that his ideas need to be taken seriously.
"I think we ignore James Hansen at our peril," Dr. Mann said.

Links

• Rising Sea Levels May Disrupt Lives of Millions, Study Says MARCH 14, 2016
• Inside the Paris Climate Deal DEC. 12, 2015
• How Much Warmer Was Your City in 2015? Feb. 19, 2016
• 2015 Was Hottest Year in Historical Record, Scientists Say Jan. 21, 2016
• Signs of the 'Human Age' Jan. 11, 2016
• The Marshall Islands Are Disappearing Dec. 02, 2015
• Short Answers to Hard Questions About Climate Change Nov. 28, 2015
• Naomi Oreskes, a Lightning Rod in a Changing Climate June 16, 2015

We Had All Better Hope These Scientists Are Wrong About The Planet’s Future

Washington Post - Chris Mooney

Climatologist James Hansen on the Eleuthera coastal ridge on Nov. 22, 2015, in Eleuthera, Bahamas. (Charles Ommanney for The Washington Post)

An influential group of scientists led by James Hansen, the former NASA scientist often credited with having drawn the first major attention to climate change in 1988 congressional testimony, has published a dire climate study that suggests the impact of global warming will be quicker and more catastrophic than generally envisioned.
The research invokes collapsing ice sheets, violent megastorms and even the hurling of boulders by giant waves in its quest to suggest that even 2 degrees Celsius of global warming above pre-industrial levels would be far too much. Hansen has called it the most important work he has ever done.
The sweeping paper, 52 pages in length and with 19 authors, draws on evidence from ancient climate change or “paleo-climatology,” as well as climate experiments using computer models and some modern observations. Calling it a “paper” really isn’t quite right — it’s actually a synthesis of a wide range of old, and new, evidence.
“I think almost everybody who’s really familiar with both paleo and modern is now very concerned that we are approaching, if we have not passed, the points at which we have locked in really big changes for young people and future generations,” Hansen said in an interview.
The research, appearing Tuesday in the open-access journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, has had a long and controversial path to life, having first appeared as a “discussion paper” in the same journal, subject to live, online peer review — a novel but increasingly influential form of scientific publishing. Hansen first told the news media about the research last summer, before this process was completed, leading to criticism from some journalists and fellow scientists that he might be jumping the gun.

What ensued was a high-profile debate, both because of the dramatic claims and Hansen’s formidable reputation. And his numerous co-authors, including Greenland and Antarctic ice experts and a leader of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, were nothing to be sniffed at.
After record downloads for the study and an intense public review process, a revised version of the paper has now been accepted, according to both Hansen and Barbara Ferreira, media and communications manager for the European Geophysical Union, which publishes Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Indeed, the article is now freely readable on the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics website.
The paper, according to Ferreira, was subject to “major revisions in terms of organisation, title and conclusions.” Those came in response to criticisms that can all be read publicly at the journal’s website. The paper also now has two additional authors.
Most notably, perhaps, the editorial process led to the removal of the use of the phrase “highly dangerous,” in the paper’s title, to describe warming the planet by 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The original paper’s title was “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming is highly dangerous.” The final title is “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming could be dangerous.”
But nonetheless, James Hansen’s climate catastrophe scenario now takes its place in the official scientific literature relatively intact. So let’s rehearse that scenario, again, for the record.
Hansen and his colleagues think that major melting of Greenland and Antarctica can not only happen quite fast — leading to as much as several meters of sea level rise in the space of a century, depending on how quickly melt rates double — but that this melting will have dramatic climate change consequences, beyond merely raising sea levels.
That’s because, they postulate, melting will cause a “stratification” of the polar oceans. What this means is that it will trap a pool of cold, fresh meltwater atop the ocean surface, with a warmer ocean layer beneath. We have actually seen a possible hint of this with the anomalously cold “blob” of ocean water off the southern coast of Greenland, which some have attributed to Greenland’s melting.
Indeed, shortly before the new paper’s publication, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released new recent data on the globe’s temperature that certainly bears a resemblance to what Hansen is talking about. For not only was the globe at a record warmth overall over the last three months, but it also showed anomalous cool patches in regions that Hansen suspects are being caused by ice melt – below Greenland, and also off the tip of the Antarctic peninsula.

(National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.)

