Australia Has A Climate Change Lesson For The World

New York Times - Waleed Aly*

A steel mill in the industrial town of Port Kembla, south of Sydney, Australia. Credit Tim Wimborne/Reuters 

MELBOURNE, Australia — No issue has been such a political graveyard in Australia as climate change. At least three prime ministers from the last decade have had their tenure buried there: John Howard, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard all lost their jobs, at least in part, for trying and failing to deliver polices to combat climate change.
To this list, you could add Malcolm Turnbull’s stint as opposition leader, which ended when Tony Abbott challenged him as party leader over his acceptance of the emissions cap-and-trade plan of the prime minister at the time, Mr. Rudd.
Today, of course, Mr. Turnbull is prime minister (a role he seized, in turn, from Mr. Abbott). And he is the latest to run this gantlet, having just announced a new energy policy that he describes as a “game changer” in Australia’s never-ending climate wars.
He might even be right. But it’s hard to tell because what he has offered is not so much a policy as a framework for what might become a policy.
Years of political conflict over the environment have left Australia with no effective climate-change strategy. Political realities have imposed unworkable limitations on policy options. In particular, a series of scare campaigns and political backflips has meant no form of carbon pricing has taken hold, and even emissions intensity schemes and clean energy targets have been rejected. As a result, Australia’s power grid is stretched thin, consumer energy prices are exorbitant and carbon emissions are rising.
Our experiences provide the rest of the world a lesson on climate change: You can ignore it if you wish, but you cannot outrun it. Eventually the science and economics will catch up with you.
Any form of carbon pricing has become taboo in Australia — particularly in Mr. Turnbull’s conservative Liberal Party — even though such a market-based approach is the most efficient, cheapest way of reducing emissions. Last week, a report from Australia’s Productivity Commission reiterated this point, declaring Australia must “adopt a proper vehicle for reducing carbon emissions that puts a single effective price on carbon.”
Instead, Australians have contorted ourselves to look like we’re responding to climate change without really doing so. We’ve paid some companies taxpayer dollars to reduce their emissions, while imposing no penalties on those who don’t. We’ve legislated a “renewable energy target,” then announced it was under review, then finally reduced it. While we reviewed, we watched investments in large-scale renewables drop an astonishing 90 percent in a year.
As a target was settled, investment recovered. But, even then, because there was no carbon price — charges for those who emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — to make investments in renewable energy more commercially attractive, energy retailers weren’t giving investors the long-term contracts they needed to get bank loans. This naturally makes investment a shorter-term affair, limiting its scope and ambition. It also means that investments in renewable energy weren’t being directly connected to the retail market.
With the lost years and disconnections between investors and retailers, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that whatever renewables investment Australia now has, it should have had more. Meanwhile, Australia hasn’t even enjoyed the short-term financial benefits of repealing the carbon tax, which was demonized for making electricity unaffordable. As a result, Australia now has the most expensive energy prices in the world, and a power supply so unreliable that summer blackouts are now a real possibility.
There are many reasons for this, including an underdeveloped renewable energy grid and coal-fired power stations on which Australia has for so long relied that are nearing the end of their operating lives.
Enter the Turnbull government’s National Energy Guarantee. Perhaps its most fundamental change is that it addresses energy retailers, rather than generators. It’s a useful idea, ensuring that energy investments have a home in the consumer market.
The policy plan makes two fundamental requirements of the retail companies that sell energy to consumers. First, retailers have to meet a quota for reliable energy — “dispatchable” energy that can be made available immediately. This seeks to minimize the chance of blackouts, which the government has argued are at least partly a function of how renewable energies like solar and wind can fluctuate with weather unless effectively stored. This may be read as a way of giving an advantage to coal, though that seems less likely as storage of renewables increases.
Second, there is a limit on the amount of emissions intensity that will require retailers to purchase “clean energy” from energy generators. It’s a proposal that manages to obey the current laws of Australian politics. There’s no carbon price, no taxes and no explicit focus on renewable energy. The reliable energy quota is deliberately agnostic on the sources of energy, thereby making it a blank political canvas. If you really believe coal is the future, the quota can accommodate that. Same if you think renewables are becoming cheaper and more reliable every year. The policy plan holds at least the potential for broad support, which is something Australia has never achieved.
But that’s only possible because, for the moment, it’s largely content-free. Just about everything depends on what the relevant reliable energy quotas will be, but no one yet knows. Will they be set low and then increased? If so, how quickly? What relationship will they bear to Australia’s commitments under the Paris climate accord? Will they shift the emissions burden to the electricity sector, or will they require other sectors to make disproportionate reductions? And precisely how severe will the penalties be for retailers that fail to meet these targets?
These are not mere policy details. They are the essence of the political differences that remain on climate change.
That this is the best we can do — indeed that this is a relative triumph for Mr. Turnbull — illustrates just how tangled Australia’s climate politics have become. The country has taken a long, hard look at every warning about the costs of delayed climate action and ignored them all. And, subsequently, it has paid for those costs through high energy prices and curtailed investment.
At last, having long understood that a carbon price would be the most efficient solution, we’ve opted for what is a fairly blunt form of regulation. It’s where nobody would have recommended we be a decade ago, and it is not ideal. But it is something. And if we can find a way to work with it, perhaps the next decade will be better than the one before.

