WEATHER WATCH: Riverina stud beef operator Lucinda Corrigan chairs
Farmers For Climate Action and says it is time for a bipartisan approach
to tackling climate control.
Most farmers have been adjusting to a
changing climate for years and Farmers For Climate Action hope national
attention will bring a united approach to tackling “pretty in-your-face
climate change”.
ABC’s 4Corners’ March 5 episode Weather Alert highlighted climate change, showcasing agriculture as one of Australia’s most climate exposed industries.
“I
think what was probably missing the other night was the fact there are
lots of people working on solutions,” said FCA chair Lucinda Corrigan.
Mrs
Corrigan has spent most of her life in the Riverina and has seen
farming practices change over the years from her childhood in the
Coleambally district to her family’s Rennylea Stud operation between
Holbrook and Albury.
“Data from the
Australian Farm Institute shows that we’re already farming in the most
variable climate in the world,” she said. “It’s incredible how
Australian farmers have adapted to that but the question is ‘how much
more adaptation do we have left in us?’
“We
have to do a lot of investment and in the meantime we need to do lots
of mitigation and try to actually reduce that outcome and that will only
happen through good policy, and consistent policy, and policy that
lasts much, much longer than one, or two, or three election cycles.”
FCA was formed in 2015 by farmers frustrated with the inadequate progress on climate action in Australia.
Chief executive Verity Morgan-Schmidt said climate change was hurting Australian farms and politicians needed face reality.
“Farmers
across Australia know that climate change is already hitting them hard –
this isn’t just a problem for future generations, it’s hurting us here
and now,” she said.
“Momentum
for climate action is growing rapidly across rural Australia and we’re
calling on farmers to speak up and our politicians to keep up.”
Mrs
Corrigan said changes in the wine industry was clear evidence of
climate issues and urged a bipartisan approach to address it.
“I
think there's plenty of evidence and people who are at the coalface,
and farmers are obviously at the coalface, are seeing that,” she said.
“People are changing their practices, there’s no doubt about that.
“Do I think that there’ll be a bipartisan approach to climate action? I’d love to think there would be.
“I
actually think the adversarial approach hasn’t got us anywhere so lets
forget that and do something different … there’s enough awareness in
Australia to have a much more consistent message to politicians.
“I’d
love to see all political parties embrace that as the right way to go
forward instead of fighting just to score political points.”
The Australian Academy of Science has joined Commonwealth of Nations
science leaders from around the globe to call on the Commonwealth Heads
of Government to use the best available science to guide action on
climate change.
The call is part of a Consensus Statement on Climate Change launched
by 22 national academies and societies of science from around the
Commonwealth, ahead of next month’s CHOGM summit in the United Kingdom.
The consensus statement, which represents the consensus views of tens
of thousands of scientists, marks the first time Commonwealth nations
have come together to urge their Governments to take further action to
achieve net-zero greenhouse gases emissions during the second half of
the 21st Century.
Secretary of Science Policy at The Australian Academy of Science,
Professor David Day, said the long-term goal of keeping the increase in
average global temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial
levels, agreed to by 160 parties in the 2015 Paris Agreement, was only
the first step in a long journey.
“Even if all the country commitments from the Paris Agreement are
met, the best interpretation of the latest data shows that by the end of
the century the global climate is likely to be 3°C above pre-industrial
levels.
“This is substantially higher than the Paris target to limit warming
to less than 2°C, and would have profound impacts affecting billions of
people throughout the world,” Professor Day said.
Sustainability is one of the key themes to be discussed by
Commonwealth leaders at the 2018 CHOGM summit, with a focus on the
resilience of developing and vulnerable countries to climate change.
“Recognising different capacities, challenges and priorities, the
approaches of each nation will not be the same. But, they must be
informed by the best available scientific evidence, monitoring and
evaluation,” Professor Day said.
“The Academy stands ready to assist the Australian Government, and
indeed broader Commonwealth efforts, by continuing to provide sound
scientific advice on issues relating to climate change.” Links
CleanTechnica - James Ayre
Over the coming century, large portions
of the most densely inhabited parts of the world will become essentially
incapable of supporting human populations above very limited nomadic
levels. The people living in these regions will be left with a simple
choice: migrate or die.
