OUR FUTURE | Leaders Must Act On Climate Change Now

Illawarra Mercury - Dr Marianne Cannon*

Working within the medical and health sector means I have seen first-hand the effects climate change is already inflicting on our wellbeing.




Increasing storms, heat waves and natural disasters amplify the traffic that comes through our door. We see more people than ever with heat-related illness, respiratory issues due to storms and injuries from natural disasters such as bushfires and floods.
There’s no questioning climate change is taking its toll - and this is only the beginning.
While at state level there are good initiatives taking place to prevent impacts, Australia is still trailing the world on taking action on climate change.
The "it’s too late" belief, and the excuse that it’s “too far into the future to contemplate”, have combined to bring on a failure of both leadership and collective decision-making.
The worst affected by climate-related health impacts are generally the very old, the very young and people with existing health issues.
Why is it we have to wait for this to affect less vulnerable people, rather than taking action while we still can?
With a policy vacuum on climate change, it seems the general public are the ones who will need to act for the sake of our own wellbeing.
This doesn’t mean each and every one of us needs to get on the streets and rally for action, but it does mean we can start the discussion in our local organisations - as farmers, nurses, first responders - we must do what we can to help.
Time is short. If we want to re-frame the debate, we need to drag our leaders along so they have no choice but to listen.
Climate change is already affecting our society, let’s initiate change before it really is too late for all of us.

*Dr Marianne Cannon is an emergency physician based in Northern Rivers NSW.

Links

• Turning Climate Change Legislation Into Public Health Policy
• Climate Change: Australia's Position Is Unconscionable For A Wealthy Country
• Disease Threat Forces SA Health To Prioritise Adapting To Climate Change
• Health And Climate Change: Call For Urgent Action
• Australia One Of The Countries Most Exposed To Climate Change, Bank Warns
• Climate Change Promotes The Spread Of Mosquito And Tick Borne Viruses
• The Temperature Is Rising ... And So Is The Death Toll
• Health Savings Outweigh Costs Of Limiting Global Warming: Study
• With Political Leaders On The Sidelines, Sport Could Take The Lead On Climate Change
• Why Climate Change Is Worsening Public Health Problems
• How Climate Change Can Spread Respiratory Infection
• Study: Climate Change Is Damaging The Health Of Millions Of People

Australia 'Unfairly Shirking Global Responsibilities' On Climate Change

AFR - Tom McIlroy

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull at the UN Paris climate talks in 2015. Francois Mori 

Australia is shirking its international responsibilities to fight climate change with a focus on Paris agreement targets overshadowing need for greater action, a new report has warned.
Analysis of approaches to the world's remaining carbon emissions budget for this century by think tank the Australia Institute finds the country's targets won't meet a fair share by population size, economic costs or a combination of both factors and will need to be ramped up.
Australia's current 2030 emissions reduction target is for a 26 to 28 per cent reduction on 2005 levels, while Labor plans to adopt a 2030 target of 45 per cent below 2005 levels.
On current levels, cumulative global greenhouse gas emissions will surpass levels needed to keep global average surface temperature increases to less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels within 20 years.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop hugs then Marshall Islands minister Tony de Brum at the Paris climate summit in 2015. Andrew McLeish

The new report, released on Tuesday, says in the context of the global carbon budget set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, neither party's policy would see Australia doing its fair share in concert with the international community.
Ahead of the next major international climate talks in Katowice, Poland in December, the report says the Turnbull government's policy is "inadequate according to any recognised principle-based approach" while Labor's alternative can be regarded as "the bare minimum necessary".
When considered by Australia's population count, the remaining budget would be quickly surpassed and net zero emissions required to be reached in about six years.
On a modified approach considering development and population, Australia's current target of 26 per cent reductions by 2030 would require complete decarbonisation within five years.
Australia wouldn't meet targets under an international cost-sharing approach, designed to equalise economic impacts across countries, with both targets seeing consumption grow and insufficient reductions in place.
The report comes amid concerns about targets for the electricity sector's contribution to carbon emission savings and the impact on other sectors.
"Given Australia's high historic emissions, high per capita emissions and high income, other approaches to assessing nations' contributions to climate action all show that Australia's climate targets are not doing a fair share," the report said.
"Any principle-based approach to target setting will result in highly developed, emissions-intensive nations like Australia having to pursue aggressive emissions reductions immediately and sustaining these reductions over the coming decades.
"The small size of the remaining global emissions budget poses a significant challenge. All countries will need to ramp-up mitigation efforts.
"If the global community is to succeed in keeping emissions within the 2°C budget, mitigation efforts in Australia and elsewhere need to be significantly accelerated on time scales shorter than those contained in the Paris Agreement."
Report author and Australia Institute climate and energy program director Richie Merzian said Australia was unfairly shirking its global responsibilities and predicted the country would come under pressure from allies and neighbours in future climate talks.
"Whether you assess the fairness of a country's emissions reduction target by population, economic cost, or a combination, our analysis shows Australia's reduction target is unambitious, unfair and irresponsible," he said.
"Australia continues to profit from high emissions rather than take up its fair share of reductions."
Emissions reductions and the transition to renewable energy sources remain a key tension point for the Coalition, as it works to deliver the National Energy Guarantee policy.
"It is in Australia's best interest to have targets that do our fair share. Inadequate targets that need continual revision brings uncertainty to business," Mr Merzian said.
"The reduction target uncertainty that has plagued the energy sector will spread and be experienced by all sectors unless we get this right."