*Waleed Aly is a columnist and broadcaster and a politics lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne.

Links

• Australia's greenhouse gas emissions soar in latest figures
• Productivity Commission says Coalition should adopt price on carbon
• Investment in large-scale renewable energy falls 90 per cent in 12 months, Bloomberg New Energy Finance report shows
• Energy Market Operator issues mixed blackout forecast for SA, Victoria during summer

Ocean Acidification Research Makes A Strong Case For Limiting Climate Change

Phys.org

In several long-term experiments with the KOSMOS mescosms, the BIOACID members have investigated the impact of ocean acidification on marine oceosystems. Credit: Maike Nicolai, GEOMAR (CC BY 4.0)

Experiments and analyses carried out by more than 250 scientists from 20 German institutions clearly indicate that ocean acidification and warming, along with other environmental stressors, impair life in the ocean.
A brochure summarises major outcomes of the project for policymakers and the public. Members of the project Biological Impacts of Ocean Acidification (BIOACID) will also be present at the United Nations climate change conference COP23 in Bonn.
As a gigantic carbon sink, the ocean absorbs about a third of the carbon dioxide (CO2) released into the atmosphere by human activities. But when absorbed by seawater, the greenhouse gas triggers chemical reactions causing the ocean to acidify.
Ocean acidification affects ecosystems and important benefits the ocean provides to humankind. This includes the regulation of the Earth's climate, food provision, recreation and biodiversity as a condition for intact and functioning ecosystems.
"Humans need to see themselves as part of a global system and understand the many ways we depend on the ocean and its services. Because everyone in this global community will be affected by climate change, it will be for our own benefit if we manage to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in such a way that global warming is limited to less than 2 degrees Celsius", says Prof. Ulf Riebesell, marine biologist at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and coordinator of BIOACID.
"The future of this planet depends on us. Wouldn't it be a great achievement if the anthropocene, the age of human dominance on Earth, goes down in history as an era of rethinking and changing behaviour?"

Cold water coral reefs also belong to the ecosystems that are affected by oceanic acidification. Credit: JAGO Team, GEOMAR (CC BY 4.0)

According to Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-coordinator of BIOACID, all countries would need to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions drastically by the middle of this century if they wish to reach the Paris climate targets.
"The current world climate report indicates clearly that net-zero emissions are a precondition for limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius.
However, reducing CO2 emissions alone may not be sufficient. Net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere would have to contribute.
"This is already technically possible, but the challenge is to develop and implement the respective technologies at a larger scale. The later the emission reductions start and the longer this process takes, the more difficult and costly it becomes to stay in line with the Paris agreement."

Important BIOACID results:

• Changes in the ocean carbonate system impact the acid-base balance in marine organisms. This can negatively affect key processes such as calcification.
• Many organisms are able to withstand ocean acidification, but may lose this ability if also exposed to other stressors such as warming, excess nutrients, loss of oxygen, reduced salinity or pollution.
• A reduction of regional stress such as nutrient runoff or the loss of oxygen can mitigate the impact of global stressors like ocean acidification and warming.
• In a natural community, the impact of stressors on a species can be amplified or diminished by associated shifts in biotic interactions such as competition, predation or parasitism.
• Even small alterations at the base of the food web can have knock-on effects for higher trophic levels.
• Marine life is able to adapt to ocean change through evolution and can partly compensate for negative effects. However, since ocean acidification happens extremely fast compared to natural processes, only organisms with short generation times, such as microorganisms, are able to keep up.
• About half the tropical coral reefs can be preserved if carbon dioxide emissions are limited to concentrations that keep global warming below 1.2 degrees Celsius. However, additional risks posed by ocean acidification are not included in this forecast.
• Ocean acidification reduces the ocean's ability to store carbon.
• Climate change alters the availability of prey for fish and as a consequence may affect their growth and reproduction.
• Ocean acidification and warming reduce the survival rates of early life stages of some fish species. This will likely reduce recruitment of fish stocks and ultimately fisheries yields.
• The distribution and abundance of fish species will change. This will have a significant impact on economic activities such as small-scale coastal fisheries and tourism.
• It is crucial to consider ocean acidification and warming in the management of fish stocks and marine areas.
• Following the precautionary principle is the best way to act when considering potential risks to the environment and humankind, including future generations. Even if the extent of possible risks is not fully understood, precautionary measures need to be taken in order to avoid or reduce the harm.
• A more sustainable lifestyle and economy require an interaction between society, businesses and politics. Political frameworks should regulate the phase-out of fossil fuels. It is crucial for every one of us to reconsider concepts of normality and adjust behaviour in everyday life.

