Sea The Possibilities: To Fight Climate Change, Put Seaweed In The Mix

The Conversation - Adam Bumpus

Nadya Peek/Flickr, CC BY-SA

The next stage of humanity’s fight to reduce greenhouse emissions may revolve around seaweed, according to an episode of ABC’s Catalyst, presented by Professor Tim Flannery, which asks the question “can seaweed save the world?”
With the help of me and colleagues around the world, the documentary explores seaweed’s enormous potential to reduce greenhouse gases and draw CO₂ out of the atmosphere. In the case of seaweed, that could include giant kelp farms that de-acidify oceans, or feeding algae to cattle and sheep to dramatically reduce their methane emissions.
But while these possibilities are exciting, early adopters are dealing with unproven technology and complex international treaties. Globally, emissions are likely to keep rising, which means seaweed-related carbon capture should only be one part of a bigger emissions reduction picture.

Net negative emissions
To stay within the Paris climate agreement’s 2℃ warming threshold, most experts agree that we must remove carbon from the atmosphere as well as reduce emissions. Many scientists now argue that 2℃ will still cause dangerous climate change, and an upper limit of 1.5℃ warming by 2100 is much safer.
To achieve that goal, humanity must begin reducing global emissions from 2020 (in less time than it takes an undergrad enrolling now to finish their degree) and rapidly decarbonise to zero net emissions by 2050.
Zero net carbon emissions can come from radical emissions reductions, and massive geoengineering projects. But it could be vastly helped by what Flannery calls “the third way”: mimicking or strengthening Earth’s own methods of carbon capture.
Studies support the need to remove carbon from the atmosphere, but there are serious technical, economic and political issues with many large-scale plans.
On the other hand, seaweed solutions could be put to work in the biologically desert-like “doldrums” of the ocean, and have positive side effects such as helping to clear up the giant ocean rubbish patches. However, there are many technical problems still to be solved to make this a reality.

We probably haven’t reached peak emissions
Removing carbon from the atmosphere is an attractive proposition, but we can’t ignore the emissions we’re currently pumping out. For any negative emissions technology to work, our global emissions from fossil fuels must start to drop significantly, and very soon.
But wait a second, haven’t we already hit peak emissions? It’s true that for the third year in a row, global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry have barely grown, while the global economy has continued to grow strongly.
This is great news, but the slowdown in emissions growth has been driven primarily by China, alongside the United States, and a general decline of emissions in developed countries.
China’s reductions are impressive. The country peaked in coal consumption in 2014, and tends to under-promise and over-deliver on emissions reductions. However, under the Paris agreement, China has committed to a 60-65% reduction in emissions intensity, which means there’s still room for them to rise in the future.
India’s emissions, on the other hand, are major wild card. With a population of 1.3 billion and rising, about 300 million of whom are still not connected to an electrical grid, and potential increases in coal use to provide energy, India will be vital to stabilising greenhouse gases.
India’s emissions today match those of China in 1990. A study that combined India’s Paris agreement targets with OECD estimates about its long-term economic growth, suggested India’s CO₂ emissions could still grow significantly by 2030 (although per capita emissions would still be well below China and the US).

The emissions reduction relay race
So how do we deal with many competing and interconnected issues? Ideally, we need an array of solutions, with complementary waves of technology handling different problems.
Clearly the first wave, the clean energy transition, is well under way. Solar installations are breaking records, with an extra 75 gigawatts added to our global capacity in 2016, up from 51 gigawatts installed in 2015. But this still represents just 1.8% of total global electricity demand.
In addition to renewable energy generation, limiting warming to below 1.5°C also means we must increase the efficiency of our existing grid. Fortunately, early-stage financiers and entrepreneurs are focusing on a second wave of smart energy, which includes efficiency and optimisation technologies. Others in Australia have also noted the opportunities offered by the increasing use of using small, smart devices connected to the internet that respond to user demand.
Although early user results have been mixed, research shows better system control reduces the emissions intensity of energy generation. These energy efficient devices and optimisation software are on the cusp of becoming widely commercially available.
Critically, these efficiency technologies will be needed to complement structural change in the fossil fuel energy mix. This is especially in places where emissions are set to grow significantly, like India. Building renewable energy capacity, optimising with new software and technologies, and better understanding the opportunity for net negative emissions all play an important part in the emissions reductions relay race over the next 50 years to get us to 1.5°C.
With further research, development, and commercialisation, the possibilities offered by seaweed – outlined in more detail in the Catalyst documentary – are potentially game-changing.
But, as we saw with the development of renewable energy generation technology, it takes a long time to move from a good idea to wide implementation. We must support the scientists and entrepreneurs exploring zero-carbon innovations – and see if seaweed really can save the world.

