23/03/2018

Complex Science Behind Climate Change And Extreme Weather

ABC Weather - Kate Doyle

Only a chimney is left standing in this Tathra house after Sunday's fire. (ABC News: Bianca Gurra)
As cyclone Marcus ripped through Darwin and fires burned homes to the ground in Victoria and New South Wales, it was just a matter of time until the climate change discussion reared its head.
This week the Greens drew a link between the two, with comments made in the Senate and in the media, saying that fires are now more severe and frequent because of climate change.
The Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull later commented that he was reportedly "disappointed" the Greens would politicise the events.
"You can't attribute any particular event, whether it's a flood or fire or a drought or a storm — to climate change," he said while on a visit to Bega, near the bushfire-affected areas.
Two people who have protested Mr Turnbull's remarks are Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick from the University of New South Wales and Dr Andrew King of the University of Melbourne.
They are two of Australia's leading researchers in climate change's role in extreme events and have spoken to the ABC regarding the field of 'climate change attribution'.

How does climate change attribution work?
The basic principle behind climate change attribution is comparing the world as it is, with how it would have been without human-induced greenhouse gasses.
To do this researchers use climate models which work like computer-based virtual worlds, to recreate the real world as closely as possible.
They then look at two sets of model experiments, one which is as close as possible to the current world, and one where the human introduced greenhouse gasses have been removed.
"We look at the frequency of that specific event between those two simulations and then compare how often it occurs now, compared to the natural world — as we think it used to be," said Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick.
"Essentially what we're doing is looking between those two groups of models and how the probability or intensity of extreme weather events [such as] heat waves, heavy rainfall events and droughts, are changing just between those two ensembles," said Dr King.
In the past, these attribution studies have found a link between the Canberra and Sydney Heatwaves of February 2017 and climate change.
For more complex weather events, for example Cyclone Debbie, or the 2011 floods of south east Queensland, Dr King says "it's harder to tell."
Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick spoke about climate change attribution at the AMOS conference in Sydney in February. (ABC Weather: Kate Doyle)
Part of the reason is that there is a lot of complexity in this analysis.
According to Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick, "It's not that easy.
"A lot of time, a lot of blood, sweat and tears go into actually defining the event and making sure you've got it right.
"It's taken me weeks before to make sure I've captured the event as well as I can."
How the event is defined, the model used, which parameters are included and how the data is analysed statistically, can all change the outcome, so these simulations are often repeated many times to ensure a robust result.

What are the limitations?
Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said one of the limitations of climate change attribution studies is that they are heavily model-based.
"You have to be certain, or very confident at least, that that model is a good representation of the actual climate," she said.
"Unfortunately, however, no matter how good your model is, we simply can't really measure what the climate used to be like before climate change actually started."
There are some old observations, mainly in Europe, and paleo records, that are helping to improve knowledge in this area.
But our understanding of pre-industrial revolution conditions are not as good as our understanding of the current climate.
Dr Andrew King at the AMOS conference in Sydney 2018 (ABC Weather: Kate Doyle)
The type of event matters too.
Dr King said that hot or cold extremes are quite easy to attribute, especially on a big scale; other more variable events like rainfall, are more difficult.
"More complex events like fire weather, which has a combination of high temperatures, low humidity, strong winds — those are a lot harder."
Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick also puts individual cyclones in the variable pile.
"It doesn't necessarily mean with those events that there is no anthropogenic signal," said Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick.
"It just means that we can't yet detect it because there's a lot of variability overlying that particular signal."