The Kiel research vessel ALKOR with the KOSMOS mesocosms in the Gullmar Fjord, Sweden. Credit: Maike Nicolai, GEOMAR (CC BY 4.0)

In 2015, an experiment with the KOSMOS mesocosms was conducted in the Raunefjord, Norway. Credit: Maike Nicolai, GEOMAR (CC BY 4.0)

Links

• Ocean warming and acidification impact on calcareous phytoplankton and reduce its ability to sequester atmospheric CO2
• Rising water temperatures and acidification affect important plankton organism
• Ocean acidification amplifies global warming
• Expert assessment: Ocean acidification may increase 170 percent this century
• Ocean warming to cancel increased CO2-driven productivity
• Acidification affects the ability of bacteria to clean our oceans
• Climate change could decrease Sun's ability to disinfect lakes
• Can corals adapt to climate change?
• Intensifying winds could increase east Antarctica's contribution to sea level rise

Loss of Federal Protections May Imperil Pacific Reefs, Scientists Warn

New York Times - Christopher Pala

Fisheries officials call the marine national monuments unnecessary, and their boundaries are said to be under review by the Trump administration.

A snorkeler approaches a school of convict tang fish in the shallow waters of Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, part of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. Credit Ian Shive/USFWS

HONOLULU — Terry Kerby has been piloting deep-sea submarines for four decades, but nothing prepared him for the devastation he observed recently on several underwater mountains called seamounts in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
“It was a biological desert,” he said. Where normally fish and crabs dart about forests of coral and sponges, “all we could can see was a parking lot full of nets and lines, with no life at all.”
Mr. Kerby and Brendan Roark, a geographer at Texas A&M University, are comparing seamounts that have been fished to those in pristine, protected areas. This month, they surveyed the upper reaches of four seamounts, one of which, Hancock, lies inside Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, which includes the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
They knew that the seamounts had been fished by trawlers and coral harvesters at some point. “But the extent of the devastation and the huge amount of gear that was abandoned on the bottom were shocking for both of us,” he said.

Left, abandoned trawl nets on the northwest side of the Hancock seamount. Right, lines caught in the craggy terrain of the southeast side of the seamount, just inside the Papahanaumakuakea Marine National Monument. Credit Terry Kerby

Among the casualties littering the seabed were 10-foot-tall black corals that can live over 4,000 years, among the oldest forms of life on earth.
“Allowing fishing in the few protected seamounts left would be a huge mistake,” said Dr. Roark.
It’s a sentiment widely shared among marine ecologists.
The Trump administration is considering rolling back federal protections for 10 national monuments, including two in the central Pacific. The Pacific Remote Islands National Marine Monument and the Rose Atoll National Marine Monument protect the waters around a handful of islands, most uninhabited, to the south of the Hawaiian Islands.
The shore reefs of the islands have long been protected from commercial fishing; the monument designations extended that protection to 50 miles from shore in some cases and 200 miles in others.
According to a memo obtained by The Washington Post in September, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has recommended that the designations of the Pacific Remote Islands and the Rose Atoll be amended “to allow commercial fishing.” (A similar recommendation was made for another marine monument, the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts, off the coast of New England.)
The memo did not mention the largest marine reserve: Papahānaumokuākea, a string of mostly uninhabited atolls and reefs that have been largely undisturbed since World War II. At about 583,000 square miles, it is the largest protected area on the planet. (Industry officials in Hawaii are pressing for commercial fishing to be allowed there, too.)

By The New York Times | Source: NOAA Fisheries

Many scientists see these marine reserves as among the last rich, untouched ecosystems where they can study the effects of climate change in isolation from the impacts of overfishing or pollution.
The fishing industry here in Hawaii sees it differently. A driving force behind the administration’s reconsideration is an obscure but powerful quasi-governmental organization called the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council, or Wespac, based in Honolulu. The council has jurisdiction over the waters where 140 long-line vessels based in Hawaii — as well as a handful in American Samoa — fish mostly for tuna and billfish.
Wespac has argued that limits on catch, gear and fishing seasons are the best tools to regulate fishing and to ensure that the Pacific yields the maximum sustainable harvests. Over the years, the council has strongly opposed the creation and expansions of each of the marine monuments.
This year, the council has embraced a new slogan: “Make America Great Again: Return U.S. fishermen to U.S. waters.” In a presentation to members of the other fisheries councils in February, Wespac officials claimed the marine monuments “curtailed economic growth” and “compromised national food security.”
Ray Hilborn, a fisheries expert at the University of Washington and a scientific adviser to Wespac, argues that tuna and billfish are highly migratory and travel in and out of the reserves. “The monuments just force the fishermen to go farther and spend more fuel to catch the same fish,” he said in an interview. “It’s a fake protection.”

An employee of the United Fishing Agency places bigeye tuna on a cart after they are unloaded from a fishing boat in Honolulu. Bigeye tuna is the mainstay of the sushi market and the principal target of the Hawaii long-line fleet. Credit Eugene Tanner/Associated Press        