Links

• Catalyst: Can Seaweed Save the World?
• How farming giant seaweed can feed fish and fix the climate
• We need to get rid of carbon in the atmosphere, not just reduce emissions
• To slow climate change, India joins the renewable energy revolution

A Changing Climate

AJP - Sheshtyn Paola

How will health services survive climate change impacts on rural and remote populations?

Climate change threatens to impact the lives of Australians living in rural and remote regions, through increased intensity of rainfall and tropical cyclones, high-fire danger days, drought and heat wave.
Scientists also predict agricultural viability will be compromised by drier soils and the unpredictability of extreme weather events, and exposure to air pollutants will increasingly impact population health, according to research published in the Australian Journal of Rural Health.
It is predicted that climate change effects will lead to increases in:

• Physical injury;
• Heat-related illness;
• Nutritional disorders;
• Infectious diseases;
• Mental health issues;
• Cardiorespiratory illnesses;
• Skin cancer;
• Food security;
• Water security; and
• Vector-borne diseases.

Medical practitioner researchers from the University of Notre Dame in Wagga Wagga, NSW, interviewed health service managers working in rural and remote areas, in order to determine their opinions of climate change impacts and strategies to strengthen the health service response.

There will be a need for pharmacists and other healthcare practitioners to adapt to climate change pressures.

The majority of respondents (90%) agreed that climate change would impact the health of rural populations in the future with regard to heat-related illnesses, mental health, skin cancer and water security.
And most participants identified the following population groups as being most vulnerable to the health impacts of climate change:

• Farmers;
• Homeless persons;
• The elderly;
• Children; and
• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People.

However many (72%) reported there is scepticism regarding climate change among both health professionals and community members – hampering their ability to strengthen health services in order to prepare for future climate challenges.
It was also discussed that there is a greater need for public health education about the impacts of climate change among staff and the community in local health districts.
“The role of health services in providing education about the health impacts of climage change is well recognised,” say authors Dr Rachel Purcell and Dr Joe McGirr.
“The need for health professionals to be aware of the health impacts of climate change has begun to be recognised in the policies and professional development activities of postgraduate training colleges and public health bodies.
“[Health service managers’] recommendations for strengthening the capacity of rural health services are integral to shaping the response of the rural health sector to climate change.”
There are several organisations including health practitioners with the collective goal of preparing for climate change and advocating for pro-environmental policies.

Most participants identified children and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People as being some of the most vulnerable to the health impacts of climate change.

Pharmacists for the Environment Australia (PEA), for example, is involved in climate change advocacy and late last year became a member of Climate and Health Alliance.
The Climate and Health Alliance is a coalition of healthcare stakeholders who wish to see the threat to human health from climate change and ecological degradation addressed through prompt policy action.

As a member of the Climate and Health Alliance, Pharmacists for the Environment Australia says that it recognises “health care stakeholders have a particular responsibility to the community in advocating for public policy that will promote and protect human health.”

Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA) is another active organisation that says one of their primary concerns is the health effects of climate change on humans and the biosphere on which humans depend.
“Global warming and climate change have serious implications for human health globally,” says the DEA in its May 2017 submission to the Federal Government’s discussion paper, Review of Australia’s Climate Change Policy.
“It is increasingly recognised that climate change is only one facet of a planetary health crisis; deforestation, air pollution, ocean acidification and biodiversity loss all pose grave threats to health,” they argue.
“Climate change threatens to further exacerbate problems in these domains. If the current trend continues, there is a real danger that efforts will be insufficient to prevent run-away global warming, which will have disastrous social, economic and health consequences.
“The mining and combustion of fossil-fuels, in particular coal, also have direct adverse effects from emission of toxic substances and pollution with particulates.
“The burden of repair of the environment is being passed to the next generations.”

