23/07/2017

Heritage At Risk: How Rising Seas Threaten Ancient Coastal Ruins

Yale Environment 360 - Adam Markham*

The shores of Scotland's Orkney Islands are dotted with ruins that date to the Stone Age. But after enduring for millennia, these archaeological sites – along with many others from Easter Island to Jamestown – are facing an existential threat from climate change.
Ruins on Scotland's Rousay Island coast, which is eroding because of sea level rise and intensifying storms. ADAM MARKHAM
Perched on the breathtaking Atlantic coast of Mainland, the largest island in Scotland's Orkney archipelago, are the remains of the Stone Age settlement of Skara Brae, dating back 5,000 years. Just feet from the sea, Skara Brae is one of the best preserved Stone Age villages in the world — a complex of ancient stone house foundations, walls, and sunken corridors carved out of the dunes by the shore of the Bay of Skaill. Fulmars and kittiwakes from the vast seabird colonies on Orkney's high cliffs wheel above the coastal grassland of this rugged island, 15 miles from the northern coast of the Scottish mainland. On a sunny day, the surrounding bays and inlets take on a sparkling aquamarine hue.
Older than the Egpyptian pyramids and Stonehenge, Skara Brae is part of a UNESCO World Heritage site that also includes two iconic circles of standing stones — the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness — and Maeshowe, an exquisitely structured chambered tomb famous for its Viking graffiti and the way its Stone Age architects aligned the entrance to catch the sun's rays at the winter solstice. These sites, situated just a few miles from Skara Brae, are part of an elaborate ceremonial landscape built by Orkney's earliest farmers.
Skara Brae and the neighboring sites have weathered thousands of years of Orkney's wild winters and ferocious storms, but they may not outlive the changing climate of our modern era. As seas rise, storms intensify, and wave heights in this part of the world increase, the threat grows to Skara Brae, where land at each end of its protective sea wall — erected in the 1920s — is being eaten away.  Today, as a result of climate change, Skara Brae is regarded by Historic Environment Scotland, the government agency responsible for its preservation, as among Scotland's most vulnerable historic sites.
Like the rest of Scotland, Orkney's climate is changing faster now than at any time since instrumental measurements began.
A global crisis for cultural heritage is unfolding along our coasts, but it's one that only a handful of archaeologists, preservationists, and climate scientists are yet paying attention to. In 2014, for example, a study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found 136 World Heritage sites vulnerable to sea level rise, including the Statue of Liberty and the Sydney Opera House. The U.S. National Park Service has identified erosion threats to archaeology at many of its properties, including Historic Jamestown in Virginia. Recent research shows that some of the magnificent moai statues of Easter Island are in danger of collapsing into the sea as a consequence of coastal erosion.
The threat is also severe in the Arctic, where protective winter sea ice is disappearing and permafrost is thawing. Storms tear away the shoreline and wash out irreplaceable remains of settlements, hunting camps, and artifacts. Archaeologists are racing to excavate the rapidly disappearing site of Walakpa near Barrow, Alaska, with its evidence spanning 4,000 years of human occupation.
Other coastal archaeology is critically endangered at Arctic sites in Canada, Siberia, and Greenland. Resources to investigate and excavate are meager.
Because of Orkney's weathered coast and the sheer density and richness of its ancient remains, many see the archipelago as the world capital of eroding archaeology. Hazel Moore, an archaeologist who has been monitoring erosion impacts in Orkney and the even more northerly Shetland Islands since the early 1990s, says, "In terms of coastal erosion and direct threat, within Orkney and Shetland there are thousands of sites at risk, and probably many we don't know about that we're not even recording."
Remains of the Stone Age settlement of Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands, threatened by sea level rise. ADAM MARKHAM
Moore leads one of Orkney's several active "rescue digs" in a fast-eroding dune system called the Links of Noltland on the island of Westray, a 90-minute ferry ride from Mainland. Remains of at least 35 stone structures dating from 3300 BC to roughly 1000 BC have been found there so far. In one of those, archaeologists discovered in 2009 the Orkney Venus, Scotland's earliest known representation of a human. Neolithic settlement sites are rare, and the state of preservation at Noltland is comparable to Skara Brae, although Noltland's area is considerably larger. Each summer, the excavation team returns not knowing what condition the site will be in after being battered by winter storms.
Like the rest of Scotland, Orkney's climate is changing faster now than at any time since instrumental measurements began. Average temperatures have risen by about 1.8 degrees F since 1961, and heavy rainfall events and severe storms have become more common. Meanwhile, sea level rise has accelerated during the last 20 years, driving an increase in severe coastal flooding events on Scottish coasts, according to Jim Hansom, a coastal geomorphologist at the University of Glasgow.
Until the 1980s Noltland's dunes were largely covered in grass, but storms have hammered them, allowing wind erosion to take hold. (Sand quarrying and rabbit damage also have taken a toll.) Intensifying winter winds have scoured away sand and soil so that in some places the dunes have collapsed nearly 20 feet. An ancient midden, or garbage pile, has been exposed to the elements for the first time in thousands of years, with shellfish and snail shells, fish bones, cereal grains, and charred fragments of animal bones discarded by Bronze Age farmers lying directly on the surface. Some of the most exposed portions of the site are no more than 100 yards from the sea and just a few feet above beach level. Moore says that speed of excavation is paramount because "nature is uncovering the site so rapidly."
The evidence for human occupation in Orkney dates back at least 9,000 years, and although we think of the islands as remote today, for several millennia they were a maritime and cultural crossroads, with close links at various times to Ireland, Scandinavia, Greenland, and mainland Europe. In the medieval period, Orkney was only two or three days' sail by longboat from Norse harbors in Scandinavia.