Asked whether Wespac sought to reintroduce fishing only in monument waters or also in near-shore reefs, Kitty Simonds, the longtime executive director, said in an email that the council also would review “the management measures that were in place before the monument designation and may recommend changes.”
The fishing industry in Hawaii is hardly in trouble, several experts noted. Indeed, the Hawaii fleet’s bigeye tuna catch has doubled since 2006, even though half of America’s Pacific waters are now off-limits to fishing.
Robert Richmond, a marine ecologist at the University of Hawaii, pointed out that the Hawaii fleet filled its yearly quota of bigeye in August this year, “so they obviously don’t need more space to fish. They’re just against all protected areas on principle.”
Over 500 million people depend on reefs for protein, Dr. Richmond said, and they already yield far less than they could if they were sustainably fished. Reef ecosystems may become even less productive as the ocean gets warmer and more acidic.
Dr. Richmond and other scientists also took issue with Dr. Hilborn’s criticism of marine monuments. They say the reserves serve as havens for species depleted elsewhere and for populations migrating away from the Equator, where warming waters are lowering plankton density.
“The fisheries benefits of marine reserves are now beyond doubt,” Callum Roberts, a marine conservation biologist at the University of York, said in an email. “They allow fish populations to grow back and spill fish into surrounding waters, they pour fountains of offspring into ocean currents that seed fisheries, and they provide resilience to environmental shocks.”
The tools favored by fisheries officials target a few species to the neglect of others, he added, while “reserve benefits reach entire ecosystems.”
One of the islands on Mr. Zinke’s list is Palmyra, an atoll that lies 1,000 miles south of Hawaii and is part of the Pacific Remote Islands National Marine Monument. The Nature Conservancy has been running a marine lab there since 2005, the only site with housing and a runway for small aircraft located in one of the most untouched tropical marine ecosystems in the world.

Coral in the Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, part of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. Credit Ian Shive/USFWS

Left, a booby chick tries out wobbly legs at Johnston Atoll. Right, a coconut crab scavenges in the jungle at Palmyra Atoll. Credit Photographs by Laura Beauregard/USFWS

With 170 inches of rain a year — compared with 37 in Seattle — Palmyra also has a dense rain forest where 11 species of seabirds nest. Discoveries made there include a surprising link between fish and seabirds: a study found that nesting birds’ droppings carried onto the reef by the rain stimulated plankton growth that attracted manta rays and other plankton feeders.
Other research has shown that the classic picture of a coral reef, with lots of pretty little fish and a few big ones, is entirely artificial. Palmyra’s reefs, like those in the other monuments, are dominated by sharks, snappers, jacks and other top predators, while smaller prey cower in fear in holes in the coral, a study found.
So interconnected are the elements of intact reef communities that allowing fishing just beyond 12 miles would disrupt the ecosystem, said Alan Friedlander, a marine ecologist at the University of Hawaii and chief scientist of the National Geographic Society’s Pristine Seas project.
“You need to keep the fishing as far away as possible, ideally at 200 miles,” said Dr. Friedlander.
Moreover, the remote locations are difficult to police. Many of the denizens of intact tropical reefs, like humphead parrotfish and wrasses, are worth thousands of dollars in Asia, said Dr. Richmond.
“Fishing them sustainably, as Wespac proposes, would mean traveling very long distances from Hawaii and taking very few fish,” he said. “It wouldn’t be economical.” Dr. Richmond predicted that fishing vessels “would poach the heck out of those islands.”
Daniel Pauly, a prominent fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia, says that given a chance, the value of the bigger reserves like those around Wake and Johnston atolls and Jarvis Island, which extend to 200 miles offshore, will increase over time.

Dr. Robert Richmond at the Kewalo Marine Lab in Honolulu. Credit Kent Nishimura for The New York Times        

Why? Evolution.
Research by Jonathan A. Mee, a fish geneticist at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, suggests that in any large marine reserve, some “lazy” fish will spend their whole lives inside the boundaries and therefore will not be caught — and the bigger the reserve, the more fish inside it will live longer.
This will raise the number of what scientists call B.O.F.F.s (Big Old Fecund Females), which produce more eggs and eggs of better quality, further increasing the density of fish inside the reserve. Dr. Mee believes that evolutionary selection of a putative “lazy” gene would accelerate the population growth inside a reserve.
“The bigger the mortality outside the reserve, the faster the population inside will grow,” Dr. Mee said in an interview.
This would be particularly helpful for bigeye tuna, which is the mainstay of the sushi market and the principal target of the Hawaii long-line fleet. The population of bigeye in the central and western Pacific is now estimated to be 16 percent of its original size.
“Technology and subsidies have allowed industrial fleets to go farther and farther, and deeper and deeper, and to deplete stock after stock,” said Dr. Pauly, who has shown that the global catch is steadily falling.
“The only thing standing between these fleets and global depletion are these big no-take reserves, so this is the time to create more, not to open up the existing ones to fishing.”
Alex David Rogers, a conservation biologist and seamount expert at Oxford University, estimated that worldwide there were about 16,000 seamounts with summits above 5,000 feet, shallow enough to harbor a rich diversity of fish and corals. Unfortunately, he said, most have already been fished.
Still, those seamounts in the Papahānaumokuākea and Pacific Remote Islands marine monuments remain mostly pristine, said Chris Yesson, an expert on ocean floors at the Zoological Society of London.
“Saving the ones in the American marine monuments is extremely important, because the NW Pacific is particularly rich in endemic corals and other marine life,” Dr. Rogers wrote in an email.
Paul Achitoff, managing attorney for Earthjustice’s mid-Pacific office in Honolulu, said many legal scholars had concluded that the Antiquities Act, which allows presidents to designate and protect monuments without congressional approval, is a one-way street.
“It does not allow presidents to remove restrictions or protections from a previously designated monument,” he said in an interview. “Only Congress can do that.”
He acknowledged that several presidents had changed monument boundaries and tweaked restrictions without court challenges.
That may change soon. “If any of the protections to the Pacific marine monuments are lifted, we will be filing lawsuits, and we expect to win,” Mr. Achitoff said.

