YourVote: Great Barrier Reef Should Be Prioritised Over Coal Mining, Survey Shows

Fairfax - Nicole Hasham

A thumping majority of Australians want the health of the Great Barrier Reef prioritised over coal mining, according to a survey of more than 63,000 Fairfax Media readers.
People living in mining states, the lower-educated, older people and men were less likely to agree to such a trade-off.

Queensland's Abbot Point, surrounded by wetlands and coral reefs, is set to become the worlds largest coal port.

However the result suggests neither major party has fully grasped the strength of public sentiment for protecting the natural wonder, which is suffering from declining water quality, and record coral bleaching largely caused by warming oceans.
An analysis of Fairfax Media's YourVote tool, which gauges respondents' beliefs to determine their political leanings, shows about 49,900 respondents – or 79 per cent - "strongly agree" or "agree" that the health of the Great Barrier Reef should be prioritised over coal mining.
Conservationists say the coal industry affects the reef because Queensland projects require port infrastructure, including dredging near the reef, and coal must be shipped through the sensitive marine environment. They also say coal burning more generally contributes to global warming, and subsequent coral bleaching.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his wife Lucy on board the sealink off Magnetic Island near Townsville. Photo: Andrew Meares

Support for protecting the reef over mining was stronger among women (84 per cent) than men (77 per cent).
Such sentiment was lowest in states and territories where mining is a large part of the economy: Queensland (73 per cent), the Northern Territory (75 per cent) and Western Australia (76 per cent).
Those who did not finish high school or undertake further education were also less likely to want the reef's health prioritised over coal mining than those with vocational training or university qualifications.

Labor leader Bill Shorten on a visit to Green Island, off Cairns. Photo: Jason Edwards

A slightly smaller proportion of respondents aged 65 or over were likely to agree with the proposition, while it had highest support among those aged 18-34.
University of Sydney professor Ariadne Vromen, a political sociologist who is advising Fairfax Media on the YourVote project, said the results suggested that neither major party were as committed as respondents were to prioritising the reef over coal, adding "this is actually a really important issue that most Australians agree on".
"The Great Barrier Reef has world heritage status and Australians clearly appreciate what that means," she said.
Both major parties have made significant pre-election pledges to help protect the reef. However critics including the Greens have called for more drastic measures, including blocking new or expanded coal and gas mines such as Adani's proposed Carmichael mine in central Queensland.

Slime blankets coral reef. The effects of coral bleaching include the formation of an insidious layer of slime, now coating a vast area of the Great Barrier Reef, scientists say.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Saturday defended the government's stance on cutting harmful greenhouse gas emissions, insisting "heroic efforts by one country … are futile" and nations must act "in a co-ordinated way".
But Australian National University professor Howard Bamsey, a former government negotiator in global climate action, said this rhetoric ignored the economic opportunities created by boldly cutting emissions.
That positive paradigm was "the biggest change in global climate policy in the last seven or eight years", he said.
"Acting unilaterally, providing you have chosen which direction and actions wisely, can make sense for the economy," Professor Bamsey said.
An international effort based on unilateral action would create "a new climate economy" driven by competition. Australia's dependency on emissions-intensive industries meant "we have more to gain in making sure we are not left behind," he said.

Links

• Slime blankets coral reef
• Ellen's Great Barrier Reef campaign
• Coalition's $1 billion funding promise for Great Barrier Reef
• The Great Barrier Reef report the government can't hide from the media
• The real story on the Great Barrier Reef

Renewables Are Poised To Put Global Fossil Fuel Investment To Shame

Grist - Katie Herzog

Shutterstock

As the cost of wind and solar plummets and technology improves, global renewable energy generation is poised to outdo gas in just over a decade, according to an analysis from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
The report, New Energy Outlook 2016, forecasts investments of $7.8 trillion in renewables by 2040. That's much more than what will be invested in fossil fuels, putting renewables on track to overtake gas by 2027 and coal by 2038.