Links

• Report: Advance Australia’s fair share - Assessing the fairness of emissions targets (pdf)
• Greenhouse emissions rise 5pc in two years
• Pressure on Labor to back energy guarantee plan
• Why Malcolm Turnbull's emissions target is a negative
• Australia’s 2017 Environment Scorecard: Like A Broken Record, High Temperatures Further Stress Our Ecosystems
• Will Our Beloved Waratahs Survive Climate Change?
• Leading The Way On Climate Change: Is It Australia’s Turn?
• Climate Change: Australia Almost Comes Last In World Ranking
• Australia Faces Potentially Disastrous Consequences Of Climate Change, Inquiry Told
• WA's South West A 'Canary In The Coalmine' For Climate Change
• Australia Ranked Among Worst Developed Countries For Climate Change Action
• Climate Change Is Burning Up Australia: Are We Losing The Battle?
• Australia Sinks On 'Most Credible' Environmental Index In The World
• Australia Drops 10 Spots In Greg Hunt's Most Trusted Climate Rankings

Saving The World’s Coral To Avert A Wipeout Of Irreversible Costs

South China Morning Post - Sophie Kalkreuth

With warmer weather destroying coral reefs, scientists – who estimate that 90pc will be gone by 2050 – are fighting against time to breed and multiply them in labs, and ultimately return them to the ocean

Coral reef engineering by the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology. Photo: Handout

I meet Dr Ruth Gates one morning in Kaneohe Bay, a sheltered cove on the southeast coast of Oahu, Hawaii. She is taking me to Coconut Island, a small island visible from shore but accessible only by speedboat. Gates, in her mid 50s, is the director of Hawaii’s Institute of Marine Biology and principal investigator at the Gates Coral Lab, and the president of the International Society for Reef Studies, as well as the author of more than 100 scientific papers and a frequent public speaker. From her modest base, she is hoping to transform the world’s oceans.
Coconut Island, which once belonged to an eccentric billionaire who fashioned it into a private retreat in the 1930s, is now the research facility for the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology. The island’s location is ideal as its coral reefs are easily accessible to Gates and her team of researchers who have, for the past four years, been attempting to breed a strain of climate-change resistant corals. Success in the programme could save as much as US$9.9 trillion (most recent available figure), a value attached to coral reefs according to research by Dr Tony Juniper and the UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre, as reported by BBC Earth.
In 2013, Gates won billionaire Paul Allen’s Ocean Challenge prize, a US$4 million endowment to selectively breed a tougher variety of corals – “human assisted evolution” as it is sometimes called. The aim is to produce a climate-adapted coral species to help bring the world’s ailing reefs back to life.

Climate change is the greatest threat to the world's coral reef ecosystems. Photo credit: Handout

Gates and her team are trying to understand why some corals survive bleaching events – when an environmental trigger such as rising ocean temperatures or increased acidity levels causes corals to turn white and stop growing – while others, sometimes just inches away, die off. “My whole career has been framed by this question of what makes one coral survive in conditions that kill another,” Gates said.
Gates’ career has also corresponded with a distressing period for the world’s reefs. Gates studied at Newcastle University in England and then moved to Jamaica in the mid-1980s to study corals, only to witness half of Caribbean coral cover die due to overfishing, pollution and development.
She continued her research at the University of Hawaii just as climate change was beginning to threaten coral populations. A bleaching event in 1998 killed around 15 per cent of corals worldwide. Bleaching events were recorded in 2002 and 2016 as weather conditions are mapped onto increased base temperatures.

Dr. Ruth Gates, director of Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology. Photo: University of Hawaii

“The last El Nino created temperatures on reefs we’ve never seen before,” said Gates referring to the weather pattern that peaked in 2016, causing the hottest year in a historical record dating to 1880.
The typical approach to reef conservation has been to protect reefs from human activity. But the effects of climate change affect reefs whether they are protected or not.
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef was the best-managed reef system in the world, but the disturbance in temperatures in 2016 and in 2017 was devastating. “We didn’t expect to see this level of destruction to the Great Barrier Reef for another 30 years,” said Terry Hughes, director of a government-funded centre for coral reef studies at Australia’s James Cook University.
Scientists estimate that 90 per cent of the world’s reefs will be gone by 2050, a conservative estimate by Gates’ measure. “The reality is that we don’t have much time,” she said, adding that she hopes to introduce corals into the wild that have been bred for resilience within 10 years.

A diver examines bleaching on a coral reef on Orpheus Island, Australia. Photo: AFP

Selective breeding has been used in everything from farming to our domestic pets, but this is the first time corals have been bred for specific qualities. Yet, when the project was announced, the lab was heavily criticised, with some accusing the lab of “playing god” while others called the project the “Monsanto of reefs”. Another concern was the risk of reducing biodiversity, or of “super coral” becoming an invasive species.
Gates says the concerns she fields are emotional, not factual. If you weigh the risks of doing something against doing nothing, “it’s a no-brainer”. Corals provide physical and ecological support for a third of all marine life. This makes them what ecologists term as “keystone species,” as their health is vital for the well-being of countless other species, including humans. A quarter of fisheries are linked to coral reefs and some 500 million people worldwide rely on reefs for food.

Bleached coral at Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Photo: Reuters

According to Gates, without corals there would be tens of millions of displaced people competing for resources, with rises in aggressive behaviour. Some of the most important reefs in the world are in the seas surrounding the Philippines and Indonesia, where local communities rely on reefs for food and money from tourism.
“This is the thing I think many scientists don’t understand,” says Gates. “I feel it behoves us to step back from our ivory towers in all ways really and say we have an obligation to do things that stabilise reefs for places that depend on them intimately.”
But some scientists have also questioned how the lab could possibly scale such an endeavour. The Great Barrier Reef is just a fraction of the world’s overall reef cover and spans an area almost the size of Germany. The vast majority of coral reefs are in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Putting corals out in Hawaii, an isolated archipelago, could take thousands of years to spread.