Links

• How warming seas are forcing fish to seek new waters
• Ocean Fish Stocks on “Verge of Collapse,” Says IRIN Report
• Global ‘fish wars’ could break out as climate change and rising nationalism fuel competition for world’s oceans
• What Are Oceans Laws Trying to Protect?
• Official statistics understate global fish catch, new estimate concludes
• Catch reconstructions reveal that global marine fisheries catches are higher than reported and declining

For Scientists Predicting Sea Level Rise, Wind Is The Biggest Unknown

Wired - Megan Molteni

Getty Images

From the air, the largest glacier on the biggest ice sheet in the world looks the same as it has for centuries; massive, stable, blindingly white. But beneath the surface it’s a totally different story. East Antarctica’s Totten Glacier is melting, fast, from below. Thanks to warm ocean upwellings flowing into the glacier—in some places at the rate of 220,000 cubic meters per second—it’s losing between 63 and 80 billion tons of previously frozen fresh water every year.
This matters because Totten glacier and its ice shelf are the only thing keeping an area of ice larger than the state of California from breaking up. If all that ice were to end up in the ocean tomorrow, sea levels would rise by 10 to 20 feet—flooding San Francisco’s iconic Ferry Building, most of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.
In some ways, this should come as no surprise. For decades researchers have been projecting that the planet’s polar ice reserves will wither in the face of rising temperatures. But more recent satellite data, models, and fieldwork have revealed that it’s happening faster than anyone expected. And increasingly, scientists are finding evidence to pin that Antarctic acceleration on a less obvious aspect of climate change: wind.
Last year, researchers from the US and Australia discovered that churn from deep undersea canyons was bathing the underside of Totten glacier in water warm enough to melt it. But the mechanisms were still a mystery. On Wednesday, they published a study showing that westerly winds blowing off the coast of Antarctica are driving the upwelling, and leading to faster ice flow on the glacier.
To get a feel for why that’s not normal, it helps to understand what’s going on at the ocean-ice interface. As glaciers and ice shelves melt, they deposit their cold, fresh water onto the ocean surface, where it sits above warmer, saltier, denser water. It’s not a gradual transition, but a sharp one. Like when your bottle of salad dressing settles in the refrigerator and you have to shake it back up before serving. That line is called a thermocline, and scientists can measure exactly where it is in the water column. If it rises up to where the glacier is, that’s when you get melting.

Surface wind causes warm water to upwell at the continental shelf break, the warm water melts Totten Ice Shelf from below, and the glacier responds by speeding up. Chad A. Greene, University of Texas Institute for Geophysics

By comparing satellite images with oceanic wind records and water temperature and salinity data streaming in from a sensor floating nearby, the team was able to track the thermocline at Totten over time. They found that when the winds blew strong from the west, warm water rushed up and into the glacier. When the winds blew from the east, the thermocline sank back down and melting ceased.
“As a pure scientific curiosity, it’s really fascinating that CO₂ can lead to sea level rise not only by heating up the air directly and melting the glacier from above but also just from wind moving heat around the ocean to melt it from below,” says Chad Greene, a research scientist at the University of Texas and lead author of the study. “But then of course there’s a gloom and doom component to this discovery as well.”
That’s because westerly winds along the East Antarctic coast are projected to get a lot stronger over the next 100 years. Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, explains that increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases aren’t just raising air temperatures. They’re shifting and intensifying the westerly wind belt that circles Antarctica. “Future climate projections show an even stronger positive phase of the Southern Annual Mode, which means stronger surface west winds occurring farther south,” he says. “That would drive those winds closer to Antarctica and provide an ongoing mechanism for melting more ice and producing greater sea level rise.”
And not just a little bit more ice, but like, a lot more ice. That’s thanks to some topographical wonkiness unique to Antarctica. The bedrock on the southernmost continent doesn’t slope up like a mountain as you go from the coast to the interior. Instead, it tilts downward, in places even dropping up to a few miles below sea level. Invading waters would quickly flow downhill, seeping further and further inland, and causing ever-larger hunks of ice to flow faster out into the ocean.
“What that means is as you melt it back at the edges, even a little bit, by bringing in that warm water, you really quickly get a runaway scenario,” says Paul Spence, an oceanographer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Earlier this year he published a study in Nature Climate Change that looked at similar upwelling patterns causing drastic melting in the West Antarctic, where most ice sheets and glaciers have their base below sea level. “This has happened in the past on pretty quick timescales. It might take thousands of years for a glacier to form, but they can totally collapse in just a few years. That’s what we’re most concerned about.”
Ocean water has already carved contoured troughs that extend all the way from the edge of Totten’s ice shelf to its bedrock 77 miles inland, and as deep as 2 miles below sea level. The last time Totten Glacier—whose melting could raise sea levels as much as all of West Antarctica—collapsed into the ocean, about 3 million years ago, it raised global waters by 20 to 30 feet.
Understanding the chances of that happening again is going to take some serious supercomputing. But the interplay between wind, water, and ice in the Antarctic is only just beginning to be incorporated in global sea level projections. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put out its most recent report in 2013, it didn’t include any information on changing ice sheet melt in the Antarctic—partly because no one understood the mechanisms very well back then, and partly because computers just weren’t powerful enough. At the time, the IPCC estimated that sea levels would rise 3.3 feet by 2100.
But some scientists now think that number should be double. By marrying some of the previously underappreciated local ice sheet dynamics with global climate data, a 2016 analysis in Nature found that Antarctica alone could contribute an additional 3.3 feet of water before the end of the century.
It’s just a start. There’s still a ton scientists don’t know about how winds will change in Antarctica, or anywhere else for that matter. And they say that’s probably the single-most significant unknown in the already hyper-complicated arithmetic of predicting sea level rise. Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a continent-wide collapse of ice into the Southern Ocean? Maybe. But only if it blows from the west.