Orkney's earliest inhabitants had to adapt to climate changes, including post-glacial sea level rise. Seas around Orkney didn't reach their current level until about 4,000 years ago, perhaps 500 years after Skara Brae was abandoned. It is likely that encroaching sands and increasing salt-spray blown in from the sea eventually made agriculture too difficult so close to the ocean.
Archeologist Julie Gibson on Rousay Island, which contains archeological finds dating back 5,600 years. ADAM MARKHAM
By roughly 3,500 BC, must of Orkney's forests had been felled, and stone, easily quarried from the islands' laminated red sandstone deposits, became the building material of choice. Because stone was used, the islands hold an extraordinarily rich repository of archaeological information from the Neolithic period through to the Vikings and beyond. At other archaeological sites in Europe, where wood was used, the organic material has decayed and little is left of buildings, but in Orkney, preservation of ancient structures is remarkable, offering vivid insights into Neolithic life. For example, the houses of Skara Brae contain stone beds, dressers, shelves, and fish storage tanks.
"The buildings at Skara Brae indicated a pattern for how people lived," said Julie Gibson, the Orkney County archaeologist and a lecturer at the University of the Highlands and Islands. "When archaeologists were digging near Stonehenge, they were dealing with houses which had been built in wood, but to the same pattern as in Orkney. They wouldn't have been able to so rapidly understand how people lived near Stonehenge if they hadn't been able to draw on the 3-D evidence from Skara Brae."
As at Skara Brae, most of Orkney's archaeological sites are on or close to the shoreline, just a few feet above sea level. Accelerating sea level rise is already having an impact, according to Gibson. Sixty years ago, local children played inside beautifully preserved Iron Age buildings at Hodgalee on Westray. Since then, seas that have risen five to eight inches have entered and damaged these ancient remains. It's an "archaeological disaster," says Gibson, and just a matter of time until all are lost to the water and waves.
The medieval church of St. Mary's Kirk on Rousay Island, another example of Orkney coastal archeology at risk because of climate change. ADAM MARKHAM
The 2013 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report projected a range for global average sea level rise of 2.4 feet to 3.2 feet by 2100, but the latest science suggests that estimate is conservative. The U.K. government has projected a possible rise in sea level of up to 6.2 feet by 2100.
On the Orkney Islands, huge waves roll in unimpeded from the deep water of the Atlantic and batter the shore. Most studies show that storm activity in the northern North Atlantic has intensified, and almost all climate change analyses agree that storm intensity will continue to increase.
Waves, too, are becoming more damaging. "In the Northeast Atlantic, the significant wave height (the average of the highest third of all waves) has been increasing over the last 40 years at about 0.8 inches per year," says Hansom. But it's not the average waves that do the most damage, it's the biggest ones. Extreme waves up to 56 feet have been recorded off the west coast of Mainland.
Storms also appear to be clustering together more often, according to Hansom. "The damage that storms do has a lot to do with the impacts of the previous storm," he says. "If you have a beach that has been depleted by a storm and then it's hit by another within a couple of weeks, then the second storm is much more destructive." The 2017 National Coastal Change Assessment found that Scotland's coastal erosion rates have doubled since the 1970s. All this could prove disastrous for Orkney's coastal archaeology.
An international team is rushing to learn as much as it can about a newly discovered Stone Age site before it is swallowed by the sea.
Exemplifying what's at risk is an extraordinary strip of archaeology on the southwest coast of Rousay Island. Gibson has lived close by since she moved here in the late 1970s to study Viking archaeology. In just a few hundred yards you can hike the entire settled history of Orkney from 3500 BC to the 20th century, including one of the biggest chambered tombs in Scotland, several Iron Age roundhouses (brochs), remnants of a Norse hall, Viking boat ramps, and the ruins of St. Mary's Kirk, once the heart of medieval Rousay.
Just down the beach from St. Mary's, an international team is rushing to learn as much as it can about a newly discovered site at Swandro Bay — which includes a chambered tomb that may contain the burials of many Stone Age people — before it is swallowed by the sea. The project also seeks to better understand the mechanisms of erosion on coastal archaeological resources. At Skara Brae too, cutting-edge efforts are underway to record and understand the rate of erosion. A team from Historic Environment Scotland used laser scanners for a detailed 3D digital survey of Skara Brae and its shoreline.
Gibson looks at climate impacts both as a threat and an opportunity. She authored the 2008 book, "Rising Tides Revisited: The Loss of Coastal Heritage in Orkney," in which she suggested that half the known sites in Orkney are at risk from climate change. But she sees a silver lining: "This is an opportunity for people to focus enquiries on eroding archaeology rather than going to look for new sites."
She believes that some of these threatened coastal sites, if protected and preserved, can provide not only invaluable knowledge about the past, but also help drive economic development on Orkney by bringing more visitors to the outer islands.
Both Gibson and Moore hope that some of the important archaeological sites now at risk of loss on the coasts can be protected for several generations at least. This may require new sea walls, breakwaters, or dune restoration in some places. What's most needed, says Gibson, are the political will and financial resources to both excavate and stabilize Orkney's archaeological treasures.
On a sunny day, standing by the sea and looking over the remains of the ancient houses at Skara Brae, one feels an affinity with the people who lived there 5,000 years ago. But the waves rolling onto the beach are a reminder that time is ticking for this extraordinary place and for so many other sites on Orkney's coastline.

