Germany Offers $15 Billion to Property Owners Cutting Emissions

Bloomberg - Brian Parkin

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is offering home and factory owners at least 13 billion euros ($14.8 billion) in loans and subsidies over the next four years to reduce the carbon emitted from their properties.
The money, earmarked in the mid-term federal budget plan, will be disbursed to property owners who sign up to programs to cut power and heat consumption, said the Economy and Energy Ministry Thursday in Berlin. About 8 billion euros of the allocation are being offered in programs run by the Frankfurt-based KfW development bank Frankfurt, it said.
Germany, Europe’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, is struggling to reach its target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent by 2020 compared with 1990 levels. It notched a reduction of 27 percent by last year with sectors including heat efficiency, transport and farming lagging behind. About 30 percent of Germany’s carbon dioxide output comes from heating buildings, according to the ministry.

“The cleanest and cheapest energy is the one you don’t use at all,” Economy and Energy Minister Sigmar Gabriel said to reporters today in Berlin. “Expanding renewable energy alone won’t realize the climate protection goals of energy policy.”
Merkel’s government is aiming to fine tune the surging growth in wind and solar energy, which has caused difficulties for transmission networks as power-grid upgrades drag on. Auctions for clean power will be introduced from 2017, tapering commitments made during two decades of guaranteed payment programs. Subsidies have been credited with making German power the second most costly in Europe after Denmark.

Climate Change Could Result in Certain Areas Becoming Uninhabitable Like Mars

Huffington Post - Michael Lazar



Climate change could impact the Middle East by the mid-century, say leading experts and scientists. Its wide-reaching effects could result in massive regions in the Middle East and in Africa being rendered uninhabitable.
According to researchers at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and The Cyprus Institute in Nicosia, extreme heat days in these areas have increased twofold since the 70s, and could become so hot in the years to come that human beings would be unable to inhabit them.
During the hotter days, these regions can routinely see temperatures that exceed 110 degrees Fahrenheit. But if climate change continues unabated, this could increase to 114 degrees by the year 2050, and peak at 122 degrees by the year 2100.
According to the study's lead author, Jos Lelieveld, who is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, "Prolonged heat waves and desert dust storms can render some regions uninhabitable, which will surely contribute to the pressure to migrate."
The heat waves could result in the displacement of more than 500 million people when all is said and done.
To create this dire prediction, the researchers studied data that goes all the way back the mid-80s. Using this technique, they were able to accurately predict modern day heat waves and temperature patterns.
The study compared what would happen if fossil fuels were reduced over the next 100 years, and what would happen if they were not, to create a predictive model.
From the years 1986 to 2005, heat waves in these areas were confined to 16 days on average.
But by the middle of the century, they could last as many as 80 days, and by the end of the century they could last over 100 days.
The study noted that these regions could experience 200 warm or hot days by the middle to end of the century if something is not done to curb climate change.
A hot topic for debate, there are arguments on both sides of the climate change topic. But the reality is that one way or another the world is heating up. Modern science, and the community at large believes that humans have helped speed up this process, at the very least, or are vast contributors to it.
If changes are not made soon, we could see hotspot regions that emulate Mars on our home planet.

The Growing Stress On The World’s Water

Washington Post - Editorial Board

A farmer carrying a hoe walks past a dried-up pond in Shilin Yi Autonomous County of Kunming, Yunnan province February 28, 2013. (STRINGER/CHINA/REUTERS)