Links

• Rural health service managers' perspectives on preparing rural health services for climate change
• Doctors for the Environment Australia
• Preparing rural general practitioners and health services for climate change and extreme weather
• Drought, drying and climate change: Emerging health issues for ageing Australians in rural areas
• Climate change and health with an emphasis on interactions with ultraviolet radiation: a review 
• Rural experience for junior doctors: Is it time to make it mandatory?
• Discussion Paper on the Review of Australia’s Climate Change Policy
• COAG: Can democracy weed out climate deniers?
• Doctors deliver message to Commonwealth Bank chiefs: For health’s sake, don’t fund Adani’s coal mine
• Action on the land: reducing emissions, conserving natural capital and improving farm profitability
• Doctor training needs to step up on climate change, urge health experts
• Shortsighted Budget 2017 ignores health impacts of climate change
• Are Australia’s Emergency Response systems prepared for the Climate Emergency?

Climate Change Sets The World On Fire

Deutsche Welle

Southern Europe and British Columbia have been devastated by wildfires this summer. And they're not the only ones - it seems like much of the world is ablaze right now, and this could be the new normal.

There have been many wildfires aound the world this summer. Canada has seen the worst season for fires since records began, with 894,941 hectares burned, the British Columbia Wildfire Service has confirmed. Large areas of the Western United States have also been affected.
Meanwhile in Portugal, 2,000 people were recently cut off by flames and smoke encircling the town of Macao. And earlier this summer, 64 people were killed by a blaze in the country.
Like Canada, southern Europe has seen a record heatwave this year, creating hot, dry conditions that saw Italy, France, Croatia, Spain and Greece all swept by wildfires. As a result, Europe has reportedly seen three times the average number of wildfires this summer.
But it's not just Canada and southern Europe that have been affected. In Siberia, wildfire destroyed hundreds of homes, and around 700 hectares of Armenian forest have also been destroyed by fire. Earlier this year, Chile saw wildfires that were unparalleled in the country's history, according to the President.
Even Greenland, not known for its hot dry conditions, suffered an unprecedented blaze this summer.

Central Portugal has been one of the areas hardest hit by fires this summer

The big picture
"A lot of these things are happening locally, but people don't always connect them to climate change," said Kevin Trenberth, a scientist at the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the US. "But there is a real climate change component to this and the risk is going up because of climate change."
With global temperatures rising, scientists say wildfires are likely to become increasingly frequent and widespread. "What's really happening is that there is extra heat available," Trenberth told DW. "That heat has to go somewhere and some of it goes into raising temperatures. But the first thing that happens is that it goes into drying - it dries out plants and increases the risk of wildfires."
The map above, compiling NASA satellite data on fires from the beginning of 2017 until mid-August makes it looks as if the whole world is on fire.
So is 2017 a record year of wildfires?

Wildfire rages in British Colombia, on July 8. It has now been confirmed the state's biggest in more than 50 years

Tough competition
It certainly looks like it's been a big year for fires in southern Europe and North America. But Martin Wooster, professor of earth observation science at King's College London, says other parts of the world have seen worse in recent years.
"For example, this year, fires across Southeast Asia are extremely unlikely to be anything like as severe as they were in 2015," he told DW.
Two years ago, drought caused by El Nino created lethal conditions for Indonesian forests and peatlands that were already degraded by draining and logging. The smoldering peat - ancient, decayed vegetable matter condensed into a carbon-heavy fuel - kept fires burning for months on end.
"This led to huge fires, far bigger than any seen in Europe, and some of the worst air pollution ever experienced," Wooster said.

NASA imagery shows a large wildfire burning in Sweden in early August

Longer fire seasons - longer recovery
But there does appear to be a distinct trend for fire seasons to be longer and more harsh. "In the western United States, the general perception is that there is no wildfire season any more, but that it's continuous all year round," Trenberth told DW.
In many parts of the world, wildfires are part of a natural cycle. Savannahs, for example, are maintained by fire. Some trees not only survive fires, but need them to release their seeds. Human intervention can disrupt these cycles, the scientific discipline of fire ecology has found. Putting out small fires can allow flammable debris to accumulate until a colossal fire starts that cannot be controlled.
But global warming is resulting in hotter, drier conditions that mean such infernos are becoming more common, even with careful forest management. And the changed climatic conditions can mean forests take far longer to recover. Meanwhile, fires are also starting in habitats in areas like the tropics that have no natural fire ecology.

