March Was Earth's 11th-Straight Warmest Month on Record

Mashable Australia - Andrew Freedman

Image: Earth simulator 

NASA's March temperature data was released Friday, showing that it was the planet's second-most unusually mild month on record, only somewhat cooler than February 2016.
The NASA data shows the monthly global average temperature was 1.28 degrees Celsius, or 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit, above the 20th century average.
According to NASA, six straight months from 2015 into 2016 have had a temperature anomaly of at least 1 degree Celsius. That had not happened in any month prior to this record warm stretch.
Data released on Thursday shows that March 2016 was the warmest March since at least 1891, making it the planet's 11th consecutive month to set a global temperature milestone.

Global average surface temperature anomalies for March 2016. Image: NASA

The data, from the Japan Meteorological Agency, as well as a separate analysis using computer model data, means that if April also sets a monthly record, the Earth will have had an astonishing 12 month string of record-shattering months.
Other agencies will soon weigh in with their own analysis of March's temperatures, including NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the UK Met Office, and their figures may differ slightly in ranking the month compared to the historical record.
The cause of the record warmth, scientists say, is a combination of a record strong El Niño event in the tropical Pacific Ocean and the increasingly apparent effects of long-term human-caused global warming.
The world was already setting more and more warm temperature records without the El Niño's assistance, but what El Niño has done was dial up the already elevated temperatures to damaging levels.
Right now, scientists around the world are witnessing the effects of this global fever. These include the third and longest-lasting global coral bleaching event, which is harming — and in some cases, killing — reefs from the Great Barrier Reef to the Florida Keys.
In the Arctic, Greenland commenced its melt season more than one month early when a freak heat wave swept in earlier this week, sending temperatures skyrocketing into the low 60s Fahrenheit in southwest Greenland and breaking records all the way to the top of the ice sheet itself, more than 10,000 feet above sea level.
In addition, Arctic sea ice set a record for the lowest winter maximum extent, potentially setting the ice pack up for a summer melt season with a largely open Arctic Ocean, depending on transient weather conditions.

Global average surface temperature anomalies for March 2016, based on the Climate Forecast System (CFSR). Image: Weatherbell analytics

According to the JMA, the global average surface temperature in March was 0.62 degrees Celsius, or 1.16 degrees Fahrenheit, above the 1981-2010 average.
When measured against the 20th century average, though, the month looks even more unusual, at 1.07 degrees Celsius, or 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit, above average.
The record warm March follows the most two most unusually warm months on record, which occurred in January and February.
The El Niño event is now fading, with a climate forecast issued Thursday showing a likelihood of a La Niña episode in the tropical Pacific Ocean beginning in the late summer or fall.
La Niña events tend to temporarily dampen global average temperatures since they feature unusually chilly ocean waters across a large swath of the tropical Pacific. This likely means that the string of record-shattering months may soon come to a temporary end.
While March's record is noteworthy, for climate scientists it is the longer-term trends that matter most, not an arbitrarily defined calendar period.
Whether one looks at a 12-month running average, 5-year average, or 30-year trends, all show stark increases in global average surface temperatures, which scientists have concluded is largely attributable to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

Link

• Heat wave in Greenland triggers record early start to ice melt season

Great Barrier Reef: The Scale Of Bleaching Has The Most Sober Scientists Worried

The Guardian - James Woodford*

Australia’s world heritage site is the largest living thing on Earth. But warm water driven by El Niño is bleaching the reef, and a recent report calls for it to be listed as in danger

A scuba diver encounters a sea turtle on the Great Barrier Reef, north Queensland. Photograph: Steffen Binke/Alamy