THE WORLD Bank has warned countries that one of climate change's most significant impacts will be on a precious resource that many people, particularly in advanced nations, take for granted: water. The concerns go far beyond sea-level rise, which is perhaps the most predictable result of the planet's increasing temperature, or an uptick in extreme weather. Countries must worry about whether their people will have enough fresh water to farm, produce electricity, bathe and drink.
Global warming will not change the amount of water in the world, but it will affect water's distribution across countries, making some much worse off. The World Bank calculates that water strain from population growth and climate change could reduce growth in some major economies by an astonishing 6 percent by 2050. That would push some countries into "sustained negative growth," which would mean prolonged suffering for millions of people.
The countries most responsible for climate change are not most at risk; instead, a belt of nations from Africa through the Middle East to central and east Asia are in most danger, the World Bank concluded. And within those relatively poor countries, water stresses "are felt disproportionately by the poor, who are more likely to rely on rain-fed agriculture to feed their families, live on the most marginal lands which are more prone to floods, and are most at risk from contaminated water and inadequate sanitation."
About 4 billion people already live in areas suffering from water stress. By 2030, "the world may face a shortfall in water availability of approximately 2,700 billion cubic meters," the bank reports, "with demand exceeding current sustainable water supplies by 40 percent." Though the bank tamps down speculation that countries will fight with one another for water, it warns that water scarcity could encourage other sorts of conflict and dislocation, such as civil wars.
The first order of business is to limit the amount of warming humans will induce. That means slashing the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for driving up global temperatures. The world has started down this path, but the effectiveness of the global climate effort likely depends, in the first instance, on the results of this year's presidential election.
And limiting emissions will not be enough. Warming is happening, areas of the world are already experiencing significant water challenges, and population growth will place increasing demands on existing resources. Countries have to manage water use more rationally.
As California's drought exposed, the United States is hardly a great role model. Rather, the answer is to treat water like any other precious resource: Create a fair and transparent market for it, allowing supply to meet demand, which will let the water flow to its most efficient uses. Meanwhile, governments should invest in water storage and gird their infrastructure against floods and other extreme weather events.
Reforms that override the parochial arrangements that often govern water access will not be easy. But, as the World Bank made clear, the alternative may be widespread misery.

Now You See Them, Now You Don't

Crikey - Comment

While Australia's political leaders trade barbs on climate change, rising seas have swallowed five of the Solomon Islands.




The Coalition announced its big election agenda this week with nary a mention of climate change. Bill Shorten, whose party has finally committed to an actual plan to combat climate change and significantly reduce carbon emissions, capitalised on the omission.
"[Malcolm Turnbull] famously said that he did not want to lead a party that was not interested in climate change. Now he has airbrushed climate change out of his presentation altogether," Shorten said.
Turnbull hit back, claiming the Coalition's uninspiring target was enough, and that Labor's plan would cause electricity prices to rise.
And besides, he said, Australia had committed to the Paris agreement and would review its targets again later, in concert with the international community.
"The way these targets will rise in the future … is by mutual agreement. So one nation will say, 'We'll go up a bit more if you go up a bit more.' That is the way these agreements are put together."

Tell that to the Solomon Islands …

Election 2016: Real Climate Change Demands Real Solutions

Sydney Morning Herald - Editorial

The common link between Labor's plans and Direct Action shows Australia now has the seeds of a bipartisan approach. All that remains is for Malcolm Turnbull to silence the deniers and stop the scare campaigns. Mr Shorten should seek out like-minded Coalition partners, too.