A wildfire smolders near Nice in the south of France in July

Human fingerprints
Climate change isn't the only manmade factor. Fires can also be started by careless humans dropping cigarettes or letting campfires get out of control.
And in regions like the Amazon, where the annual fire season increased by 19 percent between 1979 and 2013, fire is deliberately used to clear forest to make way for agriculture. "Farmers light fires to clear an area and what happens in drought conditions is that these fires become wild because the vegetation is so dry, it gets out of control," Trenberth said.
And all this can have a feedback effect - more fires mean more carbon released into the atmosphere, which in turn drives climate change.

Wildfires rage through Southeast Europe: Too close for comfort

Smoke and flames rise from a fire in the Croatian village of Podstrana, near the Adriatic coastal town of Split, on July 18, 2017. In Croatia, the blazes have spread over several locations along the coast and onto the islands, engulfing pine forests and low shrubbery in extremely dry and windy weather.

Links

• How climate change is increasing forest fires around the world
• Greece: Wildfires rage in holiday town near Athens
• Greenland: Land of ice on fire
• Massive wildfires cause 'greatest forest disaster' in Chile's history
• Wildfires smolder in southern France
• Fast-moving California wildfires force evacuations outside of LA
• Indonesia's forest fires: An environmental disaster of global proportions
• Wildfires rage through Southeast Europe

Dry Winter Primes Sydney Basin For Early Start Of Bushfire Season

The Conversation - Matthias Boer | Rachael Helene Nolan | Ross Bradstock

Smoke from hazard reduction burning has blanketed parts of Sydney, as firefighters prepare for a ‘horrific’ bushfire season. AAP Image/Dean Lewins

It might feel like the depths of winter, but Australian fire services are preparing for an early start to the bushfire season. Sydney has been covered with smoke from hazard reduction burns, and the New South Wales Rural Fire Service has forecast a “horrific” season.
Predicting the severity of a bushfire season isn’t easy, and – much like the near-annual announcements of the “worst flu season on record” – repeated warnings can diminish their urgency.
However, new modelling that combines Bureau of Meteorology data with NASA satellite imaging has found that record-setting July warmth and low rainfall have created conditions very similar to 2013, when highly destructive bushfires burned across NSW and Victoria.
Crucially, this research has found we’re approaching a crucial dryness threshold, past which fires are historically far more dangerous.

How to measure bushfire fuel
On September 10, 2013 several bushfires in Sydney’s West caused havoc well before the official start of the bushfire season. These were a precursor to fires that destroyed more than 200 properties a month later. Warm, dry winter weather had dried out the fuels in Sydney’s forests and bush reserves beyond “normal” levels for the time of year.
The timing and severity of those preseason fires were a reminder that the region’s forests are flammable all year round; they can burn whenever the fuel they contain dries out past a certain threshold.
In most forests, there is an abundance of fuel in the form of leaf litter, dead twigs, branches and logs, lower vegetation such as shrubs and grasses, as well as higher foliage and branches.
The flammability of all these different kinds of fuel depends largely on their moisture content. Leaf litter and fine dead branches on the soil surface can dry out in a matter of days, whereas logs may take weeks or months to lose their moisture. The moisture content of shrubs and tree canopies varies depending on the amount of water in the soil, so they reflect the overall rainfall and temperatures across a whole season.
The flammability of an entire forest is therefore a complex calculation of all these different kinds of fuel (both alive and dead) and their different moisture levels.