While the current refugee crisis is
certainly not a trivial matter for those most involved with it, the
reality is that it represents just a trickle compared to what’s now
slated to occur — owing to the greenhouse gases already released into
the atmosphere to date, and also due to the widespread deforestation and
topsoil erosion/exploitation that has accompanied that.
As it stands, most refugees are by and
large either: people coming from war zones with enough money available
to them to arrange for possible transit to safer areas; or economic
migrants on the other (mostly young males coming from regions where
there isn’t enough work). As the century grinds on, the “refugees” will
very likely be originating more and more with the rougher portions of
the societies in question (those with military or police backgrounds,
etc.).
For the time being, though, most of
those that are actually coming from war zones (rather than simply from
economically depressed regions) are from the “middle” or “upper”
classes, relatively speaking. As such, they often make easy prey for
human traffickers — with a great many inevitably being sold into
slavery. This is especially true of unaccompanied minors.
Estimates from the European Union’s
criminal intelligence agency Europol place the number of lone migrant
children that have gone missing in Europe since arrival over the last
few years at +10,000. It’s no real mystery what happens to these
children, though, as it’s an open secret that some of the wealthiest
countries in Europe are also some of the global hot spots when it comes
the slavery of foreign women and children in sex work.
The point that’s being made here is that
as refugee movement and mass migrations pick up over the coming
decades, human slavery is slated to continue growing as a problem … with
it already being the case that criminal gangs seem to be benefiting to a
large degree from the growing ease at which trafficking can occur. As
it stands, it’s estimated that some 40 million people are living as
slaves worldwide.
On that subject, the prominent Nobel
laureate Kailash Satyarthi recently made some interesting comments as
part of a workshop in Jordan put together by the Thomson Reuters
Foundation. The comments seem worth discussing here.
One of the primary points that Satyarthi
made in his comments was that the refugee crisis was greatly worsening
the problem of human trafficking and slavery, by making it clear to
criminal gangs how profitable such activities can be. It’s now
estimated, according to Satyarthi, that organized gangs now profit from
slavery to the tune of an estimated $150 billion a year.
“This refugee crisis has resulted in
trafficking and slavery,” stated Satyarthi, the joint-winner of the 2014
Nobel Peace Prize with Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai, due to his work
fighting child labor.
“Human trafficking, small firearms, and
drugs are the 3 most organized crimes. Now they are intermingled,” he
stated at the aforementioned workshop. Reuters
provides more: “India is home to more slaves than any other nation —
previous global estimates put the number at 18 million — with men,
women, and children trapped in forced labor and sex work. … Satyarthi
said he had heard reports of Syrian refugees agreeing to child marriages
for their daughters to stop them from being sold into the sex trade or
other forms of slavery.
“He will meet with leaders from Jordan’s King Abdullah to Panama’s Juan Carlos Varela and various Nobel laureates and activists this month to address challenges facing children on the move, such as migrants, refugees, and trafficking victims. … Satyarthi said India’s first anti-trafficking law, which may be passed this month after being approved by cabinet last week, was a major step forward with life sentences for traffickers and a rehabilitation fund to help victims rebuild their lives.”
Obviously, while all such efforts are
commendable, they aren’t enough on their own. As Satyarthi noted while
speaking specifically about the situation in India: “The caste system,
gender discrimination, and the apathetic attitude of government
officials and corruption are the biggest hurdles.”
The situation isn’t much different
elsewhere of course, though divisions always vary by region based along
different ethnic, religious, identity, etc., lines.
The reason that I chose to highlight
this subject is because discussions about these matters — slavery, the
refugee crisis, future mass migrations, etc. — usually seem to devolve
to pre-staked out positions and mischaracterization of the motives of
others.
An Even-Handed Overview Of The Current Refugee Crisis & Future Mass Migrations
So, to offer a condensed view of the
situation here, to those who aren’t too partisan to hear it … based on
decades of international travel, related work, and an extensive reading
of history:
Current refugee flows comprise a mix of: genuine refugees coming from war zones; economic migrants; and those being trafficked into slavery of various types.