Green coral in North Seram, Maluku Islands, Indonesia. Photo: SCMP

Scaling the project will involve developing a capacity that is relevant to different places – Hawaii for Hawaii, Australia for Australia, and so on. And it would need to involve input from more than just scientists, Gates said. She describes her approach to problem solving as “reverse engineering”, envisioning the end goal, and then working backwards, like bringing a new product to market.

This will make it of value to people. I say let’s think about how we actually take this on board as a valued asset that we have to protect
Ruth Gates, Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology

She’s worked with oyster farmers (already very familiar with underwater breeding work), satellite imaging companies, and even the Carnegie Observatory, making use of an airplane-mounted camera that can show how many plants are alive inside a coral from the air. “This amazing technology allows us to ask the question: can you identify high stress resistant corals from the air? That changes how we are able to scale it,” Gates said.
At Gates’ lab, there is a state-of-the-art evolutionary genetics facility, which has a custom-designed confocal microscope – the only one in the world – which uses live imaging to help scientists watch corals in simulated future ocean conditions. “You can warm the stage, acidify the compartment and we can then watch the animal at a microscopic level,” Gates explained.

A coral landscape in North Seram, Maluku Islands, Indonesia. Photo: SCMP

The microscope was donated to the lab by Pam Omidyar, wife of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Philanthropists like Allen and the Omidyars understood that the project would never be funded through traditional channels, Gates said, and while it would take money to succeed, it will save an enormous amount more.
And yet, private funding of assisted evolution raises questions. What return might donors expect on their investment? Could the world’s wealthiest people ever own vulnerable species or entire ecosystems?
Gates believes the only way to scale the project is commercially. “There has to be a revenue stream,” she said. “This will make it of value to people. I say let’s think about how we actually take this on board as a valued asset that we have to protect.”

Links

• Losing Nemo? Wider Effects Of Mass Great Barrier Reef Bleaching Emerge
• World's Coral Reefs Face New Peril From Beneath Within Decades
• Global Warming’s Toll On Coral Reefs: As If They’re ‘Ravaged By War’
• Can Corals Survive Climate Change?
• Coral Bleaching: Researchers Struggle To Find Anywhere In Pacific Ocean Untouched
• Countries With Coral Reefs Must Do More On Climate Change – UNESCO
• 50 Reefs: World-First Global Plan Says Only 10 Pc Of Coral Reefs Can Be Saved From Extinction
• Enough PR Spin: We Need A Real Plan For The Reef That Includes Ditching Coal
• Great Barrier Reef: Most Coral Now Dead North Of Port Douglas Off Far North Queensland, Scientists Say
• NASA Begins Study Of Australia's Great Barrier Reef
• Great Barrier Reef: Government Must Choose Which Parts To Save, Says Expert

Six Of The G7 Commit To Climate Action. Trump Wouldn’t Even Join Conversation.

InsideClimate News

Trump skipped the formal climate discussions, had the U.S. negotiators promote fossil fuels instead, and then renounced the group's official communique.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and other leaders agreed to several climate commitments at the G7 summit in Canada, while President Donald Trump's negotiators promoted fossil fuels. Credit: Steffen Seibert/Government of Germany

President Donald Trump's disdain for action on climate change, along with his other demands and behavior, left the United States estranged from its closest allies following the weekend summit of the Group of Seven major industrial democracies.
Trump skipped the G7's formal discussions on the global warming crisis. And in the summit's communique, the United States refused to join in common statements by the other six nations reaffirming their commitment to the Paris climate agreement, which he wants to abandon. Instead, the U.S. unilaterally promoted fossil fuels. And in the end, Trump renounced the whole communique in a Twitter tirade.
The governments of France and Germany said afterward that they and the European Union stood by the communique.
"Let's be serious and worthy of our people," the French presidency said in a statement quoted by AFP. "International co-operation cannot be dictated by fits of anger and throwaway remarks."
"We have seen this with the climate agreement or the Iran deal," Deutsche Welle reported German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas saying on Sunday. "In a matter of seconds, you can destroy trust with 280 Twitter characters."
The rupture on climate change, which has been building ever since Trump declared that the United States would pull out of Paris, was overshadowed in the mainstream press by conflicts over international trade and related issues, and by personal clashes, especially between him and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the host of the gathering.

Committed to Paris, Carbon-Neutral Economy
In the communique's section on climate change, every member except the United States stood together in supporting the Paris climate agreement and promising to work with one another, local governments, businesses and the public to deal with global warming.
"Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan the UK and the European Union reaffirm their strong commitment to implement the Paris Agreement, through ambitious climate action; in particular through reducing emissions while stimulating innovation, enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening and financing resilience and reducing vulnerability; as well as ensuring a just transition, including increasing efforts to mobilize climate finance from a wide variety of sources," the communique states.
The leaders, minus the U.S., committed to reduce air and water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions to reach a global carbon-neutral economy during the second half of the century.
The communique says they also focused on, among other things:

• energy transitions through market-based clean energy technologies;
• "the importance of carbon pricing, technology collaboration and innovation to continue advancing economic growth and protect the environment as part of sustainable, resilient and low-carbon energy systems";
• financing to improve adaptation to climate change; and
• concrete actions to protect the health of the world's oceans. The six endorsed the Charlevoix Blueprint for Health Oceans, Seas and Resilient Coastal Communities and (with the exception of Japan) the G7 Ocean Plastics Charter.