Mapping Sydney’s forests
In a recent collaborative study, we combined data from a Bureau of Meteorology project that maps water availability levels across Australia with satellite imagery to develop new tools for mapping and monitoring moisture levels of different fuels in forests and woodlands.
We checked these tools by modelling fuel moisture levels during fires in NSW, Victoria and the ACT between 2000 and 2014, and comparing our predictions to historical bushfires.
Our research has identified critical dryness thresholds associated with significant increases in fire area. Rather than a gradual increase in flammability as forests dry out, when dead fuel moisture drops below 15% subsequent bushfires are larger. Another jump occurs when dead fuel moisture levels fall below 10%. We found similar thresholds in growing plants, although their moisture content is measured differently.
These dryness thresholds are pivotal, because they may represent the breakdown of moist natural barriers in landscapes that prevent fires from spreading. Understanding these mechanisms makes it possible to predict fire risk much more accurately.
As part of this project we compared the fuel moisture in Sydney Basin’s forested areas in 2013 and 2017. As shown in the chart below, currently the live fuel moisture level is tracking well below the 2013 values, and is approaching a crucial threshold (indicated by the dotted line).
The moisture content of dead fuel has been more variable, but it has also dipped below the 2013 curve and, if warm dry weather continues, could reach critical levels before the end of August.

The median predicted dead fuel moisture content and live fuel moisture content in forest areas of the Sydney Basin Bioregion in 2013 and 2017. Black dashed horizontal lines indicate fuel moisture threshold values. The start dates of major fires in 2013 are indicated by orange vertical lines. Author provided, Author provided

In another worrying sign, mapping shows critically dry live fuel is much more abundant in 2017 than it was in 2013.

Remotely sensed live fuel moisture content in forest areas of the Sydney Basin Bioregion in July 2013 (left) and July 2017 (right). Author provided

 It’s clear that much of the Sydney Basin is dangerously primed for major bushfires, at least until it receives major rainfall. Forecasts for windy but largely dry weather in coming weeks may exacerbate this problem.

These new insights into landscape-scale fuel dryness provide a powerful indicator of what might be expected. They also build our capacity for week by week monitoring of fire potential.
Preparation by both fire management authorities and exposed homeowners is now an immediate priority, to cope with the strong likelihood of an early and severe fire season.

Links

• Climate change to blame for Australia’s July heat
• Wildfires are raging in the Mediterranean. What can we learn?
• People, palm oil, pulp and planet: four perspectives on Indonesia’s fire-stricken peatlands
• Where to take refuge in your home during a bushfire
• How climate change is increasing forest fires around the world
• Greece: Wildfires rage in holiday town near Athens
• Greenland: Land of ice on fire
• Massive wildfires cause 'greatest forest disaster' in Chile's history
• Wildfires smolder in southern France
• Fast-moving California wildfires force evacuations outside of LA
• Indonesia's forest fires: An environmental disaster of global proportions
• Wildfires rage through Southeast Europe

Australian Wind Delivers More Record Low Prices, As Private Sector Piles In

RenewEconomy - Sophie Vorrath

Just three months after Origin Energy stunned the renewables industry with a record low power off-take deal for the 530MW Stockyard Hill Wind Farm in Victoria, AGL Energy has delivered more of the same, securing an off-take price of below $60/MWh through the sale of its 453MW Coopers Gap Wind Farm, between Kingaroy and Dalby in Queensland’s south-east.
AGL said on Thursday it had reached financial close on the Sunshine State wind farm – which will be one of Australia’s biggest, once completed in 2019 – with the $22 million sale of the project to the Powering Australian Renewables Fund.
The deal includes AGL writing a PPA for electricity and associated renewable energy certificates of less than $60/MWh for an initial five years, with an option to extend the agreement for another five years at the same – or even lower – price.