The motivations of German Chancellor Angela Merkel — with regard to the supposedly humanitarian gesture of inviting large numbers of refugees into Europe — likely stemmed from a mixture of: the expectation that such people could make up part of the economic underclass of Germany (which Turks who were let in many decades ago still comprise a large part of), thereby helping to curtail the effects of an aging workforce; and virtue signaling to the international community.
Truly “humanitarian” actions depend, as all other effective actions do as well, on an honest appraisal of a situation. No one who has spent much time in Germany (or Northern Europe) as a foreigner is likely to have any real illusions about the openness of the society — bringing in large numbers of people from outside of these societies was never going to lead to anything but mass-projection, conflict, scapegoating, and the balkanization of society. Putting people in such a situation is not “helping them.”
While climate change — through the effects of droughts, water scarcity, declining crop yields, and accompanying conflict and societal breakdown — certainly represents one of the broader causes behind the current refugee flows, there is no doubt that the extensive bombing of the regions in question by foreign powers (the US and European powers primarily) is a more immediate cause. Bombing people’s countries out of existence isn’t helping them.
To put that another way, when one country imposes its own cultural and political institutions on another in the name of idealistic universalism, which is often accomplished through wars or proxy wars (ahem…), what often enough results is a failed state.
Much of Southern Europe is itself slated to experience desertification and rapidly increasing water stress and falling crop yields within just the next 50–100 years. In other words, mass migrations out of Southern Europe and into northern territories is pretty much a given at this point — those coming from the Near East, the Middle East, and Africa are mistaken if they think that they are going to find long-term stability in Southern Europe.
There are substantial cultural differences between the societies of Northern Europe and Southern Europe (to greatly oversimplify the divisions) — and accompanying widespread stereotyping, projection, and scapegoating. This will only worsen as time goes by and climate weirding and warming intensifies — which will occur at the same time that global geopolitical power is shifting to Asia and away from Europe, which will intensify the cultural conflicts in question.
The lifestyles that those in Europe have become accustomed to over recent history are an aberration, which was only possible because of fossil fuels and colonialism. As the effects of those two factors continue to diminish (as high-grade fossil fuel reserves in Europe continue to deplete, and as the “third world” grows in influence), much of the population will be forced to accept a “lower” standard of living. That is, a standard of living that’s less of an outlier from the global average. The general public will not comprehend why this is happening, and will demand that someone or some group of people be to blame. That being the case, the idea that large numbers of refugees can be accommodated isn’t credible.
Fixing the effects of climate change
on Earth isn’t complicated. When you get down to it, all we humans need
to save the world is ingenuity, grit, cooperation, and $53 trillion.
Where is humanity supposed to come up with that kind of cash at this time of night? The International Energy Agency says
Earth needs those trillions invested in energy supply and efficiency by
2035 to keep global warming below 2 degrees C. So, you could tax
greenhouse gas emitters until they cry—oh, sorry, I probably meant to
say “price carbon according to its real market cost.” But also, go to
where the big money is—statewide or national funds, piles of assets
emblazoned with names like BlackRock and Fidelity, and other
institutional investors. Convince them to stop investing in carbon
emitters and start investing in... anything but them.
Except,
whoa there, li’l Communist, because the people who run those funds are
bound by a fiduciary duty to act in the financial interests of their
clients. Which is to say, legally and regulatorily, they can’t not make
money—at least, not on purpose. And if you compare an asset portfolio
optimized for “make all the money” to one optimized for “make all the
money except if it emits carbon,” guess which one wins? “So how can we
move the majority of investors to integrate environmental factors into
their thinking?” asks Soh Young In,
an engineering doctoral student at the Global Projects Center at
Stanford. “That’s the problem. They think that environmental factors are
a suboptimal decision.” In a new working paper, In and her fellow researchers hope to convince those skeptical investors otherwise.
Finance
researchers and analysts have been chewing on this problem for
years—how (and whether) to integrate environment, social, and governance
factors, or ESG, into investment planning. Stipulate that the
right-thinking humans who work in finance know climate change is an
existential threat; what they don’t know is how to put that
knowledge to work without sacrificing money. So lots of folks have tried
to show that taking ESG into account can increase investment returns
(as well as, like, save the planet or whatever).