I pulled on my mask and dropped off the back of the boat into the warm water above Nursery Bommie, a dive site at Agincourt Reef more than 70km offshore from Port Douglas, in far-north Queensland, Australia. It is widely regarded as one of the most spectacular tourist reefs in the area.
As soon as I could start to make out the immense shadow of the bommie (an outcrop of coral reef) looming before me I could see that all around its flanks and on the summit, covered in just a metre of water in some places, were blemishes of white.
The closer I got, and the more I looked, it was clear there were white patches everywhere. The bleached colonies ranged from tiny plates, shaped like an upturned hand, to areas the size of a table top. Even more striking than the snow white corals was that all around them were other corals coloured in gaudy fluorescent hues that I had never before seen on such a scale. It was as if a masterpiece of nature had been repainted with a colour scheme more befitting a pound shop.
What I was seeing beneath me was evidence of an environmental disaster that has been unfolding over the past few months – the largest mass coral bleaching event ever recorded in this region. This bleaching is the result of a huge El Niño that has driven warm water into the western Pacific Ocean, smothering coral with temperatures beyond their tolerance.
I have dived hundreds of times, with different teams of scientists, along the reef. I have seen the aftermath of other mass coral bleaching episodes such as the most recent major event in 2002.

Bleached corals at Agincourt Reef. Photograph: James Woodford

In my past experiences of bleached corals, the effect is patchy and, while one area is devastated, another will be mysteriously untouched. Yet the scale of this bleaching event has even the most sober and senior coral reef scientists worried. If the rhetoric from marine biologists is to be believed, then the Great Barrier Reef is now in the grip of a “bommie apocalypse”.
As I continued to dive the Nursery Bommie, the fluorescent pinks, blues, purples and greens became more abundant. While these colours might look striking, they signify that the symbiotic relationship between corals and their zooxanthellae, the photosynthetic algae, has broken down.
The fluorescent colours are always there but in healthy coral colonies the colours of the algae overwhelm those of the host coral, giving them their more typical reddish and brown hue. It is true that not all corals fluoresce, but if they have to survive for too long without the algae then bleaching becomes a death sentence.

Put simply, the majority of the corals on this bommie – bleached or fluorescent – were clearly dead or dying. And it was not only the hard corals. All around were soft corals, still swaying like spaghetti in the ebb and flow of the ocean, that were white and ghostly. Most striking was that the bleaching was not just near the surface, where the water is warmest, but at depths of tens of metres where huge colonies of coral were white as well.
I swam towards a wall of reef off the stern of the boat. As I approached I saw that the seafloor was covered in fragile staghorn corals. Such a patch would normally have been the highlight of any dive to this area but now, bleached white, it was merely more evidence that a catastrophe was under way. Dismayed, I swam back to the boat.
On board was an eclectic collection of reef stakeholders including Imogen Zethoven, the director of the Great Barrier Reef campaign for the Australian Marine Conservation Society, who had also made the dive.
“I was shocked,” she said. “I had expected some patches of bleaching surrounded by mainly healthy, colourful corals. I saw the opposite.
“For decades, scientists and conservationists have been warning that climate change is an existential threat to the Great Barrier Reef and all the world’s corals. We know what needs to be done: a rapid transition to 100% renewable energy; an end to fossil fuel subsidies; the phasing out of coal-fired power stations; and keeping coal in the ground.”
While the mass bleaching is caused directly by an El Niño, which pushes warm water to the east Australian coastline, many scientists believe climate change is making the El Niño worse and more frequent, and this is coupled with a general rise in sea temperatures caused by global warming.
Also on board the dive boat was the chief executive of the Queensland Tourism Industry Council, Daniel Gschwind. The reaction of his organisation to the current bleaching requires a balancing act – on one hand, highlighting the need to protect the enormous value of the reef to the Australian economy, worth a conservative AU$6bn (about £3.25bn) a year, while on the other, making sure that tourists are not scared off by alarming news. “The Great Barrier Reef is Australia’s most important tourism asset,” he said.
We dived at a second site at Agincourt Reef that day, at Castle Rock. Again, the underwater seascape was devastated by bleaching, and the scale of the devastation was beginning to sink in.
Scientists report that the same scenes are being replicated along a 1,000km section of the reef, more than a third of its total expanse. Of 500 reefs between Cairns and Papua New Guinea surveyed during this current episode, 95% have experienced significant coral bleaching – only four reefs showed no impact.
Prof David Booth, head of the Australian Coral Reef Society, the world’s oldest coral reef society, and representing some of the nation’s most respected marine biologists, said he had never seen scientists so worried.
“The visual is shocking but so is the disconnect between the severity of the bleaching and the decisions by governments to approve coalmines and coal infrastructure,” he said. “Australia is like a drug dealer for climate change – selling all this coal, but all the while knowing the harm we are doing.”
This particular bleaching event will end once the waters begin to cool. What scientists don’t know yet is how many of the corals will die, quickly being covered in a brown algae that tourists will not want to pay to see.
But there is still room for optimism. These areas can and will recover as long as the scale and frequency of bleaching does not increase. And some other areas that have been devastated in the past decade by destructive threats – such as cyclones and crown-of-thorns starfish – are now recovering well. The reef is always a mosaic of damaged, recovering and stable areas that are constantly changing with environmental conditions.
Coral has evolved to deal with attacks from nature. The question is: can it survive all the cumulative assaults from humans?