'Weather' vs. 'climate'
Communicating the difference between long term-climate trends and individual extreme weather events is where all of this gets messy.
The weather is what is going on day-to-day; the climate is what is happening over time.
Using the wardrobe analogy: climate is all of the clothes in your closet, while weather is what you wear each day.
Which raises the question: does every event need to prove or disprove climate change?
According to Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick the answer is no.
"A lot of the events — I'm just saying a lot, I'm not saying all on purpose — would have probably occurred without climate change, but now they're occurring more frequently," she said.
"And that's exactly what attribution looks at: whether or not a particular event is occurring more frequently because of climate change,.
"We've always had tropical cyclones for example, they're always going to occur.
"It doesn't necessarily mean that every single tropical cyclone needs to be attributed to climate change."
"And we look at every event separately because they're all very different and very individual."
Likewise, not every cold snap means climate change is wrong.
"It's quite frustrating as a climate scientist to hear people saying that," Dr King said. "Especially if it's the president of the United States, it's not very helpful."
"We're always going to have that variable weather — even in a hundred years.
"It's just that the warm extremes are a bit warmer, the cool extremes are not quite as cold as they would've been in the past."
The driver of this ute got a shock when a palm tree outside his house came crashing down on him during Cyclone Marcus on Saturday. (ABC News: Neda Vanovac)
Both Drs King and Perkins-Kirkpatrick are trying to move away from publicly assigning a number or percentage to how much climate change has contributed to an individual event, despite media pressure.
Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said she understands the pressure from the media, "They want that analysis because it is interesting and it does show that climate change is actually happening now."
The researchers explain there is only so fast they can get such analysis done.
"We're reasonably confident in the method, but sometimes the media wants these results yesterday," Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said.
A fully quantifiable scientific analysis takes time.
"When we do put a number on it, it's not necessarily one that we've plucked out of thin air," Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said
"We've looked at the event, we've repeated the analysis thousands of times, so we have a range, and we never give the number that's the most scary, or the highest number — we give a very conservative number."
"So even if we say an event is, for example, twice as likely due to climate change, that's probably the lower estimate."
For Dr King, it is about making sure the context is there.
"We always give uncertainties with those numbers but often it's lost in the communication from the media sources to the public," he said.
Flames come close to a home in Tathra as a large bushfires burnt through the town on Sunday 18 March, 2018. (ABC News: Peta Doherty)
So last weekend's events?
Last weekend's fires and cyclone may have been later than most but they still occurred within both the official NSW Rural Fire Services Bush Fire Danger Period and the NT's cyclone season.

With all of this confusion, is climate change attribution useful?
Darwin residents have a lot of work ahead of them, to recover from Tropical Cyclone Marcus. (ABC News: Emma Vincent)
Dr King said it was the extreme events that people remembered.
"Understanding how [extreme weather events] are changing resonates with people I think," he said.
"So it's a really good communication tool."
Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said that ultimately, it is useful.
"Especially if you have all your methods pointing towards yes," she said. "You can say with confidence — with high confidence — that there's a signal there."
"Conversely, certain events you can't necessarily attribute to climate change.
"And if all your methods say the same thing, that climate change did not affect this event, you can say that with confidence as well."

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22/03/2018

Court As Class: Judge Gets Climate Change Lesson In Oil Suit

ABC America - Sudhin Thanawala, Associated Press


EPA Chief Scott Pruitt still won't say if President Trump believes climate change is a hoax

There were no test tubes or Bunsen burners, but a courtroom turned into a science classroom Wednesday for a U.S. judge considering lawsuits that accuse big oil companies of lying about the role of fossil fuels in the Earth's warming environment.
Leading researchers taught U.S. District Judge William Alsup the basic science of climate change at the unusual court hearing after he asked lawyers for two California cities and five of the world's largest oil and gas companies to present "the best science now available on global warming."
He cautioned at the start of the hearing against expecting "fireworks" and said he wanted to avoid politics and "stick to the science."
"This is a serious proposition to try to educate the judge," Alsup said.
What he got at the end of the nearly five-hour hearing was a primer on the history of climate change research, carbon dioxide's role as a greenhouse gas, melting ice caps, rising sea levels and extreme weather.
His teachers included Myles Allen, a professor at the University of Oxford who studies human influences on climate, and Don Wuebbles, an expert in atmospheric science at the University of Illinois who co-authored a 2017 U.S. government report on climate change.
An attorney for Chevron, Theodore Boutrous, also presented, saying the oil giant does not dispute the findings of an international panel of scientists that it is extremely likely people are the dominant cause of global warming since the mid-1900s.
But he pointed out how thinking about global warming has evolved and said the company does not agree with all proposals in place to deal with it.
"The notion that we know today of a dynamic changing climate is relatively new in human understanding," he said.
Alsup interrupted Boutrous and the scientists to ask about the climate on Mars, what caused the ice age and whether the ozone layer has a role in the warming and cooling of the planet, among other questions.
He is considering two lawsuits, one by San Francisco and the other by neighboring Oakland, that accuse Chevron, Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, BP and Royal Dutch Shell of long knowing that fossil fuels posed serious risks to the climate, but still promoting them as environmentally responsible. They also allege the companies mounted campaigns to downplay the risks of global warming and discredit research that human activity was to blame.
The companies have asked the judge to dismiss the lawsuits. Federal law controls fossil fuel production, and Congress has encouraged oil and gas development, they said in court documents. They say the harm the cities claim is "speculative" and part of a complex chain of events that includes billions of oil and gas users and "environmental phenomena occurring worldwide over many decades."
Legal observers said they had never heard of a court holding a tutorial on climate change, and they were eager to see how the oil companies explained global warming.
None of the other companies spoke. Alsup told their attorneys that he wanted them to file documents indicating whether they disagreed with what Chevron's attorney said.
"You can't get away with sitting there in silence and later say he wasn't speaking for us," the judge said.
The lawsuits say the companies have created a public nuisance and should pay for sea walls and other infrastructure to protect against the effects of climate change — construction that could cost billions of dollars.
New York City, several California counties and at least one other California city have filed similar suits.
San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said the hearing showed the science on climate change was "clear."
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Australian Bushfire Threat: Longer & More Dangerous Seasons