Annual electricity output by the major generating technologies, 2016-40, thousand TWh

Even that massive growth in renewables isn't nearly enough, especially to keep us under the global goal of 2 degrees Celsius of warming. To prevent the worst of climate change, according to Bloomberg, the world will need to see an additional $5.3 trillion in zero-carbon energy.
Fossil fuels are still going to still attract a good chunk of funding in the next few decades — to the tune of $2.1 trillion. This is especially true in emerging economies like India and other Asian markets, where Bloomberg predicts that coal-fired power will increase global emissions to 5 percent above 2015 levels by 2040. India's demand for electricity alone is expected to grow nearly four times by 2040.
Although coal production in the U.S. just fell to its lowest level in 35 years, the era of fossil fuels isn't quite over yet.

Links

• Forget energy storage. We can go renewable without it, scientists say
• Renewables are poised to put global fossil fuel investment to shame
• 6 charts that show renewable energy is getting cheaper
• 9 figures to help you understand the state of renewable energy
• Renewables poised to surge after Paris Agreement

The Paris Climate Agreement Needs Coordinated Carbon Prices To Be Successful

The Conversation - Ottmar Edenhofer

All countries will have to reduce emissions. Coal image from www.shutterstock.com

The Paris climate agreement was an important success for climate diplomacy as nation states showed a strong will to cooperate on climate action. But instead of imposing binding national emission targets, the Paris Agreement is based on voluntary country commitments (known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions- INDCs). This poses some challenges.
First, the INDCs proposed so far are not enough to limit warming to well below 2℃, aiming for 1.5℃, as agreed in Paris. The INDCs shift a large burden of the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to after 2030.
Second, the INDCs cannot, yet, be verified and compared in a transparent manner to build mutual trust over time.
Third, countries lack incentives to increase their level of ambition without reducing their competitiveness as well as securities that other countries do not free-ride; to counteract this the right institutions are needed.
Lastly, the INDCs do not automatically become national law after a country ratifies the Paris agreement. Only the promise to review and revise INDCs every five years is legally binding. Countries have to make an additional effort to include their proposed climate policy in their other national policies – for example to counteract the expansion of coal power plants.

Raising the bar
To be effective, the Paris agreement, or any international agreement, has to address these challenges. In this respect, sufficiently high national carbon prices that increase over time would be a meaningful climate policy instrument for three main reasons.
First, carbon prices are relatively easy to compare and represent a transparent indicator of the ambition level of national climate policies.
Second, a carbon price drives up the cost of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, rendering high-emission forms of energy (such as coal power) unprofitable over the long term and low-emission technologies (such as wind and solar) competitive.
Third, the additional revenue from carbon pricing could remain in the respective countries and be used to achieve other societal targets, such as the Sustainable Development Goals.
When negotiating international carbon prices, for example in the context of the G20, individual countries would pledge to increase their domestic carbon price levels via emission taxes, fossil energy taxes, or emissions trading schemes featuring a price floor.
However, these price increases would only come into effect if other countries were likewise implementing high prices. This strategy would circumvent the concern that carbon pricing leads to competitive disadvantages. It would also include a sanctioning mechanism if participants were to lower their carbon prices.

Sharing the burden
A truly global coordination and increase of carbon prices can only occur if an effective burden sharing scheme is implemented. To engage developing countries, transfer payments are necessary. A particular country would receive international support if they accept a national carbon price.
Funds would have to increase with the price level, compensating for higher emissions reduction costs. Reducing the level of ambition would lead to a loss of international support.
This mechanism in turn increases the trust that other countries will pursue ambitious climate policies themselves. The climate finance envisaged in the Paris Agreement could be a main pillar of this strategy.

Links

• Explainer: how countries could come to a global climate deal in 2015
• Thanks to Paris, we have a foundation for meaningful climate progress
• To End Windfall Profits, the EU Should Limit Free Allocation of CO2 Allowances to Industry
• The role of climate change in eastern Australia's wild storms

Future Summers Could Regularly Be Hotter Than The Hottest On Record

ScienceDaily

In 50 years, summers across most of the globe could regularly be hotter than any summer experienced so far by people alive today, according to a study by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

If greenhouse gas emissions remain unabated. virtually every summer between 2061-2080 could be hotter than any in the historical record. Credit: © Sunny Forest / Fotolia