Research
into the “G” part has shown that, yes, companies that perform well on
metrics for corporate governance—essentially how well a company is
run—have also performed better on the market. “S” looks pretty good,
too, if you look at how happy workers are. Companies with higher worker
satisfaction have also done better. It’s hard to tell if those trends
will continue, but at least retrospectively, it’s good stuff.
But what about the E? “The E, the jury is still out on,” says Adair Morse,
a finance professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. In part,
the problem may be a lack of data. Despite various projects to mandate
environmental disclosures and to try to collate that data into useful
metrics, those metrics are still hard to come by. Determinations of what
constitutes fiduciary duty have been a decades-long process.
People
touting ESG ideas argue they can have as much of an impact on bottom
lines as supply chains, market size, raw material availability, and all
the other stuff finance people worry about. “This movement said, look,
these things are relevant for shareholders and pricing,” Morse says. “So
shouldn’t we have information that’s material in the ESG factors?
Shouldn’t they be disclosed?”
When they are,
investors have something to act on—like Moneyball, but for money.
“Portfolio managers tend to be quantitatively focused. They’re used to
relying on a suite of financial data about companies and asset classes
that appear on the Bloomberg terminal,” says Chris Davis, senior
director of the Ceres Investor Network, a group of 150 pension funds and
asset managers collectively responsible for $27 trillion. (See? I told
you somebody had the money.) And Bloomberg data, for example, does
indeed now include ESG metrics.
That
swings us back around to In’s research. To be clear, it’s a working
paper, not peer reviewed—intended, as she says, to be the beginning of a
discussion and not the end. What her team brings to bear is access to a
database from a company called Trucost. Established in 2000 to develop
those quantitative metrics, Trucost has been tracking carbon emissions
since the middle of the last decade—and not just a company’s emissions
at the end of its line, but all up and down the value chain, from raw
materials to transportation to the places that cough out the widgets.
So
this is pretty slick, actually. In’s group took a firm’s Trucost carbon
emission data and then divided it by the firm’s revenues to come up
with a metric they call “carbon efficiency.” Then they used those
numbers to build carbon-efficient and carbon-inefficient portfolios, and
compared their returns. “It’s an investment strategy,” In says. “You’re
shorting your carbon-inefficient firm stocks and longing your
carbon-efficient firm stocks.”
Whoo, did that ever
work. Depending on how they constructed the portfolio, from 2009 to
2015 profits ranged from 3.5 to 5.4 percent over what you’d expect from
similar levels of risk, ignoring carbon. And according to their
analyses, the numbers held even when they controlled for other things
that often drive profits—size, value, momentum, and so on.
“So
we can say we’re getting alpha on our portfolio. But we want to know
why this is happening,” In says. More variables, more regression
analyses. “What we find is, carbon-efficient firms tend to be good firms
in terms of financial performance and corporate governance.” In other
words, low-carbon firms tend to be good at other stuff, too. That’s a
correlation, not a causation, but it’s also a rational, fiduciarily
responsible way to build a portfolio.
'It’s an investment strategy. You’re shorting your carbon-inefficient firm stocks and longing your carbon-efficient firm stocks.' Soh Young In, Global Projects Center, Stanford University
This
is good news! “From casual conversations with investors managing
institutional portfolios, they were very happy to see this kind of
academic research,” In says. They’re looking for ways to see so-called
green investing as within the scope of their duty. “If they want to
change their portfolios, they need to have objective evidence.”
In
the case of In’s working paper, that’s evidence added to a growing
canon. “There are leaders and there are laggards. In our investor
network, many if not most of the members, particularly the pension
funds, take climate risk very seriously,” Davis says. “A number of them
have done quite a bit already in reducing the carbon footprint of their
portfolios and investing affirmatively in solutions.”
For example, the $209 billion New York State Common Retirement Fund
audited its portfolio’s carbon footprint, says Davis, and then had the
investment bank Goldman Sachs build a bespoke low-carbon index ...and
put $4 billion into a fund based on it. The California State Teachers’ Retirement System put $2.5 billion
into its own low-carbon index fund. The next step: “Get some
quantitative criteria that can be used in risk models,” says Davis.
“There’s a lot of research going on with the likes of BlackRock and
State Street to try to figure out just that.”