AGL Macarthur Wind Farm. Source: AGL Blog

In a media statement, AGL said it expected the project to cost a total of around $850 million, funded through a combination of PARF partners’ equity and a lending group including Westpac, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Societe Generale, DBS Bank, Mizuho Bank and ABN Amro.
The result is undoubtedly a good one for AGL, which created PARF just one year ago, in partnership with the Queensland Investment Corporation, with the goal of using it to underwrite 1,000MW of large-scale renewables to be operated and managed by AGL.
After making its first acquisition in November 2016, buying up the 102MW Nyngan and 52MW Broken Hills solar farms as seed assets, it has managed to keep growing its portfolio, adding the 200MW Silverton NSW wind farm in January 2017.
“More than 800 MW of projects have now been vended into PARF in its first 12 months of operation,” said AGL CEO Andy Vesey in comments on Thursday.
“The strong support we have received from our equity partners and lenders for these projects is testament to the readiness of the private sector to invest in Australia’s energy transformation.”
But Vesey – who recently attended a meeting of energy retail chiefs in Canberra to discuss the problem of Australia’s world-topping electricity prices – was keen to stress that public policy settings remained vital to maintain investor momentum.
“Certainty on energy policy, including the implementation of the recommendations of the Finkel Review, will enable more projects of this kind to go ahead and help place downward pressure on energy prices by increasing supply,” he said.
AGL COO Brett Redman said the Coopers Gap deal has demonstrated the effectiveness of the investment model, the falling price and increasing efficiency of renewables technology and the key role it had to play in Australia’s future energy market.
The project, which will be developed by GE and Catcon, will use 123 specially designed GE turbines to produce around 1,510,000MWh of energy annually – enough to power more than 260,000 average Australian homes.
For GE, the Coopers Gap contract will bring the global giant’s total installed wind capacity to almost 1.4GW in Australia by 2019, when the wind farm is expected to be completed. It is GE’s first wind project in Queensland.
“That’s the largest number of megawatts in a single year by any GE onshore wind country outside the United States, ever,” said Pete McCabe, GE’s global president and CEO of GE Renewable Energy’s Onshore Wind business.

McCabe, too, took the opportunity of this week’s news to call for strong and stable renewable energy policy in Australia.
“Australia is a great market for wind, and today is GE’s second largest region globally for our Renewables business. While we see lots of opportunities in Australia, we need to continue to have policy certainty to drive investment.”
GE said the successful formula for its bid for Cooper’s Gap included custom-designed 115-metre towers for the 3.8MW turbines, to get the optimal wind speed.
The engineering team – which included German wind engineering “boffin” Dr Joerg Winterfeldt – had to ensure that the design of the taller tower avoided vibration when the blades turn and also fit within the logistical puzzle of not being too heavy or wide to cross all the roads and bridges from port to site.

Links

• Genex solar + pumped hydro project clears another hurdle
• Researchers one step closer to efficient, colorful solar panels
• Graph of the Day: Higher SA wind output, lower wholesale power prices
• Windlab’s 1200MW Kennedy Energy Park set for construction, after IPO windfall
• Redflow chooses Thailand for battery factory
• Graph of the Day: SA higher gas output mirrors higher power price
• Australia’s coal problem is also its mercury problem
• Tasmania talks up renewables, ignores battery storage, gets stuck on gas
• Warnings of energy storage market chaos, as industry unites against home battery ban

The Trump Administration Just Disbanded A Federal Advisory Committee On Climate Change

Washington Post - Juliet Eilperin

President Trump speaks about the U.S. role in the Paris climate change accord in the Rose Garden of the White House in June. (AP)

The Trump administration has decided to disband the federal advisory panel for the National Climate Assessment, a group aimed at helping policymakers and private-sector officials incorporate the government’s climate analysis into long-term planning.
The charter for the 15-person Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment — which includes academics as well as local officials and corporate representatives — expires Sunday. On Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s acting administrator, Ben Friedman, informed the committee’s chair that the agency would not renew the panel.
The National Climate Assessment is supposed to be issued every four years but has come out only three times since passage of the 1990 law calling for such analysis. The next one, due for release in 2018, already has become a contentious issue for the Trump administration.
Administration officials are currently reviewing a scientific report that is key to the final document. Known as the Climate Science Special Report, it was produced by scientists from 13 different federal agencies and estimates that human activities were responsible for an increase in global temperatures of 1.1 to 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit from 1951 to 2010.
The committee was established to help translate findings from the National Climate Assessment into concrete guidance for both public and private-sector officials. Its members have been writing a report to inform federal officials on the data sets and approaches that would best be included, and chair Richard Moss said in an interview Saturday that ending the group’s work was shortsighted.
“It doesn’t seem to be the best course of action,” said Moss, an adjunct professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Geographical Sciences, and he warned of consequences for the decisions that state and local authorities must make on a range of issues from building road projects to maintaining adequate hydropower supplies. “We’re going to be running huge risks here and possibly end up hurting the next generation’s economic prospects.”
But NOAA communications director Julie Roberts said in an email Saturday that “this action does not impact the completion of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, which remains a key priority.”
While many state and local officials have pressed the federal government for more concrete guidance on how to factor climate change into future infrastructure, President Trump has moved in the opposite direction. Last week, the president signed an executive order on infrastructure that included language overturning a federal requirement that projects built in coastal floodplains and receiving federal aid take projected sea-level rise into account.
Seattle Mayor Ed Murray (D) said in an interview Saturday that the move to dissolve the committee represents “an example of the president not leading, and the president stepping away from reality.” An official from Seattle Public Utilities has been serving on the panel; with its disbanding, Murray said it would now be “more difficult” for cities to participate in the climate assessment. On climate change, Trump “has left us all individually to figure it out.”
Richard Wright, the past chair of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Committee on Adaptation to a Changing Climate, has been working with the committee to convey the importance of detailed climate projections in next year’s assessment. The society establishes guidelines that form the basis of building codes across the country, and these are based on a historical record that may no longer be an accurate predictor of future weather extremes.
“We need to work on updating our standards with good estimates on what future weather and climate extremes will be,” Wright said Saturday. “I think it’s going to be a serious handicap for us that the advisory committee is not functional.”
The committee was established in 2015, but its members were not appointed until last summer. They convened their first meeting in the fall. Moss said members of the group intend to keep working on their report, which is due out next spring, even though it now will lack the official imprimatur of the federal government. “It won’t have the same weight as if we were issuing it as a federal advisory committee,” he said.
Other Trump Cabinet officials have either altered the makeup of outside advisory boards or suspended these panels in recent months, though they have not abolished the groups outright. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt decided to replace dozens of members on one of the agency’s key scientific review boards, while Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is “reviewing the charter and charge” of more than 200 advisory boards for his department.