*James Woodford is the author of The Great Barrier Reef (Pan Macmillan). His trip was funded as part of a partnership between the Australian Marine Conservation Society and Oris

Links

• Mass coral bleaching now affecting half of Australia's Great Barrier Reef
• Great Barrier Reef: aerial survey reveals extent of coral bleaching

Delaying Shutting Power Stations Will Bring Big Disruption Later: Climate Institute Research

The Conversation - Michelle Grattan

Electricity emissions have risen by 5.5% in the past two years due to increasing demand and the scrapping of Labor’s carbon price. David Crosling/AAP

Modelling done for the Climate Institute indicates that without big policy changes Australia’s path to zero emissions from the electricity sector by 2050 would mean huge disruption after 2030.
The report, “A Switch in Time: Enabling the electricity sector’s transition to net zero emissions”, warns that a weak policy now means big adjustments later, and calls for a range of initiatives including a program to progressively shut down power stations.
Electricity emissions are about 30% of Australia’s total emissions. They have risen by 5.5% in the past two years due to some increasing demand and the scrapping of Labor’s carbon price.
Climate Institute CEO John Connor said the modelling found that a modest carbon price rising to $40 per tonne by 2030 would result in emissions reductions similar to the Coalition government’s 2030 target of 26-28% below 2005 levels.
But “this would result in almost no replacement of existing high-carbon power stations with clean energy; a 60% collapse in projected clean energy growth from 2020 followed by stagnation through most of the 2020s, and 98% of the sector’s 30 year carbon budget used up in the first 10 years”.
This meant that the action on climate after 2030 would have to be more extreme, Connor said.
“More than 80% of the coal-fired generation fleet would have to be closed in less than five years, and new clean energy capacity would have to jump four fold and keep rising. The impact of such a disruptive shift would be felt across the economy.”
The government currently has a “direct action” policy, while Labor is crafting a new version of emissions trading and related policies with the details still to be announced. The government plans a 2017 review of the policies needed for its 2030 and longer term targets.
The Climate Institute calls for the systematic retiring of existing high carbon generators on a timeline that would have them all stopped by 2035. The policy should facilitate replacing them with zero or near zero emission energy, it says.
There should be a well funded structural adjustment package for communities affected by the closures; energy efficient policies to minimise costs to energy users and further reduce emissions; and a carbon pricing mechanism capable of scaling up over time that provides a signal to investors.
“There is a low probability that a price of sufficient strength and reliability will emerge quickly”, so the other measures proposed would be needed to deliver a timely transition, the report says.
The report estimates the additional cost to build and operate the new power infrastructure would be about $50 billion over the 30 years 2020-2050. But it argues the disruptive costs to jobs, communities and energy security of other approaches would be more than this.
The preferred approach would represent an increase in retail energy prices of 3% a year although bills would not go up by this much if energy efficiency was improved.
The report says that while both major political parties “have acknowledged the need to achieve net zero emissions, existing climate and energy policies provide no prospect of reaching this goal”.
The research was done by leading electricity market modeller Jacobs to test the ability of policy options under discussion to reduce electricity emissions in line with the Paris commitment to limit global warming to 1.5-2°C.