Climate Council



INTENSIFYING CLIMATE CHANGE is driving Australia’s escalating bushfire threat, creating longer and more dangerous fire seasons than ever before, according to the Climate Council.
“New South Wales and Victorian towns have been hit hard with devastating bushfires that have affected the lives of hundreds of people, with homes and properties lost and damaged in the process,” said Climate Council Acting CEO and Head of Research Dr Martin Rice.
“Intensifying climate change is exacerbating extreme weather events including rising temperatures, severe heatwaves, supercharged storms, flooding, intense rainfall and even bushfires,” he said.
“High bushfire danger weather has been increasing in Southeast Australia over the past forty years due to worsening climate change, which unfortunately has increased the odds that dangerous fires, such as the events we have seen at Tathra and western VIC, will occur.”
Dr Rice warned that Australia will continue to experience an increasing number of dangerous fire weather days, placing fire services and medical professionals under pressure, and communities at risk, as climate change intensifies.
“Communities, emergency services and the health sector must prepare and resource for worsening fire danger conditions now and into the future,” he said.
“The cost of bushfires in New South Wales alone is likely to more than double by mid-century to 100 million dollars per year.”
“Australia experienced its hottest winter on record last year, which was made 60 times more likely due to climate change. As Australia continues to experience such unprecedented temperatures, parts of the country are seeing dangerous bushfire conditions emerge.”
Dr Rice said the Federal Government must deeply and rapidly cut Australia’s rising greenhouse gas pollution levels, in a bid to protect Australians from worsening extreme weather events, which are creating more severe bushfire seasons.
“Australia’s carbon pollution levels have risen every quarter since March 2015,” he said.
“The Federal Government must rollout strong and credible climate and energy policy that addresses climate change and the bushfire threat - unfortunately the National Energy Guarantee falls short of this.”
“Tackling climate change, through transitioning to clean, affordable and reliable renewable energy and storage technology is critical to reducing the risk of extreme weather events, including severe bushfires we’ve seen in Victoria and New South Wales this month."
The Climate Council has created a climate and energy policy roadmap ‘Clean & Reliable Power: Roadmap to a Renewable Future’, outlining 12 key principles essential to tackle climate change in Australia.

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Buried, Altered, Silenced: 4 Ways Government Climate Information Has Changed Since Trump Took Office

The Conversation -  | 

Some information on the climate has been obscured. REUTERS/Adrees Latif
After Donald Trump won the presidential election, hundreds of volunteers around the U.S. came together to “rescue” federal data on climate change, thought to be at risk under the new administration. “Guerilla archivists,” including ourselves, gathered to archive federal websites and preserve scientific data.
But what has happened since? Did the data vanish?
As of one year later, there has been no great purge. Federal data sets related to environmental and climate science are still accessible in the same ways they were before Trump took office.
However, in many other instances, federal agencies have tampered with information about climate change. Across agency websites, documents have disappeared, web pages have vanished and language has shifted in ways that appear to reflect the policies of the new administration.
Two groups have been keeping a watchful eye on developments. We both belong to the Environmental Data Governance Initiative, the organization behind the data rescue events. The initiative now monitors tens of thousands of federal websites with the help of specialized tracking software. In January, the group published a report that describes sweeping changes to federal web resources.
Meanwhile, Columbia University’s Silencing Science Tracker documents news stories about climate scientists who have been discouraged from conducting, publishing or otherwise communicating scientific research.
These groups have documented four ways that climate-related information has become less accessible since Trump took office.