If climate change continues on its current trajectory, the probability that any summer between 2061 and 2080 will be warmer than the hottest on record is 80 percent across the world's land areas, excluding Antarctica, which was not studied.
If greenhouse gas emissions are reduced, however, that probability drops to 41 percent, according to the study.
"Extremely hot summers always pose a challenge to society," said NCAR scientist Flavio Lehner, lead author of the study. "They can increase the risk for health issues, but can also damage crops and deepen droughts. Such summers are a true test of our adaptability to rising temperatures."
The study, which is available online, is part of an upcoming special issue of the journal Climatic Change that will focus on quantifying the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Simulating a range of summers
The research team, which includes NCAR scientists Clara Deser and Benjamin Sanderson, used two existing sets of model simulations to investigate what future summers might look like. Both had been created by running the NCAR-based Community Earth System Model 15 times, with one assuming that greenhouse gas emissions remain unabated and the other assuming that society reduces emissions.
The Community Earth System Model is funded by NSF and the U.S. Department of Energy. The simulations were run on the Yellowstone system at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center.
By using simulations that were created by running the same model multiple times, with only tiny differences in the initial starting conditions, the scientists could examine the range of summertime temperatures we might expect in the future for the "business-as-usual" and reduced-emissions scenarios.
"This is the first time that the risk of record summer heat and its dependence on the rate of greenhouse gas emissions has been so comprehensively evaluated from a large set of simulations with a single state-of-the-art climate model," Deser said.
The scientists compared the results to summertime temperatures recorded between 1920 and 2014 as well as to 15 sets of simulated summertime temperatures for the same historic period. By simulating past summers -- instead of relying solely on observations -- the scientists established a large range of temperatures that could have occurred naturally under the same conditions, including greenhouse gas concentrations and volcanic eruptions.
"Instead of just comparing the future to 95 summers from the past, the models give us the opportunity to create more than 1,400 possible past summers," Lehner said. "The result is a more comprehensive and robust look at what should be considered natural variability and what can be attributed to climate change."

Emissions cuts could yield big benefits
The scientists found that between 2061 and 2080, summers in large parts of North and South America, central Europe, Asia, and Africa have a greater than 90 percent chance of being warmer than any summer in the historic record if emissions continue unabated. This means that virtually every summer would be as warm as the hottest to date.
In some regions, the likelihood of summers being warmer than any in the historical record remained less than 50 percent, but in those places -- including Alaska, the central U.S., Scandinavia, Siberia, and continental Australia -- summer temperatures naturally vary a great deal, making it more difficult to detect the impact of climate change.
Reducing emissions would lower the global probability that future summers will be hotter than any in the past, but the benefits would not be spread uniformly. In some regions, including the U.S. East Coast and large parts of the tropics, the probability would remain above 90 percent, even if emissions were reduced.
But it would be a sizable boon for other regions of the world. Parts of Brazil, central Europe, and eastern China would see a reduction of more than 50 percentage points in the chance that future summers would be hotter than the historic range. Since these areas are densely inhabited, a large part of the global population would benefit significantly from climate change mitigation.
"We've thought of climate change as 'global warming'; among what matters is how this overall warming affects conditions that hit people where they live," said Eric DeWeaver, program director in NSF's Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, which funds NCAR. "Extreme temperatures pose risks to people around the globe. These scientists show the power of ensembles of simulations for understanding how these risks depend on the level of greenhouse gas emissions."
Lehner recently published another study looking at the overlay of population on warming projections. "It's often overlooked that the majority of the world's population lives in regions that will see a comparably fast rise in temperatures," he said.