Links

• Renewables will reduce electricity costs – if we have a carbon price
• UK shows how Australia can cut emissions without a carbon tax
• Stopgap carbon policies: far from perfect, but better than nothing
• One day we won’t need a Renewable Energy Target, because we’ll have good climate policy

Climate Change: Tassie Fires

ABC Catalyst - Mark Horstman

We like to think Tasmania is a refuge from climate change – a cool green island at the bottom of a warming world.
But this summer may have seen a tipping point.
The unprecedented number and size of fires ignited by dry lightning in Tasmania are no longer 'natural' events.
Conditions are so dry that the soil itself is burning.
Ecosystems normally too wet to burn are going up in smoke.
1000 year old World Heritage forests face irreversible loss.
Is this what climate change looks like?



Links

• Transcript
• Tas Parks & Wildlife Service – Fire Management in the Tasmanian World Heritage Area, Nov 2015 (pdf)
• Global Change Biology (2014): Effects of high-severity fire drove the population collapse of the subalpine Tasmanian endemic conifer Athrotaxis cupressoides
• Royal Society of Tasmania (2015): Less than 50 millimetres of rainfall in the previous month predicts fire in Tasmanian rainforest
• Journal of Biogeography (2013): The legacy of mid-Holocene fire on a Tasmanian montane landscape
• 1999 Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Management Plan
• 2015 review, Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Management Plan
• Photo essay (2016): Tarkine...After the Fire
• Catalyst (2014): Earth on Fire

Climate Change: Website Reveals Which Homes Will Be Swamped By Rising Sea Levels

The Guardian - Michael Slezak

Coastal Risk Australia combines Google Maps with detailed tide and elevation data, as well as future sea level rise projections

A visualisation of Melbourne in 2100 under a five-metre sea level rise scenario. Photograph: Coastal Risk Australia

For the first time, Australians can see on a map how rising sea levels will affect their house just by typing their address into a website. And they'll soon be able to get an estimate of how much climate change will affect their property prices and insurance premiums, too.
Launched on Friday, the website Coastal Risk Australia takes Google Maps and combines it with detailed tide and elevation data, as well as future sea level rise projections, allowing users to see whether their house or suburb will be inundated.
Coinciding with that is the launch of a beta version of Climate Valuation, a website that gives users an estimate of how much climate change will impact their property value and insurance premiums over the life of their mortgage.
Coastal Risk Australia uses median sea level rises projected for 2100 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change under low, medium and high greenhouse gas emissions scenarios.
On the high emissions scenario – which is the path the world is currently on – the IPCC says sea levels will likely rise by a median of 0.74m by 2100. But a rise of almost 1m is within the "likely" range of levels that could be reached by 2100.
In every state and territory except the ACT, the website shows that houses and famous landmarks will be underwater by 2100. Beaches like Manly, Byron and Coogee in New South Wales would lose significant amounts of sand, as will Bell's Beach in Victoria and Noosa in Queensland.
Many coastal suburbs and cities are shown to be subject to severe inundation, including Cairns, Ballina and Hindmarsh Island.
James Hansen, a former Nasa scientist who is considered the father of modern climate change awareness, recently produced research suggesting that sea levels could rise "several metres over a timescale of 50 to 150 years".
The website also lets users see how any sea-level rise will affect an area. If sea levels rose 5m, then large parts of most coastal cities would be inundated, according to the website's calculations.