The share of coal in our power generation is increasing. Photo: Michele Mossop

It suits Labor to keep climate change under the election radar, given the party's well-based fear of a 2013-style scare campaign. The Coalition has already wheeled out the "carbon tax mark II" and "massive energy tax" lines amid questionable claims that Labor's policy will hike electricity prices.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, however, doesn't want to focus on global warming either. He knows the issue reminds voters of the rift between his "climate science is settled" colleagues and the climate sceptics who coalesce around former leader Tony Abbott.
What's more, Mr Turnbull knows that the government's expensive Direct Action plan that uses taxpayer funds to pay polluters to reduce emissions will have to become a price-based scheme – akin to Labor's policy – to be a credible long-term solution.
But try as they might, neither party can avoid global warming.
Symbolically, the Cape Grim climate monitoring site in north-western Tasmania could record its first baseline reading of 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere within 10 days. Once that marker is passed, scientists say it is unlikely to go back. That would be a reliable indicator of the effect of burning of fossil fuels and clearing land.
Practically, disturbing photographs are emerging of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef – in part due to the runoff from coal mines and warmer waters. The Solomon Islands is losing islands to rising sea levels and even the unseasonably warm autumnal days are a niggling reminder of the issue.
Yes, the Turnbull government has reversed some of Mr Abbott's attacks on climate agencies, and committed to the global fight. Mr Turnbull has also made Direct Action adaptable to higher targets.
Yet emissions from the eastern states electricity grid are still rising. The share of coal in our power generation is increasing. And even prominent officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are warning against any cuts to Australian research into climate change.
No-one outside the government believes Direct Action in its current form can meet our global commitments.
Labor's response is a 45 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030 based on 2005 levels. This is more than the government's 26-28 per cent promise in Paris in December and pledge to raise targets only in tandem with the global community.
Labor hopes to curb vehicle emissions and have cleaner power stations pay dirty brown-coal ones to shut down. For a few years big polluters across the economy would have to buy cheap international permits if they exceeded a cap on emissions. For the longer term, Labor would talk to unions and business about creating an economy-wide emissions trading scheme from 2020.
Yes, Labor would protect some local manufacturers and cut funds from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.
But Labor also offers an ambitious, and some say risky, target of having 50 per cent of Australia's electricity generated from renewable sources by 2030, with the added bonus of more green jobs. The Coalition has reduced the renewable energy target to 23 per cent by 2020.
Given the hefty cost of shifting to more renewables, Labor needs to reduce the price risk for consumers. The solution is to force generators to operate more cleanly or pay a penalty – in effect ensuring the cleanest plants have an economic advantage.
Such a system is just like the safeguards mechanism in Mr Turnbull's Direct Action policy. To stop some polluters boosting emissions even as others are paid to reduce theirs, Direct Action sets a base level for pollution. The trick comes in 2017 when a review of the safeguards can gradually require the emitters to pollute less. If they cannot, they will need to buy permits off cleaner producers, thereby creating a price on Australian pollution without jacking up power bills. Liberal Party modelling assumes this shift to a market-based scheme like Labor's. The alternative is for Direct Action to pay polluters many billions more dollars to clean up their acts.
The common link between Labor's plans and Mr Turnbull's is crucial. Australia now has the seeds of a bipartisan approach to climate change. All that remains is for Mr Turnbull to silence the deniers and stop the scare campaigns. Mr Shorten should seek out like-minded Coalition partners, too. As we argued in December, this election must focus on finding the polices that work most efficiently to meet increasingly difficult and costly targets.

Antarctic Ice Shows Australia’s Drought And Flood Risk Is Worse Than Thought

The Conversation - Anthony Kiem | Carly Tozer | Tessa Vance

The past century hasn't seen the worst drought that Australia's climate can throw at us. CSIRO/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Australia is systematically underestimating its drought and flood risk because weather records do not capture the full extent of rainfall variability, according to our new research.
Our study, published today in the journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, uses Antarctic ice core data to reconstruct rainfall for the past 1,000 years for catchments in eastern Australia.
The results show that instrumental rainfall records – available for the past 100 years at best, depending on location – do not represent the full range of abnormally wet and dry periods that have occurred over the centuries.
In other words, significantly longer and more frequent wet and dry periods were experienced in the pre-instrumental period (that is, before the 20th century) compared with the period over which records have been kept.

Reconstructing prehistoric rainfall
There is no direct indicator of rainfall patterns for Australia before weather observations began. But, strange as it may sound, there is a link between eastern Australian rainfall and the summer deposition of sea salt in Antarctic ice. This allowed us to deduce rainfall levels by studying ice cores drilled from Law Dome, a small coastal ice cap in East Antarctica.
How can sea salt deposits in an Antarctic ice core possibly be related to rainfall thousands of kilometres away in Australia? It is because the processes associated with rainfall variability in eastern Australia – such as the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), as well as other ocean cycles like the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) and the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) – are also responsible for variations in the wind and circulation patterns that cause sea salt to be deposited in East Antarctica (as outlined in our previous research).
By studying an ice record spanning 1,013 years, our results reveal a clear story of wetter wet periods and drier dry periods than is evident in Australia's much shorter instrumental weather record.
For example, in the Williams River catchment, which provides water for the Newcastle region of New South Wales, our results showed that the longest dry periods lasted up to 12 years. In contrast, the longest dry spell since 1900 lasted just eight years.
Among wet periods, the difference was even more pronounced. The longest unusually wet spell in our ice record lasted 39 years – almost five times longer than the post-1900 maximum of eight years.