“My interpretation is that this is the beginning,” Hansen says of these cool patches in curious parts of the global ocean. “And it’s one or two decades sooner than in our model.”
However, when it comes to both the melt rates for Greenland and Antarctica, and also these cool ocean patches, we have a very limited time span of observations. It is far from clear, yet, that Hansen’s interpretation of them will prevail, and the new study also suggests closely observing these areas in coming years.
Stratification, the key idea in the new paper, means that warm ocean water would potentially reach the base of ice sheets that sit below sea level, melting them from below (and causing more ice melt and thus, stratification). It also means, in Hansen’s paper, a slowdown or even eventual shutdown of the overturning circulation in the Atlantic ocean, due to too much freshening in the North Atlantic off and around Greenland, and also a weakening of another overturning circulation in the Southern Ocean.
This, in turn, causes cooling in the North Atlantic region, even as global warming creates a warmer equatorial region. This growing north-south temperature differential, in the study, drives more intense mid-latitude cyclones, or storms. The study suggests such storms may kick up gigantic oceanic waves, which may even be capable of feats such as hurling boulders in some locations, not unlike the huge rocks seen on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera, which I visited with Hansen and his co-author, geologist Paul Hearty, in November.
These rocks play a key role in the new paper, just as they did in the original study draft. Indeed, long before the current paper, Hearty had documented, in peer-reviewed publications, that Eleuthera’s rocks appear to have come from the ocean and to have been lifted high up onto a coastal ridge. This appears to have happened during a past warm period, the Eemian, some 120,000 years ago, when the planet was only slightly warmer than today but seas were far higher — but the idea is that something like it could happen again.

The giant boulders of Eleuthera that have sparked a great debate among scientists about their origin. On the left is ‘The Bull’ (2,000 tons) and on the right is ‘The Cow’ (1,000 tons). (Charles Ommanney for The Washington Post)

The paper contains many ideas and departures, but the key one is its suggestion of the possibility of greater sea level rise in this century than forecast by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“The models that were run for the IPCC report did not include ice melt,” Hansen said at a news conference regarding the new paper Monday. “And we also conclude that most models, ours included, have excessive small scale mixing, and that tends to limit the effect of this freshwater lens on the ocean surface from melting of Greenland and Antarctica.”
There is a great deal at stake. Hansen has cited the paper in court proceedings in a case playing out in Oregon, where a series of young plaintiffs, including his granddaughter Sophie, are suing the United States for violating their constitutional rights by allowing fossil fuel burning. While scientists will have to digest the new version of the paper, when the initial draft paper was released, at the website of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions, it prompted both scientific praise and also major skepticism.
David Archer, a geoscientist at the University of Chicago and a reviewer for the first round of the paper, called it “another Hansen masterwork of scholarly synthesis, modeling virtuosity, and insight, with profound implications.” But Peter Thorne, another official reviewer and a climate researcher with the National University of Ireland Maynooth, wrote that “it is far from certain that the results contended shall match what will happen in the real-world.” Thorne also expressed his “personal discomfort at the paper being openly and actively publicized before the discussion period is complete.”
Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University climate scientist familiar with the original study, said: “Near as I can tell, the issues that caused me concern originally still remain in the revised manuscript. Namely, the projected amounts of meltwater seem unphysically large, and the ocean component of their model doesn’t resolve key wind-driven current systems (e.g. the Gulf Stream) which help transport heat poleward. That makes northern hemisphere temperatures in their study too sensitive to changes in the  Atlantic meridional overturning ocean circulation,” the scientific name for the ocean circulation in the Atlantic that, the study suggests, could shut down.
However, another Penn State researcher, glaciologist Richard Alley, said by email that “though this is one paper, it usefully reminds us that large and rapid changes are possible, and it raises important research questions as to what those changes might mean if they were to occur.  But, the paper does not include enough ice-sheet physics to tell us how much how rapidly is how likely.”

A new study by NASA scientists has revealed that climate change is increasing the temperature levels in lakes across the world. (Reuters)

Links

• The world’s most famous climate scientist just outlined an alarming scenario for our planet’s future]
• What we’re doing to the Earth has no parallel in 66 million years, scientists say
• That’s heavy: Climate-change warnings include rising seas and wild weather shifts. But giant flying boulders?
• The profound planetary consequences of eating less meat
• This little flea — and its huge appetite — could ruin the Great Lakes
• This huge change in how we get energy is coming much faster than expected
• The great thaw: ‘If you want to see it, you’d better hurry. It’s disappearing — fast.’