A visualisation of Sydney's eastern suburbs in 2100, under the five-metre sea level rise scenario. Photograph: Coastal Risk Australia

"We don't want to create hysteria but we don't want people burying their heads in the sand ether," said Nathan Eaton, one of the creators of the website from the company NGIS Australia.
The tool was adapted from work NGIS did when it created a similar tool for the Pacific Island nations of Tonga, Samoa, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, in collaboration with the Australian Department of Environment and the Collaborative Research Centre for Spatial Information.
Climate Valuation, also launched on Friday, will, for a fee, tell users the probability of a property being flooded by rising sea levels; the projected increases in insurance premium from coastal inundation risk; and the projected percentage reduction in value of the property at the end of a mortgage.
It is being launched for use by researchers initially and will soon be available as part of a Kickstarter campaign, which the developers say will raise money to include more climate change-associated risks like bushfires and river flooding. People who pledge to contribute will get early access to it.
The developers say the site uses risk engines that are already used to assess billions of dollars of critical infrastructure in Australia and the new site will give the general public access to that data for the first time.
"We're hoping this helps people make informed decisions about their safety and on what is often the most significant investment they will ever make – their home," said Karl Mallon, head of the Climate Valuation Project.

Links

• Electricity emissions surge by 5.5% since removal of carbon price
• Great Barrier Reef: David Attenborough ignores politics and appeals to the heart
• Climate change plan: thinktank suggests policy both sides of politics can embrace
• CSIRO cuts were about taking focus off 'public-good research', emails show
• Nasa: sea levels rising as a result of human-caused climate change – video
• Fish failing to adapt to rising carbon dioxide levels in ocean
• History will condemn climate change denialists
• Australia's most effective pseudoscience: climate change denial
• Climate-change map shows how plants and animals will need new homes
• Climate change: Weather of Olympian

Carbon Price Needed To Avoid Economic Disruption From Paris Climate Goals – Analysis

The Guardian - Lenore Taylor

Climate Institute says regulations to phase out coal-fired generators and subsidies to encourage clean energy are needed

The Climate Institute says whichever party wins government will need to impose some form of relatively low carbon price. Photograph: Carla Gottgens/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Australia faces significant economic disruption in 2030 to meet the Paris climate goals unless action is quickly taken, according to a new analysis.
The analysis, for the Climate Institute, recommends implementing a carbon price and regulations to phase out coal-fired generators, and additional subsidies to encourage clean energy investment.
The analysis finds that whichever party wins government will need to impose some form of relatively low carbon price, as well as regulations and subsidies to force a change to clean electricity generation.
A "modest" carbon price of about $17/tonne in 2020, rising to $40/tonne in 2030, would come close to meeting the Turnbull government's target of reducing emissions by 26% to 28% of 2005 levels by 2030. However, it would do almost nothing to shift to clean electricity generation.
There would need to be a huge disruption in the market and economic activity in 2030 to suddenly accelerate emission reductions enough to reach the Paris goal of zero net emissions by mid century.
In order to reach that goal using a carbon price alone, the price would need to start at $70/tonne and rise to $100/tonne, which, the report concludes, is politically unlikely.
If coal-fired generators were also phased out after a 45-year lifespan and some kind of subsidy offered – like the current renewable energy target to achieve 50% zero emissions generation by 2030 – then the necessary emission reductions could be achieved without a sudden economic shock. Adding energy efficiency policies to the mix would significantly lower the impact on power prices.
Labor has promised an emissions trading scheme as part of the climate policy it will take to an election but will not announce the details. It is expected to hold a post-election inquiry into the electricity industry and the phase-out of coal-fired generators if it wins office.
The Coalition will review its Direct Action climate policy next year and there is a widespread expectation in the business sector that it will have to tighten the baselines on its so-called safeguards mechanism in a way that could eventually turn it into a baseline and credit-style emissions trading scheme.
The report argues that these reviews are critical because if changes aren't made now, it becomes almost impossible to reach net zero emissions by mid century – as is necessary to meet the global goal of keeping temperature rises within 2C.
"The next 18 months are pivotal to our climate and energy future, whoever wins the election," said the Climate Institute's executive director, John Connor.
"Our research shows that a policy package that actively supports both clean energy investment and the orderly replacement of our ageing coal-fired power stations can better manage a timely transition to a cleaner energy supply.
"A baseline and credit, or emissions trading scheme alone, will not be strong or reliable enough to drive the change."
The report found retail power prices would gradually rise between 2020 and 2030 under the recommended scenarios but there is a high degree of uncertainty around the forecasts.
The Climate Institute modelling was commissioned from Jacobs and was part-funded by a cross section of the electricity industry, including GE, AGL and Hydro Tasmania.
The independent Climate Change Authority is undertaking similar modelling for the government.