U.S. Goes Its Own Way: Promoting Fossil Fuels
U.S. negotiators wrote their own paragraph for the climate section that focused on promoting the burning of fossil fuels.
"The United States will endeavour to work closely with other countries to help them access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently," it said. "The United States believes in the key role of energy transitions through the development of market-based clean energy technologies and the importance of technology collaboration and innovation to continue advancing economic growth and protect the environment as part of sustainable, resilient and clean energy systems."
This resembles language that the Trump administration has offered before, but that other parties to the Paris Agreement don't embrace, and none of the other six nations signed on to it.
It's more common for other nations, whether rich or poor, to call for achieving sustainable development on pathways that simultaneously bring down carbon dioxide emissions rapidly enough to stave off the worst risks of climate change, which will hurt the poorest nations the most.

'Wrecking Ball Approach to Diplomacy'
"President Trump's wrecking ball approach to international diplomacy left him utterly isolated at the G7 summit," wrote Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
"Leaders from the other six countries didn't even try to paper over their strong disagreements with Trump on trade, climate change and other important issues," Meyer wrote. "They are joined by thousands of mayors, governors, business leaders and others who are moving forward with ambitious climate action and pursuing the tremendous economic development and job creation benefits that clean energy technologies provide. As communities across the U.S. confront the costly and harmful impacts of climate change, it's these leaders—not President Trump—who are acting in the true economic, environmental and national security interests of the American people."
This year's G7 statement on climate change was more extensive than the 2017 communique's. Last year, a single paragraph stated that the U.S. was reviewing its policies and was "not in a position to join the consensus." The other leaders said only that they recognized the process underway in the U.S. and that they reaffirmed their commitment to the Paris Agreement.
"America—until now—had led on climate," Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp wrote after this week's G7 meeting. "Today our president doesn't even care enough to be present. We all must work to restore the USA to a leadership position."
Greenpeace, meanwhile, put pressure on the other nations: "The joint commitment to climate action forged in Paris remains at the top of the geopolitical agenda despite the U.S. administration's repeated attempts to demolish it," Executive Director Jennifer Morgan wrote. "G6 leaders now have to demonstrate their commitment in practice."

Links

• Wipeout: Human Role In Climate Change Removed From Science Report
• Buried, Altered, Silenced: 4 Ways Government Climate Information Has Changed Since Trump Took Office
• Patterns of Climate Change Litigation During Trump Era
• 'Sloppy And Careless': Courts Call Out Trump Blitzkrieg On Environmental Rules
• It's Not Okay How Clueless Donald Trump Is About Climate Change
• Trump's Call For Some 'Good Old Global Warming' Ridiculed By Climate Experts
• Trump Officially Removes Climate Change From List Of Global Threats
• American Leaders Should Read Their Official Climate Science Report
• U.S. Report Says Humans Cause Climate Change, Contradicting Top Trump Officials
• E.P.A. Announces Repeal Of Major Obama-Era Carbon Emissions Rule
• Trump Takes A First Step Toward Scrapping Obama’s Global Warming Policy
• Donald Trump Is A Threat to Survival of Life On Earth: If Nuclear War Doesn't Get Us, Falling Oxygen Levels Will
• The Trump Administration Just Disbanded A Federal Advisory Committee On Climate Change
• Federal Scientists Say Climate Change Is No Hoax, Refuting Trump
• New York Times Guilty Of Large Screw-Up On Climate-Change Story
• A Running List Of How Trump Is Changing The Environment

Pope Tells Oil Executives To Act On Climate: ‘There Is No Time To Lose’

New York Times - Elisabetta Povoledo

Pope Francis has called for swift action to care for the environment and the planet. Credit Maurizio Brambatti/EPA, via Shutterstock

ROME — Three years ago, Pope Francis issued a sweeping letter that highlighted the global crisis posed by climate change and called for swift action to save the environment and the planet.
On Saturday, the pope gathered money managers and titans of the world’s biggest oil companies during a closed-door conference at the Vatican and asked them if they had gotten the message.
“There is no time to lose,” Francis told them on Saturday.
Pressure has been building on oil and gas companies to transition to less polluting forms of energy, with the threat of fossil-fuel divestment sometimes used as a stick.
The pope said oil and gas companies had made commendable progress and were “developing more careful approaches to the assessment of climate risk and adjusting their business practices accordingly.” But those actions were not enough.
“Will we turn the corner in time? No one can answer that with certainty,” the pope said. “But with each month that passes, the challenge of energy transition becomes more pressing.”
He called on the participants “to be the core of a group of leaders who envision the global energy transition in a way that will take into account all the peoples of the earth, as well as future generations and all species and ecosystems.”
In an era when the White House is viewed by many scientists as hostile to the very idea of climate change, with President Trump announcing the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, Francis is seen as an influential voice to nudge oil executives to take action on the issue.