Busting myths about drought and flood risk
Although this does not tell us when the next major wet or dry period will happen, it does help us predict how often we can expect such events to occur, and how long they might last. This is critical information for water resource managers and planners, especially when our millennium-long record tells a very different story to the post-1900 instrumental record on which all water infrastructure, planning and policy is based.
Our results challenge the underlying assumptions that govern water resource management and infrastructure planning. These assumptions include:

• that droughts longer than five years are rare;
• that droughts or flood-dominated periods cannot last longer than about 15 years;
• that drought and flood risk does not change over time, so a century of instrumental records is enough to gain a full understanding of the situation.

The fact that these assumptions are probably wrong is a concern. These principles are used to make crucial decisions, not just about predicting the likelihood and severity of droughts and floods themselves, but also about the design of infrastructure such as roads, reservoirs and buildings. Our study suggests that these decisions are being taken on the basis of incomplete information.
What's more, Australia's increasing population and development will mean that water demands and exposure to droughts and floods are likely to have been different in the past to what they are now (and will be in the future).
Therefore, given that the factors used to quantify risk are most likely wrong, it implies that current hydroclimatic risk assessments are not representative of the true level of risk.
This raises serious questions about water security and the robustness of existing water resource management, infrastructure design and catchment planning across eastern Australia and in other places where hydroclimatic risk is assessed on records that do not capture the full range of possible variation.
Water is a precious resource, meaning that we need the best knowledge about what our rainfall patterns are capable of delivering. Our findings can be used to better characterise and manage existing and future flood and drought risk. Forewarned is forearmed.

Links

• A land of (more extreme) droughts and flooding rains?
• Droughts and flooding rains: climate change models predict increases in both
• Drought conditions return to Australia's eastern states
• 500 years of drought and flood: trees and corals reveal Australia's climate history

Coalition Climate Plan 'Assumes Emissions Trading', Says Government Modeller

The Guardian - Lenore Taylor

The government is campaigning against Labor's emissions trading scheme but its own Direct Action will only work with large funding increases or as an ETS

The environment minister released the modelling by Energetics days before the election was called, saying it was proof critics of the government's climate policy were wrong. Photograph: Victor Fraile/Reuters