Links

• Coalmining does more harm than good, say majority in NSW – poll
• Victoria renewables target of 30% is achievable, modelling shows
• US clean power plan setback 'will not affect Paris climate change deal'
• Scrapping carbon capture support 'threatens UK climate targets'
• Norwegian industry plans to up fossil fuel production despite Paris pledge
• India says Paris climate deal won't affect plans to double coal output
• Climate expert calls for decarbonisation tech to help meet Paris targets
• Coal from Carmichael mine 'will create more annual emissions than New York'
• Six myths about Australia's climate policy that never did wash
• Coal is the future, insists Tony Abbott as UN calls for action on climate change

Climate Change Has Dropped Off The Political Radar (And This Is A Big Problem)

ABC - Mike Steketee*

The aversion to talking about climate change during the election campaign reflects a wider problem: our concern for this issue has fallen even while it has become larger and more urgent.

The so-called pause in global warming was no more than a temporary slowdown in the rate of temperature increase. (Reuters/Kathryn Hansen/NASA)

How much of an issue will climate change be in this year's election?
Not a major one, if Malcolm Turnbull gets his way. He has saddled himself with Tony Abbott's policy as one of the costs of appeasing the conservatives in his ranks.
And while Bill Shorten will be arguing he has a superior policy - but also risking a fear campaign over re-introducing a carbon tax - Labor, too, believes it has bigger fish to fry, such as pushing forward its credentials on education and health.
This reflects a sobering reality: in the last eight years, many Australians' concern over climate change has fallen even while the problem has become larger and more urgent.
The market research company Ipsos has been conducting surveys on the issue since 2007. In that year 54 per cent of people who were presented with a list of issues said climate change was one that needed to be addressed. In the latest report, still to be released, this fell to 38 per cent last year. This is about the same as for the previous two years, although higher than in 2011 and 2012.
Different descriptions on the list for essentially the same issue confirmed the finding, but more strongly. For example, concern about tackling "global warming" fell from 55 per cent to 35 per cent over the eight years. Renewable energy was at the top of the list of issues that needed to be addressed but it also has fallen significantly - from 68 per cent to 51 per cent.
Perhaps people are less concerned because some action has been taken. But if this is true of renewable energy, where the government has set a (reduced) target of 22.5 per cent by 2020 and Labor 50 per cent by 2030, it is hard to argue the same on other issues.
Concern about the need to address rising sea levels has fallen from 29 per cent to 17 per cent over the eight years. Sea levels rose by an estimated global average of 17cm between 1900 and 2005 and according to recent research, nearly 70 per cent of the increase since 1970 was due to human influences - that is, the thermal expansion of the oceans and the melting of glaciers due to burning fossil fuels.

The argument has been that scaring people with stories about bushfires, cyclones and melting glaciers does not work.