Robert Dudley, chief executive of BP, was among the oil executives summoned to a two-day conference in the Vatican, “Energy Transition and Care of Our Common Home.” Credit Leonhard Foeger/Reuters

Among those summoned to a 16th-century villa in the Vatican gardens were the chairman of Exxon Mobil, the chief executive of the Italian energy giant Eni and the chief executive of BP.
Paul J. Browne, a Notre Dame spokesman, said the university’s president, the Rev. John I. Jenkins, had been inspired by the pope’s 2015 encyclical instructing “all schools and departments of the university to respond to Francis’ evocative appeal on behalf of ‘our sister,’ the Earth.”
Many had complied, he said, including by expediting plans to stop coal burning at the university power plant. Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business sponsored the conference.
In his 2015 encyclical, Francis, a vocal supporter of the Paris accord, warned that climate change represented “one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day.” He called for a model of energy transition.
On Saturday, the pope reiterated his call for a transition from fossil fuels “to a greater use of energy sources that are highly efficient while producing low levels of pollution.” It was a challenge “of epochal proportions,” he acknowledged, but also one that presented an immense opportunity to “promote the sustainable development of renewable forms of energy.”
He said that though the world is affected by climate change, it was the poor who would “suffer most from the ravages of global warming.” Francis added that the transition “is a duty that we owe towards millions of our brothers and sisters around the world, poorer countries and generations yet to come.”
Last month, a group of investors representing more than $10.4 trillion in assets published a letter in The Financial Times urging the oil and gas industry to “be more transparent and take responsibility for its emissions,” which account for 50 percent of global carbon emissions, according to the Carbon Disclosure Project, an organization based in London.
To date, according to the Global Catholic Climate Movement, dozens of Catholic institutions have divested from fossil fuels, including Caritas Internationalis, a confederation of relief organizations; Catholic banks with more than 7 billion euros, or $8.3 billion, on their balance sheets; archdioceses; religious orders; and lay movements.

In “Laudato Si’,” Francis warned that climate change represented “one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day.” CreditVincenzo Pinto/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

On Thursday, Equinor, the Norwegian oil giant formerly called Statoil, released a report saying that the world needed to move faster in adopting renewable energy to achieve the goals of the Paris agreement.
“The climate debate is long on targets, but short on action,” the company said. “We believe it’s possible to achieve climate targets set out in the Paris agreement, but that requires swift, global and coordinated political action to drive changes in consumer behavior and shift investments towards low carbon technologies.”
Other oil companies, including Exxon Mobil, have endorsed the Paris accord and have called for carbon taxes, but the Equinor report appeared to be more explicit in its endorsement of more vigorous climate action. Still, Equinor remains a major producer of oil and gas, and it continues to search for hydrocarbons.
The Rev. Seamus P. Finn, a participant at a conference in 2013 that brought mining companies to the Vatican, said that exercise had been useful for the industry and the Vatican “to better understand each other,” and that follow-up meetings had “deepened the quality of the conversation.”
The Vatican is a “safe place for discussion,” said Father Finn, a Catholic priest and the chairman of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility.
“I think that all can agree that there needs to be a shift from fossil fuels to alternative forms of energy, but the debate is how long is that transition period going to be,” Father Finn said.
“For some, it’s tomorrow. For others who believe that climate change is not so serious, there is plenty of time,” he added.
The pope on Saturday said that the situation was dire. Despite the Paris agreement, carbon dioxide emissions and atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases remained high. He said the search for new fossil fuel reserves was “even more worrying.”
“We received the earth as a garden-home from the Creator,” Francis said. “Let us not pass it on to future generations as a wilderness.”

Links

• Climate change: Pope urges action on clean energy
• At Vatican, ‘Tenets of Faith’ Seen as Crucial in Climate Change Effort
• Catholic Church Leaders Issue Appeal on Climate Change
• At Vatican, Mayors Pledge Climate Change Fight
• 'Dodgy' greenhouse gas data threatens Paris accord
• Hurricane Irma: Pope Francis condemns climate change sceptics
• Pope Francis blames 'human selfishness' for global warming

Artificial Intelligence—A Game Changer For Climate Change And The Environment

 Earth Institute Columbia University - Renee Cho

AI is continually improving climate models. Photo: Los Alamos National Lab

As the planet continues to warm, climate change impacts are worsening. In 2016, there were 772 weather and disaster events, triple the number that occurred in 1980. Twenty percent of species currently face extinction, and that number could rise to 50 percent by 2100. And even if all countries keep their Paris climate pledges, by 2100, it’s likely that average global temperatures will be 3˚C higher than in pre-industrial times.
But we have a new tool to help us better manage the impacts of climate change and protect the planet: artificial intelligence (AI). AI refers to computer systems that “can sense their environment, think, learn, and act in response to what they sense and their programmed objectives,” according to a World Economic Forum report, Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for the Earth.
In India, AI has helped farmers get 30 percent higher groundnut yields per hectare by providing information on preparing the land, applying fertilizer and choosing sowing dates. In Norway, AI helped create a flexible and autonomous electric grid, integrating more renewable energy.

An atmospheric river over California. Photo: NOAA

And AI has helped researchers achieve 89 to 99 percent accuracy in identifying tropical cyclones, weather fronts and atmospheric rivers, the latter of which can cause heavy precipitation and are often hard for humans to identify on their own. By improving weather forecasts, these types of programs can help keep people safe.

What are artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning?
Artificial intelligence has been around since the late 1950s, but today, AI’s capacities are rapidly improving thanks to several factors: the vast amounts of data being collected by sensors (in appliances, vehicles, clothing, etc.), satellites and the Internet; the development of more powerful and faster computers; the availability of open source software and data; and the increase in abundant, cheap storage. AI can now quickly discern patterns that humans cannot, make predictions more efficiently and recommend better policies.
The holy grail of artificial intelligence research is artificial general intelligence, when computers will be able to reason, abstract, understand and communicate like humans. But we are still far from that—it takes 83,000 processors 40 minutes to compute what one percent of the human brain can calculate in one second. What exists today is narrow AI, which is task-oriented and capable of doing some things, sometimes better than humans can do, such as recognizing speech or images and forecasting weather. Playing chess and classifying images, as in the tagging of people on Facebook, are examples of narrow AI.