Modelling hailed by the Liberal party as proof its Direct Action plan could meet Australia's long-term climate promises in fact assumes the Coalition would turn its policy into a type of emissions trading scheme, according to the authors.
The environment minister, Greg Hunt, released the modelling, by the Energetics consulting firm, just days before the election was called and told the Australian newspaper it was proof that critics of the government's policy – who say it has no hope of reaching Australia's target without changes – were totally wrong.
Malcolm Turnbull and Hunt are now campaigning against Labor's plan for an emissions trading scheme, saying it is a "massive carbon tax" that will force huge rises in household electricity prices, while claiming their own policy can meet its 2030 target with no such impost.
The Energetics modelling found that the government's emissions reduction fund and so-called "safeguards mechanism" could achieve around half the emissions reductions required between 2020 and 2030 to reach the government's target of cutting emissions by 26% to 28%, around 500m tonnes.
But Peter Holt, associate at Energetics, told Guardian Australia that the policies would only achieve those reductions with changes – either large funding top-ups to the ERF (estimated by others at at least $6bn) or a strengthening of the safeguards mechanism so it turned into a baseline and credit emissions trading scheme.
The economist Danny Price – who has advised the government on Direct Action – agrees with Holt's assessment that despite the government's scare campaign against Labor's ETS, it is going to have to introduce a similar version of emissions trading itself to meet its international pledges.
Holt said the modelling was "bottom up" – looking at what sectors had the potential to deliver emissions reductions and then allocating those reductions to the policies that could conceivably achieve them. But the estimated reductions from the ERF and the safeguards mechanism "relied on the assumption that the policies would be adjusted to achieve that outcome".
"To achieve the government's target we would need to see the safeguards mechanism coming into play, either with declining 'baselines' that put more stringent conditions on large emitters, so it formed a baseline and credit emissions trading scheme, or else we would need to see a lot more money put into the emissions reduction fund, or a combination of the two," Holt said.
That means the modelling confirms exactly what Malcolm Turnbull said of Direct Action when he told Lateline in 2011: "If you want to ... cut carbon emissions ... in a very substantial way to the levels that the scientists are telling us we need to do by mid-century to avoid dangerous climate change, then a direct action policy where ... industry was able to freely pollute, if you like, and the government was just spending more and more taxpayers' money to offset it, that would become a very expensive charge on the budget in the years ahead."
The Climate Institute thinktank also said the "turbo-charging" assumed in the Energetics modelling would require "at least another $6bn" tipped into the emissions reduction fund, through which the government buys emissions reductions, or stronger safeguards to introduce a form of emissions trading for industry and electricity generators by tightening emissions "baselines" and forcing companies who exceeded them to buy permits.
"This modelling is chock full of heroic assumptions that the government is hoping it won't be asked about in detail during the election campaign," said the Climate Institute's chief executive, John Connor.
"They include the need for either billions of extra dollars or some form of emissions trading scheme, which sends a penalty or price signal to companies."
Price – whom the government recently appointed to the Climate Change Authority and who acted as an adviser on Direct Action – has also said the Coalition was likely to be forced to move to a form of emissions trading scheme similar to the one now proposed by Labor for the electricity industry.
"The government's Direct Action plan – its safeguard mechanism – could be modified to create exactly this same type of scheme," he said. "I've always thought that was the most likely way for them to go after the review they have scheduled for 2017, because they are obviously going to have to make changes to meet even their existing targets and this is a low-cost way to do it.
Under Direct Action the "safeguards mechanism" is supposed to ensure that increased emissions from heavy industry and electricity generators do not undo the reductions bought through the government's $2.5bn scheme, by setting baselines for their emissions.
At the moment the baselines are lenient, ensuring industries don't "go rogue" but not seeking to force them to reduce their greenhouse emissions from existing levels. But many observers, including business groups, expect they will have to be tightened after 2017 to gradually reduce industrial emissions. And that would turn Direct Action into much the same scheme as Labor is proposing.
The government has already spent 67% of its $2.5bn ERF to achieve only 7% of the emission reductions it needs to meet its Paris target. It did not allocate any more money to the scheme in the budget.
In its report, Energetics found that land use and energy efficiency could contribute significant emissions reductions by 2030.
"Energetics' analysis found that improved land management and low emissions farming practices and low carbon transport are capable of contributing the most to Australia's total low-cost abatement by 2030. In total the two groups account for just over 50% of Australia's total identified abatement potential," the report said.
"The remaining abatement opportunities were allocated to the ERF and safeguard mechanism ... ERF projects could help to reduce emissions at safeguard facilities; and safeguard facilities can purchase [carbon credits] to offset their emissions and help them to meet their safeguard obligations."

Links

• Climate change plan: thinktank suggests policy both sides of politics can embrace
• Why Coalition climate scare campaign is not credible and makes no sense 
• Business council praises Labor's 'bridge' to emissions trading scheme 
• Labor proposes two emissions trading schemes costing $355.9m 
• Greg Hunt's 'gift' will bring Coalition closer to 2020 emissions reduction goal 
• Coalition's climate policy 'best and most efficient' in the world, says Greg Hunt 
• Australia's leaders 'wilfully blind' about climate change, says former NAB chief 
• Climate change: farmers urge Coalition to restore emissions trading scheme 
• Emissions reduction: Tony Abbott says Australia is acting, not talking