1. Documents are difficult to find
Documents on existing international environmental treaties and national climate policy have been buried or removed from departments’ current websites.
The State Department’s Office of Global Change, for instance, no longer publishes Climate Action Reports, which the U.S. is obliged to produce under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The reports can no longer be found at their former addresses. Instead, they are archived at new addresses in the Department’s Obama-era web archive, making the reports more difficult for the public to access.
Climate reports removed from the State Department website. Versions from Jan. 20, 2017 (left) and Jan. 26, 2017 (right) on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
URL: https://www.state.gov/e/oes/climate/climateactionreport/index.htm
Environmental Data Governance Initiative, CC BY
In another instance, the Environmental Protection Agency removed links to the Climate Change Adaptation Plan documents, which offer guidelines on climate change mitigation. While the web pages still exist on the EPA server, links from key access points on the site have been removed or redirect to a “This Page is Being Updated” notice.

2. Web pages are buried
Some administrative pages have disappeared from agency sites and can be accessed only from the Obama-era web archive.
The Bureau of Land Management’s climate change page – which discussed the agency’s climate-friendly approach to land planning – now exists only in archival form. State Department pages describing the Montreal Protocol, a global effort signed in 1988 to protect the ozone layer, are similarly displaced.
The EPA appears to have been hit the worst. Two hundred of the original 380 web pages on climate and energy resources for state, local and tribal governments are now accessible in archival form only. What’s more, the word “climate” is no longer in the official website’s title.
The EPA also removed the website for the Clean Power Plan, a signature Obama-era regulation that the current administration hopes to repeal.

3. Language has been altered
Departments have scrubbed websites of environmental terms. The term “climate change,” for instance, no longer exists across certain web pages of several agencies, such as the White House, the Department of Transportation and the Department of the Interior.
Within the Department of Energy, the Clean Energy Investment Center removed the term “clean” from its title. The Government Accountability Office deleted an online warning that “oil and natural gas development pose inherent environmental and public health risks.”
In other cases, language has been changed to reflect the new administration’s agenda. For example, the Bureau of Land Management removed “Clean and Renewable Energy” from its list of national priorities, adding “Making America Safe Through Energy Independence” and “Getting America Back to Work” instead.
Bureau of Land Management’s shifting priorities. Versions from Feb. 7, 2017 (left) and Nov. 26, 2017 (right) on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
URL: https://www.blm.gov/about Environmental Data Governance Initiative
4. Science has been silenced
But website changes and deletions are just the tip of the iceberg.
Columbia’s Silencing Science Tracker records 116 instances when scientists have been obstructed. The list includes budget cuts, staff cuts, unfilled positions and suspended funds. Climate-related research projects have been canceled and climate fellowships rescinded. In some cases, advisory boards and research centers have been dismantled entirely.
For instance, as of Dec. 31, 2017, the administration had filled only 20 science-related positions out of the 83 total. That pace falls short of both the Obama administration, who had appointed 63, and the Bush administration, who had filled 51, at the same point in time.
The silencing suggests that the administration values “pro-growth” policies over environmental goals and stands with industry, no matter the cost.

Why it matters
In most cases, it’s not possible to know who ordered and administered these changes, whether agency staff working independently or the Trump administration itself.
History shows us how public information on government activities has changed to reflect the policy directives of different administrations. The Bush era saw a similar chilling affect on scientific research and environmental regulation. Several scientists at the time came forward to accuse the administration of censoring public awareness efforts about climate change.
In recent years, the U.S. has reduced its own greenhouse gas emissions. And the Obama administration invested in combating climate change and making related information more available to the public. Now that information is being stifled, but climate change continues, whether it’s documented or not.
These changes are not just damaging to those trying to address climate change. In our view, burying climate science diminishes our democracy. It denies the average citizen the information necessary to make informed decisions, and fuels the flames of rhetoric that denies consensus-based science.

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21/03/2018

Can Climate Litigation Save The World?