Links

• Coal Use Must 'Pretty Much' Be Gone By 2050 To Curb Sea-Level Rise, Researchers Say
• 25 Years Of Global Sea Level Data, And Counting
• Are The Floating Houses Of The Netherlands A Solution Against The Rising Seas?
• Climate Change Will Almost Certainly Heat The World So Much It Can Never Recover, Major Study Finds
• Satellite Snafu Masked True Sea-Level Rise For Decades
• Earth Could Become ‘Practically Ungovernable’ If Sea Levels Keep Rising, Says Former NASA Climate Chief
• Contributions To Sea-Level Rise Have Increased By Half Since 1993, Largely Because Of Greenland’s Ice
• Scientists Say The Pace Of Sea Level Rise Has Nearly Tripled Since 1990
• Climate Change: Model Predicts Australia To Lose Iconic Sites In New Sea-Level Rise

Australia To 'Far Exceed' 2030 Paris Climate Pledge As Need For Action Rises: UN

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

National pledges to cut carbon emissions fall well short of what's needed to avoid dangerous climate change, with Australia likely to miss its 2030 commitment by a wide margin, a United Nations body said.
The UN Environment Programme's Emissions Gap 2017 report found pledges to cut pollution made at the Paris climate summit two years ago are only about one-third of what's needed to be on a "least-cost pathway" to stopping the worst effects of climate change.


Carbon dioxide levels surged in 2016
The amount of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere in 2016 hit a rate not seen for millions of years, the United Nations said.

The target is to stop global average temperatures rising two degrees or more above pre-industrial levels. Change on the scale is expected to cause major droughts, food shortages and damaging sea level rise.
"There is an urgent need for accelerated short-term action and enhanced longer-term national ambition, if the goals of the Paris Agreement are to remain achievable," the report said.
The positive news is that global emissions have largely flatlined for the past three years, thanks in large part to a plateauing in China. Still, other potent greenhouse gases such as methane are rising, and carbon dioxide emissions could accelerate if global economic growth picks up.
Frank Jotzo, a professor at the Australian National University's Crawford School and a contributor to the report, said tumbling costs of renewable energy and other low-carbon technologies suggest nations could increase their emissions cuts "and it won't be terribly hard".
"More climate action and deeper commitments are needed, but it's eminently possible to achieve [the Paris climate goal] from the economic and technical perspective," Professor Jotzo said. "It's the politics that get in the way."

Climate flurry
The UNEP survey is one of a flurry of reports to be released ahead of the UN climate conference - COP23 - that begins next week in Bonn.

National pledges to cut emissions so far fall far short of what's needed to hit the Paris climate goals, the UN says. Photo: AP

The World Meteorological Organization said atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rose at a record pace last year, rising 3.3 parts per million to 403.3 ppm. That's the highest in as much as 5 million years, and the last time it was this high, sea levels were as much as 20 metres higher and temperatures 2-3 degrees warmer.
A new health and climate report by The Lancet, meanwhile, has found the number of vulnerable people exposed to heatwaves had increased by about 125 million from 2000 to 2016, with infants and the elderly especially at risk.

Renewables on the move: Contractors instal a mobile solar farm at New Century Resource's zinc mine and processing plant site, 250 kilometres northwest of Mt Isa, Queensland. 

Labour productivity among outdoor workers has also fallen by about 5.3 per cent since 2000, while the frequency of weather-related disasters jumped 46 per cent over the period, The Lancet said.
Caritas, a Christian aid organisation, said climate change was also hitting Pacific nations hard, with as many as 35 coastal communities in Papua New Guinea forced to move or having lost homes in the past year because of worsening beach erosion.

Railroading global warming: the case against coal without capture and storage of emissions is getting stronger, UNEP says. Photo: AP

Australia's Torres Strait islands are also being hit by worsening king tides, with as many as 15 communities at risk over the next six decades, the State of the Environment for Oceania report found.

Australia needs 'further action'
The UNEP report, though, also named Australia as one of the G20 nations - along with the US, Canada, the European Union and others - that "are likely to require further action" to achieve its 2030 goals.

Oil use, too, will have to decline if Paris climate goals are to be realised. Photo: AP

Australia's goal is to reduce 2005 emissions 26-28 per cent by 2030. The report noted government projections point to Australian emissions reaching 592 million tonnes of CO2-equvialent a year by 2030, compared with the targeted range of 429-440 MTCO2 needed by then.
Independent analyses "confirm that the emissions are set to far exceed" the target, it said.
(See chart below of the government's own projections.)