'Most of the markets of the world are far more comfortable with where the investment risks and opportunities are going to come from.' Nathan Fabian, Principles for Responsible Investment
The
research comes in the nick of time, if not slightly after. Not everyone
thinks fiduciary duty and lack of metrics are as much of an obstacle as
US investors seem to. “That data’s not perfect, but there’s sufficient
data to know what the emissions profile of fossil fuel assets is, and
there’s sufficient data to know what the storm risk for infrastructure
and physical assets is,” says Nathan Fabian, director of policy and
research for Principles for Responsible Investment. “It might take a bit
more effort than simply using the portfolio return numbers or company
earnings numbers you’ve used for the last decade, but the truth is, all
the risk is in front of us, not behind us.”
The
1,700 signatories to PRI’s standards for ESG-based investing
collectively manage $62 trillion. That’s a lot of oomph if someone could
point it in the right direction. And in lots of places, people are.
“The truth is, most of the markets of the world are just far more
comfortable with where the investment risks and opportunities are going
to come from than US regulators and the US financial sector,” Fabian
says. “That’s a real competitive issue for the US over time.”
This
week, Fabian says, the European Union plans to update rules to clarify
how fiduciary duty can incorporate environmental, social, and
governmental issues. The Chinese government is setting its financial
system up to encourage green financing. “You’ve got Europe moving
aggressively, China moving aggressively, and the Californians trying
quite hard. But really there’s a drag on the US economy,” Fabian says.
The
In team’s working paper doesn’t solve that problem. The relatively
short timeframe of the Trucost database, for example, makes for a bit of
a frowny face; her group hasn’t yet gotten all the data for 2016 to see
if the trend continues. And the correlation between carbon efficiency
and governance and performance means you have to ask what’s actually
driving that performance—governance, revenues, or carbon? But something
has to convince firms to get on board a transnational movement. The
journey of $53 trillion must begin with a single step.
Politician and activist Al Gore answers the Internet's most searched questions about climate change. Links
It's been just over 25 years since 1,700 leading scientists
from around the globe put their names to a document warning of a
'collision course' between humanity and the rest of the natural world.
Last year, a follow-up report
was signed by more than 15,000 researchers from 184 nations. Needless
to say, it wasn't exactly glowing. So much so, several months later it's
still one of the most talked-about research papers in the world.
In
1992, a group of Nobel Laureates teamed up with other researchers to
form the Union of Concerned Scientists. Their tagline was "science for a
healthy planet and a safer world."
This union outlined the
biggest environmental threats faced by our population in a report titled
World Scientists' Warning to Humanity, ending it with a powerfully
written call to action.
What's happened in the quarter of a century since? Not a whole lot, it seems.
The 1992 report was followed up in November last year with a paper in the journal Bioscience called "World scientists' warning to humanity: A second notice".
In what amounts to a report card you wouldn't proudly stick on the fridge, we earned one gold star for taking care of that thin patch of ozone over Antarctica ... and not much else.
So it's time for another wake-up call.
"Humanity is now being given a second notice, as illustrated by these alarming trends," the report states.
Before
you think it was just a few alarmists waving their hands wildly, the
article has been trending in scientist circles ever since, seeing it
co-signed by a record-breaking 15,364 names from 184 countries.
If that's not impressive enough, it currently ranks 6th out of 9 million papers on the Altmetric scale, and has even inspired some high-level speeches before Israel's national assembly and Canada's BC Legislature.
"Our
scientists' warning to humanity has clearly struck a chord with both
the global scientific community and the public," says the paper's lead
author, William Ripple from Oregon State University.
Responses to the document are also coming in thick and fast.
One paper by the University of Sydney recently published in Bioscience emphasises the need to take economics into account when guiding action.
"There are critical environmental limits to resource-dependent economic growth," the authors write.
The researchers propose two key actions that are necessary for us to turn things around.
Firstly,
in awarding prizes for influential work in economics, we must
acknowledge the limits of the biosphere and other environmental factors.
Secondly,
carbon pricing must be expanded from its current application in some 42
countries and 25 states into a globalised system.
Economics is
clearly a critical factor in our impact on the environment, and any
action we take must take into account such driving factors behind our
'collision course'.
The Second Notice ends with an equally
powerful call for change. "We must recognise, in our day-to-day lives
and in our governing institutions, that Earth with all its life is our
only home," the authors write.