The Guardian - 

Courts are a new front line of climate action with cases against governments and oil firms spiralling, and while victories have so far been rare the pressure for change is growing
Those bringing climate litigation hope to force governments to act and companies to pay damages for their role in causing global warming. Photograph: Oliver Berg/EPA 
Global moves to tackle climate change through lawsuits are poised to break new ground this week, as groups and individuals seek to hold governments and companies accountable for the damage they are causing.
On Tuesday, action by 12 UK citizens reaches the high court for the first time, while on Wednesday in San Francisco, the science of climate change will effectively be on trial at a key moment in a lawsuit.
The litigation represents a new front of climate action, with citizens aiming to force stronger moves to cut carbon emissions, and win damages to pay the costs of dealing with the impacts of warming.
They are inspired by momentous cases from the past, from the defeat of big tobacco to the racial desegregation of schools in the US. Big oil is fighting back hard, but though victories have been rare to date wins are more likely in future, as legal experts say the attitudes of judges often shift with the times.
A flurry of billion-dollar cases against fossil fuel companies brought by New York city and communities in California over the rising seas has pushed climate litigation into the limelight. But cases are being brought across the globe, with more than 1,000 suits now logged by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia law school in New York.
Richmond, California – home to a Chevron oil refinery – has filed a lawsuit against 29 fossil fuel companies to seek damages. Photograph: Getty Images
The UK government is now facing its first major climate change lawsuit, brought by 12 citizens through a legal group called Plan B and which already has the support of the government’s former chief scientific adviser, Prof Sir David King.
“The UK carbon target for 2050 does not match the Paris agreement goal and the government knows that,” says Tim Crosland, a barrister at Plan B. He says the purpose of the case is to make the government live up to its responsibilities: “It is about closing the accountability deficit which is one of the biggest problems with climate change – if everybody is responsible, nobody is responsible.”
The UK has had climate laws in place for a decade and is seen by some as a leading nation, but Crosland argues the great dangers of global warming make this irrelevant. “Either we don’t want to fall off the climate cliff edge or we do. Who is doing better than others is the wrong question.”
On Wednesday meanwhile, a landmark case in California, in which the cities of San Francisco and Oakland are suing major oil companies for damages, reaches an unprecedented moment with a day-long hearing on the science of climate change itself.
Further cases are under way from India to Uganda, and across Europe including the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Portugal and Norway, where campaigners are seeking to block oil drilling in the Arctic. In Colombia, 25 young plaintiffs are taking to the courts to halt deforestation.
Greenpeace are appealing after losing a Norwegian arctic drilling lawsuit. Photograph: Will Rose/Will Rose / Greenpeace
Lawyers won a rare victory – now under appeal – in the 2015 Urgenda case in the Netherlands, with the court ruling the Dutch state must increase its cuts to emissions. A Pakistani farmer has also won a ruling that the “lethargy of the state in implementing [climate policies] offends the fundamental rights of the citizens”. And a Peruvian farmer is suing German energy company RWE over its alleged contribution to the melting glaciers near his Andean hometown.
But it is in the US, the world’s most litigious nation, that the greatest number of cases have been brought. The most high-profile suit against the government is the Juliana case, filed by 21 teenagers in Oregon, which saw off a Trump administration attempt to halt it earlier in March.
The basis of the case, says Julia Olson, lead counsel for Our Children’s Trust which is fighting the case, is failure of US administrations to protect its citizens by tackling global warming. “The US government has put these plaintiffs and other young people in a dangerous situation. First and foremost it is about personal security and the danger that exists presently. Beyond that, it is about protecting other fundamental rights under the US constitution – basic liberties such as to be able to decide where to live and to raise a family safely.
“I can’t convey how egregious and incredible this story is across every presidential administration of our government going back 60 years,” Olsen says. “This is not a Republican versus Democrat issue. Every president made those choices.”
While lawsuits against governments seek stronger action, those against the fossil fuel industry seek a simpler remedy – money. The argument is that these companies knowingly sold products that caused damage and a financial settlement is required, drawing parallels with the titanic legal battle fought and won against the tobacco industry.