*Adam Markham is deputy director for Climate & Energy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He writes about climate impacts on biodiversity, conservation and cultural resources, and on international climate policy. He was lead author of the 2016 UNESCO/UNEP/UCS report "World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate."

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22/07/2017

'Astounding': Shifting Storms Under Climate Change To Worsen Coastal Perils

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Shifting storm directions under climate change are likely to worsen threats to coastlines already at risk from rising sea levels and more intense tempests, according to researchers at the University of NSW.
Scientists took advantage of the predicted huge east coast low in June last year to document the before and after shape along 177 kilometres of coastline from Sydney to Coffs Harbour. The scale of the survey was "unprecedented" for a cyclone outside the tropics, they said.

We should be forecasting erosion
It took just two days for the the beach at Collaroy to go from its widest in decades to devastatingly eroded.

They found the coast shifted an average of 22 metres inland, with almost 12 million cubic metres - enough to fill the MCG to the brim sevenfold - during the three-day event, according to findings published in Nature Scientific Reports.
"The amount of erosion was astounding," said Mitchell Harley, a senior research associate at UNSW's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Houses at Collaroy Beach took the brunt of the June 2016 storm. Photo: Peter Rae
"It was akin to the amount of sand shifted by Hurricane Sandy [a superstorm that lashed the US in 2012]".
The June 2016 storm caused widespread beach erosion. Photo: Nature
The impact of the June event, though, was less to do with the storm's intensity - it was about a one-in-five-year event - but rather its unusual direction coming largely from the east.
"When you get particularly unusual waves it really causes huge changes [to the coast]," Dr Harley, the paper's lead author, said. "The whole south-eastern Australian coastal line is in equilibrium, lined up for southerly or south-easterly storms."
While easterly storms are not unknown, climate change is projected to increase their frequency, he said. Homes, roads and even vegetation now usually sheltered by headlands or offshore reefs and islands may be less protected in years to come.
"Certainly, the indications are that storm direction will shift in the future" as the tropical regions expand poleward in both hemispheres, Dr Harley said. "So in Sydney we may see storms more akin to what you see in Brisbane."
Dr Harley made the comments on Thursday from Coogee Beach in Sydney's east, one area that was hammered in last year's event. The local surf lifesaving clubhouse, normally well protected from swells by Wedding Cake Island, copped heavy damage.
The NSW government is in the midst of overhauling its coastal planning, with some residents anxious for an acceleration of the reforms to guide new developments in the wake of last year's storm.
Those changes have sought to take into account projected sea level rise and also the prospect of more intense storms increasing the height of storm surges. Dr Harley said the likelihood of shifting storm tracks should also be considered.
"The coastal hazard lines… are all designed for coastal events of the past," he said. "We need to rethink how we approach coastal planning and maybe these hazard lines needed to be reviewed."

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Inaction On Climate Change Risks Leaving Future Generations $530 Trillion In Debt

The Conversation - 

24Novembers / shutterstock
By continuing to delay significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, we risk handing young people alive today a bill of up to US$535 trillion. This would be the cost of the “negative emissions” technologies required to remove CO₂ from the air in order to avoid dangerous climate change.
These are the main findings of new research published in Earth System Dynamics, conducted by an international team led by US climate scientist James Hansen, previously the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The Paris Agreement in 2015 saw the international community agree to limit warming to within 2°C. The Hansen team argue that the much safer approach is to reduce atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ from the current annual average of more than 400ppm (parts per million) back to 1980s levels of 350ppm. This is a moderately more ambitious goal than the aspiration announced in Paris to further attempt to limit warming to no more than 1.5°C. Many climate scientists and policymakers believe that either the 2°C or 1.5°C limits will only be possible with negative emissions because the international community will be unable to make the required reductions in time.

Putting carbon back in the ground
The most promising negative emissions technology is BECCS – bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration. It involves growing crops which are then burnt in power stations to generate electricity. The carbon dioxide produced is captured from the power station chimneys, compressed, and piped deep down into the Earth’s crust where it will be stored for many thousands of years. This scheme would allow us to both generate electricity and reduce the amount of CO₂ in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Other energy sources are at best carbon-neutral, but BECCS removes more than it emits. Elrapto, CC BY-SA
BECCS has important limits, such as the sheer amount of land, water and fertiliser required to satisfy our energy demand. Perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t exist at anything like the scale required of it. Thus far only small pilot projects have demonstrated its feasibility. Other negative emissions approaches involve fertilising the ocean to increase photosynthesis, or direct air capture which sucks CO₂ out of the air and converts it into plastics or other products.
An ethanol production plant in South Dakota, US. We’ll need many more of these – equipped with carbon capture tech – to have an impact on global emissions. Jim Parkin / shutterstock
The Hansen team estimate how much it will cost to extract excess CO₂ with BECCS. They conclude that it would be possible to move back to 350ppm mainly with reforestation and improving soils, leaving around 50 billion tonnes of CO₂ to be mopped up with negative emissions technologies (the plants grown for BECCS take in the CO₂, which is then sequestered when burned).
But that’s only if we make significant reductions in rates of emissions right now. If we delay, then future generations would need to extract over ten times more CO₂ beyond the end of this century
Scenarios for future carbon dioxide emissions and extraction.
They estimate costs between US$150-350 for each tonne of carbon removed via negative emissions technologies. If global emissions are reduced by 6% each year – a very challenging but not impossible scenario – then bringing CO₂ concentrations back to 350ppm would cost US$8-18.5 trillion, spread over 80 years at US$100-230 billion a year.
If emissions remain flat or increase at 2% a year, then total cost balloons to at least US$89 trillion and potentially as much as US$535 trillion. That’s US$1.1 to US$6.7 trillion every year for eight decades.
To give these numbers some context, the entire US federal budget is about US$4 trillion, while spending by all countries on military and defence was US$1.7 trillion.