'Suite of policies'
Fairfax Media sought comment from Josh Frydenberg, the Environment and Energy minister.
Mr Frydenberg has repeatedly stated the Turnbull government's "strong commitment" to the Paris accord, and it had a "suite of policies" to meet its 2030 goal.
Mark Butler, Labor's climate spokesman, said Australia was on course for 2030 emissions to be in line with 2005 ones, implying no progress.
"This isn't surprising since the government still don't have a climate change policy to deliver on their commitments, and are proposing an energy policy that will strangle renewable energy and prop up aging coal power plants," Mr Butler said, referring to government's National Energy Guarantee.
Independent analysis conducted for the Greens has found the remaining abatement needed for 2021-2030 amounted to 513 to 893 million tonnes of CO2 if the electricity sector merely tracks the 26-28 per cent reduction.
"The latest sham, the National Energy Guarantee, doesn't require the electricity sector to do the 'heavy lifting', which shifts the burden to agriculture, industry and transport, where there are no effective policies for pollution reduction at all," Adam Bandt, the Greens climate spokesman, said.

Links

• Emissions Gap Report 2017: Governments, non-state actors must do more to reach Paris Agreement
• UN warns of 'unacceptable' greenhouse gas emissions gap
• 'Inhospitable planet': Global CO2 surges by record rate
• Sea levels could rise 1.3 metres by 2100 if coal use continues
• Emissions gap remains 'alarmingly high' says UN

A Proposal In New Zealand Could Trigger The Era Of ‘Climate Change Refugees’

Washington Post - Rick Noack

Laundry hangs on the edge of a lagoon near Funafuti, Tuvalu, in 2004. (Richard Vogel/AP)

New Zealand could become the world’s first country to essentially recognize climate change as an official reason to seek asylum or residence elsewhere, a government minister indicated in an interview Tuesday. If implemented, up to 100 individuals per year could be admitted to the island nation on a newly created visa category, according to an initial campaign promise the proposal which is now being considered is based on.
This may appear relatively insignificant, given that the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center predicts 150 to 300 million people to be forced out of their homes because of climate change by 2050. Yet the announcement has still stunned environmental activists who have long demanded such resettlement programs but have been blocked by governments and courts — including New Zealand’s Supreme Court.
Although New Zealand’s approach does not bind other host countries, the experiment could be used as a role model, both in national courts and in the public debate. If implemented, the New Zealand proposal would likely be used by activists in European nations such as Sweden or Germany to pressure their own governments into creating similar schemes.
The 1951 U.N. refugee convention, written long before there was such a thing, does not recognize victims of climate change.
Host nations have so far been reluctant to change the convention, prompting some islands which are expected to be hit hardest by climate change to try to reframe the problem as a solution. The Pacific island of Kiribati launched a “Migration With Dignity” scheme, which trains citizens to be the kind of highly-skilled workers in short supply in New Zealand or elsewhere.
Kiribati’s program was created on the assumption that large multinational corporations may hold far more lobbying powers to change visa regulations than poor nations affected by climate change. Companies in richer countries such as New Zealand, the United States or Germany often face difficulties in recruiting skilled workers for certain tasks, and have pressured governments to relax visa restrictions much more successfully than nations such as Tuvalu or Kiribati could have done themselves.
This strategy may work for some smaller islands, but not all climate refugees can become highly skilled workers.
The vast majority of them will likely either face the prospect of staying in their home countries — if they still exist — or becoming “second class” citizens abroad who are not officially recognized as refugees.
Activists in New Zealand have led international efforts to prevent such a scenario, given that their comparatively wealthy country is surrounded by smaller island nations such as Tuvalu or Kiribati, which are just two meters above sea level and could be fully submerged in approximately 30 to 50 years.
In a major step forward for proponents of such efforts, New Zealand’s Green Party promised the introduction of a new visa category in the run-up to September elections. The party has now become a coalition partner in the new Labour-led government.
“The lives and livelihoods of many of our Pacific neighbors are already being threatened, and we need to start preparing for the inevitable influx of climate refugees,” New Zealand’s UNICEF director Vivien Maidaborn wrote in an op-ed this month, in which she urged the government to make good on that promise.
In June 2014, a family from Tuvalu was granted residency for the first time by the country’s Immigration and Protection Tribunal after it claimed to be threatened by climate change there. At the time, experts told me that they were skeptical whether the ruling would have a wider impact, though. The family succeeded because it claimed “exceptional humanitarian grounds,” which is a wording recognized in New Zealand’s immigration legislation but not by many other governments, said Vernon Rive, a senior lecturer in law at AUT Law School in Auckland. Others factors, apart from climate change, played into the court’s 2014 decision to allow the family to stay, as well. Since then, similar cases have been declined and asylum seekers deported.
Given the resistance of many countries to make changes to the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention and the fact that court rulings in other cases don’t apply, legal scholars have explored a third alternative: the creation of legal arrangements on a bilateral or regional basis. New Zealand’s new proposal would fall into that category. It would mostly be open to climate change refugees from Pacific islands and would necessitate close collaboration between authorities in New Zealand and in the affected nations.
Those island nations have long been open to talks. At least in some richer countries such as New Zealand, there appears to be a growing awareness that time is now indeed running out, as a new report published Monday by the British medical journal the Lancet warned. Its authors concluded that climate change is essentially a “threat multiplier” for all global health hazards, with manifestations that will be “unequivocal and potentially irreversible.”