Michael Burger, at the Sabin Center, says there is a similarity in that these growing cases threaten a level of legal and reputational risk to the companies that might eventually force them to settle or face financial oblivion.
“The other obvious similarity with tobacco is you have a long history of corporate obfuscation and attempts to blur the science and public understanding,” he says. Some of the characters involved are even the same – on both sides – with the same scientists defending both tobacco and oil companies and the same lawyers prosecuting them.
“But there is also a key difference,” says Burger. “Tobacco is a product individual people inhale and it gives them cancer. Fossil fuel production is the beginning of a long chain of causation that includes numerous corporate actors and individual consumers, as well as government licensing and permitting schemes. The causal chain is much longer.”
90 firms are responsible for two-thirds of all emissions of fossil fuels. Photograph: Florian Gaertner/Photothek via Getty Images
Scientists are now confident they can quantify the emissions resulting from each big company’s fossil fuels – just 90 firms are responsible for two-thirds of all emissions. But lawyers for the fossil fuel companies are robust in their response, saying a causal link to damages is “unprovable”.
The oil giants are also fighting back, with ExxonMobil in January seeking court permission to “investigate potential claims of abuse of process, civil conspiracy, and constitutional violations” by the Californian officials suing them. One of these, Serge Dedina mayor of Imperial Beach, says: “This appears to be the same kind of bullying tactic that the industry uses again and again to avoid accountability.”
Industry lobby groups are also mobilising against climate litigation in the US, with the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) launching a campaign against “politically motivated legal attacks” in November. “It has become clear that these activist plaintiffs’ attorneys, sympathetic academics and agenda-driven media outlets are distorting the use of tort litigation to advance their narratives with the ultimate objective of undermining manufacturers and the engine of the American economy,” said Linda Kelly, NAM general counsel.
However, an international panel of senior judges concluded in January that many companies around the world may well already be in breach of existing laws in relation to their impact on climate change. “Very, very few enterprises currently meet their obligations – if they did [climate change] would mostly be solved,” said Jaap Spier, who was advocate general in the Dutch supreme court until 2016 and part of the panel that published the assessment.
Spier says judges are influenced by growing concerns in society, such as worries over climate change, and are increasingly likely to look favourably on climate litigation in coming years. “If you assume companies don’t [change] at some stage, I have not the slightest doubt that courts will understand that they must step in.”
More and more climate cases are being filed, with lawyers suggesting a range of factors, from the election of Donald Trump to more extreme weather events, to revelations about what fossil fuel companies knew about climate change dangers, and a growing awareness of the urgent need to act.
A car after flooding in Gonzales, Louisiana. Extreme weather events are one factor in more climate cases being filed. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Despite this, major victories at a supreme court level still appear years off. But Burger says even wins along the way to the highest court add to the pressure for change: “There is a victory here which is just surviving the initial motions to dismiss. Having courts advance these cases towards a trial could itself move fossil fuel companies to want to start to seek some other solution.”
Nick Butler, who spent 29 years at BP and is now at King’s College London, says the companies do not believe the point has been reached where they are likely to lose cases but the pressure is real nonetheless: “The legal actions add a further dimension to the pressure for change in an industry that has begun to accept the need to reinvent itself.”
Olson argues that the courts are starting to recognise the urgency and highlights that the district judge in the Juliana case, Ann Aiken, said climate change needs to be addressed with “all deliberate speed”. That is a potent phrase in the US, taken from the 1955 supreme court judgment on the Brown v Board of Education case that ordered the end of racial segregation of schools.
“We need a decision that says you cannot discriminate against young people and deprive them of a climate system that will sustain their lives,” she says.
“[Aiken] very much understands that constitutional rights are at stake and that speed is the critical factor here. I think we will be on a very fast track.”