A climate balancing act
Humans have pumped over 1.5 trillion tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere since 1750. It is not just the amount, but the rate at which this CO₂ has been added. The oceans can absorb extra CO₂ but not fast enough to remove all human inputs and so it has been progressively building up in the atmosphere. This extra CO₂ traps more heat than would otherwise escape out into space. More energy is therefore entering the climate system than leaving it.
Over decades and centuries the climate will move back into balance with the same amount of energy leaving as entering. But this will be at a higher temperature with among other things less ice, higher sea levels, more heatwaves, and more floods. The last time the Earth’s climate experienced such an energy imbalance was the Eemian interglacial period some 115,000 years ago. At that time global sea levels were six to nine metres higher than today.
The Hansen team argues that even maintaining the current energy imbalance risks locking in several metres of sea level rise. That is because slow processes such as melting ice sheets still haven’t “caught up”. The longer the climate is held out of balance, the greater their effect will be.
Climate change isn’t instant. Even if carbon emissions ceased today, ice caps would keep melting for decades. Bernhard Staehli / shutterstock
One argument against making drastic cuts to greenhouse gas emissions is that it will harm economies as our industries are still largely fossil fuelled. Responding to climate change needs to balance the desire to continue to grow economies today with avoiding disastrous climate change or prohibitively expensive remedies tomorrow.
Whatever assumptions you make about economic growth, or however much you discount future costs, it’s unimaginable that US$535 trillion could be afforded. While these costs will be spread over 80 years, this will also be a period in which the global population will increase from seven billion to perhaps 11 billion and beyond. Humanity will need to grow enough crops to feed these billions while fuelling BECCS schemes at a time when climate change will already be impacting food production. There are also no guarantees that BECCS or any other negative emission technologies will actually work. If they fail then large amounts of CO₂ could be released very rapidly with disastrous consequences.
By delaying significant carbon emission reductions we risk handing both an impossible financial and technological burden to future generations. Our children and grandchildren may be unable to understand how we negotiated such an arrangement on their behalf.

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Local Governments in California File Common Law Claims Against Largest Fossil Fuel Companies

Columbia Law School - Michael Burger



Yesterday, three local governments in California (San Mateo County, Marin County and the City of Imperial Beach) filed potentially groundbreaking climate change lawsuits in California state courts, each one charging a group of 20 fossil fuel companies with liability for public nuisance, failure to warn, design defect, private nuisance, negligence, and trespass.
This type of state common law climate litigation has been a long time coming, and these cases may well represent the first of a slew of similar cases nationwide. Here, I summarize several interesting aspects of the complaints, and offer some first blush thoughts on both the legal hurdles they might face and the potential outcomes they might produce.