Links

• New Zealand considers creating climate change refugee visas
• Climate change fueling disasters, disease in ‘potentially irreversible’ ways, report warns
• 'Inhospitable planet': Global CO2 surges by record rate
• Australian emissions to 'far exceed' 2030 Paris pledge: UN
• Pacific Islanders call for Australia not to fund Adani coalmine
• Satellite eye on Earth: September 2017 - in pictures
• UN warns of 'unacceptable' greenhouse gas emissions gap
• Climate change already bringing disease, air pollution and heatwaves
• Global atmospheric CO2 levels hit record high

Study: Climate Change Is Damaging The Health Of Millions Of People

Time - Patricia Espinosa | Richard Horton

George Rose—Getty Images

The evidence is growing harder and harder to ignore—climate change is already having a profound and detrimental impact on public health. Around the world, warmer temperatures are creating and complicating a whole host of health challenges, many of which have been all too obvious this year.
As over 20,000 delegates from around the world prepare to meet in Bonn, Germany, for the annual UN climate conference, the unnaturally warm surface waters of the Atlantic Ocean have helped produce a historically high run of 10 named hurricanes this season, which have taken lives and destroyed communities from Texas to the Caribbean to Ireland.
Many parts of Europe sweltered this summer under a heat wave that was so bad that it was dubbed “Lucifer.” The American Southwest was meanwhile suffering through its own historic heat. And then came the wildfires, sparked on drought-scorched lands in Western Europe, the Pacific Northwest, and California.
A report published this week by The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, provides an annual “check up” of how climate change is impacting public health, and how countries’ actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are reducing health risks. The research, conducted by a group of leading doctors, academics, and policy professionals found that climate change is already damaging the health of millions worldwide.

How? The deaths caused by unnatural disasters like warming-fueled hurricanes and wildfires are obvious, and the threat of extreme heat waves — which can kill outright or cause heat-related illnesses — to public health is clear. But there are many other climate impacts that are every bit as sinister, and potentially lethal. Changing weather patterns are already altering the transmission patterns of infectious diseases, resulting in unexpected outbreaks of malaria, dengue fever, cholera, tick-born encephalitis, and West Nile virus. Allergy season is getting longer and allergen levels higher. Lyme disease is spreading, with the number of cases in the United States tripling over the past two decades as deer ticks can carry the disease farther north and as warmer temperatures allow them to Floods, which are increasing in regularity and severity, create even more breeding grounds for disease-carrying insects. Uneven, unpredictable precipitation patterns and higher temperatures are also reducing crop yields, causing more widespread malnourishment and nutrition deficiencies.
Tragically, these burdens are being — and will be — borne mostly by children, the elderly and low-income vulnerable populations that have done little to cause climate change and have benefited the least from the burning of fossil fuels. But make no mistake, the impacts will be felt by all.
Perhaps most troubling, what we’re experiencing today is just the beginning.
Over the past few decades, the global health community has made great gains in tackling the spread and sources of infectious disease, and in combatting malnutrition and hunger. But this progress could be undermined in a warming world that exacerbates such health threats.
It’s a dire diagnosis, but the good news is that we know the cure. We simply must stop burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, transitioning to clean, renewable energy resources.
What’s more, many of the steps we take to combat climate change can create immediate benefit public health in other ways. Fine particulate matter and other local air pollution in cities — from tailpipes and coal plants, for instance — kills some 2.6 million people annually worldwide, according to the Lancet Countdown. Solving the greenhouse gas problem also cleans up the smoggy air that’s polluting lungs.
These longer term and immediate health factors are why the Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change called a comprehensive response to climate change “the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century.”
Policymakers recognize climate change as being a massive public health challenge — and not just an environmental one — and act accordingly. The Lancet Countdown’s annual reports can help quantify the full costs to the public, and should be utilized to drive more ambitious efforts to transition to a low carbon future.
There are encouraging signs that this is starting to happen. The two-week climate conference, opening on November 6, has health among its key priority issues.
For the 25 years that the global community has been working to find a way to collectively combat climate change, not nearly enough has been known about the true risks to public health. We can no longer use that ignorance as an excuse for inaction. We’re seeing the impacts now, and they are measurable. Without aggressive action, the public health problems we’re seeing today risk intensifying to a widespread health emergency.
With ambitious action, however, we can both rein in long term warming and — by cleaning the air of fossil fuel-borne pollution—we can start improving health and saving lives right away.

Links

• Climate change to cause humid heatwaves that will kill even healthy people
• Global pollution kills 9m a year and threatens 'survival of human societies'
• UK poorly prepared for climate change impacts, government advisers warn
• Shattered records show climate change is an emergency today, scientists warn
• Workers face 'epidemic of heat-related injuries' due to climate change
• Climate change threatens 50 years of progress in global health, study says
• Climate change will significantly affect Australians’ health, report finds
• Climate change: the poor will suffer most
• Climate change 'already affecting food supply' – UN
• Cleaner air from tackling climate change 'would save millions of lives'