AI considers its next move in chess. Photo: viegas

When Netflix and Amazon recommend shows and products based on our purchasing history, they’re using machine learning. Machine learning, which developed out of earlier AI, involves the use of algorithms (sets of rules to follow to solve a problem) that can learn from data. The more data the system analyzes, the more accurate it becomes as the system develops its own rules and the software evolves to achieve its goal.
Deep learning, a subset of machine learning, involves neural networks made up of multiple layers of connections or neurons, much like the human brain. Each layer has a separate task and as information passes through, the neurons give it a weight based on its accuracy vis a vis the assigned task. The final result is determined by the total of the weights.

Art created by deep learning. Photo: Gene Kogan

Deep learning enabled a computer system to figure out how to identify a cat—without any human input about cat features— after “seeing” 10 million random images from YouTube. Because deep learning essentially takes place in a “black box” through self-learning and evolving algorithms, however, scientists often don’t know how a system arrives at its results.

Artificial intelligence is a game changer
Microsoft believes that artificial intelligence, often encompassing machine learning and deep learning, is a “game changer” for climate change and environmental issues. The company’s AI for Earth program has committed $50 million over five years to create and test new applications for AI. Eventually it will help scale up and commercialize the most promising projects.
Columbia University’s Maria Uriarte, a professor of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology, and Tian Zheng, a statistics professor at the Data Science Institute, received a Microsoft grant to study the effects of Hurricane Maria on the El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico. Uriarte and her colleagues want to know how tropical storms, which may worsen with climate change, affect the distribution of tree species in Puerto Rico.

Photo: Kevin Krajick

Hurricane Maria’s winds damaged thousands of acres of rainforest, however the only way to determine which tree species were destroyed and which withstood the hurricane at such a large scale is through the use of images. In 2017, a NASA flyover of Puerto Rico yielded very high-resolution photographs of the tree canopies. But how is it possible to tell one species from another by looking at a green mass from above over such a large area? The human eye could theoretically do it, but it would take forever to process the thousands of images.

Uriarte’s team has identified every tree in some plots. Photo: Kevin Krajick

The team is using artificial intelligence to analyze the high-resolution photographs and match them with Uriarte’s data—she has mapped and identified every single tree in given plots. Using the ground information from these specific plots, AI can figure out what the various species of trees look like from above in the flyover images. “Then we can use that information to extrapolate to a larger area,” explained Uriarte. “We use the plot data both to learn [i.e. to train the algorithm] and to validate [how well the algorithm is performing].”
Understanding how the distribution and composition of forests change in response to hurricanes is important because when forests are damaged, vegetation decomposes and emits more CO2 into the atmosphere. As trees grow back, since they are smaller, they store less carbon. If climate change results in more extreme storms, some forests will not recover, less carbon will be stored, and more carbon will remain in the atmosphere, exacerbating global warming.

There’s only so much that can be done from the ground, said Uriarte. Photo: Kevin Krajick

Uriarte says her work could not be done without artificial intelligence. “AI is going to revolutionize this field,” she said. “It’s becoming more and more important for everything that we do. It allows us to ask questions at a scale that we could not ask from below. There’s only so much that one can do [on the ground] … and then there are areas that are simply not accessible. The flyovers and the AI tools are going to allow us to study hurricanes in a whole different way. It’s super exciting.”
Another project, named Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security (PAWS) from the University of Southern California, is using machine learning to predict where poaching may occur in the future. Currently the algorithm analyzes past ranger patrols and poachers’ behavior from crime data; a Microsoft grant will help train it to incorporate real-time data to enable rangers to improve their patrols.
In Washington State, Long Live the Kings is trying to restore declining steelhead and salmon populations. With a grant from Microsoft, the organization will improve an ecosystem model that gathers data about salmon and steelhead growth, tracks fish and marine mammal movements, and monitors marine conditions. The model will help improve hatchery, harvest, and ecosystem management, and support habitat protection and restoration efforts.

How AI is used for energy
AI is increasingly used to manage the intermittency of renewable energy so that more can be incorporated into the grid; it can handle power fluctuations and improve energy storage as well.

Photo: Kenueone

The Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory operated by Stanford University will use machine learning and artificial intelligence to identify vulnerabilities in the grid, strengthen them in advance of failures, and restore power more quickly when failures occur. The system will first study part of the grid in California, analyzing data from renewable power sources, battery storage, and satellite imagery that can show where trees growing over power lines might cause problems in a storm. The goal is to develop a grid that can automatically manage renewable energy without interruption and recover from system failures with little human involvement.
Wind companies are using AI to get each turbine’s propeller to produce more electricity per rotation by incorporating real time weather and operational data. On large wind farms, the front row’s propellers create a wake that decreases the efficiency of those behind them. AI will enable each individual propeller to determine the wind speed and direction coming from other propellers, and adjust accordingly.
Researchers at the Department of Energy and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are using AI to better understand atmospheric conditions in order to more accurately project the energy output of wind farms.
Artificial intelligence can enhance energy efficiency, too. Google used machine learning to help predict when its data centers’ energy was most in demand. The system analyzed and predicted when users were most likely to watch data-sucking Youtube videos, for example, and could then optimize the cooling needed. As a result, Google reduced its energy use by 40 percent.

Making cities more livable and sustainable
AI can also improve energy efficiency on the city scale by incorporating data from smart meters and the Internet of Things (the internet of computing devices that are embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data) to forecast energy demand. In addition, artificial intelligence systems can simulate potential zoning laws, building ordinances, and flood plains to help with urban planning and disaster preparedness. One vision for a sustainable city is to create an “urban dashboard” consisting of real-time data on energy and water use and availability, traffic and weather to make cities more energy efficient and livable.