The Lawsuits
Each of the complaints presents the same simple, compelling storyline: These fossil fuel companies knew. They knew that climate change was happening, that fossil fuel production and use was causing it, and that continued fossil fuel production and use would only make it worse. They knew this, but they hid it. And then they lied about it, and paid other people to lie about it for them. All the while they profited from it, and plotted to profit more.
Ultimately, their actions caused sea levels to rise, and thereby caused harm, are continuing to cause harm, and are contributing to future harm to the plaintiff governments and their residents. Accordingly, the complaints claim that the defendant companies should be held liable and forced to pay, both for the costs the local governments are incurring to adapt to sea level rise and for the companies' own willful, deceptive, and malicious behavior.
The named defendants include Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Citgo, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, Peabody Energy, Total, Eni, Arch Coal, Rio Tinto, Statoil, Anadarko, Occidental, Repsol, Marathon, Hess, Devon, Encana, Apache, and unspecified "Company Does."
According to the plaintiffs, these companies are responsible for about 20% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that were emitted during the period from 1965 to 2015, an amount which the complaints argue is a "substantial portion" of the climate change problem. The "substantial portion" claim is legally significant.
To show that the defendants are liable, the plaintiffs must demonstrate that they caused the alleged harms. Climate change, of course, is caused by many different actors; sea level rise and resulting impacts are attributable to climate change and, in some instances, other factors.
Thus, it may be argued that the defendants are not the only parties who can or should bear responsibility, or blame. However, as a matter of law, causation can be shown by proving that the defendants are a "substantial factor," or that they contributed significantly to the harm. Relying on a cumulative carbon analysis, plaintiffs make a strong case that that standard is met.
The timeframe plaintiffs employ for the cumulative carbon analysis is an important one, for both its legal and narrative impact. In rough terms, it corresponds with what Will Steffen calls the "Great Acceleration," the years since the 1960s in which approximately 75% of all historic industrial emissions have occurred, and in which the rate of fossil fuel production and consumption has significantly increased.
The specific years also mark notable bookends in climate change history. In 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson's Scientific Advisory Committee Panel on Environmental Pollution reported that unabated CO2 emissions would, by 2000, alter the climate, and Johnson charged Congress to address the problem. In 2015 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had just issued its Fifth Assessment Report, relaying the state of the art in climate science and understanding, and the global community signed the Paris Agreement to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The plaintiffs recite an increasingly well-documented, and familiar, timeline regarding what the fossil fuel companies knew and understood about climate change, and what they said and did (or did not do) about it. Several aspects of the story jumped out to me:
  • In 1980, Imperial Oil (a Canadian company in which Exxon owns a super-majority stake), reported to Exxon and Esso that power plant carbon capture technology was technologically feasible, but that it would "double the cost of power generation." (Carbon capture is not yet deployed at scale in the power sector.)
  • Some fossil fuel exploration and production companies started climate proofing their own infrastructure around 20 years ago. They started investing in Arctic development capacity even further back, likely in anticipation of new exploration and production opportunities in a melting region.
  • In 1988, industry fundamentally shifted its stance towards climate change, turning away from independent research and outward statements favoring action, and turning towards the strategies and tactics documented in Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt, further revealed through reporting by the Energy and Environmental Reporting Project at Columbia University, and the ongoing subject of investigations by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and others.
    That year, according to the complaint, the political will to take on the climate change challenge was becoming increasingly evident. The insinuation one draws is that once industry sensed the real possibility of a commitment to international cooperation and domestic regulation it began to mount its overt and covert defenses.
  • Current EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt was an active participant in fossil fuel companies' coordinated effort to resist climate change regulations.
According to the plaintiffs, the consequence of the cumulative emissions put into the market by defendants, and of the disinformation campaign waged by certain industry leaders and the think tanks, communications shops, and lobbying operations they funded and hired, are rising sea levels that have already impacted local governments and residents, and that will continue to do so, in ever more extreme ways, in the years to come.
These impacts include inundation of public beaches and coastal property, and more frequent and extreme flooding and storm surge, resulting in some permanent property losses and requiring expenditure of funds for impact assessment, as well as adaptation and emergency response planning and implementation.
And so they have sued, seeking damages, both compensatory and punitive, under a range of common law theories that place blame on and assign responsibility to these defendants because of their knowledge, their resistance to mitigation, and their various roles in fossil fuel exploration, production, marketing, and consumption.