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20,000 Scientists Have Now Signed 'Warning To Humanity'

EcoWatch - Lorraine Chow

The article, 'World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice' has been co-signed by 20,000 scientists around the world.     
A chilling research paper warning about the fate of humanity has received 4,500 additional signatures and endorsements from scientists since it was first released last year.
The paper—"World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice"—was published in November 2017 in the journal Bioscience and quickly received the largest-ever formal support by scientists for a journal article with roughly 15,000 signatories from 184 countries.
Today, the article has collected 20,000 expert endorsements and/or co-signatories, and more are encouraged to add their names.
The "Warning" became one of the most widely discussed research papers in the world. It currently ranks 6th out of 9 million papers on the Altmetric scale, which tracks attention to research. It has also inspired pleas from political leaders from Israel to Canada.

IMAGE - link
"Our scientists' warning to humanity has clearly struck a chord with both the global scientific community and the public," said lead author ecology professor William Ripple at Oregon State University in a statement.
The 2017 paper is actually an update to the original version published 25 years ago by the Union of Concerned Scientists. It was signed by 1,700 scientists then, including the majority of living Nobel laureates in the sciences.
The first notice started with this statement: "Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course." It described trends such as the growing hole in the ozone layer, pollution and depletion of freshwater sources, overfishing, deforestation, plummeting wildlife populations, as well as unsustainable rises in greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures and human population levels.
Unfortunately, the authors of the updated paper said that humanity failed to progress on most of the measures and ominously warned, "time is running out."
"Especially troubling is the current trajectory of potentially catastrophic climate change" from the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities, the paper stated.
The authors concluded that urgent measures are necessary to avoid disaster. They called upon everyday citizens to urge their leaders to "take immediate action as a moral imperative to current and future generations of human and other life."
This week, three letters in comment and a response companion piece by the "Warning" authors was published in BioScience.
The response piece, "Role of Scientists' Warning in shifting policy from growth to conservation economy," includes two key areas for action in policy and science, from introducing a Nobel Prize in Economics for incorporating the limits of the biosphere to introducing a global price on carbon.
Watch below for an interview about the "Warning" paper with co-author Thomas Newsome of the University of Sydney's School of Life and Environmental Sciences:


Scientists' warning to humanity ‘most talked about paper’

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Turnbull Knows Better Than To Deny Fire Weather Link To Climate Change

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Raising the issue of the role of climate change in extreme weather events is always a delicate matter for families battling grief over lost homes and emergency service teams managing the aftermath.
But that doesn't mean the rest of us can't have a discussion about the issues. If not now, when?
Malcolm Turnbull visit burned out homes in Tathra on Monday. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
Malcolm Turnbull echoed the comments of his deposed predecessor Tony Abbott when he visited Tathra, the NSW south coastal town hit with huge fires amid record-breaking March heat.
Abbott in 2013 declared in the wake of Blue Mountain bushfires that destroyed 200 homes that "these fires are certainly not a function of climate change, they're a function of life in Australia".
Unlike Abbott, though, Turnbull is not a denier of climate change, having taken personal efforts to school himself in the issue with scientists from the University of NSW well before becoming Prime Minister.
So, it's surprising to hear Turnbull on TV on Monday, in rebuttal of Greens' leader Richard Di Natale that climate change was behind Sunday's fires, saying: "We have an environment which has extremes. Bushfires are part of Australia, as indeed are droughts and floods."
He preceded those comments, though, with a view that, if truly held, suggests the Prime Minister isn't listening to his scientific advisors.


Fears of asbestos contamination restricted residents coming to see if their home was destroyed by fire to a bus tour of the NSW south coast town.

"[A]s you know very well, you can't attribute any particular event, whether it's a flood or fire or a drought ... to climate change," Turnbull said.
Labor leader Bill Shorten said on Tuesday there were legitimate questions to ask about the impact of climate change but opted to avoid inflaming the discussion just now.
“I understand there is a debate about climate in this county,” he said during a visit to Tathra. “On a day when 69 houses have gone, it is not a debate I will start.”
Actually, the science of attribution is advancing fast, and extreme heat - and with it, days of high fire risk - is among the clearer climate signals.
As Andrew King of Melbourne University and David Karoly - now head of the CSIRO's climate centre - noted Australia is actually at the head of the pack when it comes to joining the dots between extreme weather and global warming.
To be clear, it's not a case of saying Sunday's fires near Bega (or south-west Victoria) were sparked by climate change. Rather it's a matter of probabilities.
"While we can’t say climate change caused an extreme event, we can estimate how much more or less likely the event has become due to human influences on the climate," King and Karoly note.
Whether the Tathra fires are deemed large enough to examine for attribution (and the chance that Adelaide, Hobart, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane should all hit 30 degrees so late in the season as they did on Saturday) will be up the scientists to decide.
But fire authorities across Australia know the bushfire season is getting longer. So, too, is the frequency, intensity and duration of heatwaves.
Add our fire-prone eucalyptus forests - with many species needing fire to regenerate - and it's no wonder Australians have particular cause to fear climate change.
"Nature hurls her worst at us ... always will and always has," Turnbull said.
The worst, though, will in some cases get more extreme, and pretending otherwise is not leadership.

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