Links

• Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment
• EPA’s Scott Pruitt just told dozens of scientific advisory board members their time is up
• White House reviewing new report that finds strong link between climate change, human activity
• National parks put a ban on bottled water to ease pollution. Trump just sided with the lobby that fought it.
• Trump to reverse Obama-era order aimed at planning for climate change

Coral Bleaching: Researchers Struggle To Find Anywhere In Pacific Ocean Untouched

ABC News - Nadia Daly

The vessel Tara is studying how coral reefs in the Pacific are adapting to climate change. (Supplied: Tara expedition)

Scientists aboard a French research ship say they have been shocked to see the extent of coral bleaching across the Pacific Ocean, just halfway through their two-year voyage around the world.
The vessel Tara has been sailing around the globe for more than a decade to study the effects of climate change on the ocean.
Its current expedition will cross 11 time zones and span 100,000 kilometres from Europe to Asia and back again, and the group claims it is the biggest study of this scale across coral reefs.
The focus is how coral reefs in the Pacific are adapting to climate change, and on a stopover in Sydney, captain Nicolas De La Brosse said the extent of damage is already deeply troubling.

Captain Nicolas De La Brosse said there was even coral bleaching in areas far from heavy pollution. (ABC News: Nadia Daly)

"What we've seen in really isolated spots like Samoa for example, even though it's very far away from [developed] countries with pollution, we struggled to find any coral life," he said.
Mr De La Brosse said nowhere was immune to the effects of global warming.
"It doesn't matter where you are in the Pacific, coral is starting to bleach."
He said data was still being collected and analysed and the final results would be released at the end of 2019.
The ship is not just a floating science lab — it is a temporary home for 16 people, including engineers, scientists, sailors, crew and, of course, a cook who whips up French dishes and sometimes, local favourites.
"When we arrived in Australia I made a banana cake because I know in Australia you have this cake," chef Dominique Limbour said.
Spending months at a time at sea together in the 26-metre vessel can be a challenge.
"We have to work all together. You can't argue with someone else — you have to be pretty easygoing," Mr De La Brosse said.
After its Sydney stop the ship will head north to study the extent to which coral in the Great Barrier Reef is adapting to climate change.

The vessel, which has been sailing around the globe for more than a decade, docked at Darling Harbour. (ABC News: Nadia Daly)

Links

• Barrier Reef coral bleaching 'could cost $1b in lost tourism'
• Dramatic images show bleached coral covered in slime
• Could removing seaweed save the Great Barrier Reef? 
• Damselfish in distress as coral bleaching masks predator's scent
• Next term of government will seal Great Barrier Reef's fate, report warns
• Only 7pc of Great Barrier Reef escapes bleaching: survey
• David Attenborough returns to struggling Great Barrier Reef to find answers