The Legal Obstacles  
Scholars and practitioners have theorized this type of climate action for years. For example, in 2011, my colleague Michael Gerrard wrote this piece, surveying a host of issues such cases will inevitably encounter, and Doug Kysar of Yale early on wrote this piece on how climate change may itself influence the future shape of tort law. Tracy Hester at the University of Houston has written this analysis of the different elements of state common law climate cases. Thinking on this goes further back, to the state common law public nuisance claims included – but never decided – in Connecticut v. American Electric Power.
Importantly, these cases have been filed at a particular moment in time, when scientific consensus on and understanding of climate change is at an all-time high but the federal government's commitment to addressing the problem is at an all-time low. In fact, it's in negative territory, with a president, an EPA administrator and an Interior secretary determined to ramp up fossil fuel production and consumption while doing nothing to mitigate emissions or adapt to impacts. And the fossil fuel industry's active role in fighting against climate action continues to come to light, making comparisons to the tobacco litigation (like this one) increasingly accurate.
Without detracting from the many other legal issues likely to arise in the lawsuits, here are three that come immediately to mind.
Standing: The first issue that tends to come up in thinking about climate change litigation is standing. Standing is a threshold issue in any challenge to government action, or inaction, in the climate change arena. But these are common law tort claims. The elements of standing – injury, causation, redressability – constitute the merits of the case. Were plaintiffs harmed in a tortious manner? Did defendants cause that harm? Are plaintiffs entitled to damages? That's the whole case, not a preliminary matter to determine jurisdiction.
Accordingly, it seems that a standing challenge should not, in theory, succeed; at least, not before the merits of the case are determined. Nonetheless, standing was an issue in Connecticut v. AEP, where the Supreme Court was asked to rule on whether a federal common law public nuisance claim could proceed. In her opinion finding the federal nuisance claim displaced by the federal Clean Air Act, Justice Ginsburg noted that "[f]our members of the Court would hold that at least some plaintiffs have Article III standing." Justice Sotomayor did not participate in that decision, meaning that Justice Kennedy voted to uphold his own opinion from Massachusetts v. EPA, which found states had standing to sue due to injuries they suffered from climate change.
Thus, at the moment, there are likely at least five votes for the broad proposition that states have standing to sue for climate change. The opinion in Mass. v. EPA, however, relied on the "special solicitude" owed states due to their quasi-sovereign status. Here, plaintiffs are local governments, which may or may not be given a similar weighting by Justice Kennedy and others.
Political Question: In Connecticut v. AEP, the federal district court originally found that there were no judicially manageable standards by which to adjudicate a public nuisance claim brought by states, cities, national environmental organizations, and three private land trusts against five power companies, and that the cases raised a political question necessarily left for the political branches. The Second Circuit reversed this judgment, finding that courts have long adjudicated complex environmental nuisance cases, and that the political question doctrine did not pose a bar.
The Supreme Court's view of the matter is a little obscure. Justice Ginsburg noted that "at least four judges" found that neither standing nor any other "threshold obstacle bars review."
The infamous footnote 6 in that opinion refers to the political question doctrine, but neither it nor the text offers an explanation of exactly how the justices voted on the matter. All of which leaves the political question issue unresolved.
The 9th Circuit, in Native Village of Kivalina v. ExxonMobil Corp., another federal common law nuisance case, did not directly address the political question doctrine, relying instead on the displacement analysis from Connecticut v. AEP. In Comer v. Murphy Oil, a Fifth Circuit panel found that the political question doctrine did not bar state tort claims brought against several companies for their contributions to climate change. However, that decision was later vacated in a uniquely bizarre procedural sequence.
The facts of this case, however, are different. Plaintiffs have framed their case not about climate change policy in the abstract, and not only about a specific quantity of emissions contributing to climate change, but also about these private actors' individual and collective conduct, which includes not only producing GHG emissions but interacting with the market and with regulators in a sustained disinformation campaign. Plaintiffs are not seeking to establish a specific policy in regards to GHG emissions, public lands management, or other matters of federal agency discretion. Rather, they are seeking damages for harms caused by market behavior they claim was, among other things, knowing, negligent, and intentionally misleading.
Preemption: In Connecticut v. AEP, the Supreme Court found that a public nuisance case brought in federal court under federal common law had been displaced by the Clean Air Act. Because the Court had previously held in Mass v. EPA that EPA was authorized to regulate GHGs by the federal legislation, there was no longer room for federal common law. However, the court did not reach the state common law claims also plead in that case.
It remains an open question whether state claims such as those plead here are preempted by federal legislation, including the Clean Air Act, the Mineral Leasing Act, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, and other statutes setting federal GHG emissions and fossil fuel extraction, transportation, and consumption policy. In Comer, the original Fifth Circuit panel concluded that federal preemption was inapplicable to plaintiffs state common law claims; but, as noted, that decision was vacated and has no precedential value. Its reasoning, of course, nonetheless bears consideration.
One preemption case that defendants may seek to invoke is the Fourth Circuit decision in North Carolina v. Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). There, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit dismissed a common law nuisance action brought by the state of North Carolina against TVA. The action focused on emissions from TVA-operated power plants in Alabama and Tennessee, which were alleged to cause air pollution and associated health problems in North Carolina.
Even if this were the case, however, TVA would not be liable for public nuisance according to the Fourth Circuit. In reaching this decision, the Fourth Circuit noted that "[c]ourts have traditionally been reluctant to enjoin as a public nuisance activities which have been considered and specifically authorized by the government," such as under the Clean Air Act.
The Fourth Circuit reasoned that "TVA's plants cannot logically be public nuisances where TVA is in compliance" with the Clean Air Act, and its plants have been permitted by the states in which they operate. Defendants will likely cite to this case to argue that federally permitted activities cannot be the subject of nuisance suits.
Assuming arguendo that North Carolina v. TVA was rightly decided (and there are arguments to be made that it was not), there is at least one key distinction between it and these newly filed cases – the facilities in that case were specifically permitted to pollute under the standards set through the Clean Air Act, and the permits in question authorized the pollution in question.
Here, by contrast, none of the federal programs through which defendants have operated, and none of the foreign governments that have permitted them to operate in other jurisdictions, have thoroughly considered, far less sought to regulate, the downstream GHG emissions associated with their activities.
What's more, given the Trump Administration's outright resistance to using the federal statutes to regulate GHGs at any stage there can be no conflict between state law and federal law, and state law cannot be said to be an obstacle to achieving any particular federal goals. Defendants might argue that state common law liability would conflict with the Trump Administration's decision to not protect public health and welfare, or to pursue "energy dominance," or some other such thing, but we have to hope that that line of reasoning will not find sympathetic audiences in court.

Possible Outcomes
As with the case of Juliana v. United States, currently winding its way towards a trial date next year, these cases face significant legal hurdles. Success on the merits is far from assured. But it could happen. The facts are there, making the case for causation and culpability, and the law can accommodate these claims. What's more, if other cases in other jurisdictions are brought, we may ultimately see a large-scale settlement similar to the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, or perhaps establishment of a fund through federal legislation, along the lines of the Superfund program established under CERCLA.
However, and again as with Juliana, there are also potential outcomes short of success on the merits that could still advance the ball on climate change. For one thing, these cases represent a new pressure point on the fossil fuel industry, and a new spotlight on that industry's engagement with climate law and policy.
They make the case that these companies are bad actors, who have lied for years to continue to generate profits at the expense of the local governments and individual citizens and residents who bear the costs of climate impacts. The drama of the courtroom setting could mobilize the public's interest and give life to local activism on these issues, much as Juliana has captured the youth climate movement and given it voice.
Moreover, the prospect of judicial judgment affirming plaintiffs' case might nudge these companies to accelerate their own transition away from past practices, towards new approaches to providing energy to consumers.