We may just be getting started. Though the timing remains uncertain, scientists know that global warming can produce a tipping point at which there are large and irreversible losses of ice, causing sea level rises of metres, not centimetres.
Public concern about climate change in 2007 coincided with the millennium drought and water shortages. It also meant that the Howard government went to the election that year promising an emissions trading scheme, similar to the one that Kevin Rudd undertook to implement as prime minister before getting cold feet and for which Turnbull's support cost him his job as opposition leader.
Howard subsequently sided with Tony Abbott and other conservatives in his party and conceded that it was public pressure that forced his hand in 2007.
That makes the point about our current situation: the message on climate change is not coming through strongly enough to put pressure on the government to adopt a tougher policy.
Often the strategy by interest groups and politicians has been to accentuate the positives, such as a clean energy future and green jobs. The argument has been that scaring people with stories about bushfires, cyclones and melting glaciers does not work.
But it also has meant ceding ground to climate sceptics. They certainly did not worry about selling their message too hard: to the contrary, they thrived on their shrill advocacy to grab attention.
Their success in challenging the overwhelming scientific consensus on the human causes of global warming, as documented by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway in their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, was to create uncertainty in the public mind and give the impression of a debate between two more or less equal sides.
The signs now are that attitudes are changing. An Essential poll last month found that 63 per cent of people agreed with the statement that there was fairly conclusive evidence that climate change was happening and was caused by human activity. This was up from 56 per cent in November last year. Those who agreed that we might just be witnessing a normal fluctuation in the earth's climate fell from 32 per cent to 27 per cent.

The signs of a more receptive public provide an opportunity to elevate climate change from a second order issue during the election campaign.

The yet-to-be-published data from Ipsos shows a jump from 27 per cent to 44 last year in the group of so called "active believers" - those with a strong sense of urgency and concern about climate change. Ipsos research director Jennifer Brook says that although the size of the increase surprised her, there are signs of "a general shift to acceptance that climate change is something that is a threat and needs to be tackled".
It is possible that this also could be mainly caused by another El Nino year. But in the longer run it is becoming harder to ignore the accumulating evidence.
February of this year was the 10th consecutive month of record-breaking global temperatures and, at 1.21C above the average for the last century, it was the largest amount above the average for any month on record. Last year was the hottest year recorded globally and 14 of the 15 hottest years have occurred in the last 15 years.
Unusually high sea surface temperatures in the tropics during last summer have contributed to the longest coral bleaching ever seen on the Great Barrier Reef. Arctic sea ice shrunk to its lowest ever area in January and February.
And so on. It is now clear the so-called pause in global warming seized on by climate sceptics was no more than a temporary slowdown in the rate of temperature increase.
Nevertheless there remains considerable ignorance about climate change. When people were presented in the Ipsos survey with a list of possible causes, the largest number - 55 per cent - chose greenhouse gas emissions from industry and burning of fossil fuels. But 32 per cent picked the hole in the ozone layer and 22 per cent rubbish or litter - neither of which are responsible for warming. (Respondents could pick more than one cause).
This drives home the need to push a stronger message. In the words of last year's Ipsos report:

Despite Australians' acknowledgement of the impacts of climate change, there is clearly a need for consistent, clear and simple information about climate change, especially the causes.

The signs of a more receptive public provide an opportunity to elevate climate change from a second order issue during the election campaign.
There have been major progress in recent years to curbing carbon emissions, particularly in China and notably driven at least in part by public concern over smog produced by industry. Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions have stayed flat for the last two years, according to the International Energy Agency. It adds that renewables accounted for about 90 per cent of new electricity generation last year.
But in Australia emissions from electricity generation have continued growing - by 3 per cent in 2014-15 - and emissions overall have increased by 1.3 per cent.
The Ipsos research shows stronger public support for the Coalition's direct action policy than for the emissions trading scheme advocated by Labor perhaps mainly because the former is easier to understand, even though most experts argue that the latter is more effective.
The Grattan Institute this week proposed a pragmatic solution - building on direct action by gradually reducing emission limits and introducing elements of emissions trading. That offers one way, particularly for Turnbull, to harness public opinion to move forward against recalcitrant in his party.

*Mike Steketee is a freelance journalist. He was formerly a columnist and national affairs editor for The Australian.