Links

• Future risk of record-breaking summer temperatures and its mitigation
• Searing Heat Waves Detailed in Study of Future Climate
• Climate Detectives Reveal Handprint of Human-Caused Climate Change in Australia
• Humans Play Role in Australia's 'Angry' Hot Summer
• 'Warm blob' in Pacific Ocean linked to weird weather across the USClimate scientists forecast permanently hotter summers
• Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across US
• Climate change threatens to worsen U.S. ozone pollution
• Arctic ice melt could pause for several years, then resume again
• Extreme summer temperatures occur more frequently in U.S. now, analysis shows

Coalition Will Protect Great Barrier Reef With $1bn Fund, Says PM

The Guardian - Gareth Hutchens

Amid a series of reports detailing the poor state of the reef, Malcolm Turnbull is promising improved water quality and clean energy for the region

A 15km section of the Great Barrier reef photographed from space. Photograph: ISS/Nasa/ESA

Malcolm Turnbull has promised that a re-elected Coalition government will protect the Great Barrier Reef by tackling its two biggest challenges – climate change and water quality.
The prime minister will pledge to set up a new $1bn reef fund with $1bn – taken from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation’s $10bn special account – to invest in projects that will improve water quality, reduce emissions and provide clean energy in the reef catchment region.
The fund would deliver the $1bn over 10 years and build on $461m in funding already committed to the reef since the Coalition came to office.
“Climate change is the greatest long-term threat to the Great Barrier Reef and to all coral reefs around the world,” Turnbull said, adding that the government’s plan to protect the reef stood in “stark contrast” to Labor’s record of mismanagement.
“Australia is playing its part in the global climate change effort through signing the Paris agreement and implementing policies to reduce Australia’s emissions.
“The $1bn reef fund builds on the Coalition’s existing policies, including the landmark reef 2050 long-term sustainability plan, as well as the innovative reef trust which is improving water quality and fighting the coral-eating crown of thorns starfish.”
The policy comes amid a flurry of reports about the poor state of the reef.
Surveys have revealed that 93% of the almost 3,000 individual reefs in the reef system have been touched by bleaching this year, and almost a quarter – 22% – of coral over the entire Great Barrier Reef has been killed by this bleaching event.
Many scientists believe it could be too late for the rest.
A study found that on the current warming trajectory, within 20 years the conditions that caused this year’s bleaching would be normal on the reef.
The Greens say they want coal companies to start paying “for the damage they are doing” to the teef and they have announced a plan to tax miners heavily and use the money to revitalise the reef and to invest in clean energy projects and jobs.
Labor has promised to invest $500m over five years to boost scientific monitoring and management of the reef, and say it will adopt every recommendation in the Great Barrier Reef water science taskforce final report, released in May.
Turnbull said he was committed to protecting the reef for future generations, and his $1bn in funding would “support clean energy projects that reduce runoff of pollutants, fertiliser and sediment, and it will support the installation of more energy and water efficient irrigation systems, pesticide sprayers and fertiliser application systems”.
“The fund will also help coastal sewage treatment plants to reduce ocean outfalls with efficient pumps, biogas electricity generation and next-generation waste water treatment. Improving water quality will enhance the reef’s resilience to climate change, coral bleaching and outbreaks of the destructive crown of thorns starfish.”
The $1bn that will come from the reef fund is not new funding.

Links

• The Great Barrier Reef: a catastrophe laid bare
• Great Barrier Reef election explainer: how do the parties compare?
• Great Barrier Reef: 93% of reefs hit by coral bleaching
• Great Barrier Reef: devastating images tell story of coral colonies' destruction

Global Warming Is Starving West Coast Waters of Oxygen

Climate Central - John Upton

Just west of Los Angeles, decimated populations of spiny rockfish rummage for prey among bush-like corals. Cold currents from deep valleys wash nutrients between the Channel Islands, fertilizing plants that are eaten by fish. The fish are eaten by dolphins and pelicans and served with fries to diners watching ocean sunsets from Venice Beach.
Rockfish populations that crashed off the southern Californian coast in the 1990s have been protected by fishing rules and marine parks. But climate change is making a natural threat to the fish even worse.
As atmospheric pollution warms the planet and its seas, oxygen levels are declining in the oceans, making it harder for the bottom-dwelling fish to breathe.