Beijing air pollution. Photo: Kentaro IEMOTO

In China, IBM’s Green Horizon project is using an AI system that can forecast air pollution, track pollution sources and produce potential strategies to deal with it. It can determine if, for example, it would be more effective to restrict the number of drivers or close certain power plants in order to reduce pollution in a particular area.
Another IBM system in development could help cities plan for future heat waves. AI would simulate the climate at the urban scale and explore different strategies to test how well they ease heat waves. For example, if a city wanted to plant new trees, machine learning models could determine the best places to plant them to get optimal tree cover and reduce heat from pavement.

Smart agriculture
Hotter temperatures will have significant impacts on agriculture as well.

Moisture sensors monitor soil water content for irrigation management. Photo: USDA NRCS

Data from sensors in the field that monitor crop moisture, soil composition and temperature help AI improve production and know when crops need watering. Incorporating this information with that from drones, which are also used to monitor conditions, can help increasingly automatic AI systems know the best times to plant, spray and harvest crops, and when to head off diseases and other problems. This will result in increased efficiency, enhanced yields, and lower use of water, fertilizer and pesticides.

Protecting the oceans
The Ocean Data Alliance is working with machine learning to provide data from satellites and ocean exploration so that decision-makers can monitor shipping, ocean mining, fishing, coral bleaching or the outbreak of a marine disease. With almost real time data, decision-makers and authorities will be able to respond to problems more quickly. Artificial intelligence can also help predict the spread of invasive species, follow marine litter, monitor ocean currents, keep track of dead zones and measure pollution levels.

A Taiwanese ship suspected of illegal fishing. Photo: US Coast Guard

The Nature Conservancy is partnering with Microsoft on using AI to map ocean wealth. Evaluating the economic value of ocean ecosystem services—such as seafood harvesting, carbon storage, tourism and more—will make better conservation and planning decisions possible. The data will be used to build models that consider food security, job creation and fishing yields to show the value of ecosystem services under differing conditions. This can help decision-makers determine the most important areas for fish productivity and conservation efforts, as well as the tradeoffs of potential decisions. The project already has maps and models for Micronesia, the Caribbean, Florida, and is expanding to Australia, Haiti, and Jamaica.

More sustainable transport on land
As vehicles become able to communicate with each other and with the infrastructure, artificial intelligence will help drivers avoid hazards and traffic jams. In Pittsburgh, an artificial intelligence system incorporating sensors and cameras that monitors traffic flow adjusts traffic lights when needed. The systems are functioning at 50 intersections with plans for 150 more, and have already reduced travel time by 25 percent and idling by more than 40 percent. Less idling, of course, means fewer greenhouse gas emissions.Eventually, autonomous AI-driven shared transportation systems may replace personal vehicles.

Better climate predictions
As the climate changes, accurate projections are increasingly important. However, climate models often produce very different predictions, largely because of how data is broken down into discrete parts, how processes and systems are paired, and because of the large variety of spatial and temporal scales. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports are based on many climate models and show the range of predictions, which are then averaged out.

Photo: CC BY-SA3.0

Averaging them out, however, means that each climate model is given equal weight. AI is helping to determine which models are more reliable by giving added weight to those whose predictions eventually prove to be more accurate, and less weight to those performing poorly. This will help improve the accuracy of climate change projections.
AI and deep learning are also improving weather forecasting and the prediction of extreme events. That’s because they can incorporate much more of the real-world complexity of the climate system, such as atmospheric and ocean dynamics and ocean and atmospheric chemistry, into their calculations. This sharpens the precision of weather and climate modeling, making simulations more useful for decision-makers.

AI has many other uses
AI can help to monitor ecosystems and wildlife and their interactions. Its fast processing speeds can offer almost real-time satellite data to track illegal logging in forests. AI can monitor drinking water quality, manage residential water use, detect underground leaks in drinking water supply systems, and predict when water plants need maintenance. It can also simulate weather events and natural disasters to find vulnerabilities in disaster planning, determine which strategies for disaster response are most effective, and provide real-time disaster response coordination.

What are the risks of artificial intelligence?
While AI enables us to better manage the impacts of climate change and protect the environment in addition to transforming the fields of business, finance, health care, medicine, law, education and more, it is not without risks. Some prominent individuals such as the late physicist Stephen Hawking and Tesla CEO Elon Musk have warned of the existential dangers of uncontrolled artificial intelligence.
The World Economic Forum report identified six categories of AI risk:

• Performance. The black box conclusions of AI may not be understandable to humans and thus it may be impossible to determine if they are accurate or desirable. Deep learning could be risky for applications such as early warning systems for natural disasters where more certainty is needed.
• Security. AI could potentially be hacked, enabling bad actors to interfere with energy, transportation, early warning or other crucial systems.
• Control risks. Since AI systems interact autonomously, they can produce unpredictable outcomes. For example, two systems came up with a language of their own that humans couldn’t understand.
• Economic risks. Companies that are slower to adopt AI may suffer economic consequences as their AI-based competition advances. We are already seeing how brick and mortar stores are closing as the economy becomes increasingly digitized.
• Social risk. AI is resulting in more automation, which will eliminate jobs in almost every field. Autonomous weapon systems could also hasten and exacerbate global conflicts.
• Ethical risks. Since AI uses inferred assumptions about groups and communities in making decisions, it could lead to increased bias. The collection of data also raises privacy issues.