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21/07/2017

Satellite Snafu Masked True Sea-Level Rise For Decades

Nature - Jeff Tollefson

Revised tallies confirm that the rate of sea-level rise is accelerating as the Earth warms and ice sheets thaw.
As the Greenland ice sheet thaws, it is helping to raise the world's sea levels. Joe Raedle/Getty
The numbers didn’t add up. Even as Earth grew warmer and glaciers and ice sheets thawed, decades of satellite data seemed to show that the rate of sea-level rise was holding steady — or even declining.
Now, after puzzling over this discrepancy for years, scientists have identified its source: a problem with the calibration of a sensor on the first of several satellites launched to measure the height of the sea surface using radar. Adjusting the data to remove that error suggests that sea levels are indeed rising at faster rates each year.
“The rate of sea-level rise is increasing, and that increase is basically what we expected,” says Steven Nerem, a remote-sensing expert at the University of Colorado Boulder who is leading the reanalysis. He presented the as-yet-unpublished analysis on 13 July in New York City at a conference sponsored by the World Climate Research Programme and the International Oceanographic Commission, among others.
Nerem's team calculated that the rate of sea-level rise increased from around 1.8 millimetres per year in 1993 to roughly 3.9 millimetres per year today as a result of global warming. In addition to the satellite calibration error, his analysis also takes into account other factors that have influenced sea-level rise in the last several decades, such as the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 and the recent El Niño weather pattern.

The view from above
The results align with three recent studies that have raised questions about the earliest observations of sea-surface height, or altimetry, captured by the TOPEX/Poseidon spacecraft, a joint US–French mission that began collecting data in late 1992. Those measurements continued with the launch of three subsequent satellites.
“Whatever the methodology, we all come up with the same conclusions,” says Anny Cazenave, a geophysicist at the Laboratory for Studies in Space Geophysics and Oceanography (LEGOS) in Toulouse, France.
In an analysis published in Geophysical Research Letters in April, Cazenave’s team tallied up the various contributions to sea-level rise, including expansion resulting from warming ocean waters and from ice melt in places such as Greenland. Their results suggest that the satellite altimetry measurements were too high during the first six years that they were collected; after this point, scientists began using TOPEX/Poseidon's back-up sensor. The error in those early measurements distorted the long-term trend, masking a long-term increase in the rate of sea-level rise.
The problem was first identified in 2015 by a group that included John Church, an oceanographer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Church and his colleagues identified a discrepancy between sea-level data collected by satellites and those from tide gauges scattered around the globe. In a second paper published in June in Nature Climate Change, the researchers adjusted the altimetry records for the apparent bias and then calculated sea-level rise rates using a similar approach to Cazenave’s team. The trends lined up, Church says.

Rising tide
Still, Nerem wanted to know what had gone wrong with the satellite measurements. His team first compared the satellite data to observations from tide gauges that showed an accelerating rate of sea-level rise. Then the researchers began looking for factors that could explain the difference between the two data sets.
The team eventually identified a minor calibration that had been built into TOPEX/Poseidon's altimeter to correct any flaws in its data that might be caused by problems with the instrument, such as ageing electronic components. Nerem and his colleagues were not sure that the calibration was necessary — and when they removed it, measurements of sea-level rise in the satellite's early years aligned more closely with the tide-gauge data. The adjusted satellite data showed an increasing rate of sea-level rise over time.
“As records get longer, questions come up,” says Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist who heads NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. But the recent spate of studies suggests that scientists have homed in on an answer, he says. “It’s all coming together.”
If sea-level rise continues to accelerate at the current rate, Nerem says, the world’s oceans could rise by about 75 centimetres over the next century. That is in line with projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2013.
“All of this gives us much more confidence that we understand what is happening,” Church says, and the message to policymakers is clear enough. Humanity needs to reduce its output of greenhouse-gas emissions, he says — and quickly. ”The decisions we make now will have impacts for hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of years.”

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Kids Suing Trump Over Climate Change Get A Boost From Grandpa

Huffington Post - Alexander C. Kaufman

He's famed climatologist James Hansen, whose new research strengthens the case for climate action.