Swells roll past the Channel Islands into Venice Beach, where they break. Credit: Chris Goldberg/Flickr

Ocean warming is projected to continue reducing oxygen levels in some hotspots that are naturally low in oxygen, such as the eastern Pacific Ocean. The oxygen declines in coastal waters like California’s threaten to create invisible chemical barriers, boxing vulnerable wildlife into smaller territories.
“The importance of oxygen loss has been underestimated or overlooked by ocean scientists,” said Lisa Levin, a Scripps Institution of Oceanography professor who is helping to pioneer research into the problem.
Levin’s lab published a study last week revealing the heavy influence of oxygen levels on the biodiversity of worms, molluscs and other creatures that live in West Coast mud, which are eaten by rockfish and other marine predators.
That’s jeopardizing fisheries already afflicted by overfishing, wetland losses, water pollution, ocean warming and ocean acidification.As oceans warm, fish and other sea animals need more oxygen, yet the sea water they breathe holds less of it. Ocean circulation changes caused by global warming can also reduce oxygen levels below the ocean’s surface, where it’s absorbed from the atmosphere.
“For some things that can’t move, it’s going to kill them,” Levin said. “For things that can swim away, it’s going to shrink their habitat.”
Oxygen levels can be highly variable, and scientists are still trying to untangle the role climate change may have played in declining West Coast oxygen levels since the 1980s, some of which coincided with local ocean cooling.
Scripps and federal government scientists calculated in 2010 that the oxygen declines could reduce cowcod habitat in protected Southern California Bight areas by 18 percent by the 2020s, if trends continued.
“Ocean warming and ocean acidification have had much more attention,” Levin said. “The people who have been studying changes in oxygen didn’t raise the issue about global declines until probably eight years ago, and haven’t focused on communicating to the media, to the public, everywhere it needs to go.”
Levin led a three-person Scripps research team that analyzed data from biological surveys of ocean mud using advanced statistical techniques. They reported last week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B that oxygen levels appear to have more influence than temperature or a measure of acidity over the number of small mud-dwelling species found on West Coast coastlines.
The results were very different when the researchers examined samples from a different region. In the Arabian sea, the scientists discovered that the measure of ocean acidity was more closely tied to biodiversity levels than oxygen concentrations.

Cowcod are recovering from overfishing off the southern California coast, but oxygen declines threaten their revival. Credit: John Butler, NOAA

The finding helped to illuminate the local and regional nature of the low-oxygen threat, and the complex relationships between warming, acidification and oxygen depletion that are being caused by climate change.
“If more data were available from another area, such as the East African coast, I suspect that may be different as well,” said Nancy Rabalais, a Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium professor who was not involved with the research.
Rabalais said the new Scripps study could help scientists predict how the three major ocean changes caused by global warming — warming, acidification and deoxygenation — could affect biodiversity in key marine habitats.
Each of the trifecta of global warming impacts tends to harm wildlife. Each of those impacts could be slowed if a United Nations climate treaty, which was negotiated in Paris in December, succeeds in sharply curbing fossil fuel use and deforestation.
Scientists point out that battered marine ecosystems would have greater chances of surviving impacts from warming if overfishing, plastic pollution and habitat destruction are also curbed. Marine parks can also help.
Extreme oxygen shortfalls already occur in seasonal dead zones, such as in the Gulf of Mexico, which is caused by farming and sewage pollution. By warming seawater, climate change can make dead zones bigger.
In areas where oxygen levels are naturally low, including off the West Coast and in the eastern Atlantic and southern Indian oceans, recent modeling showed climate change is already worsening the problem — which can fuel severe oxygen shortfalls that scientists call hypoxia.
Those impacts were projected by computer models to spread to additional regions during future years and decades. Some high-oxygen parts of oceans, by contrast, might not experience any impacts from the declines this century, the research showed.
“It’s hard to attribute a single year of hypoxia to warming,” said Curtis Deutsch, a professor at the University of Washington who contributed to the modeling analysis, which was published this year in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles. “And yet, at the same time, we expect it to become more frequent.”

The recent modeling study projected when current high rates of climate pollution would cause oxygen declines to become evident. Credit: Long et al., "Finding forced trends in oceanic oxygen," Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 2016.