Whether we'll see a third notice in 2042 or not is anybody's guess.
If we do more than just talk about the first two, we might have something we'll proudly stick on the fridge.
San Francisco and Oakland are battling the world's oil giants in
federal court for knowingly producing fossil fuels whose emissions have
triggered sea level rise. The two coastal cities argue that oil
companies — including BP, ExxonMobil, and Shell — should foot the bill
for hugely expensive infrastructure defenses to hold back rising waters —
such as formidable sea walls.
And now — for the first time — a federal judge will listen as both
sides present their understanding of climate science and the causes of
global warming before the court. The hearing, referred to by the judge
as a "tutorial," will address at least 14 specific questions that U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup asked both sides on Feb. 27.
"To my knowledge, no court has asked for this sort of presentation on
climate science," said Justin Gundlach, a climate lawyer at Columbia
University's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, in an interview.
"This is an odd procedure, but one that makes sense," Gundlach said.
Oil companies and the cities have fundamental disagreements about
climate science findings, so settling on some foundational realities
about the effects of sending massive amounts of carbon emissions into
the atmosphere could give Alsup an improved idea of how to rule in the
case.
"What’s interesting about this request is that it does seem that an
inevitable outcome is a list of stipulations about climate science —
things all reasonable people should agree on," said Gundlach.
"That’s not to say that the parties are going to agree," he added.
The rate of global sea level rise has been accelerating, according to a new study using NASA data
Judge Alsup wrote a court notice
asking that a "tutorial" be provided over the course of five hours, in
which both sides will be given 60 minutes to present on each of two
subjects:
Tracing "the history of scientific study of climate change,
beginning with scientific inquiry into the formation and melting of the
ice ages, periods of historical cooling and warming, smog, ozone,
nuclear winter, volcanoes, and global warming."
Setting forth "the best science now available on global warming, glacier melt, sea rise, and coastal flooding."
While Gundlach said he's not sure what approach the oil companies
will choose to take when describing climate science, he speculated that
they may "emphasize uncertainties about how climate change will affect
the future" as a way to avoid responsibilities for effects like sea
level rise.
The lawyers for San Francisco and Oakland will likely present
evidence that, as early as the 1970s, scientists within the oil industry
were well aware of the effects carbon emissions would have on the
global climate.
"Defendants took these stark warnings and proceeded to double-down on fossil fuels," San Francisco and Oakland's lawyers stated in their complaint, filed in September 2017.
"Even at this time, with the global warming danger level at a
critical phase, defendants continue to engage in massive fossil fuel
production and execute long-term business plans to continue and even
expand their fossil fuel production for decades into the future,” the
complaint states.
Already, climate scientists are working to crowdsource answers to
Alsup's climate science questions. Many of these questions are
elementary to climate scientists and are not up for much debate in the
climate science community — such as the causes of ice ages.
Beyond addressing these basic tenants of climate science, it's possible both sides may look at recent research
attempting to gauge each oil corporations' responsibility for historic
carbon emissions — meaning who's responsible for what fraction of the
world's total emissions from burning oil and gas.
"I would think the fight would be over that — to the extent that there’s a fight," said Gundlach.
This lawsuit is part of a wave of legal actions taken by everyone from 21 young Americans to New York City
to try to force the oil industry and the federal government to
recognize the scientific consensus on the subject and take action to
address climate change.
Rolling waves driven by Cyclone Christian appear
in the Elbe estuary near the North Sea close to Brunsbuettel, northern
Germany, on Oct. 28, 2013. (Christian Charisius/European Pressphoto
Agency)
Scientists on Thursday published an alarming scenario for
what could happen to the planet’s oceans and fisheries by the year 2300
if very high levels of global warming are allowed to continue.
The
good news is that it’s eminently avoidable and a very long way off from
happening. The bad news is that, according to the concerned authors,
it highlights a new vulnerability that could arise in a severely
disrupted climate system — and becomes a real possibility if rampant
global warming continues well beyond this century.
The
study finds that in a future world of extreme warming, after Antarctic
sea ice collapses and oceans are altered, large volumes of essential
nutrients could become trapped in the Southern Ocean. That could impair
the growth of tiny marine organisms that form the base of the food chain
in other parts of the world ocean, thus triggering a 20 percent decline
in fishery yields overall, including a 60 percent drop in the Atlantic.