To deal with these risks, the World Economic Forum states that government and industry “must ensure the safety, explainability, transparency and validity of AI application.” More interaction among public and private entities, technologists, policy-makers and even philosophers, and more investments in research are needed to avert the potential risks of artificial intelligence—and to realize its potential benefits to the environment and humanity.

Links

• How India is Striking a Balance Between Energy and Emissions
• Introducing the Environmental Science and Policy Class of 2019!
• Climate-Related Flooding May Quickly Disrupt Global Trade Chains
• What Happens to All The Carbon We Emit?
• Will Climate Change Cause More Glacial Lake Outburst Floods?
• What Are Climate Models and How Accurate Are They?
• The Conservative Case for a Carbon Tax
• Photo Essay: How High Could Seas Rise?
• How High Can Seas Rise? On a Tropical Isle, the Answers Are Not Always Obvious.

The Scientific Method And Climate Change: How Scientists Know

NASA - Holly Shaftel

Starting in 1958, Charles Keeling used the scientific method to take meticulous measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) at Mauna Loa Observatory in Waimea, Hawaii. This graph, known as the Keeling Curve, shows how atmospheric CO2 has continued rising since then.

The scientific method is the gold standard for exploring our natural world. You might have learned about it in grade school, but here’s a quick reminder: It’s the process that scientists use to understand everything from animal behavior to the forces that shape our planet—including climate change.
“The way science works is that I go out and study something, and maybe I collect data or write equations, or I run a big computer program,” said Josh Willis, principal investigator of NASA’s Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission and oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “And I use it to learn something about how the world works.”
Using the scientific method, scientists have shown that humans are extremely likely the dominant cause of today’s climate change. The story goes back to the late 1800s, but in 1958, for example, Charles Keeling of the Mauna Loa Observatory in Waimea, Hawaii, started taking meticulous measurements of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere, showing the first significant evidence of rapidly rising CO₂ levels and producing the Keeling Curve climate scientists know today.

“The way science works is that I go out and study something, and maybe I collect data or write equations, or I run a big computer program, and I use it to learn something about how the world works.
- Josh Willis, NASA oceanographer and Oceans Melting Greenland principal investigator

Since then, thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers have come to the same conclusion about climate change, telling us that human activities emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, raising Earth’s average temperature and bringing a range of consequences to our ecosystems.“The weight of all of this information taken together points to the single consistent fact that humans and our activity are warming the planet,” Willis said.

The scientific method’s steps
The exact steps of the scientific method can vary by discipline, but since we have only one Earth (and no “test” Earth), climate scientists follow a few general guidelines to better understand carbon dioxide levels, sea level rise, global temperature and more.

1. Form a hypothesis (a statement that an experiment can test)
2. Make observations (conduct experiments and gather data)
3. Analyze and interpret the data
4. Draw conclusions
5. Publish results that can be validated with further experiments (rinse and repeat)

As you can see, the scientific method is iterative (repetitive), meaning that climate scientists are constantly making new discoveries about the world based on the building blocks of scientific knowledge.

“The weight of all of this information taken together points to the single consistent fact that humans and our activity are warming the planet."
- Josh Willis, NASA oceanographer and Oceans Melting Greenland principal investigator

The scientific method at work
How does the scientific method work in the real world of climate science? Let’s take NASA’s Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) campaign, a multi-year survey of Greenland’s ice melt that’s paving the way for improved sea level rise estimates, as an example.

1. Form a hypothesis
   OMG hypothesizes that the oceans are playing a major role in Greenland ice loss.
2. Make observations
   Over a five-year period, OMG will survey Greenland by air and ship to collect ocean temperature and salinity (saltiness) data and take ice thinning measurements to help climate scientists better understand how the ice and warming ocean interact with each other. OMG will also collect data on the sea floor’s shape and depth, which determines how much warm water can reach any given glacier.
3. Analyze and interpret data
   As the OMG crew and scientists collect data around 27,000 miles (over 43,000 kilometers) of Greenland coastline over that five-year period, each year scientists will analyze the data to see how much the oceans warmed or cooled and how the ice changed in response.
4. Draw conclusions
   In one OMG study, scientists discovered that many Greenland glaciers extend deeper (some around 1,000 feet, or about 300 meters) beneath the ocean’s surface than once thought, making them quite vulnerable to the warming ocean. They also discovered that Greenland’s west coast is generally more vulnerable than its east coast.
5. Publish results
   Scientists like Willis write up the results, send in the paper for peer review (a process in which other experts in the field anonymously critique the submission), and then those peers determine whether the information is correct and valuable enough to be published in an academic journal, such as Nature or Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Then it becomes another contribution to the well-substantiated body of climate change knowledge, which evolves and grows stronger as scientists gather and confirm more evidence. Other scientists can take that information further by conducting their own studies to better understand sea level rise.

All in all, the scientific method is “a way of going from observations to answers,” NASA terrestrial ecosystem scientist Erika Podest, based at JPL, said. It adds clarity to our way of thinking and shows that scientific knowledge is always evolving.

Links

• Warm water creeps into otherwise-calm Central Pacific
• Two decades of Earth data
• NASA soil moisture data advances global crop forecasts
• NASA invested in cracking Earth’s carbon puzzle
• Climate change may lead to bigger atmospheric rivers
• Twin spacecraft launch to track Earth's water movement
• NASA satellites reveal major shifts in global freshwater
• GRACE-FO will help monitor droughts
• GRACE-FO: Cracking a cold case
• Before the flood arrives
• New technology doubles scientists’ view of ocean-air interactions
• Tiny sea creatures could hold secrets to Earth’s climate