Scientists like Deutsch are turning to models to try to understand how climate change may be influencing oxygen levels in oceans. Those concentrations are influenced by a confounding array of natural and human factors, and they haven’t been well measured.
“There are parts of the ocean where models predict that we can be detecting real, long-term changes in the ocean that are distinct from natural fluctuations right now,” Deutsch said. “For fisheries, it hasn’t been detected in data, but all of the indicators point toward this being an important concern for the future.”
The modeling study honed in on oxygen impacts in the open ocean, but it didn’t reveal or project more complicated changes in coastal regions, such as in the colorful coral and sponge habitats of the Southern California Bight.
The findings from the modeling runs corroborated those from similar studies that have been published in recent years.
“These are very expected results,” said John Dunne, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration biogeochemist and climate modeler who has researched the topic.
Dunne said impacts from projected oxygen declines will matter most in parts of the ocean where levels are naturally low to begin with, such as along the West Coast, including the waters off Los Angeles.
Changes in southern California may already be squeezing decimated populations of fish that are popular with fishermen and diners, such as cowcod and other rockfish, into dangerously small territories, further threatening their survival.
“At high levels of oxygen, it doesn’t matter,” Dunne said. “At low levels of oxygen, it matters a great deal.”

Links

• Climate Change is ‘Devastating’ The Great Barrier Reef
• Ocean Warming is Making Floods Worse, Study Finds
• Here’s Where Ocean Acidification Will Hit the U.S. Hardest
• Carbon Fee Debate Goes Mainstream in Washington State
• Satellite Shows U.S. Has the Most Gas Flares in the World
• With The Paris Agreement Signed, Hard Work Begins

Globalization Made Economic Production More Vulnerable To Climate Change

Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

The susceptibility of the global economic network to workers' heat-stress has doubled in the last decade, a new study published in the journal Science Advances finds.
The analysis by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Columbia University shows for the first time how enhanced connectivity of the global network of supply can amplify production losses, as these losses can be spread more easily across countries.

Shown are the 1000 largest trade flows between 26 industry sectors and final demand in 186 countries for the year 2011 (based on data from the Eora World MRIO, by M. Lenzen at U Sydney). The study analyzes the susceptibility of the global economic network to heat-stress for the years 1991-2011. Source: zeean.net

"Climate damages do not only depend on the warming of our planet, but also on the resilience of our societies and economies," says lead author Leonie Wenz.
"Our study shows that since the beginning of the 21st century the structure of our economic system has changed in a way that production losses in one place can more easily cause further losses elsewhere."
The study examines the example  of local heat-stress-related productivity reductions causing global effects.
Across the world, production is interlinked.
"What is self-evident for us today is really a phenomenon of the last two decades," Wenz explains.

From typhoons to heat-stress on workers: local events, global effects
Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines destroyed more than half the world's production of coconut oil which is one of the two most commonly used vegetable fats in food production worldwide.
The 2011 flood in Queensland stopped production in the fourth biggest coal exploration site on Earth for weeks, with economic repercussions well beyond Australia.
While single major shocks to economic networks like these illustrate how economic activity is globally linked, the researchers focused on the effects of small daily perturbations due to extreme temperatures leading to heat-stress among workers in construction, agriculture and other economic sectors.
Previous research shows that increasing temperatures decrease productivity, because, for instance, workers get exhausted more rapidly.
The study covers economic flows between 26 industry sectors from mining and quarrying to textiles and wearing apparel and to post and telecommunications as well as final demand in 186 countries.
Combining data on temperature, population and the global economic network from 1991-2011 and based on existing research on temperature effects on workers, the scientists run computer simulations of heat-stress consequences in order to find out more about the network's vulnerability to the propagation of production losses in each year.

"This is the basis for implementing appropriate adaptation measures"
"With unabated climate change, the effects of increasing weather extremes, like most recently seen in Paris, will have severe impacts on natural and societal systems," says co-author Anders Levermann.
"To estimate the costs of future climate change we need to assess global economic impacts of more frequent heat extremes and meteorological impacts, such as floods and tropical storms, and understand their relation to the economic network's structure.
"This is the basis for implementing appropriate adaptation measures – in a warming world with more intense weather extremes it is likely that society needs to become more resilient and more flexible."

Links

• Globalized economy more susceptible to weather extremes, scientists warn
• Climate Economics: Make supply chains climate smart
• Changing the Resilience Paradigm