Young People's Burden

If Sophie Kivlehan's crusade to convince skeptics that humans are causing climate change has taught her anything, it's that the surest way to erode doubt is to make the science personal.
The 18-year-old can now point to new research that comes from a very personal source ― her grandfather. And she only needs to sway the federal judge overseeing a landmark lawsuit brought by herself and 20 other young Americans to force the U.S. government to slash planet-warming emissions.
Former NASA scientist James Hansen, Kivlehan's granddad as well as the "grandfather of global warming," published a paper on Tuesday arguing that preventing catastrophic climate change requires far more drastic policy shifts than any government has taken so far.
"There's a narrative out there that because of the Paris accord and because solar panels are becoming cheap, we've turned the corner on dealing with the climate problem," Hansen said on a call with reporters. "In fact, what we show … is that the growth rate of these greenhouse gases is actually accelerating in the last several years, so not only do they continue to grow, they grow faster and faster."
The research compared the currently projected warming of more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius, by the end of the century to the only slightly lower global temperatures during the Eemian, an interglacial period that ran from 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. During that time, sea levels surged six to nine meters, or 19 to 30 feet.
At those levels, modern coastal cities would easily be submerged.
To avoid such massive coastal flooding, Hansen argues that the current temperature rise needs to be capped at 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1 degree Celsius, through aggressive steps such as mass reforestation, widespread use of carbon sequestration technology and radical curtailing of fossil fuel production.
The study gives weight to the lawsuit by 21 kids and young adults who accuse the federal government of violating their constitutional rights to life, liberty and property by promoting fossil fuel production and failing to implement efforts to curb climate change. The suit was filed in 2015 with the help of the Oregon-based nonprofit Our Children's Trust.
Although it originally targeted the Obama administration, the case is now proceeding against President Donald Trump, whose administration has moved to roll back environmental regulations and bolster oil, gas and coal production.
"We will leave young people in the intractable situation in which climate change is occurring out of their control and costs of trying to maintain a livable planet may become too high to bear," Hansen said.
Hansen, who is also a plaintiff in the suit, has a long history of raising the alarm about global warming. He has become a sort of bogeyman among conservative skeptics who dismiss his warnings as "alarmist."
We will leave young people in the intractable situation in which climate change is occurring out of their control and costs of trying to maintain a livable planet may become too high to bear.
Former NASA scientist James Hansen
But his latest report, which he produced with a team of 14 co-authors whose expertise ranges from paleoclimatology to carbon cycles, was tested by three different peer reviewers before being published by the European Geosciences Union.
"The paper should be judged on its scientific merits," Hansen said. "This is hard science, and it's been very severely put through the wringer to make sure everything is well justified and clear."
Its conclusions are also not controversial. The United Nations-brokered Paris Agreement, which was signed by every country but Syria and Nicaragua, urges an ultimate goal of reducing emissions enough to halt warming at an increase of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. The official 3.6 degree target was adopted in the spirit of pragmatic compromise. (Trump announced plans to pull the U.S. out of the pact in June, but cannot legally initiate the process for another two years.)
Still, Hansen's study isn't aimed at convincing the hard-core doubters who embrace the industry-backed pseudoscience often pushed on right-wing news sites like Breitbart. The paper "is intended to make the human impact on the climate clear to the educated lay person, including judges in court," Hansen said.
"In particular, our case focuses on putting the best available science in the courtroom to show how our youngest generation and future generations will be burdened by the continued high fossil fuel emissions," the plaintiffs' co-lead counsel Phillip Gregory said on the call.

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California Communities Are Suing 37 Fossil Fuel Companies Over Climate Damages

ThinkProgress - Natasha Geiling

Two California counties and one town are suing fossil fuel companies for damages related to sea level rise.
Waves pound a wall near buildings in Pacifica, CA. CREDIT: AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File
Two California counties and one California city have filed a lawsuit against 37 of the world's biggest fossil fuel producers, seeking payment for damages brought by climate change.
The three localities are all located along California's coast, and could see as much as 3 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century, according to a 2012 report commissioned by governors from California, Oregon, and Washington. In San Mateo county alone — the most at-risk county in California for sea level rise, according to a Climate Central report, and one of the counties involved in the lawsuit — sea level rise threatens more than $21 billion dollars worth of property.
Alongside San Mateo, Marin County and the city of Imperial Beach filed separate complaints with the California Superior Court, arguing that 37 coal, oil, and gas companies knew about the harm their products posed to the planet and continued to undermine and obfuscate the dangers of climate change.
The localities suing the fossil fuel companies hope to hold them accountable for their carbon emissions, and the subsequent damage that those emissions have caused — and will cause — to the communities.
"The environmental harm these companies knowingly caused to our precious shorelines, and the entire world, and their deliberate efforts to conceal those frightening truths, jeopardizes the public's health and places the financial burden of those consequences on the taxpayers," San Mateo County Board of Supervisors President Don Horsley said in a statement.
The complaint alleges that the 37 companies named as defendants — through extraction, promotion, and marketing of fossil fuels — have accounted for approximately 20 percent of all industrial carbon dioxide and methane pollution released between 1965 and 2015. Specific companies named include Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and Peabody Energy, among others.
It isn't the first time fossil fuel companies have been taken to court over a common law claim. In this case, the plaintiffs are making a claim of public nuisance, which is legally defined as something causing widespread harm to a community. Public nuisance claims were brought against tobacco companies in the mid-1990s, which ultimately resulted in a $365.5 billion settlement to recoup Medicaid costs associated with treating smokers.
Public nuisance claims as they relate to climate change have seen limited success in the past. That is due in part to the difficulty associated with linking a particular harm to a particular actor, and in part because courts have found, at least at the federal level, that the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions displaces any kind of public nuisance claim through the court.
But according to Michael Burger, executive director for the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, the lawsuits in California come as close to the tobacco public nuisance claims as any climate litigation in history.
"It's really the degree to which these tort claims rely on this long history of corporate malfeasance and active collusion of industry to hide science, to obfuscate understanding, and to prevent government regulations from something that it appears to be well-aware ought to be regulated," Burger said.
The California localities might also face an easier road than past public nuisance claims, in part because of the increased scientific evidence linking climate change to sea level rise, and an emerging understanding of fossil fuel efforts to hide climate science from the public. In 2015, investigations by both the Los Angeles Times and InsideClimate News found that ExxonMobil was aware of climate science for decades but continued to fund public misinformation campaigns and, potentially, misled investors about the threats climate change posed to their assets.
To really become analogous with the public nuisance claims that eventually resulted in the multi-billion dollar tobacco settlement, more cities, counties, or even states would eventually need to file their own lawsuits or join onto one larger lawsuit. But depending on how the suits in California move forward, Burger sees the potential for more cities and states to follow as a distinct possibility.
"The prospect of that kind of groundswell of state-based litigation would further the analogy to the tobacco litigation and perhaps represent the best chance of getting industry to buy into the idea that some kind of comprehensive settlement would be appropriate," he said.

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