This
would occur because the Southern Ocean near Antarctica is a key site of
“upwelling,” in which deep ocean waters, which have picked up such
nutrients as phosphorous and nitrogen from the depths (which end up
there after marine organisms die and their bodies sink), rise and
deliver that biological bounty to the surface. Then, the nutrients enter
the global ocean circulation and are carried northward to more moderate
climes.
But
if warming gets severe enough, Southern Ocean upwelling can be
suppressed by warm ocean surface waters. Meanwhile, many of the
nutrients that do manage to rise will be consumed by the increasingly
active biology of the mostly ice-free ocean around Antarctica — leaving
far fewer nutrients for the rest of the world.
In this case, as organisms in the Southern Ocean die, more nutrients again sink to the bottom of that ocean, and stay there.
“So
you have nutrients building up in the deep ocean, down where the
biology can’t use them or get to them,” said Keith Moore, the lead
author of the study in Science and a professor at the University of
California at Irvine.
The researchers concede
that the picture they paint is dire — and requires very high levels of
warming that might never materialize. The temperature of the Antarctic
Ocean in the scenario, for instance, would be 6 degrees Celsius (10.8
degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than it is now, and the sea ice ringing
Antarctica would be almost entirely gone.
The
computer modeling study also uses a worst-case scenario for the burning
of fossil fuels to the year 2100 and even beyond it, ultimately
triggering atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide just below 2,000
parts per million. That’s far in excess of the current level around 410
parts per million. It’s questionable that humanity would let things get
that bad, and growing numbers of wind and solar installations and
electric cars suggest that in future decades, we’ll be powering key
aspects of life without fossil fuels.
Still,
the authors said, it’s worth probing such extremes to understand how the
climate system works, and they noted that for now, a high emissions
scenario remains possible.
“These simulations
paint a fairly dire picture of what I think will be catastrophic changes
in the context of unmitigated climate warming,” said Matthew Long, one
of the study’s authors and an oceanographer at the National Center for
Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “Along the path to those very
catastrophic events, we may cross thresholds that we don’t know about.
And so, I think it’s important for people to reflect on the impact we’re
having on the world’s ocean and consider that in the context of action
to mitigate climate warming.”
A
researcher who was not involved in the study but reviewed it for The
Washington Post, oceanographer Lynne Talley of the Scripps Institution
of Oceanography, said she found the scenario plausible if warming
is strong enough.
“Maybe they’ve got an extreme
answer here, but all the pieces are what you’d expect to happen in a
more moderate forcing,” Talley said.
An
accompanying essay in Science, by ocean experts Charlotte Laufkotter and
Nicolas Gruber of the University of Bern and ETH Zurich, respectively,
in Switzerland, added that “the mere possibility of a future Southern
Ocean nutrient-trapping scenario is highly concerning, warranting
dedicated efforts to further our understanding of the unique role of the
Southern Ocean in the global climate system.”
Fortunately,
the study assumes as its premise a level of global warming that we in
the present have ample opportunity to prevent.
If
you think that the Paris climate agreement will work, holding the
warming of the planet to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees
Fahrenheit) and bringing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations back
down before they get much past 450 parts per million, then you can
safely assume that such things will not occur.
On
the other hand, if you don’t think the world can manage economic and
population growth in the coming decades without a continual or even
growing reliance on fossil fuels, this extreme scenario may be hard to
get out of your mind.
Moore also said that he
thinks the scenario presented in the study could at least begin to kick
in at a lower temperature than the extreme ones in the paper. He said
he’ll start to worry at a global temperature rise around 2.5 degrees
Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit), when a lot of floating Antarctic sea
ice could start to go.
“We don’t know exactly
where that tipping point is,” Moore said. The study thus reinforces the
importance of the Paris climate goals.
In the
end, Long said, there is a value in describing what the worst-case
scenario actually is — even if it is never actually realized.
“Human-driven
climate warming is driving changes in the ocean that are epic in the
context of Earth history,” he said. “They’re commensurate with some of
the biggest, most fundamental reorganizations of the life support system
of the planet. The scenario is unlikely, yet action remains stalled.”
